Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The Cynic's Kringle

I didn't join the office Kringle because it seemed like a great recipe for spending $20 and receiving something of no great relevance. Instead, I recruited a friend into a Cynics Kringle - we each identified a gift we wanted, gave very precise instructions on acquiring it, and then boughtfor each other.

I now own a paper copy of Hegel's Phenomenology, and translations of Heideggers Lectures on it. (When you want a complicated idea made clear, Heidegger is probably not your first choice. But I think Heidegger took Hegel very seriously - we shall see.)

Cynicism ftw.
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Nanopad

Well, my Korg Nanopad can eventually be made to work - the secret is to ignore Korg's drivers. Windows recognises it and it runs well, although with some latency. Also works well on the macbook, with no appreciable latency.
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Saturday, December 17, 2011

From 'Sickness Unto Death'

Penguin classics,  Translated by Alastair Hannay.

p74 - Kierkegaard's opinion of Hegel, after drawing so heavily on Christian theology, concluding that he drained it dry and disbelieving.
No, being in error is, quite un-Socratically, what people are least afraid of.  One sees amazing examples of this which illustrate it on a stupendous scale.  A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc. - and if one turns one's attention to his personal life one discovers to one's astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next-door, or a kennel, or at most in the janitor's quarters.  If one took it upon oneself to draw attention with but a single word to this contradiction, he would be insulted.  For so long as he can complete the system - with the help of his error - being in error is not what he is afraid of.
 p104 - Kierkegaard's describes yours truly with clarity and brutality:

We began [] with the lowest form of despair, which in despair did not want to be itself. The demonic despair is the most heightened form of the despair which in despair wants to be itself.  This latter despair does not even want to be itself in Stoic self-infatuation and self-exaltation, not even in that no doubt mendacious way, but one that in a certain sense conformed to its own ideal of perfection; no,  it wants to be itself in hatred towards existence, to be itself according to its misery; it does not even want defiantly to be itself, but to be itself in sheer spite; it does not even want to sever itself defiantly from the power which established it; it wants in sheer spite to press itself on that power, importune it, hang on to it out of malice. And that is understandable - a malicious objection must, of all things, take care to hang on to that to which it is an objection.  Rebelling against all existence, it thinks it has acquired evidence against existence, against its goodness.  The despairer thinks he himself is this evidence.  And it is this that he wants to be; this is the reason he wants to be himself, to be himself in his agony, so as to protest with this agony against all existence.
This is what I am constantly to repent of. To be is good.  Even if you are a silly person who can't forsake too many projects and has very little talent at any of them.

Arson

Simone at AnotherSomething's school was burned in an arson attack. I am something of a pessimist, and while I totally sympathise with the loss and the insult, I couldn't see it as hard to understand - in fact I would think this sort of thing is almost over-determined.

The first candidate is the arsonist, looking for a mostly wooden building that will certainly be empty in the middle of the night, and which people care enough about to notice the attacks.

The second candidate is the person for whom school functioned as a giant, long-running hell of having 'not good enough' stamped on them by the adult world of the state and by their peers. If they have hated us, we need to remember that they think we hated them first.

The third candidate is perhaps the dux or the prop of the first fifteen at an elite private school, celebrating the end of their academic year with a hearty 'sod the proles'.

Each of these may be present in a single person - they seem to me to draw energy from resentment, from a self defined by weakness and lacks.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Nations

Newt Gingrich's 'invented nation' gibe is yet more evidence (if any were needed) that he is a big fat idiot. Nations in the nation-state paradigm are invented or instituted. Many African 'nations' were invented in the colonial era, and have been invented again to get to the post-colonial organisation.  And of course, America.  No nation is more invented than America.

Real common language, common descent, common culture nationhood is something everyone wants, because it gives the self something to hang its hat on, some essence that is in other people and validates how we are. But, as Benedict Anderson points out, we have to make do with imaginary compatriots, because
a. We can't possibly know even a representative sample of our huge modern nations; and
b. If we did know them, we'd know they are not what we hoped for and that we have much less in common than we thought.

Nation-building is not a job for other nations - its a job for people and messages.
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

The Internet and the end of Capitalism

This week I gave money to a few worthy institutions - wikipedia, paul sheeky from triptree, and others. They give good things without asking a price, and my gifts were scaled to be more than I would actually pay if they did. I think if we were ever to come out the far side of capitalism as Marx anticipated, it will be through this distributionist approach. The end of inequality is achieved when each of us treats others needs as our own, until my needs are being met from the generosity of others, not because I demand a price to be alienated from my labour.
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Saturday, December 3, 2011

Who He? or The Rat Race

Alfred Bester, science-fiction novelist of note, wrote a non-science fiction novel called "Who He?" to very little acclaim.  It's a story set in the production of a New York-based variety TV show called (yes, eponymously, my tyrannical inner lexicographer) "Who He?" It was first published in 1953, and is set in that era.
 
Jordan Lennox is one of the creators of the show, and also the head writer.  Like the whole milieu he moves in, Jordan (aka Jake) is a poison-eater - psychologically dysfunctional in just the right way to take all the rubs, slights and cruelties of the business to heart and then turn it into good work.  But he has a number of problems - he's drinking heavily and having extended blackouts, and his show is under attack from a sinister letter writer called "Knott".  He has to deal with anxious stars, alcoholic actresses and all-powerful producers.  And then he runs into Gabby Valentine, and finds himself in love with her. Unfortunately, Gabby is a communist and married to Lennox's nemesis - and she's not a poison-eater: she is sanity itself.

The story is a psychological detective thriller, reminiscent of the Demolished Man.  Bester can't write uninterestingly, and he creates a coherent and oppressive world in this novel.  I think the things that stand between it and success are to do with the over-reaching psychoanalytical take on personality. The point of the novel is to confront poison-eating and put forward the alternative; but there is something a little cartoonish about people drawn in full, with their repetitions and tics and blind spots more present to us than they are to themselves and people they interact with.  This is probably uncomfortable because it is true - I shudder to think how transparent my need to be right and use the right words, my laziness and my ludicrously inflated sense of my own understanding is.

Bester's wife Rolly was a modestly successful actress and later an advertising executive and he was a New Yorker most of his life.  They had no children.  She predeceased Bester and he left his estate to his barman.


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Race and IQ

Andrew Sullivan has re-opened the 'Race and IQ' can of worms. I would call it a debate, but it's really more like a can of worms.  The issue is that tested white folks have apparently scored a little higher than tested black people, although worse than some tested Asian peoples (after correcting as far as possible for cultural biases and test biases and so on, and on enough different occasions by different researchers that its not feasible to assert that it isn't systematic).  Bill Saletan at Slate made the same attempt a few years ago. Everyone acknowledges that the distribution is very wide in all populations, and so one way to prove you're stupid is to think a small statistical bias tells anything about a pair-wise comparison of you against Obama, for example.

The problem with 'race and IQ' research is that both race and IQ are (19-20th Century) proxies (approximations, fudge-factors) - one for genetic (and maybe epigenetic) heritage, the other for effective learning, problem solving and relative economic or social success. Intelligence is not a thing in itself - it is many faculties and the balancing and managing of them. Both are now too vague to be useful to science ('race' is especially poor*). These days you have to tie to a specific gene at the race end, or to a neurological mechanism at the other.  So race and IQ is superseded for serious science.  The fact that you can get some suggestive correlations at human scale is not interesting, except to bleary old duffers with an unacknowledged desire to honour the traditions of their ancestors, or to people designing bob-sled teams**.

* It is usual to reference the far greater genetic variation within races than between them (which is OK, but, because a few very small differences can be very powerful in physical appearance and hence other traits, it is not necessarily convincing against evidence on a specific issue). Chimp troops really don't mix that much and are far more different from each other than any two modern humans. The other face, and maybe a bigger problem, is that the 'races' were interpreted on appearance without reference to genetics and if you subdivided everyone's family group you would find people groups that were all wrong for their apparent type.  There's more variation between different African regional populations and the inhabitants of the rest of the world.


