A cultural injunction

Posted on May 30, 2007 by acb

The Lives of Others is not only a very good film, though I think it would have been better had it ended with the car accident, but it has inspired a remarkable piece of film criticism from Timothy Garton Ash. Go and see it, if you haven’t, and afterwards read TGA.

Posted in Blather, Journalism | Comments Off on A cultural injunction

It had (haved?) to come

Posted on May 29, 2007 by acb

LOLCODE is a much better language than Ruby, and so we need to work hard to make LOLCODE ON MONORAIL the standard web development language!

For a stunning example of what can be done with this almost completely natural language, see here.

Thanks, Ben.

Posted in Net stories, nördig, Software | 1 Comment

Sodding lolcats

Posted on May 28, 2007 by acb

I hate these things, but they are infesting the internet at the moment. Rupert sent me the atheists’ version.

Ponder Stibbins has a link to some physics lolcat slogans, I am disappointed that no one there had done the obvious lolkitten “I am in maybe ur box.” UPDATE: Rafe, in comments, points to the Schrödinger’s lolcat, which turns out to have been on Flickr all the time (or maybe not; how would I know?)

Geoffrey Chaucer, also, would fain have cheezburger.

Posted in Net stories | 5 Comments

Vain echoes, desisting.

Posted on May 27, 2007 by acb

I have devoured Zachary Leader’s biography of Kingsley Amis, whom I hugely admire, and I wish in some ways that the book had been twice as long. But any life of Amis must have elements of a temperance tract, and from this fact emerge some interesting figures. Here, for instance, is the meal he ordered at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge, when the Sunday Express took him to lunch there in February 1988: He began with a couple of martinis (“a proper drink”) while deciding to eat dressed crab and steak tartare. After he ‘boasted modestly’ that he knew nothing about wine, he ordered a Chablis Grand Cru (£44) and then a 1970 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild (£140). Then a glass of Sauternes with his raspberries; port with the cheese and a large Calvados to mop up any survivors.

Three years later, in one characteristic month, he spent £315 on radio taxis; his bar bill at the Garrick was £432; drink for consumption at home cost him a further £1032. No wonder he considered his divorce had bankrupted him.

A couple of years later, he fell down some stairs after lunch:

Amis drank between a half and a quarter bottle of whisky, Gewurztraminer with the meal itself and a Cointreau as digestif. Morgan remembers him as ‘completely articulate’ at the end of the meal. ‘He wasn’t drunk or anything like that,’ Virginia Rush remembers.

But of course, he knew what had happened, and wrote it down, exactly. Here is an unfinished poem, apparently published in the TLS in 2004 but not during Amis’ lifetime, which Leader found among his papers:

Things tell less and less:
The news impersonal
And from afar; no book
Worth wrenching off the shelf.
Liquor brings dizziness
And food discomfort; all
Music sounds thin and tired,
And what picture could earn a look?
The self drowses in the self
Beyond hope of a visitor.
Desire and those desired
Fade, and no matter:
Memories in decay
Annihilate the day.

There once was an answer:
Up at the stroke of seven,
A turn round the garden (Breathing deep and slow),
Then work, never mind what,
How small, provided that
It serves another’s good.

But once is long ago
And, tell me, how could
Such an answer be less than wrong,
Be right all along?

Vain echoes, desist

Posted in Literature | Comments Off on Vain echoes, desisting.

Low thieves

Posted on May 27, 2007 by acb

My sister discovered last week she had had her Switch card cloned; at least her details had been used to buy £1500’s worth of goods in a week, none of which she had ordered. We know quite a lot about the perpetrators: the first purchase was a top-up on a mobile phone; the next were in Sainsbury’s supermarket; finally they spent £1000 on pre-written essays. So someone out there is preparing to sit their exam using an essay not their own that they have paid for with stolen money. I wonder what I can do to bugger up this plan.

