2012 — 27 December: Thursday

A little overnight banter on which I was cyberspatially copied1 brought me the cynical reflection (by Max Planck?) that physics advances, not by quantum leaps and bounds, but rather by one funeral at a time. I hadn't previously heard that one. Though now that I consider it at leisure over my delicious breakfast pair of freshly sliced oranges,2 I can suggest a relevant SF short story or two.

For example how about the 1952 "Noise Level" by Raymond F Jones? Or Tom Godwin's 1953 "Mother of Invention"? (Coincidentally both in the excellent Kingsley Amis and Bob Conquest annual Spectrum anthologies that I adored and my mother sneered at, as being "a waste of my pocket money". Not that she ever read them, of course... she just knew3 they were utter rubbish.) That's mothers for you — or mine, at least.

Back on Planet Earth...

... meanwhile, in the real world, I note that I once again forgot to put out my black crate with its pitiful little collection of empty marmalade jars for collection and recycling. Though, judging by the industrial-level tinkling sounds of breaking glass earlier that ungently roused me from my slumbers, there was many an empty bottle being brutally harvested from the other houses hereabouts.

A gadfly is at it again:

To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It's somebody's value that's been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it's to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it's to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes — and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.

Jaron Lanier in Smithsonian


"It's the Rich wot gets the Pleasure..."

Meanwhile, how's this for a correction?

Correction (12/18/2012, 11:11 a.m.):
This article originally quoted Price as saying that Herman Melville owned a copy of The Natural History of the Sperm Whale that was pristine, indicating he had not read it. After the article was published, Price learned that the book had in fact been heavily annotated by Melville, and asked that The Chronicle replace her original example with the example of Hemingway's copy of Ulysses. The article has been updated to add that example.

Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle


Ouch. Another apocryphal anecdote bites the dust. Never mind; here's something else to fret about:

... Dyson worries that humanity could be in danger of being reconstituted by Turing machines: "Are we using digital computers to ... better replicate our own genetic code, thereby optimizing human beings, or are digital computers optimizing our genetic code — and our way of thinking — so that we can better assist in replicating them? ... No genuinely intelligent artificial intelligence would reveal itself to us"

George Dyson, quoted by Michael Saler in The TLS


Skynet, anyone? Or has that been subject to retraction? And here's yet another unglowing report.

So, here I am...

... just coming to the end of letter "N" when — Shock! Horror! — I realise that I either never bought a copy of Ian Carr's 1972 album Belladonna on CD or, if I did, it has slipped through a wormhole in Time or Space and gone defiantly AWOL before being ripped to MP3. I certainly had a copy on vinyl, from which I copied it to cassette, and from there finally to my 29th minidisc. Although it was a "Nucleus" album in all but name, it was issued as an Ian Carr solo project. Ho-hum. I've just snaffled the last new CD of it from Amazon, thereby also obtaining a duplicate copy of Solar Plexus.

Not that I'm any sort of completeist. Oh deary me, no. No way. Perish the thought. Better yet, I also spotted and just pre-ordered a long-awaited release of Neil Ardley's A Symphony of Amaranths despite not even knowing what an Amaranth is. (I was delighted to learn, back in my ICL Beaumont days, that then new recruit David Baker [owner of a splendid beard and an even more splendid old Rover saloon in which he conveyed me to a management course held at the Westonbirt Arboretum in December 1977] had been an assistant recording engineer and disc cutter on Ardley's 1976 album A Kaleidoscope of Rainbows before deciding to join ICL for a complete change of scene.)

Now if you'll excuse me I may just have to go and lie down, with a fresh cuppa, of course. Phew!

Dear mama's...

... care-home is once again closed to visitors while they sort out the latest gastric bug. That's what happens with an influx of festive visitors, I expect. I simply stayed away. Meanwhile, I find it deeply patronising for a guvmint minister to suggest that we should praise 'rich' recipients of the Winter Fuel top-up payment if they "give it away". Why not tell a civil servant to add a simple means test if he wants to restrict payments, and thus make himself even less popular?

  

Footnotes

1  By email, while I was safely asleep.
2  A fruit that always reminds me of an autobiographical piece in an ancient "Reader's Digest" in which a blind person recalled her astonishment on learning that oranges were orange-coloured.
3  Actually her malformed attitude to so many of my childhood interests gave me quite a kick start in the direction of evidence gathering and argument formulating, so maybe there was some method to her madness after all? Though it still strikes me, half a century later, as a perverse and high-risk approach to affectionate parental nurturing :-)