Status-Q

Family tech support over the phone is a wonderful thing, especially with screen-sharing, but it can still be slow progress to achieve some simple tasks…

Me: “You can select several things at once: click the first one, then shift-click the last one”

Relative: “Shift-click?”

“Yes, hold down the shift key while clicking”

“I’m sorry — I don’t know where the shift key is…”

“The one with the up arrow that you use for making capitals.”

Long pause.

“No, it doesn’t seem to do anything different”.

“Oh. Perhaps it doesn’t work in this mode. Let me try here. Mmm. It works fine for me. Tell me exactly what you’re doing…”

Long discussion during which we discover that beloved relative is actually using the (generally less useful) capslock-click manoeuvre. We try again.

“Are they all selected now?”

“They’re all blue”

“Good, that means they’re selected. Now… Mmm. What were we doing?…”

One of the things that strikes many of us visiting the US is the number of advertisements for prescription drugs, even on prime-time TV. This is not allowed in most other countries.

Vox has become rather good at producing short informative videos on a wide variety of topics; here’s their take on this subject…

Janet Daley, writing in The Telegraph about being an immigrant to the UK:

What does choosing to live in another country mean in today’s world? To my mind then (and now) there is no question that I had decided to become, for almost all intents and purposes, British. The whole point of my decision was that I admired the values and attitudes of this country. Why else choose to live here?

Residing in a country did not seem to me to be simply a matter of adopting a flag of convenience under which it would be possible to live any way one liked so long as the local circumstances facilitated it. In fact, the old countries of Europe were attractive precisely because they had established cultural histories and an inherited stability that the US – with its constant social churn and neurotic insecurity – lacked. You came to live in Britain because you wanted to be part of what Britain was.

The European Union’s “free movement of people” rule and its obtuse confusion over the assimilation of migrants seem deliberately designed to undermine any such notion of cohesive national identity.

What will preserve the integrity of a nation’s institutions if the collective memory of its history is lost?
You need not choose anymore. Your habits and social assumptions need not change. You can have it all: any number of nationalities; a whole wallet file of identity documents; a peripatetic working life that drifts in and out of what would once have been communities but are now simply transit stops in a migratory existence.

Maybe you think this is progress. I can understand the argument which says that it is liberating: a new form of personal freedom. For the young and unattached, this may be – temporarily – true. What bliss to come and go across defunct borders, working and living without encumbrance wherever you please, as if life were a permanent gap-year adventure.

But what happens after that? When the responsibilities of grown-up life cause people to long for rootedness and a real sense of hereditary belonging – what then?

And then there is the more urgent political issue: what will preserve the integrity of a nation’s institutions if the collective memory of its history is lost?

You know that strange disclaimer that appears at the end of every film? The earliest movies, of course, don’t have it. Have you ever wondered how it started?

Well, there lived a certain man in Russia long ago…

Here’s a very rough rule of thumb which I find exceedingly useful:

If something uses 1W of electricity, and it’s switched on all the time (24 x 7), it will cost about £1/year in electricity.

So, for example, I have an elderly Mac Mini next to my television which used to be on all the time because it was my ‘media centre’ – it recorded things from the TV onto disk, etc. It takes about 80-100W, so it costs me roughly that many pounds per year, which means that if I turn it off I can get my Netflix subscription for free!

All sorts of calculations become pretty straightforward.

• I have a second display for my iMac, which uses about 60W. (I’ve just measured it.) So that would be £60/year, but it’s only on for about 8hrs/day, so £20/year.

• If a salesman tells you a new fridge will save you an average of 40W compared to your current fridge, but costs £400, you can work out easily that it’ll pay for itself in about 10 years.

In case you’re curious, this rule assumes you pay about 11.5p/kWh for your electricity, which is close enough for most UK residents. I forget who first pointed the convenient annual multiplication out to me, but I find myself using it all the time, so I thought I’d pass it on!

Most of my ‘reading’ these days is in audiobook form. I have more time, and I’m more alert, when I’m driving or walking the dog than when I’m sleepily in bed after a long day and a glass or two of wine (though I do read in bed as well). I’ve written before about this — have a look at this post for some recommendations. The main advantage of listening over reading, of course, is that you can do it while leaving your eyes free for other tasks.

Listening to a book is different from reading it, of course – better in some ways, inferior in others – but some people also feel it’s cheating. Melissa Dahl, writing in New York magazine, suggests it isn’t.

Excerpt:

Researchers have studied the question of comprehension for decades, and “what you find is very high correlations of reading comprehension and listening comprehension,” Willingham said. As science writer Olga Khazan noted in 2011, a “1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension — suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it.” Listeners and readers retain about equal understanding of the passages they’ve consumed, in other words.

Decoding, by contrast, is specific to reading, Willingham said; this is indeed one more step your mind has to take when reading a print book as compared to listening to the audiobook version. But by about late elementary school, decoding becomes so second-nature that it isn’t any additional “work” for your brain. It happens automatically.

According to the simple model of reading, then, you really can’t consider listening to a book to be easier than reading it.

For the record, though, I’d like people to know that I always listen to unabridged versions…