2014 — 19 June: Thursday

There comes a point1 when further sleep is obviously not on the day's agenda (though another batch of fresh food will be in a couple of hours). Personally, I would prefer that point to be a bit later than 04:30, but I'm slowly beginning to realise that you hafta settle for what you can get in this Life. It at least gets that all-important initial cuppa into the body that much sooner, of course. Though it also gives the red eyes from yesterday's pollen blasts less time to recover.

The downside...

... to early attendance at Waitrose is the distinct lack of my favourite cold roast chicken. However, it got me out of the house for the duration of my network loss. Pollen levels are still high if my rate of sneezing is a reliable metric. Flushing my eyes with the filtered water that otherwise goes into my tea helps. It's far cheaper, too, than using the Optrex that is about five years beyond its three-month 'Use' window. (Guess who's been putting into practice Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science".)

I'm delighted...

... with both the new graphics card and the new pair of screens. Not a single howl of anguish. I like it when that happens. Given the current lack of ankle-biters now to be found crawling around, and sticking their noses (etc) into the toys scattered around Technology Towers, I feel it's safe to leave one side of BlackBeast's case off to assist cooling (rather than reinstating either of the two system fans). Should I ever become a grandfather I can always revisit that decision.

But then, I feel it's safe to jam bare wires into power sockets when I can't be bothered to fit a plug, so what do I know? (And, please don't mention the bare wall socket I re-discovered four years ago that lives behind one of my living room bookcases). Electrons are friendly.

Yesterday's Spitfire

Markings were KJI:

Another dead boid

Should be enough for Big Bro to tell me the pilot's name.

In my more impressionable...

... youth — in the early to mid-1970s — I was much taken by synthesists and prognosticators who seemed able to make sense of the world in a way that I never could. I'm thinking (oh, the shame!) of people like Herman Kahn, and Alvin Toffler. (In my defence, I was very young.) I struggled through stuff like "Thinking the Unthinkable (On thermonuclear war)" and "Future Shock" just as avidly as I tackled many an SF novel.2 I recently mentioned the viciously entertaining hatchet job performed on a TED pamphlet by Evgeny Morozov, not least because he, in turn, touched on Professor Harry Frankfurt's elegant little essay "On Bullshit".

I'm currently Kindling my way through Chapter 6: the nonsense du jour in Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" and have just found myself reminded3 of Vladimir "Popski" Peniakoff's oft-quoted (and ever true) assertion to Park Yunnie that "Bullshit baffles brains". Then, just a couple of pages later (when he gets stuck into the thorny topic of "nutritionists" and their bizarre fads and fancies) I find myself immersed in the following lovely quote from page 55 of my 2005 edition of that very essay (though Goldacre cites it as a "classic" essay from 1986). This is the merest snippet:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Date: 2005 (or, possibly, 1986)


On the other hand "It's not a lie if you believe it" — the classic defence of the George Costanza character in Seinfeld.

  

Footnotes

1  Each morning, so far!
2  I was particularly impressed by how John Brunner took ideas and concepts from "Future Shock" and turned them into his 1975 novel "Shockwave Rider" but that's literally another story.
3  Perhaps by his mention of "[The Daily Mail's] bizarre ongoing ontological project, diligently sifting through all the inanimate objects of the Universe in order to categorise them as a cause of — or cure for — cancer."