2012 — 12 February: Sunday

Sleep, which has only recently fled,1 is a jolly clever invention. But I've noticed it flees in its own good time. Good job I'm a gentleman of leisure.

Fortified by a cuppa, and the delicious "I talk to the wind" (King Crimson), I can calmly contemplate this little gem of an assertion:

By 2007, the international financial system was trading derivatives valued at one quadrillion dollars per year. This is 10 times the total worth, adjusted for inflation, of all products made by the world's manufacturing industries over the last century. The downside was the invention of ever-more complex financial instruments whose value and risk were increasingly opaque. So companies hired mathematically talented analysts to develop similar formulas, telling them how much those new instruments were worth and how risky they were. Then, disastrously, they forgot to ask how reliable the answers would be if market conditions changed.

Ian Stewart in The Observer


What a bunch of quants! I don't care how 'clever' they are, nor how 'clever' their equations are, they are still dangerous idiots.

Speaking of which, Corporate idiocy goes from strength to strength. If Christa's favourite news magazine (Der Spiegel) can be believed, IBM Germany is going flexible:

Those currently employed as permanent staff by IBM will in future become freelancers in an international "talent cloud." To be part of this cloud they will have to obtain quality assurance certification as specified by IBM... Positive scores — including the timely payment of credit card bills — and self-financed training courses at IBM would increase the "digital reputation" of an IT specialist...

"Personnel organised in a 'cloud'," the magazine quotes from the IBM document, "would receive international employment contracts, in order to circumvent restrictive regulations in their home country."... Thus, the company would reach a state "achieved long ago by the financial markets": it could "do away with part of the national regulations."

Dietmar Henning in World Socialist


Who could possibly wish for a better model to follow than those financial markets?

What goes around...

... comes back. This (late) afternoon's example: I'm listening to Tangerine Dream's 1978 album "Cyclone" and suddenly realised that Christopher Franke did indeed move, in later years, to work on the music for "Babylon 5". It's hard to believe it's taken me so long to make that connection.

Tomorrow I'm revisiting 'Gecko' (the high-end home cinema place) in hopes of seeing a demo of a Sony projector that handles 4K (up to 2160 x 4096 pixels) resolution, which is — I believe — the same resolution as used in UK digital cinema systems. Not that there's any material currently available in that resolution for purchase by impoverished ex-IBM pensioners... perish the thought. The projector is a snip at £18,000 or thereabouts, I gather.

If proof were needed...

... regarding the idiocy of some of my 'entertainment' technology, I would offer the following. My Oppo Blu-ray player can accept a USB memory device, from which it can play a goodly range of audio, video, and image files. However, if I switch off the plasma screen while playing back an audio-only file (such as an MP3) from one of my memory sticks I lose the audio intermittently for up to 30 seconds while the fatuous HDCP handshaking makes repeated attempts to convince itself that there is no longer a valid HDCP-compliant screen on the other end of the hdmi lead on which to 'display' this audio-only signal. Digital audio output from the player's co-ax socket couldn't care less whether or not the plasma screen is switched on. Though it shows itself as limited to 44.1KHz whereas the signal delivered via hdmi claims to be "PCM HD" whatever the hell that means in practice. (The Audiolab doesn't report its sampling frequency on the hdmi inputs.)

My new Panasonic Blu-ray player goes one worse. While it can also accept a USB memory device (of up to 2TB, usefully) it won't output any digital audio-only signal at all via hdmi when the plasma screen is off, but only via an optical SP/DIF output (which would be fine if I had a spare optical SP/DIF input on my pre-amp). So I have two choices: either to use the phono analogue stereo output, or to hook back up my dinky little optical-to-co-ax digital converter and then plumb the co-ax digital signal output from that into either the one spare2 co-ax digital input on the pre-amp, or into the co-ax input on the Sony minidisc recorder (and then switch on the recorder and set its input mode to co-ax digital and leave it set in 'record' mode for the duration of my listening).

Why switch off the plasma screen? Well, to minimise screen burn from the essentially static and high contrast images that both players output while playing audio files, and to cut down my energy bill — the plasma screen uses over half a kilowatt. Simple, really. But it all seemed much simpler still in the analogue domain.

  

Footnotes

1  It's 09:24 and, as usual, quite chilly.
2  Except that it's no longer spare, 'cos I've just plumbed it into the Oppo player's co-ax digital audio output...