McCain 08

I was wrong. I really thought Obama was going to be the next president. Watching the Saddleback Forum last Friday I knew it was, if not over, at least going to be very difficult for Obama to win. The reason basically, is that Americans are a simplistic people. Certainly not simple, but a people for whom thinking is not really a priority and in some contexts something to be quite proud of avoiding. Watching the forum last week, as McCain rattled off (actually quite impressive) little sound-bites to fierce applause, and then Obama ground out complex, convoluted, responses (to what really were complex convoluted questions), you could almost hear the grinding of gears in the heads of the participants, accompanied (was off-screen but I'm sure of it) by expressions of mild discomfort (you know like, when you've got constipation), oh yeah, and a few spatterings of applause. That was when I realized it's over. It's not that Americans are bad at thinking, it's just that they *really* don't like doing it. This isn't always a bad thing - one of the reasons America does so well is that, come a point, further analysis is a matter of diminishing returns, and by the time a, say, European has finished mulling things over, an American is half-way finished building something, but it does make them extraordinarily bad at choosing leaders. They vote out the boringly competent George HW Bush (commander in chief of the most flawless victories in modern military history) and yet vote back in his blustering buffoon of a son, who has to exhibit a modicum of ability at any aspect of his job (actually I'll give him the Surge - no idea how it worked, but seemingly it has). 'W' was simply easier to understand. Now, it looks like McCain is going to be voted in for the same reason. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a strong candidate, and it's an interesting fantasy imagining he'd been elected in 2000, and while his age is a real concern, I think he'll make a good president (possibly better than Obama). It's just the *reason* for his probable election that's so depressing.

the wire

"I think people are going to be watching The Wire in fifty years the way they're reading Dickens 150 years later. This is a document, a historical document, about what it's like to live in our era."

Jacob Weisberg, Editor, Slate.com

synchronicity

Trinity was set off at 5:29:45 am (local time - 11:29:45 GMT). Couldn't they have waited 15 seconds? I'd have thought there were all sorts of advantages to having it occur precisely at a nice round time. It's not like a nuclear test is an instantaneous event - the initial radiation release occurs over seconds, the pressure wave lasts minutes, the mushroom cloud hangs around for a while and fallout rains down for days and weeks. In such a controlled environment, accumulating so much data, surely it would have been much nicer to not have to add those extra 15 seconds. Shockwave reaches pressure sensor XYZ at 5:30:14 - okay 14 + 15 = 29, no problem, but for god knows how many zillion sensors they had sprinkled out all over the place, before computers, surely that same +15 second calculation is going to get really tedious. I guess the alternative is to set up an independent timing system but given the effort society has gone to in synchronising time across the globe and sorting out all the time zones and everything, it seems a waste not to take advantage of it.

What's interesting is that precisely 24 years (and 2 hours, 2 minutes and 15 seconds later), another of the more siginificant technical events of the century, the Apollo 11 launch, occurred. Launch time was 13:32:00 GMT - they *did* make sure that launch time at least lined up on the minute, although they still couldn't hit the 13:30. The proximity makes me wonder though whether that was the goal and somebody forgot at the last moment to flip some switch and set everything back by two minutes.

things that confuse me (still) about America

* how can you have a proper civil war where the capital of one of the belligerents is on the front line?
* why are Americans so patriotic about the Revolutionary War when it had so blatantly no moral justification whatsoever (discounting tax dodging and indian land theft)?
* why are Americans so patriotic about the Revolutionary War when so few of them are descended from those who took part?
* how do Americans combine a fervent patriotism with an intense consciousness of their 'home' countries?

There are many more but these are paticularly bothering me right now

The Wire

Have just watched the first season of The Wire. This is one of the best tv shows ever made, and certainly the best police series. The only thing that rivals it was the 1992-1993 Australian series, Phoenix.

