2011 — 9 August: Tuesday
Not being a TV watcher, and preferring to live life to a musical background, I've only just discovered that people are having a riotous time. Assisted, it is claimed, by mobile technology. My Tablet is innocent.
In less vicious news, I see two of our noble Lords1 have taken umbrage at a part of the BBC Trust's examination of the impartiality and accuracy of the BBC's coverage of science — which strikes me has got more and more feeble and dumbed-down2 in the last three decades, but what do I know?
Professor Jones describes incidents of what he calls "false balance" and suggests there may
sometimes have been "an over-rigid application of the (editorial) guidelines to what is
essentially a fact-based field. This can produce an adversarial attitude to science which
allows minority, or even contrarian, views an undue place. The BBC has tried hard to find a
suitable balance."
There will of course be occasions when a scientific story should be presented as a debate
purely and simply within the scientific community. There will be others when it is
appropriate to broadcast a range of views, including some from non-experts, because
science cannot be divorced from the social, political and cultural environment in which it
operates.
That highlighted phrase sounds like pure sh1t to me. An uninformed opinion is worth less than the paper it's printed on, in my never humble opinion.
Is that the time?
No wonder I'm hungry. Better get some lunch, then. "Put (newly-descaled) kettle on, Mrs Landingham."
Mr Parcel Postie's cheerful...
... mid-afternoon knock provided a useful respite from my self-imposed task of cleaning up three old PCs before whizzing them off in the direction of a charity next week. First, some classy listening:
I already have the Solti conducting the "Concerto" and the "Dance Suite" (who doesn't?) — it was regarded at the time (30 years ago!) as a superlative early digital recording of a wonderful performance, and may well not yet have been bettered. But I don't mind the duplication as all the other performances are new to me. The Ozawa performances date back over 40 years, and should be fascinating to compare with his later work. As for the Alan Bennett, who needs a reason?!
Next, a "naughty" old film by Adrian Lyne (finally displacing the early DVD+R I cut from my elderly PAL LaserDisc). It will dovetail nicely against the DVD of his even older film "Flashdance" that I got last month. And the 2001 book "The Dark Fields" on which the new film "Limitless" has been based. I read some excerpts online and decided it seemed well-written:
Right! A quick brew, and back to the dust. I must say, Dell cases are a maddening puzzle until you solve them; then they seem clever.
Recall AJ Liebling?
He, that is, of the eidetic memory? (Clue here.) I happen to like vodka (amusing quotation here), but not so our friend Mr Liebling, it seems:
The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago by the then Estonian consul-general in New York, and it accounts perfectly for the drink's rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy — tomato juice, orange juice, chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.
Chicken broth? Yuck! But it reminds me to do something about an evening meal. It's 18:45 and sunny.
My son says they are so far unaffected by any riots in his bit of London. Let's hope it calms down. He's just told me about a tool that will "boot and nuke" any hard drives it can detect. "Learn something new every day", that's my motto.
News!
Mr and Mrs Big Bro are contemplating a trip to Blighty at the end of September — methinks there must be an air show in the offing somewhere :-)
I've suggested they stay in one of the local hotels as, like it or not, Little Bro's little house (unlike Big Bro's massive country estate) is now effectively reduced to a single bedroom, and that's mine!
<Sigh> There's still some form of tricky slip 'twixt the server and the Tablet. Although I was able to add the last two paragraphs while sitting upstairs, wireless (as it were) and enjoying the last of the Stravinsky, and although I could then whizz the edited file back on to my webserver from the Tablet, I was stymied by being unable to drill far enough down the folder structure on the server to put it where it actually needed to be (despite the fact that that's where I'd got the file from mere minutes earlier). So I've had to creep downstairs — temporarily defeated — to move my edited file around on the "big" (I hesitate to say "real") system. Grrr.
Still... downstairs is where I keep the kettle, oddly enough. So that's handy.