2016 — 8 September: Thursday
Today's adventure? Another lunchtime rendezvous with "my friends in the North".1 I shall be recommending they watch the new Disney Jungle Book which I caught last night. Remarkable blend of CGI and amusing choice of people for the various character voices.
Meanwhile...
... since reading a two-page article in the new "Linux User" magazine on how trivially easy it is to start running RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi I'm now seriously thinking of trying it on my so far barely-used Pi3. If only for the nostalgic experience. Last time I had RISC OS under my roof (as it were) was on my 64MB Acorn RISC PC700 (unearthed briefly last year — and promptly recycled — while I was making room in my garage for the slightly longer Mazda2).
I'd added the 200MHz StrongARM upgrade to it in late 1996. That had been a relatively blistering speed upgrade at the time, but "the time" was a very long time ago in terms of processor evolution. Even if I'd kept all my application software from then it wouldn't run today on the Pi3 without some serious patching as the pace of both ARM and RISC OS development, although pretty glacial in the latter's case, has been quite steady since its 26-bit days.
John Baez...
... of (inter alia) the wondrous properties of the number 24 and the "Crackpot Index" is back and considering the Continuum. Touching, in passing, the assertion in 1840 by Laplace that clearly influenced EE "Doc" Smith's view of the capabilities of the average Arisian super brain. (Link.)
When I read...
... the glorious essay I mentioned here last year, it was the first time I'd seen the name "Avies Platt". And in the margin of that same LRB page was another name I barely registered: William Empson. Since the Empson article lived behind the LRB's paywall I couldn't explore further. Today I found this; source and snippet:
The Face of the Buddha wouldn't exist if Empson hadn't ended up in Japan after being expelled from Cambridge, when his private stash of condoms was discovered in his room by college porters. Maddeningly, the scandal took place only weeks after he was elected to a fellowship at Magdalene College that would have guaranteed the secure position and income (of £150 per year) he needed to write Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson had to move into cheap living quarters in bohemian London, and the debacle meant that his chances at an academic career in England were slim.
Are academics not supposed to use contraception? Just askin'.
I lose track of the number of times I read about all the benefits that will inevitably accrue from businesses that sell their software operations to other businesses. Today's example being Micro Focus and HPE.
Mr Postie dropped off...
... as batty a combination of odd entertainment as I could wish for shortly before I set off on my "straightforward"2 little trip::
I've long admired the late Mapplethorpe's 'brand' of photography. The story of Florence Foster Jenkins is a zany one. Kaufman makes interesting films. And I have high hopes of the SF novel.
Many a true word...
I found this at the end of a piece on work ethic by Harry Mount in a recent "Spectator":
Until the Big Bang in 1986, life in the City principally consisted of dim public schoolboys squeezing in a few hours' work around two-bottle, three-hour lunches. In the 30 years since, the City has been taken over by lean sushi-munchers with Ivy League MBAs and Oxbridge firsts, working 14-hour days. And what did that lead to? The biggest financial crash in generations.
I've downloaded...
... and installed the latest version of UltraEdit on Skylark, but am not convinced (yet) that it's bringing enough new 'stuff' to the table to warrant the purchase price. I have a 30-day clock now ticking, as it were. And (in theory at least), I have at least one installation left from my existing purchase of the earlier version last year.