2016 — 14 April: Thursday
Having been told1 "that two high-precision experiments to measure the half-life of a free neutron have returned results differing by 8 seconds — far more than the experimental uncertainties" and having woken this sunny morning JIT to catch our Melvyn and (inter alia) Frank Close2 coincidentally banging on about the neutron, I thought I'd give it a try.
[Pause]
32 minutes in, and finally the half-life ("about 10 minutes") of a free neutron gets a mention.
I've just read...
... my first simple, clear, description (by John Lanchester) of Bitcoin and the blockchain. Is that all there is to it?! A fascinating read. (Link.)
And isn't this well-put, too? Source and snippet:
The crucial contributing factor to [fame as a writer, or lack of it], which involves being both incredibly, outlandishly famous by serious-writer standards while also being unknown to the general reader, is the fact that [Neal] Stephenson works in the area of SF and fantasy writing. For reasons I've never seen explained or even thoroughly engaged with, there seems to be an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the wider literate public. People who don't usually read, say, thrillers or military history or popular science will read, say, Gone Girl or Berlin or Bad Pharma. But people who don't read fantasy just simply, permanently, 100 per cent don't read fantasy.
They thus — both literally and literarily — don't know what they're missing :-)
Reality? Pah!
I hope Jenni Diski's quote from the NYT is real!
All we really need to know is that, accurate or not this week, relativity, cosmology, quantum mechanics don't concern us in our everyday lives. Let the quantum physicist panic because she knows the floor she walks on is almost entirely empty space with a few widely scattered molecules dotted here and there. The rest of us stomp around in blissfully ignorant confidence that — barring unforeseeable acts of God — a floor will continue to do what a floor is supposed to do. Or as the New York Times for 10 November 1919 put it, 'Einstein Theory Triumphs. Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry.'
I've just browsed...
... a "BBC Worldwide" web site that's been completely off my radar screen, but is no doubt long-established and very well known to everyone else. "Culture". Rather fine.
I may even retry watching Soderbergh's film! (I never finished it on first encounter.)
An interesting...
... take on "Cultural Intelligence", though I chose my snippet as it seems to explain much about IBM's ever-evolving mutating3 systems of carrots and sticks that puzzled me at the time:
[collapsing at the hands of self interest] often happens in business. When management changes its incentive system, the initial effect is to improve the alignment of work effort to corporate goals. But over time, employees learn how to maximize personal rewards within the system while undertaking minimal effort to achieve corporate goals. Thus, it becomes necessary to periodically revise the rules concerning bonuses, promotion requirements, and so on.
No snake charming needed
I was able to confirm that the version of "I'm so glad" I've just heard (on the "Late Junction" from 10 September last year) could be pinpointed by copying the magic code "b068tvnm" from the name of my downloaded file on to the end of my magic generic BBC URL for such programmes...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b068tvnm
It was indeed by Skip James — whose music I'd earlier noticed used by blues enthusiast Terry Zwigoff in the soundtrack to the lovely film "Ghost World" he made from the equally lovely graphic novel by Daniel Clowes:
Snake charming? I didn't need to feed the magic code to Brian's wondrous Python. My Mk I eyeball sufficed.
In the time needed...
... for my cuppa to go from too hot to too cold I've managed to apply an initial coat of Danish Oil to approx. half the total surface area of my hunk of decoratively-twisted wood. No spontaneous combustion so far. It's slightly darker than I'd hoped, but that may change as it soaks in and dries. Or hardens. Or whatever it's going to do.
Ian Hosker's advice: there is always room for another coat. One coat a day for a week, followed by one coat a week for a month, followed by one coat a month for a year. After this (!) oil may be applied as necessary. The test is whether water runs off without penetration. Or the fumes kill me. I've just exiled my lint-free (microfibre) application cloth to the garage overnight.
I mentioned...
... a bunch of CDs I acquired in an hour or so of weakness. I wanted to hear one. (The Rough Guide to Desert Blues.) OK, where's the MP3 set? Pause for thought. "C" for compilations? No. "R" for Rough Guides? No. "W" for World music? No. Actually, I don't recall ripping it. So where's the damn' CD? Pause for further thought. Not in my CaseLogic folder "system" in exile in the dining room — that would be too obvious. Besides, there's no entry for it in my CD "database".
Oh gawd, now I remember. I bundled it into the overflow "system" in the chest of drawers under the stairs that I never really found a use for after I'd cleared out a great deal of Christa's stuff, including more than one pair of shoes. There it is. Alongside about 75 more CDs that, I fear, have also managed to evade David the Ripper. See what happens when you lose both your Windows PC and dear Mama at roughly the same time? And it turns out to be a double CD, too. Great!