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And we're off

2005-11-24T14:34:00.000-05:00

Okay. The layout ain't done. I've somewhat toned down the sorta bizarre (to my tastes) built-in skins, but they're still kinda... ummm... clunky. Got some stuff I'm messing with, but work's keeping me pretty busy. Not sure when I'm gonna have time to make things prettier.

That said, the new blog's up, and should route just fine from wherever, now. I'm over at The Accidental Weblog, slowly tuning the software and designs. Few new posts up. So this should be the last post ever at this site.

(Covers last couch with sheet, locks door.)

Not quite gone yet

2005-11-14T22:36:00.000-05:00

... been messing around with software, servers, images, other stuff, trying to figure out what I want to do with the blog to be. And what with work 'n kids 'n writin' 'n everything else, it's not happening real quick as yet.

Decided a few things. I think. Pretty sure I'm going to build it from Blog:CMS. Yes, it's a fussy, insanely full-featured thingy, and the built-in designs are very not to my taste (have these people even heard of serifs?), and it doesn't look like it's the most popular thing out there... but hell, it ain't like I've ever been into using what everybody else is usin', and I like their attitude about standards. And I'm an ole' PHP hand. I can—and will—bend the system to my will.

(Cackles evilly...)

Hell, I've already posted a fix to a buggy install script. In for a penny, and all.

Overall look is coming together. I think I know where I'm goin'. Need to shoot some photos, scan a few I've only got on film. But we'll get there.

Other stuff, like domain, title, well, durn. I dunno yet. Thinking. Many possibilities. It'll get there.

In other news: to the rink today with the eldest. She's a great kid. Falls down, gets upset, shakes it off, gets up. Note the all-important 'gets up' part.

And the little guy's doing good too. Very mobile, vertical as much as crawling these days, though still no more than a few seconds at a time without holding onto something.

And work's okay; I'm settling in. And I'm still kinda sick. Going for a record, in that latter department.

More news to follow when there's a server it can live on.

If you can see this, I'm leaving

2005-11-09T00:49:00.000-05:00

...soon.

See, I just posted this from FireFox. For some damned reason, Opera 8 and Blogger don't seem to be getting along terribly well.

Actually, they're getting on maddeningly poorly. Post from Opera, and poof... whole post... gone. Try the 'recover post' stuff, and you get mixed results.

Which means, ya know, you can write a whole nice bit on the recent idiocy in Kansas, and Blogger or Opera (or, I suppose, both, depending on just what level of stupidity is involved here, and from which parties) will eat it when you hit 'Publish Post'... and there's a strong possibility you'll never see it again...

I do not know whether Opera or Google is to blame for this stunt. But I ain't impressed, here, people.

And sorry, Blogger, if it does turn out to be the Opera folk, but I think I've just decided who I love more...

And hey, it probably really is time I got a domain name that isn't an entrenched error.

So I mean this. If you see this post, it's an Opera v. Blogspot thing. And that means it's time I got off my duff and moved on to a Movable Type blog, on a host I got some control over, like I'd always meant ta. And my next post will be the last, with the forwarding address.

'Til then.

Crazy kid

2005-11-04T04:07:00.000-05:00

The littlest one has woken us in the wee hours two mornings in a row now—five o'clock yesterday morning, three-thirty this morning.

Teething thing, presumably. Yesterday's solution involved Daddy cuddling with him 'til he conked out again. Mommy's on the hook tonight... Ya gotta do this shift thing, pretty much, to survive this kind of thing. Dunno what single parents do, but I'm betting if their work involves heavy equipment, it's a bad scene...

Damn, my body ain't happy about this. Even when my bit for the evening just involves sitting with him a little before going back to a bed sufficiently distant from the noise, it's still pretty rough on physical and mental functions that rely on nice, stable circadian rhythms. I don't sleep much—but the few hours I get, I need...

And while, thankfully, there's no heavy equipment involved, today's work involves fun, fiddly, finite-field math for asymmetric crypto... kinda thing you do (or I do, anyway) have to be pretty durned awake to pull off...

Oh yeah. Gonna be a fun day.

Another bit

2005-11-01T23:04:00.000-05:00

... of background stuff not gonna appear in the manuscript. And thus also probably no biggy putting it up here.

Still 'round

2005-11-01T00:45:00.000-05:00

... just real busy. First few weeks in a new office, a lot on the go, and nursing a nagging cold which has taken up stubborn and prolonged residence in my left Eustachian tube.

Rewrites are still going good, for those who asked. But no, I dunno when it's gonna be done. Ask me in a few more weeks, maybe...

And, then again, maybe not.

We're watching you

2005-10-27T17:16:00.000-04:00

Now, I can't tell you where, and I can't tell you who, but I overheard something disturbing, the other day, while trying, oddly enough, to do my job.

I overheard someone who Knows Too Much.

Yes, I'm afraid so. He's onto us. He's caught onto the fact that it wasn't a buncha angry young Islamists who flew planes into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, killed some 3,000 people, a few years back now. He knows.

Or he sorta knows. He knows it can't have been a commercial passenger jetliner which hit the first tower, at least—and that's making me nervous. He thinks maybe it was a military fuel tanker. And the Pentagon thing? He thinks it was a missile. Or somethin'...

Good thing he hasn't yet found out about the giant space laser frisbees we really used. Or I'd haveta just have 'em abducted by our alien collaborators right off.

And that's always so much paperwork. And such a mess to cover up. I mean, ya'd think the damned Greys would get with the program, just grab 'em using a black van or somethin' like the rest of us do, stop messing around with the flying saucers and those goofy probes of theirs, get the whole missing memory/missing time thing right. But noooo... they always gotta hover over the farmhouse, walk through the walls, make the big entrance, leave a few telltale traces of nightmare, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder to mess people up, send 'em sobbing off to their shrinks... Such a pain. I'm pretty damned sure they're doing it on purpose, purely out of vanity. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: what part of 'conspiracy' don't these allegedly technologically superior twits understand? They're not supposed to be bucking for fame. Abduction ain't about the glory. Get in, get out, get it done. And enough with grabbing the dead/washed up celebrities. That Elvis thing, that was just asking for trouble. What the hell were they thinking?

Anyway, getting back to the issue of the day: we're gonna have to watch this guy. And just to make sure he knows we're watchin', I'm thinkin' I'm gonna have to slip one of those plastic keychain 'Illuminati' model all-seein' pyramid thingies into his briefcase, next time he's not watchin'.

That's always good for a laugh.

(A little) more seriously:

A friend asked a little while ago why I blog.

My reponse was one word: "Tourette's".

