2016 — 18 January: Monday
A chum mildly rebuked me for having rendered him "vulnerable to being tortured by a superintelligent AI at the end of time", adding "I thought the Intelligent Creation crowd were bad, but it seems the Create Intelligence mob are even worse".1 He might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.
He also kindly pointed out the relevant XKCD strip — trust me, there's always a relevant XKCD strip. Don't miss the text tip on this one. It's not one I'd seen as, despite my best intentions, I don't visit daily.
Even Replicants...
... have to keep their supply chain intact, so just as soon as I can find some tin-foil to conceal my thoughts from any malevolent AIs I shall be tending to that little domestic duty before the day is too much older. I'm running perilously close to "empty" in the cow juice department.
I read Scruton's piece on music and philosophy yesterday. There's now a crop of interesting comments springing up. (Link.)
The thermometer...
... in my little Mazda assured me it was 7C. The one on the front porch was voting for 4C. The invisible breezy bits make it feel rather cooler. Still, at least twice in the past eight years on this date the abhorrent snow has lain deep and crisp and even. And I have the pixels to prove it. Having just about prised my frozen fingers from the steering wheel I think I shall treat myself to a hot cuppa. I went overboard and actually bought some non-decaff instant coffee (though it was only because I was too impatient to wait for Ms Shelf-Stacker to move aside).
I don't doubt...
... the virtuosity of the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra. But why waste it on something as horrible as Alban Berg's "Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments"? It's (almost) enough to put me off my sardine salad. It's certainly enough to make me prefer silence for a bit. Well, that's if you don't count the bone-conducted sounds of contented chomping...
Having trudged...
... rather slowly to the end of movie titles beginning with the letter "L" in the ongoing Kodification of my video-listing system, I've decided it's time for a change of hobby. And listening to Melvyn Bragg largely failing to derail / sabotage an amusing round-table discussion of "Emma" (and its possible claim to be the greatest novel so far written in the English language [!]) has given me an idea...
Mike Russell's paper...
... (see yesterday) is certainly one of the more poetic papers I've enjoyed reading:
Providentially, of course, more massive stars are shorter lived, and in their necessarily unpeaceful deaths bequeath to their cosmic neighbourhoods all nuclei beyond lithium — and thereby make it possible for subsequently formed stars to host wet, rocky planets; rocky planets most vitally with a healthy endowment of radionuclides bearing billion-year half-lives — sufficient, that is, to keep a rocky planet of good size in a tectonic boil — at least for the time required for the fledgling of life to take wing on the updrafts from serpentinization, taking advantage as it does of those other trans-lithium elements for catalysis all the way up to atomic number 74, tungsten.
It amuses me to think how life in this universe could just be an inevitable consequence of gravity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One wonders what various "holy" texts have to say on the matter?
Long, long ago...
... in a galaxy far, far away, I sold my IBM shares and bought a £1,600 Yamaha DSP-1 A/V surround sound amplifier...
... that, with its digitally sampled concert hall and music venue DSP settings, could be used to shape playback2 in a way that simulated these environments.
Now fast forward 18 years. What have the folk at Yamaha been up to? Consider their doubtless splendid CX-A5100 A/V pre-amplifier. Inspect page 21 of its 187-page manual, and pause to soak up...
... the 11.2 channels of amplification that are now apparently necessary for modern musical immersion! (I shall be sticking with the stereo I reverted to in mid-2010.)