2015 — 27 July: Monday
By my usual standards of retired quotidian slothfulness,1 I fear today — or, at least, this morning — will see me dashing around as busily as Ring Lardner's one-armed paper-hanger for a while. I face:
- A paperwork session with young Mr Mazda ("It will only take 5 minutes, sir") ahead of this Thursday's collection of my new little flivver
- A closure session with Barclays ("Is it something we said?") as I shake loose the final traces of my recently-concluded five-year2 financial entanglement with dear Mama's business affairs while she 'existed' in the care-home
- A conventional session in Waitrose to do something about the once-again parlous state of Mother Hubbard's cupboard
"I may be gone a while."
My assigned reading...
... for today is the Mazda2 Owner's Manual. (I persuaded a copy out of them for my perusal.) So I already now know how to switch off the "stop/start" system, though it has to be done on each journey as the default state is "on". The inversion of wiper, and lights/indicator, controls will catch me out a few times. I need another pair of little wide-angle mirrors to stick on the wing mirrors. Jolly useful for minimising blind spot woes.
I've long been...
... aware of Conway's "Game of Life" with its cellular automata patterns such as the "glider gun" and the gliders it shoots out every 30 generations. And "Sprouts", of course, which I read about in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Carnival" having already seen it 'played' in Piers Anthony's "Macroscope". But this was new to me, and struck me as beautifully neat, while explaining nothing:
If physicists have free will while performing experiments, then elementary particles possess free will as well, and this probably explains why and how humans have free will in the first place.
I can't help wondering what my former neighbours — a pair of NHS Pakistani doctors who tried to convince me the only real truth lived in their particular choice of holy text, preferably read in its original language, too — would say. They denied both the existence and the possibility of free will. I do neither. (I could be wrong, of course, but then how would I know?)
Nagged by a...
... persistent memory — and becoming frankly bored by the rather dry Mazda2 manual — I trotted up to my Books Warehouse to dig out, and then remind myself of, the early chapter in Karl Sigmund's 1993 book:
As I thought, it's an entertaining overview of matters Conway-Life-related. Despite Sigmund's oddly-staccato writing style, one day, I may just finish reading the whole thing :-)
Much less entertaining...
... are these glowing reports of the UK's ongoing nuclear clean-up. (Can you believe it? An unelected little committee of the great and good is currently re-examining the scope of the Freedom of Information Act under which material like this is, erm, persuaded out into the daylight.)
I'm delighted...
... to see, and smell, these chaps pursuing their own Games of Life again on my favourite rose bush:
And I've just eaten one of my tasty red gooseberries, too.
Late postal services
The things I do for that brother of mine. I've just nipped out (it was nearly 23:00, so I wore my hi-vis jacket, though I saw no pedestrians and only one car) to post an order for Mike Ramsden's new biography of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. With any luck, when I send it to him, it will cross in the mail with a newer, slightly larger, bush hat.
I also tried, and very rapidly discarded, two films ("The Butler" and "This is 40") before settling for re-watching Series #1 episode #1 of that Nordic Noir masterpiece, "The Bridge" before "Jazz on 3" kicked off. I sometimes wonder if there's a way of resetting my (low) boredom threshold. Short of a lobotomy, I rather doubt it...
Oh. I also now know that the driver's side wing mirror already has an extra wide-angle section. But I still think flipping the turn indicator "up" to indicate a right turn is a bit silly when the control is on the right hand side of the steering wheel gubbins.