2015 — 27 December: Sunday

Not content with giving me about £25 festive "cashback" on my latest annual credit card spending my online bank now exhorts me to check the festive current a/c statement they have just "released" to their Internet bank. "If only" I would sign up to mobile banking they would be happy to add "impulse savings transfers" to the capabilities they extend to me. That doesn't sound like me. Besides, I spend more time at home (where I can "impulse save" to my heart's content) than out and about with a physically insecure, eminently nickable, smartphone of dubious security.

No more scudding clouds...

... out there. Instead it just looks uniformly grey as the small print¹ in a banking email, moist, and rather dull this morning. What a charmless time of year. But an Amazon email holds out the cheery promise of "Cherry 2000" today. It looked silly and delectably sleazy, though I've not seen the film. An even madder variant of the Stepford Wives perhaps?

In a mischievous attempt...

... either to stop me from re-reading "Emma" or (perhaps) just to get me to believe the White Queen's "six impossible things before breakfast", a chum has emailed me a couple of interesting links regarding Bell's Inequality Theorem:

#1 comes from the original Usenet Physics FAQ. I'd previously been fossicking around in that playpen three years ago when reading the John Baez piece on that mysterious number 24. I love this gentle assertion regarding its credibility:

Most of the entries that you'll find here were written in the days when the Internet was brand new. But rather than showing their age, this means that they were written in a time when most contributions to the Internet came from authors who had a lot of knowledge of their subject. The same is no longer true of the modern-day Internet, where a vast number of authoritative-looking wiki-type pages are written by anyone who wants to, regardless of their knowledge.

Date: Timeless!

I'm fully aware that Quantum Mechanics is way beyond weird. But I prefer to "think" that the Moon is "really" there whether or not I'm "observing" it. My chum, meanwhile, says he's now retreating to the safer ground of the sound of one hand clapping. Perhaps I should smack his head to enlighten the grasshopper?

:-)

Following ...

... a late light lunch hard on the heels of an unplanned expotition to Badger Farm, I'm now warily contemplating my first-ever whole persimmon. Report to follow, if I survive. [Pause] My first contact with a bezoar was in the "Sandman" saga. Now I learn that...

Unripened persimmons contain the soluble tannin shibuol, which, 
upon contact with a weak acid, polymerizes in the stomach and 
forms a gluey coagulum, a "foodball" or phytobezoar, that can 
affix with other stomach matter.

Thanks, Wikipedia!

Strange fruit, indeed. Still, that's one more new thing tried. Rather too insipid for my taste.

Footnote

¹ In the bit of small, grey "print" at the end — below the various large, brightly-coloured stupid festive buttons inviting me to "like" them on four festive lumps of social media — they unreassuringly add: "Whilst we've taken reasonable steps to scan this email, we can't accept liability for any virus that may be contained in it." Perish the thought of a bank accepting liability for, well, anything much that may diminish their profits, I suspect. Except their noble principle of festive bonuses for the splendid folk sitting on "my" money.