2016 — 8 November: Tuesday

Nice to see that the latest issue of "Full Circle" has opened up a KODI Room. That's on my 'to-do' list¹ for today. Meanwhile, the rain that my Google News and Weather App is displaying is currently manifesting in "reality" as a cloudless sky, sunshine (where the treeline permits) and what looks like an abundance of baked-on icy stuff on the cars all cluttering up my little paradise.

My cuppa helps. [Pause] Given the occasional clusters of hidden files starting with "._" knocking around (uselessly,² as far as I can tell) in some otherwise innocuous music data folders, here's a tiny code snippet with just the right hint of potential danger:

When President Trump...

... kicks off World War III (in, what, two days or so?) I expect a few hidden Linux files will seem a minor irritant. One is, I gather, never supposed to blame the voters. Pretty tempting, though, surely?

Personally, I find this story only slightly less horrific.

And this one fascinating.

My assigned homework...

... ahead of tomorrow's walking QED symposium is this lecture. [Pause for Deep Thought.] Excellent lecture. Though I could do without the non-removeable zero-length file that is now malingering on my desktop after the YouTube download. It seems not even 'sudo' can nuke something that "isn't there". Spooky.

Hah! Re-booting works :-)

I was just...

... looking up the (to me, dubious) word "maunderings"³ to reply to a mild jibe describing the quality of my writing when my eye was caught by this 'expansion' attached to the proverb about "Many a mickle makes a muckle" (one of Dad's [many] cryptic sayings that somehow he never quite got around to explaining to me):

A timely reminder...

... of the 'purpose' of guvmints, or why we shouldn't confuse symbols and things. Source and snippet:

Government has become so much a thing unto itself that it is now essentially separate from human society, to the degree that governments regularly pass laws and collect taxes in the interest of, and for the furtherance of, government itself — laws and expenditures having nothing to do with the interest of the people the governments were originally designed to serve...
George Bernard Shaw once described religion as "what keeps the poor from killing the rich" — our realization of upward mobility is the modern equivalent, except that it has more intrinsic truth than does religion.

Paul Lutus in Symbols and Things

I can't resist quoting Lutus's conclusion to another fine piece, on evolution, too:

...If religious fundamentalists actually understood 
evolution, they would try to give God credit for it.

(Link.)

Footnotes

¹  As if I had one.
²  A guru writes: The ._ files are probably metadata generated by one of the media players you have been experimenting with (the dates might give you a clue). Probably contain play stats, restart points and the such. Deleting them is unlikely to break anything but might interfere with some of the convenience functions of your player.
³  It's not in Christa's 1999 Concise OED but — annoyingly — can be found in Merriam Webster's Collegiate. Pah! My critic no doubt found it in "The Hour of the Dragon" (chapter 11, apparently).