2015 — 1 February: Sunday — rabbits!
The sun is shining. The wind is blowing. The tea is hot and fresh. Breakfast doesn't seem to be a pressing need. "Cerys on 6" is about to launch. And I've just received an email that hints at the possibility of tailoring program shortcuts on an individualised basis to tame (some of) their wayward Windowing behaviour.1
So far, my 4K screen...
... is still happily refreshing at 60Hz this morning. (Faster than me, certainly.) Perhaps the answer was just to leave it in 'sleep' mode while I, too, slept. A simple enough cure if that's the case.
Carl Djerassi
Another of my heroes has left the building. Carl Djerassi was a chemist, a playwright, an artist, a novelist and an all-round fierce intellect. We could do with more people like that steering Planet Earth. (Link.)
I have only one book...
... with Lynne Segal's name on its cover still on my shelves. It dates back over two decades to those distant days when I was rather more interested in sexuality and gender studies than I find I am now. Whisper it quiet: the book wasn't very interesting, or even polemical, and I eventually stalled2 on page 200 or so:
But I was genuinely shocked to learn today that, back in 1973, this radical feminist Australian professor — a year or so older than Big Bro— was already being paid £7,000 (enough for her to buy a big Victorian house in Islington, north London) as a psychology lecturer. Five times more than my 'weekly staff' salary as a would-be (but would-not-be-for-much-longer) aeronautical engineer for teaching psychology? Good grief. Heck, it was more than my father, an engineering company director, was getting (though they did throw in an all-expenses large company car renewed every two years to assist his daily commutes).
With Java...
... it was supposed to be the virtual "sandbox" that was going to keep all our web data processing activity safe from the Bad Guys. Now we have a "Databox" — a personal, networked service — for collating and controlling who gets to see what of our personal data, in another (probably vain) attempt to enable a more nearly "level playing field" relationship between a hapless user like me and all the social media that everyone but me seems hellbent on interacting with. An interesting idea. I had to smile when I read:
... it is generally not a practical response3 to decide to withdraw completely from all online activity.
Try telling that to all too many citizens of the Third World. But putting that to one side, the issues4 are extremely complex (or extremely simple, I suspect, depending on your position in the technology food chain) as it's largely a massive culture clash between privacy and profit. Or do I mean between the individual (of varying degrees of ignorance or incipient conspiracy theory paranoia) and the rich, powerful, greedy(?) Corporations that the US Supreme Court (in its not-quite-infinite wisdom) seems happy to go on treating as super-privileged individuals.
There's a six-page PDF file (including a page of 27 interesting-looking references) linked from here.
I bought...
... my current pre-late-lunch listening yesterday after hearing a bit on "CD Review". It's yet another "Carmina Burana":
This one's 'USP' being that it's performed on period instruments. I also spent the generous sum of £0.00 (thanks, Mr Bezos for your unsolicited free gift voucher) on a Kindle version of Neil Gaiman's "Stardust". I last read that in its considerably more sumptuous graphic novel variant...
... shortly after Christa died. [Pause] I've just noticed a repeated chord sequence in "In Taberna, Olim lacus colueram" that, unless I miss my guess, was also later to crop up in a portion of the soundtrack to "The Matrix". Crikey. Or do I mean "how Orff-ful"?
I'm jolly glad...
... we've got this sorted out:
Though (having watched it) I wouldn't have classed it as a "tirade". After all, Charles Darwin made more or less the same point in his letter to Asa Gray, (a minister) on May 22, 1860:
There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasps] with the express intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.
Whatever next?