2016 — 25 January: Monday
Later today I shall take the newly-refreshed "get_iplayer" program out for a test drive1 as I noted an update go whizzing by yesterday. Sleep has again fled, but then I did call it a day mere minutes after midnight so I've still managed to clock up the usual six hours or so.
Data Kodification...
... continues after Brian supplied me yesterday with (we both hope, I suspect) a final "disambiguating" tweak to his Python KodiPhy code. Recall, I am perverting Kodi by just using its baked-in SQLite DB as a convenient way to hold details2 of my own video collection. Today, films... tomorrow the more challenging world of my random collection of recorded TV material.
Manually over-riding the result of any errant data in the DB scraped by Kodi turns out to be trivially easy by "fixing it" with an XML tag of supplementary data in an .nfo file created to sit alongside a given film's data stub. Brian has deduced the way in which any supplementary ".nfo" files appear to be processed and sent me a little logic diagram:
10 Things I Hate About You
Here's my data stub for this film. It's in a file named "10 Things I Hate About You_(1999).bluray.disc".
<discstub> <title>10 Things I Hate About You</title> <message>Media is located at A001</message> <purchasedate>2014/08/19</purchasedate> <purchaseprice>£5.00</purchaseprice> <medium>BluRay</medium> </discstub>
Kodi "data scrapes" what it can find out about this film, populates its local SQLite DB, and ultimately displays:
Very neat, I think.
One could wish...
... that Lewis Thomas did not wax quite so lyrical:
We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
Should you want more...
I'm now going to stop reading about the Zika virus.
After a brief pit-stop...
... while it first updated a plug-in automagically, get_iplayer snaffled up all the radio stuff I wanted. Most excellent.
The "Cecil Parkinson" being described in glowing radio tributes must be some other chap than the one I shudder to recall...
This seemed a bit OTT until I was reminded that just over two years ago in the Commons a Tory MP did in fact clamour for a free market in human organs. He was interrupted by the irrepressible Tony Banks (Lab) who shouted: "In that case I put in a bid for Cecil Parkinson's plonker." This brought the House down, as you can imagine, and induced extended hysteria in many of the journalists present. Alas, the exchange is obscured in Hansard, which merely records an 'Interruption' at that point.
Then there's this...
... from the people who call themselves "humanists":
All this applies with particular intensity to sex robots. If culture is anything to go by, it's pretty clear that as soon as convincing human robots appear, people (men) are going to have sex with them. Sex robots have been a persistent trope from The Stepford Wives (1975) and Blade Runner to Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Channel 4's Humans. The hugely questionable trade in silicone-skinned "real dolls" suggests a ready market already exists. Winfield insists it's a path we shouldn't go down, echoing many of Ashcroft's concerns about how the treatment of robot workers would rebound on our fellow humans: "It encourages a complete objectification — which sounds absurd, how can you objectify an object. But you're not objectifying an object, you're objectifying the thing the object represents, which for a sex robot would be a man or a woman."
I always find it amazing that people are so ready to tell other people what they should, or should not, think, or do.