2016 — 22 June: Wednesday
My merry gang of workers showed up minutes after consciousness did.1 My walk, however, is currently delayed (for reasons not unrelated to the next generation's pending next generation). These things happen. I shall settle for making some breakfast instead.
I may yet squeeze in a little adventure later.
Chaos at /home (?)
I like to kid myself I'm a fairly tidy-minded sort of chap. I'm clearly not, alas. I've just been doing some casual file backups2 and I was quite taken aback to realise 1,811 files (8.3GB of pretty random "stuff") has somehow managed to build up in my "all-sorts-of-rubbish" folder zzzMisc — so-named to ensure it sorts out of the way at the "bottom" of my /home space:
I'm not short of space, but that's still nearly as great a volume of "stuff" as there is in the 8.7GB of files in Documents (41,015) and Pictures (11,785) combined. These webfiles out on 'molehole' are, by comparison, a mere 420MB total. (Granted, there's another 1.3GB on the Intranet I run inside my firewall, but that's a whole different story.)
But I knows what I likes
Apparently not. Isn't it delicious what you can get paid to research these days? Philistine snobbery, for example:
Paintings with high monetary primes or with high ratings by peers and art experts led to higher participant liking ratings. In contrast, paintings with a low rating by the low-education/income social group led to higher liking ratings by participants.
(Link.)
Apparently...
... running Thunderbird as my email client makes me a geek. Blimey. Who gnu? (Link.)
Should...
... "Buckminsterfullerene" (C60) now be renamed?
Over the winter of 1948—’49, [Kenneth] Snelson built models whose parts were secured by taut wires, the balance of tension providing structural stability. Snelson showed Fuller his model. By the summer of 1949, the school's students, guided by Fuller, successfully built a geodesic dome using metal curtain rods purchased at the Woolworth's in Asheville.
Try doing that these days. (Finding a Woolies, I mean.)
I'm looking forward...
... to watching this...
... though I guess I should really attend to the Guvmint Gateway's "State Pension online activation code" first. It's marked "URGENT - USE WITHIN 28 DAYS" and two of those have already evaporated in transit.
I smiled at this...
... which came at the end of a profile of Judith Butler:
Retirement "deinstitutionalizes your work," she explains. "It doesn't diminish the amount of work."
Ain't that the truth?
Wendy Brown, Butler's partner, is a political-science professor at Berkeley, and their son, Isaac, is now 21. "Once, when he was younger, I said, 'So, how is it for you having queer parents?' " Butler remembers. "He said, 'That's not the hard part. The hard part is having two academics.' "
I smiled less at the news (to me, if no-one else) that in 2014 Facebook "stopped limiting its gender options to male or female and began giving users some 50 other choices (from neutrois to genderqueer to cis)." Now, you can use up to ten terms of your own. I doubt UK passports have that option, somehow. The State Pension gorp certainly doesn't.
I confess...
... I didn't realise quite what I was letting myself in for when I ordered this amazingly-thick pair of books after hearing their author on Sunday's "Private Passions" radio programme:
Over 1,600 pages of pretty dense text... That's going to carve a chunk out of my free time.
Building work...
... is ending for the day. Progress has been good, and the results are looking very good, too. I could hardly believe the accumulation of, erm, "stuff" that you can find in gutters after 35 years.
I have (so I'm assured)...
... successfully submitted my online claim for a State Pension. Turns out I did already have a Guvmint Gateway userid, though I hadn't a clue what it was. They overcame that little glitch in what struck me as a secure manner. So, fingers crossed.