2014 — 6 October: Monday

Hello pension, just don't get too comfy and settled in there1 as there's lots for you to do out in the wider world.

Definitely raining...

... out there this morning. And some food storage space to be re-filled. (If I want to eat later — and I've found I generally do.)

I confess...

... I was blissfully unaware of the Majorana fermion. I'm also not quite entirely clear just how atoms that can represent ones and zeros at the same time makes for "much easier" quantum computing. But then I'm but a bear of little brain and no longer required to worry about such things. As long as there's a spot of reduced-sugar orange marmalade to spread on my last slice of toasted stale bread I'll be fine until the therapist arrives.

It brings to mind...

... a gentle "argument" I had with an elderly gentleman2 during my aeronautical engineering apprenticeship in the summer of 1972. I had already long realised that engineering was not going to be my career choice, so I was spending a lot of my time casting around for preferable alternatives. I thus read widely around all sorts of other fields using the Polytechnic library as the main source of my tertiary education.

I was attached (during one of the Polytechnic holidays) at the time of this particular "argument" to the 'Quality Control' department — a small department, but with very welcome desks and chairs in contrast to the rudimentary seating arrangements available out on the factory floor where I spent all too much time in ghastly apprentice overalls doing hot, sweaty things like clambering around inside aviation fuel pod tanks to 'dolly up' the rivets that were noisily hammered in from outside. I was spending my lunchtime reading the "Wireless World" magazine articles on the construction (using about 119 discrete logic gates in the ICs that were then just about becoming affordable for poorly-paid apprentices) of a simple four-function calculator.

The gentleman to whom I was naively enthusiastically describing this project showed very little interest in the usefulness of such a calculator (which struck me as more than a little odd) and took major issue with what he regarded as the misuse of English in the term "logic gate", refusing to believe3 that any calculation could be performed by such a thing, nor that any good would derive from the end result.

Given the lousy...

... weather, I'm in no hurry to get out and about in it, preferring to nibble away at my "stock checking" of my little collection of videos. I've trickled gently along as far as that unutterable tosh "The Da Vinci Code" which, I note for the first time, our UK classifiers warns (or should that be "warms"?) me "Contains flagellation and other moderate violence". Christa and I wasted 2 hours and 22 minutes of our lives with this rubbish on the evening of 26 January back in 2007. [Pause] And I've just been assured by Lib Dem Vince Cable that any would-be guvmint promising both balanced books and tax cuts in the next parliament "is lying". That's fighting talk.

Thinking of...

... that primitive DIY calculator project from (shudder) just over 40 years ago reminds me that one of my longer-lasting focused enthusiasms over the years4 has been the pursuit of programmable calculators of various kinds. Not to mention books on how to drive them. I once drove Christa and Peter nuts by insisting we go down from our holiday flat, in the rain, to the camera shop in St Peter Port, again, early on a Monday morning, because I had been assured by the nice chap in the shop that a particular Casio model I was lusting after would have arrived on the Sunday evening ferry...

Casio FX-602P

Today, after I'd found it sitting on a shelf tucked between some books, I picked up a pack of what I thought were the correct size of Lithium cells for it on my quick dash out to Waitrose for more boring stuff (like food). They weren't, but they fitted nonetheless, with just a tiny bit of persuasion. Cool. Now, where the devil have I stashed the programming manual?

Tens of thousands of 'phantom' Chinese guvmint officials? Good grief. It was a story on the radio news, but I can't see it on their website.

  

Footnotes

1  My account, that is. It provides only short-term accommodation :-)
2  Who, I belatedly realise, must actually have been a decade or so younger at the time than I am now.
3  He may well have been right, though at the time I remember thinking that he was simply missing the point. Of course, he may just have been amusing himself by teasing me. I got that a lot, being a depressingly literal-minded youngster.
4  Literally, since the day I first saw (in the vicar of Old Windsor's copy of the "Times" in 1974) a full-page advert for a totally unaffordable Reverse Polish Notation, miniature mag card reader-equipped HP-65 programmable scientific calculator.