With due respect to the poor folks genuinely afflicted with that odd and disturbing disorder, it's a bit like that. They're compelled by a brain disorder to say stuff that ain't good for their social life...

Me, I'm compelled to research and write stuff that ain't good for me, in the overall sense. There's something you know you shouldn't be doing—shouldn't be getting into—'cos it's not smart, there aren't enough hours in the day, and this sure as hell ain't the time, and so on, and so on, but somehow, it's like this itch.

Trouble is, I know a bit about this stuff already. Just enough to get annoyed hearing it trotted out again. Researched it a bit, some months back, when I heard someone else on about the same thing. I've a sick fascination with the way really, really deeply irrational beliefs spread, and I was just curious enough to dig a bit, get a picture of the movement.

And frankly, the way it usually does, it at once pissed me off with its rampant stupidity, and fascinated me in its suggestive similiarity to so many other possibly related phenomena. I believe I see a common currency here with my somewhat conjectural picture of the memetic evolution of religions—a progression toward stories that resist easy refutation, and present enough of the fantastic to get repeated...

And then I had to move on, as usual, before I made myself ill.

Yes, I'm afraid, there really is such a thing as knowing too much. Or, at least, working too hard on it, all at once (but please, don't anyone quote Ecclesiastes here—and by 'anyone' I mean 'Scott'—or I'm sendin' the cliché police after you...)

So, anyway, this twit is goin' on about some of the usual really, really bad crazy September 11 stuff in my earshot—y'know—not enough wreckage on the Pentagon lawn, seismographs that look like explosions, that calibre of thinking. And, sadly, I can't find my headphones, just tune him out. And my BS detectors are all redlining, and a little demon on my shoulder is shouting in my ear: 'Debunk! Debunk! 30,000 words, now! You're up to it! You can do anything! The physics, the metallurgy, whole damned thing. Hit 'em with documents and photos... nail him so hard he never says anything this monumentally stupid in his life again... or at least nowhere near you! Pop outta nowhere (he don't so much know me) and Scully the fuck out of him!...'

Thing is, it ain't on. I'm starting a new job this week. I gotta force my poor, tired brain though a whole lotta crypto algorithms. And if I can get my head outta that long enough to do anything else, it's gonna be to work on a manuscript I might, someday, sell. Not a lotta stuff already said by folk better qualified to do it without having to study in sometimes entirely new fields.

I had started something. Long piece starting with the fact that I don't much like the Bush administration, and do think it's valid to suggest they might have some questions to answer about their management of intelligence regarding such threats... then moving to the fact that asking some of the questions these folk are asking in the first place isn't so crazy, overall. Not given things governments have done and tried to cover up that we can substantiate—and how, in fact, the notion that a government might try to hurt a lot of people and then hide the fact later isn't really so far-fetched...

Then moving to why that is, and a little on what some of the real coverups looked like. Like the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations' attempts to obfuscate what happened in Halabja, for the benefit of the Ba'ath party, back when Hussein was the guy we were counting upon to hassle the Iranians. Like the blackballing of coverage of the El Mozote massacre, for the benefit of the regime in El Salvador. Like the games the military plays with studies into the effects of depleted uranium. Like the messing around with intelligence done to cook up a suitably popular pretext to invade Iraq. And on and on...

And how very not like those sorts of things the so-called 'September 11 truth movement's' idiot tangle of ambgiuous video artifacts, mildly anamolous eyewitness reports and half-baked one world government crap looks... How the problem isn't always with the questions, some of which aren't so crazy... it's with the answers they find, and their standards for evidence in arriving at those.

Trouble is, I can't do that. Not today. Probably not anytime soon. It's a big babble, thing is. Probably takes about as long to dissect as the idiocy of, oh, say, the creationists... And I got other fish to fry.

So here's a few suggestions if you're curious: you hear any of this stuff, do check out the Snopes page, besides Michael Shermer's comment on the thing (not terribly informative, but nicely put, however), and, finally, Popular Mechanics' view of the thing... and yes, Popular Mechanics is kinda a booster of the military, and yes, the so-called 'truth movement' deeply hates this piece, calls it a hatchet job, straw man attack, so on... but do read it anyway, and assess for yourself what credibility it leaves on the table for those so pissed with it. And check a few journals for yourself, if you're still wondering, 'bout certain claims made about steel...

Me, I should probably be working on some crypto stuff.

You know. So the one world government can get on with its business without being interrupted.

Stop me if you've heard this one before

2005-10-24T21:58:00.000-04:00

Did you hear about the mafioso who studied French deconstructionist philosophy? He goes around making people offers that they can’t understand.

— from Waterloo In Dover: The Kitzmiller v. DASD Case at The Panda's Thumb

Wokka wokka wokka...

Okay. Really just wanted to pull out the bad standup line. Rest of the article's a largeish summary of the Dover 'malignant obfuscation' case (see also 'intelligent design'), worth a read if you want the blow-by-blow.

I've been enjoying the trial, more than a bit—having the ID yutzes being cross-examined on the stand has been good entertainment. Yesirree, dears, this is a court, not Usenet. So if you don't answer the question, it gets asked again, and your evasion gets entered into the record... and then the York Daily Record has a little fun with you.

Pass the popcorn.

Excerpt

2005-10-19T10:38:00.000-04:00

I'm stickin' with my previous position that I'd probably better stop posting excerpts from The Manuscript That Ate My Brain if I really want to flog it for publication at the (I hope imminent) end of the current rewrites.

That said, this bit (PDF) should be fair game, seein' as it's not meant for the manuscript.

Just a bit of background on a principal. And before anyone says so, yeah, I know: I do have my recurring themes.

CBC

2005-10-18T12:52:00.000-04:00

Well, it's great to have the old voices back. Anna Maria Tremonti and The Voice on The Current, Ms. Finlay and Ms. Budd at As It Happens... real news every 15 minutes or so that isn't punctuated by annoying, juvenile banter... Ideas when I'm up to it...

Okay. It's mostly great. But is Stewart McLean still on the air? He's just annoying. And that Rogers woman over at Sounds Like Canada? She gets on my nerves... And don't get me started on that idiotic 'Sad Goat' thing they use to fill the afternooons...

I mean, ummm... yeah. Great to have everybody back.

Serenity

2005-10-14T20:15:00.000-04:00

Kay. Y'all probably figure by now that where Whedon's concerned, I'm jes' a fanboy, not to be trusted. 'Course I'm gonna like his stuff.

