2013 — 15 May: Wednesday

I hardly have time to wonder at news that scientists at the University of Manchester1 have been using high-resolution X-rays to investigate the inner secrets of a caterpillar's metamorphosis into a butterfly since, idiot that I am, I wrote "Green" in my kitchen diary to remind me which wheelie bin to, erm, wheelie out for emptying, but then went to bed last night without checking in the diary for any 'required' actions. Maybe I will one day metamorphose into a competent adult?

Only connect

An interesting piece on the effects of loneliness, though I, for one, draw the line at joining a church :-)

Humans are vastly more social than most other mammals, even most primates, and to develop what neuroscientists call our social brain, we had to be good at cooperating. To raise our children, with their slow-maturing cerebral cortexes, we needed help from the tribe. To stoke the fires that cooked the meat that gave us the protein that sustained our calorically greedy gray matter, we had to organize night watches. But compared with our predators, we were small and weak. They came after us with swift strides. We ran in a comparative waddle.

Judith Shulevitz in New Republic


Nowadays, predators come after us with telephone cold calls and spam email...

It's not fair!

A complaint familiar to every parent.

My first request to deliver a talk on fairness came from a committee struggling with a government brief on social care for the elderly. "We wanted to come up with a fair scheme, so we had first to decide what fairness meant," the committee chair told me. "We thought that would be the easy bit, but we got into a bit of a tangle."
Is it odd that a committee of highly intelligent and accomplished grownups got confused about the notion of fairness, when young children can handle the concept with ease? Or rather, should we say children have little trouble with the concept of unfairness? Much in life is unfair: almost none of it is fair. Except, apparently, recent government policy.

Jonathan Wolff in Grauniad


Feeling "Blue" yet?

Having just learned (here) that Windows 8.1 ("Blue") will be heading my way in time for Xmas, I've just searched for the "Modern App" that accesses the "Store" — the mechanism by which the Service Pack (if that's what it is) will be delivered — run it, browsed all the stuff currently on offer, and applied an update (just to satisfy myself I could) that was available for the only such App I run... the Weather one. Easy peasy.

I wonder to what extent they intend to backtrack on the touch-oriented UI (which is, of course, gloriously, ludicrously, inappropriate for a non-touch pair of 24" desktop screens — but which is also trivially easy to sweep out of the way). Time for breakfast before it gets renamed lunch.

As I sort through...

... my last few hundred CDs in readiness for filing them into what will (I hope) be the final batch of CaseLogic folders that should arrive next week, I re-discover the occasional gems of information (just as I did six years ago) buried in often tiny print on the artwork. The example here, at nearly twice life-size...

On the Rocks

... took me to the track in question, on the 1987 album "World Service" by Man Jumping, where you can hear the following sad tale of a bulfinch.2 "Bulfinches were very gifted mimics of all kind of tunes. In France, we had one singing the French National Anthem, La Marseillaise, very distinctly. There was a bulfinch in Berlin, I never forget it, singing the Communist song, the Red Flag. And when Hitler came to power in 1933, somebody denounced the owner of the bird. He was arrested, and was released only after the poor bulfinch had been killed. You see? Even mimicking birds have to suffer under dictatorship."

BT persists in trying to sell Christa on the idea of broadband. I only wish she were still here to buy it, of course :-)

Duty called

I failed to dodge the showers as I drove to and from the care-home. And if asked to summarise dear Mama's 'state' I'd have to go with "No change". I didn't linger long. "Know when to leave", that's my motto. Quite why the mid-afternoon mid-week motorway should be so full of suicidal lunatics is another conundrum.

So that's it?

My latest email Catalog from Last Gasp pointed me to a lovely short video "Book Moment" interview between Jon Longhi and Robert Crumb...

Robert Crumb

... in which it is revealed that "What's the secret of Life etc etc?" isn't the right question. At all. We should be asking "How to survive?" instead. Wise man, Mr Crumb.

February 1971?

How can it possibly be so long since Paul Beaver and Bernard L Krause recorded the sublime "Gandharva" in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco? Its 7-second delay time lends itself beautifully to Gerry Mulligan's baritone sax, too. I never tire of hearing it.

Crikey. For only the second time in all the years I've been maintaining my otiose little web presence somebody has just requested I remove a link to them. I won't tell you who since that would defeat the purpose but, it seems, their Google backlink facility (a means, I assume, of tracking who links to them) is causing them an unacceptable performance hit. Fair enough, as they're probably trying to make a living whereas I'm just a retired pottering hobbyist. Though I'd be truly astonished if they've been getting excessive traffic via 'molehole'.

  

Footnotes

1  Once home to the development efforts behind some of the finest research computers in the world.
2  Of the "Bulfinch" (sic), in Graves' Garden Birds: "It is thought that they mate for life, but we don't know whether this shows a commendable constancy or a disinclination to have to go through all that courting again every spring."