2016 — 23 January: Saturday
This morning's variant1 makes a change, I suppose, but once again rather puts me off the idea of expotitions. I am, in any case, ill-disposed to such things on any day beginning with the letter "S" as that's when the workaday world (and his wife and offspring) all seem fiercely determined to get underfoot while keeping the shops afloat. Recall Sartre.
Linux...
... caught me out yesterday. And I'm not referring to the BBC's complete refusal to support it, either. I've been "kodify"-ing my various video titles. Yesterday, along came the final Robert Aldrich fillum "California Dolls" (the UK title, it seems). It's better recognised by Brian's data-scraping Python process as "...All the marbles" and thus is now the very first entry in my sorted list:
The filename of the "data stub" that his Python generates uses the title. Since this title starts with a "." character the generated stub remained present, correct, and hidden from me (Virtual, Case 3: it's there; you can't see it: transparent) in the subdirectory until I got the necessary hint to tick "View hidden" — and thus I also now know the "Ctrl/H" key combo to toggle the two states.
Brian closed my gentle bug report as "User Error" :-)
Economics...
... catches me out far more often than Linux. Today, after first pausing to savour the delectable "truthiness" of this opening paragraph...
DISMAL may not be the most desirable of modifiers, but economists love it when people call their discipline a science. They consider themselves the most rigorous of social scientists. Yet whereas their peers in the natural sciences can edit genes and spot new planets, economists cannot reliably predict, let alone prevent, recessions or other economic events. Indeed, some claim that economics is based not so much on empirical observation and rational analysis as on ideology.
... at the end of the piece I bumped up against the concept of "mathiness" in the theory of economic growth. (PDF file.) Trust me; it's worth reading.
I had to stop...
... what I was doing and just listen while amiable Brummie Graham Short described his micro-engraving techniques. (Link.)
Having marvelled...
... at the insightful flowchart of the IBM Watson medical algorithm as, erm, re-imagined, by the ever wonderful XKCD while listening to Kathryn Tickell's musical choices I'm now tucking into some rather-overdue lunch.
I suppose...
... I can just about see a faint resemblance. Crossing the border into Germany with Christa in September 1974, I was tersely invited to step out of her (German-registered) car and then held casually at gunpoint for what felt like far too long...
... while some of the plods disappeared into their little hut, with my UK passport, to convince themselves that actually, no, I probably wasn't a member of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Christa took it all quite calmly, but she wasn't the one having weapons pointed at her! It reminds me of that venerable story (from a 12th-century Persian poem) about some sheep trying to leave the country. They explain to the border guards that they want to get out because the secret police have received orders to arrest all elephants...
'But you're not elephants.' 'Try telling that to the secret police.'
A gun, a uniform, and a badge is a horrid combination.