2015 — 31 October: Saturday
Well, I've missed the first hour of "Sounds of the Sixties".1 It's not raining. The Beatles are playing "A Day in the Life"... (Apparently there are 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.) And I have my first cuppa. All's well.
:-)
Chomsky got a mention...
... in the review I was reading yesterday of Isaiah Berlin's voluminous correspondence. It mentioned his, erm, unforgiving tenacity in calling out Berlin on a piece of back-stabbing "feline" gossip, which amused me. Let's re-visit Chomsky's relatively recent assessment of global power. Source and snippet:
Today power is in the hands of financial institutions and multinationals.2 These institutions have an interest in Chinese development... As long as China has what's called economic growth, that's fine.
Actually, China's economic growth is a bit of a myth. China is largely an assembly plant. China is a major exporter, but while the U.S. trade deficit with China has gone up, the trade deficit with Japan, Taiwan and Korea has gone down... The more
advanced countries of the region — Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan — send advanced technology, parts and components to China, which uses its cheap labor force to assemble goods and send them out of the country.
And U.S. corporations do the same thing: They send parts and components to China, where people assemble and export the final products. These are called Chinese exports, but they're regional exports in many instances, and in other instances it's
actually a case of the United States exporting to itself.
Just heard an excellent analysis (by Howard Goodall) of "What a fool believes" by the Doobie Brothers. (Link.)
As I battle on...
... with some long-overdue (and much-needed) data cleanup, I've added some musings here.
Luca Turin...
... is hosting "Saturday Classics". His book "Perfumes: the guide" is — well, I hesitate to say "evocative" — but it's certainly one-of-a-kind. Here, for example, is his review of Lancôme's Trésor:
I once sat in the London Tube across a young woman wearing a t-shirt printed with headline-size words ALL THIS across her large breasts, and in small type underneath "and brains too." That vulgar-but-wily combination seems to me to sum up Trésor. Up close, when you can read the small print, Trésor is a superbly clever accord between powdery rose and vetiver, reminiscent of the structure of Habanita.3 From a distance, it's the trashiest, most good-humored pink mohair sweater and bleached hair thing imaginable. When you manage to appeal to both the reptilian brain and the neocortex of menfolk, what happens is what befell Trésor: a huge success.
What, I wonder, would my dear old Uncle Graham (a commercial traveller in French perfumes for many years) have made of that "across a young woman"?
I mentioned...
... my hero "Daedalus" last Tuesday, jotting some random musings here. Listening to Turin's inter-music anecdotes about perfume (including Habanita, in fact, "which", he says, "tastes disgusting!") reminds me of a particularly brilliant flight of chemical fancy in an Ariadne column 37 years ago. I OCR-ed it from my yellowing collection of "New Scientist" clippings back when I still had my pretty decent OCR "solution" in the days of RISC OS. It proposed an ingenious solution4 for offensive smells. I have edited it for length purely out of copyright respect for its author:
My anolfactive friend Daedalus has been pondering on body odour, bad breath, and similar things his best friends won't tell him about... One theory of smell claims that smelly molecules roughly fit in, and therefore bind briefly to, one or other
of the many types of receptors in the nose. Daedalus deduces that a molecule which fitted perfectly would bind so strongly... it would ... block that smell-receptor permanently.
Once your "BO pattern" has been analysed, DREADCO will compound an "anti-perfume" for you, which will desensitise the nostrils of those around you to your specific smell.
I'm not a hacker...
... but I found it quite fascinating to examine the source code of the web page here... just for fun. Doing so, I learned something I didn't know about Internet Explorer (not that I can use that sad joke of a web browser on Linux).
I display all three predictive traits.
Depressing...
... but ringing horribly true. A snippet made me snort:
Serious advocates of high culture specialized in discrimination. An artist's putatively lofty intentions did not by themselves get him past the gate. I remember Sam Lipman one day telling me that the night before he had seen Philip Glass's new opera. When I asked what he thought of it, he replied that the message was clear enough: "Glass is saying die, die, die, fools, but first give me $175 for a seat to hear me tell it."