2015 — 22 December: Tuesday
I confirmed yesterday that my web browser of choice now "does" HTML5 as seen (as it were) on the BBC's Beta pages1 providing I essentially whitelist all scripts on that page. And I seem to have cured the System panel's recent tendency to move stuff around at random, having now locked an easily-overlooked "Notification Area" divider in position. The "Log Out" button is now the only widget that parks itself to the left of that divider.
Progress of a sort :-)
Having scampered...
... to the grocer and back, on my last pre-Xmas expotition of that nature, I observe that the vultures are already out in force. And remarkably few faces out there were looking unstressed. But now I shall finish my only slightly re-zapped initial cuppa and relax. It's not even 09:00 yet. And I have a lunch date.
On a whim...
... I let the Arts & Letters Daily website choose a random link for me. But was I exercising free will? What can I say? Since it suggested a Scientific American piece on the correlation (negative, by the way) between the urge to pee and belief in free will that I'd noted 13 months ago I'm left none the wiser. As I said:
My ex-neighbours — the Pakistani doctors who urged me to save my soul by reading the Koran in its original language and thus (?) ceasing to be the infidel that they were required to slay — had no belief in free will. Mind you, I don't know how full of urine they were. (Link.)
It's a crazy planet. Correction: it's a planet with crazy people on it.
Eight years ago, I was delighted to find what was, then, a new Feynman quote for me. It cropped up again last week in Munich, it seems:
Physicists typically think they "need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists," the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians and physicists last week in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.
The link is well worth taking if only to admire the charming diagram it contains of the range of scales involved in making physics so expensive these days. And the extent to which either end of the scale is "beyond our ken". Bayes, it seems, should take over from Popper.
Unlike...
... the reviewer of a fat biography of Ezra Pound, I have no knowledge of, and thus no opinion to offer on, either that chap's politics or his loyalties. However, I liked one of the comments that quoted from a late-in-life interview with him:
"I found out after seventy years I was not a lunatic but a moron."
Alas!
My first little portable USB3 hard drive (a 500GB Toshiba [aka the "Red Sucka"] from what was the 'Comet' store next to Matalan several years ago) now seems to be on the way to the scrapheap. This morning, it was only recognised by the USB3 port on the back of the Dell screen. Two other USB3 ports, and even a USB2 one, had all failed to elicit any response. I've cleaned out all the files that were on it, and asked Len to re-format it on a native Windows PC. His first attempt, under Win7, failed. (Probably not a good omen.) Next up: stick it on his Linux NUC and blast it with GPartEd before trying again — this time successfully — under Linux, but as NTFS file system. However, on its return to base it will now once again only mount on, and speak to, that one USB3 port.
Not acceptable, I fear. [Pause] The Sucka has been found "Not Guilty" as charged. What has been found guilty are the two USB3 ports on the top of BlackBeast's case. I may have dislodged the header lead to them from the motherboard. (Oh. Didn't I mention I knocked the whole case over recently, with quite a bang?) But the USB3 ports on the back of the case soldered to the motherboard are fine, also. I thus still have an elegant sufficiency of the things.
And still it rains.