2016 — 8 August: Monday
While two of my PCs were cooling down, and the third was flinging binary digits hither and yon1 — in what I laughingly regard as the pursuit of my data backup strategy — at my behest yesterday evening, what was I up to? Well, I was just as gainfully/gainlessly (?) employed listening to nice music... and browsing fairly randomly along shelves full of dead trees smeared with information. Case in point: having blown the dust off the only book I have by Louis Francis Salzman, title (appropriately enough) "A random scrap book" I opened it at random.
He charmingly describes it as his "swan song". It was printed and published for him by W Heffer and Sons, and is probably quite rare.2 Try this snippet:
In the twelfth century the Pope pronounced a ban on the use of that terrible new invention the cross-bow — except, of course, against infidels. The immediate result was to advertise the new weapon and make all military leaders eager to acquire bodies of cross-bowmen. Any treaty banning a particular type of weapon, even if inscribed in invisible ink on a toilet-roll, will still be worth less than the paper it is written on unless, as was the case with 'gas', the weapon is felt to be ineffective or too liable to provoke retaliation in kind...
Off I went...
... to Project Gutenberg in search of his Mediaeval Byways. The man sounds like a delightful chap, and is definitely my kind of academic. And he writes a pretty mean Foreword. I have a great respect for well-written Forewords and Prefaces. They have to be written last, oddly, if they're to have any chance of being any good.
- The Book of Prefaces by Alasdair Gray, which I've been picking up (and putting back down) ever since its original publication as an over-priced hardback in 2000. At £3, I have now finally succumbed! This has to be one of the ultimate pieces of meta-literature ever assembled.
Because I can...
... I've just given the i5 NUC a bit of a workout:
- fired up Xplayer on it — the new Mint 18 default, it seems, for multi-media files
- accessed one of my 'big' NAS drives
- started playing my newest David Gilmour album (excellent choice, by the way)
- routed the audio from it (fed to BB from the NUC by NoMachine) to the hi-fi via BlackBeast's Creative X-Fi soundcard
- captured a screenshot of the Xplayer window
- processed it in the GIMP on the NUC (surprisingly sprightly)
- popped a GIF on to the shared "Pictures" folder on that jolly useful little access-all-areas 2TB "WD My Cloud" NAS
- picked it up from there on BB
Et voilà:
OK, his voice isn't quite what it was (!) but the guitar is still pretty wonderful.
I'm hungry!
Breakfast next, methinks, before my assault on the Post Office to whizz Big Bro's book of pretty pictures down to him. Cheeky blighter's now describing it as an "early Xmas present", which brings me round to another item on those dread infidels that came in over the wire in response to the Salzman quote. It describes a weapon I've seen in the Buckler's Hard maritime museum, the "Puckle Gun":
Puckle demonstrated two configurations of the basic design: one, intended for use against Christian enemies, fired conventional round bullets, while the second, designed to be used against the Muslim Turks, fired square bullets. The square bullets were considered to be more damaging. They would, according to the patent, "convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilization".
Little wonder Recept Tayyip Erdogan is talking to Putin.
NoMachine reference
For my benefit. Marvellous software. [Pause] Also for my reference. Some of her art is altogether too reminiscent of Cordwainer Smith :-)
Not every comment...
... appearing "below the fold" on Grauniad Forums in response to their articles is as well-formulated as this one by a Paul Greenwood:
More's the pity.
It's also a pity...
... we can't lubricate some of our joints as easily as I've just done by smearing some LM2 Multilube along the moving parts of my relatively new (and let's keep it that way) garage door. Big Bro's book of Heathrow photos is now in the international air mail system:
It costs more to send than it did to get here in the first place... and niece #1 told me just this morning that Amazon doesn't ship a Kindle cover/case to NZ, which is a bit naff. [Pause] Whereas an Amazon seller has just shipped me this...
... from Australia. In six days.
Punctuation matters!
Nice article. Source and snippet:
Did the inquisitor's consultants charge Galileo for separate scientific and theological objections, or is the objection regarding philosophy simply a parallel statement about heresy?
Physicist Christopher Graney recently generated new high-resolution images of the original verdict, showing that the full semicolon rightfully belongs in history. The consultants, and the inquisitors that followed, all believed that scientific arguments provided
sufficient grounds for objecting to Galileo's ideas.
Turtles all the way down, surely?
Had I not...
... been browsing here, I would have missed a pointer to these four programmes as I tend to favour music over speech. But I always like hearing how people answer the question "How do you know you're sane?" First encountered in...
... of course. It's entirely Russell's fault I got interested in Charles Fort, but that was long ago :-)