2010 — 3 December: Friday
Exactly as predicted1 yesterday's fluffy snow has metamorphosed into today's rock-hard ice. Unlovely.
Speaking truth to power...
... has never been a safe undertaking. Frankly, I was quite surprised the Wikileaks site remained on the web for as long as it did... Mind you, I was even more surprised that anyone was much surprised by the contents of these diplomatic cables. Refer to Ambrose Bierce and his Devil's Dictionary:
DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Some breakfast is now called for. It's 08:42 and yukkily grey-looking out there. Any journey I make today will definitely be on my horse Bayard of ten toes. (Someone else has borrowed Shanks's pony!)
Elegant science, it may be...
... but the chap's sense of ethics was from a different planet. Seems to be a characteristic of some of the people from the RAND Corporation:
While doubters questioned the usefulness, logic and ethics of killing people and sparing property, Mr. Cohen called his bomb a "sane" and "moral" weapon that
could limit death, destruction and radioactive contamination, killing combatants while leaving civilians and towns unscathed. He insisted that many critics
misunderstood or purposely misrepresented his ideas for political, economic or mercenary reasons...
In recent years, Mr. Cohen prominently warned of a black market substance called red mercury, supposedly capable of compressing fusion materials to detonate
a nuclear device as small as a baseball — ideal for terrorists.
Could he also have been the inspiration for that nifty "red stuff" used in the latest Star Trek film? :-)
I've just been reading predictions of a long, hot "La Nina" heatwave down in New Zealandland. My trusty German front porch thermometer reckons it's -5C more locally. Brrr.
Sharp as a Buffon needle
I rarely throw anything out (which is, of course, precisely why — these days — I can rarely find anything). Last Friday I mentioned my pleasure at having BBC BASIC on BlackBeast. Here's a scan of one of my earliest BASIC programs2 written to run on the decsystem10 at Hatfield Polytechnic in 1972. Critics may notice it already contains (line 100) that which it is attempting to simulate the generation of.
dec's operating system used simple hard-wired round-robin scheduling to give the (maximum) 63 terminal users one 64th of a second per second each. Now, the larger the loop size in my little simulation, the closer the approach to a value of "pie". But the longer the program running time3 — during which I couldn't do anything else (like, for random example, my engineering course work calculations) at my teletypewriter terminal. No problemo. Brief scrutiny of the dec reference manuals in the campus bookshop (before they were removed!) showed me I could "detach" from my current process but leave it running while I logged back in and did whatever else I needed to.
You can probably see where this is going.
Having set my harmless little program running with a loop size of one million, I detached from it, logged in afresh, and started keying in some more work-related material. About five minutes went by before an irate systems chap stormed into the console room to suggest, neither calmly nor quietly, that whoever owned job number such-and-such should take it off his system right now! as it was absorbing every spare CPU cycle. Looking back, I suppose it was quite amusing how easily a simple end-user could cripple such a "big" system in those innocent days :-)
Also amusing: when I flew out of the aircraft industry to join ICL in February 1974 I quickly discovered that the humble teletype was considered an "exotic peripheral". It was the only sort I'd dealt with at that point. And in 1996, when I upgraded my 64MB Acorn RISC-PC700 with a then-new 200MHz StrongARM processor, I found I could run my program entirely in the processor's cache and produce an equally approximate result hundreds of times more quickly.
PlanetRock has just told me that Southampton airport will re-open at 13:00 today. Time (11:42) for my next cuppa.
Doors of Perception
I'm currently re-reading Colin Wilson's 2004 autobiography "Dreaming to some purpose" and (on page 111) he touches on Blake's recognition that "things would be seen as 'infinite' if the doors of perception were cleansed". Odd that I found a similar quote on one of yesterday's batch of CD sleeve notes.
The Confession of Isobel Gowdie — my after-lunch listening — is not a piece I've heard before. It is lacking in tunes that one could whistle. But has borrowed freely from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring for some of its rhythms. If you're going to steal (Picasso) always make sure you steal from the best :-)
Brrr
It's 16:20 and there's now very little difference between the colour of the sky where there's no cloud and the ditto of the ditto where there's some cloud. It seems to have remained stuck on -5C steadily all day, too. I had a brief chat with my cousin in the Midlands who will keep a gentle eye on dear Mama's house. We're going to take it off the market until the new year. My chum Gill is, indeed, thoroughly snowed in up in Hurstborne Priors, but snug with a fire4 lit. I've also listened to the wondrous soundtrack album that Eurythmics developed for the film "1984" — doubleplusgood, 26 years later. Quite why Michael Radford used only 15 seconds of it in his film is anybody's guess.
I noticed the network dropped a couple of times today, eight hours apart, but it probably had no effect on molehole's server. And if it did I wouldn't be able to fix it in any case :-)
Somewhat later
Just had a call from the relatively newly-discovered (half) aunt Sue asking for advice on spending £1,000 on a 3D TV to replace a 3-year-old Toshiba that's developed a "known" fault. My strong recommendation is to avoid this technology for quite some time to come; with age, and costly experience of several notable technological cul-de-sacs, what else could I say? It's 20:22 and Nicky Horne has just revisited the story of Pink Floyd's Battersea "flying pig" incident in 1976. "Perish the thought", says he, "that it was anything but an accident..." Quite so.
It's 23:03 and that's enough for today. G'night.