2012 — 28 December: Friday

Returned home a few minutes ago1 in mild drizzle on an almost deserted motorway. The evening's entertainment was no great intellectual stretch: "Men in Black 3" followed by the tosh that is the latest "Spiderman". Not even the presence of Martin Sheen and the delectable Emma Stone could save it, alas. However, MiB3 turned out to be very enjoyable and delightfully (time travel) twisted with a good ending. And now there's an unusual performance of the extracts from Pulcinella that form the "Suite Italienne" with some highly discordant cello and piano struggling to keep up with each other.

But bed beckons.

Now here's a thought...

... to ponder, briefly, over my first thirst-quenching cuppa of the day.

"Almost any religion can be explained to another person in about half an hour ... But to know anything about astrophysics or biology or anything that really gives us an insight into the real beauty of the universe? That takes some years of study at least."

AC Grayling in Humanist


As does computing, though I'm less sure about any consequent insights :-)

Shopping in the rain...

... has never been my idea of fun but, at least, setting off just before 08:00 ensured it was a relatively speedy in-and-out process while the shelf-stackers still far outnumbered the shelf-unstackers. But being the first customer through the checkout meant I had to wait a little while longer for the till to boot. Swings and roundabouts. Right! A spot of breakfast, methinks.

As the time for my next lunch rendezvous approaches, I note it's drier, but has remained grey, with the grey stuff up there scudding along quite quickly. Mid-winter, heh? You can keep it.

On the first birthday...

... that poor Christa was no longer alive to celebrate the damnably-frequent things, I mentioned James Meek's remark that "The point at which a man starts finding discrepancies in dictionaries is probably the point at which he should go for a long holiday to a place that is sleazy and restoring". I suspect the same can be said of the hapless chap (me) who's just spotted that precisely one of the 24,000+ MP3 file meta-tagged titles so far examined and cleaned-up has an unnecessary leading space.

Title discrepancy

This just may be a manifestation of the same dubious 'gift' that ensured I could open any of my (or my colleagues') books when they arrived back from the printer, and immediately spot the typo that had until that point escaped all editing and proof-reading. A 'gift' that spookily also extended to PDF files.

Since yesterday's CD...

... turned up this morning just before I set off out to lunch, I've been listening to it (delightedly) and renewing my acquaintance with the lovely font work on part of the booklet...

Belladonna

... though, of course, it was far more impressive back in 1972 when I first bought the 12" gatefold vinyl record sleeve.

This gloriously paradoxical...

... specimen could well have been specially commissioned for my chum Zeno, don't you agree?

XKCD and Zeno

What's even better is the browser text popup on the original comic... The prosecution calls Gottfried Liebniz! I'm reminded of Larry Niven's SF short story "Convergent Series".

  

Footnote

1  And even remembered to put out the green recycle bin.