2016 — 29 September: Thursday
Being the sort of chap I am1 I already have, salted away somewhere, the Stephen Potter BBC Third Programme item "How to listen" that was first broadcast 70 years ago today. It's tagged as comedy though your smileage may vary.
Today's treat...
... is a lunch out somewhere. Let's see where the GPS takes us, shall we?
I had a rare opportunity to read the entire print edition of the "Grauniad" yesterday. I did so. I see no reason to resume the habit. Even if it is about the least worst of the options more or less to my political taste. The idea that a serious national newspaper can devote three pages to the topic of eyebrows makes my point for me.
This could...
... run and run, I suspect:
With the 48/52 vote split it's unlikely to end without tears before bedtime, too. Mind you, name me a single guvmint that wouldn't prefer to ignore Parliamentary process!
Feynman?
The chap who sent me a link to a Feynman diagram yesterday — his satirical comment on the best way of keeping tabs on the time-travelling going on in Paul Levinson's "The Plot to save Socrates" — had somehow overlooked a fine piece of text (an excerpt from one of his lectures) from Feynman at that same web site. The chap (the webmaster, that is, not my chum) keeps it on a scroll in a box shaped like a human skull and trots it out as needed in his science and maths lessons. Recommended. Highly. Here's a snippet from its wrapper:
When I say all of this, my students often stare at me, disbelieving, uncertain of what to say or how to respond because no one has ever talked to them like that before. I'm thinking, Sherlock-style, "Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring!" I try to tell myself, it's the system, it's the society, it's the way things are. But agh! I just want to grab my students and shake them. What are you doing?! Learn everything! Drink in the universe! Gather it inside you!
I think I know how he feels. I hate incuriosity.
Or Philosophy?
An interesting slant. Source and snippet:
[Peter] Singer concludes from the remarkable prominence of philosophers in the public sphere that the billion or so people who don't have to worry about food and other basics are hungry for answers to the great questions of life, a hunger that only philosophy can satisfy. "I know from my own experience," Singer writes, "that taking a course in philosophy can lead students to turn vegan, pursue careers that enable them to give half their income to effective charities, and even donate a kidney to a stranger. How many other disciplines can say that?"
Thanks, Mr Postie
An all-zones Blu-ray coming to me from the U.S. via Sweden for £10-38 including postage. And German language artwork plus certification, but an English sound track:
52 years ago...
... I bought Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" (before it became a trilogy). It's the source of a quote I'd been trying to pin down about exoplanet geochemistry after yesterday's final excursion through Scharf's "The Copernicus Complex". It took just the title from Len to steer me there and I responded with "Jason dinAlt" (as one would, of course)...
"I'm frightened," Jason said dryly. "What do you have, methane or chlorine reactions? I've been down on planets like that —"
Kerk slammed his hand down hard on the table... "Laboratory reactions!" he growled. "They look great on a bench — but what happens when you have a world filled with those compounds? In an eye-blink of galactic time all the violence is locked up in nice, stable
compounds. The atmosphere may be poisonous for an oxygen breather, but taken by itself it's as harmless as weak beer."
"There is only one set-up that is pure poison as a planetary atmosphere. Plenty of H2O, the most universal solvent you can find, plus free oxygen to work on —"
Just like Earth, in other words.
[Pause]
Good film, by the way, though the textual elements on screen were all in German :-)