2016 — 6 March: Sunday
The overnight frost was sufficiently hard it's currently surviving the sunlight now hitting various neighbours' roof tiles. It's not surviving my morning cuppa. Not much does.
Hello, pension...
... just don't get too settled in there before I can get my hands on you tomorrow; this is the month I pay for last month's NUC-related1 indulgences.
Having read...
... John Lanchester's "Whoops! Apocalypse" — I'd noted a while back that it actually featured on a "books of the year" list; not many of my choices tend to — I thus felt equipped to catch up last night with "The Big Short", based on the Michael Lewis book all about the "sub-prime" mortgage financial fiasco, responsibility for which (these days) seems to be blamed pretty much on immigrants and poor people.
Much like "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil", the film starts by telling you it's based on a "true story" (who knew?!) and two hours later the last spasm of the end credits then reassures you that all the depicted people, names, and events are fictional. Given the way the whole unedifying story hinges throughout on greed, lies, stupidity, and fraud I guess that's par for the course.
No comment :-)
Possibly...
... not the best choice of phrase? Just sayin':
Out of context, cocaine is a totally uninteresting molecule: seventeen carbon atoms, twenty-one hydrogens, one nitrogen, and four oxygens. What makes cocaine cocaine is the fact that its accidental shape happens to fit lock-and-key into the
microscopic machinery of the reward circuits*... Substances that can give a shot in the arm to the mesolimbic dopamine system have self-reinforcing effects, and users will rob stores and mug elderly people to continue
obtaining these specific molecular shapes.
* The brain of a honeybee uses the same reward programs that your brain does, running the same software program on a much more compact piece of hardware.
Or, as Robert Persig once asked: "Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?"
Surely not even the most rabid proponent of (what seems to me the crass idiocy of) "Intelligent Design" could deny the pitch-black sense of humour being demonstrated here? Come on! A collection of one set of atoms becoming addicted to a differently-shaped set of the same atoms. Needless to say, I found David Eagleman's "Incognito" a fascinating read.
Good Gottfried!
There's a fascinating, almost throw-away, reference — in almost the first footnote of "Incognito" — that thanks George Dyson for bringing to Eagleman's attention De Progressione Dyadica by Leibniz. Naturally, I went poking around the Interweb for that and thus I now have a much better understanding of why Norbert Wiener, in 1961, suggested Leibniz should be considered the patron saint of cybernetics. I think a celebratory cuppa is called for.
Just to prove...
... I still can, I've re-generated my lists of books, sorted (within category) by author and by title. It's almost effortless (with Python) compared to my earlier methods. So how come it still took me over a month to get around to doing it?
Answer comes there none.
My powers of prediction...
... when inspected over two decades later leave something to be desired!
Dear Mother,
Sorry this is a day late — I've been at home today finishing off one of my book projects after a full weekend on it. There are rarely any meetings for me in IBM on a Monday so I just logged on briefly this morning from home to tidy up my e-mail (including a missive
from the Lab Director despite his being now en route for America for two weeks). By the way, IBM's latest (annual) personalized (sic) statement of benefits has just arrived. In it, I can see I've now got less than 20 years to go until retirement. (The computer
industry of 21 years ago has changed beyond all recognition — what will it be like in 2014?)
I was reading that...
... while listening to a 1973 Jackson Heights album. Marvellous stuff. Actually, this letter replaced the one I'd drafted a day before, but had been persuaded (by the combined efforts of Christa and Carol — two very wise women) not to send. I "enjoyed" a frankly strange relationship with dear Mama over many years. I sometimes wonder if I can attribute it to the fact that I spent the first couple of months of my life in an oxygen-enriched incubator — presumably gasping for breath — at an age when most new-born chaps are busily bonding with their mothers...
I'm no fan of psycho-analysis, but I read some of John Bowlby's work on attachment theory about 40 years ago when trying to work out what on earth had gone so wrong with this "primal" relationship. I recall he claimed he wouldn't send a dog to a boarding school at age seven. Boarding school was one of the maternal threats held over me from time to time. I suspect the Jesuits got it about right with their "Give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man" malarkey. Thanks, but no thanks!