Tuesday, December 31, 2013

She's the princess and the pea

Christmas time is a season for family and family is historical.  My aunt was explaining the sensitivity of my cousin - how as a child she had complained about her mattress until the bed was upended and some scrunches in an old mattress protector were found.  'She's always been like that - she's the Princess and the pea,' said my Aunt.

I liked that expression. Someone says about Narcissus - 'he is the scorcher and him who is scorched.'. Kierkegaard says 'the self is a relation that relates itself to itself'.  It would help in a lot of problems to realize were the Princess and the pea, that which hates to yield and yet does, and that which doesn't care and is unyielding.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The One

The more I think about Hegel, the more I get out of Christianity.  The idea that God is one is not just a proposition about God - as an image, I must be one, resolving in myself the manifold external tensions, pressures and strains. Even their existence as tensions feeds on my one-ness.

King David (who killed Goliath) was 'a man after God's own heart'.  But his rule was constantly shored up by advice and murder from Joab, the commander of his army.  King Solomon famously begins his reign by being blessed by God with wisdom.  Among the first thing he does is direct a set of murders - prejudicial execution, of David's old enemies - and Joab. His wisdom takes the form of being both king and killer.  He knows the tensions are parasitic on him and he resolves them, to then do great things - and early court culture of learning, a prefab temple pushing workers to design and prepare, and trade relationships galore.

I want to be that more and more - more deadly resolution, more flourishing.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Eat a good lunch for $2 a day

Here are two basic meals I make in bulk and freeze for future use - almost always my work lunch:

Both: frozen peas, beans, and broccoli from a kilo bag $4-5.

Then either:
Salmon cakes (2 x 450g time of salmon + 2-4 eggs + some flour; ball and fry) with brown rice

Or:
Kangaroo mince bolognese starting with 1kg of too mince and a jar of bolognese sauce, plus whatever veg.  (I like onion, celery and carrot; I often stir some brown rice in to absorb excess moisture and provide some carbohydrate.)

Each batch should make at least ten meals.  Each of these meals gives you about 100g of meat, not a lot, but probably all you need, and 100g of green veg.

They are nothing special, but I enjoy them more and more.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Symmetrical

You know who is symmetrical?  Anonymous and the NSA.  I doubt there is any overlap, but they are mirror images - drawn of identical similarities and polar oppositions.

Monday, December 9, 2013

Secret to a good marriage [contains swearing, mum]

Jo found this Chris Rock quote in a comment the other day - how we laughed...
[Secret to a good marriage - Chris Rock] 

Fellas, when you wake up in the morning, you should look yourself in the mirror and say, "FUCK YOU! Fuck your hopes, fuck your dreams, fuck your plans … fuck everything you thought this life was going to bring to you. Now let's go out there and try to make this bitch happy."

Then we thought about this same sentiment comes from the pulpit as a quote from Colossians 'Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church" 

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Education and reproduction

I have written before that education is reproduction, and that I conclude we owe the next generation everything we had and more: maths, language, literature, philosophy should all have a place in our economy.

The Gonski project for school funding in Australia is about supporting the needs of the disadvantaged children of the Australian underclass.  Children of parents who live underemployed, or working very hard to bring home all too little, or who are absent because of prison or gormlessness have a tough time. 

I remember in the Australian documentary series 'life at five', one of the boys had an absent father, and his mum was 17 (very young, anyway) and then (I think), his mum had another child to a different guy.  The next child had a developmental problem that meant he would never be mentally or physically self sufficient.  He was still only 2 or 3 during filming, and carrying him, feeding him and changing his nappies were manageable, but he would live 50 or 60 years or more and never crawl or say first words.  But for the little boy of 5, there was not much time or energy.  His school teacher said (approx): "X is a lovely little boy, really have enjoyed having him, but there's only so much we can make up here and he doesn't get a lot of help at home (understandably)." The main researcher closed out by saying (approx),"We know that the resources and experiences of very early childhood are strongly determinative - if a child is wounded and not keeping up below the age of 5, they are unlikely to ever catch up that gap."

Abused children, children of broken homes (not just failed relationships, but homes which are not stable, loving environments), will do even worse. If you learn before you are three that authority is a trick of abusive people, it is going to be hard to believe that learning your times table is of value.

All of which brings me to the legitimate problem of where to put your investment.  Negatively, I would say that conventional school is not great, and particularly so if the prerequisites are lacking: familiarity with knowledgeable and kind adults, the usefulness of books and thinking, sitting still and listening.  The difference you can make for many students even with a heck of a lot of money may not be great.  The good thing about Gonski is its suggestion of devolved control.  But education may always be too little, and too late.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Don't go! Don't go!

