Distributed processing is great…until it isn’t. Similarly, distributing tasks among independent nodes allows us to scale up easily and to achieve greater reliability. However, these goals are often in conflict. The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the harder it is to maintain consistency between them, and the more critical it is that you get the networking element of the problem right. Strange emergent properties of the system may surprise you, and it seems to be a law that the consumption of drink scales O(log n) with the number of cooks.: from this nice piece by occasional FT pub-fancying commenter Alex the Yorkshire Ranter, likening cookery to computing and vice versa. (The ingredients can be found in the comments thread at this post on Unfogged, but the final salad of all the gags is smart as as it’s funny.)
ok i ett this yesterday: had been swimmin w/dr vick near victoria park, and she was keen to check out the weird village-y bit of victoria park road — it comes across like dulwich village except without a not-as-good-as-it-thinks-it-is minor public school — ftb having tea and cake, and we found a bakery/caff called “loafing” (hoho DYS), and yes, it was the best SR i ever had = a fancy cuisine echo of the foodstuff recollected here!
a piece i’ve often wanted to write has been something about the switch from dourly puritan late-50s stasis (back-to-backs you will never escape) to slippy mid-60s mobility: this — possibly deluded — urgent new sense that you could get a beatle-shaped ticket to ride out of grim-up-north nowhere down into swinging bedsit london (a city which rarely features in the kitchen sink canon: up the junction? the ipcress file?), and, who knows? become whatever you wanted to be…! this 1969 series being a touchstone fragment of whatever you’d want to call the relevant realism, except i can remember nothing whatever of the actual programme, only the pentangle theme music…
(This is a series in which FT contributors read the ghost stories of M. R. James. Hey! It is not going as slowly as some FT series! But er yes, it has taken me quite a time to get round to this one. If you want to read it first — and do, bcz there will be SPOILERS — it can be found here.)
It’s all about the numbers, obviously, so let’s begin there. This is a nicely turned haunted-room tale, with four very excellent aspects to it, and five oddities. Actually it’s a subvariant of the haunted-room tale. The classic would be something like F.Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth“, where those who stay overnight in Room 105 on the ship Kamtschatka encounter something pretty grisly, and respond accordingly. This subvarant is probably better termed the “hauntING room tale”, as it’s less a matter of the unsuspecting visitor to the house being at certain times troubled by the room’s occupant, as of the building being at certain times troubled by the room. more »
LWW: lucy and susan get to ride on a lion’s back PC: omg lucy and susan get to WINE-CRAZED ROMP with BACCHUS dude. Actual real quote: “Two of the Maenads… helped her take off some of the unnecessary and uncomfortable clothes she was wearing” YES I’LL BET THEY DID! VDT: er ok pass, though lucy does get sold into slavery briefly, plus cuddles reepicheep at the world’s end plus er er seamen, yes PP can have this one… SC: jill gets blown by a lion and rides on the back of a giant owl and a CENTAUR MN: polly gets to ride on the back of a flying horse HahB: aravis gets to ride a talking horse LB: oh noes susan prefers teh lipstickz to RIDING ON LIONS AND AN ETERNITY WITH PRIAPIC GOATMEN
c.s.lewis had a fear of female sexuality: I’m sorry the more telling psychological evidence says otherwise…
<— The Old Narnians, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)
Hundreds of posts now hang off Steven Wells’s intensely moving farewell article at the Philadelphia Weekly, which ends with an atypically cryptic Swellsy in prophet mode, quoting Michael Jackson, before the thread-flood of sad affection and bafflement from readers and colleages, bafflement that such a chaotically vivid force of self-willed nature is stilled; bafflement perhaps too that such deep fondness can well up out of the fury he loved to work to spark in one and all. I’ve read it declared a dozen times now that Steven alone is the reason such-and-such took up writing as a trade — all the little fires he started in all these hot little hearts, what’s that come to? The consensus (correct) that he was just a big bald huggable pussycat at heart, a friendly and a kind man behind the shoutiness; the gnarly and rather unacceptable sense that his lifelong war on the useless has somehow left us with more of it not less (which may be our fault not his); and huge great gobs of the feeling — utterly conventional and surely utterly bogus — that times and possibilities aren’t what they were. more »
he calls himself “seth edenbaum” and “d. ghirlandio” though i don’t think either is his name (her name? my instincts say no, but a mask is a mask is mask…); he may be an artist; this may just be a disguise
he’s been banned as a troll from crooked timber (tho i suspect he’s posting once more, under yet another name): on his own blog he’s furious, frustrated, isolated, relentlessly suspicious, oddly and unexpectedly generous… and consistently fascinating, because of rather than despite the cryptic incompleteness of his posted thoughts, on politics and art, reason and imagination and the self-absorbed rent-seeking intellectual classes:
“One of the many mistakes of the 2oth century was to imagine it might be possible to know without doubt which of our creations would avoid obsolescence. An art or society of ideas, a dream of scientific socialism or of the morality of technological progress, all are predicated on the same assumption, that modernity could mean infallibility, as if a cursory reading of Freud could render one immune to the effects of the unconscious. Such confidence doesn’t work now any more than it did 80 years ago. It doesn’t work for Donald Rumsfeld, or Steve Jobs, any more than it did for Lenin or Le Corbusier.”
Duke of the Rotten Underfelting of All Culture, Marquis of the Mothed Marches, gorgeous as the fifth moon and terrible as a tummy with hammers, i bind your gnomes to slake my bed: ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR
Distributed processing is great…until it isn’t. Similarly, distributing tasks among independent nodes allows us to scale up easily and to achieve greater reliability. However, these goals are often in conflict. The more cooks you have in the kitchen, the harder it is to maintain consistency between them, and the more critical it is that you get the networking element of the problem right. Strange emergent properties of the system may surprise you, and it seems to be a law that the consumption of drink scales O(log n) with the number of cooks.: from this nice piece by occasional FT pub-fancying commenter Alex the Yorkshire Ranter, likening cookery to computing and vice versa. (The ingredients can be found in the comments thread at this post on Unfogged, but the final salad of all the gags is smart as as it’s funny.)
(This is a series in which FT contributors read the 
LWW: lucy and susan get to ride on a lion’s back
Full harmonic convergence achieved. See all other entries. 
Hundreds of posts now hang off Steven Wells’s intensely moving 
alex harrowell of 
he calls himself “