So it's pretty much just de rigueur that I'm gonna say I saw Serenity last weekend, and thought it was a damned fine piece of filmmaking, great, snappy dialogue... taut, compelling storytelling... all 'round a beautiful thing destined to prove to a skeptical world that Whedon can too weave his magic on 35mm stock and in the two-hour feature film format...

Yadda yadda. You knew I was gonna say this, right? So you're not listening. You're just gonna go watch some damn, wincingly predictable, beautifully shot and intellectually vapid made-ta-please-da-jury Oscar fodder with strings drenched in reverb leaning on every moment you and the rest of the sheep in the theatre are expected to weep, forget yet again that the sharpest, smartest, all 'round most inventive guy doing scripts this century has his first really totally his-own thing happening in the theatres this month... Yeah, I know your game. Ten bucks yer gonna dump on it, just so you can tell the neighbours yer all, like, mature or somethin'.

So here's the deal. Fine. Don't see Serenity just 'cause I said you should, and I have, now and then, demonstrated to you something that looks a bit like taste. Don't see it just 'cos you know this guy writes interesting characters you might actually give a damn about. Don't see it just 'cause he's proving before our very eyes that great film can still be great fun.

See it 'cos if you don't, I'm gonna find out. And I know where you live.

Live the cliché. Dare to dream.

2005-10-12T18:37:00.000-04:00

So I've genuinely spent a few hours this week writing in a coffee shop.

Yeah, live the cliché, dare to dream. I'll stop if any annoying, self-absorbed middle-aged angst creeps into the thing, honest. And when you've got a nice house full of lovely, sunlit places to perch with the laptop, crawling off to the cave-like local Bridgehead isn't just a bad novel in itself. It's almost perverse.

Thing is, there was a reason. Little guy's turned out to be as light a sleeper as is his daddy, so even running the grinder in the basement kitchenette is running a risk of waking him from his very critical morning snooze. And Daddy needs his espresso in the morning. And he's going to be back at full-time work in about another week, which means he's probably not going to have the opportunity to experience this particular scene again any time soon. So never mind the probably quite valid warnings that nothing worth reading ever gets written in a coffee shop anymore, here we are, let's see what we can get done in an hour or two...

Discovery: quite a bit, actually. Always been one of those guys who can get into his trance just about anywhere, if he really has to. And I'm kinda driven, these days. Got this thing I want done already, a million ideas for doing it, and never quite enough time to make it happen, most days. So I'm in the zone, pounding away, never mind what they're babbling about two or three feet away at the next table; I'm in my own world.

And, as it turns out, kinda rude. Usually, I'm one of those really entirely formal guys, in public—heaven forbid I should ever present anything less than state-to-state level diplomatic protocols even to a wino I'm handing a quarter, normally—but these aren't normal times.

So the surly guy in the corner of the Bridgehead at Bank and Third, who, when you asked if this seat was taken, snapped/grunted something that sounded like 'whatever' and went on typing? That was me.

Hardship

2005-10-12T17:59:00.000-04:00

Opened a few rather large bottles of wine for a dinner party this Friday past. But somehow, even with better than a dozen adult guests, they remained largely unconsumed. My wife's friends are so very... restrained.

Hardship. Several days of working on a decent Chianti, a none-too embarrassing Ontario Pinot Grigio, to get 'em all down before they got too toxic. Gotta invite those folks again.

Wellington Arkell and insanely hot wings...

2005-10-06T22:26:00.000-04:00

... ordered from a local bar and then doused liberally in Frank's Red Hot*.

There's really no better way to celebrate a decent job offer.

(*the wings, that is. The Arkell is just fine on its own.)

Why the media give slimy, lying con-men credibility

2005-10-06T10:04:00.000-04:00

Timely for me, in wake of my own recent foaming over the subject, CSICOP does a piece on just why it is the slimesucking twits pushing 'intelligent design' get press:

In the article, we note that as school boards, state legislatures, and the courts pay increasing attention to the claims of the ID movement, journalists rely heavily on the agenda of these political venues to guide coverage decisions. As a consequence, there is a rise in media attention to ID, but perhaps more importantly, as science is debated within these policy arenas, there is a transfer across news beats, with coverage no longer dominated by context-oriented science writers, and instead the subject of stories contributed by political reporters, opinion writers, and TV journalists. We reached this conclusion after systematically reading through seventeen months of recent news coverage at national and local newspapers, conducting an analysis of opinion page content at the papers, and reviewing relevant TV news transcripts.

As this shift in news beats takes place, coverage de-emphasizes the type of technical backgrounder favored by science writers. These context-oriented articles typically highlight accurately the overwhelming scientific consensus in support of evolution. In contrast, political reporters and television news correspondents are more likely to cover the issue through the lens of political strategy and gamesmanship. Though these types of stories provide important details about the tactics, fundraising, and communication strategies of the ID movement, they often also ignore scientific background, and instead carefully balance arguments from both sides, thereby lending credibility to the claim by ID proponents that there is a growing “controversy” over evolutionary theory.

— CSICOP, Understanding Bias in Coverage of Intelligent Design

So who wants to spring for free remedial courses in evolutionary biology, comparative genetics and natural history for any political reporter stupid enough to even bother talking to Hovind?

Taubenberger et al

2005-10-05T17:36:00.000-04:00

Alternate title: Weekly harbinger of doom, redux.

In this week's Nature, Taubenberger et al, 'Characterization of the 1918 influenza virus polymerase genes'...

In this week's Science, 'Hey, guys, y'know that virus that killed 50 million people? We just re-created it!'

Erm...

What could possibly go wrong?

The beauty of a perfect wall

2005-10-04T18:27:00.000-04:00

Been painting our bedroom, last few days. Or, rather, prepping it for painting.

I been 'round a while, painted more than a few things in my life. And when I do prep, I do prep. Take a few days at least for a decent sized room: rake the loose plaster out of cracks and seams against moulding, tighten up ducts coming into the walls, replace louvres as necessary, tape all the cracks and then mud the tape, use good wood filler in gaps in the moulding (old house, there's always lots of these), mud everything including every little ding as often as it takes to get a good buildup and fill in shrinkage, feather-sand 'til every edge is invisible, then go heavy with the white-tinted shellac to seal it all up tight...

Yeah, you wind up with nostrils full of plaster dust, a head full of alcohol fumes (from the shellac, people)... But durn, when you're done, there's nothing like a perfect wall. Bedroom's the last thing I've done in this place; always a challenge getting to it when there always seems to be someone or several someones asleep in there—young kids, that's how it goes...

Finally got to it, prep's almost done now, and we've decided it's going a really dramatic, dark red, white trim. Gonna be sharp.