In Charles L Harness old classic 'The Paradox Men', a mysterious spacecraft crashes to earth and two living beings are rescued.  One passes for human, but is clearly more.  The other is a bad tempered monkey of no clear species.  Meanwhile, the mining the sun for Muirium (a sort of PyRE) has put insane super weapons in play on earth, and it seems inevitable that the government will succumb to all out war soon. 

Against the government stands all that remains of Kennicot Muir (inventor of Muirium) and the mysterious Guild.of Thieves.  I cannot now recall or find the name and position of the antagonist, but let's say he's the presidents chief of staff.  He has adopted the monkey and has a personal vendetta against Alar the thief. In a final  confrontation on the sun, they are all launched across the universe faster than light* in an epic Muirium meltdown.

Before he left, the president was warned by the wee monkey: 'Don't go! Don't go!'

I got the same appeal from my little monkey this morning - and wondered where I would end the day.

*spoilers: this means they go a little way back in time while circumnavigating the universe, and become the spaceship Alar and the monkey come from.  The monkey was the chief of staff's future self.  Another echo of my little messenger this morning.

Health in a sick time

The news is all bad.  Grown men see they are playing prisoners dilemma with no policemen and yet will not make peace (Israel / Palestine / Iran; Afghanistan and Pakistan).  Democratic countries have admitted that actually, totalitarian control is where its at, if you're going to be a successful nation-state. Secret courts, secret prisons, indefinite detention.  Australia is supplying equipment to prevent the escape of people who want to claim asylum. Sri Lanka may not be North Korea, but not being a Tamil trusting my life to whatever boat I can find, I'm hesitant to judge.

Not just bad things are happening, but that the reporting apparat has an interest in palliative reassurance: we can do nothing about climate change, what poverty is like, the absence of peace, the strangers in our midst and monsters.

(To avoid being part of that bad news apathy, I should quickly plug spending money on media that are great: subscribe to your favorite news organization (crikey.com, theage.com, andrew sullivan, the atlantic - the economist, whoever)- they really need it; go see great films that fit your taste; donate to wikipedia.)

The other thing to do is write to your MP and ministers and parliamentarians. I'm going to try that, and I'll put the first drafts on the blog.

These are attempts to stave off depression.  I'm really in trouble with a lack of motivation, lack of excitement, lack of productivity at work.  When you see the world as a calamity (the slaughter-bench of history - is that Agamben or Benjamin or someone?) piling up your day's labour, throwing its corpse into the pit that is working for the man to keep it going is not very motivating.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Entitlement

There was an article in the Age (daily life) this week that was reflecting on the practices of the horrible youth rape ring in New Zealand.  The problem was identified as 'misplaced entitlement.' I've heard that language from other sources, and to me it seems to betray an unhealthy prioritization of social reality over physical reality.  The same thing happens when sensible warnings about rape incidence rates (higher when there's alcohol; higher when more intimacy has been available (strangers< on a date <kissing <embracing <frotting) are denounced as apologies for rape.  Trying to make social reality ultimate is doomed to failure, and is arguably a bad project (social reality is vulnerable to physical reality and must respect it). 

However, making physical reality ultimate is also disastrous. A state is a power machine, made of violence*, but the more successful states are societies in which vast swathes are at little risk of physical violence, are protected classes. (I believe the laws and norms have effect, but often wonder when estranged fathers kill their children whether they have the full effect aimed at. Are these killings and honor killings related, I wonder, just two forms of the same disappointed rage?)

The work of giving young men a complete social identity was kind of a big deal in a lot of very old societies (and even then, out-group women were at their mercy, and in-group women had to take their chances on the group norms).  Initiation was often violent, often resembled the hazing it is in its modern form, but with real scars. These days, the same issues are thrashed out in more dislocated groups - professions, clubs etc, for whom the young men are a means to an end, not their whole futurity.

I'm not sure where to finish with this.  I think its true that some rapists have a feeling of entitlement - but the basis of title in our society is force - try stealing and see who stops you. Our society is a power machine, made of violence.  Maybe its just a plea to ladies not to discount their physical power to reduce rape by strategic behavior.  Maybe its a plea for men to discover a role in constructing social reality that works for them.

*This very apt description I first saw in a translation of a Chinese general's intro to his warlike friends book.  It is very Hegelian, which always reminds me that China's communism, Marxism and materialism are actually thoroughly intelligible Western ideas.  The Chinese practices around law and corruption, family and power are probably more foreign. Later I saw some toned down translations but that was disappointing.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Racing Car Week

This has been racing car week in our house.  We started with a Formula 1 race (recorded by MythTV).  Then I saw these little car kits as I was dropping off some drycleaning. You may remember them from your youth.  They were being sold off at $3ea, so I bought a couple.

