2014 — 22 June: Sunday

I suspect Big Bro realises1 that his daylight hours (if not his days) will be getting longer for the next six months... Annoyingly, my hemisphere is facing the opposite situation. Time has a cruel mind (and flow) of its own. What was that Douglas Adams line? "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

I find it...

... a little disheartening to think that the first global trillion-dollar company could be here in the UK, built on 'big data' filched from the NHS. (Link.)

Who could resist...

... the lure of the headline: "Is Math liberal?" More lurks behind the pic:

Linear v Curvilinear

What a (welfare) state to be in, to be sure.

As I munched...

... my pre-walking breakfast, and following yesterday's deep re-immersion in that strange culture called "Washington", I discovered I'm now more sympathetic to Mr Google's assertion several years ago that it's "an incumbent protection machine". Said assertion cropped up in an interesting review of a new book by a chap I last mentioned just three days ago. Source and snippet:

But the techno-pundits Morozov criticizes ... are also telling people what they want to hear: that the time they spend playing video games makes them 'smarter'; that retweeting is an act of civic engagement on par with organizing a protest; that quantity (measured in clicks, tweets, or likes) is the same as quality and determines the worthiness of everything from art to music to literature; that the many hours they spend on 'the Internet' help solve the world's problems.
And these tranquilizers of the conscience, to borrow a phrase from the tech apostate Joseph Weizenbaum, are much harder to fight. The critic must contend with the reality that not everyone will cotton to his criticism, not because he is wrong but because they can comfortably ignore what he is saying and instead feed on a steady diet of what they would prefer to hear.

Christine Rosen reviewing Evgeny Morozov's book "To Save Everything Click Here" in New Atlantis


It's 30 years since I read Weizenbaum's somewhat-despairing "Computer Power and Human Reason" — will re-reading it now make me, too, a tech apostate I wonder?

I've just placed...

... my butter dish on the kitchen windowsill for a couple of minutes of sunshine. That should give me a fighting chance of being able to smear a bit of the stuff across the stale surface of my lunchtime bread roll. Now where did I hide that old rind of cheese I had in mind?

Back...

... a little older, a lot hotter (fixed by a cool shower a few minutes ago) and slightly touched by the sun. It was a sticky 6.5 miles or so. I'm sure it's good for us. Big Bro assures me there's no pollen in NZ. What was it Goebbels said? "If you're going to tell a lie, make it a big one."

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually 
come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State
can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military 
consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to 
use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy 
of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

No pollen? Yeah, right!

Being an...

... elderly Luddite, I was quite surprised to find that — with two pretty large desktop screens side by side — it's not only perfectly feasible to have my taskbar down the left-hand vertical side of the left-hand screen, but that I very much like the effect. Like that 'big cat' in those old Aardmann Animation TV adverts "I need space!"

Full-width desktop

Sadly, a (full) screen capture is too wide (5120 pixels) to open for editing under good ol' Fireworks, and I had to resort to the GIMP. [Pause] Which is now updated to 2.8.10, by the way.

I was a little...

... taken aback by the glaringly-conspicuous lack of extras of any kind with my Season #1 boxset of "House of Cards" Blu-rays. Well, it seems they have been fixing that with Season #2. I've just watched Kevin Spacey giving a miniature Masterclass in the dramatic theory of "breaking the fourth wall" off the back of a 10-month, 12-city world tour he did of "Richard III" (which I now desperately want to see, of course).

Meanwhile, I suspect the fact that it's 26C here in my living room as the time approaches 21:00 means it could be summer. It won't last. After all, doesn't Wimbledon start any day now?

  

Footnote

1  By now.