Kinda neat

2005-10-04T09:15:00.000-04:00

From their vantage point in a clearing at Mbeli Bai in the northern Republic of Congo, Breuer and his colleagues spotted a female gorilla, called Leah, studying a pond before venturing a few steps into it. She then turned back and grabbed a handy metre-long branch from the bank, which she proceeded to use as a 'walking stick', repeatedly prodding the pond's bottom with it. After apparently assessing the depth of the pond with each prod, she eventually moved almost 10 metres from the shore.

...

The researchers saw another female, Efi, using the trunk of a dead shrub as a bridge to cross swampy ground. Efi ripped the 1.3-metre-long, 5-centimetre-wide section from the ground and leant on it like a crutch while she trawled the marshy ground for food. Then she laid it down like a plank and strode over it.

— Gorillas branch out into tool use in Nature

Weird tangents

2005-10-01T13:54:00.000-04:00

I've recently found myself building a system to simplify and partially automate the generation and cataloguing of artificial languages.

Yes, there was a (fairly) good reason. Had a sudden need to come up with a few such languages, in a little more detail than it's often done in literature. And when you're trying to come up with something that sounds halfway convincing, with various bits and pieces of the grammar that decline in various odd and sorta believable ways, it does get to be a bit of a pain to keep track of it all in a word processor or spreadsheet. And while cataloguing programs (like Shoebox) do exist, they all kinda assume the language is already there.

I wanted something I could tell: okay, do we have this word yet? Yes? Good. What is it? No? Okay, I need this word. Gimme some possiblilities. That one, thanks. Okay, that part of speech declines in a coupla different ways in this language. Here's one way how... remember that for next time, too. Now do it to this root, gimme the results, and I'll edit them for actual usability/realistic irregularity, and then you can catalogue it all for when I ask you next...

We now have that. Just possibly the most esoteric piece of software I've ever come up with.

It's also quite possible I'm insane.

Oh yeah?

2005-09-28T09:11:00.000-04:00

Amazon sez they figure I'm about 555 times more likely to purchase Tom Waits' Real Gone than are the rest of their 'members'.

Okay. They're onto me. I probably am.

But there's something annoying about this. I really don't like being predictable. Mindreading point-of-sale systems, I'm agin' 'em.

I'll take some comfort in the fact that they've either (i) not assessed or (ii) not admitted to assessing the probability I'll buy it from them, specifically.

Which is pretty low. Seein' as the locals have it.

Who the fuck asked them anyway?

2005-09-26T16:58:00.000-04:00

I'd ask ya to pardon the salty language, but that would be inconsistent, wouldn't it? Sure... write it... then say excuse me.

So fuck that. I mean it anyway. Good ancient, properly pithy word, that one. Gets the point across.

Still seem to be steaming, just a bit, 'bout a few things. And Ms. Benson over at Butterflies and Wheels is still on a good tear—the latest broadside being on the subject of the spurious authority granted certain mouthy religious types on the subject of just what the fuck (there I go again) the rest of us are allowed to say:

The assumption that the MCB knows 'what is unacceptable to Muslims' and is the bod to consult on the subject, when in fact lots of Muslims find the MCB itself 'unacceptable.' And the BBC's continued ongoing fostering of that very assumption by itself 'consulting' the MCB. And of course even more, the calm, smug, authoritarian assumption that Muslims or any religious group should be able to tell a secular national museum what not to display.

— Ophelia Benson, Imaginary Offense and Real Censorship

Yeah, it's pushy, smug, authoritarian. Always wondered about that, myself. And to take the point about religious groups commenting on art and what is and isn't 'offensive' to a larger issue: I'd say the presumption is of a piece with all the mouthy fundies trying to push their idiot creation myths into science class, and with the oh-so-full-of-himself pontiff pontificating on birth control, abortion, stem cell research, and everything else he feels like giving a properly mediaeval opinion upon. Sure: what we say matters because... umm... because our frickin' magical sky bunny says it does?

Honestly, who the fuck cares? Why does the media even quote these twits? What's their opinion worth if they haven't cracked a science textbook since sometime in the 1300s? And, for that matter, if they claim to hear voices from invisible sky fairies? The street person off his meds I walked by yesterday evening, screaming incoherent babble into my neighbours' flower beds is probably just about as qualified to pronounce upon science policy, reproductive technologies and education as is that lot.

I say, tell 'em to get stuffed. Come up with a coherent, rational opinion on the subject that suggests you take your advice from someone other than the voices in your head, and then we'll talk.

What she said

2005-09-21T09:41:00.000-04:00

That's not a group of people seeking understanding or enlightenment or further education or information or an interesting discussion—that's a group of aggressive over-confident truculent aggrieved fools who think they have a special pipeline to certainty and a right to challenge people who both know more than they do and eschew certainty. That's a pack of hostile theocrats out to dismantle every secular institution and branch of education in existence. Nothing will make them shut up, nothing will make them understand that their pipeline to certainty is a short rusty tube leading nowhere. Nothing will even make them perceive the irony of the fact that it is science, which actually revises its findings on the basis of evidence, that disavows certainty, while it is know-nothing zealots like them who do not, ever, revise their obstinate beliefs excuse me 'faith' who claim to 'know' that someone made the universe and who the someone is.

They piss me off.

— No wonder, Butterflies and Wheels

Had coffee with an old friend yestereve. We had a minor difference of opinion. He said he hoped when the idiot zealots come looking for our heads, they use bullets, as opposed to burning us at the stake. I said I hoped they'd just fuck off and die.

In a cranky mood this week.

Modern injuries

2005-09-20T08:26:00.000-04:00

I have all of these, now. Is that a problem?

Friendly reminder

2005-09-19T22:17:00.000-04:00

This is the captain. We may experience some slight turbulence and then... explode.

— Mal, Serenity

It's opening in 11 days.

Go Josh... err... Joss.

Quiet

2005-09-17T10:09:00.000-04:00

I know. Been a bit sick, a bit busy. Lovely wife had a really busy week; I hadda do a lot of taking-care-of-the-kids stuff.

Did find time to run a few Cat 5e cables (for 1000Base-T ethernet) through the house last week, tho'. First I've done; figure I'll be putting a few more in, when I can make the time. Wireless is nice 'n all, but Ethernet's faster (and yeah, I move stuff between boxes in my house a fair bit), and ya don't gotta wardriver proof it. And I'm pretty good with a fish tape anyway.

It amuses me

2005-09-17T10:03:00.000-04:00

... when annoying pop-up ads pop up (or under) only to complain that they can't run in your browser.

Really? No? Well... damn.

My incompatibility is calculated.

(Today's patentable idea: a telephone incompatible with telemarketers' autodial systems.)

