2013 — 1 August: Thursday — rabbits!
Deep joy!1 I'm off to see Dr Fang in a few minutes. I can't remember why I always ask for an early morning appointment but the habit is probably now too well-established to be worth trying to change. So, a hasty breakfast, then I shall hunt for a toothbrush. I expect there's one somewhere.
I'm amused, given...
... one of the (many) topics of conversation with my polymathematical chum Ian yesterday, to read this nice essay. Source and snippet:
So what is the nature of things, then? Francis Bacon was discovering it when he acquired a dead hen, bought from a poor woman at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and stuffed it full of snow, to see if refrigeration would have the same effect as salt, and delay putrefaction. The snow badly chilled him, and he repaired to the Earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, where according to Aubrey he was put into a good bed with a pan, but it was damp bed, unused for a year. Two or three days later he is said to have died of suffocation, which probably means he contracted pneumonia. The nature of things does not always invite inspection without penalty. Bacon had been interrogating nature for a long time; nature finally took her revenge.
Given that I spent 90 minutes yesterday evening winkling three long-buried titles from my bookshelves for one of my chums I shall make no attempt on either "The Periodic Table" or on "Brief Lives". Life's a bit too short, and it's well past time for my next cuppa. Besides, I have (as it were) other fish to fry. I'm recently back from picking up a bunch of JPEGs that Brian was able to retrieve for me from an archive I'd extracted from Christa's (now long since discarded) Dell PC of her Thunderbird email. It was too elderly to be digested by today's more modern incarnation, so he wrote a surprisingly few lines of Python to find, parse, and convert back into JPEG format the MIME text that they had been turned into for email purposes.
I was able to "pay him back" by pointing him to yesterday's "MuseScore" discovery and watching him install it under Linux Mint and play an example tune. As he's just started the ukulele he should find it useful.
It's now three years...
... since Stewart Lee had this excellent piece in "The Observer". Sadly, it rings truer than ever. I have precisely one (bit of) wall left that will take another floor-to-ceiling set of book shelves. And even that will merely make redundant two floor-standing bookcases while failing to accommodate the current overflow, even if it would allow the carpet to breathe. Recall I've yet to regain the use of my dining room table, let alone the dining room.
Perhaps I should stage an intervention? Just let me finish that "Happily ever after" celebration of Pride and Prejudice. It arrived this morning, keeping company with the Wallace Wood illustrated stories, the final series of "House" and the re-issue of the first-ever Country Joe & the Fish album from 1967.
Buried treasures
I'm listening to the Diane Rehm show. It is making it clear that the "assisted living" racket industry, aka "the warehousing of the cognitively-impaired elderly", is as alive and (un)dead (and lucrative) over there as it is over here. I shall cheer myself up by revealing...
... the three titles I eventually managed to find last night.
Remind me of...
... the difference between a cynic and a realist:
...mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists... people in authority will always be inconvenienced by schoolchildren or workers or citizens who are prickly, intelligent individualists — thus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such "abnormal" people until they are properly docile and stupid and "well-socialized".
Guess who was skimming Ian's copy of the "Essentials of Asperger's" book yesterday, followed today by a tiny repeat browse of Eric Raymond's reliably entertaining (and, I hope, well-known) Jargon File? Appendix B, to be precise. I note that I have all three 'authorised' editions. See above re shelf space. [Pause] Having found both Baron-Cohen's "Essential Difference" and Barbara Jacob's "Loving Mr Spock" I doodled my way through the "AQ" questionnaire2 and scored 39/50. Again.