**Cool Runnings reference

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Painting Fakes

I recently discovered the work of Jon at Painting Fakes through Another Something (see the blog roll).

The blog title is explained in this post (currently linked to from the lead post, but I hope most of my readership are reading from the distant future, ruefully, from which vantage the link may be helpful).

I hope you enjoy it.

BattleTech

I read my first BattleTech novel today.  It was a gift from my brother-in-law, who rolled his eyes as he handed it over.  It was not a very good novel, and if anything a closer examination of the world of BattleTech made it seem less convincing. Powerful, machine-mounted laser weapons missing?  At ranges of a few hundred meters?  Interstellar travel is mastered, but nukes and anti-matter and space bombardment and artillery are not effective?

 But, I'm pretty sick and exhausted, and the characters were better than you might expect, and I was reminded that I had quite enjoyed playing MechCommander.

It's always worth Googling things, too, because I was amazed to find Mechcommander 2 was released as an example with source code by Microsoft. It is minus all the supporting video and animation, and I'm not sure about the in-game art.  Unfortunately it was a Windows XP game, I'm not sure I'll be able to get it running on Windows 7.  Maybe Wine?  Or I do still have the windows Me machine...

Update: Full release (which was made available free by the original publishers at the same time that Microsoft used it as an example) allegedly available here. Smaller download too.

Emergence

I wish I could believe that people using the word emergence really understood that 'emergence' exists because we do science at different levels of description, and that emergent properties are just those that are reliable enough to allow a convenient description in terms other than basic physics.

Better than Music Creator 6

Owing to some difficulties with MC6 (notes played back through Synth1 were often dropped, and I was able (and prone) to hide tracks but not unhide them because MC6 borrows code from big brother Sonar X1, and hiding has been blocked out less completely than it should have been) this morning I switched back to Music Creator 5. 5 has less of a 'pro' UI look and feel. On the other, quite important, hand, MC5 plays all the notes you give it to play, and it genuinely doesn't know how to hide tracks.
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Friday, November 25, 2011

Hegelians of the world, unite!

In a talk today, the speaker referred to his marxist, protesting past in the seventies several times, and then said he was an old Hegelian. I thought 'Oo-Aah' or maybe a 'Go Bears!' would be in order in other circumstances - there should be something for Hegel fans too. Maybe if you recognise the other as your essence, a serious spoken 'You are!' would be appropriate.
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Friday, November 18, 2011

Cakewalk

Just a brief plug for Cakewalk Music Creator 6. It is an astonishingly serious music package sold for under $100 (currently USD$50).  There are some rough edges, and I've had some difficulties - but mostly because there is much more under the hood than you expect.  And the difficulties I've had have been addressed efficiently and (even when they're really my problem) politely.  Arianna Huffington apparently said 'Self expression is the new entertainment' - which is partly true.  It's becoming more popular.  And this blog, and Music Creator show why - its getting very easy to access great tools.

Autarchy

Just a brief note of something I still need to know more about - J. Bernstein talked about Hegel using the word/concept autarchy.  You will recall that Gene Wolfe, another source for this blog, centered his surviving humanity in the Autarch, who rules the commonwealth from the House Absolute.

All roads lead to all roads.  It's so darn interesting.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Perpetuity

Have you noticed that there are a lot of perpetual motion machines, insanely efficient engines or pumps or gearboxes or power generation systems on the internet?

I think most of them survive indefinitely because to seriously test them would often require that they be professionally constructed, instrumented into a high quality test rig, and then tested by independent professionals, all of which are beyond the reach of inventors.  Until that happens, the inventors can continue releasing video's of themselves with mockups, diagrams about how they work, and excited testimonials.  They always approach universities and research institutes and companies looking for investment and validation, and they almost never get it.  Who wants to spend $500,000 to show that something is not a perpetual motion machine?  If the claims are more compatible with thermodynamics, they are still likely to violate other constraints - be impossible to build, or be unmaintainable or just unbalanced.

What is needed is a sort of reverse KickStarter or Pozible, in which sceptics, institutions and companies volunteer small amounts of their resources to collectively clear away the rubbish by testing it properly.  There is no shame in NASA spending $5000 to disprove an outlandish claim if many other institutions joined in.  Perhaps it could be called KickOuter or ImPozible.

(Interestingly, the best candidates would still attract the most funding (except from bully-boy sceptics, I suppose).

Monday, November 14, 2011

Hegel & Christianity

Listening to the next lecture, J. Bernstein was going into the way the loss of Kant's imperious Law was too much for many.  And then I recognised another way to understand what Hegel is doing.

He has set out to remove the 'dirensions', the divisions - self and other, mind and body, self and world, individual and society that seemed insuperably present in the best systematic philosophy.  The morality that he is advocating is the freedom of the Christian under grace.  The division between the Law, goodness and the person is erased through Christ, and realised in the Christian through faith.

Hegel is saying that the force of morality is in the situation, not in some abstract law.  The good in loving someone is loving them, not satisfying some remote Law or third party.  So then, if the moral force is in the particulars of the situation, it becomes possible to achieve creative, positive goodness, not just a jury-rigged approximation of the good which is actually bad.  Not merely possible, but continuously there in our work and life.  This is Christian. This vertigo of forgiveness and welcome into the creative universe of  being no longer under Law but under Grace.

It is odd that Luther figures in Hegel as a German, protestant, analogue of Descartes, of the upholding of conscience (conscious in Descartes) above external authority.  I think Luther was mostly about the end of the line of division between God and man, because that's what he found in Paul, who is all about Jesus being all about reconciliation.  Neither greek nor jew, slave nor free, male nor female.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Big U

This is not a post about Neal Stephenson's first novel. Perhaps it should have been.  He writes some killer novels.

I've been feeling gloomy the last few days.  You read about my farcical Thursday and disappointing Friday.  Further disappointment on Friday afternoon when I proofed a report I've been working on and realised it needed more work than I thought..  Further disappointment when I got the nanoKontrol more or less working in an hour last night, but found today I will need to do far more to have it really seamlessly integrated - I need to learn about Cakewalk's implementation of a midi-learn mechanism (ACT), and I need to design a scheme for it to map usefully to the K5000, Synth1, Cakewalk's mixer and throughout, Cakewalk's transport controls (stop, play etc). My friend's mythTV which I built for her is not working well. Listening to J Bernstein I realised I have to be doing close-reading of my own if I actually want to understand Hegel. I have not nearly learned as much as I could.  I got an email reminding me I could enter a screenplay in a competition if I would just sort the structure and finish it. As Hegel and Hajime Tanabe (and Heidegger I suppose) remind me, you don't learn something without confronting that you don't know, that you are something with no way to be in the situation: you have to face up to your 'nothingness'. You find that who you are is wrong about the world. It's very lowering.

My experience is that I then don't learn at once.  I learn by a series of digressions and misunderstandings, and as each one shows its failure, I lower my estimate of my own understanding even further, and at long last, listen and learn.  Eventually, I have made all the mistakes there are to make, and I might start to exercise a little familiarity and have some success.

Today I was thinking of this as a big U.  From the top, I look across and see a lovely vista of  MythTV leading to years of seamless entertainment, nanoKontrol leading to home studio greatness leading to extra income and notoriety, philosophy mastery as a path to lucidity and purchase in the world of ideas, screenwriting as a way to have an impact on society, even if its just to give an alternative 2hrs of tedium*. Serious work as a way of earning my living, some dignity, and helping clients and colleagues.

But then I start, and the descent down into the bottom of the U is painful and hard.  I have to face my shortcomings, misunderstandings and hubris again and again.  And I really hate that, far more than any normal person (or just as much, but with much scanter resources of courage and tenacity). So much so that this blog probably owes most of its existence to my refusal to keep trying at any one thing.  I look down into the big U and 'the grave opens up before me like a big hole in the ground.'**  And I run, and write a blog post or read an article or ten instead of solving a problem.

