2015 — 24 September: Thursday
If you were me — perish the thought! — where would you put the long, thin, pointy bit intended to fit on the end of the Dyson's extendable sucking (sic) hose? No, I don't know either. Just askin'.
There's probably...
... (also) a word to capture the process of re-assembling a clean (and mostly dry) Dyson sucker without all its constituent bits while only recently awake. "Non-retentive", perhaps? I can't claim I haven't had enough time to develop my own system of misplacing domestic gadgetry, but in this case I wasn't actually the last person to use the thing. I was merely left to clean it out after the white tornado that is Peter's g/f had departed in the wake of the Great Dining Room Liberation1 campaign last month...
It's amazing what you can find under the stairs and then relocate to the dining room. Consider what I currently have to contend with:
- Newly-discarded Windows-related books piled on the table itself.
- Two boxes that contained large monitor screens.
- Four rediscovered CaseLogic folders for unfiled classical music CDs.
- Four rediscovered cartons of non-classical CD artwork still awaiting scanning.
- Three cartons of hundreds of about-to-be-discarded DVDs and their unsorted but matching artwork.
It all quickly eats into any physical space left momentarily empty around Technology Towers. Nature abhors etc etc
Of course, a vacuum is never really empty:
This is where quantum physics enters. In the advanced version called quantum field theory, a vacuum is never really empty. It is the 'vacuum state', the lowest energy of a quantum system. It is an arena in which quantum fluctuations produce evanescent energies and elementary particles.
Glad that's sorted out. Now can I have some breakfast?
I long ago...
... gave up on the "Sunday Times". (Fair enough; it's long since ceased to be much of a newspaper.) Apparently it's quoted an un-named general sounding off in the way such pillars of the Establishment last did in the mid-1970s:
But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that's not been heard in Britain since the 1970s — and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else — is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and "not helpful", was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be "almost impossible" to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.
I still have no Styron or du Maurier in my library, but I have now discarded Roeg's "Don't look now". (Link.)
Right! I'm away to my lunch date. And the sun is shining. When I return, this afternoon's experiment will be to see if (for the first time ever under Linux) I can persuade both audio and video out of my PC via the HDMI output on the graphics card. It ought to be possible, and would even allow me to dispense with the X-Fi sound card. Because a thing can be done is reason enough to try it.
After a suitable pause...
... for the digestion of a delicious venison steak at the "Plough" in Sparsholt, chased down by a raspberry cheesecake for "pud", I've just proved that the HDMI connection does, indeed, behave perfectly. That's all I need to know for now.
OMG
Browsing through a file box (one of several to be found up in my loft, I fear) stuffed full of snippets I clipped from a variety of magazines for later, more leisurely, perusal — and then promptly filed and forgot for a couple of decades — can be both addictive and quite entertaining. Some of my interests have clearly changed over the years; many did not. An example, from "New Statesman".
As recently as 1985 (if you were deluded enough) you could buy yourself a copy of A Catechism of Christian Doctrine for 50p from the oxymoronically-named Catholic Truth Society. Just a few years later, at a time when it seemed possible that genetic determinism2 might soon necessitate the rewriting of the rules of human behaviour, Pat Coyne had this to say about the thorny topic of original sin ("that guilt and stain of sin which we inherit from Adam, who was the origin and head of all mankind") in this fun-packed tome:
[It] does not say where exactly in the long line between some ancient Australopithecine and present day Homo sapiens Adam comes, nor why that particular anthropoid (and his descendants) should cop for the lot, while his mum and dad and the rest of the line upwards could presumably fornicate to their heart's desire without a care in the world. But it does indicate that the Catholic Church considers that humanity is easy prey to its nature.
Erm, would that be our "God-given" nature? Just askin'. People do choose to believe in the most bizarre things. I don't much mind, as long as they don't act on these beliefs or try to get me to accept them as some form of "truth" or "reality". But the trouble is, quite a lot of them do precisely that. It irritates me.