OMG ponies!!! of war 30 April 2007
Posted by DSM in Canada, politics.comments closed
As a rule, I avoid stepping into comment sections for other than one-timers.. but I’ve thrown my hat into the ring over at David P’s blog.
We consider the idea that “in long periods of war, violent crime tends to increase as people become more and more desensitised to violence”, and the IMHO farfetched possibility that such an effect involving the UN-sponsored Afghanistan campaign will result in higher Canadian crime rates. Homicide rates in the UK and in the US are discussed.
57424 26 April 2007
Posted by DSM in astronomy.comments closed
There’s a popular and long-running astronomy program here, The Sky at Night, hosted by Sir Patrick Moore. (That’s not the same Patrick Moore who co-founded Greenpeace and was later excommunicated from the environmental movement for his good sense.) Richard appeared on the show last year to talk about planet formation, and covered the Nice model that Hal Levison and company came up with. The episodes I’ve seen were very good, and didn’t dumb down the science nearly as much as you’d expect.
There was a party on Tuesday evening in honour of the program’s fiftieth anniversary — the boss went, to celebrate with the Great and the Good — at which it was announced that an asteroid was named after the show. I can’t find any Web coverage of the story, but I suspect it’s 57424 Caelumnoctu, for the obvious reason..
There’s a tragic-romantic aspect to Moore’s life as well:
The war had a significant influence on his life: his only known romance ended when his fiancée Lorna, a nurse, was killed by a bomb which fell on her ambulance. Moore subsequently explained that he never married because “There was no one else for me… second best is no good for me…I would have liked a wife and family, but it was not to be.”
Huh.
Anyway, Richard guested on the July 2006 episode.
UPDATE: Paul Sutherland of Skymania dropped a note pointing out that he did a brief writeup on the event; links to photographs are included.
I also asked Richard about how the evening went. He skipped off to Paris for a few days afterwards to plan a conference in honour of John Papaloizou with Steve Balbus (yeah, that Balbus, the one from the magnetorotational instability) and Caroline Terquem, so I couldn’t ask until Friday. The boss agreed that it was a good deal of fun, and that even at eighty-odd years, Sir Patrick can still summon the energy when he needs to: it’s like flicking a switch when the attention’s on him.
I know there were some behind-the-scenes efforts to get the presentation here at Queen Mary — Sir Patrick’s a Fellow of the College, and taught here for about a decade — but they fell through, alas. Too bad: I could’ve probably soc-eng’d my way in.
forgetting the Tao 24 April 2007
Posted by DSM in daily life.comments closed
To put it briefly:
“Through nonaction nothing is left undone.”
Aaaaaaaargh!
Aaaargh! Aaargh!!!
Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!!
birthday wishes 23 April 2007
Posted by DSM in politics.comments closed
I hope everyone had a great Lenin’s Birthday yesterday! Appropriate celebrations include slaughtering millions, but I’ll understand if you only tortured and murdered a handful of your political enemies; these are busy times for everyone, and a communist’s work is never done.
Fortunately fellow travellers around the world are doing their part, and there are even encouraging signs that in Great Mother Russia power is returning to the true Vanguard of the People.
Long live the Revolution!
beyond responsibility 19 April 2007
Posted by DSM in QOTD.comments closed
Remember that it is nothing to do your duty, that is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty; the only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.
W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
wherefore art thou Juliet 16 April 2007
Posted by DSM in television.comments closed
Okay, this has been coming a while.
By coincidence (I think), several different sites I read have been discussing the idea of “jumping the shark” over the last few weeks.. and more than a couple of them decided to go meta- and say that the idea of jumping the shark had jumped the shark, even as they applied it to various TV shows that I watch.
But you know what? Consider this my Declaration of Fan Independence. I’m scarcely being original here, but I’m officially joining the fellowship of those who have gone down this path before and prepared the way.
First we have to go back in time.
Every year in junior high, everyone taking music would go on this practice trip to a camp in the forest. Mostly it was an excuse to flirt: or, in my more socially-awkward case, shyly suppress my desire to flirt with a bright, sweet, and unspeakably beautiful French horn player whose father had his own small observatory. In the event that she’s reading this (she’s now happily married, more’s the pity): I admit to everything! Of course if rumours are to be believed, you knew anyway.. why did you have to go away for high school?! Just as I was finding my confidence..