Hadn't actually heard of it until Sudhir Venkatesh ('Gang Leader for a Day') started discussing it with his subject.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/what-do-real-thugs-think-of-the-wire/

mixed ethnic labelling as racism

Why is Barack Obama incessantly referred to as 'black'? His mother was white. If he'd had only a black grandfather and three white grandparents? Still black? I suspect for some at least the answer would be yes. Extending this to other races - American Indians are for the purpose of federal scholarships routinely identified as such with as little as 25% true indian ancestry. Australian Aboriginals are generally more subtly (dare I say, intelligently) defined, in particular, ABStudy scholarship requires both a degree of ethnic descent but equally importantly continuing membership of an Aboriginal community. Nonetheless, it was interesting that when Real Life began on Australian tv in 1992 with Stan Grant (of partial aboriginal descent), he was widely lauded as the first 'Aboriginal' anchor (interestingly this is much less emphasied nowadays).

However, other mixed ancestries, eg Chinese/English, or Indian/English, aren't subject to this same imbalance. If they are referred to by their ethnicity at all, they are (from a European perspective) inevitably 'half-Chinese', 'half-Indian'.

In short it seems the degree to which ancestry from a particular ethnic group is required in order to be assigned to that group is a measure of racism. The more 'inferior' an ethnic group is perceived to be, the less ancestry is required for membership. It would be interesting to see how this theory held up to a more scientific analysis but I suspect the answer would be very well. Obviously this post has only taken a purely european viewpoint as well - I can only speculate on how applicable this is to say, China.

In the meantime, would everybody *please* stop calling Barack Obama black. By doing so you're revealing far more about your own racism than perhaps you realise.

LN-S4095D, PS3 Blu-Ray playback problems

Bought a 40Gb PS3 last night

There was an initial problem with Blu-Ray playback.

After the disc had loaded my LN-S4095D lost signal. Ejecting the disc would restore the signal at the menu screen.

The solution (from www.fixya.com)

Settings -> BD/DVD Settings -> BD 1080p 24 Hz Output (HDMI) -> Off

Cloverfield

This isn't bad - in fact it's considerably better than most of the reviewers seem to give it credit for. Cloverfield is pretty much what it says on the tin - 85 minutes of hand-held camera-work 'documenting' a monster attack on NYC from the viewpoint of some twenty-somethings. It's remarkably good at this. Even the monster, at 500ft always going to be the weak link, is convincing. The main characters are neither irritatingly stupid nor preternaturally insightful, and the military's response is plausibly revealed as it intertwines with their own. The view of the B-2 is quite beautiful.

Apparently it's given some people motion sickness - twenty years of FPS's and an already dodgy sense of balance (closely linked to my sporting ineptitude) seem to have rendered me immune.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer

I never seen this before - 0% on the tomatometer.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/meet_the_spartans/

"Meet the Spartans" is a downtrodden cinematic vacuum—a sickening, derivative, shallow, condescending, utterly worthless piece of shit.
- Dustin Putman

http://themovieboy.com/directlinks/08meetthespartans.htm

military without militaria

The Register - the bullshit extirpating IT website has had Lewis Page on their payroll for a while. It took me a while longer to realise that I'd been reading his articles almost exclusively.

Two of his better ones on
- assault weapons and
- in particular the AK-47.

charles stross

Science fiction works by a new writer bursting onto the scene with an IDEA. A redefining work which lurches the whole genre in a new direction. Then slowly they decay away as their idea is subsumed into the general 'canon' of the genre. Their work doesn't necessarily get any worse (although it might get repetitive) but does become less relevant as they're left behind by newer paradigm shifts. Sometimes they may contribute a number of new ideas simultaneously (Steven Baxter) or at least overlapped, and sometimes a writer might reinvent themselves (Greg Bear managed this), but frequently they rely on reader loyalty and earnest but usually unsuccessful attempts to adopt newer ideas not of their own creation and with which they never become completely comfortable.



It is genuinely interesting how dynamic science fiction is over time but how homogeneous it is at any one time. Very few science fiction works maintain much relevance beyond a decade. This is particularly obvious in those sequences of movies which straddle the decades and still try to maintain continuity. The later Star Wars movies (okay - I know they're not true sci-fi but they do adopt most of the space opera conventions) were bad (actually apalling) movies in their own right but it was never going to be possible to successfully tie them in with a product of the seventies (making princesses *elected*!?). That Star Trek TNG pulled it off is something of an exception I think due to how ethically advanced the original was and how the on-screen time difference permitted TNG to cheerfully ignore most of the original (interestingly enough Enterprise failed largely because this option was not available - I suspect the new film will also fail unless the makers bite the bullet and do make a sixties film).


