The TPCI August Headline is
COBOL scores a new all time low
You know, the sultry weather of this August is not healthy for woebegone mammoths. 
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Archive for the 'English' Category
This release adds links to the original websites.
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The World Without Us describes how Earth could react to our as hypothetical as istantaneous disappearance. It is clearly a pretext to write about some fundamental properties of this planet and, indirectly, of the temporary nature of our human adventure.
How could I have refrained myself from reading a book so close to the concept of temporariness that gives the name to this blog? I’ve previously written about this subject, altough under a slightly different point of view.
The book, that is definitely interesting, describes, amoung other things, which remains will remain in the very long period: at the top of such a list we find objects made to last (Mount Rushmore might last 7.5 million years - the same time that divides us from our farthest ancestor - or Channel Tunnel, that could survive in the deep darkness for a few million years too… anyhow it would be quite less than the rests of the Voyagers) while others were not intentionally designed to survive us such a long time, like many kinds of very large artificial polymers that we, not so wisely, spread all around every single day.
As described in the book, even though in many ways this planet could mostly return to itself within a few hundred thousand years, under many other aspects it is deeply signed by us and, surely, who accidentally come after would find what we left as well as the empties we created during our passage (like huge underground volumes once filled with carbon, gas, petroleum and alike): a poorer planet compared to the one we’ve got just 7.5 million years ago but with a still strong Nature.
I’ve thought many times that while our instantaneous disappearance is very unlikely (it’s just the idea that the author used to write about those subjects) it could be more realistic reading his pages thinking about a still populated planet in which, for the reasons that the Olduvai theory describes, we couldn’t be anymore able to control most dangerous activities we’ve already started.
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Iconize is CSS file that uses… regular expressions (!) to improve links experience: for example, if a link points to a .pdf file, it shows a pdf icon after the link and so on.
It is so easy to modify it that even a CSS illiterate like me was able to give two new example:
a[href ^="http:\/\/en\.wikipedia\.org"] {
padding: 5px 20px 5px 0;
background: transparent url(icons/wikipedia-icon.gif) no-repeat \
center right;
}
code[class ^="mailto"] {
padding: 5px 20px 5px 0;
background: transparent url(icons/icon_mailto.gif) no-repeat \
center right;
}
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- this one liner (698) makes K2 able to show
<span class="entry-tags">only when it is necessary; - this one liner (699) makes K2 able to show the kind of gravatar selected on the back end.
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This release uses uses the new feedproxy.google.com feed (thanks to Casey).
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This release uses uses the new feedproxy.google.com feed (thanks to Casey).
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The average reader of Darker Than the Deepest Sea is not someone who bought it choosing at random in a bookshop, knowing nothing about the life and the work of Nick Drake: their involvement ranges from mild fanatism to strong obsession… even though reading a book requires at least to be able to move eyes and hands, so they aren’t in the deepest sea (and you know what I mean).
I enjoyed this book and the first words that came to my mind to describe it were: sober, calm, clear… very English (its rhythm increases just from Part 3). It provides many details and a deep analysis but author’s opinions are never exaggerated or naive: Trevor Dann is a former Head of BBC Music Entertainment and his professional skills are showed clearly.
An evident example of the deep work he has done is on page 69, where he describes the letter that Rodney Drake wrote to the tutor of Nick in Cambridge; Dann noticed that
There is a change in the shade of ink in the final paragraphs which suggest that they were added later (…)
I suppose that finding this old letter was not easy and observing “a change in the shade of ink” shows great attention and a very sharp eye.
As I’ve just written, the prose of Mr. Dann is calm and placid but here and there you can find some fun: the most unbelievable and amusing story he reports is the adventure in Morocco (beginning at page 124) that worths alone the price of the book!
On page 243, Dann proves once again his professionalism with a bad assessment for the song “Sunday”: a book about Drake is not a good reason to avoid negative notes.
Funnily, on page 258 he remembers to us that
bootlegs (…) illegally distributed
but just a few lines following, on the very next page, he starts to describe one by one most of the songs you can find on them.
My last note is that the website La Luna Rosa is written in Spanish: it’s not Italian as stated, although “La Luna Rosa” (”The pink moon” in English) is a valid name with the same meaning in both Spanish and Italian.
I didn’t write everything, of course: the book contains many interesting things I didn’t mention here. I suggest to buy the book and express your acknowledgement to Trevor Dann.
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In some way, a century after his birth, Aurelio Peccei is still standing.
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Passing peak oil, skeptical people would say:
Soon or later, we’ll reach again the past peak… it’s just a question of time.
Strictly speaking, it’s not possible to negate this statement but, thinking about it, I’ve started to wonder about another question:
What is the longest period in history between a local peak and its next greater or equal value?
To find the answer to my question, I’ve used:
- data kindly gave to me by Jean Laherrère (thanks to Prof. Ugo Bardi, too) for the 1857-1958 period.
- the BP Historical data Workbook for the 1965-2006 period;
As you notice, I wasn’t able to find data for the 1959-1964 period but fortunately it’s not a problem because the answer - according to the available data, of course - is: 14 years (therefore it’s more than the missing years). This period of 14 years is placed between 1979 and 1993.
That would’nt be enough for the incorrigible sceptic but it might be of some interest for anyone else.
You can download here the computed data:
- 1857-1958_1965-2006 (csv format);
- 1857-1958_1965-2006 (ods format);
- the list of peaks/next greater (text).
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