2014 — 17 December: Wednesday
I can't say that the current rain1 makes today's planned walk an alluring prospect, though I'm sure the planned lunch and chatter will make up for it.
Nor does the horrible news...
... that's been coming in of yesterday's Pakistani school attack fill me with any wish to visit that beautiful country. My ex-neighbours are currently living and working in Saudi Arabia rather than proceeding with their original intention of opening a clinic in Pakistan...
There's...
... an interesting review of a new book by Nicholas Carr questioning our growing dependence on, and indeed possibly misguided faith in, technology. I was unaware of the June 2009 train crash in Washington DC that is mentioned:
And among knowledge workers in various fields, automated "decision-support systems" software increasingly substitutes data processing for old-fashioned human judgment, siphoning autonomy from humans in the name of greater efficiency. Surveying the many ways we are outsourcing cognitive tasks to automated technology, Carr cites technology historian George Dyson's pugnacious question: "What if the cost of machines that think is people who don't?"
There are surely already enough problems being caused by people who don't think. There's a pleasing irony to the journal's use of an algorithm to assess my humanity before permitting me to comment.
We'd adjourned to...
... the Brambridge garden centre for a spot of the light lunch that revives (after a six mile hike). As we left, I spotted one of the new Richard Stark "Parker" titles that I'd read about in "The Getaway Car" last week:
Westlake (for it was he) had produced a string of these extremely hard-boiled noir thrillers between 1962 and 1972 or so, and then 'silence' until 1997. Today's chance find is from 2001 but there have been eight or nine titles for me to track down since I last looked (as it were).
Not that I'm a completeist.
The latest spin...
... of the NoScript browser add-in now once again allows me to see the NAS Synology boxes with the Pale Moon web browser. That was a rapid fix.