2015 — 14 August: Friday
Well, it's another moist morning, but so far no sign of the Noah's Ark style floods merrily forecast in the Met Office warnings.1
Strike one against the super duper new keyboard this morning. It failed to make itself known to Linux until first being unplugged and replugged. I shall try2 my USB to PS/2 'converter' to see if that improves matters. I don't want to have to grovel around BlackBeast's Dark Side each morning. Not my sort of thing.
Supplies safely gathered in
It's a bit drizzly out there, but a good time to shop given the usual Friday hordes. I'm planning a little picnic lunch for my pending drive up to High Wycombe next week. It's been a very long time since that was my stamping ground. Might as well shoot for a little enjoyment to lift the funereal mood, heh? (Thinks: better remember to print out my little 'speech', too. And take it with me.)
Inperience
I've just checked... and I do, indeed, still have John Lilly's "The Centre of the Cyclone". And "The Scientist"...
... not to mention Robert Mapplethorpe's lovely book of photos of Lisa Lyon. (My friend Val's friend Graham always enjoyed checking that out of my little library. But how many people know her connection to Lilly, I wonder?) It's Lilly's rather New Age 'metaphysical autobiography' that deals with the flotation experiments and experiences so well-described in this Aeon piece. (One could say "it all came flooding back", perhaps?) Source and snippet:
Blaise Pascal declared that 'all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone'. I've come to suspect he is right. Henry David Thoreau knew all about this inability. 'It is easier,' he wrote, 'to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with 500 men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.'
Leafing though...
... my copy of David Deutsch's "Fabric of Reality" to remind myself of what he was saying about evolution in the late 1990s (in light of another Aeon piece I read today on his more recently-developed (evolved?) "constructor" theory) I was waylaid — it often happens — by this stellar piece of stellar-scale speculation from chapter 8:
If the sun does become a red giant, it will engulf and destroy the Earth. If any of our descendants, physical or intellectual, are still on the Earth at that time, they might not want that to happen. They might do everything in their power to prevent it ... we already know, in broad terms, what it would involve (namely, removing matter from the Sun). And we have several billion years to perfect our half-baked plans and put them into practice.
It seems likely that the knowledge required to control the Sun in this way could not evolve by natural selection alone, so it must specifically be intelligent life on whose presence the future of the Sun depends.
That sort of speculation puts into clearer perspective more local wrangles about who is fit to lead a particular political party, don't you agree?
Soon to be playing...
... quite near, perhaps even "Right here in River City":
I shall have to inspect...
... my chum's new Intel NUC toy. It's just taken up residence alongside his cats (and finally been persuaded to work) as a Linux Mint Xfce media PC running Kodi (initially) with one of those fancy new m2 SSD drives. Hence the latter part of the morning driving around in search of the lacking mini-DisplayPort to full size DisplayPort lead for his 2.5K screen. The PCWorld at Hedge End is currently being refurbished — for Xmas, probably — so we ended up at Maplin3 in Bevois Valley. (When was I last there?)
Chaps and their hobbies...
My recent evening meal...
... was an unconventional treat. Haven't chosen a name for it yet. (Tutti Frutti has already been taken.) I kicked off with a small bowl of fresh fruit (cherries, plums, cranberries, strawberries, raspberries, all swimming around in the juice of two freshly-squeezed oranges, plus just a few dabs of vanilla ice-cream on top). And I followed that with a slice of toasted Italian bread (mouldy bits first carefully but casually pinched out and discarded) with thin slices of cheddar cheese melted on to it under the grill. No butter, of course. (Would have been far too much mess to clean up.)
But why is this the first time I've made melted cheese on toast since before Christa died? Riddle me that!
My next treat — at least, I hope it's going to be a treat — is to find out what my friends in "Castle" have been getting up to since I stopped watching at the end of Season #4 for no particular reason. Season #7 has now ended, so I've a fair amount of lost ground to make up.