2014 — 10 June: Tuesday
Did you know it was already over 100F in Kuwait this morning?1 Do you care? That's not as hot as my morning tea, after all. There needs to be a substantial spot of supplies shopping in an hour or so if I'm to remain well-fed and in debt to my grocer. (Man cannot live by crockpot alone.)
Since my next country ramble isn't due until tomorrow I should be able to manage. There are, however, two main problems caused by watching a complete TV series such as "The Newsroom" in a mere couple of gulps:
- The proportion of time it necessarily soaks up from that available for other 'normal' activity (such as sleeping)
- The degree of cognitive dissonance suffered on re-entry to Planet 'normal' if/when the material is sufficiently engaging
Scarlatti — Sonata in B minor, Kk.27 — helps :-)
In a former life...
... I wrote, among much other stuff, "traditional manuals". I fear I can partially empathise with young Pinker here:
Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It's a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. The medium by which we share complex ideas, namely language, has been studied intensively for more than half a century. And so if all that work is of any use it ought to be of use in crafting more stylish and transparent prose. From a scientific perspective, the starting point must be different from that of traditional manuals, which are lists of dos and don'ts that are presented mechanically and often followed robotically. Many writers have been the victims of inept copyeditors who follow guidelines from style manuals unthinkingly, never understanding their rationale.
Psychology, heh? Well I didn't ever enjoy the (doubtless) manifold benefits of a copyeditor (inept or otherwise) until I'd joined2 IBM. And my first editor there was a charming ex-RAF chap far too comfortable with the concepts of adherence to style manuals and unquestioning obedience. We did not get on terribly well.
Never have I seen...
... that Tuscan invention (double-entry bookkeeping) explained quite so succinctly:
Instead of a simple list, it consisted of two separate columns, recording income in one against expenditures in the other. Every transaction of expenditure could be checked against
corresponding income: If one sold a goat for three florins, one gained three florins and, in the other column, lost a goat. It was a kind of self-checking mechanism that also helped
calculate profit or loss...
Today... No one publicly celebrates the virtues of balancing one's books and of audits with great art or gripping characters. Occasionally an accounting hero emerges, bringing a
billion-dollar loss to light, but few people appreciate it, as the Dutch did, as a profound moral advance in business and public affairs.
"I'd rather be a lumberjack".
Speaking of timber...
... I'm delighted to see that my neighbour on the corner is, finally, having (some, at least) of his far-too-tall, far-too-close-to-my-house, trees in his front garden shaped and trimmed (or possibly even felled) in the way that all of his own neighbours (including me) have done in the last several years. Nor do I care about the noise. I'm just very happy to see the size of this one remaining horribly-local hazard reduced with some, at least, of it being taken away in the form of a large collection of wood chips.
He may even be able to stop leaving one or more of his house lights on 24x7 at this rate.
A perfect, and...
... perfectly typical, final paragraph to the TV review Nancy Banks-Smith wrote about "The Survivors" nearly 40 years ago for the Grauniad:
I don't want to be too haughty about a perfectly passable pastime. It's all right. And it goes down very well indeed with children. I found three of them sitting perfectly still and silent watching my second TV set. And I don't even have three children.
Guess who's been glancing through his copy of "The Bedside Guardian" #24 for 1974-75? [Pause] I've also been switching back and forth between the Freesat BBC 48KHz Radio 3 'live' satellite transmission and the 'HD audio' feed available here. (I was listening by piping it directly into the VLC player, which reports it as a 44.1KHz MPEG AAC [mp4a] stream.) I cannot reliably tell the difference. Of course, listening via satellite doesn't eat my download bandwidth.
Another 30 minutes...
... of my life spent security-patching BlackBeast to within an inch or so of its life, but all (several reboots later) still seems to be well. Though Google Chrome is now getting in on the act, and rather unkindly disabling the Copernic Desktop Search Connector because it isn't listed in their Chrome Web Store... IE11 also managed to update itself. And Firefox is bumping up to Version 30 as I type.
Listening, again, to...
... John Taverner's "The protecting veil" I have to say it's growing on me.