2015 — 21 December: Monday
"It's bein' so cheerful as keeps me goin'" (or so they say). Today's extra dollop of good cheer arrives in the form of my late-morning date with Dr Fang's assistant.1
:-)
It seems...
... referring to the fluctuating entropic levels here in Technology Towers is funny after all. Come back Claude Shannon and Edward Lear:
"Snunkoople" indeed. (More here.)
Back from...
... the dentist, who — after first cheerily characterising my mouth as a bacterial pond in which the calcification of plaque (that is, food débris, and bacterial poop) into Tartar is a process that takes only three days — set about scraping and polishing her way round for 30 minutes. I emerged with a slightly cleaner set of gnashers and a stern warning not to rinse out the fluoride toothpaste after brushing... and am now recovering at home with a cuppa looking out at what has turned into a rainy afternoon. (There was blue sky earlier.)
I gained further practice...
... in the Dark Arts at about 01:00 this morning — the art of summoning a Firefox window back on to the Dell portion of my extended Linux desktop from Limbo.2 A minor character flaw allows Firefox to drop in on the Kuro plasma screen unannounced. But if the Kuro isn't switched on, the Firefox window is trapped inside a black hole. The only trace is its thumbnail on the bottom taskbar. Now I thought in this situation I could just use the combination "Alt plus F7" to 'grab' the window and use the keyboard left-arrow key to move it back. Well, this time, nuffin' happened. I could switch focus to the window with "Alt plus Tab" but it stayed resolutely where it was on the Kuro.
The Kuro plasma screen is at the end of a chain of HDMI connections: Linux PC, through Oppo Blu-ray player, to Kuro screen. Simple enough, one might think. I gave up trying and actually switched on the Kuro to see what was, or was not, going on. I deduce Firefox says to Linux "put my window here" and Linux puts it on the "Oppo Digital, Inc. 52 inch" as instructed...
... since it regards this as a perfectly legitimate display device. The fact that the actual display the Oppo in turn talks to isn't active could be a step too far, I suspect, into the swampland of the HDCP protocol. I can live with that. But, lo and behold... what should I see when the Kuro fired up but a modal dialogue box that, until dismissed, was perpetually "blocking" my magic key combo. I don't mind the odd modal dialogue box, but it does seem a bit naff to display it invisibly. A trick that Windows had mastered long ago.
During the recent digital audio experiments I seem to recall that the VLC player would simply snap back from the Kuro to the Dell if the Kuro was switched off. Firefox would do well to learn that trick.
Though...
... it was interesting to learn here how Noam Chomsky visualises his apparently eidetic memory...
...he has what he calls "buffers," or little drawers in his brain that he opens to retrieve conversations and correspondence from as long as 50 years ago...
... and that, "for a long time, he thought everyone had this ability", I have to admit it was actually his assistant's blog with her description of Italian driving that finally "made the cut" here:
In Italy, although you can drink alcohol from the time you are weaned from your mother's breast, you can't legally drive a car until your eighteenth birthday. I say "legally" loosely, because in Boston, driving like they do here in Rome would buy you a trip to the courthouse in the back seat of a police cruiser. I'm guessing that in Italy you earn a violation only when a body has to be pried, shoeless, from your car's front grille.
I recognise the style from the rush hour Turin traffic I was surrounded by in April 1965 when the Fiat factory's gates disgorged the workers, mostly in nippy little Fiat 500s that were minnows to Dad's Wolseley 6/110 saloon...
The car (good old DYP676C) was the first of three that Dad had before branching out a little (into a Daimler V8 followed by a Jaguar 420). The Wolseley was a comfortable ride for the trip to Italy.
I noted...
... Cynthia Ozick for her use of "second first novel" quite a while ago. Here she is again, this time putting the case for the value of gossip:
We too do not like Mrs. Elton, nor are we intended to like her; but oh, what nasty pleasure we take in making her acquaintance! And must Jane Austen be admonished, by the strictures of biblical fiat, to keep her tongue from speaking acidly? Interior gossip of this kind, not yet spoken aloud or acted out, is certainly not the most cutting, though elsewhere Jane Austen can do better (by doing far worse).
Humans are weird
Compare and contrast two stories from the same BBC "Health" page:
I love the idea of trusting those omniscient "officials".