2015 — 23 June: Tuesday
I have to wonder1 why any sane person, having had the top-of-the-greasy-pole job once, would ever want it again:
Ten months as a completely powerless first-line manager in 1977/78 cured me :-)
The weather...
... looks OK for today's lunch date preceded, as often, by a few repairs to the state of Mother Hubbard's cupboard. Who eats all this stuff?
I was quite simply unaware of much of this activity across the Pond at the time. And, no, I certainly didn't realise "why restrooms in offices are always locked". (Link.)
There's a...
... well-argued review here of John Searle's new book. Having read it, I first scurried out to my grocer (my flawed ["unhappy"] perception of reality seeming [to me, who else?] to assert that that task took priority) before scurrying upstairs and retrieving the only title ...
... I actually have by the Good Professor. I was curious to see whether after 30 years he was now changing his mind, or at least the ideas contained in whatever a mind is. This older book encapsulates his 1984 Reith lectures and I still commend "Chapter Two: Can computers think?" to any and all cognoscenti labouring in that field. There's also a clear description of Searle's original "Chinese Room" thought experiment in that chapter. He concluded:
... mental states are biological phenomena. Consciousness, intentionality, subjectivity and mental causation are all a part of our biological life history, along with growth, reproduction, the secretion of bile, and digestion.
By the way, you hafta love the ampersand character in that book title! (Click the pic to see a close-up.) I'm guessing it's from an "expert" set somewhere in the Baskerville or Caslon family. My so-far futile attempt to identify one of my fonts on a previous-millennium CD-ROM2 just crashed UltraEdit so badly (while trying to open a new edit session as root to handle a locked descriptive text file on the CD to help me pinpoint the font I wanted) that it pleaded with me to send an error report and then quietly disappeared without a trace.
The welcome...
... weekly lunch and "set the world to rights" chat has been enjoyed (this time, at what used to be called the "Casa Bodega" on the edge of Romsey heading out towards Salisbury). And a walk pencilled in tomorrow may yet yield an opportunity to inspect a chum's wife's new Asus netbook. I've just eaten my first strawberries of the year, too. Yum.
I've just tried out the "less" tool. My guru suggested it would be far, erm, "less" likely to provoke a crash if invoked in a terminal window and pointed directly at a read-only .txt file on, say, a CD-ROM. He's probably right. Apparently, many of the more sophisticated file editors try to write a shadow copy of a file when you first open it, to save me from myself. This wouldn't work on a CD-ROM. He could, I feel, have told me all it takes to exit from "less" is the letter "q".
This example...
... is about as close as I could get, though it's not an exact match:
It seems to have been produced by Frederic Goudy in the first decade or so of the 20th Century. Name? Kennerley Old Style.