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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.