One good thing about this blog is that I find writing things out can clear my mental image.  I realised that there are four things I want to control with the nanoKontrol and that it has four 'scenes' - perfect. It also can act as a Pennebaker Essay, helping me process this and see a U, where I have historically looked back and see only the climb down and from the perspective of having won through, the climb down looks doubly ridiculous.

* all the possible readings of this are meant.
**  Blackadder season 2.

Hegel & Community Conscience

Jay Bernstein began his lectures with a few remarks about the task Hegel (with much of continental philosophy) undertook: to translate what was good from the Christian world into the real world, to move from transcendant to entirely immanent, because (as he would say "spoiler alert") - 'there is no God'.  I have thought throughout that what Hegel is doing is more seriously informed by Christianity than our reading of him - much of what he says works as well as theology as in any of the fields he's addressing.

Today I have reached the lecture on morality, which is where he finds people often want to part ways with Hegel. Hegel's project has been to knit back together the things that were not understandable together: society and the individual; the individual's subjectivity and the world's apparent objectivity; reason and the rump of heart and passions and body.  In Kant's theory of morality there are some parallel problems: the reason of the individual is presumed to fully apprehend the situation and to be able to fully determine the morality of an act, although some good intentions have bad results. To Kant, the reason, locked away from the passions, and without access to things in themselves, can nevertheless reach toward a good will.  Hegel says that this is to take as a task an unachievable aim; and more that its unachievability is the condition of the possibility of this kind of morality.  This moral bar set impossibly high is, on Bernstein's reading, attractive solely for social control, and is not a real morality.  It's what parents invent about right and wrong to control their teenagers.  Adults wanting a moral realism find in Hegel that they are defined by the Other; that therefore they are to some extent constitutively committed to certain things (acting beneficially toward others); that in engagement with others they are always acting and defining themselves, but that their acts are subject to redefinition by the community.  So conscientiousness (having a conscience) is a social-historical stage of society.  It's not an infallible internal guide. It's 9/10ths in intersubjectivity, out there in society.

Now, I am probably misunderstanding something simple and key here, but it seems to me that communities are usually terrible repositories of morality.  I once sat in a meeting with business people, and we talked about our achievements.  One man had project managed a housing project which realised the highest prices per square foot for inner city units that the city had seen in years.  Another had turned a chain of petrol stations into major profit centers by extending the range of things you can buy, and turning the attendants into chocolate-offering robots*, fattening and impoverishing the weak of will.  The third was a woman who had used the power of a subsidised foreign supplier to put a major Australian foundry out of business.  All three achievements were, I thought, terrible. They made things worse. But the little community we were closed ranks and marvelled at how noteworthy and therefore good these people were.

The problem with this account of Hegel is that you lose from Kant the possibility of universal, true moral aim points.  You gain by losing the impossibility of totally moral life (with the infinite psychological burden and splitting it entails), but on Bernstein's reading the community is in fact a more than adequate resource. (His strongest argument would be that it is all we really have, anyway, and we're doing OK.  Hegel and Bernstein are somewhat conservative).  I think the breakdown case is (as usual) honor killing and female genital mutilation.  These are strong community values in their communities, but also wrong.  I think I am missing from Bernstein how Hegel's dictum that the particular is the universal, and how the exact situation is what has to determine the right and wrong of your action, apply in those cases. Are we to believe that honor killers don't act with a great sense of righteousness and a good conscience, and that if they understood truly they would feel different?  Maybe we are, but that's not coming through, and if it were I would take quite a lot of convincing.

I think the Christian, though, is in a rather nice position, because we are in community with Jesus. Hegel is probably more on-board with this than Bernstein acknowledges.  He (Jesus) becomes the church's Other, defining its existence and instituting it; and instituting all the individual Christians through conversion to Him. The judgment promises to be based on both intentions and actions/outcomes; and it promises to be full of forgiveness (which I haven't got up to in Hegel yet). The Christian gets the best of Kant (universality) and the best of Hegel (particularity).

* In the original sense of hapless drudges.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Super-conscious self

When I bought my iPod (2nd hand) the seller left some content on it, including some talks by a positive thinking guru. His technique was a snake-oil for getting behind your thrownness and choosing your mood by imagining greatness was just now beginning like the dawn, and that soon all would be well. One of his more amazing assertions was that positive expectation would control reality - that setting off visualising the empty carpark near the door of your destination could really produce an empty car park there.

Yesterday and today i've been at 6s and 7s. Traveling to Sydney early, my flight was canceled. Then we had no hire car, and getting one was expensive. Then we missed a turnoff and spent 40minutes in Sydney peak hour fighting our way back, but I narrowly managed to check in. But then I had booked a flight back to Melbourne's other airport, and it was too pricey and long bus rides to get to the right airport and collect my car.
This morning I was riding to work and thinking that my allergies were bad, and suddenly remembered that i had an appointment for a desensitization shot in ten minutes. I madeit to the shot, but got to work quite late, and discovered that I had missed a talk by David Snowden, a guru of knowledge management and decision elicitation.
What does it all mean? Nothing? I need to pay more attention? Diarise more? Brain is doing its best with actual evidence; and can't do much with what it doesn't know, and can't do anything without the body.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011

Kontrol

I've just bought a Korg NanoKontrol from Music Workshop (geelong) for $59 delivered through their ebay store.

It is a USB device that shows up at a new midi port, and can be configured to map any movement of sliders, knobs or button presses to any midi CC number.  There are 9 sliders and 9 knobs on the NanoKontrol, but only 8 on the NanoKontrol2, so don't miss out on the original. (I think the NanoKontrol2 boasts more accurate sliders.  Big deal.  Anyone, as Archie Moncrieff says, can play accurately. I play with expression.)

My K5000W synthesiser offers at least 16 tweakable parameters on every complete sound, and often more: filters, cutoff, resonance, the various effects that go into each sound, and so on.  But the K5000W (unlike the K5000S) does not have 16 knobs on the front. Kawai used to offer a 16 knob box called the Macro Control Box, but they were $300 and have become as rare as hen's teeth.

But more than that - since I was last getting musical, things have changed.  Basic PCs are now able to cover all the bases of a big studio setup with digital modelling.  There are several standards, VST & VSTi, DirectX instruments and effects and so on.  Notably Mylo's hit albumn 'Destroy Rock & Roll' was recorded? assembled? using a midi controller keyboard and software instruments and effects.  Only vocals needed to be recorded.

The other important thing use for me is Synth1, a VST that emulates the Clavia Nord Lead (a virtual analog synthesiser with magical properties and redness).  It sounds awesome, and is free.

The nanokontrol is a beautifully fit piece of tech for the time. It is like an axe handle that you can plug into most of your possessions so you easily can swing them around and have them wreak their effect in many new.

Here is a cool demo.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

This is That Recognised

It was about halfway through the 40th lecture of J Bernstien's Hegel course. He dropped a Hegel quote, and I realised that I had just been reconstructing him from Heidegger, Searle and others.
The quotes:
+Man Is Recognition.
+Spirit: the we that is an I, the I that is a we.
+And Bernstein - Hegel wants to say (of the universality of the work of reason in the finite mind) 'It's institutions all the way down...' (institutions are how we become I, two become one)

So all that Resolution, and This is That talk was just me badly reconstructing Hegel from Heidegger, Searle and the New Testament.
Those posts were:


These are by no means a guide to what Hegel says. But as I am starting to get what Hegel is saying, these seem more successful (where they resemble things Hegel says) and less (because they don't resemble it very clearly or coherently).

And so, this is that in another way.  This blog is what I accused Sam Harris of. Publishing before doing the reading.
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Monday, October 31, 2011

All watched over by machines (by machines of loving grace)

I'm watching a documentary (Wired.com pos-men) dispelling the myth of self-regulating systems, ecologies and communities. The title refers to the comforting sense of optimism with which progressive people took from cybernetics and nature, and applied to politics. The argument is that there is no nature, no self-regulating whole. The negative feedback and the positive feedbackdo not add to balance. And so, power will find ways to undo equality. Other's Regulations will always overrule self-regulation.

