2013 — 15 June: Saturday
With midsummer's day a mere week away, shouldn't it be a bit more, well, erm, summery?1 Or should that be "Sprautumnal"? I shall continue to take my comfort from my books...
In the half-millennium when paper reigned supreme, few pages ever made it into the hands of readers; most gathered dust on the parlor shelf before being recycled in the kitchen or privy. Even illiterate servants had their favorite newspapers, based not on their politics but on whether the paper was repellent or absorbent.
Or from watching Harlan Ellison ranting (absolutely correctly) about "Pay the writer". Or describing the origins of "The Terminator". (A tale from which James Cameron never quite seems to emerge smelling of roses.) There's a fun interview with Ellison in today's Grauniad, too. His take on "a great bearded avuncular spirit up there watching us carefully" made me chortle. But then, I'm clearly destined for Hell (as are all the best people).
Meanwhile (as usual)...
... there's a great deal of "shoot the messenger" going on:
It says something about the lack of a positive case for keeping the NSA spying programs secret that the main line of defense is to attack Snowden for lacking the proper credentials to speak out against the government.
Keeping a (casual) eye...
... from time to time on what looks awfully like the ongoing mess that is Java security2 patching really does nothing to encourage me to allow it on to (or anywhere near) BlackBeast (even if that means leaving unexplored some of the extra facilities on offer from my shiny new Synology NAS box). It's bad enough having some form of Java embedded in my two Blu-ray players.
Aside to Christa
There's an Amazon seller asking £200 for a Sid Phillips album you bought in Englefield Green in 1974 while I was buying a couple of Ian Carr's "Nucleus" albums. Hell's teeth! [Pause] And now Alyn Shipton has just played the lovely "Black Marigolds" from the Don Rendell and Ian Carr Quintet album "Phase III". That track has an underlying rhythm that is uncannily similar to Pink Floyd's "Set the controls for the heart of the sun" — both pieces date from 1968 or thereabouts, too. Perhaps there was something in the water...
Having spotted...
... a copy of Littlewood's miscellany on a chum's shelves the other day I was just leafing through my own copy (which I'd last read back in July 1989 when I bought it) while catching up with last Friday's Kermode and Mayo film review podcast (featuring Joss Whedon at the moment) and alighted upon his essay "Large Numbers" which appeared in Mathematical Gazette, July 1948, Vol XXXII, No. 300:
§2. Certain ancient Indian writings reveal an awestruck obsession with ideas of immense stretches of time. See Buckle's History of Civilisation in England, pp. 121—124 (2nd edition). (I thought the following came from there; I cannot have invented it, surely.)
There is a stone, a cubic mile in size, a million times harder than diamond. Every million years a very holy man visits it to give it the lightest possible touch. The stone is in the end worn away.3 This works out at something like 1035 years; poor value for so much trouble, and an instance of the 'debunking' of popular immensities.
The end of the podcast, with the comments and gratuitous bleeping, had me crying with laughter. 2.3 million downloads? Blimey!