Posted in Net stories | Comments Off on Low thieves

You can’t sacrifice a taxi driver

Posted on May 22, 2007 by acb

This is what I have decided that the programme I have been working on this week should be called. It is about brain plasticity; in particular the mysterious phenomenon of adult human neurogenesis. For obvious reasons, this is easier to study in rats, marmosets, and other creatures which can be killed when you want to find out what has been going on in their brains. By a rough count — and all my mental operations are rough right now — my producer1 and I have been travelling a thousand miles a day for the last seven days in search of enlightenment.

It turns out of course that we were completely wrong in the idea we started with, which is normal, natural, and the sign of a worthwhile story, except when one of you has sold it on the basis of the the story you first thought of. Still, that’s showbiz.

One answer would be to go ahead and make the programme we first thought of. I suspect something like that is what led to the story which two people have drawn to my attention already, about hamsters getting their jetlag cured by viagra. OK, so I have the following symptoms right now: an intermittent migraine, an upset stomach, sudden nosebleeds, and an inability either to sleep or to wake up properly. How, exactly, would my life be improved by an attack of priapism? Especially if it came on while I was queueing at immigration?

Besides, I can’t help wondering what would happen to a priapic hamster who got himself caught in the exercise wheel …

Anyway, the serious point is that you really can’t and shouldn’t extrapolate from rodents too much. As Liz Gould, at Princeton, said, the normal environment for a laboratory rat is so profoundly dull and unstimulating that we have no idea whether it is the exercise that perks them up, or simply the pleasure of a new activity. Besides — not that anyone could say this on the campus at Princeton — the thought occurs that if exercise makes you smart, how come there are athletic scholarships?

But to give an idea of the kind of thing underlying these results, if you want to measure how depressed a rat is, one standard test is simply to throw it into a basin of water and time how long it struggles for. This is not really an entirely convincing analogue of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ fathomless deeps.

1 Louise, sometime of these comment pages.

Posted in Journalism | 8 Comments

Some notes on American capitalism

Posted on May 19, 2007 by acb
  • I wanted a pay-as-you-go sim card. A Radio shack in Greenwich Village offered me the sim on its own for $35 or the sim in a motorola phone for $20. The sheer lunatic profligacy is what strikes one first: that this really quite complicated piece of machinery is essentially given away to sell sims for less than is charged on their own. Then I reflect on charging $35 for a sim on its own. This is just naked punishment for trying to save money.
  • A heartbreaking story on the front page of the NYT about a couple and their credit card debts. They earn about $66,000 a year, both working full-time:

Their credit card debt came to $22,228, including $380 in monthly finance charges. Interest varied from 12.1 percent to 32.24 percent. The Moellerings also have a mortgage of $93,000 and a home equity loan balance of $68,574, at 8 percent interest.
“We have friends in the same position,” said Ms. Moellering, who earns $30,000 a year as an administrative assistant. “One was off his insurance for a couple weeks and he broke his arm, and they’re out 25 or 30 thousand. We’ve talked to them about it. It doesn’t matter what you do, you always have that credit card debt.”

You may say that they don’t need any of the things they have borrowed money to buy. I’ll bet they don’t. But the rapacity of the banks involved makes me wish the Pope would spend more time denouncing Usury:

On March 27, Mr. Moellering used a debit card rather than a credit card to make nine purchases, ranging from $5.38 to $48, hoping to avoid finance charges. But he miscalculated their checking account balance. Each purchase incurred an overdraft charge of $32, or a total of $288 in penalties, more than the $221.82 cost of the purchases. (After some pleading, the bank, National City, forgave four of the charges, leaving the Moellerings with $160 in penalties, plus interest on both the fees and the principal.)

Posted in Travel notes | Comments Off on Some notes on American capitalism

Why I buy thinkpads

Posted on May 17, 2007 by acb

I never know why people buy any laptop that isn’t an ultralight thinkpad. The mixture of light weight, robustness, and service seems to me unbeatable. Until, yesterday, on an aeroplane somewhere south of Nova Scotia, I flipped the thing over to change the battery and it wouldn’t start. Two beeps and a sign saying “Fan Error”.