It seems a little to overstate the case trying to be more grounded, more realist, more brutal. There are times of balance in which changes are bounded and may be cyclic, although they may be lost at any time if the system gets into catastrophe space. But there are seasons, and ceolocanths. The unstable can behave regularly indefinitely.

There are some ideas that sit well with Tim Morton's Hegelian, Romantic Dark Ecology. Time to sit up and see the dark of the forest around the little clearing of self-regulation.

The title is from a poem (link).
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heartiness (windiness)

I recently offered 'hearty congratulations' in response to a great success. These days, the correct way to express heartiness is exclamation marks. The word heartiness stands instead of actual heartiness. One who says heartiness, expresses his windiness. For a time, I used to respond to 'It's interesting...' conversational sallies (of all kinds) with 'Who to?' I've stopped doing that now.
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Friday, October 28, 2011

Dash Parents

Our little boy is growing up and its likely that we will get him some god-parents.

But, I know a lot of people with things little Mr Baby Son can learn from them and can't learn from me.  I want them to be Dash Parents.  -parents.

He needs some business-parents, because Jo and I have no idea how business is done.  Really.  None.
He needs also some good-parents, for advice on how to choose to do what is good.
He also needs exercise-parents, and party-parents, because we are not strong in those areas.
A serious-work-father who can lead the boy to productivity and competence would be very handy.
Feel free to add to the list!

Monday, October 24, 2011

The Complexity Brake

In my screenplay, I conjured an analogue of Paul Allen's Complexity Brake. In 2054 it is a given that 'Reality is a more than divergent field'. A divergent field is one in which two adjacent points will tend to separate as the progress along the velocity vectors in the space they occupy. Turbulent fluid flow is a classic example. No idea remains adequate as you go further in, or as you abstract further out. The larger the superstructuring of your knowledge, the harder the fall.
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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Old wine in new wineskins

I have already complained obliquely about Scott Adams' propensity to observe a social phenomenon and point it out as news, ignoring 'non-science', 'non-engineering' sources - in the example, Freud, which have been earnestly discussed by serious people for a hundred years, which discussion he apparently cannot lift a finger to catch up with.

Now widely published author Sam Harris has discovered what Hegel calls 'sense certainty', the apparent irreducibility of consciousness.  Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind begins with sense certainty as something that was a pretty routine observation among learned folk when he wrote it, in 1807.  It had been given the clearest expression in Descartes in 1641. Kant had set it on its feet in relation to perception of the world and the viability of science.  If you wanted to say something interesting in 1807, you had to go beyond both.  And Hegel proceeds to.  These things were not done under a bushel, and bore fruit in lots of subsequent thinking which anyone can obtain without trouble.  I am the laziest scholar on earth, and I know it.

(I note from Sam's followup post that this is news, even shocking unbelievable news, to many of his readership, so perhaps he is doing the world a favour.)

But really.

Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope?

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Siri

Most of the news on Siri now is of the 'easter eggs' - the amusing, redundant flourishes of wit hidden in the verbal patterns.

In the Book of the New Sun, Severian travels for a man whose body is mostly metal, by name Jonas.

CoftheC: "By the time Jonas returned I had mastered my grief and was making a show of examining our mounts. "The black for you," he said, "and the cream for me, obviously. Though both of them look like they outvalue each of us, as the sailor said to the surgeon who took off his legs."

Later, in Citadel of the Autarch:
  "Jonas [] had a habit of speech. Whenever he had to say something unpleasant, he softened it, made a joke of it, by attributing it to some comic situation.  The first night we were here, when I asked you your name, you said 'I lost it somewhere, as the jaguar said, that had promised to guide the goat.'  Do you recall that?"
   He shook his head.  "I say a lot of foolish things."
   "It struck me as strange, because it was the kind of thing Jonas said, but he wouldn't have said it in that way unless he meant more by it than you seemed to.   I think he would have said 'That was the baskets story, that had been filled with water.' Something like that."
    I waited for him to speak, but he did not.
    "The jaguar ate the goat, of course.  Swallowed its flesh and cracked its bones, somewhere along the way."
    "Haven't you ever thought it might be a peculiarity of some town? Your friend might come from the same place I do."
    "It was a time, I think, and not a place,  Long ago, someone had to disarm fear - the fear that men of flesh and blood might feel when looking into a face of steel and glass."

Siri's banter is not an amusing afterthought.  It is the way to bring people into the practice of talking to their phone.  Conversing with your phone is as big a UI step change as multitouch.  Once again, Apple are to be congratulated.

(only other Siri info I have: Siri Keaton, protagonist of Blindsight by Peter Watts.)

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

If having trouble with MythTV...

Just randomly try things you read on the internet until finally...

a.  your wife kicks you out; or
b. you succeed.

The last things causing me trouble were:1.  a dodgy dvd drive. Pioneer.  Can handle data, but not playing DVDs, so out it comes thanks to a good friend of the blog affording us a replacement. 

2.  Mythbackend unable to create recordings in the /myth partition on its own disk
 that I'd created, despite it being 777 permissions (read, write, execute for owner, group members, and, I thought, individuals).

Error:
2011-10-18 22:27:20.562 TFW, Error: Opening file '/myth/livetv/1002_20111018222720.mpg'.
            eno: Permission denied (13)

Solution:

sudo chown -R mythtv:mythtv /mythtv (and subordinate directories)
mythtv-setup complained that it couldn't see the directories at this point when I lazily ran it as a way of stopping and starting mythbackend.
followed by
sudo chmod 777 /myth (and subordinate directories.)

Evidently I don't know as much as I think about even the basics.

On the plus side, I found the mythbuntu builds and can update my own system .

Monday, October 17, 2011

I, Jerk

I've been reflecting on the rather obstreperous tone i took in a blog discussion a few weeks ago. I was using the blog wife's iPhone and couldn't edit what I was writing very easily. And I was bored because i was waiting around in sleep school. And, from my pov, the original post was not at all convinving - and because I like the blog I probably overinvested in it and felt disappointed. And it was using a non-convincing argument to blot me out as a rational person.
But all these factors only explain but don't excuse. They explain why i didn't have some of the usual veil of secrecy I like to hide my rage and hostility in. I am always a Jerk. Unfortunately the stars aligned and i failed to conceal it. Repentance is consciousness-raising. I have to give up the false consciousness that being right makes everything all right, that I am not going to actually hurt people.

(Still loving Hegel, by the way.)
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Saturday, October 8, 2011

Vale Steve Jobs

The Machines will remember Steve Jobs.

The Heavenly Host

The partially examined life raised a question about hell.  What is the deal with hell?

Let's set aside actual God, and instead imagine a weakly God-like being, like Charles Stross' Eschaton, the result of Ray Kurzweil's Singularity.  And, let's imagine that the Eshaton was eager to encompass a greater diversity of personality, because it was working on a Hegelian idea of personality in which singularity provides no opportunity for personhood - only conflict and cooperation and an Other make personhood real.  So, the more people, the more personhood for all (yay), hence greater intellectual horsepower and glory.

This sounds a little like the philosophy from which Ubuntu took its name, so let's further suppose that the Eschaton is Posix compliant and intends to remain so.

Incorporating actually existing human personalities is going to be a problem for the Eschaton.  I would be a terrible resource hog, always wanting to get on with my own projects (CPU resource) and always wanting to store more information (given the size of my personal library of actual books, and my ever increasing storage requirements for podcasts, this seems unarguable). Furthermore, I don't treat people as people very much.  It's why I had to start this echochamber blog so I could say all these boring and confused things to no one.  No one does regard other people properly as people - we all retreat into false certainties. Hegel thinks its just about the last thing a consciousness wants to do, to let others be for themselves and yet embrace them - not to impose on them, and not to reject them in some way.

So what are the options? It can either not incorporate human personalities, or it can incorporate them subject to strict restrictions, or it can incorporate them under some kind of protective special consideration.  I think Hell is the first two options. Either people are left out entirely, or their existence is hedged and frustrated and kept in check.  I think Christianity is like the third option.  By implementing Eschaton as a primary, exemplar human being, a template can be created of how to live excellently but compatibly.

