2016 — 27 September: Tuesday
Just for a change1 all (PC) systems seem to be "Go" this morning. Including NAS access from the i5NUC and consequent digital audio. It's always faintly worrying when that happens. I shall make some breakfast and await my plumber friend Bri.
The race to become...
... "top dog" in the U.S. has gone so far past bizarre and surreal that I'm tuning it out. Bad enough that people who seek this job aren't automatically ruled out by reason of insanity without having to listen to what they say.
Surf's up, dude
Masshole??
The O.E.D. sent Warshaw a few more terms, and before long hired him to be its first-ever Surf Consultant (total pay: four hundred pounds). The O.E.D. has some three hundred consultants, who provide an extra layer of expert scrutiny in such areas of arcana as falconry and wine. It has always tried to keep up with American slang; noted recent additions are "Masshole" and "vape." "Clearly, they felt they needed to up their surf game," Warshaw said. He speculated that there was a closet surfer on staff.
Now what "Party" is...
... being characterised here, do you suppose?
The image I have of how the Party works is Fed Ex. The corporate leadership make all of the important decisions for the company. The truck drivers deliver the goods with almost no input into the decisions made. The organisers are the men and women truck drivers for the Party. The leadership and the Party staff reside in separate quarters physically and mentally. Policies and major campaigns are developed with little or no input from the staff in the field. This leads to a lot [sic] mistakes and resentments.
There's an interesting extract (a so-called "long read") from "Respectable: The Experience of Class" on class and the UK. It always struck me how much dear Mama worried about such things. I tend not to.
Pleasingly...
... my central heating system is holding up very nicely. Somewhat like its owner :-)
Now to see...
... if my post-lunch delivery is any easier on the noggin than Jaynes' original book:
Back in December 2013...
... I read a neat essay by David Dobbs in "Aeon" confirming that there was a good reason not to be re-incarnated as a grasshopper. Here's another snippet (re-discovered while shovelling a bunch of saved bits from "A" to "B"):
As a David to Dawkins's Goliath, West-Eberhard faces distinct challenges... while Dawkins holds forth from Oxford, one of the most prestigious universities on earth, and deploys from London an entire foundation in his name, West-Eberhard studies and writes from a remote outpost in Central America. Dawkins commands locust-sized audiences any time he speaks and probably turns down enough speaking engagements to fill five calendars; West-Eberhard speaks mainly to insect-crazed colleagues at small conferences. Dawkins wrote a delicious 300-page book that has sold tens of millions of copies; West-Eberhard has written a bunch of fine obscure papers and an 800-page tome, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (2003), which, though not without its sweet parts, is generally consumed as a meal of obligation.
Linux — infamously — has...
... numerous ways to de-fur members of the feline family. This afternoon's example was provoked by a series of annoying glitches when I was trying to transfer some saved web pages from the aforementioned "A" to "B". Many of them successfully made it in (as it were) one piece. A few rather fell apart2 during the journey. And some of the shattered remnants were really quite stubborn in resisting my attempts to clean up the mess from the NAS drive where I'd popped them in a form of Calais refugee "holding" camp en route to their intended destination.
There was no particular rhyme or reason that I could see why the ones that failed, erm, failed. Could have been overlong filenames. Could have been a folder structure that was too deeply nested. Could have been the perversity of the Universe hereabouts, reacting angrily to my over-confident footnote a few hours ago.
However, if (before attempting the transfer) you first compress the entire directory of files into a single file — a .tar.gz archive — and then just whizz that single file (humongous though it is) along the electric string... on its arrival you can simply extract all the files from it (with sub-folder structure and filenames completely intact) at the destination. Result? A series of beautifully de-furred felines with nary a dropped bit to be seen.