2014 — 28 August: Thursday
Despite the retina-searing orange warning box added to the top of my 'YODEL' parcel tracking page1 I was delighted to see that my new little toy had slipped through enemy lines (as it were) and already made it as far as the Soton hub:
And the Blu-ray of "All that Jazz" has set off on its journey here, too...
I really enjoyed...
... the first of yesterday's little batch of "too big for the letter box" items when I watched it last night. Let's skip lightly over some of the more glaring plot-holes; it looked gorgeous:
Do you suppose all those Futurists are correct in thinking there will (or can?) only be one Singularity? :-)
Shock! Horror!
I've just been told (by the BBC Radio 3 news, naturally, in between all the classical music that only about 1% of us listen to)...
... that there is social stratification right here in modern Britain. Who would have thunk it? Though, I admit, I seem to recall first noticing some slight evidence of this back in the early 1960s.
There's a bit...
... of ancient doggerel, impossible to dislodge:
Roses are red Violets are blue...
Of course, roses cover much of the spectrum, and surely a violet's name ought to match its colour? (Let alone the fact that an orange is called an "orange", whereas a lemon clearly isn't called a "yellow".) Now I've just learned that a mineral's colour can be "tuned" by introducing targeted defects into the crystal structure:
Consider the ruby. Its red hue comes from an accidental 1% substitution of a chromium ion (Cr3+) for aluminium in the common mineral corundum (Al2O3). When the Cr3+ is forced into this environment, its electronic states become altered, which changes the way the material absorbs and emits light.
Turns out the equations of quantum mechanics describe the chemical tweaking needed to "tune" the colours, if you have a stonking great supercomputer of the sort used by Proctor & Gamble to seek out a better cathode material for its Duracell division. (And, I suppose, if it isn't already too busy hosting the uploaded consciousness of Dr Will Caster.)
I last heard...
... from Nigel Farage when he was assuring me, in writing, that Eastleigh2 was going to be flooded by 29,000,000 Romanians and Bulgarians in 2013. A typically-accurate political prediction, it seems. Last year about 243,000 migrants managed to trickle into the UK. Of these, about 28,000 came from the countries Mr Farage so confidently pinpointed.
I've received...
... a link to an "official" (and remarkably silly) sneak preview video of Dyson project N223 and am asked to tell them what I think it is. I assume I was sent it because they know where I am, having sent me a replacement battery for my cute sucker a year ago. Personally, I always feel a marketing video represents much less of a waste of money if the punter is left with a clear idea of what the new product is, or does, or is likely to cost. (Or, ideally, all three.) But that's just me; I'm old-fashioned that way.
I mentioned...
... just a couple of weeks ago a few remarks made by George RR Martin about his teachers taking away books by Asimov and Heinlein and suggesting George Eliot's "Silas Marner" as a more acceptable, and much-improved, substitute. Well, browsing back through an issue of "Foundation" (#55, Summer 1992) I found an amazingly crass comment about my favourite Wyndham title ("The Chrysalids") which had at the time apparently been deemed for many years by teachers to be "safe, comfortable, and generally free of controversy". A point shown in an extract from a Schools Council Research Study ("Children and their Books", Frank Whitehead and others) quoted in a telling essay by Rowland Wymer:
We suggest that for the child retarded (sic) by Enid Blyton The Chrysalids may offer an efficacious bridge between The Secret Seven and The Crucible which could perhaps lead him (sic) ultimately to an appreciation of The Scarlet Letter.
They clearly hadn't read the same subversive book I enjoyed so many decades ago. [Pause] Time for my evening meal.
In the continuing...
... absence of the (hoped-for) toy delivery I had to settle instead for two more parts of yesterday's little batch of incoming pixellated entertainment...
"Clone" is a mildly futuristic tale, and the nearest thing I've yet seen to an English Bergman (but who happens to be Hungarian). It's set largely on the same ravishing northern German beach landscapes as parts of that recent Polanski film "Ghost Writer", and also featured two young ladies who were later to crop up in "Game of Thrones". "Perfect Sense" is a somewhat more apocalyptic tale, told on a small-scale Glaswegian canvas by the chap who did "Hallam Foe" (which I liked) and "Spread" (which I disliked) some while back. It also benefitted very much from Max Richter doing the music.
I'm apparently going through a brief Eva Green phase. I expect it will wear off.