2016 — 18 September: Sunday

Last night's search for my copy of Lawrence Durrell's "Antrobus Complete" was unsuccessful. My chum Val in Stockholm had mentioned trying some Durrell (almost certainly the Alexandria Quartet) "years ago" and given up on it. I have more pleasant memories of the tales of Antrobus, mirrored somewhat by the antics of Keith Laumer's "Galactic Diplomat" James Retief.

But if I can't find it1 I shall just have to move on. Still, I did winkle out a further five Bill Bryson titles to cull.

Home is where...

... the mortgage isn't, it seems. Source and snippet:

Like many others at the time, her mortgage had been handed off to a different company — in her case, Nationstar, a mortgage servicer. As home loans were packaged into investment securities, they were sliced and diced so many times that banks lost track of the underlying ownership. This practice occasionally ended up creating situations where banks foreclosed on a home when they no longer owned the loan...
The banks that had created the crisis had been bailed out as a group, but homeowners like Daniel were left to struggle individually, the bailouts somehow failing to trickle down to the people at risk of losing their homes.

Sarah Jaffe in Dissent


Good old bankers! (Even the German ones.) Here, the Royal Bank of Scotland managed to mislay my Title Deeds for seven years though at least they acknowledged they had done so, and that I had actually paid off the damn' debt.

While researching that little factoid I discovered (to my surprise) that I first got my vari-focal lenses in February 2007 for £249 — my second pair is now in the process of costing me £347 as (so far) my JLP card is carrying that little burden for me.

Is America crazy?

Hard to decide. The "Carceral State" was a new one on me. Source and snippet:

The very first [federal sting operation] was this fake mafia operation involving Washington DC police officers, federal agents, and Department of Justice officials. They rent an unheated warehouse on the northeast side of DC, dress like characters from The Godfather and speak with fake Italian accents and gave themselves names like "Angelo Lasagna," and they recruit people to bring stolen goods to the warehouse...
By the 1980s ... the Miami Police Department starts manufacturing crack in the county courthouse from the cocaine that it seizes and selling it to drug abusers before arresting them. Sting operations are still a very important part of how law enforcement is done today. It's a great way to arrest people.

Timothy Shenk in Dissent


The fact that...

... part of the experimental setup is "located in the sub-basement of the Vienna Hofburg castle" adds curiously little to my overall understanding, but rather a lot more to my enjoyment, of this bit of quantum legerdemain. Source and snippet (from the Aeon essay that led me to the Zeilinger paper):

At this point, defenders of other views of quantum mechanics will point out, rightly, that the zigzag idea is just a proposal; there isn't yet a well-developed model of how to implement it. They will also insist that Parisian elegance is not compulsory. If you wish, you can choose to live with action-at-a-distance, or time-asymmetry, or shut-up-and-calculate-and-don't-think-about-reality.

Huw Price in Aeon


But does this mean I can have my Free Will back? Pretty please? If so, I'll now be able to start worrying about the implications of retrocausality (if I haven't already). I hafta say, I loved the proposal (hinted at right at the end of the Zeilinger paper) too:

By setting the detectors using pairs of quasars or patches of the 
cosmic microwave background, observed violations of Bell's inequality 
would require any such coordination to have existed for billions of 
years — an improvement of 20 orders of magnitude.

(Link.)

Time, perhaps, for a more determined assault on this?

Huw Price book

Having quickly deduced...

... how much easier it is to repopulate my SQL DB of books than it would be (at least, with my present knowledge of SQL commands) to slog through the DB with the SQLite Browser looking for the specific Bryson titles I wanted to delete, I ended up:

  1. Generating a new master ASCII file from my current Books DB (to ensure I was working from a good starting point)
  2. Deleting the Bryson titles from that new ASCII file (using good ol' UltraEdit's well-understood "Search and Destroy" facility)
  3. Creating a new SQL DB from the (now slightly) smaller ASCII file
david@skylark ~/Databases/ReportGen $ python3 BuildMasterFile.py
9059 Books read into the books master file 

(now edit the ASCII file deleting five titles)

david@skylark ~/Databases/ReportGen $ python3 UpdateDB.py
Creating Database tables...
Importing data into Database tables...
9054 Books inserted into the books table

It took less than five minutes, including regenerating all the HTML for the 'molehole' web pages. Thanks, Brian! I confess it took me much longer to scour my shelves in vain for my "Antrobus" stories, and then give in and order an affordable replacement second-hand copy. Grrr.


Footnote

1  I prefer not to contemplate the consequences of the breakdown of the law of the conservation of matter hereabouts.