I picked up my son and told him about these toy cars.  He opened the box (the picture on the front is LAIRY) and spoke for both of us: "Where's the car?"

More assemblies was required than I remembered, but once I got into it I found them well-made.  They have little wheels on their bumpers to help them bump off walls from glancing impacts, but the shape of our house means they are invariably stuck seconds after they set off.

Hence the simple tethered system below.  The central pole is from a retired IKEA lamp.  This is a prototype.  I expect it will retire soon, due to lack of reliability and interest.  Its really a bit limited (although we could build some ramps.)

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

You are not a God

I was listening to Frithjof Bergman on the Partially Examined Life podcast and he spoke about the intolerability of hard work in in hard jobs - how the joy left work when recuperative powers and opportunities were inadequate.  Bergman has been advocating for New Work - a new, more sustainable, more communitarian approach to work.

The example I thought of was a friend who was trying out palliative care as a medical specialty.  What was it like?  'People are dying,' he said.  Most people would come into his care when home care was over, only a few days before they would die. He would talk to families, prescribe pain killers and (conceivably) minor procedures to relieve suffering. I'm not sure of the stats, but I think three to five people died each week. No one survived.  Palliative care is a hard specialty to fill - not many people feel called to it, and not many can face the strain of so much death indefinitely.  My friend worked a year there, but afterward he took a different path.

At the time, I thought that there was a need for community representation right alongside him, for other people to share the load on a rotating basis.

The New Work ideas made me think of this again.  In Ancient Rome, a successful general might Triumph into Rome, applauded by all Rome.  But behind him stood a slave to say ' You are not a God, you are just a man' throughout.

A palliative care Dr, supervising the ragnarok of a human life, has the mirror image, the final defeat, happening on his watch.  Maybe he or she needs someone whispering in their ear 'You are not God. This person died, but you only did them good all the days you knew them. Death is not your responsibility.'

Sunday, November 10, 2013

More bargains and projects

1.  Logitech K400r is $33 from Logitech on eBay.  This is a good little keyboard/touchpad combo, apparently pretty good in a htpc type situation where the ui lapses into pc keyboard and mouse.

2.  I'm not sure this would work well enough, but I've been thinking about a Raspberry Pi based car simulator.  A Pi with a basic steering wheel and pedal set (Thrustmaster Ferrari $80). Then I could retire my current screen to be a gaming screen.  This would be for my little son, so a cool wooden cockpit would finish it off.  Driving games (eg TORCS) for Linux aren't going to be hassle free (force feedback might not work, etc) but total cost below $200 would be pretty good, and a 3yr old can probably live without some things.  Driving games are competitive but not murderous, a good model of social competition.

3. My 7790 continues to suck quite a good deal in Linux.  I don't know whether its attributable to packaging, or the fact that the most up to date packages I can get for Ubuntu (the oibaf ppa) are not built on LLVM 3.4, the development version that provides stuff for GCN. But contra Phoronix enthuse and the driver Dev document, I have almost no high level features - no OpenGL, no VDPAU. A $25 Raspberry Pi frontend would easily outperform it.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Batshit

On Scriptnotes a few weeks ago they read from a reader submission: 'Batshit'.  Here is an idea for a completely different short film with the same title.

Basically, it would be the story of a parent catching something like Hendra virus from you know what (I saw today that SARS was probably caught from bats originally).  They would be survived by one modern young person.  The doctor's inability to cope and the poor suffer would be mirrored by the overwhelmed young person reaching deep into their vocab and coming up with a rueful, marvelling 'batshit'.

I recently rewatched the 'Neon Genesis: Evangelion' series, and I enjoyed it very much, although the final couple of episodes are pretty hard to take. I found the bleak world view fit my current mood very much.  This story idea is probably very sophomoric.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

What an age we live in...

Here are some things that can be had for the price of admission to the internet:
Coursera:
+Kierkegaard on Irony
+Interactive Python Programs (simple graphical games)
+General Game Players
+Compilers
+Programming languages (really about functional programming)
+Algorithms (Bob Sedgewick!)
And much more!

ITunes:
+All of Bert Dreyfus on Heidegger and the other existentialists.
+A History of Electronic Music podcast
+Yale's basic Game Theory, intro to New Testament, Evolution ecology and behavior course.
+MITs biology course by Weinberg and Lander
+lots of other great things.

Others:
+A lot of out of copyright books, including most of the notable ancient philosophers. Still looking for a free Heraclitus - if you spot one, let me know.
+Hegel explicated by J Bernstein at Bernsteintapes.com.

Open source software:
+MythTV - just recently got the beta client for Android and its pretty cool to stream to a handy device - although I'm wishing we had a Nexus 7 instead of an iPad.  Will try Torc on our iDevices soon.
+Python, Numpy, Scipy
+Java, Android SDK
+

And of course, blogs.  Anyone who has time is immeasurably richer than they were twenty years ago.