Arthur C Clarke was largely before my time but I understand he was considered revolutionary during his peak. I found Rendez-Vous with Rama interesting (within its context) and that was released some twenty years after his first works (which I've not read but which also sound interesting). His later works are frankly woeful. The Rama sequels in particular were a very uncomfortable attempt at modernising a traditional seventies hard space opera (although in his defence I don't know how much Gentry Lee is to blame).

Isaac Asimov has followed a similar path - his Foundation Series were interesting in a quaint way, however, his 1989 Nemesis is one of the worst science fiction books I've read.

Greg Bear is probably my all time favourite author. Hardfought, Anvil of Stars, Moving Mars and Queen of Angels are desert island books. He also popularised and by some measures invented the idea of nano-machinery. He is interesting in not being a trained scientist but I've yet to discover a mistake (within the admittedly considerable constraints of my own technical knowledge) although this is probably a testament to precisely how advanced his ideas were. I'd mark the end of his relevance as being the release of the competent Slants (sequel to Queen of Angels) and at which point his idea was finally irreconcilably superseded by technological developments. His reinvention was a shift to the biological with Darwin's Radio. It's quite an impressive idea and was very well received although he never really addresses those science fiction ideas which superseded him or even modern technology. He essentially ignores the former and never really feels comfortable with latter. I've not read any more recent works (and likely never will) but I understand they all tread similar turf.

Stephen Baxter's importance as a science-fiction writer is now effectively over. He is unusual in having had a few impressive ideas, the Xeelee sequence (and similar works), a number of alternative histories, and the quite stunning Titan and inferior but similar Moonseed. Titan was probably his last important work. His later works are just... strange. Before his writing career he had attempted and failed to join the NASA astronaut corps. He now seems to have become somewhat obsessed with the 'break out into space' (or lack thereof) and his books seem a combination of wish fulfilment on the part of mercurial individuals kick-starting space programs and told-you-so accounts of a slowly degenerating humanity (or humanities) trapped on a resource depleted Earth.

Greg Egan is an author who's now in the terminal stages of his science-fiction writing. His idea, however, was probably the biggest in the history of the genre and Diaspora is one of the most important works written not just in science-fiction but in any literary genre. I still read whatever he produces but I suspect that will end after Incandescence's release this year. He was the first author to fully explore the newly relevant paradigms of virtual reality and more generally computer science and tying these in with fundamental physics. He hasn't really moved on from this, mainly varying on his theme, perhaps improving its sophistication but if so, in a way that's beyond my mathematical skills to properly appreciate. Consistent sub-themes in his works are a truly vehement hatred of religion (and not just organised) and exploration of sexuality - many of his characters are either temporarily or permanently gay, transgender or simply neuter.

Which finally leads to Charles Stross - he is the man. He's the one active sci-fi author who's still at the peak of his powers. A Colder War (amazingly - available free online) and Antibodies are literally stunning. He is not particularly talented as a novellist - the plot and characters sometimes seem to exist only to give a guided tour of his ideas. In short the novels are less than the sum of their parts. But those parts... His major themes are the technological singularity, and an update on the Lovecraftian idea of reality being considerably 'deeper' than is immediately apparent. His knowledge and understanding of the human world is perhaps more encyclopedic than any other writer I've witnessed and quite awe-inspiring. It's the same unsentimental comprehension derived from simplification that enables both economists and simulation designers to accurately model human social behaviour by disregarding delusions of morality (and they are, tragically, mostly delusions), but this enables it to be expanded so widely that few aspects of society remain, on his level at least, unexplainable.

unwanted memories

Are you keeping up with Commodore?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7lAhguZWdE

Christ I actually remember this... is that healthy? Is anybody else similarly afflicted?

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/half_of_26_year_olds_memories

I wonder what the floor plan of Citadel Station displaced in my brain

Halting State

"Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn't really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree - his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn't invaded Poland and France - and it's even worse today"

Halting State, Charles Stross, p239