2012 — 26 September: Wednesday
A chum's insomnia led me to this source of embeddable web fonts, and thence to the wonderful Google doodle on Alan Turing. It's my own fault: I've got into the habit of using the Google search field my web browser offers, and that bypasses the front page where these doodles appear. I obviously don't spend enough time on this Interweb malarkey.
I must be too busy making cups of tea and glumly contemplating the depleted state of my store cupboard, even though I've noticed it tends to get this way every time in periods of lousy weather, or whenever I remember to eat stuff.
In case you're wondering1... this is what data70 looks like...
Having just...
... sneaked my last bit of rubbish into the black bin ahead of today's collection, I note (literally in passing) that my local blackbirds have very effectively stripped my vine. I honestly don't mind sharing my grapes with them, but to leave so few for me strikes me as a bit mean.
Sunshine is slowly taking over from the showers, but I don't yet feel impelled to venture out. It's only just gone noon. And dear Mama has had more snailmail than me, dagnabbit.
And there's me...
... thinking this only happened in the UK:
While he doesn't seek to explain all of American history as the conflict between "eggheads and fatheads" or between populist democrats and cultural elites (though it can sometimes sound that way), he does stress the pervasive influence on our culture of politically conservative evangelicals and the harm done to our children by a system of education that regularly favors personal development over intellectual challenge...
At times the schools of the country seem to be dominated by athletics, commercialism, and the standards of the mass media, and these extend upwards to a system of higher education whose worst failings were underlined by the bold president of the University of Oklahoma who hoped to develop a university of which the football team could be proud.
Recall Paul Graham's lovely essay on nerds: "Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits." (Source.)
I have little regard...
... for the dismal science. It seems a few people agree with me, judging by the comments attracted by this thoughtful 'Chronicle' essay on neuro-economics. I particularly liked this one as it accords so well with my own prejudices:
They don't call it the "dismal science" for nothing. Ever since I heard a long time ago that economists posit2 the absurd proposition that human beings can be considered "rational actors" in the realm of economic decision making, I knew the field was severely limited. People are primarily motivated by fear and greed and those "mental states" involve a complex interplay between the "reason" and "executive planning" of the frontal cortex and the emotional responses (pain/reward) of the limbic system.
Fear and greed will generally trump rationality on any day of the week with the letter "y" in it.
Before nipping out...
... to do something about my empty food cupboard I thought it might be amusing to take Microsoft's variant of the "RoboHornet" web browser benchmark test suite out for a trial run. But it seems they really don't want to expose any of their earlier web browsers to their own tests. From the top, IE9 version 9.0.10, Google Chrome 22.0.1229.79 m, and Mozilla Firefox 15.0.1:
So my 64-bit Internet Explorer 9 simply isn't good enough for them. I wonder why? And, of course, you can only install the IE 10 Preview under the Win 8 Preview. Get outta here!
A rainbow in curved air
The spirits of my inner child are invariably lifted by seeing a rainbow — I always imagine myself looking up from the surface of a moon in relatively close orbit to a gigantic planet. Somewhere, in other words, away from this solar system.
And I only wish dear Mama hadn't seen fit to throw out the anthology of SF stories that had just such an image as its front cover painting. Her respect for my possessions was never her defining characteristic. But my determination as a parent never to behave this way did become one of mine...
I've just been very satisfactorily creased up by the latest little burst of BBC Radio 3's "Piano A to Z". (H for Hiring.)