2014 — 21 February: Friday
A much sunnier start to the day.1 The game commences: usual fee, plus expenses. I'd be in Dire Straits without it :-)
The best-laid plans
A phone call from Christopher in the soggy north (as I was zapping my neglected second cuppa) has just postponed today's planned mission of Win 8 mercy (and lunch, dagnabbit), so I think I will put the unexpected free time to good use and divert into Soton for my lately-much-neglected habitual Friday burst of retail therapy. (Possibly picking up a final batch of those IKEA LED bulbs. Every light in the house is low-consumption, but there are still some relatively elderly CFLs in the mix.)
I've already placed an Amazon order for the "Game of Thrones" paperbacks so I won't be lugging those home :-)
I read my first...
... Germaine Greer — The Female Eunuch, inevitably — over 40 years ago, it occurs to me. Here she is, still on very good form, demolishing a new collection of erotic poetry edited by Sophie Hannah:
Versification is as sexual a phenomenon as birdsong; it is typically male display, elaborated more to dishearten and drive off competition by other males than to seduce the oblivious female, whether she be an illiterate human or a foraging hen bird. The male display is sexual but it is not about having or doing sex; it seeks to elaborate a fundamentally banal and momentary interaction by artifice and invention. Once penetration has been achieved, silence falls — for bird and poet.
Technically, since the males of most bird species have no phallus, it's more a question of fleeting cloacal contact. But why ruin the poetry of a romantic encounter?
Cognitive skills
This, too, is a fascinating piece on the extent to which we can be regarded (sometimes, at least) as biochemical puppets. Or not:
When you're thirsty, you don't just squirm in your seat at the mercy of unconscious impulses and environmental inputs. You make a plan and execute it. You get up, find a glass, walk to the sink, turn on the tap. These aren't acts of genius, you haven't discovered the Higgs boson, but still, this sort of mundane planning is beyond the capacity of any computer, which is why we don't yet have robot servants. Making it through a single day requires the formulation and initiation of complex multistage plans, in a world that's unforgiving of mistakes...
Tell me about it.
It was 20 years...
... after reading Greer that I first started hearing earnest discussions in IBM meetings about the looming "mainframe crisis" and what to do about the revenue impact we were clearly (and unenthusiastically) facing. Now here's El Reg talking about retiring greybeards.
I remain glad that I retired when I did :-)
Talk about "no-brainer"
As soon as I spotted this title2 among a list of supposedly quirky items on AbeBooks "I had to have it!" (as they say). I have no idea who Peter and Janet Ostrow of East Amherst, New York, are, but I'm very glad their copy of a reprint of a 1963 classic collection of nonsense science...
... eventually migrated via Better World Books (an outfit that collects books and sells them online to raise money for libraries and leading literacy charities) on to my shelves before I set off this morning. It will be slotted in alongside six of its close relatives:
- Science Askew by Donald E Simanek and John C Holden
- A random walk in science by Robert L Weber
- More random walks in science by Robert L Weber
- Science with a smile by Robert L Weber
- Droll Science by Robert L Weber
- The Drunken Goldfish by William Hartston (this title rated an earlier mention here)