Anyhow, back to our story. The band trips were a lot of fun, but one of my memories that just won’t die is of a bus ride one year, where the cool kids — in whose number I wasn’t counted, to put it mildly — played a handful of songs OVER AND OVER AND OVER.
The artists in question? Well, we’re exactly not talking the brilliant violinist Joshua Bell playing the angels-unawares game and doing the Chaconne from Partita Number 2 in D Minor on the mean streets of D.C. No, we’re talking about New Kids on the Block — before the NKOTB relabelling, and yes it disappoints me that I remember that — and, with the heavens as my witness: Milli Vanilli.
“Blame it on the rain, yeah, yeah..”
“Girl, you know it’s true!”
Probably it was the rain song that got the most bus play, but if time has mixed up their interchangeable songs in my memory I think I can be forgiven. It was definitely those two bands, though, and the cool kids didn’t bother to ask if anyone else wanted to hear the same eight songs repeated continuously for hour after hour.
A few years later, long after those flash-in-the-pan groups had burned out, I bumped into one of the twins who had been at the top of the social pyramid in middle school and somehow those band trips came up in conversation. I mentioned how much I’d hated listening to their terrible songs on repeat. Even if it had been the Bach, I think I’d have gotten tired of it after a GAZILLION HOURS.
And to my face, the guy lied about it.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.” Though most of the words have mercifully washed away with the years, I can still do the tunes from that interminable bus ride.
“No, I didn’t.”
He couldn’t admit to having been a fan, because the standards had moved on, and now even having liked them in the past was embarrassing. He’d spent so long being hyperattuned to the consensus that he couldn’t confess even though he knew I knew he was lying.
After I got over my disbelief at his audacity, I decided that I’d never say that I liked something that I didn’t because it was popular.. and in good contrarian fashion, I also decided not to dislike something just because it was popular, either. Simply flipping the signs didn’t make you different and interesting, it just made you opposite.
Instead I’d like what I liked, take my lumps when I wasn’t in tune with the spirit of the age, and be damned with the lot of ‘em. Not because of any strength on my part, you understand, just because that twin — or his brother? — was so annoying.
[Wait a second. Didn't you start liking the blues in part because your father was a jazz fan, and you wanted to be different? And didn't that development come after this story? --ed.
No comment. --me.
Coward! -- ed.
Fine, you want a comment? "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." -- me.
Always a sign you're losing when you break out the Whitman. --ed.]
For the record:
I liked S2 of Twin Peaks. I liked Alias, even after everyone else got bored with it. I think the complaints about this season’s BSG are mostly rot.
While I’m at it, I thought S5 of Andromeda is highly underrated. They were trying to tell three or four years’ worth of stories in one year. Did it come off? Not completely, but there’s a lot of good stuff there anyhow, and the idea of having your heroes completely lose, completely fail, and have to rebuild in a new way was a bold choice.
There’s another show, doesn’t matter what, that I like, but lots of people said that S2 wasn’t nearly as good as S1 because the chemistry wasn’t as good between the two leads as it was in S1. I think they’re crazy, the dynamic was much better in S2, less broad lowbrow humour but more honesty as they’re finally slowly admitting to themselves and each other what’s going on between them.
And yes, I still like Lost, which has gotten the most alleged-sharkage recently. A lot. S3 has been a lot of fun, and I have a mad crush on Juliet, and I don’t even care that she’s one of Them.
Maybe I’m just easy to please. If I like the setting, or a character, or a plot, or even an idea, I can enjoy a story for what it offers and write off what it doesn’t. So be it!
If memory serves, net.friend Rebecca mentioned sometime over the past few months that she found that she’d been able to enjoy a show — House, probably — much more when she didn’t know that Everyone(tm) had already written off an episode as the Worst Episode Ever(tm), or whatever.
I think that’s probably a good policy in general, and one I’m going to adopt myself.
So jump your own sharks. Mine are for aphrodisiac purposes only. Well, that and dinner.
unfoiled again 16 April 2007
Posted by DSM in daily life.comments closed
Whoa, was that ever a long week!
