2012 — 5 October: Friday
I realise the world is, largely, barking mad1 when — in among the various heated pieces of opinion flying around regarding who has been blasphemed by whom and who should therefore be stoned to death (or whatever righteous revenge is sanctioned as fitting) by whom — I stub my visual toe more locally when I see a line of 'argument' put forward that I first encountered two decades ago (in IBM,2 of all supposedly über-rational places). I suppose it could just be Hampshire? (Link.)
Should I simply give up reading "Butterflies and Wheels", "Private Eye", and all my other secular sources of information?
I headed off...
... any mini-jihads at the pass and ended with a note to Iris:
Date: 12 April 94, 12:13:17 BST To: Iris Lee IRISLEE at WINVMJ Security: IBM Pantheistic Re: Yoga Why shouldn't IBM 'promote a practice which is so closely tied to Hinduism'? After all, it promotes carol singing here in December each year. Perhaps its fervent support for the trees of Hursley Park means we have some Druids among us, too! Surely, IBM (if it's to espouse "its policy of religious neutrality", and if such a policy exists) should simply not 'take sides' at all in such matters? Or, to sort of quote further, "I, along with many (SUBSTITUTE BELIEF AND VALUES GROUP NAME OF YOUR CHOICE HERE)" believe I'm right, you're wrong, and everyone else is so thick that it's dangerous and daft to let them think for themselves... There's nowt so queer as folk! D
Perhaps I should switch to the Onion and its eye-watering cartoons?
Who can resist...
... documentation with alluring headings such as "How Do I Configure My Bucket As a Website?". It seems that if I do move away from SSIs to static pages then Amazon's Simple Storage Service may just be able to do the trick. On the other hand, what is one to make of "When you configure a bucket as a website, it is available only via the region-specific website endpoint where the bucket resides."?
Does anyone bother to read this sort of stuff before they publish it?
I stopped itching to get started when I spotted this:
Just back from...
... Eastleigh, where I was compensating for forgetting to carry my Waterstone's card the day before yesterday.
The second tranche from the police blog has been a long while in coming. And Miles Kington was an excellent comic writer. Apart from his Franglais. [Pause] Time for some lemonses.
Remind me. Is it god that lurks in the details, or the devil? I can never remember:
There's a churlish comment lamenting the failure to remind us that SEM images are 'falsely' coloured. You don't say. The attractive tessellation in this particular image reminds me (faintly! — your mental mileage may vary) of the cover of what turned out to be Martin Gardner's final book. And the image on that was, in any case, creatively adapted from Escher's 1955 wood engraving "Depth".
Thanks, Mr Postie...
... for dropping off the latest invoice from the care-home and the book I rather obliquely referred to (though one of my readers 'got' it) last Sunday. The picture links to a large (83,000 word) PDF file of Rudy Rucker's notes:
The "Burroughs", by the way, although related to the computer chap, is not the computer chap :-)
I never knew that... dept.
I'm aware that early critics of the railways were seemingly certain that the human body would be pulverised if travelling at such unnaturally high velocity, though I don't know if that was the origin of the chap with a red flag whose job it was to walk in front of a train. This just in, however, from the Mary Roach book "Packing for Mars" about life in space:
Body parts resonate down in the long, inaudible wavelength range called infrasound. A launching rocket, on the other hand, creates powerful infrasonic vibration. Could those sound waves shake apart your [liver]? NASA did testing on this back in the 1960s, to be sure, as one infrasound expert told me, "that they didn't deliver jam to the moon."
I recall a post World War III novel ("Twilight World") by Poul Anderson (whom I never realised was Greg Bear's father-in-law). I bought the novel in 1964, though it was culled at some point in the mid 1990s. It featured a young autistic idiot-savant / mutant who throws together just such a disruptive piece of kit for use against raiders. And I recall an old song, too — to the tune about John Brown's mouldering body — about a chap jumping from 30,000 feet without a parachute. Part of the chorus... "they scraped him off the tarmac like a lump of strawberry jam!"
Classic one-liner: "Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, Mitt Romney was built on the Death Star". Ooh, that Sandi Toksvig is wicked.