2016 — 26 October: Wednesday
I was gently warned yesterday that, unless regularly powered on, electrolytic capacitors in power supplies can dry out.1 My consultant was hypothesising that this could explain recent misbehaviour on the part of both my depressingly-expensive A/V stack CD players. CDs have rapidly become somehow terribly old-fashioned. When I buy any these days I invariably 'rip' them to high-quality MP3 files and then just file the things away in the dining room out of the way.
I ended up playing yesterday's three excellent new 'free' CDs on my Oppo Blu-ray player, and I may well now decide not to bother with replacements.
It's not as if I lack for playing capability. The Denon tuner/amp collecting dust upstairs has a CD drive. My "standby" BlackBeast PC has an internal optical drive — a Blu-ray, in fact — that I could relocate to Skylark in about 10 minutes. There's also a pair of external USB-connected DVD drives knocking around that are equally available to any of the three PCs... the smallest of which is currently churning out an enjoyable stream of BBC Radio 3 "Late Junction" programmes.
Today's treat?
A lunchtime walk'n'chat with Iris. The weather for that is sub-optimal, but the time of year makes it entirely unsurprising. If she remembers to pop them in her boot, and I remember to ask for them, there will also be a top-up with further copies of her slightly-used "Spectator" magazines. Always good for raising the blood pressure.
Trouble with Lichen
Turns out, many many years after last reading John Wyndham's SF novel, that what he taught me about lichen symbiosis between fungus and alga is at least 50% more complex than was initially recognised. Lichens are poorly-understood "self-assembling and self-replicating microbe colonies" (in the words of Toby Spribille). More formal snippet:
For over 140 years, lichens have been regarded as a symbiosis between a single fungus, usually an ascomycete, and a photosynthesizing partner. Other fungi have long been known to occur as occasional parasites or endophytes, but the one lichen-one fungus paradigm has seldom been questioned. Here we show that many common lichens are composed of the known ascomycete, the photosynthesizing partner, and, unexpectedly, specific basidiomycete yeasts.
The closer we look, the more we find (and the less we understand).
Some hours later
A pleasant stroll along the River Itchen from Brambridge as far as "The Hub", back to Brambridge (which, by then, was looking too stale to be viable for a late lunch) so over to Banaras for a simple Indian before a parting of the ways until the next Yoga teaching break. Very nice.
Back in 1992...
... those rascally NPR "Car Talk" brothers came up with a witty bumper sticker. They updated it in 1996, and — knowing that I was a fan — Carol sent one over to me for Xmas that year...
Seeing the tagline of a new "Aeon" essay on an open mind...
... brought it straight back to mind, though I'm not sure I like Mountcastle's idea of the top-layer of thought being a mere six cells deep!
Cortical neurons are connected with each other and with cells in other parts of the brain by a vast number of synapses, of the order of 1012. The cortex is organized horizontally into six laminae, and vertically into groups of cells linked synaptically across the horizontal laminae... (Link.)
Content-associative memory is a weird and wondrous thing, as shown by ICL's Content Addressable File Store (CAFS) system nearly 40 years ago — at a time when processor speeds lagged behind the rate of data flow from disks. I can't help but wonder how the vaguely-related version 'running' between the ears actually works. But — and it's a wonderful cop-out — if the brain were simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to understand it!
As a measure...
... of my relative shift in technology focus to Linux PCs in recent months I found, on updating my A/V system diagram and notes (to reflect the removal of the CD player) that it had been over four months since I last updated those pages. And the artwork files were still sitting over on my now quiescent BlackBeast PC (as I only belatedly realised after an initial minor panic).