2014 — 19 August: Tuesday
Overcompensating for yesterday's early start (not quite pre-dawn) it's already after 09:00 and time to get cracking. I can't help wondering why my sleep patterns vary so much, but I've long since learned not to worry about it.
I renewed...
... an old acquaintance last night1 when I found him in "Scientific American". That may account for the weird dream. It certainly wasn't the cheese sandwich, though that will be the basis for today's walking lunch break. Tick tock...
Perhaps only a writer...
... would smile quite as broadly as I did, on reading this. Source and snippet:
If you believe that having four editors edit a story produces a better story than having one editor edit a story, I submit that you have the small mind of a middle manager, and should be employed not in journalism but in something more appropriate for your numbers-based outlook on life, like carpet sales. Writing is not a field in which quantity produces quality. Writing is more often an endeavor in which the passion and vision of one person produces a piece of work that must then be defended against an onslaught of competing visions of a series of editors who did not actually write or report the story — but who have some great ideas on how it should be changed.
Oddly enough, IBM used to employ editors, paid more than writers (naturally)... until the bean-counters finally completed their takeover.
Harking back...
... to the ghastly Rumsfeld and his "Unknown knowns", I have no idea what a Roomba is...
Anthropomorphism in technology has raised deeper philosophical concerns as well. Computer scientist and critic Jaron Lanier has argued that making machines seem more 'alive' would make people unduly deferential to their
devices, and harmfully scramble their intuitions about the difference between a fellow human and an electronic device whose plug we shouldn't find it hard to pull. In a widely circulated 1995 essay, Lanier called the issue
of anthropomorphism "the abortion question of the computer world" — a debate that forced people to take sides regarding "what a person is and is not."
Today the discussion surrounding anthropomorphism is much less heated — maybe because 20 years after Clippy, the closest thing many people have to a social robot in their lives is a Roomba.
What am I missing? [Pause] OK, I now know what a Roomba is. I doubt it can cope with the loose tealeaves I've just sprayed across the lidless butterdish that lives on my worktop, however.
Mr Postie...
... has just delivered 50% of the evening entertainment:
The other 50% may well be Joss Whedon's "The Cabin in the Woods", assuming I don't find it too scary. Mike has lent me his Blu-ray to try.
While I was...
... courting cardiac arrest "running up that hill" this morning, my chum Len was driving around while listening to (most of) an incredibly moving radio item that he later kindly drew to my attention. Now, lest anyone ever accuse me of being a completeist, let me just say here and now that I have only six versions of "Space Oddity" in my collection, four of which are by Bowie himself, of course, one by Natalie Merchant, and one by the Langley Schools Music Project:
It was one of 18 "rare and unreleased" versions of songs by Bowie on a freebie compilation CD stuck to the front cover of "Uncut" magazine in March 2003:
The chance discovery of one of the original 300 vinyl copies of the original project in a thrift store eventually led to the film "School of Rock", but that's another story.