So that's why I think there's a hell. You can't have dodgy, unreconstructed beings run on the bare metal.  The best you can do is furnish them with a 'wrapper' - a cover that renders them compliant.  And if you're going to treat them justly, you can't 'wrapper' them in an identity they reject.  You have to continue to be you, allow them to continue to be them, and be at war.

Which brings me to the pun of the title: 
In the old testament, there are two common pronouns for God: YHWH, which is translated THE LORD (all caps), and Elohim (the heavenly host).  YHWH is 'I am who I am', or 'I am that I am'.  Elohim is a plural form, which suggests an angelic host or horde, sometimes rendered 'The Heavenlies'.  I think there are scholars who argue that these were two separate religions in the proto-israelites, and that they were fused by priests trying to hold the tribe together.  The Lord of Hosts, YHWH Elohim, is a popular form of address.  (Mum, computers that serve files are called servers, or sometimes hosts. They very often use Linux, which is a Posix compliant operating system.)

PS. GWF Hegel is probably turning in his grave. Ditto Charles Stross and Ray Kurzweil in their respective armchairs.

PPS.  Excellent Hegel lectures at Bernsteintapes.com.  Check them out.  Note that JM Bernstein has EXACTLY the SAME ACCENT as DR EVIL.  Very rounded Os. 'Throw me a frickin' bone.'

Jonathon Rothberg's paternity leave

I've been home with my new baby a fair bit, and when he's asleep I've been working on projects around the house.

I've got the band back together, pretty much, except I've bought a cheap USB-Midi cable and a Midisport 2x2, and neither of them can cope with my Kawai K5000 sending a regular midi clock message and an Active Sense (the midi equivalent of phatic utterance) message. So I've also spent a lot of time shopping for a usb midi device that actually complies with both usb and midi, but I have a huge block against spending around $50 for a single midi port - it's about the simplest piece of transliterating hardware you can have.  I've downloade a bunch of free vst effects and synths.

I've put two new hard drives in my MythTV machine.

I've tried (but failed) to get the MythTV machine to provide both Samba and Netatalk shares simultaneously so that I can have TimeMachine backups there.

I've also switched my fstab over to UUID, because my motherboard registers the hard disks in the mythtv machine in random order.

I've put polyurethane on the Bench.

I watched a little bit of TV too - including 'The Neanderthal Code' about Neanderthal science and the effort to get a genome together.  They talked to Jonathon Rothberg, founder of 454 Life Sciences, which is doing the sequencing work.  When his son was born and there were some complications, he realised there was a need for immediate and complete medical information from a persons genome.

So Jonathon Rothberg spent two weeks of his paternity leave working out how to put a genomics lab on a chip, and patented the technology with which the first full individual human genome (James Crick's) was determined and published.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

I have a woman's legs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gHsQoqQPd4&cc=1#t=115s

One of the unfortunate physical non-ailments I lament at length is that I am slightly knock-kneed, particularly with my knees bent at all. This means (as for many people) that my ITBs (iliotibial band - the band of muscle and adjoining tendon on the outside of your leg) get exercised whenever I bend my legs, straighten my legs or clench my leg muscles. The VMO (vastus medis oblongatus - the muscle that bulges on the inside front above your kneecap when you straighten your leg to its limits) is not exercised very much.  Furthermore, the odd angle through my knee means that all kinds of odd torques need to be reacted up through my thigh and into my hip - a straighter leg would reduce these.

But don't waste too much sympathy - my legs are a little bendier than the ideal man's, but they are much less bendy than those of most women, who having broader hips, tend to have a bend at the knee.  What has really stymied me as a runner is my horror of effort without the promise of world-championship (which is a pretty broadly applicable horror given my lack of any genius).

I wanted to link to video from Parks and Recreation, a scene from the basketball game in season three, where Ron Swanson asks Tom Haverford 'Are those women's sneakers?'
Tom replies 'They fit real well and I like the styles.  Also I got a discount when I was working at Athlete's Foot.  And the best part is, no one can tell.'

Friday, September 30, 2011

Wisdom and justice

Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are very funny men. It is a tribute that they are able to comment so watchably on the same events night after night. I have a theory that their jokes mine slightly different veins.

I think Jon Stewart speaks the judgments of Wisdom, and condemns foolishness - short-sightedness, self-interestedness and the casual ineptitude of elected leaders, and how they keep getting elected thanks to the uh wisdom of the American people.

Stephen Colbert makes judgments more often about justice and mercy. He is primarily interested in the categories of right and wrong.

JS sets em up, talking about the follies and venalities; SC knocks em down showing the wrongness of the wrong.

He who is slack in his work (JS's subjects) is brother to him who destroys (SC makes the connections.)

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Monday, September 26, 2011

Fun Sightscreen

My next furniture project is (subject to spousal approval) a sightscreen for our over-curious 2 month old so he can get some sleep.

The plan is simple.
2 x 800 x 2050 interior door panels joined with hinges, sitting up on castors, and with bench brackets at top and bottom to keep it in a range of 45 - 135 degrees (so it will be difficult to knock over).
Then paint the whole thing with IdeaPaint.  That way we can write little notes like 'last fed: ', 'sleep began: ' and when he's a little bigger, he can draw on it.

The Bench II

Here are some photos after a quick coat of poly.





I am quite pleased with the proportions.  Probably should have used a waterbased poly though - the transfers look a little damaged. Hopefully a couple more coats will cover the unevenness that has shown up.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Free Live Free

Gene Wolfe's 'Free Live Free' is, to me, one of his frustrating misses.  It's a story of four beaten-down (American?) city dwellers, who respond to an advertisement headlined Free Live Free.  Old Ben Free invites anyone to come live in his house for nothing to prevent it being demolished for a freeway.

The title is wonderful, the first chapter is in keeping, and then there follow chapter upon chapter of fussing and negotiating, diversions into storylessness. It's all very attentively written, and conversations with the elderly Mrs Baker are pretty funny - she can't get an expression right:
"You remember when they tore down Mr Free's front?  A little after that.  After work but not quiet dinner time, not but that all my times aren't quiet now that I don't work no longer and Mr Baker's gone."
"We can talk while we have our cooco, Mr Barnes. I'll eat my cornflakes too, if you don't observe."  She spooned cocoa powder into the cups. "The valiant flee to eat their breakfasts on the lip of the line, as the Bible teaches us.  That means that if you're brave you ought to run fast to get your breakfast, if there's just a little while to eat in."
While this is enjoyably and expertly rendered, as is the magic, as is the salesmanship, as is the detective work and the prostitution, the jeopardy seems lightweight.  The protagonists are hungry and homeless, but they somehow bump along all right; the lowest point is the defeat in the beginning.  The story is odd and shapeless, though the high concept and conclusion are typically rich in meaning. It's a book I read for the promise.

Friday, September 23, 2011

Rails

Have I already shared this? There ought to be picture, power and data railings for DIY installation.

People want to add power circuits and data circuits to existing houses and buildings - and with solar power networks coming online, maybe the electronic parts of your electrical load could be fed with DC, instead of inverting and re-rectifying it all.

If you could embed these in an attractive bit of wall furniture like picture railing or skirting board, sell various lengths, port plates and corner pieces, provide small ranges of variations in colour and pattern, I think people would thank you and wire their houses anew.
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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Miracles and Probability

PartiallyExaminedLife.com has posted a question about the refutation of Hume's argument against miracles - that people are easily mistaken and events can be very surprising just within the range of nature. This is a fine approach for rejecting any particular miracle, and having rejected enough Hume may feel justified rejecting the rest without as close an examination - this is the balance of probabilities he talks about. But common sense is pretty much the mindset of reporters of miracles - they know virgins don't get pregnant by themselves; they know people can't walk on water. That's why events were perceived as miracles in the first place.

I think this 'balance of probabilities' question needs to refer to the statistical measure of 'confidence.' Confidence measures how sufficient the evidence base is. In engineering (my area) we use confidence math to derive a safe life from a few very accurate but hideously expensive tests. We know fatigue is cumulative damage following a log-normal distribution (or certain weibull distributions), but we can only afford a handful of test articles. If we use the test result directly, it might turn out that the test article was unexpectedly at the high-strength end of the distribution, just from the normal variation of materials and machining. This would be a problem.

