Christmas Expropriation

Long time, no reflect.

We are members of a locale-based facebook group where people buy and sell, and sometimes share news.  Several have reported 'prowlers' and a few have been burgled.

We were burgled once.  I never felt much of the sense of violation that others report - for once the anxious depressive stance fitted the times, instead of being a strange cloud.  My main thought was that someone was willing to treat me as an object - that my friendship was worth less to them than my carcase.

Christmas time is a great season for burglary, a great season for layoffs, for less shifts for casuals, and for the difficulty of finding presents for the children (or meth, I guess) to be overwhelming.  If I want to be a friend to a (potential) burglar, I reckon the way to do it (which I am quite a bit too crappy to actually do) would be to put a PS4 on the doorstep with 'for the undeserving poor' on it.  

It's important to remember that this is only nice gesture, and the gulf between me and a would-be burglar is pretty wide: I have not transformed him or his further burglary and made them more damnable. There is a temptation when you have reached out a little way, to blame all the failure on the other. The ATO, for example, provides a lot of support - but precisely proportional to the support to get it right, is the intense prosecution of wrongdoing.

Memorial to past EBay auctions lost

I opted not to bid on a Bo-ema single group coffee machine this weekend - it was listed and sold for $400, and I think the purchaser got a great bargain, a very serious dual-boiler machine suit a small cafe or home with many tired people.

Another time there was a fully expanded Nord G2 Engine, a virtual modular synthesis engine that can emulate any synthesizer. Although they are not easy to program, and USB support for them is always getting bent out of shape by Windows 'progress', it would be a prize addition to my little home audio studio.  Usually that would sell for $900 (if selling with restrictions like 'buyer must pick up from bendigo') up to $1200 for a really open market. For no obvious reason, the seller got only about $650 for that one.

So, salutes to those brave purchasers.  You have done well.

Strange dream

Saturday night I dreamt that I was in an abandoned city, something like detroit.  A man called Andrew was living in a well-appointed house that he needed to leave.  I was to tell him.  I needed a helper, and for some reason in the dream I chose Slate.com's film critic, Dana Stevens, because we were going to be communicating with Andrew via the sniper rifle we had with us.  Dana showed me how to stay in cover - apparently it was good practice to avoid making a silhouette for fear someone might shoot at it, and Dana Stevens really knew how to survive (and work as a sniper).  I never found out how the rifle was to be used - I remember wondering if we were going to shoot lettering into the wall, and thinking we didn't have enough shells to finish a message.  I also remember knowing somehow that Andrew was sentenced to thirty years in the house, and after twenty years still felt obliged to stay another ten.

Free Speech

I was recently putting a case rather forcefully on Facebook that it was wrong to think vilification laws were a universally good idea because:
1. People's experience differs and people build prejudices on their experience.  Someone might say 'All men are bastards' and we might look at their life, their social circle (Cabinet?) and conclude they were making a fair enough point rather clumsily.
2.  The law is a slow and blunt instrument; and trying to legislate on behalf of every group who might identify themselves in a pejorative adjective is infeasible.

But, I thought to myself later, is there not progress of political ideas?  This was partly informed by my thinking about secularism, legitimacy and genuineness.  At some point, western societies began to give up on 'legitimacy' and be satisfied with 'genuineness' - a real Quaker is accepted as better than a fake Anglican.

If WWII taught us anything (and let's hope it did) surely the lessons were: 'give refuge', and 'in fighting and dying, all are equal.' Out of those lessons come the UN conventions on refugees, human rights and so on, and within states, you get the fulfillment of the new deal, the national health and the economic liberality of the fifties trying to respect the sacrifices of the troops.  Mussolini was elected on a platform of fascist racism.  That was what his brochure said about him.  Now, that sounds absurd. (National socialism sounds a lot better...)

Is it wrong to codify these lessons in law? Do we really have to win the argument again and again?

The Prime Minister of Australia persists in describing asylum seekers as illegals, the Treasurer wants to talk about the 50% of our lives in which we are too young, too old, too unskilled or physically disabled as being a leaner, a shirker, a rorter.  The labels are pejorative and wrong.