I gave up trying to repair my work process years ago. A sensible man works hard for eight hours a day and then goes to play. I instead goof off for days on end, accomplishing nothing, but then do nothing but work — barely stopping to eat and sleep — for as long as it takes to get the job done. It’s nowhere near as healthy as the alternative, but I don’t seem to be able to change, and so I choose to look at it as a feature..
The last week’s been one of the work-on weeks. Focused like a laser beam. (Aside: on a whim in high school I bought this self-hypnosis tape which was supposed to increase my focus and concentration, like a laser, especially when I pushed my thumb and my pointer finger together. The guy had a great voice for it, and I still remember his description of the carpet (“perhaps your favourite colour”) on the staircase you walked down at the bottom of which was an ultracomfortable chair. The entire idea of hypnosis is basically pseudoscience, but the tape was a great sleep aid. I wish I could find it again.)
First I spent a day tracking down a problem with a published paper (not one of mine, thankfully) when I found that I couldn’t even reproduce the first few graphs. After some time I realized to my astonishment that the graph wasn’t in radius but in diameter.. nobody plots diameter in our field, which is why I managed not to notice how the graph was labelled.
It was very, very frustrating. Even after I fixed it, though, I still couldn’t match the author’s results. Finally I emailed him, after I’d narrowed the difference down to a factor of two or so that wouldn’t go away. He’s a good guy, and a friend-of-a-friend, so I figured it couldn’t hurt: he’s kindly answered my questions before. Turned out that indeed the graph was wrong, and the error was exactly a factor of two (I thought it might be, but I only trusted my reading of the logplot to within a factor of 25% or so), because of a mistake made in plotting the diameter! Aaaargh!
Why was diameter being plotted in the first place?! What’s next, plotting sizes of objects in terms of the size of an equivalent-volume object such as a cube with a central sphere removed with radius equal to the side of the cube divided by e? Sounds ludicrous, but if you did that, you’d only be off by a factor of 1.74.. and as it was the graph was off by a factor of 2!
Fortunately the author — who really is a great guy, and very knowledgeable — was very helpful and his turnaround time from question to response was very low, so I shouldn’t tease him too much. He’s better on his off days than I am on my good ones.
After working on implementing his model for a while, I switched to dealing with some code issues which had been troubling me involving planet-planetesimal mergers.
I won’t bore you with the details, but after thirty-two hours of barely-interrupted coding I managed to get things sorted out. Suffice it to say that I wasn’t the only one to blame, the guys who wrote gcc deserve some.. but it looks like things are working now.
So last night after Mass at the Cathedral I went for a walk, through St James Park and then around downtown, and finally decided to see The Curse of the Golden Flower, a recent Chinese film, at the impressive but overpriced CineWorld theatre down from Piccadilly Circus. Not really much of a movie guy — I prefer TV — and not one for seeing movies alone, but I was in a good mood and figured I’d indulge myself, especially seeing as I only had to wait half an hour before it started..
Movie had beautiful cinematography, and the lushly claustrophobic scenes of life at the Imperial palace overwhelm you with their intensity.. but the ending didn’t leave me completely satisfied. To say more would be the spoil the film. 9/10 for the optics, 6/10 for the story.
Still, it was fun to give in to temptation for once. (That’s not a claim to any particular virtue. It’s just that I’m ch– um, Scots — so I don’t surrender to expensive ones very often.) Almost gave into another as well, but I haven’t finished that confession post, so you can’t hear about that yet..
distance 10 April 2007
Posted by DSM in faith.comments closed
From a review of the series Rome over at First Things:
Some may quibble with the historical accuracy of this or that detail, but in the main the show has it right. The picture presented by Rome is provocative, troubling, and at times downright strange. Despite how well we know the story of the fall of Rome, and despite our clear debts to the Romans as a constituent part of our own culture, they are not us and we are not them, in large measure because of the interposition of Christianity. Indeed, the most recognizable people in the series are perhaps the Jewish characters, whose ethical structure is clearly recognizable as our own from the brief glimpses we are given of it.
