2013 — 8 May: Wednesday

Next thing you know, it's pouring with rain. This is entirely suitable weather against which to listen to some well-spoken gent1 from the Institute of Directors spinning his way around answering the simple question about eroding workers' rights as being nothing more sinister than a simple wish to arrange for "compensated no-fault dismissal". Or "think of it as a divorce", he said "if things aren't working out". Mind you, he also said that Lord Lawson's remarks yesterday were very sensible. Too much Europe is a Bad Thing, it seems, because here in the UK we always implement their ever-changing rules in full (unlike Johnny Foreigner).

Meanwhile, I gather the "dismal science" clowns from the IMF are also in town for a few weeks. They appear to have flip-flopped on whether too much austerity in the UK can also be a Bad Thing if viewed in the uncertain light from their crystal ball(s). We should be borrowing to spend, it seems. Or was it spending to borrow? I always get those two far too mixed up for my own good.

It appears from...

... the discontinuance in my local grocer of cheaply convenient packs of fresh mixed winter veg that my crockpot habit may have to be modified for the next few months. It must be summer, I guess. That would explain the rain.

I remain dubious...

... about getting a copy of Mandelbrot's memoirs, though I admit I was intrigued by the review I've just read. It's also the first time I've seen Fernand Braudel mentioned2 anywhere. He turns out to have been one of the reasons that Mandelbrot ended up in IBM. Source and snippet:

Fernand Braudel invited him to set up a research center in Paris near the Luxembourg Gardens to promote the sort of quantitative history favored by the Annales school. But Mandelbrot continued to feel oppressed by France's purist mathematical establishment. "I saw no compatibility between a university position in France and my still-burning wild ambition," he writes. So, spurred by the return to power in 1958 of Charles de Gaulle (for whom Mandelbrot seems to have had a special loathing), he accepted the offer of a summer job at IBM in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City. There he found his scientific home.

Jim Holt in NYRB


Even today, I suspect, any IBMer would have to smile at the assertion: "As a large and somewhat bureaucratic corporation, IBM would hardly seem a suitable playground for a self-styled maverick". Not that I'm sure that someone can be allowed to style himself as a maverick.

I'm a little vexed

My first trip out was fine, and I now have the makings of my next delicious crockpot taste sensation. But my subsequent trip to Soton, and some unsatisfactory hanging about in my new 'bank', brought me a replacement PIN generating gadget (my first was already claiming to be low on battery) but not much joy on the online savings account front. I can open one of several but they are basically all (with the natural exception of the lowest interest variant) one-way streets for the liberal accepting, but not the free withdrawing, of my little pittance.

Still, said lowest interest variant turned out to be both creatable and openable from here at my home PC and so I've just managed to do that and lob some cash3 into it. There's a fighting chance that the result of all my hard work will be visible online in about five days from now, though there's already an instant "some cash"-sized hole showing in my current account. Of course. They do have sticky fingers, our friends in the banking business.

Thanks, Mr Postie

A couple of oldies but goodies (and, crucially, cheapies).

DVDs

How on earth...

... did you ever manage to get stuff up into, and (more to the point) back down from, the loft, Christa? Or was it actually something we only did when we were both on hand to pass stuff up and down that damnable ladder? I guess that was probably the secret, so I can't do much about it unless Junior drops by. A remarkable amount of his ski and dive gear is now further cluttering the more easily get-at-able bits too, dammit.

I've just spent the last 63 minutes (judging by web page file timestamps) clambering and squeezing my painfully contorted (and occasionally profanity-fueled) way over joists and past rafters to the furthest corner, to assess the magnitude of the remaining hill I must climb in terms of cartons of CDs still up there — that have now been sitting undisturbed for six years or more — and then transferring the next four down to the heart of Technology Towers. A literally laborious process undertaken at considerable risk4 to life and limb.

Still, look on the bright side, David. Nary a wasps' nest to be seen. I'm now in desperate need of a shower and a change of clothes. And a fresh cuppa. Good job it's only a hobby. Ho-hum.

  

Footnotes

1  Whose well-tailored pinstriped three-piece suit was almost visible in his radio voice.
2  At least, in the quarter of a century that has now elapsed since I bought, but have largely been defeated by, that gentleman's fat three-volume history of civilisation and capitalism between the 15th and 18th centuries.
3  Just the bit of my current a/c that exceeds the threshold above which its interest rate plummets to a mere 0.1% so I can instead squeeze a whole 0.36% (net) interest out of it. Christa would be smiling.
4  Not to mention to the integrity of the all-too-numerous bits of loft floor (aka upstairs ceiling) in between the casual set of loose floorboards, shelves, and what have you that constitute the (you should excuse the term) "flooring" we have up there in the less-trafficked byways.