Wishing

Acquisitiveness log, stardate I don't really care for Star Trek:
1.  I recently started using Runkeeper to track my bike commute, and have been enjoying it.  I'd like to add a heart rate, and the way to do it seems to be with a Bluetooth 4.0 (Smart) heart rate monitor.  Best value chest strap is probably Jarv ($57 at Fishpond.com). I'd like to avoid a chest strap and have fancied the Mio Alpha (bluetooth version, not Ant+) since I first heard of it.  $190 from eBay seller in Hong Kong.

2.  I recently bought and rewatched Neon Genesis: Evangelion.  Such a great series. Under all the cartoonish  teenage philosophy, psychology, sexuality and angst there is Gendo Ikari, a man living at war with what is. (Man, those last two episodes are the greatest RickRoll ever - once you know what happened and see the End of Evangelion movies you can see there's sincere creative effort there, but gosh). Another anime great is Star Blazers is available on eBay for $66.60, and I'd like to go there next.

3. I'd like to upgrade our monitor on mythtv to a 27" IPS screen.  I like the AOC 2757 3d version ($360 @ MSY), because the very high refresh rate needed for 3d can be useful in 2d formats.  Not sure if thus specific monitor supports Lightboost, but just a high refresh rate on a large screen is easier on the eyes.  IPS has wider viewing angles and more and more accurate color.  Also worth a look, the Kogan versions, although they are WQHD which is more than I need.  Still waiting for the full capabilities of my Radeon 7790 to be available to Mythtv in Ubuntu.

4.  There are a lot of Gene Wolfe books I don't own.

5.  Thinking about a Kaveri CPU upgrade in the new year.  Asrock has some nice FM2+ motherboards at MSY already. Intel CPUs are better, but maybe Dual Graphics will ultimately work.

6.  I would need new runners and an armband for my phone to get into running training.

But this is all a bit moot because baby no2 is coming down the shoot and we're moving to a larger house and savings must be found.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Game semantics and dialectics

Giorgio Japaridze has suggested an interpretation of dynamic logic as representable as game semantics, the stuff of game theory.  Games are minimal worlds in which there are agents, objects, spaces, and it makes intuitive sense that dynamic logic (which tries to make logic marry up with  real world activity) and game semantics would be closely aligned projects.

I would add Hegel's approach to dialectics to this group. He makes an move, presents reality's counter, makes another move and so on, until he gets to people and completes the analysis of master and servant.  The servant is in the position of great consciousness for the servant must master himself and the whole world, while the master has only desire and violence.  The submission quickly becomes only a part of what the servant is doing.

A long time ago now, people would ask in exasperation what game I was playing. That question - what game is it? - is fundamental.  'What game are we playing?' could be a candidate for game zero, the game of which all other games are sub-games.  I recently commented somewhere that the only positive evidence of something beyond the greedy-pig-athon of modern economic life was the Bill Gates move of saying 'enough winning - what else have you got?'. Of course, that undersells Melinda Gates' Catholicism.  He was made alive to the reality that thousands of people die for lack of $5, $20, $50 interventions, and looking around in exasperation for the people holding all the dollars, was able to see himself.  Good on him. He's making universality game zero.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Linux Graphics

So you decided to get a Radeon 7790 and hope for the best...

Briefly, Michael Larabel at Phoronix recommends that you use Fedora 19/20, and he is probably right.  The Linux graphics stack is complex ( http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/) with a lot of software components and interfaces. Fedora are packaging mostly the latest drivers with most of the functional options switched on (key option is vdpau).  The radeonsi driver used by the very new cards is still a bit rough around the edges. 4,5,6000 series cards seem to be working well for people on the r600 radeon driver.

Ubuntu (in 13.10B) are not yet so up to date.  There is a ppa (oibaf) for up to 13.04 that will enable what you need, but you need to add the latest kernel yourself.  Xorg-edgers don't seem to compile for vdpau, although that may (have) change(d). 

I tried Suse and found it very good, but strongest at things (virtualization) that I cared least about. I gave up when I couldn't sudo alsamixer while in the folder which had the alsamixer binary. Still don't know why...

It is certainly possible to download and compile the complete graphics stack, but it is onerous, and requires some manual config and library binding which is a bit of a black art to me.

At the moment, my $150 video card is an obstruction and I can't smoothly play back even over-the-air HDTV, which is 720p or 1080i at most.  Nuts.  I could possibly get better performance from the onboard radeon hd4000, a tiny little chip.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The Secret of the Universe

A friend was telling me about another friend's experience as a prison psych working with sex offenders. Many will say anything to get out and offend again.  My friend was marvelling at such an encounter with evil. It's hard to change someone who has found the secret of the universe. 

