2014 — 20 October: Monday
A somewhat wry smile flickers on my grim visage1 this morning as I update a file with details of the results of an evening of commercial web browsing (among other things — I like to think I still have a life). Not for the first time (now, there's a surprising admission) I've ordered several Blu-ray replacements for DVDs of varying venerability.
Reason for the smile?
Well, one of the replacements is actually of a relatively-recent DVD — one that arrived at Technology Towers just before Xmas 2007, in fact. Yet it's also the oldest (or should that be youngest?) title I've replaced from among the small heap2 that I've somehow managed to accumulate "since Christa". That strikes me as a somewhat wry factoid since she not only didn't ever watch the original DVD with me, but (obviously) isn't around to watch the Blu-ray either. Title of last night's replacement? "Stardust". She would have loved it.
There's not a trace...
... this initially quite sunny morning of all that hard work put in by Boris the Spider yesterday. No trace of him, either. Odd. Nothing lasts forever, I guess. In fact, the sun's now hiding, too. I shall have to close the patio door. Brrr. Time for breakfast and another cuppa.
Oh, good grief!
New use of the verb "roost". Don't miss the photos. Source and snippet:
Lyle explains there's not a lot known about the architecture and culture of privies, but it's possible to draw some inferences based on the parts of their design that have survived. The six-holer, Lyle says, "has two seats for adults with high arms, and the other four seats for children [are] of different sizes." The smallest child's seat is about half the size of an adult seat ("you want to protect them from, God forbid, from falling in"). Lyle speculates that family members probably used the privy one at a time, so the large number of seats likely indicates each family member had his own dedicated place to roost.
Is that the time?
Or is it too early for Gödel?
In 1949, on the occasion of Einstein's seventieth birthday, Gödel presented him with an unexpected gift: a proof of the nonexistence of time...
Playing with Einstein's own equations of general relativity, Gödel found a novel solution that corresponded to a universe with closed timelike loops. A resident of such a universe, by taking a sufficiently long round trip in a rocket ship,
could travel back into his own past. Einstein was not entirely pleased with Gödel's hypothetical universe; indeed, he admitted to being "disturbed" that his equations of relativity permitted something as Alice in Wonderland-like as spatial
paths that looped backward in time. Gödel himself was delighted by his discovery, since he found the whole idea of time to be painfully mysterious.
Glad...
... I've moved beyond Windows 7 :-)
Not to mention spotted that it's actually Monday today, not Sunday.
I was taking...
... a look at what else Wikipedia could tell me about the Storegga slides, having seen them casually mentioned in the October issue of 'Scientific American'. Wikipedia already refers to the same piece. I admit I had no idea that a cubic metre of methane hydrate brought (up) to ambient temperature and (down) to ambient pressure (in my back garden, for example) expands to 164 cubic metres of methane gas and 0.8 cubic metres of water. Tricky stuff.
This evening's episode...
... of the Museum of Curiosity was funny enough to make me laugh aloud several times. And next week we shall hear what the brain surgeon Henry Marsh has to offer.