Friday, July 27, 2012

This place feels expensive...*

SFB is coming to you live from a new-bought laptop.  It's an Asus U36SG-RX138SS.  These were new perhaps 12 months ago, and are now being cleared out at a discount to make room for the next gen of ultrabooks.  I considered some other options, but concluded I would save some money - partly because we are getting the house re-stumped and it keeps getting more expensive (there were some concrete stumps in place on the only exposed side, so I thought it likely it had been professionally restumped, which would mean all the stumps were done.  But no, after the restumpers dug around it turned out that almost all the stumps were still the original 1930 red gum. Shenanigans.)


Intel core i5 - 2430M (2.4GHz up to 3+GHz with 'turbo-boost')
750GB HDD with ~4GB of NAND Flash as cache, which means some things are supposed to be fast and low power. It has seemed extremely fast.
8cell, 83 Whr battery, claimed good for 10hrs, in reality good for 5+ hrs.
1.7kg - nice and light.
White - actually incredibly similar to my previous laptop that died in colour, although the new surface coating doesn't mark as easily.
3 USB ports, VGA and HDMI, gigabit LAN, a SD/MMC card reader.
Allegedly it gets hot when gaming,but its nothing compared to my old ASUS laptop.
Bundled with a USB DVD burner & Home&Student Office
Screen is 13.3" 1376 * 768, but really poor - noticeably grainy. The illuminated space of each pixel is isolated - you can see the fine pattern of the grid, and the 'gamma' changes wildly with viewing angle.
The touchpad has some multitouch and I'm getting used to it.

$800 from MSY. My last laptop (in addition to being this colour, rather light, and prone to overheating to the point that I remember swearing to buy Apple next) was also bought somewhat reduced as it was superceded.  Here is a very good review.

I don't have buyers remorse, but I am reminded of a pair of proverbs that used to be translated:
If a fool persists in his folly he will become wise.
Though a fool persists in his folly, he will never become wise.

* Homer Simpson reference

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Denominations

Whose likeness is on the coin?

I would be interested to know if the government could administer all electronic financial transactions - or at least the infrastructure. People like financial advisers, banks and credit unions could repackage the wholesale credit, but switching from one bank to another would be close to free because it would just change one or two fields in a common data set.*

If the government controlled the electronic and cash infrastructure, it would be more feasible to reduce the fungibility of cash (if you wanted to). You could have a dole moneykind that worked for healthy food and drink, for heating and electricity bills, and for modest internet - enough to do text things like read, write and learn. You could have other moneykinds for objects of addiction, like technology. Or perhaps the moneykinds should be more and more fungible - the most desired work earns the most versatile money, basic non-destructiveness is compensated with basic necessities. The careful contracting of lending and the 'capital controls' and food vouchers instead of cash are all examples of where restrictions on how money can be used could be useful. But I'm not sure this is even an idea.

* we could call it the National... well the Commonwealth... well, we could call it something.
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Sunday, July 22, 2012

Why I blog...

One of the great things about having a blog is sharing the good and amusing things one runs across.  At the moment, the blog wife and I are reading 'The Magicians' by Lev Grossman, a novel referencing Narnia and Harry Potter, but written for a more adult audience about students who get into a bespoke university for magic.  The hero (and all the characters) are bright-tending-brilliant students who have a magic sensibility.  Naturally people are somewhat flawed and stressed - the hero gets his head punched by Penny, a punk magician who felt threatened by the hero's easy progress.  One character notes that he had been stewing a long time, with a lot of repressed rage.  "He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog."

Hey, wait a minute...

Friday, July 20, 2012

A year

It's a year since the blog son matured to the human equivalent of chest-burster phase and entered our world.  He's a fun little presence, especially since he's started sleeping reliably from about 7 at night to at least 5 in the morning.  It's amazing how little he knew when he was born, and how much he has had to learn just to have his current fragile toe-hold on reality.  Marvellous.  I recommend it to anyone.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The Rich Get Richer

There is always something of moral panic when we see growing income and wealth disparities because the rich get richer. The rich, for their part, see themselves as working for it - attending to their investments of time and money and care. I think the moral panic is because wealth per se is not an enjoyed good; it isn't food or drink or fine living or helping people or knowledge or any other good thing itself. People whose astute investments and good ideas make them money which they re-invest or spend are actually fine.

