2015 — 10 November: Tuesday
Having woken a little too early for my semi-habitual supplies run into Waitrose this morning, I decided to Improve the Shining Hour by having a little muse.1
The adventurous reader...
... is thus now invited to contemplate, briefly, the life of a writer who was once buried deep within an IBM laboratory. While I go and make myself some breakfast. And here, by the way, is the text of the Erwin Schrödinger footnote I mention there...
I am adopting the version which is usually given in popular treatment and which suffices for our present purpose. But I have the bad conscience of one who perpetuates a convenient error. The true story is much more complicated, inasmuch as it includes the occasional indeterminateness with regard to the state the system is in.
It was just perfect for the purpose. And too clearly describes the state I am so often in.
Particularly on learning that "developing an increasingly-warped sense of humour" could be an early warning symptom of impending Alzheimer's. Blimey!
Hic!
Or do I mean fractional distillation? This spirited anecdote is from a review of Edward Frenkel's book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Rothstein, and is supposedly "a peculiarly Russian example":
I was too lazy to trim the footnote :-)
Am I surprised...
... to see Big Bro's new vehicle has vanity plates?
Mildly.
In between...
... reading about changes coming up in next April's Ubuntu 16.04 LTS version, I've been intrigued to discover an unexplored OCR facility (that seems to be a front end to Tesseract), and requested to try out Brian's latest piece of HTML-generating Python code for my video lists.
Back from...
... paying in a cheque for Big Bro (well, for me, until the next time he wants some postage stamps, or books, or whatever). Time to enjoy the last banana before I patch one errant line of the Python code, re-run it against my "coming along nicely" SQL database of films, and offer a snapshot of the first few lines of the generated web page on my 'localhost' webserver:
I'm not yet ready to make this "live". Kodi is not always picking the right IMDB links because of mis-matched film titles in said SQL DB. <Sigh> Is it time for lunch yet? Or a cuppa, at least? Or my meds?!
I've already heard...
... both these CDs courtesy of the Amazon "Auto-ripping" Elves:
John Grant is a relatively recent discovery. Pete Townshend? Not quite so recent :-)
Tomorrow...
... it will be eight years since Christa died. I can't say it hurts any more, but that doesn't stop it being completely baffling. And not in a good way.
KBO
Churchill used that acronym, of course. Here's an extract from a letter written by Evelyn Waugh to Nancy Mitford, touching on Churchill's son, Randolph (Mitford's cousin) and Freddy, the 2nd Earl of Birkenhead:
In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph £20 that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight. It would have been worth it at the price. Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud I say I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible "bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave" or merely slapping his side & chortling 'God, isn't God a shit!'
No argument from me.