2011 — 13 July: Wednesday
The "news"1 continues to offer a certain entertainment value. Who would have thought the media Baron was unpopular?
It's odd what you can find while looking for something else — in this house, at least. I still need a system. But I need breakfast rather more urgently. It's 08:41 and there are tentative plans for a lunch at the biker café.
Things that go "bang" in...
... the flight. Freeman Dyson has a neat pair of book reviews both dealing with the life and work of a hero of mine. Source and snippet:
He went to Washington and found what he had expected at the heart of the tragedy: a bureaucratic hierarchy with two groups of people, the engineers and the
managers, who lived in separate worlds and did not communicate with each other. The engineers lived in the world of technical facts; the managers lived in
the world of political dogmas.
He asked members of both groups to tell him their estimates of the risk of disastrous failure in each Space Shuttle mission. The engineers estimated the risk
to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred missions. The managers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred thousand missions.
The difference, a factor of a thousand between the two estimates, was never reconciled and never openly discussed. The managers were in charge of the
operations and made the decisions to fly or not to fly, based on their own estimates of the risk. But the technical facts that Feynman uncovered proved that
the managers were wrong and the engineers were right.
'Twas ever thus. [Pause for thought] There's an equally scary reality mismatch to be found in the adjacent review dealing with (some might say "trashing") the upcoming new edition of that wonderful bible of the psycho-pharmacological universe, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (Link.)
I happen to have a low opinion of the "field" of psychiatry, I admit. It doesn't make the 'cut' here, note!
Why...
... do delivery people call when you're not at home? So now I have an early evening trek down to Nursling to pick up my OCR package. Before that, I shall whizz over to the care-home on a chocolate drop, as it were. Such good fun.
Serendipity calling...
I'd not thought of scouring the photo-albums dear Mama has with her in the care-home, simply because I'd assumed they were full of NZ family shots. So I'm left wondering who took this (about six years ago, I'd estimate):
I also found a print of Peter, circa December 1988, that happens to show a slightly clearer image of my original A/V switchbox and (finally) this nice shot of the two sisters-in-law:
I'm reasonably sure Big Bro will be able to pinpoint the place and time, but I'm damned if I can. He can have this task as homework during his flight back from sunny Brunei to wintery NZ next Wednesday evening.
Pastafarian?
Who said Austrians lack a sense of humour? Tee-hee. (Link.)
My new toy...
... is an OCR product called OmniPage 18, which I've now installed, registered, activated, and taught to play nicely with the Canon scanner. Results so far are incredibly good, though the learning curve is interestingly steep. Colour me happy.
It's 21:12 and I've earned my next cuppa.