People move along through life. The rich get richer, the fat get fatter, the well-read read more. If we want to arrest this, one part is a need for metanoia - for life direction changes. There is no solution without solving this problem.
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Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Backstory Magazine

I just subscribed to Jeff Goldsmith's Backstory magazine for the iPad. IPad magazines are a great format - easy, glorious pics, documents, videos and more. If you have an iPad and sometimes see films, you might like to check out Backstory - it is at least as interesting as any 'making of' dvd extra, and the first issue is still free. There are four complete screenplays and several extracts. (Jeff has been a screenwriting booster for many years, starting a free podcast at Creative Screenwriting and now still free as 'The Q&A.')
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REAMDE

The dear blog wife and I have been sharing REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, reading by turns as the other tidies up. It's sort of extravagant, because we could each read it silently and do the chores and have time left over. But, we wouldn't share it.

We have found Neal Stephenson suits us. We made it through the entire Baroque trilogy (it certainly was Baroque) and Anathem (although she found it too ponderous). We have also read Harry Potter this way, and others. But Neal Stephenson is referring so widely that it's often necessary to have too brains and backgrounds to get all the marrow out.

REAMDE was huge and very enjoyable, but much less conceptual than much of his earlier work. It has been described as letting his hair down, but it might also be a strategic move back from the pure philosotainment precipice beyond Anathem. I was expecting more to come of the computer networks and games background to this. In fact, like Alistair Maclean crossed with PG Wodehouse crossed with Tolstoy or Proust (someone prolix), he gives an endlessly detailed adventure yarn with a big cast. One of the interesting effects of putting so much effort into the detail is that coincidences which might (maybe should) seem contrived start to seem inevitable. (This is the likeness to PG Woodhouse.)

I would have enjoyed a little more denoument performance, an interval of comedy longer than the scant pages he gives. It's not confusing or disappointing (which he has been in the past), but it is short. I wanted some afterplay, some of the story of how sorry Olivia and Seamus's bosses were, how Oprah got Zula on - just how everyone was celebrated. I guess I'm just not a real Forthrast.
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Tuesday, July 3, 2012

New Girl

I have been hugely enjoying New Girl, a Zooey Deschanel vehicle about 20-somethings flatting together and trying to mature.  One of the funny devices that they use is revealing lists, lists that tell you a lot about a person.  These lists are usually hysterical in context, because they are so revealing and so incongruous.

Chris Reeder has done the internet a service by collecting some of them here.  I quote this one example, but there are a few more there:

Anyway, the gang found his [Schmidt's] 2007 New Year's resolutions, and read them aloud to much delight:

Everything is easy when you are a battleship invading the bay of success
Stop pursuing Caroline. She's Nick's girl. Deal with it.
Begin the search for the cocoon that will one day release your butterfly.
Find out where Winston gets his sparkle, and then steal it.
Only think about hot new CFO every OTHER time I masturbate.
Start floating the idea that people call me Mr. Finish/Game Time Jones/The Hook-Up-Erator
Just pick a color of Crocs and buy them already.

This week, Schmidt broke up with model girlfriend CC and tried a date with her room-mate Nadia, a model in the 6'2" estonian-waif-descended-from-partisan-femme-fatales mould.  Making conversation, Schmidt asks how does she like America. Nadia replies in halting English and somewhat uncertain tones:

'I like salad bar.  I like Despicable Me. Tash 2.0. I like 'Connect Four'.  Freedom of Speech.  David Fincher.  Sidewalk.  I like 1-800-SLIM.  "Yo' mama" jokes. Strawberry.  Wilma Valma Valma(?). Leon J Panetta. Ice-skating for fun, not to save life.'

It's funny when its trivial, and by starting at trivia, then going to what delights her inner child, then politics, then a specific director bespeaking a certain literacy in film...  As the list progresses you get a sense of her personality, and like any personality revealed there is real pathos in it, and a series of surprises that are the stuff of hilarity. 

It's a very warm show, on the whole, and it makes me laugh like a drain, but somehow the comic edge of immaturity it rides makes me think of liking it as immaturity in myself.

