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.

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.

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.)

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.'

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.

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.

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.