2011 — 4 November: Friday
One hates to say "I told you so"1 but the chaps who currently supply my gas and electricity asked me for meter readings last night and today's online bill (setting aside the tortuous PDF reader upgrade process needed for me to view it) has indeed now nearly doubled the much-reduced direct debit payment that they'd initially proposed during our last flurry of negotiations. (I was then paying £144 per month, and they wanted to drop that payment to £22. My counter offer was £58. They're now suggesting £109. I'm still about £300 in 'credit' with them...)
My grumpiness is mild, though not much improved by the two cracks of thunder during the night that were each loud enough and near enough to wake me. Christa and Peter invariably slept through such things and generally failed to believe I didn't.
It's Life, Jim...
Not many people I know seem to listen to BBC 6Music, but I've just been listening to an interview with Brian Cox describing a massive evolutionary oversight. He suggested we should have cyanobacteria embedded in our skin so we could photosynthesise our own lunch like the jellyfish he's currently investigating in the Phillipines. As Schrödinger apparently suggested in an essay in 1943 or so, Life may well turn out to be thermodynamically inevitable in the presence of energy gradients (pressure, heat, chemical) of various sorts. And those 'black smokers' on deep sea rifts which weren't then known about could well turn out to be the origin — something that curiously seems to have been overlooked (or undocumented) by all the world's deeply insightful religions :-)
Speaking of Schrödinger. (Link.)
There's an interesting piece in Nature on "Geeks in love", worth a look even if just for the artwork. Source and snippet:
As most experts believe that genes have an important role in autism, it's also plausible that two parents with milder, 'autistic-like' traits could be more likely to have a child with autism. It also fits at least some clinicians' experiences. "I see deep geeks of all sorts," says Bryna Siegel, a clinical psychologist who runs the autism clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, referring to the parents of children with autism. "They don't make great eye contact, all their clothing is from the Intel shop, they don't have a lot of social understanding. I do think that when these geeks marry each other, that's bad news for the offspring."
I didn't even know you could buy your clothes from the Intel shop — but then I'm more of an AMD chap at core. Nor did I realise parsing True Type fonts could be so potentially dangerous. (Link.)
I had a few...
... errands to run, which led me to Eastleigh (to buy a new calendar for my kitchen worktop — how else can I track the correct colour of bin to be emptied? — and get my Waterstone's card updated with recent purchases) via my GP's surgery, where I declined a free NHS "health check" (based, if I read it right, on a 20-minute questionnaire and a few drops of blood), and back in time to see Mr Postie's second British Museum monograph in two days:
The other two titles came back with me from Eastleigh. Now, it's time for the Kermodian film rants, and then I shall nip over to see Roger and Eileen.