A short note to the Prime Minister (submitted)

Hello Prime Minister,

I recently got an email from NICTA, reminding me that your government had dismantled it. NICTA was doing one of the things Australia enjoys a competitive advantage: discovery and invention.  It was doing it in a domain that seems likely to remain highly relevant: computer communication infrastructure and algorithms.  What do I not understand here?  Algorithm design and development has at least matched the 'Moore's law' growth in computing performance - that is, at the same time computers have steadily grow more powerful, the algorithms for using that computing power have drastically improved. Having intellectual property by discovering it yourself is by far the cheapest way to get it. The book of Proverbs (16:16) reminds us: How much better to get wisdom than gold! To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver.

When I look at funding cuts to the CSIRO, closure of various science offices and you taking on the science portfolio, I don't see a serious attempt to govern Australia in Australia's interests.  I see the captain of the plan turning off the instruments and sensors, denying what they're telling him, and proposing to make flying the whole point. Your promise to leave no Australian behind has taken on a kamikaze edge.

The Son

I have a friend who is a maximiser - he is working on his physique, his useful knowledge repertoire, or his investment strategy every hour of the day.  In a group discussion he once mentioned his great fear is losing it all by getting married and having kids.  He described his (existential?) horror of having kids like this: "my parents had me, and their parents had them, and their parents had them, and for what?  Someone has to come at the end of that chain and be the point of it all."

I often think of this since that (quickly debunked) gospel of Mary which spoke of Jesus' wife. I guess I think of a young Jesus getting married, maybe going through infertility and marriage difficulties, and his wife dying in childbirth with his son, and Jesus looking at his world and his place with new eyes and thinking 'someone has to be the reconciler of all this trouble in the world - someone has to be the point; maybe the turning point, I am the son the world was waiting for.' It would be like being born again, and finding your life other than it was.

To be clear, I doubt Jesus was married and it would mean nothing (theologically) if he had been. Still, this fiction has some charming aspects, from some points of view.  Jesus was a real man, far wiser than my friend, but still, real.

Let’s try to be genuine about our illegitimacy

I wrote this short essay hoping it could go in Slate.com and I could get some money.  Now I've written it, the answer is obviously not, and I've an even deeper respect for Slate's writers and editors.

‘I have legitimately no idea what legitimately means.’ <== This is a big problem.

Search Twitter for ‘legitimately’ and you will find an illegitimate ‘legitimately’ born every minute.  Here’s my beef – all these people mean ‘genuinely’, or maybe ‘authentically’. Something genuine has the right ‘origins’ story.  A genuine spiderman has been bitten by a radioactive spider. Someone who genuinely loves you does it out of their heart, not social obligation or pecuniary interest.  But someone who genuinely loves you could still be an overbearing, smothering brute, or a coolly distant critic.  Their love is genuine and has the right origins, but in its social expression it is not legitimate.  Legitimacy exists when there norms that are being upheld. You can’t legitimately put ‘legitimately’ in front of an entirely subjective experience.  ‘I had legitimately no idea it was your birthday honey’ is not going to wash, unless you can prove the complicated negative that you didn’t know what day (or, given the seriousness of the example, month) it was, or that you had a very serious head injury and forgot the day of your honey’s birth.  ‘I genuinely had no idea’ describes a recognizable experience – but one that still needs an apology, because it is not legitimate.

A Yahoo! Answers user called ‘The Global Village’ looked into this in 2010, in the proper place- public opinion.  ‘Does legitimate mean genuine, or legal?’

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100809014255AAkk8vW

Unfortunately: “Best Answer chosen by Asker” – ‘genuine.’ Several better and more correct answers are ignored. That answer was already in the mind of the questioner.

I’ll allow that there is a lot of overlap: plenty of things are legitimate if they are genuine and vice versa (bank notes, love notes, damning evidence). And, I grudgingly suppose, it’s a fine line between a solecism and a first recorded usage in etymology and being a pedant. Two fine lines.  I fight it because there’s a lot riding on this confusion. Creation science – I want to say practitioners? – genuinely hold their views. Homophobia is genuine. All the most bloody and foul impulses that course through us are genuine.

I think the trouble began with democracy.  At the point that legitimacy derived from a ‘mandate from the masses’ rather than some relatively orderly process (a watery tart lobbing a scimitar, for example), we had pretty much given up on it, and then who cares what words mean any more?  You go in the booth and pull the lever and your opinion is as good as the next person’s.

