A Mind @ Play

‘I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.’ That supposed shibboleth of the turn-of-the-century captains of finance, whose unrestrained pursuit of profits led western economies to the brink of collapse less than two decades ago, provides a suitable refrain to this review of the financial services industry.

Another year of the plague behind us, another 365 days of solitude. It’s hardly Marquez, but it certainly feels like life has been chugging along in neutral after so many heady years in first gear. The year was mostly dominated by work, with little in the way of holiday breaks, social activities or other diversions to break up the monotony.

So joining the yearly roundups from 2015 , 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 and 2020 , here’s looking back over the second year of the plague, 2021.

I recently gave my machine a long overdue brain transplant, but stupidly didn’t consider what would happen to my Windows 10 licence after making a major change to the hardware. Of course, upon booting back up I was greeted with the friendly warning that my OS installation had not yet been activated.

While it is possible to reactivate Windows after a hardware change , this relies on you having linked the licence to your Microsoft account, which I hadn’t done beforehand. Various attempts to troubleshoot the problem just had me going around in circles navigating the same help pages from different angles (“have you tried turning it off and on again?”) And as tempting as it sounded to spend another evening elbow-deep in transistors restoring the status quo ante, there’d be no guarantee that my copy would be activated again with the original hardware in place (anyone know if this is the case?)

This year has been anything if not interesting. At the start, a lot of people around me seemed to answering the call for change, with numerous friends choosing to up sticks, start new careers, move houses, or meet new partners.

While little changed for me beyond shifting to working from home, one difference was saying goodbye to a forum I’d been running for nearly two decades. As no one had posted anything in nearly twelve months, and its use had been dwindling for some years already, it seemed the time had come to save some computing cycles and lay the bits to rest.

One of the key ways we know how genes work is to look at what happens when they go wrong. We do this deliberately in experimental animals, precisely or randomly disrupting genes to see what happens. For obvious reasons, we don’t do that in people, but the equivalent is to study the genetics of disease and disorders.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford

A linguistics professor was addressing his class one day, and made the following remark: “In some languages, like in English, a double negative will make a positive. In some other languages, such as Russian, the double negative will remain a negative. Yet there is no language on the planet in which a double positive becomes a negative.”

A voice from the back of the room popped up, “Yeah, right.”