2014 — 15 March: Saturday

Visual evidence1 suggests Big Bro might soon be hearing gurgling sounds... Mind you, I'm sure I've mentioned this animation to Ian in the past. (Link.)

Meanwhile...

... I've just added the final batch of Xmas cranberries to my next dish of stewed plums for my breakfast cereal topping. They lasted jolly well. I shall try to remember to explore some of the frozen fruit aisles in future.

I have a shocking...

... secret. Not one of my 9,000 or so books features shared tales from the world of what our North American cousins call the elevator industry...

Elevator Man

... though I contend its cover illustration is quite similar to this equally non-mainstream (and excellent) occupant of one of my shelves:

American Steel

If we tend to ignore the significance of elevators, it might be because riding in them tends to be such a brief, boring, and even awkward experience — one that can involve unplanned encounters between people with whom we have nothing in common, internal turmoil over where to stare, and a vaguely unpleasant awareness of the fact that we're hanging from a cable in a long, invisible shaft.

Leon Neyfakh in Boston Globe


I usually take the stairs.

Core values?

My present trail of webby browsing began here...

"Inequality" is an inadequate word for the Big Smashup, but we need some term to describe all the things that have gone to make the lives of the rich so superlative and the lives of people who work so shitty and so precarious. It is visible in the ever-rising cost of healthcare and college, in the deindustrialization of the Midwest and the ballooning of Wall Street, in the power of lobbying, in the dot-com bubble, in the housing bubble, in the commodities bubble.

Thomas Frank in Salon


... and meandered around more than somewhat...

... passing through Apple's "normally soporific" AGM:

For example, all iPads and iPhones are flown from the manufacturing plants to the distribution warehouses. The reason is that the interest on stock is higher than the air freight costs. So, it's actually cheaper, costs less overall, to fly than ship them by sea. And CO2 emissions be damned where the bottom line is concerned.
Similarly, the teardown companies regularly castigate Apple for building shiny shiny that it almost impossible to upgrade, repair or even recycle. One example is the practice of gluing batteries into place meaning that once you've gone through the battery's lifespan of recharges you've got to junk the entire device. Very sustainable that is: but also highly profitable for the company, which gets to sell you a new one.

Tim Worstall in PandoDaily


Before encountering this heart-warming tale:

I will admit though that the Russian, or Soviet if you prefer, insistence upon rational engineering standards did not always go well. The powers that be realised that they simply weren't able to keep up with American processor development, so a plan was hatched to buy a job lot of 80286 processors and then install them into home grown motherboards so as to kick start computing. At the time chip pins were 1/10th of an inch spaced. But the Soviet Union was rigorously metric and this translates into 0.254 of a cm. Clearly, a ridiculous spacing so the motherboards were manufactured to a rational size, 0.25 cm. This didn't, as you might imagine, work when the chips turned up from Intel.
Last I heard that stash of chips was picked up at $5 a pop for the gold refining possibilities.

Date: Early to mid-1980s, (I assume)


I was always...

... somewhat tickled to see that decks of mag tape drives took a firm hold in the public perception of what a "computer" looked like. This charming example lifted from Adam Cornford's rambling interview with Clifford Harper — published in book form (in 1984) as "The Education of Desire" — forms...

Clifford Harper

... approximately one-sixteenth of a poster drawn for a Leeds Co-ops fair in 1980. Harper drew (perhaps still draws) the lovely graphics for the 'Country' diary in the Grauniad — a fact that has taken shamefully long2 for me to realise because "Desire" predated these. I've just ordered a copy on this sunny afternoon.

I'm pleased...

... to learn that "XKCD" has (another) book coming out. The 'text tip' lurking behind his announcement...

XKCD new book

... mentions issues with printing an antimatter edition :-)

There's just a wee touch...

... of irony involved in stuffing four SSDs into BlackBeast, in pursuit of blissful peace'n'quiet (and less heat and power) only to have a neighbour fire up some obnoxiously-noisy power tools for much of the day. Is that Instant Calmer? :-)

I've also raised a Support Ticket regarding the failure of any of the SSDs, regardless of the SATA III port they're on, to report S.M.A.R.T. data back into the super-duper new PerfectDisk Optimising tool. Piriform's "Speccy" can (mostly) manage that trick, so I don't see what the problem is. Short of blaming Win8.1, of course. After all, it's not as if HDCP is involved anywhere!

  

Footnotes

1  In an overnight email from New Zealand.
2  About three decades!