2014 — 5 December: Friday
Who knows where sleep goes when it goes? I certainly don't.
Last night's...
... sleepy idiot has (as usual) magically transformed into this morning's dopey one.1 Some of the dreams were even more bizarrely surreal than the norm. The first house we (nearly) bought in 1974 transformed into a preserved relic on a railway station platform? Where did that come from, I wonder? While I don't worry about what goes on inside my head it does, erm, make me think...
Firing up Pale Moon shows me yet another Noscript update. I must say, by the way, how much I prefer the Pale Moon variant to its Firefox elder sibling.
I lost...
... one of my focused enthusiasms — the interest in linguistics — more or less simultaneously with my reading (I won't say "enjoyment") of Ian Watson's The Embedding in the 1970s. From that point, I tended to regard Chomsky more as a source of incisive geo-political information than anything else. Now I learn that he was retreating from his "language instinct" position over a decade ago. An interesting read:
Recursion allows us to rearrange words and grammatical units to form sentences of potentially infinite complexity. For instance, I can recursively embed relative-clause phrases — phrases beginning with who or which — to create never-ending sentences: The shop, which is on Petticoat lane, which is near the Gherkin, which... But we now know that humans are not alone in their ability to recognise recursion: European starlings can do it too. This 'unique' property of human grammar might not be so unique after all. It also remains unclear whether it is really universal among human languages.
So much for bird brains. But what about Steven Pinker? Not to mention the black monolith from "2001" :-)
Speaking of black monoliths... it's three years to the day since I managed to fry the six cores inside BlackBeast Mk I during my misguided attempts to improve (and quieten) its cooling.
The upside...
... to a really early start on a Friday morning is the way you can be back from a round trip expotition to Mr Postie's bat cave...
... and the weekend foodie shop while the world and his wife are still wiping the breakfast chookie egg yolk off little Quentin's chin before delivering him to school.
Now. Where's my cereal?
Inexplicably...
... this little gem has been malingering on my shelves (still unwatched) despite beaming down hereabouts in November 2005:
Odd. But — despite the presence of Judy "beautiful supreme councillor Fulvia" Geeson — there always seems to have been something a little more, erm, worthwhile higher up the priority queue...
I've barely heard...
... of taxi-summoning App "Uber" and now it's valued at more than $40,000,000,000 and is being questioned on its privacy policies (if any) by a US Senator who, last time I looked, was a TV comedian.
Is "cashback"...
... of more than £30 received simply for having used a credit card (on which I've paid no interest by settling the monthly bill in full each time) 'real' interest? Just askin'.