2016 — 18 July: Monday
An early email from my Python wrangler confirms he's fixed the bug1 I was bitten by, and reported, last night. That's very nearly 24x7 support in my book.
As an early adopter...
... of ARM technology back in the day when it stood for Acorn Risc Machines (as far as I was concerned) I note with some amazement the present sale price of ARM Holdings. I trust all the financial wizards in "the City" who re-engineered Acorn out of existence just to get their sticky fingers on the value "locked up" in its ailing body by virtue of its then part-share of ARM feel unduly hard done by as they see how their wretched few million pounds would now be measured in the few billions two decades down the road.
Not quite enough to pay for renewing the equally wretched Trident nuclear submarines...
Reading this 'farewell' piece...
... is a sobering reminder of quite how long I've been aware of Richard Norton-Taylor's work. I even have a copy of his 1990 book "In defence of the realm?" malingering somewhere. Just don't ask me precisely where.
Things that we know...
... that ain't necessarily so! News to me, for one:
[Rieff] reminds us — in fact, one suspects most of us will be hearing it for the first time — that the American national holiday called Memorial Day, which falls on the last Monday in May, first took place on May 1st, 1865, "and was organized by African American freedmen in Charleston, South Carolina, in honor of the 257 Union soldiers who had died in the local racecourse that the Confederates had used as a prison camp during the war... " — a fact to cause any dedicated white supremacist to choke on his can of beer.
Who wants to live forever?
Not me, thanks all the same. And certainly not in silicon form, though it's an oft-encountered trope in SF. Interesting piece though:
But it's more likely that a digital afterlife will be a gated community and somebody will have to choose who gets in. Is it the rich and politically connected who live on? Is it Trump? Is it biased toward one ethnicity? Do you get in for being a Nobel laureate, or for being a suicide bomber in somebody's hideous war? Just think how coercive religion can be when it peddles the promise of an invisible afterlife that can't be confirmed. Now imagine how much more coercive a demagogue would be if he could dangle the reward of an actual, verifiable afterlife. The whole thing is an ethical nightmare.
Now, and until death us do part...
There's a neat...
... sort of EU "Venn diagram" puzzle here asking you to locate Britain's current "place" in Europe. I actually got it right! (All you had to know was what does the UK have in common with Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia.) Simple.
I'd missed this...
... little gem from the obnoxious BoJo during his recent job as mayor of London:
... he boasted in a press conference [in Japan] about London's contactless Oyster card technology.
"I can get on the Tube, I can get on a bus and just wave it in the general direction of the cashless receiver and, completely painlessly, very small amounts are deducted from my bank account," he told a distinctly non-plussed audience.
When a member of the audience pointed out that such technology had been used in Tokyo since 2001, a surprised Johnson replied: "Really? Doesn't this undermine my whole raison d'être for being here?" Johnson quickly salvaged the trip however, after he was later filmed
ruthlessly rugby-tackling a small child.
Ten months into...
... my inglorious, erm, career as a first-line manager in ICL...
... I slid a "Transfer Request" form across the desk to my own first-line manager (the chap, in fact, who had promoted me into management) only to be told that he had resigned from ICL the day before to go off and be the Bursar at the school set up for the children of the scientists and engineers seconded from across Europe to work on the JET project.
I've updated...
... my notes on the Python-assisted book list generation process and re-spun all my lists. Successfully.