Were we to travel back to the Empire, we would have been impressed by Rome’s grandeur, and Egypt’s legacy, but the despised and weird foreigners with their complicated rules are more our ancestors than those who designed the buildings we imitate and gave us the script we use. There’s more than one way to fulfill a prophecy, counting Abraham’s descendants, after all.
Athens, meet Jerusalem.
I’m definitely feeling philo-Semitic recently. Might be reaction to the locals.
God is dead 7 April 2007
Posted by DSM in faith, theology.comments closed
At first — and even second — consideration, the idea that God is dead doesn’t make much sense.
Assume there is a god as traditionally understood by the Western tradition: unique, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and so on, and thus appropriately capitalized and called God. If there is such a being, who stands above and before everything else, then he must be uncaused. He would also be ontologically necessary: that is, his existence would be the only one which must be. Everything else could have been different, or it might not have existed at all, but God must be who he is.
If such a god existed, then it’s obvious that he can’t die. He can’t end. Neither can he begin. He simply always was, and always will be. To suggest that God would die is to commit a category error of such magnitude that it’s hard to find a good analogy.
Moreover, if God is in fact logically necessary — in the same sense that 2+2=4 and Fermat’s Last Theorem is true are necessary truths: they could not have been otherwise — then again he can’t die. Mathematical truths can’t stop being true, and if they really do subsist in some Platonic realm in the mind of God, then to say that God died means more than saying that 2+2 stopped equalling 4: it’s to say that the statement itself is meaningless. From a contradiction you can derive anything.
The conclusion seems inescapable. Any god who could die is not God as we have believed or disbelieved in, and so “God is dead” could only refer to the social status of belief in him or something along those lines.
About the only loophole you can come up with is to distinguish between person and nature. If the “who” of a person isn’t the same as the “what” he is, then if God could take on a different “what” then he could die. That is, the person of God could die, even if the divine nature itself couldn’t. It’s easy to imagine this in a crude form. I think I’ve even seen it used in fiction, where the heroes defeat their enemy (who’s too strong to fight directly) by mind-swapping him into a weaker body. You get the drift.
In such a scenario it might actually be both logically and ontologically possible for God to die, as long as it’s a contingent nature that the person of God adopted which handles the mechanics of death.. though it seems something of a stretch, and it’s not obvious what the motivation would be.
Long ago, on an unremarkable Friday in a second-rate capital in a rural backwater of the Empire, the regional administrator signed off on a death warrant because the local aristocracy of his domain had threatened to take their complaints over his head, and he was still in political trouble from the last time they’d done so.
And thus the machinery of state brought about in an afternoon what looks like the most impossible event, the most incoherent truth, in all history:
God is dead.
this is the way the mind ends 4 April 2007
Posted by DSM in daily life.comments closed
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed occasional mental lapses. Usually it’s with names. Once I forgot the name of my officemate (who I’d seen roughly seven hours a day, five days a week, for months) — it was embarrassing, because I forgot it as I was signing us up for a racquetball slot, and I stood there, mindblank, for quite a while — and another time I forgot the name of another friend who I’d known for years and saw regularly.
Some kind of early-onset memory disorder, I suspect.. </hypochondria?>
Yesterday I didn’t forget anything, but made a strange mistake. In a line of documentation for code I was working on, I wrote “correctpong” instead of “corresponding”.
Correctpong?!
“That’s not even a word!” (Points if you can place that line without googling.)
There’s no hand mispositioning which can explain this one: it was a genuine, full-fledged brain error.
During my last six months at Kingston I signed up for a whole bunch of experiments, partly to kill time, partly to help out fellow grad students, and mostly for beer money. I had MRIs taken of my brain in a couple of them, and there didn’t seem to be any obvious anomalies.. Time to call in House?
I also managed to drop something on myself last night which gave me a respectable shiner on my left eye. I won’t say what, or how, or where, because the details make me look like an idiot. So to distract you, I’ll now mention the goofy but enjoyable 2002 Hong Kong drama “My Left Eye Sees Ghosts”.
Yesterday was not a good brain day.
unfolding grace 2 April 2007
Posted by DSM in faith.comments closed
Today is the second anniversary of the death of Karol Wojtyła, Pope John Paul the Second. Or, as some would say, John Paul the Great. Time will tell: the Church can afford to think in terms of centuries.
