2016 — 5 September: Monday
Listening — for perhaps the third time since buying it1 very nearly a decade ago — to Ladytron's "604" album... I still like it. Just don't ask me why. Of course, these days it's streamed off a NAS, mangled by the i5 NUC, and passed along to the hi-fi while I can keep an eye on its progress by inspecting the NUC's Desktop (and the Clementine music player) in a window on my chosen PC at the other end of the living room.
I can't inspect it any other way because of a fundamentally-flawed understanding (somewhere in the connection chain) between the NUC, the Rotel pre-amp, and the Kuro plasma display screen on how to handle the HDMI-conveyed video signal. Still, since it suits me to run the NUC semi-headless I can live with that. [Pause] It's cool and rather moist out there. Better to stay in here for a while, I think.
I harbour doubts...
... about the Grauniad's choice of "headlines" on occasion:
This is one such occasion.
In due course...
... Iris will (I hope) pass along to me the issue of the "Spectator" that contains Francis Wheen's review of "Orwell's Nose: a pathological biography" (no, I'm not making this up) by John Sutherland. Truly, we must be living in the End Days.
A nice bit...
... of prescience from 2001:
... the power the Internet gives each one of us to control deliberately what information and opinions we are exposed to — to tailor a communicative world to our prior interests and convictions — is a threat to democracy. The threat is that the choices made by individuals will add up collectively to a fragmentation of society so pervasive that the public sphere will cease to exist, and we will be left with multiple like-minded subgroups whose members talk only to their fellow members and never to those with whom they disagree, and who are exposed only to the kinds of opinions they want to hear.
Sounds like the Fox "news" operating principle to me.
I've been enjoying...
... reading what Clive James has to say about TV going all the way back to his columns in "The Observer" as my Sunday entertainment in the mid-1970s. So I look forward to his new accounts of recent binge-watching:
Not that I've ever watched "Band of Brothers". Not really my cup of tea. Nor did I ever bother to catch up with the last four episodes of "The Sopranos". But "GoT" and "WW" are entirely to my taste. As are others he discusses. A treat for a spot of binge-reading.
Once a year...
... on following an interesting link from my ¬blog on (as they say) "this day in history" I make another, more-or-less randomly-chosen,2 assault on some of the material I find. Today's choice very nearly melted my brain. Don't say I didn't warn you. I've chosen my snippet carefully:
Regardless of our conscious beliefs, it's psychologically very difficult for us to avoid bifurcating the world into inanimate objects that obey strict laws of causality, and animate objects (like ourselves) that do not. This dichotomy was historically appealing, and may even have been necessary for the development of classical physics, but it always left the nagging question of how or why we (and our constituent atoms) manage to evade the iron hand of determinism that governs everything else. This view affects our conception of science by suggesting to us that the experimenter is not himself part of nature, and is exempt from whatever determinism is postulated for the system being studied. Thus we imagine that we can "test" whether the universe is behaving deterministically by turning some dials and seeing how the universe responds, overlooking the fact that we and the dials are also part of the universe.
This...
... is a particularly-fine short film. (Link.) Better yet, it can be easily downloaded and played locally by today's newly-learned magic incantation:
sudo apt install youtube-dl
followed by a simple command line:
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY&feature=youtu.be
Guess who's been...
... doing a tad of video file transcoding? I was hoping to end up with something I could transfer to, and play from, the NAS and hear the soundtrack...
The Oppo Blu-ray player doesn't handle whatever the original audio format was, and nor does VLC, so I was rather hoping HandBrake would be able to come up with some bright ideas. It didn't. However, Kodi plays the file perfectly.