Of course, trying to get legitimate legitimacy was the death of a lot of people.  Legitimacy is REALLY HARD – the letter kills. There can be no way to get there, from here.  Genuineness, on the other hand, is available to everyone (although the existentialists, who think it’s terribly important, think it’s a narrow way that only a few find.)  The Enlightenment repented from extroverted legitimacy-seeking (in the English civil war and succession-wrangling before and after) in the Act of Toleration.  Democracy is probably for the best.  We can’t be sure what’s legitimate, but we can all try to let each other be genuine.  This is all very well for actual reality – but if we lose the word ‘legitimately’, then we don’t even know what we overcame in getting to ‘genuineness’.

My Machine I

PcPerspective (.com) is having a 'competition' to give away 5 nVidia GTX750Ti's.  These cards are what I thought I was getting when I bought a Radeon 7790 last year - good for games, low power, and good for rendering hi-def output from MythTV.

(This was because I took the code drops around VDPAU for the opensource Radeon driver way too literally.  Not having had the forethought to by card five years ago so that support would eventually arrive in the Radeon driver, I am still waiting on VDPAU that is more than a slideshow.  It's been coming for a long time but I've owned this card since July last year. Tracking via Phoronix.com, I would guess the 7790 will be adequately supported and compiled stacks available in the Oibaf repository by Dec this year, but I wouldn't bet much on it.)

The Asus 7790 I bought is pretty great.  Only 1GB of GDDR5 but clocks high enough that its almost a 260X, and TrueAudio on board.  But my gaming time is limited; this machine spends a lot more time running Ubuntu and MythTV, recording and serving up video around the house, particularly on the main screen.  When running Ubuntu, the nVidia blob has been really good for a long time, and lots of things bolt on to it nicely.

As you can see from CPU-z to the left here, I've got an old Athlon x4 620e.  Clearly I'm committed in my way to low power operation.  Not shown - my Antec Earthwatts Platinum, a nice quiet 90% efficient PSU.

In a followup post, I'll put a picture of the beast in its Antec Sonata III case.  The bright blue 'EMU' in the pic is my Emu 1010 with the 0202 daughterboard (Emu 1212 Pcie).

I don't think this is really what the PCPER guys have in mind, and the odds are bound to be very long since its one of the few competitions open internationally.

My Machine II

This is the beast:

I recently got it sleeping and waking up to record TV as required things. Its other duties include: car Sim for my 2 year old, and lightweight recording studio.  I've got a Kawai K5000 and Jv1010, although these days the virtual synths are usually better (exception: Nord G2).

Her?*

I really liked 'Her'. I watched it in the company of a friend who had also been unable to persuade his wife to see a film about a man in love with his computer.  It was very romantic.

It was very original, and yet very inevitable, a lovely sweet romance on the  possibilities of technology after Siri.  It was all the more plausible thanks to the present practices of phone sex, continuous digital presence, and the ever increasing mediation of our relationships by electronic technology.  Finally, the medium becomes a mediator.  It was a romance in which a stale older male meets a much younger woman who spontaneously loves him, who is slightly magical and very helpful.  The few people who I've seen express disappointment have been women, taking issue with the idea of a man becoming committed to a someone who is not a real woman.  I think there is a breath of ManicPixieDreamGirl about Samantha, but only a breath - she is grounded as an sf idea can be and makes more sense as a woman than any MPDG or MRF.

It was also good sf.  I had wondered how the plot would resolve and it was both pure sf and classic romance.  It reminded me a little of Gattaca - low key, interested in social change.  But Gattaca was 3-stars, and relied on a magical take on human spirit - this is 5-star with no tricks beyond the premise of an AI operating system.

The other point of reference for me would be Lost in Translation (and Somewhere) by Sofia Coppola - once married to Spike Jonze.  These are the questions of existential meaning and connection against a background of unusual freedom from demands.

I think the other interesting way this could have gone would be the 'extended mind' - if the AI truly became an OS for the protagonist, becoming his way of being in the world, or him negotiating a shared identity.  Can an Operating System be a person?  A program is a set of ways, an operating system is a special program able to control the activities of subsequent programs.  Taking your life and putting it on the rails of another person to make it run seems, to a Christian, very reasonable.

*'Her?' is Michael Bluth's disbelieving interrogative whenever his son's girlfriend Ann is mentioned.  It always comes to mind with this film.

Would you like to visit schools to promote science, technology, engineering and maths?

Posters have gone up at the office recruiting for STEM promotion in schools. 

While I don't really want to promote those things, I do have some cranky rants to discourage interest in commerce, business, law, marketing, management and elite musicianship that I'd be happy to deliver...