Could we give you a copy of Atlas Shrugged to piss on?

2005-09-10T22:08:00.000-04:00

... like the Road to Serfdom idea too, mind you. Much more to the point than my 'Friedman's a wanker' t-shirt idea.

New Get Your War On online today. And there was much rejoicing.

Cheating again

2005-09-09T23:09:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I suck. Keep saying a certain manuscript's gonna be ready soon. And it never is.

What's worse: I think I'm pushing the excerpt limit. Can't keep sticking stuff in here, and still flog it for publication.

So I gotta cheat again. This totally unrelated work (PDF) from something like a decade ago is all I got around I can conveniently stick in here right now.

But yeah, things are progressing. Really. Good things happening, in painful fits and starts, but frequent ones, at least. And yeah, it's gonna be ready soon. Honest.

Delightful blasphemy

2005-09-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

Spent a bitta time yestereve setting up a T21 (Thinkpad model I've become quite fond of) grabbed off Ebay for a good price. This is a bit silly, as I might just wind up selling it again before long—gig I bought it for is the one that went south earlier this week—but we'll see, I guess; is other stuff I might be able to use it for. Don't really have a laptop that's all together, right now, otherwise.

Headed over to Digital Blasphemy for the wallpaper—was in the mood for a bit of escapism, after a week of contracts, invoices, other uglier paperwork. And wound up grabbing this to gaze upon while working...

Purty, no? Love this guy's eye for things.

Still here

2005-09-08T09:51:00.000-04:00

... just having a kinda nutty few weeks. Picked up another contract... lost that contract... after doing much running around and tooling up to be ready to satisfy it... Now waiting on some paperwork for another gig... And generally running around again. Semi-employed, now, and doing a lot of waiting, paperwork, shuffling things 'round...

Ah well. Haven't had anything much like a vacation in a very long time anyway. This is sorta like that. Only more stressful.

Mmmmm...

2005-09-04T08:44:00.000-04:00

Gorgeous, cool, clear morning. Breeze pouring through the study window is cold enough that it's ixnay on bare feet again (I'm a sandal guy, much of the summer). You can taste the autumn in the air.

Autumn's really my thing. Ain't built for summer. Always feel mozzy and muddled through heat and humidity; can't keep a real drive at anything going 'til we get somewhere under 19 degrees C.

Morning like this is perfect for conquering the world.

A word or two from 1886

2005-09-03T20:25:00.002-04:00

Bizarre. Been reading a lot of nattering about the lawless conditions in the disaster area. Some of what's going on, sure, it's over the top. But did I really hear people proudly chiding (presumably from their nice, comfy, non-flooded homes) about looting in New Orleans, just now?

A word or two, from 1886:

What is hateful...is not rebellion but the despotism which induces the rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men, who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitioners that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone.

— Wilfrid Laurier, commenting on the Riel Rebellion

Or, translating for the 21st century:

After two days without fresh water, my kids clutching at their throats in the heat of the gulf summer, figuring I've got maybe another day, tops, before I'm too dehydrated to piss, and still wondering if anyone in the rest of the world gives a rat's ass I'm up to my ankles in sewage, you bet your ass I'd loot a Safeway.

And honey, you would, too.

Seriously. This ain't no time to be commenting on anyone's manners. Apart from the twits shooting at rescue crews (now there's a survival strategy), I'm at a loss to figure why anyone gives a shit what anyone still in there is doing with their apparently ample free time. Get 'em out of there, is all.

(All that said, I really should say something about the good people who are actually getting it done now. Something like: good for you.)

Been quiet...

2005-09-02T22:38:00.000-04:00

...I know.

Apologies. I'm fine. Just busy. And a bit stunned.

Bodies rotting in the heat. All a bit much.

New Orleans is sinking

2005-08-31T16:31:00.000-04:00

(Alternate title: Hindsight 20/20)

Substantive article over at Scientific American from 2001 on the subject, on why the coastline is degrading and why it's worth trying to put the delta right.

Sad day.

Cleaner fusion

2005-08-30T12:09:00.000-04:00

Okay, it sounds like it's even farther from viable than what they're planning on doing at ITER, but a Russian team is now reporting they've come up with a cleaner way to do fusion...

Neat. Nice to see the neutron flux might not be, after all, an unavoidable thing. And nice to know the folks I read saying so earlier weren't all about wishful thinking.

Paul Myers walks into a bar...

2005-08-30T00:33:00.000-04:00

... and writes a far more worthy piece than some twit apparently being paid by the Washington Post to do so.

Justice would be that Myers' piece winds up being more widely-read than the ill-considered nonsense the Post hack drew a cheque for. Hereby doing my bit to make it so. Go. Read.

I'll be flying to the DC area in a few hours. Memorizing Ms. Jenkins' mugshot. If I see her, I'll make a point of laughing. Derisively. And loudly.

Home bleak home

2005-08-29T21:10:00.000-04:00

In the

course of redecorating my study a week or two back now, I made a few changes to the hanging art. Wasn't so much a matter that the stuff that was there wasn't lovely. But after I'd painted the walls a deep, dark blue, some of what had worked with lesser colours didn't work quite so well any more.

As a for-instance, the lovely little photo to the left—a framed print of which, before the redecorating, hung behind me when I sat at my desk—looked, well, a bit like black on midnight next to the new paint. Little too dark for the overall scheme, which I figure now calls for the bright and zany, art-wise (see, if you're wearing a really, really dark suit, oftentimes, we're talking bright funky tie; it's much the same principle).

This hurts a bit, tho'. Thing is, that's a photo I shot must be most of a decade ago now. Still more than a bit fond of it, and I've always felt bleak is what I do best...

Fun fact: a friend once, in a moment of single malt-induced madness, asked me to shoot his wedding. My portfolio at the time, as you might expect from the sort of work I was doing, and the landscape in which I was doing it, mostly consisted of (i) accident scenes, (ii) house fires, and (iii) land-and-cloudscapes kinda like today's subject.

So I ask him: umm... so you genuinely want your nuptials to look like this?

He declined. Probably wisely.

Anyway, seein' as I've nowhere to hang it any more, I figured I'd post it. So here it is. Click for larger file. 150kB-ish.

Let us again praise great software

2005-08-25T13:16:00.000-04:00

Today's honoree: Gaim.

See, there's this annoying thing going on in the online world. Many, many chat clients, many networks, many protocols.

For us consulting types, this frequently means: Client A likes Yahoo. Client B likes AIM. They'd all kinda like you to be around on chat, now and then... So you could wind up with a lotta crap running behind the firewall you'd rather wasn't there. Many little bits of software by many occasionally shifty organizations, many of them either not much into security or not much into jes' being plain polite about things.

