2013 — 31 October: Thursday
Drizzle1 is the prevailing theme so far this autumnal morning. Still, I have a lunch date to look forward to, and there's also a large (and steadily growing) hole in Mother Hubbard's cupboard that now desperately needs attention if I intend to eat this weekend. I expect I do.
(First) mission accomplished, and out goes an undevoured — indeed, unopened — pack of four of the unborn dating from two months ago...
... to make room for the next batch.
Here, surely...
... is the partial chronicle of a desperate science? Source and snippet:
In that passage, Losada explains how human interaction is a lot like fluid viscosity. People, he writes, "could be characterized as being stuck in a viscous atmosphere highly resistant to
flow." The authors of "Wishful Thinking" offer their opinion of this metaphorical approach in a few sentences worth quoting in full:
One could describe a team's interactions as "sparky" and confidently predict that their emotions would be subject to the same laws that govern the dielectric breakdown of air under the
influence of an electric field. Alternatively, the interactions of a team of researchers whose journal articles are characterized by "smoke and mirrors" could be modeled using the physics
of airborne particulate combustion residues, combined in some way with classical optics.
Could be, in other words, but shouldn't be.
Nice to see Alan Sokal keeping up the good work. Though how a professor can distance herself from the supposedly underlying maths and simply trust to the peer-review process boggles me somewhat. Probably why I'm not a professor, and lack any doctorates.
Lunch is now...
... a tasty repast of the past. In fact, it's nearly dark and will soon be time to think about an evening snack. How time flies.
Having received a demand for, supplied, and had my energy meter readings digested, all in the course of the last few hours, I'm a little dismayed to see quite how much I am now in credit with the blighters. I remember taking out a bank loan for less than that amount to pay for a replacement gas-fire and back boiler in the Old Windsor house (a mere 37 years ago). But then, I also paid more for our (Indian) lunch today for two of us than my starting weekly salary in ICL back in February 1974. Crazy values and prices.
Having lost...
... since upgrading to Win8.1 Pro both the motherboard's integrated graphics ability to load the driver it needs and for some other reason the ability to run the ATI Radeon Catalyst Control Center (sic) utility I'm left able to display video material on the 60" Kuro plasma from BlackBeast, but I cannot persuade the material to extend fully to the edges of the screen. By default, the ATI Radeon card scales down the image to around 87% of full screen. I haven't a clue why, nor do I seem to have any current way of fixing it. The two Dell screens are unaffected, and the display subsystem detects, and is perfectly well aware of, the 1920x1080 resolution of the Kuro. Most annoying.
All fixed!
A momentary dalliance with Mrs Google was all it took to discover that the ATI Radeon utility has now been revised and unified. 197MB of new code and a reboot later...
... all is sweetness and full-screen light. Pixel-perfect, you might say.