M1: A New Era For The PC -- April 24, 2021

Apple: start here. 

Apple: now this. Archived.

• The 2021 iMac is the fourth M1 Mac, but the first to be built around the chip. I think they’ve been working on it for 3-4 years.
• It ushers in a new era of PC design centered on the ARM instruction set, not Intel’s long-dominant x86.
• Apple is no longer only the Mac company, so this trend will have less effect on them than others.
• But it also highlights a key portion of my long-term Apple bull thesis.

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The Literary Page

Over at the sidebar at the right, I link to a few literary blogs, for example, White Mischief. Near the end of the White Mischief, the author James Fox notes that his collaborator, who had dropped out of the project, Cyril Connor, had come very, very close to solving the murder.

1971: Cyril Connolly had written in his notes -- "The end of the trail." 

It was notes of his interview in 1971 with Juanita Carberry, June's stepdaughter, who was 15 years old at the time of the murder, and very, very close to Broughton, one of the few people who actually listened to Juanita.

"It wasn't quite the end of the trail, as it turned out. But he had come remarkably close to it, and it was only Juanita's evidence that had kept him [Cyril Connollly] a few steps away." -- James Fox, page 279 or a 299-page book.

Based on that little snippet, I decided to buy Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, c. 1938; republished, in 1948, and the newest edition, 2008, is the one I have. It turned out to be a challenging book for me to read. But any book that gets published in 1938 and keeps getting re-printed deserves a look.

Today, I skipped to part three, his autobiography. Chapter XVIII: "The Branching Ogham."

The first time I read the book I skipped over "Ogham." It turns out "Ogham" has an interesting backstory.

From wiki:

Ogham: Modern Irish; Old Irish: ogam is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language (in the "orthodox" inscriptions, 4th to 6th centuries AD), and later the Old Irish language (scholastic ogham, 6th to 9th centuries). 

What amazes me: wiki seems to have an entry on "everything."

There are roughly 400 surviving orthodox inscriptions on stone monuments throughout Ireland and western Britain, the bulk of which are in southern Munster.

The largest number outside Ireland are in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

The vast majority of the inscriptions consist of personal names.

According to the High Medieval Bríatharogam, names of various trees can be ascribed to individual letters.

The etymology of the word ogam or ogham remains unclear. One possible origin is from the Irish og-úaim 'point-seam', referring to the seam made by the point of a sharp weapon.

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The Last Interview