Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

.. and on how if we want all that cheap shiny stuff, well, that's the price . Or is it.

The council presented me with a bill for unpaid council tax for £38.20 for 2007. So I phone to enquire about this -final notice with no previous notices, two years on? And they tell me that there is an outstanding amount of o£350-something for that period, for ‘recalculation of benefit’. I never claimed benefit (two of my flatmates at the time did, if I remember correctly) and they’re long since gone from this place. No matter, I have to pay that amount, they say, even though it is a bill that largely has nothing to do with me. I should imagine it would be impossible to recover those ‘recalculated benefits’ from those two flat-mates (one of whom may be reading this). I really didn’t need this at this point, grr.

My MacBook refused to start up this morning, with clicking sounds coming from where the hard disk is. This is a generally not very good sign. Iand it is not a very convenient moment to have to go spend eighty or ninety quid on a hard disk drive at this point.

Anybody want a guitarist for their wedding, bar-mitzvah, funeral, investment bank dissolution ceremony? Can also provide a duo singing mournful songs about the destruction of the universe and the binding fate of the human condition... :P

It had to happen. Serve us mac-users right, for being so smug about these machines not getting viruses.

nicked from crookedmonkey:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7687286.stm

This item on the BBC science pages sent me on a sort of wistful mood,f or some reason. Maybe because as a musician, making music often feels like something very important and transcendent, something that goes to the essence of what the world is and of ourselves, whilst in living our lives in a human society we often feel (or I do, at any rate) that what we do is unimportant and irrelevant and that that is one reason why so many of us struggle so much in the ‘real’ world...

Other occasions the world didn’t end, from Times Online and nicked from cracksmacker

Quite surprised to learn that a lot of people -quite well educated people, some of them, believe that the starting up of the Large Hadron Collider may bring about a catastrophic event that could pretty much wipe the world out. We (or some of us) seem to need to believe in these ‘end of the world’ scenarios. The arrival of the year 2000 was going to create havoc with our technology, endangering civilisation. Before that, we lived under the shadow of the (rather real) threat of nuclear obliteration during the Cold War. No way of knowing how close we may have been but for a lot of people it was quite real and even immediate, imminent, inevitable. It didn’t happen, at least then. There’s been many times through history when people have made predictions of doom and right now, apart from the LHC, we are expecting the onset of a catastrophic climate change (a real risk as far as a layman like myself can tell, but I’m really talking about perception and our possible need for the doomsday scenario), or even the possibility of Earth being hit by an asteroid (which, again, is very possible and has happened many times in the past, but ..) and, for some, an imminent fulfilling of the Biblical Apocalypse.

It is bad enough that life is short and to a large extent out of our control as individuals... it seems to me far more useful to us to live our lives in the understanding that our world will end one day, yes, but without obsessing about things that are completely out of our control or creating the ghosts of deadly dangers where there are none . And of course I don’t think that in the case of the LHC it is going to bring about the end of the world. It may or may provide some answers to our curiosity, perhaps help throw hints at the answers for a few very big questions and, in due time, the science it helps produce may bring about some unexpected practical benefits * -and yes, some unexpected dangers or inconveniences, as those things always do. That’s it.


* Who ever mentions Teflon gets shot... :P

Not so much the 'unseen' hand, here...

taken from photoshop disasters