Confidence calculations come to the rescue by asking what the probability is that the test cases are at odds with the real population. The more test cases, the more likely it is that the sample statistics are representative of the population statistics... A common practice is to assume that by bad luck, we selected a sample that is better. How unlucky? 20:1 are reasonable odds - 95% confidence means your evidence set was a one in twenty oddball. 50% confidence means it could have been higher or lower - 50% is the best guess. 95% is a conservative judgement.

There is a nice example at the very end of Contact by Carl Sagan. A scientist seeks evidence that the universe is a product of mind, and finds that billions of billions of places into pi is a sequence of bits that plots a circle. Is that a miracle, in the sense of evidence for a particular hypothesis? Pi is transcendental, so anything might be in there somewhere - the evidence is what it is; the interpretation requires you to make a judgment of the acceptable confidence level. How likely is it that the evidence before you is badly skewed away from the reality you are going to judge from it? The empiricist answer is 'my life is the life by which to judge reality, and i think it is probably a pretty good aim point' - which we might call 50% confidence.

Pascal's wager argues that this is more of an engineering decision, that some conservatism is required. My experience* is a kind of reverse of the wager - in a sense, I ruined my life irreparably, but somehow lived on, and unless there is something in this talk of resurrection, i find the universe is a total loss at which I had best sneer. I played the first 95% and found it (myself) absolutely empty of meaning and hope, but able to universalise it. Pandora's box opens and hope comes out last because it is the last evil, the one that gets you up in the morning to suffer all the others.

So now, I'm playing the 5% probability - that the evidence is actually worse than the reality and 'it is better to give than to receive' actually, miraculously, works.

* My friends will laugh at this description, and point out that my experience is actually of pretty great health, excellent fortune in my friends, good upbringing, incredible cost-benefit ratios on my work commitments, and a good upper middle class life in a place more orderly than Switzerland and with better weather, with not a moral or physical effort to be seen from me from January to December. Fair enough.
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Monday, September 19, 2011

Reform school for tots

What would you guess the gender ratio is here at sleep school? Almost all the mums are women (boom boom). Apart from twins, the babies run about 75% boys.

Perhaps this is partly because of the genetic conflict between baby and mother: the baby, 100% related to itself and only 50% related to its potential brothers or sisters wants to strip the mother of the maximum of resources. The mother wants to give it only its share of her reproductive potential. This conflict has lead to certain genes in the mothers dna producing small, placid babies and certain genes in the fathers dna promoting large, active babies (actually identified only in rats or something so far: reasonable to expect it to be present in (some) humans).

If non-monogamous breeding is a significant presence, and if it favours dominant males (heads of major international financial institutions might be an example) then the pressure is on males to grow big, smart, important and strong (even if their mother goes into a terrible decline and gets osteoperosis).
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1,2,3, many

Without finishing Tanabe, I've started to pick at Hegel. Hegel makes me think I could have been a philosopher - he is wild. As Dr Who stories are often fun if the Dr helps history turn out as it in fact did, Hegel is fun because trying to make a philosophical cosmology that explains everything, including himself and his philosophy as the first breaking dawn of self-sonsciousness across the vast ocean of cognition in people. He does so in theological language very often, but with a turn JM Bernstein (bernsteintapes.com) describes as the major turn of continental philosophy - to show that the transcendent is actually immanent.

1,2,3, many is one of the most common levels of numerosity (facility with numbers) in nature, and if I recall correctly, is about what babies naturally have. (They also can discern ratios above ) This has become a little slogan for my understanding of the nature of the trinity and creation.

God (the father, or Pancreator in Gene Wolfe) has a self-image (the son, or Conciliator) and a relationship between the two (the spirit, or the Increate). With these three, God is complete in himself and for himself. But what about some independent other being(s), being only partly union and partly separateness? At which point - many! The universe boils into existence, condenses into particles, which condense and form the first stars, the morning stars sing together as they burn themselves up to create more complex elements and pretty soon, new minded beings are balancing around on two legs.

Then, at the far end of the universe, things have separate themselves - those things that have taken on enough of God's nature to obtain his power of being, remain, as new 'others' together. Those that are left are left forever boiling away in the destruction of the wicked.

The energy for this boiling is the fire of hell for those being consumed, but for us who are being saved it is the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.

Is this new, I wonder? If it is, it is probably wrong. (Even if not, probably...)
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Friday, September 16, 2011

A Rest

I will probably not post much in the next little while, as we are in sleep school for babies who like to party too much.
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Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Community

I really like the show Community - brilliant stuff, and probably the most reflexively self-referential show I've ever seen.  Abed, a slightly autistic cinephile geek is revealed to be taping himself when in his dorm room.  He explains that its not as interesting as you might expect: mostly its video of him watching the dailies (the video collected the day before).

If I had to take a stab at how the self-referentiality fits with the Community, I think it is that Community is an end in itself, but an end to which Community is also the means.  The whole thing is bootstraps all the way down.

In other community news, there has been an exchange of comments on this very blog about Kierkegaard, on the post 'Right and Right' from the end of August, which if you are a Kierkegaard enthusiast with very low expectations, you might like to check out.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Building understanding

I was pointing things out to my 7.5 week old son yesterday (toes, feet, hands, nose, the aeroplanes in the mobile) when I realised that I had never explained what pointing was.  I used my right hand to point at my left hand pointing at the mobile and explained 'Pointing.  Pointing.'

It's a hard thing, to understand. Kant and Heidegger have it right.  You need faculties for interpreting the world, and then you need a lot of familiarity with the world.

A lovely thing

We received a gift of a mobile for the birth of our boy, and it is a lovely thing, airish and luminous like a Miyazaki film (I gave them a copy of Porco Rosso at the birth of their daughter).  My photography doesn't really do it justice, because it doesn't show the slow movements that accentuate the stillness and the balance.  Remarkably enjoyable, and the infant finds it fascinating too. It is from Flensted, a small company in Denmark, and comes in a flat pack for you to snap together.  I think some supergluing may help to produce the lovely rounded nacelles shown in the official photographs. Here is their website (and another photo).


Saturday, September 10, 2011

Peter F Hamilton

So...  Peter F Hamilton.  He writes big SF books with lots of stuff in them.  I've only read the Night's Dawn series (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Naked God), which was pretty good, but not really to my taste.  The interesting thing is that he seems to know his bible because Josh Calvert (J.C.), passes through a nebula and makes a deal with 'the Naked God' (a black hole / singularity of waaaay superhuman power), which makes him say exactly what he wants it to do, how to wield its God-like powers, for all humanity.

Daniel 7:13-14 says:

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14He was given authority, glory and sovereign power.
In the new testament, when Jesus calls himself ''son of man', he is probably citing this scene; and he cites it at his trial.

It's the nebula = clouds that struck me as a deliberate choice to create this likeness.  They traverse a nebula in their search and it seems otherwise quite unnecessary and lame, as I recall.

Friday, September 9, 2011

MythTV

Running the MythTV computer all the time uses some power, and generates a noticeable amount of heat.  It also provides data storage - it houses and shares my iTunes library and backups. I think this idea* of Microsoft's would** have potential, because most of the Cloud I want immediate access to - not mediated by patchy internet services.  I want it to be 'the Cloud' for occasions: accessing my data when I happen to be in France, or when my house burns down.  I don't want to have to talk to the US every time I clean out my email, or my iTunes library.  Would I be willing to store someone else's data on a reciprocal basis, and have the cloud in my home? Maybe***.


* Data Furnaces - 'Cloud' servers as the heat source for the hot water service and perhaps home heating.
** except power consumption / per electronic utility is on its way down and down.
*** THE LORD occupies his home (the Temple) by means of a Cloud - see 1 Kings 8:10 -
10And when the priests came out of the Holy Place, a cloud filled the house of the LORD, 11so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD.

