2014 — 5 July: Saturday

Brian Matthew just played a track by Jayne Mansfield.1 Meanwhile an early-ish bird reader of 'molehole' — having correctly identified the bright orange disks in the Moroccan lamb I watched him eat yesterday as sweet potato — has stumbled over the link I left lying in a broken heap on the floor for the past 24 hours. There's always one, isn't there?

Speaking of...

... orange things and cooking, I never realised that a bag of little carrots, when left long enough in the 'salad' drawer of my fridge, actually liquefies. Still, at least it gave me a certain impetus to wash that drawer. Although, since Peter and his g/f are going / have gone straight home from their IoW week, I might have got away with it for quite some time.

Domestic deity, that's me.

I've long had...

... an interest2 — possibly unhealthy, I grant you — in people with lively minds, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) how those minds work. Those minds, and their owners, are so much more fun than the dull average that (by definition) predominates and often seems to me to be in real danger of over-running the planet. I thus found this article fascinating, well-written, and full of delightfully personal touches. (To my untutored mind, it epitomises the polar opposite of the "Bad science" gently [sometimes, not so gently] lambasted by Ben Goldacre in his book of that title.) Source and tiny snippet:

For example, as you read these words on a page or a screen, they register as black lines on a white ((pale yellow!)) background in your primary visual cortex. If the process stopped at that point, you wouldn't be reading at all. To read, your brain, through miraculously complex processes that scientists are still figuring out, needs to forward those black letters on to association-cortex regions such as the angular gyrus, so that meaning is attached to them; and then on to language-association regions in the temporal lobes, so that the words are connected not only to one another but also to their associated memories and given richer meanings.

Nancy Andreasen in Atlantic


Oddly, the article did not seem to make a similar impression on many of the people commenting on it. Particularly those coming from a religious angle. Well, to hell with them!

Well worth repeating:

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

Carl Sagan in his CSICOP Keynote Address, 3 April 1987


Not content...

... with simply robbing me blind, my (forgive the pun) current energy supplier has sent me a snailmail demanding an extra £1 per month, and seeks to entertain me by showing me (on the back of the envelope) an "infographic":

All that energy

Remind me where the VAT goes, by the way. What does Brenda's gang do for their £20+ of this hypothetical £(100 plus VAT). And their letter, dated 1 July, tells me they will "start taking this new amount" on 10 March. Nice, timely warning. (10 March 2014, that is.)

A post-prandial clean-up chore of growing urgency has been to chuck out the bin liner (and thoroughly wash the bin) that had most recently been containing those liquefied carrots. Yuk. If that doesn't earn me my next cuppa, I don't know what will.

Those orange lilies...

... that I hadn't realised Christa had planted are back, briefly:

Orange lily

Sliding back...

... through the years to July 1995, I see I could be found regaling dear Mama with news of my little family:

Peter's off to work for the next two weeks. He turns out to have been mostly top or second in his year, let alone his class, in his various exams, too, now that the results are all in. The only one he has a real problem with (relatively speaking) is the literature side of English, where he's been finding it difficult to work out how the teacher awards her marks. Having met the lady at the last parents' evening, I can't say I'm surprised, and nor was I unduly impressed. In fact, I wouldn't be taken aback to find that he's already more widely read than she is.

Christa, in her varying struggles while checking and editing the translations produced by translators of highly variable quality, is demonstrating the proof of an argument I had in IBM back in September 1981 when they chose to send me over to Germany for a one-week trainees' writing course (despite having just hired me, and paid for me, as an experienced writer — a decision that amused me at the time). I came up against a Nordic translator of fixed (and in my humble opinion, wrong) opinions. Her contention was that all translation problems were caused by poor writing; I maintained then, and do so still, that a good translator has to be both a good writer and knowledgeable in the subject matter, or all is lost.

DCM, 2 July 1995


Not that this elicited the slightest response. Why did I bother, I wonder? As for me, back then, what was I getting up to?

Grappling with AFS for OS/2 client, another quarterly review, setting up other people's Web Home Pages for them (nearly gave the lawyer kittens when I called his "The Hursley Legal Aid Centre" — I think he thought it was already exposed to the entire globe), sitting in on design reviews that are a lot of circular technical arguing and only a little reviewing.

Now all I want is the very latest level of WebExplorer. But for that I need Warp, and for that I need latest LanRequester, and for that I need latest version of TCP/IP and, to cap that, I have to rip out my Cyrix gofaster pretend it's a 486 chip until I've got Warp on board, and for that I need Brian Bloor to return from holiday as he has both my old 386 chip and the associated docs and software as he was going to get himself the same gofaster chip.

DCM, 6 July 1995


WebExplorer was IBM's web browser for running under OS/2 Warp. My tale of that Cyrix 'gofaster' chip is here, by the way.

  

Footnotes

1  She should have stuck to "acting".
2  Starting, I suppose, when I read various books by Hans Eysenck and his ilk in the mid-1960s. I was naive enough to believe psychology was a solid science, perhaps? And I was desperately trying to find out why so many people seemed so 'happy' being so 'dull'. It's now no longer something I obsess over; I've just made a life-long habit of trying to avoid dull people.