2015 — 13 June: Saturday
As I await my usual Saturday morning treat1 I've been enjoying another pre-breakfast cinnamon bun while emailing some audio thoughts back to a chum who's busy trying to repurpose the Calibre ebook library system as a media server. (Largely because he can. Perhaps better not to ask?) He does with video files more or less what I wish to do with audio files; arrange them in such a way that it is speedy and effortless (hah!) to browse the collection, and select one for playing from NAS via a server to his A/V system. What could be simpler?
There is a seemingly endless array of possible solutions, but all have their cons as well as some pros, in seemingly endless combinations. Prioritising video over audio has driven his storage space needs skyward quite alarmingly.
It's far too late...
... to be alarmed by this, I suspect:
I run a browser plugin called Noscript, and another called Ghostery. I don't recommend them, not because they aren't good, but because they turn web browsing into a part time job. No one has time to deal with these things. In order to not be tracked, you have to constantly be paying attention to what every page is doing.
What a wonderful world. I wonder if "Quinn Norton" is her real name :-)
Actually, another good way not to be tracked is to emulate Marvin Boggs in RED.
Further down...
... the rabbit hole I found an excellent but depressing set of notes on Max Weber that at this point in my life can only make me glad I largely managed to avoid the close study of institutional sociology:
Thus we have economic bureaucracies in pursuit of profit that deplete and pollute the environment upon which they are based; political bureaucracies, set up to protect our civil liberties, that violate them with impunity. Agricultural bureaucracies (educational, government, and business) set up to help the farmer, that end up putting millions of these same farmers out of business; Service bureaucracies designed to care for and protect the elderly, that routinely deny service and actually engage in abuse. The irrationality of bureaucratic institutions is a major factor in understanding contemporary society.
Ain't that the truth? Bean counters and perverse reward systems everywhere you look. Not that I can now escape the consequences without getting off the planet...
I was drawn back into...
... the world of Quinn Norton for a second dip by an excellent piece she wrote on infections and bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Source and snippet:
While the majority of our biomass is us, genetically speaking, of the individual cells that make up our bodies only about one in eleven is human at all. The rest are myriad flora and fauna for whom each one of us is a little galaxy. To our inhabitants we exist on a nearly geologic time scale. For E. coli, a generation can last somewhere between 40-90 minutes, and so a human of normal life span would seem to be around for more than 10 million (relative) years. This is why evolution can happen at the scale of my bladder.
It makes me quite happy to be old. And gave me a striking new mental image of a way to think of things beyond my idle bus stop thoughts of 30 years ago. Mind you, there was a "Daedalus" column (by David EH Jones, that is) speculating on a novel approach to the problem a while back:
Addictive drugs are thought to work by taking over some part of body chemistry and so becoming essential. Every living thing must have this vulnerability, but as bacteria biochemistry is so different from ours
there must be many substances addictive to them but harmless to us. Hence DREADCO microbiologists are performing the usual tricks of tipping random chemical junk into microbe cultures — but looking not for sudden
death but for heady exuberance among their charges.
Some such active chemicals will be vitamins, energy-rich foods, etc; but some should be the bacterial equivalents of heroin and cocaine. The key test will be lethal withdrawal symptoms when the dosage is discontinued.
"Sir" Van Morrison? Crikey!