2015 — 28 September: Monday
So far this morning, my celebration1 has consisted of a cuppa and a very strong disinclination to open the patio door on what looks like a chilly morning out there. Still, if Dr Fang says "Bite on" for another six months I shall have to decide on a suitable, minor treat. Meanwhile, why break with my recently-established anniversary tradition of one of my favourite photos of Christa?
Christa in the early morning light, Beaumont, June 1974
Temperatures...
... may reach 18C in London says the ever-cheery BBC Radio 3 chap. Brrr. Breakfast beckons.
Although I never...
... had the pleasure and joy so clearly and readily available to those attending a psychiatric case conference, it was fun to read a paper called "Why I do not attend case conferences". Source and snippet:
I do not believe the difference between an IQ of 135 — perfectly adequate to get a respectable Ph.D. degree in
clinical psychology at a state university — and an IQ of 185 is an unimportant difference between two human beings (cf. McNemar, 1964)...
The plain fact is that what most people have to say about anything complicated is not worth listening to. Or, as my medical colleague Dr. Howard Horns put it in a lovely metaphysical witticism, "Most people's thoughts are worth
their weight in gold."
In pursuit of...
... but one of my many naïve dreams — that I might one day succeed in restoring at least one of my two Dyson suckers to something approaching its original state of, erm, cleanliness — I can see that I've now delayed my lunch quite long enough. In with the salad, therefore, before resuming battle.
I read the El Reg article...
... on Christensen's theory of "disruptive innovation". Naturally, I followed it by a detour into Jill Lepore's gentle but scholarly demolition job on that same "theory" that she'd written2 in one of those generally excellent "Annals of Industry" pieces that appear on occasion in the New Yorker. She called it The Disruption Machine.
Pondering these while pottering around at all the other stuff that I, erm, potter around at (in this case, not very exciting laundry) I recalled one of my "Letters from Phyllis" that I'd drafted for the IBM Hursley Lab Director in 1993. I'd transcribed a BBC radio programme by Peter Day, who'd interviewed a similar business guru — a chap called Michael Hammer (not Mickey Spillane's hard-boiled detective) — during the early 1990s vogue for "business process re-engineering". I thus found myself wondering whatever happened to him. (Answer.)
My latest book...
... is a fat set of memoirs by the chap (Edward Teller) whom some suppose to have been the real-life 'model' for Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove". He re-tells an oft-told tale of John von Neumann's quick mind:
His mind operated at speeds that suggested neural superconductivity. Once someone posed him the following problem: Two trains, each going 30mph, are approaching each other on the same track. When the trains are one mile apart,
a super-fly, travelling at 50mph, begins flying from one train and back again to the other. How long a distance will the fly travel before it is crushed?
Johnny gave the answer instantly. One of the physicists in the group asked, "How did you solve the problem?"
"I summed the infinite series."
The funniest part of the story is that he might actually have done so.
The version I first heard described his chagrin at missing the "easy" solution.
Blast from the past
An extract from an email I sent to Big Bro a couple of weeks before I took early retirement:
With a mere 111 working hours to go, (not to my birthday, but to my freedom from serfdom) I've started my cerebrations (!) early by treating myself this afternoon to
an IBM-subsidised HP Media Center PC.
Christa remains well, and improves with age. We're both looking forward to the start of my pre-retirement vacation after 3 November. What the pension will be like after 5 January is another matter but I'm
almost sure we'll manage. One way of looking at it is I'm sacrificing £multiple over the next 8 years to spend doing what I like and sharing my time with C rather than showing up in an increasingly weird software
Lab. populated by increasingly strange young folk of dubious habits and curious education.
Actually, I doubt the Lab. will still be recognisable by the end of that time. And I'm sure that if I stayed there I wouldn't be either!
Many a true word, and all that!