2016 — 6 September: Tuesday
After numerous experiments1 my "data sorting" guru is concluding that perhaps the only real solution is "you only buy books and films with sensible titles!" In fact, today's walk is in some danger of turning into a rant on the topic.
The "problems" that have been thrown up are all really a result of trying to match data sorting behaviours between the case and accent flattening that Brian has cooked into his Python for handling such oddities among my set of books and authors, and then being faced with anomalies when re-using the same chunks of code to generate my video and film title lists.
It's all Fred Hoyle's fault
Had he not chosen the title "A for Andromeda" both for the book and the TV programme all might have been well.2 Look carefully at the title. Like the infinities on offer in a few grains of sand, it neatly illustrates the potential issues surrounding what happens when an automated sorting procedure attempts to improve matters by the removal of definite and/or indefinite articles. But without recourse to a "blacklist" of special cases.
Punctuation (used, for example, as separators in the numeric bits of some titles) depends entirely on locale settings. Weird mixtures of upper and lower case letters, with and without accents, cause collating sequence meltdowns. The fact that Kodi supports the concept of being able to specify a separate "Sort Title" DB field is very useful. Would that my DB of book titles had been so far-seeing.
Actually, I was quite far-seeing. It's now become very clear that using anything beyond simple ASCII brings with it an astonishing variety of oddities. He'd found Python has a "Natsort" — supposedly natural, that is, human — sorting module, but it seems to throw away all spaces and punctuation and then sort the resulting (some might say "revolting") string that remains.Oh, good grief!
Parliament is back. Have we left Europe yet? It seems not, though there's a splendid chap called Davis in charge of the process. He gave a "lack of progress" report. The shadow minister for Brexit queried him on this:
"So far all we've learnt about Brexit is that the government is not going to introduce a points-based immigration system or give £350m per week to the NHS," she observed. "Both of which were two of the key Vote Leave promises in the referendum campaign. The government
has gone from gross negligence to rank incompetence. You're making this up as you're going along."
Davis took this as a compliment. A sign that he was really getting to grips with the job and that progress was being made. Even if only by a process of elimination.
Cripes!
My next long-term health-care professional has retired on me. I now have to break in a new optician, dagnabbit. I'm getting too old for this lark.
When Robert Conquest...
... wasn't too busy helping Kingsley Amis compile five superb early anthologies of SF short stories he was indefatigably researching and documenting the activities of our Soviet friends. A hat is suitably tipped to him in this horrifying piece. Source and snippet:
[Wolfgang Leonhard's] autobiography, Child of the Revolution, tells a story, set during the Great Purges, about some families in a communal apartment who are awakened at 4 a.m. (the usual time for arrests) by a peremptory banging at the door. Finally one old man, with less life left to lose, answers, disappears into the corridor, and at last returns. "Comrades, relax!" he explains. "The house is on fire!"
Voting
Is democracy the least-worst system?
No one would submit to an operation by a doctor who refused scientific evidence, or think a jury of fact-resistant partisans had any business sending them to jail. But by ultimately entrusting life-and-death decisions to our fellow citizens, we are launching wars, sustaining mass incarceration, and punishing people harshly for marijuana use and (until recently) same-sex relationships on the basis of ignorance and prejudice.
Good job we do things differently here in the UK :-)
Guns
This is a fabulous piece, and describes a truly horrendous state of affairs. (Link.)
I've now twice...
... found the optimal sort order of one of my pesky lists perturbed by the difference in "apostrophes" ...
... used by those who have "crowd-sourced" data into the online DBs that Kodi uses for its information scraping. It's obviously just as well I'm not obsessive about this sort of thing.
I knew nothing...
... of this chap until just the other day, but I'm always willing to try time travel novels:
This is the first of a well-received trilogy.
I note the death...
... of one of the stranger ladies of recent times... Here is the only exchange I had with Carol about the lady:
Message 424 to Carol (30 Sept, 13.30ish)
Today, two interesting Americans I've heard on the radio over here. The good guy was Studs Terkel, who seems to me to be your equivalent of the late James Cameron. The bad guy, although about as fascinating as a black mamba in a horribly hypnotic way, was a woman called
Phyllis Schlafly.
The quotes I jotted down included such gems as "If what you want is a job, you should get down on your knees every night and thank God for Ronald Reagan's economic policies", "Sex education is a major cause of promiscuity, disease, pregnancy, and leads to illegitimate
births", "Abstinence until marriage", "Seven of God's commandments are negative...", "There are two classes of Americans, the pro-family and the promiscuous", "The recipe for a successful marriage: social compromises, with the husband coming first, the children second,
and the wife's career third".
Just two questions: Is she serious? and Where do you grow these fruitcakes, Carol?
Her reply:
Where do we get the likes of Phyllis Schlafly? But we grow them! Isn't she wonderful? The only thing about Phyllis is that she's so far out of synch with most influential American thought (female division) that she's relatively harmless.
Rather like Zaphod's revised entry on the Earth: "Mostly harmless". Schlafly's son Andy is the chap who created Conservapedia to offer him a platform to claim, for random example, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics "disproves the atheistic Theory of Evolution and Theory of Relativity"...
I am not making this up.