That secret is power.  Feminists often sometimes say rape is all about power and not about sex.  I can understand that reduction in a rape and murder, or domestic violence.  I think there is some performance aspect.  In the case of a rape I think it is more a ritual closing of the breach between power and desire.  It is expressing the truest thing the rapist knows, their understanding of how things are. Those with more power run over those with less. The desires of those with more power are satisfied, the desires of those with less go begging. The opportunity to be him who has power is beyond price - if you have no alternate resource for understanding the world.  This might be the same for people in the bdsm community - by playing out the awful truth of the world, they can be reunited with the world.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Liberal Government

While I'm temperamentally uncomfortable with liberal government, I think it's time to take the opportunities it presents seriously.  I take the Liberal party positions as coming out of the idea that to have a self is an achievement, and to maintain the autonomy of that self is the foundation of all serious and responsible living. They see a lack of self -centeredness as a lack, an immaturity, and I have to say at least for myself they are (would be - I don't believe I've ever come up at Liberal party HQ) right.

While a lack of self-centredness is a lack and having a self is good, having a bad self is conceivable - the self should be defined by negativity about the right things. There are some things it is appropriate to be negative about - laziness is probably worst.

I'm going to take this three years as a season for self-serving industriousness, for taking opportunities to work and profit seriously.

Monday, September 9, 2013

Elysium

After District 9, Neil Blomkamp deserved my trust on his next film, and I took the mixed reviews on Elysium with a grain of salt.  Having seen it, I think I agree to some extent with Dana Stevens of Slate - a great premise that the story somehow fell short of. Not that it was at all a bad movie - solid 3.5 stars and I will certainly want it on DVD - but it was a 5-star premise.  Some of the protagonist's back-story was a little disjointed, a little obvious, a little perfunctory.  And, like Oblivion, every cross-reference that recalled that back-story should have been lighting up watchers brains, but was instead lighting up the screen spelled out and laboured.

What would I recommend?

1. Less back-story, more rage.  As a stripped down cyber-punk action film like Judge Dredd, this would rock.

2.  More moral murk.  People on earth have every chance (apparently) to practice restraint, to garden earth, but do not. Are they oppressed by the wealthy as part of a strategy or are they just bad? How could letting the whole earth have the Elysium lifestyle work?

3.  More anxiety about the body. Major interventions worked out pretty well throughout.  (I liked the body-mod shop as scariest-ever tattoo parlor scene - 'Yeah its gonna hurt, but it will look cool'). People should be subverted more viciously by this kind of intervention. E.g. Mat Damon's exoskeleton should have some wicked reflexes causing him to be danger to his friends.

4.  More time in this universe.  Sequels, Prequels.  It's a universe with issues.  It will take a few stories to work them all out.  Maybe start with President Spider despairing about overpopulation, their uselessness, the impossibility of education for many and the awful fact of being responsible for everyone.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Watching 'In the Night Garden'

Just a few scattered thoughts:
1. The pinky-ponk is a dirigible behemothaur (see Iain M Banks' Look to Windward).
2. Macca Pacca is like an ideal 457 visa holder seen from Liberal party HQ  - he has the stones for comforters, toils cheerfully at almost worthless tasks like cleaning and arranging stones, lives in a hole, is very small and non-threatening , lacks elbows and (I suspect) proper bicamerality.
3. Sir Derek Jacobi.  I like to imagine that, true professional that he is, he insists on recording the introductory songs for each character for each episode, rather than it being the same copy. So much low quality nonsense.
4. Fairly strong gender types in Upsy-Daisy and Iggle-Piggle, compared to the Teletubbies, for example.  Upsy-Daisy can't stop communicating her emotional state, has a large vocab and a certain proprietary huffiness.  Iggle-piggle is robustly cheerful but has a single squeak for vocab and tends to collapse if he finds himself socially embarrassed.

Although it's much loved, the boy is developing a severe dependency and I may need to break Mythtv.

Peppa Pig, on the other hand, is lovely for all.  'The Noisy Night' episode is the whole contemporary tragicomedy of raising a newborn.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Ford, Ford, Ford...

I am sitting waiting to enter the passcode in my car stereo to reactivate it.  I had to pull the radio out to access the serial number, so that Ford could authorize release of the password to me, thus validating my ownership of the radio.  Its a basic antitheft measure, but a normal car company associates the code with the vehicle chassis number.

Putting the code itself on the body of the radio would be ridiculous. It would make it hard for honest customers to reactivate after a battery failure, and easy for thieves.

Idiots.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

The Way

On Scriptnotes, a couple of weeks ago, Craig Mazin was complaining that the 'monomyth' of a suffering hero who dies and rises lacks drama if the hero is Superman (or Jesus).