Mediation

I think I have heard it argued from Hegel, that idealism brought to bear on real-world events develops with a logic of Terror (named for the French revolution Terror). When  a fixed ideal of human being, expressed completely in concepts, the result for real exhaustible humans is terror; to meet the ideal we must subtract whatever most obviously does not conform - with the guillotine or the progrom or the camp.

This reading is quite applicable to religions - many atrocious crimes can be attributed to some zealous attempt to bring heaven to earth right now, and can be justified by the criminals based on ideas and often, by texts. I think 'Islamic' Terrorism can be read this way: it is too easy to say that no terrorist is a true muslim and no true muslim is a terrorist. Islam does not have secularism in its foundation, and it has a lot of text expressing ideals for human being.

I have misgivings about Christians who want Christianity to be bible-based.  As a distinction from other Christianities it may be useful, but as a distinctive from the world it is destructive and leads to the kind of 'terroristic' confrontation described above. Christianity is a man-centered religion, the God-man in particular. In the bible and by the Holy Spirit, one can get a pointer to that man.  But its like sailing to the North pole.

If I want to get to the North Pole, but will have some easting or westing in whatever straight-ahead line I choose, I must continually recheck.  Standing on the equator and heading North-west will take me in a great circle around the earth to where I started.  I need to go and then find the local North-west that will correct my drift away to the south. What the bible says to you will evolve as you move North.  Who it points you to will not.

The tragedy of Partition

I have an SSD in a fairly odd state after being twice repurposed and having the OS updated twice.  There is a small boot sector, an 8gb windows Vista recovery partition, a 200gb windows 8 partition and a partition for Ubuntu.  Grub is actually on one of the secondary drives. This mess is making it impossible to upgrade to 8.1 (AFAICT).

There's one born every minute, and its me.

Living large

Simple ways to have enough:
- a Queen-size bed and king-size bedding.  This is really good in the cold, when sharing a bed.
- enough socks and underwear. Sometimes the washing gets done on time, but sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes you remember to fish used socks out and sometimes they are out of circulation for a week.  Having an extra $50 invested and 50% more socks is well worth it.
- Mythtv, Linux, and membership in some good support fora.
- home made espresso
- one thing at a time / not losing hours to attending to everything and nothing
- enjoy your commute: get some exercise or enjoy a podcast or audio book.

Sad things and Depression

My little son is having a hard time getting used to childcare.  He often gets upset, but this morning he said very specifically 'I don't want to go to this one. There are too many children. Can I go to another one?' Which is a pretty clear thought for someone who is not yet three. I had to leave him there so I could come to work, where I am currently trying and failing to implement undergrad aeroplane performance calculations in Python while all around me people are constructing sophisticated models with realistic AI agents.  Sometimes we are just Cheesoid.  http://t.co/kPI27hoZMW

Tired? Stressed?

You'll feel better on a luxury omelette of potato, cherry tomato and chorizo.  Just microwave a potato for 5 mins while you mix eggs and milk and heat a pan.  Smash the cooked potato in the pan, distribute tomatoes and chorizo slices, let them brown a little then add the egg.

Ender's Game

I finally caught Ender's game from a Hoyt's Kiosk vending machine. (These are surprisingly good, by the way.)  It was a classic adaptation from a too-rich book - lots of moments that were important reduced to a single scene or maybe two, and a little egregious dumbing down of space battles.  Asa Butterfield was very good, but too big to produce the pathos required at certain points, especially when Bonzo was so tiny.  The Giant's Drink was used well.  A loving adaptation that struggled to stuff the book into contemporary film conventions - I would certainly look at a 'director's cut' with interest.

The Cold Equations

I read about a discussion of misogyny in sf that cited a story called "The Cold Equations" in which a lonely watch keeper in an interstellar transport found a young woman stowing away.  Since they would be unable to get to there destination with her additional mass, the cold equations demanded she be cast adrift.  The discussion focused on the fact that this seemed more like a contrivance to justify pushing a girl out an air lock than an exciting tale of science overcoming all.  I actually think science overcoming love and life is a pretty serious subject, but there is definitely misogyny afoot.