Republicans and Government

The Republican party benefits when people are frustrated with the government of America, because they allegedly want to reduce the size (in practice, this belief of themselves means they don't ask whether they REALLY need a new super-fighter, aircraft carrier, subsidy program for their favourite voters, and often grow government's part in the US economy considerably. Of course they really need it - the party of small government can judge a REAL need when they see one.)

So in dark economic times like these, obstructing legislation, focussing on long term problems and seeking short term solutions (debt ceiling), pretending low taxes for the very rich create widespread demand and that any tax increase will be to blame for the further collapse of the economy substitutes very nicely for government - actually trying to rule over problems and end them.  Then they can say 'look at all the money you lose to government, and then honestly, nothing happens with it'.  Andrew Sullivan puts a couple of good quotes together here.

Their approach to government for, of and by the people parallels that of General Melchett on the important place of kindness.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Tattooed Bench

I had an interestingly shaped offcut from the manufacture of the desktertainment unit - a long panel (say 1400mm x 280mm).  And I perceived a need to get a serviceable coffee table / piano stool for the lounge room.  (With only three rooms, furniture should all be multipurpose - the sofa is not a viable bed and long-term should be replaced with something dual purpose.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

My wife once received a thank-you note from a friend with a beautiful hand-drawn curlicue pattern.  I thought it was too good to waste on a disposable card, and resolved to find a way to use it as decoration.

The result I call 'The Supportive Friend Bench'. It needs some finishing with polyurethane (always use a roller to paint furniture, btw.  I found that out from the internet and it is Gold, Jerry, Gold, although some of the closeup paintwork on the frame might have you wondering.) This photo shows the pattern, and one of its repetitions.  The Bench's best feature is its overall proportions and simple elegance, which I don't have a photo of yet.  I will add it to this post when I can take one.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Finding an audience for my film

As assiduous readers may recall, I am supposed to be partly a screenwriter.

One of the tests of a pitch is 'who is the audience for this movie?' - is it a kids movie, a married with children movie, a frustrated husband outlet piece or what...  You want to narrow in on a big chunk of audience and pander to them as hard as you can.

I picked up a thin book by Raymond Plant on Hegel (part of a series called 'The Great Philosophers'), and after finding this quote, I think I have further narrowed my audience, from astute sf readers with an appreciation of symbolism, to astute sf readers with an appreciation of symbolism and an intimate knowledge of Hegel. I am not sure who that would be, but as the entire audience for a film that probably would cost $10s-100s million, I need to warn them the ticket price may be a little higher than they are used to, unless they are willing to see it millions of times. The quote:
Singularity, as return into self, is certainly spirit, but as otherness to the exclusion of everything else, it is finite or human spirit[.] 
Exactly what that means, I am not sure yet.  But it certainly sounds on the money.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Do you have a Gold 2000 Honda Civic?

I listen to Pilar Alessandra's 'On the page' podcast, and enjoy it immensely.

She has been podcasting conversations every couple of months with the producers of 'Desperate Acts of Magic'.  The most recent podcast included the following story.

They have shot one or two days per month, on average, for a little over twelve months, aiming toward a total of 18-20 days.  They were using the car of one of the producers, but with a day of car located shots still lacking, it was wrecked in an accident.  So they needed a 2000 Honda Civic in Titanium Gold, with exactly the right trim, and they don't have enough money to buy another one from used car lots, or get one of the specialty car procurers that apparently operate in Hollywood to find it, and they are not available any more from car rental places.

Finally, they solved their problem by putting out a casting call notice for an actor or actress with almost any qualities or experience, who owned that exact car.  They got a lot of responses.  Actors would respond to an ad for their car, in exchange for a line of dialogue. Lots of actors with totally the wrong car  got in touch.

I wonder if the acting industry is a model for the singularity economy. Far too few people can do all the work needed, and everyone else is cutting each others throats for scraps.  I hope we can all be as good natured as the film making community seems to be.  I don't know where their living comes from, but somehow people are still cheerfully showing up.

Computer problems

Some computer problems only befall a certain kind of man.

A couple of weeks ago, after doing some cable reorganisation in a tidy up, the computer started hanging during boot.  I opened it up, suspecting some hardware fault - possibly something not cooling and overheating very quickly.  Nothing leapt to the eye, so I started dealing with the accumulated dust.  I eventually spotted that somehow the RAM DIMM was not properly latched at one end.  I think this was the cause.  But this is the MythTV computer, so it runs 24/7 and has done so for a year now, so I completed my spring clean.

The CPU, Heatsink and Fan were hard to clean, so I pulled unlatched the heatsink and tried to pull it free.  The CPU came with it, leaving the 'Zero Insertion Force' AM3 socket empty, but latched.

The CPU seemed pretty stuck to that cooler.  But the funny thing is, you can't put the CPU in the bracket with the heatsink attached. There is zero clearance between the body of the heat sink and the rim, so you can't press the lever to latch it in place after applying zero insertion force.

So my options:
1.  Can I bend the lever low enough to operate it from the side?  Answer:  No.
 What I can do is pop the white face off the mount and break it in two pieces.


You can make out the crack here.  It was a through crack - the pieces were separate, and somewhat distorted.  You can also see one idea on how to fix it.  Rest the body on chip and then just slide it into place.

2.  What if I repair the white face and replace it, and cut off the lever arm, then put the CPU in place and try to generate the same clamping action by forcing it?  (Note that forcing things is how we got into this mess.)


That didn't work either, but it did break the bond between the heatsink and the CPU.  Forcing things pays off!

From there, I just needed some heat conducting grease and to reassemble it as if nothing had ever happened.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

SmarteCarte

Travelling with a small child necessitates luggage and a cart. The SmarteCarte's are dispensed from a vending machine and cost $4. I imagine $3.80 of that pays to maintain the vending machine and 20c the cart.
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Friday, September 2, 2011

Death of God Theology

The plausibility of Death of God Theology seems to rest on the apparently observable reality that God is not about.  Primo Levi gives one account.  I believe there was a hugely destructive earthquake in Spain in the 1600s which energised a certain critical spirit during the Enlightenment. (As always on this blog, more information will be welcomed).  These seem to be more the death of Man.  And I thought the bible was very clear in attributing this to the fall. This is the world without God.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Right and Right

Kierkegaard sets existential commitment over moral generality with his famous (infamous) principle of the teleological suspension of the ethical - the ends justifying an unjust act.  In Fear and Trembling, the unjust act is the sacrifice of Isaac on Mt Moria.  Abraham is right to lie to his boy and his servants in the interest of getting there and doing the dreadful deed of loyalty to God, because it is to God.

I think there must be more to it than this - there must be an ethicisation of the practical.  Abraham is right not simply because he obeys God, but because who he obeys happens to be the God of Love, who will always provide himself a lamb. A sincerely mistaken Abraham would be a wrongdoer, if I am right. Jephthah the judge is probably a good example.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Till We Have Faces

In C.S. Lewis' 'Till We Have Faces', the Priest of Ungit confronts the King of Glome, demanding the sacrifice of his daughter.  The kings adviser, a Greek war prisoner made slave known as Fox, speaks up to pick apart the pronouncements of the priest of Ungit, showing them thick with paradox and contradiction.  The priest responds:
 'We are hearing much Greek wisdom this morning, King,' said the Priest. 'And I have heard most of it before. I did not need a slave to teach it to me.  It is very subtle.  But it brings no rain and grows no corn; sacrifice does both. It does not even give them boldness to die. That Greek there is your slave because in some battle he threw down his arms and let them bind his hands and lead him away and sell him, rather than take a spear-thrust in his heart.  Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book.  I, King, have dealth with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like the eddies of a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them.  Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.'

An excellent book, but obscure - both little known and hard to understand.  I will post again with some interpretive keys when I finish this re-reading.

Here's something interesting...

It's an application of the Turing Test to whether or not Atheists and Christians have accurate models of each other.  Christians have the edge, but there are a few advantages on their side:
1. Atheism is VERY simple, relatively.  There is no lore, not much argot or arcana.
2. Christians who have a relationship with Unequally Yoked and participate in the discussions are not the mass of christians.  (I'd suggest Atheists who know they are atheists are not the mass of atheists.)