(What's weird is that you can get a PG rating on a show where Nadia announces that she's going to sex Schmidt in the face, and puts him in hospital with a broken penis. I guess its all talk. Still, I am often surprised.)

Monday, July 2, 2012

Gene Wolfe

My wife has always complained that Gene Wolfe makes her 'feel itchy' - that his writing has a real creepiness to it, redeemed by his great variety, skill and seriousness, but not fully explained either.

Case in point for those who have read TBOTNS - little is made of it, but Severian sleeps with both his grandmothers. Dorcas, who he raised from the Lake of Birds, was Ouwen's mother. He (Ouwen) first recognizes her while he Waits (tables) at the Inn of Lost Loves by the Sanguinary Field. Dorcas follows Severian the Thrax, but then journey's back down Gyoll looking for her real lost love.

In Thrax, Severian meets a beautiful older woman at an evening masquerade, Cyriaca. He allows her to seduce him and then cannot kill her as he is supposed to. He learns of her lost love, her daughter Katherine, sent to the Matachin Tower of the Torturers for occasioning some killing or other as a young beauty.

Finally he learns that Ouwen had slept with Katherine when she stayed at the Inn, in time for him to be born to her before her excruciation and death.

Waiting at the Inn of Lost Loves is so innocuously presented that I only realised it was symbolic in writing this. Is there something in the intimate relations with Dorcas and Cyriaca? Until I find something, I'm a little itchy too.
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Sunday, July 1, 2012

I write the music and sing the themesong?*


Here's another coincidence of the interests of this blog. For mysterious reasons, I've ended up recording little versions of the theme song to Pilar Alessandra's On-the-Page podcast, a free 30-50min chat with the sharp and funny host (Pilar) and her producer and a guest. Very enjoyable. The original theme was composed by Dave Zukowski.   I can't find a web link for him, but episode 50, at the end, is where I got his name.  There's a hotmail email address.  Leave a comment if you believe me looking up the exact email address is a good idea for your porpoises.  I mean purposes.

I've put them on soundcloud.

Are you ready to be Bemused???**

I said, 'Are you READY to be BEMUSED?!!'

* Little Britain reference
** Really, if you don't come here expecting to be bemused, it is hard to know what you do expect.

More Life

If there is a common theme in 'The Stars My Destination' and 'The Book of the New Sun' and my worrying about right and right (adaptive, functional and moral, upright) and perhaps the gospel, it is the power of wanting and believing in More Life.

Gully Foyle spends six months in a wrecked spaceship fighting for enough food and water and air, and gets to know himself as a thing deserving and demanding more life. He finishes by stripping moral and real power from the few and imposing it on the many who had chosen to lead empty formalities instead of lives.

Severian, weighing the consequences of a white fountain (an energy emitting singularity) entering our solar system and interrupting life on Urth, remembers how the long tortured clients would lose hope of justice or vindication, and wish only for sunlight and air, for more life. The despair of an Urth in which everything has been tried and come only to frustration, is absolute. But even to be destitute, to despair, there must be something better that is despairing. In the end the only dimension that matters is more life.

This is Nietzsche's 'yes to everything' morality; a morality that works differently from 19th century morality of good and evil. To the 19th century late-christian morality, evil was a kind of monstrosity, a self-justifying wickedness that (like virtue) was its own reward. Nietzsche thought this was more an artifact result of an artificial (and therefore wrong) morality.

This week I saw a paper on Arxiv on a recasting of certain statistics to revolve around an analogue of Absolute Zero in thermodynamics. The goal was to create statistical tests for which more evidence would always be additive - to find a way of expressing an absolute zero for evidence.

I think Christianity needs to get back to its moral work of asserting that 'to be is good'. There is more and less good, but there is a limit to evil, an absolute zero of good. The fundamental communication from public christians to 'the world' has been 'no to everything' when it should have been More Life.*
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PS.  There is not space to point out that such a view is already, exactly the non-Manichean, Evil only as absence of good, view of Christianity.

PPS.  The Absolute Zero metaphor of evil is actually made a real thing somewhere in The Reality Dysfunction series by Peter F Hamilton.