2016 — 13 September: Tuesday
I doubt if many readers of XKCD1 need much convincing of climate change and its potential for (human) disaster. This is just a tiny snippet from his infographic:
Awesome.
On a smaller scale...
... I've been led to rather a nice2 monospace font ("Hack") by Lucas Westermann's piece in the latest issue of "Full Circle" magazine.
Then there's this...
... charming caveat:
Although a handy way to get the latest Intel graphics stack on Ubuntu, this tool also makes it very easy to hose your entire system.
Just what I need: an even easier way of getting into trouble. (Link.)
One has to grin...
... at some of the comments that articles (like this one by Jonathan Lynn) about Brexit attract. Example:
I'm not sure about Theresa May. The current grammar school nonsense makes me think she might be as recklessly insane as Cameron. But on Brexit she's playing a blinder: come up with a meaningless slogan (Brexit means Brexit) put some incompetent tossers (Johnson, Fox, Davis) up as cannon fodder and people to blame when it all goes tits up, sit back and wait for the long grass to grow around the whole sorry mess.
I wonder how long Lynn's new venture will last?
One also has to grin...
... at the truth of the several gems contained in Amy Hungerford's erudite little "Chronicle" essay here. One reminded me that Matthew Wilkens had published a horrifying factoid: 50,000 new novels appear annually in North America. When I first read that, it had led me (in March 2014) to take a brief interest (for reasons not hard to fathom) in Franco Moretti's work. And now, today, to dig out my two "meta books" on the topic of, and mentioned in, Hungerford's essay. Both these were written in the last decade or so.
I bought Mexican Gabriel Zaid's elegant little tome "So many books" on a whim in December 2004, and admit I stalled at around the 80-page mark for no very good reason. Snippet:
Those who aspire to the status of cultured individuals visit bookshops with trepidation, overwhelmed by the immensity of all they have not read. They buy something that they've been told is good, make an unsuccessful attempt to read it, and when they have
accumulated half a dozen unread books, feel so bad that they are afraid to buy more.
In contrast, the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
My other "meta book" is by French philosopher Pierre Bayard — I'd spotted a witty review of it in the TLS and I bought it in February 2008. It has in its central section a wonderful chapter on David Lodge. (One of the few writers I truly admire.)
I've yet to read...
... this, but then it only arrived a couple of hours ago:
Patterson died shortly before the publication of this slightly longer second volume of his two-volume biography (here's volume #1) of the Grand Old Man of SF. I hold Heinlein more than somewhat responsible for what bits of sanity I possess. As does Chuck Lorre (the co-creator of the "Big Bang Theory" TV show), as shown by this particular Vanity Card...
... I now see that immersing myself in this kind of literature informs my current view of the world. The path of history is, for me, forever seen through the eyes and imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and many, many more...
I can drink to that.