2016 — 17 January: Sunday

A temporary state of bliss can be induced1 by something as simple as a good night's sleep, a fresh cuppa, and the return to active service of a freshly-laundered favourite sweater that has somehow mysteriously failed to shrink in the wash. I shall be using that #10 economy setting again, I suspect. But will my blissful state survive payment of my annual house and contents insurance...?

The premium has risen...

... by 4.3%, unlike my pension. And there's no sign of a no-claims bonus. Still, the mere fact that online renewal exists is a happy discovery. Whether the process is the "safe and easy" one promised remains to be seen. I'm rarely impressed by online processes. They tend to make lots of unwarranted assumptions.

What's this mysterious "Windows" thing, for example? :-)

I'm unsure...

... how there can be a new album by Jeff Buckley, but Cerys is playing a track from it in my newly-reinsured2 house as I type.

Some people grow roses

I'm not "some people", though I certainly try to do nothing to harm any of the roses that Christa planted. And I've been growing a chemical garden3 (in an empty jam jar that once held Rose's lime marmalade) for some 30 years now:

chemical garden

I was actually reminded of two things by Tim Requarth's Aeon article. One, you can see above. The other, from 1982, you can see below:

Genetic takeover

There's actually a third: Cairns-Smith's lighter-weight 1985 "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life" but I haven't yet managed to dig that one out from its hiding place. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Isn't it amazing...

... just what sort of stuff nearly vanishes forever? Even very expensive NASA stuff!

Before...

... my frozen peas are fit to take their place in a bowl of crockpotted tastiness the little iceberg of the things has first to be zapped into a more malleable form / phase of matter :-)

Everything comes...

... to he who searches diligently enough:

Seven Clues

Roko's basilisk

This piece of glorious, erm, thought-experiment stupidity made me smile. The link is here, but (as a Public Service) here's my summary:

Don't panic!

Date: today


Entropy rules

There's an interesting paper here (PDF file) from Mike Russell, of the JPL. It wasn't cited in the Aeon article I began from half a day ago, but I'm used to that sort of thing. Life as "A struggle for entropy", heh? I can relate to that.

  

Footnotes

1  Sometimes!
2  After temporarily letting NoScript allow over half a dozen bits of script to run. Still, I now have an extra 419 points on my "partnership" card.
3  While reminding myself after all these years exactly what "water glass" — the clear liquid all those metal silicate stalagmites have been growing in — actually consists of (sodium silicate in water) I found a glorious anecdote about the US nuclear submarine Nautilus when it was en route to the North Pole in June 1958. In Seattle, crewmen dressed in civilian clothing were sent in to secretly buy 140 quarts of an automotive product containing sodium silicate (originally identified as Stop Leak) to repair a leaking condenser system.