2015 — 28 December: Monday
An unfamiliar bright thing up there is lighting up the morning more than somewhat...
Please, sir! Can I have...
... my infinity back? I missed a chunk somewhere in my maths education regarding the diabolical properties of divergent series. Mind you, it has affected my journey through Life not one Whit. Not only did I not know that the sum of the natural positive integers (1+2+3+ etc etc) was minus one twelfth1 but no less an authority than the New York Times boarded this particular bus down the Rabbit Hole.
There is — inevitably, these days — a Wikipedia page full of links. The best refutation of this specious trickery, not to mention the best pictorial representation...
... of any physical reality behind convergence to a limit I have read so far this morning2 is here.
Speaking of reality...
... it seems that, closer to home, I may just have had a narrow escape. One of my trusted Linux gurus, who has until now been successfully running Linux Mint 17.3 in a VirtualBox, has just been derailed by his attempt to upgrade his "real" system to match his virtual one. Since I selfishly use him as an ice-breaker (and/or software canary in a mine shaft), I shall delay my own upgrade until he sorts out what went awry. [Pause] Which, he now thinks, was a "simple disk error" on his /home partition.
Earwiggo again...
... or, once more into the "Retractions" arena / Hall of Shame. Here's #5 in their Top Ten:
I keep wondering...
... whether or not to deploy this particular bit of localised CSS more widely in my little web site. Meanwhile, here's an excuse to update one use of it — the current A/V setup in tabular form.
| Source | Audiolab input | |
|---|---|---|
| Oppo Blu-ray | HDMI #1 | |
| Humax Freesat | HDMI #2 | |
| PC audio | DVD | |
| CD | CD | |
| Minidisc | MD | |
| Cassette | TAPE |
Turns out...
... I now have a retraction of my own to make. My chum's Minty Linux upgrade problem was in part merely an unkind, but coincidental, manifestation of Murphy's Law. He had picked for his /home partition a device that — unknown to him at the time — first needed an fsck process to be run to fix an error on it. There may, however, also be a genuine upgrade bug that was revealed by his using a separate /home device. Either way, I'm not currently enthusiastically marching off down the same upgrade road before (as it were) he's sure of all his facts. That said, he reports "Rosa" as feeling faster and the alsamixer bug with the Broken Pipe for the Xonar soundcard was fixed. Though not the digital output.
Yesterday's Blu-ray...
... eventually showed up, but quite late:
It's only set, now, just over a year in the future :-)
It must be comforting...
... to be sure that the Nanny State always knows best:
"Yes, Minister" must be required viewing in Whitehall. Consider Series #1, Episode #1... it's called "Open Government". From February 1980, amazingly.
A mere six and a half years...
... after buying the final season of "Battlestar Galactica" DVDs I've just completed — as my Xmas treat — a marathon viewing session of the entire saga for the first time. Verdict? I thoroughly enjoyed it, obviously! Only about three episodes struck me as failures (out of 70 or so). It was a show that got kicked way out into the long grass in the wake of Christa's illness. But I had a feeling I'd get around to it at some point, so I kept buying each season as it became available. In the end, my son finished watching it (and enjoying it) several years ahead of me.