2016 — 19 July: Tuesday
An Alfred Bester story1 had something to say about the correlation between temperature and levels of android-mediated violence. I wonder how "pocket monsters" behave in warmer weather?
Thou shalt not what?
My "local" MP (despite being an active follower of a nominally peaceful religion, one commandment of which [last time I looked] was still "Thou shalt not kill" — or have I got that wrong?) voted in favour of the renewal of the insanely expensive and morally indefensible Trident nuclear missile launch submarine system. At least his surname (Brine) is somewhat appropriate.
I do my best...
... to avoid boredom. I doubt I'd enjoy attending a conference on the topic:
An interdisciplinary assembly — philosophers, psychologists, education specialists, sociologists, linguists and others — presented much good work. There were also, of course, a few turgid bits, but even those clunkers productively invited metacritical reflection on the nature and ramifications of tedium. Best of all, nobody droned on too long — every session ended promptly upon the waving of a toy giraffe (slow rocking at the five-minute mark, vigorous shaking at time's up).
Reading...
... the profile here of Martha Nussbaum, a typical sidebar New Yorker cartoon (the Twohy, with the caption "At this point, we know it's addictive") sent me scurrying upstairs to dig out my complete collection of the things. Sadly, I had managed to forget that I bought this (very large, very heavy, rather unwieldy) book way back in 2005, it stops at 2004...
... and, of course, the cartoon I wished to examine today dates from 2008. <Sigh> (The image, by the way, came via my Canon, no flash, some considerable brightness and contrast tweaks, and a change of perspective to compensate for my, erm, non-vertical camera alignment. Thanks, GIMP!) No way could I have used my puny little flatbed scanner.
Phew!
It's a mere 27.9C here in the living room. But the source of the problem isn't yet at its height. I shall cower indoors yetawhile. I may even switch on a room fan. [Pause] I tried it on "oscillate" but, like me over the years, it's developed a creak or two.
A mild rant from a while back (so for "over 20 years ago" you'd better read "about 30" now) ...
When they dug up our road over 20 years ago and offered us cable TV to try out I signed up for everything going ... When I switched on their piece of junk and found precisely one film2 (out of 501 on offer that month) I would have wanted to see ... I cancelled the contract and returned the so-called state-of-the-art system within less than a week. "State-of-the-art" ... consisted of composite video and mono analogue audio. If you wanted stereo for a movie with a Dolby Surround soundtrack, you had to dedicate a preset on your FM tuner — if you changed the cable channel, you re-tuned your tuner. Amazing.
... while Mr Beardy's outfit still keeps sending me expensive snailmail invitations to sign up to his horrid cable TV offerings.
I have a cunning plan...
... to re-introduce my dinky Class D power amp and my electrostatic headphones at the PC end of the living room. It's far too hot to read upstairs in the reading room.
Questions I've not yet...
... thought to ask! (A high-speed electron hitting water; what happens? [Link.]) Loved the preamble:
There are four stages. To get a feel for these, it helps to remember that a femtosecond is 10-15 seconds. This is roughly the time it takes for light to travel a third of a micron — about 5000 times the radius of a hydrogen atom.
Though I learned quite some time ago now, and from this book...
... that water was a cheap and cheerful way of cutting down ionising radiation, besides being good to drink. Doc Savage (I hope he has a doctorate; the name's too good to miss!) has an unusual way of defining "easy".
My bank is also...
... a building society and keeps an eye on house prices, erm, 'nationwide'. Today's email from them has a house price calculator so I plumbed in my purchase price, region, and date, and it came up with this:
Predictably, my current pension fails to match that percentage increase :-)