I think there are two answers:
-first, there is uncertainty as to whether they are Superman (or Jesus) until they outstrip the not-to-be-outstripped. This is surface level but real drama.
-second, more interestingly, these climactic events must resolve the dramatic tension, and in Judaism the tension has always been questions 'Adam, why are you hiding?' or like Solomon's 'will God really make a home on Earth?  The highest heavens cannot contain Him.' Or 'the ransom of a life is heavy, no one can pay enough.' Or 'If there were fifty righteous people, would you not spare the city?'  How will God remain God, absolutely good, judging evil, and yet be reconciled to actually existing human life?

Heidegger's 'technological understanding of being' saw our culture in terms of recurrence of functional relationships, of activity and agency expressed and mediated in techniques.  The characteristic move of this technological understanding is 'enframing', boxing some function by its preconditions and postconditions. This is like the black box of circuit analysis - a thing is what it does, and things not expressed in what it does are arbitrary, meaningless and subject to redesign at will.  The technological understanding of being enables a real engagement with a world of people, equipment and mere physical presence. But it obscures or reduces other things, like values or transcendent meaning in experience or life. If a man or woman can be replaced in a specific function, there is no reason not to replace them. The usefulness of things levels them down to mere equipment.  It is possible to respond to your times authentically (in an original, authorial way), but it is not meaningful to assert that the times are wrong in their very fiber, or that behavior can be transcendentally wrong (or right) as well as locally wrong (or right). Much is already determined in your thrown-ness that amounts to ontological guilt (things that could have gone otherwise but did not and that commit you certain ways - being Australian at the moment commits me to a variety of things I can't get behind (heh heh)).

Heidegger didn't think that the understanding that of being was fixed, but that it developed in each culture and that people could be virtuoso developers of practices, or slavish followers. He talked about 'one' - das man - as a vast repository of convention 'one' could skillfully exercise or unskillfully be lost in. The man of skill (phronemos) is able to respond with new practices to new situations in ways that are applauded. Every so often, a crisis comes along which drives a reorganization of the culture into a new one - some cultural stressor becomes too great and a work of art sets up a new understanding of being.  The life of Jesus is an example, radically reorganizing Jewish culture and then Greco-Roman culture, not simply adding new organizing principles to Rome's power pyramid, but subverting the cross and giving it meaning from Judaism.  These innovations are  institution of new practices.  The slogan from a film (Across the Universe?) is not 'you are what you do' but 'You are how you do things.'  Clive James talks of developing a style as the core of becoming a thinker and a person. The question of being human is primarily how to be, not Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.'

Foucault's famous phrase 'technology of power' captures this in culture. In a culture, power is expressed in ways that fit or strain or violate in certain ways a background of expectations. Where the technological understanding of being holds sway, nepotism is injustice - only one person has the most merit for that job, and that person is probably not in your family.  At other times and in other places, building the apparatus of powers out of family members was both the most secure and the most profitable use of power - simple common sense, the main reason to have power in the first place.

When Christianity was beginning, it seems to have called itself The Way. It began with (the message of) the cross, foolishness to Greeks (lovers of wiseness) and blasphemy to Jews (conspicuous avoiders of anything approaching blasphemy).  It was something more than an innovation - it claimed to give an account of a union of God and Man, in which political murder could also be holy propitiating sacrifice, without the murder being validated. It said power is for love and may be given up entirely and yet retained.

I think the central move in the new understanding is repentance/penitence and that repentance is the full form of which 'enframing' is a manifestation.  The technology of the technological understanding of being is taking what is good and enacting it, openly acknowledging what is bad so it can be worked around or repaired.  Everything that can be shaken will be shaken until only the unshakeable remains. For acceptance of actually existing human beings, sacrificial atonement could be seen as an enframing move - disposing of what is worse, and replacing it with what is better.  But the direct opposition of the world and God as to worse and better is the judgment of the world.

You may not be a Christian, so let's make a Durkheimish equivalence. Martin Luther King's very recognizable style is evident in this quote, but the content is very apt to what I am saying.

When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact...that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to his scientific and technological abundance; We've learned to fly the air like birds, we've learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters...

Is there a Way?  The cross says 'this is how.'

[Updated for more and better]

Monday, June 24, 2013

The Ascians

In the Book of the New Sun, the Autarch is ruler of a Commonwealth, a land of many nations and races ruled by him (or her).  They are sometimes called 'men without shadows' (Ascia) because they were believed to come from the waist of the world, although in fact they come from further north.  Since the south, and the Commonwealth, are lands where people take matte (a spicy tea) that is presently drunk in various places in the continent of South America, it is reasonable to think of the Ascians as an end product of technologification and standardisation.

