2012 — 25 February: Saturday
Today's walk1 will now take place tomorrow. Since I managed six miles or so yesterday while Mike was contending with the ongoing kitchen refurbishment and feeling in dire need of more sleep, it was a mutually beneficial decision.
Tea, Mrs Landingham. I (again) need tea! This, after contemplating today's chronological milestone: I bought my Canon digital SLR five years ago. Crikey! And the 60" Kuro plasma screen three years ago.
Yes, well, erm...
Where to start?
Palaeoanthropologists have taught us that the human brain gradually evolved from ancestral brains, particularly in concert with practical toolmaking, centring on the anatomy of the human hand.2 This history shaped and constrained the form of intelligence now housed in our skulls (as the lifestyle of other species form their set of cognitive skills). What chance is there that an intelligence geared to making stone tools and grounded in the contingent peculiarities of the human hand can aspire to uncover all the mysteries of the universe? Can omniscience spring from an opposable thumb? It seems unlikely, so why presume that the mysteries of consciousness will be revealed to a thumb-shaped brain like ours?
Oh, gawd. Have I become a mysterian? [Pause]
Having (eventually) found the (imaginary?) book just four meters away from where I'm sitting — on, literally, the last shelf I examined — I also reminded myself of this delicious anecdote:
The apocryphal story is about a bluff and arrogant surgeon who was expanding on his favorite topic. "The hand," he said, with his usual pomposity, "is the surgeon's finest instrument." A physician overhearing him, remarked sotto voce, "At least the old bugger won't be able to leave that behind in the abdomen!"
Does that class as a cutting remark?
During my little stint...
... of paid employment in IBM numerous management fads and fashions came and went. One of the more fatuous ones was a personality type assessment of team members. This concluded, in my case, that I was a "completer/finisher" which in the scheme of things is only mildly insulting, I suppose. (They could always just have asked me, of course.) Anyway, in the spirit of full disclosure, here's another lovely book I bought on that same London day trip just before my 42nd birthday:
This made me...
... smile more than somewhat...
... and also reminded me (somewhat) of that Charles L Harness 1950 SF story "The New Reality" which hinged — or maybe unhinged — on a desperate attempt to destroy a photon.
Minor upheaval
So there I am, playing another of Len's Beethoven CDs when the Oppo DVD player that I was using starts making a lively mechanical buzzing noise (as if the drive was spinning the CD at the sort of speed PC drives do, rather than a staid, domestic, piece of hi-fi kit). I therefore figured I'd do better to bring the NAD CD player back down from the upstairs "reading room" and extract the Oppo from the stack. Some while later: done. In fact, it's now 18:12 and I think I'd better do something about an evening meal before I get much older.
The Beethoven CDs are jolly good listening, by the way.
(Self-)Portrait of the artist...
... as a young man. Some while ago, I published the portrait of Christa (as a very young girl) that her parents had commissioned in the very early 1950s. A few minutes ago, I found a pencil sketch I made of myself, circa 1969:
Christa had tucked it away in a folder deeply buried among some ancient letters and slides.