This morning I've been window shopping for technology. I seem to need a DVD drive update, and was considering a bluray player ($64), or burner ($82) rather than a straight DVD rewriter ($20).  Also useful might be a 'Ethernet over power' kit ($50-$65).  But I need to keep in mind that any money not paid on the mortgage will be paid three times or more.  The $130 will become $500, which is another half a week at work. And those items are just the beginning - there's always another project. Not that I don't love my job, but at some point these projects need to be pushed out an airlock.

Dream journal

I am on the deck of a massive trawler that has caught a monstrous sea squid. I have my little son with me.  I explain the tentacles and the fronds, differentiating them from the looping entrails that are meters in diameter now being hooked out.  Then the sea convulses and it is clear their is a lot more fight in this monster. My son has got a fright and I feel like I should have been more prepared.

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...

Uses for a Touch Cover

The MS Touch Cover is very funky, but reviewers have not been taken with it.  Instead of keys traveling to make contact, the Touch Cover has pressure and motion sensitive pads, very (very) like the pads on digital music equipment like to Korg nanopad. The ability to determine how hard a key is struck is very useful.  Look on YouTube and there are some great little vids boosting the nanopads with gifted percussionists playing full rhythm sections on them. (Writing this on my phone or I would link)

It is a travesty that MS and a Windows- oriented music software package like Cakewalk have not got together and built a keyboard / drumpad overlay.  The Surface needs creative applications and the touch cover offers enormously more sensitivity than a regular keyboard.  There is a musician's surface that is marked out with different sliders, but it's only useful to musicians.

Second use is just a toy using the same feature: emotional typing.  Hit hard, get bold and bold-underline.  Hit gently, get small fonts, or italics or a particularly mellow font.

If anyone has AU$700...

Surface Pro (I) with free touch-cover and free shipping at the Microsoft store.  A great device at that price - won't last long.

Everything is Soylent Green

I was thinking about Hollywood, and all the projecting and typing of it. 'Hollywood is a ruthless town.' 'Hollywood looks like tinsel but if look underneath all the tinsel, there's more tinsel.'. What is Hollywood? I wondered.   'Hollywood... Is - PEOPLE!' (You have to imagine Charlton Heston's final despair in that exclamation.)

Actually, almost everything... Is PEOPLE!  Wars, corruption, current affairs shows, international tennis events, golf, testicles you can dangle from your car's tow ball - the great big pile of shit that is modern life... Is PEOPLE!

Andrew's complete happiness

Time to check in on my complete happiness:
. I have a Raspberry Pi, courtesy of the cynical kringle
(probably my greatest innovation).
. I have all the support items it needs (a screen, a power supply, SD cards, a keyboard and mouse.)
. I have some new merrell road glove 2s - barefoot running shoes.
. a pair of 'yurbuds ironman focus' headphones, so running around here we come.
So that's all pretty good.

I will be working toward:
. a nice 27" screen. Probably 1920 x 1080 IPS (not wqhd - don't have the gpu, not TFT). Aoc d2757Ph might do it - $355 at MSY.
. a good heart rate monitoring solution (mio alpha was looking great, good price at kogan $189, but Intel put out some heart rate sensing earbuds at CES and all bets are off). Don't want a chest strap.
. screenplay reads and hosting at the black list (blcklst.com) $80 each, ideally want to do both screenplays together.
. getting a proper tamper for my coffee machine (special measure - $65-70)
. seeing Jupiter Ascending, Enders Game and more at the Sun theater in Yarraville.
. building a weight rack / heave beam.(almost free)
. building a car Sim for my son.

Derivative blogging

After that last post I picked up 'Purity of Heart is to will one thing' by Kierkegaard, a slender volume that I was going to finish this holiday, after failing to give it its due lo these many years.

"Is not despair simply double- mindedness?  For what is despairing other than to have two wills?  For whether the weakling despairs o er not being able to wrench himself away from the bad, or the brazen despairs of never being able to tear himself completely away from the good: they are both double-minded - they have two wills."

My early attempts to read this book (and SK elsewhere) obviously left traces.