On this anniversary, though, I can’t help but link to my favourite JPII story, as reported by Roger Cohen, which reminds us all that the child is father to the man.
During the summer of 1942, two women in Krakow, Poland, were denounced as Jews, taken to the city’s prison, held there for a few months and then sent to the Belzec extermination camp, where, in October, they were killed in primitive Nazi gas chambers by carbon monoxide from diesel engines.
Their names were Frimeta Gelband and Salomea Zierer; they were sisters. As it happens, Frimeta was my wife’s grandmother. Salomea, known as “Salla,” had two daughters, one of whom survived the war and one of whom did not.
The elder of these daughters was Edith Zierer. In January 1945, at 13, she emerged from a Nazi labor camp in Czestochowa, Poland, a waif on the verge of death. Separated from her family, unaware that her mother had been killed by the Germans, she could scarcely walk.
But walk she did, to a train station, where she climbed onto a coal wagon. The train moved slowly, the wind cut through her. When the cold became too much to bear, she got off the train at a village called Jendzejuw. In a corner of the station, she sat. Nobody looked at her, a girl in the striped and numbered uniform of a prisoner, late in a terrible war. Unable to move, Edith waited.
Death was approaching, but a young man approached first, “very good looking,” as she recalled, and vigorous. He wore a long robe and appeared to the girl to be a priest. “Why are you here?” he asked. “What are you doing?”
Edith said she was trying to get to Krakow to find her parents.
The man disappeared. He came back with a cup of tea. Edith drank. He said he could help her get to Krakow. Again, the mysterious benefactor went away, returning with bread and cheese.
They talked about the advancing Soviet army. Edith said she believed her parents and younger sister, Judith, were alive.
“Try to stand,” the man said. Edith tried – and failed. The man carried her to another village, where he put her in the cattle car of a train bound for Krakow. Another family was there. The man got in beside Edith, covered her with his cloak, and set about making a small fire.
His name, he told Edith, was Karol Wojtyla..
You’ll have to follow the link for the rest of the story, but I should quote one more part:
In his early, and very personal, observation and absorption of this suffering lie the roots of the late pope’s core belief: the inalienable value and sanctity of each human life.
This belief carried Pope John Paul II to convictions that some found old-fashioned or rigid. But in an indulgent age of moral pliancy, why seek to be indulged by the pope, of all people? He offered his truth with the same simplicity and directness he showed in proffering tea and bread and shelter from cold to an abandoned Jewish girl in 1945, when nobody was watching.
When nobody was watching.
Rest in peace, Father.
stopped clocks 2 April 2007
Posted by DSM in daily life.comments closed
[written yesterday]
Took the weekend off from real work to play tourist again, which I haven’t done nearly enough of lately.. between teaching and the various research projects I’m allegedly being paid to contribute to. (Alleged contributions, not alleged pay, thankfully.)
Which is what brings me to watch the sunset — it’s gorgeous, with a nice cool breeze: London can be pretty in the spring when she tries — here in St James Park, beneath a Heaven Tree, to write this post and wait for the evening service at the church. One disadvantage of going to the 7:00 Eucharist is that I didn’t carry a palm around for the day: I always enjoy the puzzled looks I get until the sudden realization.
I noticed something strange on my travels this weekend which hadn’t happened before.. I think I supported both of the protest booths I came across!
One was on the Strand, where people were singing and dancing to protest the bloody and disastrous reign of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I’ve found the unwillingness of nations like South Africa to use even moral persuasion against the Zanu PF thugs very depressing.
The other was up in Chinatown.. Newport Court, I think, just down from the the Guanghwa bookstore. There was a booth with most of the signs written in Chinese, but I had to approve of the English sentence they’d put up:
“China’s New Era Begins When The Communist Party Ends.”
You can always win me over with anticommunism!
Incidentally, I was the victim of some racial/linguistic profiling on Saturday: there were a couple of people handing out leaflets or papers or something, but they were written in Chinese. They offered copies to most passersby, but not to me! Now, admittedly, they were right: I can’t read any Chinese whatsoever, so giving one to me would have been a waste. But they had nothing to go on except a statistical correlation between my appearance and my likely behaviour, which under other circumstances would get people hauled before a court..