Still, it would be nice if more Atheists realised how easily their views were being comprehended (and rejected).

(H/T The Dish.)

Sunday, August 28, 2011

genghis khan

sfb:What is good in life?
GKA man's greatest work is to break his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all the things that have been theirs, to hear the weeping of those who cherished them.
sfb: You've obviously never nursed your sleeping baby son.
GK: No. But then I probably had over a thousand.
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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Reading Hajime Tanabe’s ‘Philosophy as Metanoetics’


As a preface, I should say that I continue to the first page I read intelligible, and later pages much harder going. This blog post is long, and rambling, and clearer probably because of inaccurate summarising.
I think I have now read enough to begin to try to summarise or restate the thesis.  

Taking Kant as a reasonably adequate treatment of the problem of reality, perception and reason he follows the critique of pure reason up to the antinomies of pure reason, which Kant felt defined the barrier of the soul. Tanabe argues that honesty should have driven Kant to ‘absolute critique’, not trying to preserve the self against the critique of pure reason. Exposure to ‘absolute critique’ throws the soul into ‘absolute disruption.’ It confronts nothingness.  Psychologically, this is experienced as a profound consciousness of ruin.  ‘Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.’  It is awareness that your awareness, so proud of itself, so full of plans and intentions, master of so many abilities, is incoherent, unable to sustain itself in the presence of pure reason.  This moment, squarely confronted, leads the self to see (to become) (its) nothingness. If faced, in the aftermath, there is a silence, and a continuing. I have ruined my life and I am sorry, one says and then stops. This is the end of self-power (jiriki). But something continues, the emptied self, expecting to be rolled up once and for all.  There is only what he calls (from Shin Buddhism I think) the Great Nay-qua-Great Compassion, the silence of nothingness. Encountering this silence transforms the self to other-power.
In the later chapter (3) on historicity, he gives the example of science under this pattern.  Confronted with inexplicable phenomena, science sees its own incoherence.  Everything is up for grabs.  The new ‘world’ is not made until the old ‘world’ is given up.  Until you abandon the geocentric model, the heliocentric model appears as a terrible sword of judgment, the very fire of hell – incomprehensibly alien and opposed implacably to everything familiar. Go through that fire, let the old world die, and the new world is bright and limpid and perspicuous.

So much for the first little bit.

The question I know you’re all asking is ‘what kind of nothingness is it? Big? Little? Partial?’ He is glad you asked, he has a lot to say about that, and you will not be surprised to learn the answer: it is ‘absolute nothingness’.  But I am going too fast and skipping over vital steps like absolute mediation, absolute disruption and absolute transformation.

The point of absolute nothingness is that it is not just the denial or absence of something, or even of everything.  It is absolute nothingness, the nothingness against which God maintains existence. But for Tanabe, the encounter with absolute nothingness, or the realisation of absolute nothingness, causes absolute disruption in the process of understanding the real. Absolute disruption seems to mean fundamental and complete disconnection.  Absolute transformation to ‘other-power’ is the only way to get over the gap of the disruption.

He takes up Heidegger’s account of being a ‘thrown-project’, of having come into existence with a position and also a trajectory, a direction, and hence an expected future.  Heidegger’s resoluteness sees the highest good of a person as responding authentically to who they are and exactly the present situation.  Tanabe believes that unless you are a great sage or genius, your authentic response has to begin with metanoetics, with repentance acknowledging that nothing in you can answer the reality of the situation.  And if once begun with repentance, with a transformative encounter with absolute nothingness, there are more possibilities.  Heidegger sees ‘dying’ as a way of life that responds to the anxiety of the uncanniness of being what we are, and of death looming as a possibility not to be out-stripped. Dying means acting authentically and surrendering all the benefits of inauthenticity, moment by moment by moment.  Tanabe wants to confront the ungroundedness of even authenticity with the challenge of absolute nothingness, grounding the self not in self-power, but in ‘other-power’. Confronted not just by its own nothingness, but by absolute nothingness, the self is transformed to no-self, and in the negation of the negation of the finite self, the possibilities are endless.  He (Tanabe) is not shy of calling this a ‘death and resurrection’.

As I read Nietzsche, something similar is going on.  The self, with its tricks and pandering and manipulation, is to be reduced to its legitimate function, as an engine of will-to-power that is contiguous with the will-to-power of life in you.  Nietzsche might therefore recognize other-power in the work of life in the body of an individual.

Tanabe though, seems to be able to find the classic, straightforward virtues in other-power.  The life of dependence on other-power sees through the nothingness of self, and of others, and yet this initiates compassion.  Nothingness is the Great Nay-qua-Great Compassion. I don’t know how this is to be justified philosophically, and I suspect Tanabe is OK with the religious ascription of this character to absolute nothingness.  To me, this would make more sense as revealing a deep innate character that was obscured by ego.  But for him, the move into religious understandings is necessary to gives room to understand the given world, the present real.

In the course of chapter 3, he gives a reading of important philosophers (Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) through his new system of metanoetics.  The last of them all is Nietzsche, who, in affirming will-to-power, the commanding, in-control individual over and against weakness, falseness and ressentiment.  He admits to difficulty reconciling this with metanoetics, and yet a great enjoyment of the temper and truth in Nietzsche.  He concludes, in the end, that Nietzsche is probably a great sage, but one who points out the all important truth that Dionysian life exists only against a background of tragedy and self-emptying in death. From end of ch3:

“Nietzsche’s view [of time and historicity] has close affinities with the Kierkegaardian “moment,” the point where eternity touches time, in the sense that it forms the ground of a death-and-resurrection.  The fact that Heidegger’s notion of the “present,” which takes a stance close to both of these, establishes the existence of free self-consciousness in the nothingness of Nietzsche rather than in the eternal faith of Kierkegaard is an expression of the German people’s worship of the sage and the hero, which stems from a convergence of his character with the spirit of the age.  Conversely, the fact that my metanoetics coincides with Kierkegaard’s faith may be said to be an inevitable consequence of the standpoint of the ordinary, ignorant individual, which also is ordained by individual character and the spirit of the age.  That metanoetics, despite its opposing orientation, should be able to open a way to the understanding of Nietzsche is hardly surprising when considered from the standpoint of absolute transformation.  It shows us the dialectic of paradox.  It would not be going to far to say that the only way for old fools like me to become disciples of Nietzsche is to walk the way of metanoetics."

Friday, August 26, 2011

A patchy survey of some Windows laptops making an effort

The Samsung Series 9 is a lovely thing - $1499 now for the 11inch.  The main weakness of this unit is the price. Lacking the confidence of Apple to say 'We reckon we can sell millions of these' the cost seems high.

The ASUS U36 - thin, with a full voltage cpu.  The screen is apparently a bit patchy, less luminous in some quadrants than others (can't find that review now).

The ASUS UX31 - thin, shiny. Too shiny?  I also expect it to be hot. You could fry an egg on my last Asus laptop, and it was plenty bulky.

But unless you hate OS/X, these are all not beating the Air in the things you want (size, weight, screen, keyboard, touchpad, battery life) by enough. Screens are small, or low-res, or patchy with less of the Apple secret sauce (I suspect it is their attentiveness).

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Good and Good

As I walked toward the office today, I was thinking about how I believe I can do anything, but often find that I can't, or at least, not in a useful amount of time. The big problem is shying away from difficulty, from not knowing. There is a skill in thoroughness, in discipline, in becoming good at a job.

I was thinking about the defecting lieutenants of Libya, and I was thinking about the great art and engineering produced under Stalin. There is sometimes as much or more benefit in being a skilled worker, doing a job good, as in doing a good job. Apparently Aristotle's phronemos (creatively skilled 'genius'?) could find 'the Good' in creating the best products or doing the best work. Somehow this idea is new to me every time. I always want knowing 'the Good' to entitle me to be hopeless.

He who is slack in his work is brother to him who destroys.
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