Enter Gaim. Gaim does all the major protocols, all the major networks, all in one client. And it's open-source, so there's no nagging ads, no silly chrome, no spyware, none of that rot. Just connectivity.

Chat, fundamentally, is an evil. But a necessary evil, in my biz. (Holds up product, smiles for camera)... With Gaim, at least, it's that little bit less evil. Download your copy today.

You've probably been in tech too long

2005-08-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

... when you find yourself eating cold Chinese take-out... and liking it.

Today's WayLay

2005-08-23T13:33:00.000-04:00

I think I'm in love (warning: Salon thingy... might need ad clickthrough if you're not a subscriber).

'Reality TV'. Bleagggh. Urgggh. Argggh. Thpppt.

Hums Gilbert and Sullivan... 'They'd none of them be missed/They'd none of them be missed...'

Memories in the making

2005-08-21T16:23:00.000-04:00

As it turned, after all, into a lovely sunny afternoon, and it is, after all, just a ten minute walk, I took our lovely daughter to the local Exhibition thingy this aft, took her on all the rides that didn't scare her... or me. And managed, for a few hours, not to think about deadlines and letters and forms and account balances.

Good call; fun stuff. She's four, so it's all the little kid rides—carousels, little trains and cars, bees and flying elephants where you push on a bar to make them go up or down, a big air-filled trampoline, a two-stories-high slide thingy. Some of it, Daddy has to go with her, somehow squish a six-foot frame into various fibreglass and metal contraptions not really built to that scale.

Memories in the making, I guess; she obviously had fun. But damn...$70 over two hours, and that's almost all rides, with Daddy being smart, walking past the carnies running the various 'spend $5 to win an inflatable toy worth 50 cents' things... Sure, this is like mandatory childhood memory stuff, and I'm not so much griping, but they're serious money sieves, these things.

The mouthy guy in the hat

2005-08-20T05:12:00.000-04:00

Well, I note Il Ratzinger is still on about how secularism is responsible for all the evils in the world... And, apparently, liberalism is a 'totalitarianism'.

Note also the now-standard equating of secularism with nihilism, the 'dictatorship of relativism', et al. Yeah, yeah, keep at it, hat-boy. We got your number.

Ratzinger, dahlink, it's not that the secular world believes nothing. It's that we don't believe what you do. But I'm betting both you and your PR office know this perfectly well.

Putz. Open question to the press: I note this guy gets column inches every coupla days to attack the Enlightenment. Who are you quoting who actually stands up for it?

Jes' asking.

Excerpt

2005-08-18T12:50:00.000-04:00

From the manuscript eternally a few weeks from completion, another excerpt from recent edits (PDF).

No, it's not done. Sorry. Still focusing on staying in business, paying the bills, wild and crazy guy that I am.

Still renovating

2005-08-17T15:28:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't died or anything. Just really busy. In the fashion of all home projects, the work on the office mushroomed into its own little industry. Wound up, in total, outside the repairs to the tile grout on the floor above: repairing the ceiling, repairing one of the walls, repainting the ceiling, walls, and trim, replacing the curtains ('cos they didn't go with the new paint), replacing the light figure ('cos it was ugly), replacing the outlets and switch ('cos they were kinda ugly too, and really didn't go with the new paint either), and finally refinishing the floor ('cos it needed it, and hey, at that point, you might as well).

It looks lovely now. But damn, I gotta stop getting into things like these. Was still painting trim at five in the morning, a few nights ago. No, I'm not kidding.

Anyway, the goods news is: one more coat of urethane on the floor, and I'm done. And it really does look gorgeous. Very, very dark blue ('Indigo' or 'Noir', Pratt & Lambert call it) walls, contrasting with white trim and ceiling, sheer white drapes, freshly finished oak floor. Ver' nice.

Manual labourer boy

2005-08-15T00:41:00.000-04:00

Crazy few days. Ran back down to Sandbanks/Prince Edward County Thursday to offer moral support and company to my lovely daughter, whom my wife informs me is being treated like dirt by her endlessly awful cousin^*—this being necessary staffing, as my lovely wife is having trouble dealing with this with a six month old on the other arm.

Turns out it's every bit worth it, for quality time swimming and canoeing with a grateful four-year-old, but now I'm making up the time. Today, a whole and very long day of sanding, priming, and painting my study, and regrouting, water-proofing and caulking tile in the bathroom above it, after an exploratory ceiling opening to deal with some water damage begun last week with la famille absent turned up medium-bad news (medium bad is tile repair; serious bad would have been plumbing issues in the whirlpool bath's jets, since this would have required much more opening up of tiles and ceilings et al to get at them). It's gotta get done as the contents of my study are now all over the house, and besides this being very unchildproof, I need my study for work.

Midnight rolls around, kids are in bed, and most of the stuff that can get done is done, and I realize I haven't eaten. So it's out to Kettleman's, the truly awesome 24-hour bagel place a few blocks over that makes a mean smoked meat sandwich on their handrolled Montreal-style (boiled then baked) bagels.

This is fun and necessary, but it'a a time warp. 'Cause now it's me in a pair of beat-up jeans and a plain white t-shirt, freshly showered but with paint flecks all over my hands, looking for all the world like manual labourer boy just off the night shift. And I'm thinkin' damn, me lookin' scruffy, a deli at midnight, fifteen to twenty years ago this could have been me coming out of the tail end of any number of manual labourer and/or journalism jobs (trust me, they're not always so far apart).

Ah well. 'Least I can guess I'm amicable looking as a labourer type. The girl at the cash is friendly, and the sandwich is just what the doctor ordered. And now it's 1 am, and we're back to the work I actually get paid for.

Oh... And seein' as there was some damage to the plaster details near the top, and the walls hadn't been done in a while anyway, I also redid the study walls—bravely painting them a truly vivid, deep navy india ink colour, courtesy Pratt & Lambert, with trim and ceiling white. And it came out frickin' gorgeous, if I do say so myself.

( ^* You could be forgiven for thinking this sounds a mite indulgent... But we're talking a seriously awful cousin here—as in years of therapy awful—and the poor little thing had been trapped in a cottage with the little (ahem) for most of a week, very inadvisedly, as it turns out. So it was called for; trust me on this. )

Yeah, baby

2005-08-09T11:13:00.000-04:00

Further to earlier pining, my copy of Red Sails in the Sunset finally got here today.

Yeah, baby.