'They are blinded by their technology, deafened by it.'  Ascians speak only correct thought, set sentences laid out in official texts. To speak of a beating, an Ascian may say 'No one is to receive more than 100 blows.'  'The populace shall be strongest when disagreement is banished so that all only speak Correct Thought.' There must be a reference to ASCII as well, American Standard Code for Information Interchange - the common standard for simple text.  This standardisation of the units of text

I was listening to Twilight of the Idols recently and Nietzsche was complaining about the terminal phase of human life under the disease of constructed reasons (I think).  I was struck by the coincidence of noon and the high point of humanity, but I may be guilty of taking a surface reading in thinking that the terminal abolition of the true and apparent world is anything to do with the terrible state of Ascia.  I was, perhaps, primed by a reference to the old sun.

Except from Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with the Hammer - 

HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE. 
The History of an Error

1. The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man;
he lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive.
A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
2. The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the
pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious,
incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian. )
3. The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but
the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea
has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being
unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating:
how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
5. The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not
even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous —
consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's
embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the
apparent one.
(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high
point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Operations Research

An applied science called Operations Research was born in WWII.  Scientists with a nice pragmatic turn of mind took on the problem of making military operations work better.  One famous result was choosing to armour bombers in the places that no returning bombers had damage.  They wanted to change the outcomes for those that didn't return.
Second-hand bookshops in Australia generally fill up in the same paradoxic fashion. These are the books that were dispensable, worthless to their owners.  The chance of them finding buyers is small. The chance of buying one and feeling happy about it, likewise.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Star Trek: Into Darkness

I've never found the Star Trek universe very compelling.  Good looking people who like themselves and each other overcoming fanciful oppositions doesn't really get at the tensions of our technological age.  I prefer Primer, or Moon because they ask about technology, power and human instrumentality directly.  So, given that I thought it was about less pressing problems than our present problems, what did I like?
I liked the intro, which sold the Federation as something like the Culture, and set up the problem of obedience and individual commitments.  I liked Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, John Cho and Zachary Quinto.  The plot was faintly ludicrous, but only faintly, and the premise was fairly good.
Bad was recycling Khan into something so different.  A good character slightly spoiled for me by the associations he was supposed to be inheriting. Also bad, the callback of Nimoy and the Alice Eve underwear scene.

Monday, May 6, 2013

Balloons on a cold morning

Chilly air and fine weather today, so the hot air balloons are out.  Not the sort of thing the nexus 4 camera excels at, but maybe it gives you a sense of how nice this commute of mine really is.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Wishlisting

I am slightly crazy about a few bits and pieces of computer hardware at the moment.  I think it is the effect of having zero spare dollars.  A local cunning weasel cracked our wireless network and used half or more our 12GB of 3G mobile broadband allowance in the first week. We have week to go and are $110 over. I feel a little like Ron Burgundy when Baxter ate an entire wheel of cheese.  'You got that much downloaded from our Vodafone? I'm not even mad. That's amazing.'

Kogan WQHD IPS monitor $400
AMD Radeon HD 7750 ($125 for passive cooling) or 7850 ($210) with 'Never Settle' bundled copies of BioShock Infinite and another game ($100 value).
Bluray drive $60.
8 GB ram kit $65
Cm hyper 212 eco cooler ($35)
Discount Am3+ mobo for upgrade ability if/when AMD gets Steamroller sorted out for high precessing power and lower power consumption. ($29) This would retain PCI slots for my TV tuner card, and is slightly more power efficient. I'm worried PCI slots may disappear altogether in a few years.

I'd like to get a seasonic or viewsonic platinum low noise 400W power supply, but they are $200 and even on 100% use, the saving above my bronze (noisy) earthwatts is like $20 a year.

Free upgrades / changes in the pipeline:
-I think I've got mythtv shutting itself down and starting up in time to record shows, fingers crossed.  Saves power and also makes you stop and think about whether you really want the TV on. Fingers crossed.

-Phoronix reported that full decode on AMD hardware support was available through the vdpau interface. When that's in fglrx, I can probably switch to onboard hd 4200 video. Then I can get rid of my nvidia gt210, freeing the pcie slot it is in, and a neighbouring PCI slot which can take an old single tuner card I have.  This would give us the upper hand in the broadcast channels' ongoing campaign to put the weeks good TV on the same hour or two of the same night.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Strange projects I've completed

Going through old PC hardware I found this Geforce FX5600 video card, for which I made a standoff block of solid aluminium to for a silent peltier-based cooler.  Looks awful, but I ran like that for several years.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Mailing it in

Here's two real Georgia juleps, prepared quite late in the peach season.

