2016 — 23 July: Saturday
Another email exchange1 and somehow a book of photos of Heathrow over 70 years is now on its way here before refuelling and heading off down South. Though given that Big Bro found it on Amazon easily enough I find myself wondering what value I'm adding to the order fulfillment process. I suppose the fact that the cost is coming out of his little postage stamps fund?
Not in Wales, thanks all the same!
The Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts said that if Trident left Faslane, "the Westminster government will need to find a base in England, because we are not so poor in spirit as to accept the toxic status symbol of Britain's imagined standing on the world stage". Nicely put. (Link.)
This is just...
... downright depressing, even though the man still strikes me as a peculiar joke:
But while the former Ukip leader Nigel Farage enjoyed his trip to Cleveland, milking the applause of admiring US conservatives on the fringes of the convention, the arresting parallel between the current politics of the two countries is one far less comfortable...
One comedian, nodding to Monday's revelation that Melania Trump had stolen words from a speech delivered in 2008 by Michelle Obama, quipped that the rest of the Republican convention had plagiarised from the Salem witch trials.
One can only wonder what goes through the minds of these people.
I've just been...
... re-united with my Mazda SatNav's SD card. Here's hoping it will still know its way around. [Pause] I'm pleased to hear of a new series of the "Museum of Curiosity" as the "Dead Ringers" comedy signally failed to make me laugh. Or even smile. In general, it's hard to take BBC Radio 4's attempts at comedy seriously. If you catch my drift.
It's always nice...
... to remind myself where Christa got her smile from! Her parents2 first visited us here a few months after we'd moved in:
In early 1982 it was still a building site. Or, from Peter's viewpoint, a glorious sandpit... just for him.
I toddled over...
... to Roger & Eileen for a cuppa and a chat. We agree the world is crazy. Getting crazier by the day. And unlikely to stop doing so. But at least the SatNav still seems to know where it's going.
Speaking of crazy...
... I live in hope of one day finding the remainder of the "Heretic's Guide to Modern Physics" that appeared in "Wireless World" in 1982-83 by WA Scott Murray. So far (as I noted two years ago) I've only unearthed Part 7, which appeared in March 1983. I can't believe I wouldn't have clipped them all, though I admit that was the year Christa's health first went pear-shaped, so who knows what fell by the wayside?
That Richard Feynman chap...
... was no idiot. In the second of the seven "Messenger lectures" he gave at Cornell he dealt with the relation of maths to physics. Typical brain-bending snippet:
It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.
Feel free to examine page 57 of "The Character of Physical Law" if you don't believe me :-)