Bought journalism, circa 1945

2005-08-08T07:46:00.000-04:00

From the history file, a little reminder that seeing reporters being used by those in power to attack folks and stories they don't like is nothing new. Amy and David Goodman are petitioning the Pulitzer board to revoke William L. Laurence's prize over just such shenanigans, at the end of World War II.

Laurence covered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disputing the accounts of the entirely ballsy independent reporter Wilfred Burchett out of Hiroshima on the horrors of radiation poisoning. Burchett, who rode a train for 30 hours, and then walked into what remained of the city, published in the London Daily Express.:

In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

Laurence, in the pages of the New York Times, disputed this, dismissing it as Japanese propaganda. It later emerged Laurence was on the pay of the war department.

There is nothing controversial about the notion of radiation poisoning today, for the record.

Phew

2005-08-08T05:59:00.000-04:00

I suppose everybody in the world's probably commenting on this, right now, but I can't help myself.

Good to see. And I'm ever so happy to be proved wrong. Think it must have been Saturday morning I heard a radio report to the effect that they were still down there, and it was going to be a while before help got to them, and thinking damn, that's it then, and what a way to die—aren't a lot of actually good ways to go, but suffocating in a cold, dark sealed chamber on the bottom of the ocean, that's definitely way down my list.

Nice from the international cooperation angle, too. Downright warms the heart of this Cold war baby.

(One minor quibble: is it just me, or are those 'Last gasp' headlines jes' a little tasteless?)

Prince Edward County

2005-08-08T05:46:00.000-04:00

Spent yestereve in a cottage on the shore of Prince Edward County—a sizeable island (though only by virtue of the canal cut across the narrow strip of land joining it to the mainland) on the North shore of Lake Ontario.

The area's unique in Ontario in climate, vegetation, and bird life—not sure if it's all or entirely a very big sandbar piled up in the lake—but it's heavy on the rolling dunes, anyway, hence the odd vegetation. And then, thanks to this, the fact that it's a fair way south, and the fact that it's a good place to stop after crossing Lake Ontario, the bird life tends to be unusual. Found myself wishing I'd brought some field guides—could identify neither the big, pretty compound leaved monstrosity towering over the cottage on one side nor the jay-like bird scampering about in it and its neighbours.

Nice. Wished I coulda stayed longer (as my wife is now doing). Having to work sucks.

Narcissism

2005-08-05T02:42:00.000-04:00

(Alternate title: 'See... I can too take physical form')

Did some self-portraiture this aft. And, 'cos as far as I'm concerned, ya can't have too many pictures of me on this site, a few of the results are to the right.

I have an excuse: I had to come up with a few headshots for a new web gig I picked up (how images of me are supposed to be good for traffic, I dunno, but it's in the contract), and as the Daddy in the family unit, there really aren't a lot of recent pictures of yours truly on file. Mostly 'cos, when the cameras are on, it's usually me operating them.

So I set up a tripod, fired up the mini-DV, mugged in front of it a few minutes, sucked the footage into one of my Debian boxes (mini-DV cameras are all digital, and have Firewire on the camera, making this very easy), and grabbed some stills from it. Fine for web stuff (at a resolution of 720x480 pixels), and less trouble than messing around with a self-timer on a still camera.

Not bad, if I do say so myself. Though next time, I guess I gotta keep in mind that white shirts and the sun do not a happy exposure make. Ya'd never know I used actually to get paid for shooting photos. Think I'm just gonna claim I was actually trying to get that weird otherworldly glow thing going.

(That's our crabapple tree in the background, by the way—along with one of our more seriously out of control flower beds. If I look nervous, it's because I'm afraid that, at any moment, the Virgina Creeper that's been staging a determined invasion from over the south fence might actually try to strangle me.)

Training for the Iron Daddy competition

2005-08-03T13:45:00.000-04:00

So we've got one of those cool MEC frame-pack child carriers. Essentially a heavy-duty frame-pack style thing into which one can put a child.

Little guy's really taking to it. Sometimes, there's not much else that calms him, but putting him in it, walking 'round the neighbourhood a while.

As he's now probably somewhere just south of 30 lbs (or so I guess; his last paediatrician visit was almost two months ago now, and he was 24 lbs then), this makes for a reasonably serious pack. Do this daily, for a good 20 minutes, and it's got to have some conditioning value, methinks.

Little guy's obviously just making sure his Dad stays healthy 'til he moves out, is all.

And, announced at about the same time...

2005-07-31T09:55:00.000-04:00

... another, smaller than Pluto, but with a small moon.

2003 EL61. Distance 51 AU. Mass approx 4×10²¹ kg, or 32 percent of Pluto's.

Quite the week.

Days of miracles and wonders

2005-07-31T09:16:00.000-04:00

New Kuiper belt object discovered. Designated 2003UB313. Distance approx. 97 AU. 'Definitely bigger than Pluto'.

Damn.

The press, of course, is now due to do several thousand more column inches on nomenclature—whether this is the 'tenth planet', whether Pluto, Sedna, and this latest iceball ('Xena', I hear, perhaps), are properly to be called 'planets'. Which, gee, is of course the most interesting aspect of the story.

Regardless, the Kuiper belt just got to be a slightly more interesting place.

For reference, Pluto's mean orbital distance is about 39.5 AU. And depending a bit on surface brightness, this object may be 1.5 times Pluto's size.

Carburetors, you say?

2005-07-29T21:50:00.000-04:00

I'm either in too cranky a mood, or they're really not that funny this year, so I can't excerpt one or two in particular that really made me laugh...

Still, it would seem simply wrong not to mention this: the results for the 2005 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest—this being a contest celebrating intentionally bad fiction writing—are out. If you've never heard of this thing, just to give you an idea what you'll find if you click that link, the winning entry has a besotted swain comparing his lover's breasts to... yes, I'm afraid so... dual carburetors.

That really should be funny, seems to me. Must just be my mood.

About this blog's title

2005-07-29T06:26:00.000-04:00

... or, 'adventures in entrenched errors'.

Okay, folk keep asking me about this. Seeing as it's been a year since I set this thing up, and I'm still doing it, I guess it's time I explained.

C₈H₁₀N₄HO₂O₂ is an entrenched error. I'd meant to register the molecular formula for caffeine, did a search on 'caffeine formula' at Google, and this page, from Ellingwood's The American Materia Medica (1919) was the first one up. Which, as you can see, gives C₈H₁₀N₄HO₂O₂ for that molecule.