Recipe:
2 bourbon
2 peach juice (I had infused the bourbon)
Muddled mint
Lots of crushed ice
(Brown sugar to sweeten if your peach doesn't cut it.)

Serve in a pewter mug.

Photo from the Nexus 4 I'm using now.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

What to think about everything, or 'Life is NP-Hard'

This post was entitled 'What to think about everything', and waiting in my drafts.  Naturally I got excited, but it turns out that it was not populated. I've no idea what I would have said, but anyway...

The world is a place full of entities and possibilities, because its always developing through time.  The brain is nature's way of keeping the world's tendencies to kill your genes from developing into actualities.  The mind is the brains way of keeping the brain's tendencies to kill you from developing into actualities.

The brain is solving the problem of Abduction - relating a schema of the super-sensible to a limited observation of a reality in motion is an NP-hard problem (C.S. Pierce first showed that thinking depends on abduction; there are a variety of papers on it but Bylander et al 'The Computational Complexity of Abduction' 1991 is pretty good). NP-hard in a large world means that you can't solve it fully in a reasonable amount of time*, unless you can reduce by orders of magnitude the number of involved entities by:
  • lumping up sensations into objects which are cleanly defined by not being other objects, excluding them from their space.  Sensations denote limbs and a body which is really just one bear that can be treated as a point, in relation to the question of what to do next.
  • expecting repetition of familiar scenarios.  Run away.
  • importantly, being set up to be pretty darn insensitive to things that don't matter, like 'what if this bear just a regular cuddlepie who are not out to kill us?' meh. No one cares about that. Assume everyone's out to kill us, especially people who look like they don't have our genes.
  • Being sensitive to generalisation logic, to reasoning with representations rather than imagining entire entities.  I really like Lukacs Kaiser's paper on building a logic detector and solver for tic-tac-toe, connect-four and other simple games. It shows the potential power for symbolic reasoning to play games, and I think games, narrative and dynamic logic are going to get unified pretty thoroughly pretty soon.
  • Letting a really simple brain (the emotions) cooperate with you and run the mechanics of the limbic system and what not, and even take over entirely at times, causing you to punch people, cry, or start a blog.
  • Making contingent decisions and commitments that will be modified soon.
Over time, the disintegrated solvers get fine-tuned to my environment and it becomes possible for them to be more and more integrated.  For me at least, many of those integrations didn't come up with more than a fractious truce.  My emotions are kept at arms length a lot of the time, and I don't feel very much, and I don't imagine how something would feel for myself in the future or another person in the present all that well.  My reasoning has not been very purposive - I hardly plan, am often unproductive, and get motivated about weirdly small things, and deeply dejected about normal size things, like having a job and a few extra-curricular commitments. (To illustrate agonizing about the very small, I spent a number of hours agonizing about buying a couple of computer components totalling about $30 which I don't need.  They were heavily marked down.  But I couldn't (or didn't try to) imagine a me in the future who just didn't care that he didn't have them, or a me who did but was disappointed, or a me who suddenly saw what that $30 could have gone toward.  I stalled in the emotional desiring and the super-ego's denial.)  My reasoning is also unmotivated by anything except deeply personal felt trouble.  The mere promise of approval and acceptance, of satisfaction in a job done (whether well, or medium) moves me very little, unless the job is immediately in front of me.

I've been reading 'The mindful way through depression' by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He points to a similar phenomenon in depression, of using the reasoning ('doing') executive brain parts in fruitless wars against desire; in inquisitions against feelings of disappointment or remembered shame; and (I suspect this in my case very much) in abdicating to the emotions when pressed to work hard at something that doesn't seem immediately personally relevant (item 0 -> coaching the emotional brain into useful contribution by putting the right prompting and questions to it).

These two (and other faculties of body and mind) are me.**

*Well, we can't at the moment. Some problems that are NP-hard have no conventional (Turing/von Neumann etc) computing algorithm that completes in polytime, but Shor's algorithm is a famous example that means a quantum computer could complete it in polytime.
** The recent PEL podcast on Lacan suggested that this unification of the divided subject, taking responsibility for all the internality (however it was produced. Mostly made of externality (cultured stuff)) was the goal of psychoanalysis.  This is a Pennebaker Essay on how I overcame the major psychic division and became cheerful, emotionally alert and productive. 

Friday, March 22, 2013

300*

Well, my 300th post after a long delay.

My first 299 have been a model of idiosyncratic self-service.  If you weren't bored by the philosophy, I bored you with screenwriting. If you thought those were interesting, I digressed into politics, or computer hardware. And the religiousness - either too christian or not christian at all.  This post, after a six month silence, is another example, entirely self-referential.

I haven't been able to alienate my whole audience, but I have been able to alienate a lot.**

* Movie title reference
** Homer Simpson reference.