2016 — 21 May: Saturday
The fact that I've missed half of "Sounds of the Sixties" — actually not the greatest loss in the world — suggests I'd built up quite a sleep deficit during the past week. No matter. It also looks as if I'm not now to have the pleasure of hosting the Younger Set this weekend. Also no matter, given the rather grotty wet weather currently going on out there.
I find my thoughts...
... turning vaguely once again in the direction of a 4K PC display.1 The prospect of higher-resolution screen real estate remains quite enticing when things get a tad cluttered hereabouts. Here, to scale, the darkest blue represents the Full HD (1920x1080) that I get on the 60" Kuro plasma — and on the NUC in its NoMachine remote desktop display on my Dell. The lightest blue represents a nominal 4K display of 4096x2160 pixels. And the one in the middle, of course, represents my current 34" Dell with its 3440x1440 pixels:
It helps that I now know Skylark's nVidia GTX 950 with its proprietary driver plays nicely with Linux, doing a good job of shovelling pixels around and turning them on and off. The major drawback is that 4K displays larger than 28" diagonal aren't exactly thick on the ground. Nor are they cheap. It's irritating when you can clearly see the effect of market forces on the price of 'UHD' TV displays, but I've yet to find DisplayPort inputs appearing on them.
I paid...
... about as little attention as I generally do to the large cruise ship I saw parked in Soton yesterday. (Hell being other people, the prospect of being stuck with them while some ghastly vomiting virus runs rampage is unappealing at best.) "Harmony of the Seas" (!) turns out to be currently the world's largest example of the hellish breed, and a godawful air-polluter to boot. (Link.)
This is a...
... far more congenial floating companion:
And includes 19 previously-uncollected tales disinterred from mouldering newspaper files.
Ouch
Ask not for whom the bell tolls, etc etc
Kinsley's contribution to the wave of new books, shows and miracle antidotes to aging is his approach. Where others would groan, wince, cry or whine, Kinsley is looking for the joke. So, after undergoing nine hours of deep brain surgery, he thought of what he could say to assure his
friends he had not lost any of his analytical skills.
"Well, of course," he said, post-op. "When you cut taxes, government revenues go up. Why couldn't I see that before?"
Being but...
... a bear of little brain, I find it next to impossible to stop myself (if such a thing exists) from reading about — and all sorts of things into the implications flowing from — the non-existence of free will. I can only assume my behaviour must be deeply encoded (though gawd alone knows the evolutionary reason[s] why) in my genes. Source and snippet:
The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable...
For Waller, it simply doesn't matter that these processes are underpinned by a causal chain of firing neurons. In his view, free will and determinism are not the opposites they are often taken to be; they simply describe our behavior at different levels.
If the Arisians were right after all I find that profoundly depressing. So I shall side with Waller :-)
Although...
... I was quite taken by the "Qwerkywriter" keyboard, I found it more fun to watch these, and ponder.
Memories!
Of, in this case, my fairly short-lived freelance programming career. (IBM took a very dim view of it.)
Too good...
... not to quote:
Source: Another ICL Anthology.