Cue 12 hours of intermittent panic as I pondered the loss of all my notes, my todo list, and the articles and letters I had written on the plane. The machine is still under warranty, and I am scrupulous about backing up, so all my data lives on three physically distinct hard disks but that’s not very much consolation at such times.

It’s not at all easy finding the phone number for IBM tech service (1-800-IBM-SERV) on their web site. But when I finally got through to a human, named Sydney, he was not only polite and competent, he fixed the damn thing in minutes. “Have you got compressed air?” he asked. No. “Well. put your mouth against the fan slots, and blow as hard as you can, three times”.

I blew. It worked. The machine boots. And now I must dash to Manhattan.

Posted in nördig | 2 Comments

The blessings of freedom

Posted on May 14, 2007 by acb

The Wall Street Journal of all places, has an article about mercenaries which suggests to me that we have made no progress since the Middle Ages at all. Here are the two meatiest paragraphs:

Only two contractors out of the tens of thousands who have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 5½ years have been indicted for violence, and only one has been convicted. Given the aggressive tactics contractors use in both countries, where they routinely force vehicles off the road or shoot at cars that draw too close to them, Democrats and Iraqi officials say there should be more indictments and convictions.

and — the peg is the murder of an elected Iraqi politicians’s bodyguard within the Green Zone by a drunken mercenary who was then shipped home without trial:

The incident began when an off-duty Blackwater employee who had been drinking heavily tried to make his way into the “Little Venice” section of the Green Zone, which houses many senior members of the Iraqi government, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. He was stopped by Iraqi bodyguards for Adil Abdul-Mahdi, the country’s Shiite vice president, and shot one of the Iraqis, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. The bodyguard died at the scene, the officials say. The contractor was fired by Blackwater and has returned to the U.S. The company has declined to disclose his name.

I wonder what would happen if one of these goons shot a policeman, or even a protestor, in the UK.

Posted in War | Comments Off on The blessings of freedom

Another hack at a dead horse

Posted on May 14, 2007 by acb

Oh for fuck’s sake Dawkins!

“If, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, I had expounded the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus, Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller, it would have been a miracle. I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Duns Scotus illuminating my central question: does God exist?”

Let’s just transpose this defence of ignorance and bad faith into another key. Phillip Johnson writes a book denouncing Darwinism,. It is objected that none of his examples actually reflect what real scientists believe about the workings of natural selection and evolution. He replies

“If, as one self-consciously intellectual critic wished, I had expounded the epistemological differences between Stephen Jay Gould and and Simon Conway Morris, Ernst Mayr on biodiversity or W.D. Hamilton on parasites (as he vainly hoped I would), my book would have been more than a surprise bestseller, it would have been a miracle. I would happily have forgone bestsellerdom had there been the slightest hope of Simon Conway Morris illuminating my central question: is Darwinism true?”

Such a reply would quite rightly be shredded by anyone who cared about truth or science. Of course most people who think they know about DNA or evolution will be wrong. You need only glance at the newspapers to understand that. Indeed there’s a nice example, already, in the comments to Dawkins’ piece, where some fundie is claiming “it is a basic law of biology that ‘life comes from life’.” But that sort of ignorance doesn’t alter the truth of evolution for a moment. It’s just that if you want to find out what evolution might really be and how it happens, you have to ask biologists.

Similarly, the overwhelming majority of claims about god’s possible nature are going to be ludicrous, wrong, and all the rest of it. But if you want to find out what might be true, you’re going to have to talk to the people smart enough to understand the questions involved. They may still be wrong. But they will be wrong in different, more interesting way, which is harder to dismiss. And if — god save the mark! — you actually believed in the power of reason to change the world, that is the discussion that might stand a chance of changing it, a little.

(today’s Dawkins number is 34)

Posted in God | 4 Comments