2016 — 2 January: Saturday
I enjoy the music of Steve Reich, and while listening to a snippet of the "Desert Music" I agreed with the BBC chap that it's wrong to lump him in with the "other" minimalists. Radio 3 is currently off on a modern tangent. I belatedly realised I was listening to some Stockhausen yesterday evening. That will never do!
What's wrong with Stockhausen?
Well — skipping over the memory of Beecham claiming never to have conducted any, but to have once trodden in some — it was distracting me from the delightful book I borrowed from Roger yesterday after snaffling one of his mini mince pies: Carlo Rovelli's "Seven brief lessons on physics". As a defiantly dilettante-ish life-long dabbler in physics I was amused to meet an elegant formula equating the properties of curved space to the energy of matter:
Rab − 1/2 R g ab = Tab
My aeronautical engineering never flew at such an altitude! Rovelli: "to study and digest Riemann's mathematics in order to master the technique to read and use this equation takes a little commitment and effort... but less than is necessary to come to appreciate the rarefied1 beauty of a late Beethoven string quartet." We must agree to differ(entiate) on that one...
... as I found Sabbagh's populist treatment six years ago harder work than loading a cassette tape :-)
Much to ponder...
... as "Edge.org" once again stops to take its annual look around to see what's really going on. Just Sapolsky's first item, on the recent Ebola virus outbreak, is quite enough to diminish my appetite for breakfast. I first read about that little horror in Richard Preston's "The Hot Zone" a while back... The Ebola virus is classed as 4 on a 1 to 4 scale where the common cold is 1 and HIV is 2. Seems there was a well-hushed-up outbreak of Ebola in Washington in the mid-80s (the original incident having been in 1977 at the Ebola river somewhere on our Dark Continent). It's really not a virus you want to be exposed to.
Meanwhile...
... I'm glad to see Clive James still being reliably entertaining:
I'm hoping...
... my next £12-50 or so of weekly crockpot extravagance will be at its nutritious peak in time for my evening meal. Prep time is about 35 minutes and each crocked pot yields typically five meals. Today's slice'n'dice festival was accompanied by interesting tales of Inuit ice-fishing and of being cold in Canada generally. −40? (A temperature Dad contended with on a business trip to Finland in the mid-1960s.) Who needs that? Brrr.
This week's spuds are a colourful variety new to me: "Ruby Gem". Diced lamb, mint, leek, swede, parsnip, carrot, onion, cooking apple, tomatoes, onion gravy, stock, small splosh of wine. And (if I remember) I'll add a few separately-nuked peas just before serving. What's not to like?
Further into that "Edge" piece...
... this tickles me:
Sadly, even the most enthusiastic followers of String Theory admit that it is not yet a full self-consistent theory but rather a series of compelling mathematical observations called — with an apparently complete lack of irony — "miracles."
Long-time practitioners of quantum gravity have advised me that if one wishes to publish in the field, any advance that claims to improve on one aspect of quantum gravity must be offset by making other problems worse, so that net effect is negative. If economics is the dismal
science, then quantum gravity is the dismal physics.
Even quantum gravity sucks, heh? :-)
Having convinced myself...
... I can use Kodi to do exactly what I want2 as opposed to using it to actually, you know, play stuff, I've just nuked the entire shooting match. I will now re-install it, carefully feed it several thousand of my nice, cleaned-up physical media stub files, and then set about wrangling this meta-data.
Some might well ask: "Why not just generate a SQLite DB directly from your ASCII video data file?"
To which I can only reply: "Have you any idea just how inconsistent my ASCII data can be?"
No, with the recent experience of (and the scars from) my "Books" DB behind me, I have finally learned my lesson. [Pause] I shall crack open my crockpot while the data is reloading. I shall also buy my own copy of the "Seven brief lessons on physics" — it's a wondrous little book with only a couple of typos! (Though, for all I know, that Riemann formula could also be wrong.)