2016 — 18 June: Saturday
One of yesterday's bits of PC fixing was to reinstate the useful CCleaner utility that Windows 10 had unkindly and quietly removed from the system Iris (on my advice) runs. I put it back, checked the settings, ran "Analyze", and found an amazing accumulation of 1.8GB of gorp to remove. It was removed.
However, I couldn't do anything to persuade the Rapport security tool out of hiding. Her online bank semi-insists on this being used. (Opinions vary on its usefulness.) It certainly claimed to be present and correct — indeed I saw it produce a weekly report before my very eyes — but Googling around suggests1 her latest level of Firefox may be a step too far for it on her 64-bit system. Or it's just keeping its head down in a way I don't remember from the last time I tangled with it...
I find...
... I simply do not miss Windows. Why is that, I wonder? After all, I used it in IBM since 1995, and also on one or more of my home PCs since 2002 (which was when I reluctantly but finally dispensed with my Acorn RISC OS systems after 13 years). Well, Linux — even after having to send my chum Ian a longish tutorial yesterday offering hints and tips on hosting his own, externally visible, web server — just strikes me as altogether less imperfect.
Slightly less imperfect :-)
Breakfast? Yes, good idea.
Ever onward?
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the... scientific community. I'm merely an interested dilettante, reading widely. I wouldn't have the patience to devote decades of painstaking research to what could prove a fruitless dead-end. (String theory, anyone?) The meta-thinking displayed here would be total anathema to me, admirable though it may be:
Given the public awareness that science can be low-quality or corrupted, that whole fields can be misdirected for decades (see nutrition, on cholesterol and sugar), and that some basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory), the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval in its irrelevance to present realities.
Ouch. I had never heard of Ravetz! Let alone "Post-normal" science. Though it reminds me of the cartoon of a messy programming flowchart with a box somewhere in the middle, labelled "At this point a miracle occurs".
As I approach the foothills...
... of late-ish Middle Age, nothing says "You're getting old, chum" quite like today's snailmails. It's State Pension time, and I will soon officially become an OAP. You are encouraged to claim your pension via our splendid guvmint's "Online Gateway". Last time I knocked on that particular door, in July 2006, "they" confidently asserted that one or more of...
- My date of birth
- My National Insurance number
- My postcode
... was "unknown" to them, and they could not let me in. I had to write to them to correct the postcode, which had grown an extra digit since 1981. Happily, today's mail gets my postcode right, gets my NI number right, and implies (by the very fact of its generation) that "they" have a fair grasp of my date of birth. So I shall try once again to storm their "Gateway". I may be gone for some time...
Until today...
... all I knew about Giardia was gleaned from a book I mentioned to Carol:
Speaking of woods, have just finished a well-written tome (well, more of a pamphlet really) by one Kathleen Meyer called How to shit in the woods with a delicious subtitle — An environmentally sound approach to a lost art. It told me more than I wanted to know about Giardia (a protozoan pest) while easing my long-felt, albeit not overwhelming, curiosity about aspects of outdoor life that are (to put it mildly) glossed over ... Must admit, however, that my main reason for ordering it was that I simply couldn't resist the title. The lady in my local bookshop was forced to ask "Where do you hear about these?" Any day that happens is chalked up as a triumph!
Today, I found Giardia lurking here, too:
... there was even a group of seemingly ancient critters — members of the so-called Archezoa, such as Giardia — one evolutionary step below the modern complex organisms, that were believed to be both eukaryotic and primitively asexual.
I added the eukaryotic hypertext link. It's to a pretty diagram I found last April. And I may yet lend the book to Brian for one of his off-grid tours of the UK.
So much for...
... our guvmint's understanding of the meaning of 24 hours a day, seven days a week:
I'd somehow overlooked...
... this Paul Graham essay, which I found linked from here. Source, and two separated snippets:
... hackers themselves can't tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.
To the extent there is a secret handshake among good hackers, it's when they know one another well enough to express opinions that would get them stoned to death by the general public...
There was a shameful failure of user input data validation — a month field switched between numeric and alpha on two consecutive pages, then moaned about the inconsistency, but wouldn't let me go back to fix it — by an outfit called Experian when I attempted (in the absence of a working Gateway) to use a second route to official confirmation of my identity. However, my second assault on the guvmint's puny Gateway eight hours later worked (in the sense that it was no longer unavailable). My registration is thus confirmed, and I now have to wait for a pair of further snailmails that will give me 28 days in which to struggle one step nearer my State Pension.
Joined-up systems? Cue audio f/x: hollow laughter and sound of a dying trombone!