2012 — 19 August: Sunday
And some mornings1 get off to an earlier start than others. This is one such :-)
It wasn't until I...
... downloaded, and listened closely to Hans Zimmer's score for the film Gladiator yesterday,2 that I realised quite how much he'd borrowed from "Mars, bringer of war" by Gustav Holst. Indeed, I gather a law suit was filed some six years after the film's release. The thought of a dead composer (might one even say a "decomposer"?) bringing a law suit against the borrowing of music representing a Roman deity used in a film about Romans is slightly wry.
I now have the first 1,056 CDs safely tucked away into the four new CaseLogic folders I bought recently and have to face up to the unpleasant challenge of clambering around up in the loft yet again for the next batch of cartons to bring down. I think I shall procrastinate a little on that task.
And now I'm listening to (Sir) Tom Jones chatting amiably to Cerys Matthews. I've yet to spend this week's virtual tenner. A perfectly lazy Sunday morning... oh, damn! I've forgotten to go to church... again. That must make over 3,000 lost opportunities.
Gearing up for...
... lunch, as the whizzy digital thermometer suggests it's a mere 26.3C down here at 12:59 as I slave over a hot scanner. Uncool. Doesn't do much for my appetite, frankly.
Only in Texas
Access to the original article is quite expensive, not surprisingly. There's a similar story locked away somewhere on the New Scientist web, too. Anyway, here's a summary from the chap who brought us the Annals of Improbable Research:
Phelan and Lin wanted to see whether, over the long haul, it pays best to promote people on supposed merit (we try, one way or another, to measure how good you are), or on an "up or out" basis (either you get promoted quickly or you get the boot), or by seniority (live long and, by that measure alone, you will prosper). As a benchmark, a this-is-as-bad-as-it-could-possibly-get alternative, they also looked at what happened when you promoted people at random. They got a surprise: random promotion, they admitted, "actually performed better" than almost every other method. Phelan and Lin seemed (at least in my reading of their paper) almost shocked, even intimidated, by what they found.
I'm starting to wonder how I would now manage without Omnipage 18. And I didn't even have to train it on various fonts, a tricky procedure necessary in the early days of my OCR adventures (over two decades ago, granted) on the Acorn RISC OS platform. [Pause] It's 26.7C down here — obviously time for my next hot cuppa. While I wouldn't like a musical diet of nothing but reggae, the BBC 6Music celebration of 50 years of Jamaican independence this month is proving surprisingly congenial. It's certainly well-matched to the weather. It's quite reminiscent of that summer of 1976.
Right! Enough PC for a bit. I shall switch to a more passive line of pixel-based entertainment. It's still (at 19:15) stuck on 26.7C down here, so I've given in and switched on a fan. It gives a pleasing illusion of being a cooling breeze.