2016 — 23 August: Tuesday
If I only understood why1 yesterday's diary jotting had mysteriously morphed back (overnight?) into a non-UTF8 file I would hope to be able to stop that happening. Then there's the Xonar external USB sound card. If I simply plug that in, I can get only analogue stereo out of it. Whereas, if I reboot with it already plugged in, along comes optical digital stereo as an option.
I've been having a...
... pleasantly noisy psychedelic morning (Acid drops, Spacedust and Flying Saucers)...
I can hear no audible difference between its playback from the i5 NUC using its motherboard audio, and playback, from the same network drive, in the same application ("Clementine", as it happens) from an i7 PC.
The ravages of Time?
This is a good example:
Another opening line from near-future speculative fiction is that of William Gibson's debut novel Neuromancer: 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.' The startling metaphor seemed to speak with remarkable directness to a world in which new forms of media and mediation had come to define human consciousness. The passage of time has raised questions, however. Today, to a generation of readers who barely watch TV on 'channels' and don't really know what a 'dead' one would look like, the metaphor will be nearly inscrutable.
Isn't all fiction speculative? Just askin', Professor.
Gawd help us
Who you calling WEIRD? "A lot of medicine is done with mice, a lot of genetics is done with fruit flies. And in psychology, the model organism is the American undergraduate". Does that debunk psychology's claim to being a science? (Link.)
Gawd help us — II
Fear of the light, indeed:
"I've found that probably 95% of my students come from either an urban or suburban environment, which means they can only see a dozen stars at night, and no planets," Stanley said. "When you say the Milky Way to them, they imagine a spiral galaxy, which is fine, but that's not what the Milky Way looks like — it's a big, whitish smear across the sky. I have to do a lot of work to orient them to what human beings actually saw when they looked at the sky. They don't know that stars rise and set. Their minds explode."
Not literally, I trust.
I've just seen news...
... of the death of Antony Jay. I read and greatly admired both "Management and Machiavelli" and "Corporation Man" long before "Yes, Minister" came along to convulse us. He maintained one of the most important discoveries of his working life was made on Thursday 9 April 1964. He realised how much you could get done in a single day when you no longer worked at the BBC...