2015 — 5 July: Sunday

There can be no denying that some lifeforms¹ hereabouts fully approve of the weather. Here, for example, is the overnight annual display of the "Return of the Giant Hogweed", or some such — it's certainly not a triffid — but it's within easy barefoot range of both my patio door and my questing Canon lens:

Now, about that cuppa? I'll get right on it.

Something...

... to smile about? Absolutely not. But still nicely put, in any case:

The business community has thrown its executive toys out of the pram, and now there are chrome ball bearings on strings everywhere, tripping up unpaid interns and making life difficult for immigrant cleaners scrabbling under desks on less than minimum wage. David Cameron, an electoral promise to oppose the third runway sticking in his throat like an undigested salmon bone, can only duck his cowardly head and hope some terrible atrocity or a Wimbledon win wafts our attention away.

Stewart Lee in Grauniad

My comix hero Ron Cobb drew this in 1969. Click it to see the "small print":

The insanity of perpetual growth

It appears in his collection "Raw Sewage".

Keeping things in trim

I revisited the updated guidance notes here, as a result of which it seems I have now successfully carried out some (probably much-needed) SSD tidy-up:

I've also added "noatime" to all but the swap partition. I spoil my SSDs! And I've now decreased the swappiness inclinations of my system. As I carried out these minor tweaks I was reminded that until I was in my early teens I was unaware of the concept of "alienation".² Today, it resurfaced when I saw the lines...

# Log Martian Packets
#net.ipv4.conf.all.log_martians = 1

... in the /etc/sysctl.conf file where I was changing the default value of "swappiness" from 60 to 1.

Administrivia

Letters in pursuit of Step #4. (When Christa died I don't recall writing any letters to myself!)

Localhost web serving using 'lighttpd' is back online, though SSIs are only intermittently successful. Odd. I followed my own instructions. How could that fail?

Grimly fascinating

I first met Leo Szilard via his 1952 story "Report on Grand Central Terminal" which cropped up in several of my SF anthologies. I suspect I first read it in 1966 in Frederik Pohl's "The Expert Dreamers" but, alas, that's one that subsequently³ got away. This radio programme is well worth hearing.

Footnotes

¹  I'm not certain I'm one of them.
²  It was "explained" to me by my French language conversation assistant in the mid-Sixties. It had come up in the context of André Gide.
³  Callow youth that I was, I thought great scientists do not invariably make great writers (or, certainly not of SF) and I was more interested in SF than science, per se, back then. My focus changed over the years.