2015 — 11 April: Saturday

Rain? In April? What's going on?1

Odd...

... that I mentioned Matthew Crawford on Thursday. I've just read an essay by him written (he admits) as something of a precursor to his new book. Source and snippet:

My hypothesis in what follows is that Enlightenment epistemology was not the fruit of a serene inquiry into how our minds work. It began as a quarrel about politics, and had a polemical point. The quarrel was "won," as a historical fact, by the party that was animated by a single master principle: to liberate — whether from the ancien régime, ecclesiastical authority, or Aristotelian metaphysics. That is why the term liberalism is useful for characterizing the big metaphysical and anthropological picture that was established in those revolutionary centuries in which the quarrel played out.

Matthew Crawford in Hedgehog Review


So that's why I'm a Liberal! I hate it when other people — be they the bearers of the 'burden' of historical privilege throwing their weight around, the so-called wisdom of the Ancients, or merely a skewed view of reality2 that they wish to impose on me — try to persuade me that I should just leave all the thinking to them.

And pay them while doing as they tell me, of course :-)

Yo-yos as weapons?

Faintly plausible, I suppose.

I'd bought a clutch of Japanese yo-yos (I've decided that "clutch" is the appropriate collective noun), which I'd packed into a custom-made padded case. When this package went through the x-ray machine at Narita airport, all hell broke loose: If six evenly spaced metal cylinders encased in a locked aluminum container weren't improvised explosives, they were probably chemical weapons of some kind. In the end, I had to unpack and demonstrate each of the yo-yos in turn, much to the amusement (and eventual applause) of the security team.

Chris Goto-Jones in Atlantic


Linux versus the world

Now ain't this the truth?

Moaning

Or how about this?

The CIA term for this kind of cockup is "blowback" — the unintended, harmful consequences of actions. It has become a defining feature of American policy and only last week the former head of the NSA warned about just this kind of processor embargo.

Iain Thomson in El Reg


Time for some breakfast (before lunch, that is).

The GIMP...

... is all very well, except when I just need a pair of tweezers for making pixel-level tweaks to an image. Searching for a simple variant of MS Paint brought me to a useful list of Linux alternatives here. So far I've had a bit of a fiddle with mTPaint and XPaint. But I shall now break off to scan the cover of an incoming triple Blu-ray set of the original "House of Cards" (£8?! Incredible value.)

House of Cards original UK BDs

I think I shall settle on Pinta. Feels comfortably familiar.

Should I be...

... amused, or horrified, that a commerce website is unable to proceed until I change the "Safari" settings it thinks I'm using? :-)

[Pause]

The youngsters have arrived, and propose to take me out for an early evening meal. This is good. But my Creative X-Fi sound card appears to have stopped processing bits into sound. This is doubleplus ungood. I've also bitten the bullet and upgraded to an uncapped broadband by paying a small incremental fee. Who knows? I may even start streaming TV right here in Technology Towers... One day.

It helps — if you want (reliable?) digital audio — to install the (missing) xfce-4 audio mixer. Just sayin'.

[Pause]

I can recommend the "Everest Cuisine" Thai, Indian, Nepalese restaurant in Soton. Yummy.

  

Footnotes

1  Well, "Sounds of the Sixties" for a start.
2  My bedtime Kindle reading is currently Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality" so don't get me started on what that is. The kind I can (and do) stub my toe on gives me quite enough grief for one lifetime.