2015 — 10 June: Wednesday
Today's the day I get my new garage door fitted.1 I wonder how grotesque a white door will look? Still, it's one of the colours I've yet to try... yes, I know, technically white isn't a colour. The present incumbent is green, underneath which can be seen its original blue. And the door back in 1981 (the one partially wrecked by my brother-in-law Georg) was an untasty shade of brown.
Still, I'm not the one who has to see the thing. And I can't say I notice the neighbours' colour choices, either.
My external 'molehole' is...
... currently responding "503 Service Unavailable" which suggests some midnight maintenance over in Texas. Sorry about that.
Oddly, "Enola Gay" was...
... one of the pieces of music credited in "Ex Machina" (though for no good reason that I could see). This paragraph is from a fascinating piece that again touches on yesterday's topic of the facticity of facts:
And there was me, still naïvely thinking history books are written by the "winners", with calm scholarly impersonality and tidied-up narratives of timelines full of clear, crisp, truthy facts. Meanwhile, it's hard to disagree with this summary:
His latest, 2014's The News: A User's Manual, argues that media are the primary form of education for post-university adults and a touchstone for developing democratic opinion. Unfortunately, the news operates in a dysfunctional manner, transmitting the same types of stories over and over again and feeding our low impulses for gruesome details, repetitive narratives, and salacious babble. Reporting fails to provide the contextualizing necessary to foment the enlightened views required to support a healthy free society.
"Drop the dead donkey", in other words. The book remains in my to-be-read pile 30 days since buying it. In my defence, I tried the "Quantum Thief" (stalling about 100 pages in) and very much enjoyed "Do no harm", passing that straight over to Peter's g/f. I'm retired, you know.
South Hill Park
Having done some recordings there in the mid 1970s for my first "book" and become friendly with the recording engineer, Christa and I also attended a series of evening lectures there, culminating in a demonstration of a mini-Moog that (at about £1,000) was sadly beyond our reach. I heard Will Gregory just last week on the steam radio. Not knowing at first who he was or what I was hearing, I initially assumed somebody had unearthed an old bit of Walter/Wendy Carlos material. Good stuff.
Où sont les croissants d'antan?
Not yet out on the shelves of Waitrose, this early sunny breezy morning, that's for sure. So I settled (perfectly happily) for some cinnamon hot cross buns. Hyphenate that as you wish. Yum.
I recently noted...
... descriptions of the brain as "a dual-core engine ... perfectly capable of running on a single core" (here) and as having "the consistency of jelly" (here). Given its most recent visual manifestation as a gel in "Ex Machina" I find it irresistible to see what Stafford Beer had to say in a keynote address over 30 years ago:
The brain is always discussed — have you noticed this? — in terms of the available technology of the day. This is a rather ominous thought... Warren McCulloch, my beloved mentor, used to say that the brain was a three-pound electrochemical computer running on glucose at twenty-five watts.
Mainframe skills?
The lamentable story here ("Hope is never a good mainframe strategy!") reminded me powerfully of that anecdote in Ellen Ullman's book "Close to the Machine". It was a meeting with a vice president in charge of reengineering her company's global transaction processing. She had three programmers maintaining the system. On Christmas Eve 1995 her department processed 72,000,000 credit card transactions amounting to $3,000,000,000:
"How old is the system?"
"Fifteen years."
"Fifteen years! Oh my God..."
I trailed off and reconsidered the vice president, in her plain but excellent suit, whose billions in electronic funds were riding around the planet atop
fifteen-year-old assembler code...
Owing to...
... a momentary lapse of reason2 I failed to factor in the slight noise made — as it bumps gently along the roof of my car — by a plastic widget on the end of a pull-rope hanging from the new garage door's lock. When I remove it, I shall also experiment with refitting the car's radio aerial as the new lock is about two feet nearer the ground than the previous one. Its trajectory on opening and closing, therefore, may well not clash with the aerial.
Oops! Better make a bit of late lunch. I'm starving.
Having reminded myself...
... of that ancient first book of mine, and the way it led to some initial half-way decent home recording kit (not to mention my first hi-fi magazine article) I recalled dear Mama's hi-fi system, a 1971 Sony HP-488 system. It failed after 25 years. She expected me to fix it. I gently disabused her of the notion in one of my weekly letters:
Sorry not to be able to be more optimistic about your poor old Sony. But the first thing you must do is give thanks that it has lasted about ten to fifteen years longer than could reasonably have been expected!