I registered the blog, got writing. Didn't look too closely at the formula. It looked right, on casual inspection (I do have a few years of organic chemistry; my degree's in biology), and really, the blog was just a whim at the time. I'm a pretty serious web guy, among other things, been running sites since about 1995 (and currently run four, in total, including the blog, one of my own outside the blog, one I get paid to do, and one I do on a volunteer basis), just kinda figured it'd be interesting to see what the 'push-button publishing' stuff I'd been hearing about was like. Never really expected to keep at it too long.

Thing is, as you might just know, the usual formula given for caffeine is C₈H₁₀N₄O₂. I noticed that when I got 'round to building the ray-traced model currently in the background of the top of the page. But by then, I had a fair bit of material up, and migrating's a bit of a pain. I keep telling myself I will eventually move to a Movable Type system, move the content over, but I never seem to get 'round to it; it's still on the to do list. So that formula's still up there. I suppose it's also possible there's some sense in which it's actually right; still wondering why the Ellingwood book reports it this way. Some complex the molecule forms in aqueous solution? Maybe? Should probably ask a real chemist someday.

As to why that title: yes, I'm pretty heavily into caffeine. My delivery system of choice is coffee—usually espresso, sometimes in various latte/capuccino type things, sometimes all on its own—and strong, light roasts in a French press are also fun. There are, in my home, as of this posting, two pump-driven espresso machines (with steam wands for capuccinos et al), a stove top/campfire top portable espresso pot, two drip coffee machines, a french press, and three (count 'em, three) grinders. I keep them pretty busy.

Excerpt

2005-07-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

Okay. I know I promised some of you a certain manuscript would be in shape for reading about now. Or even some time ago now, for that matter.

Thing is, I'm really supposed to be doing about three or four other things right this moment. And yeah, it's stuff that matters. Staying employed kinda stuff. You know... stuff I gotta get done if my kids are gonna eat? That kinda thing?

But I've been far from dry lately. So here's an excerpt (PDF) from the new material in the edits. The whole thing should be along in just a little longer, honest. Just as soon as I can carve a bit more time free to finish off the last of it.

Got quoted in the Times

2005-07-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

Yes, as in The New York Times. Neat. Thanks Ms. Napoli.

You don't s'pose this means I'm going to have to sketch a more properly coherent, detailed position on the relative merits of the shuttle program versus more nervy, innovative stuff, do you? Suppose, maybe, Homer Hickam would be willing to help me out?

Yikes.

Ya done good, guys

2005-07-26T13:07:00.000-04:00

The US today launched its first manned space flight since the February 2003 Columbia disaster.

At 10.39am local time (3.39 BST), the countdown began and space shuttle Discovery, faulty fuel gauge fixed, launched from Cape Canaveral, in Florida.

Piggy-backed on its giant, rust-coloured fuel tank, Discovery and its seven crew rocketed into a partially cloudy sky in the fleet's 114th launch since Columbia left Earth on April 12 1981.

— Discovery blasts off into space, in The Guardian

Yeah, okay, there's still lots of room for muttering that these heavy, creaky shuttlebuses to low orbit are eating up a lot of money, attention and time from the program that's sent men to the moon and robots into the Kuiper belt... but said griping aside, it's still great to see them back on the horse that threw them. Go, Discovery!

Brains... braaaaains...

2005-07-26T09:28:00.000-04:00

It was the Bad Brains' glorious I Against I last night. Highly recommended.

Yeah, I'm a white kid from rural Ontario. But people, these are the Brains. Trust me.

Possibly related: a beautiful thing happened to some of the edits to le manuscrit immortel yestereve... finally. That is, they became obviously worth the trouble. Or so I say, anyway. Excerpt probably coming soon. Dunno if H.R. and Dr. Know should get any credit or not, but I'm in a charitable mood this morning, so I'm gonna say so anyway.

Words to live by

2005-07-25T13:11:00.000-04:00

The point is, you see, that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.

— Ford Prefect, in Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything

I'm worried about Fafnir

2005-07-22T11:55:00.000-04:00

... but I'm still laughin'.

Here's to those who, when they go mad, do so entertainingly.

Taps

2005-07-22T10:40:00.000-04:00

Further to previous, the laptop is pretty much dead.

Cleaned it out, powered it back up, all looked good, for about 20 seconds...

And then it looks like something analog went south in the video subsystem. Screen started flickering unhappily, going an unpleasant shade of white...

Doesn't look good. Damn. It was a nice ole' T41 I'd grown quite fond of.

(Plays 'Taps', mournfully...)

Oh, my

2005-07-21T10:32:00.000-04:00

Okay. This really isn't fair...

But damn, it's funny.

Believe I've mentioned previously, I've got this thing about really, really, really hostile reviews. They amuse me. The sheer nastiness and hauteur a thoroughly pissed-off critic can muster, that's a beautiful thing, in its own misanthropic little way.

And so, for your enjoyment, I present Tom Eaton's deliciously consistently nasty review of the latest Rowling book*.

Look at this thing. Sheer perfection. Not a single paragraph (unless the byline counts) that doesn't take a new swipe. Favourite excerpt, methinks:

Still, when they’re not being human filth, they are devouring the apparently endless sludge of platitude, cliché and middle-class smugness dished up by Rowling, which is better than them licking razor-blades and throwing hand-grenades at poor people. Enter the “at least they’re reading” school of thought, clung to by parents who have clearly long since surrendered their parenting duties to teachers and television.

It is a philosophy that has spawned a curious piece of logic: if you get children reading schlock, they’ll grow into adults who will explore the classics. This is rather like hoping that if you get your child addicted to crack, he’ll quickly develop a fine nose for wines and a taste for haute cuisine.

— Tom Eaton, Buckets of banality, a dash of honey, now turn this turgid tome to money!

Ouch.

Now, for the record, no, I don't really think this of Rowling. And Eaton's hauteur, in this case, smells strongly of a certain anti-escapist snobbery I and others have noted previously. I think fantasy's got its place (obviously) and can certainly justify the cost of the paper it's printed on, done artfully enough. And my opinion of Rowling, specifically is that's certainly better than average children's fare, judging from what little I've read, really. Think it was a Guardian critic (can't seem to find her this morning) who said it best, saying roughly: listen, they're not bad. Not great, but not bad. And if everyone hadn't been jumping up and down and saying these books are the greatest thing since sliced bread, we'd still have the perspective to say so.

Also, for the record, I actually lined up this time at midnight. Yep. I did. Though, honestly, this was only because (follow this) (i) my lovely wife has been following the series pretty closely, doesn't want some loose-lipped twit or other to give away who gets killed before she can read it for herself, and so (ii) preordered for pickup at the crazy midnight 'opening' at a funky little toy store down the street so she can rush through it quickly enough to make this unlikely, but then (iii) conked out early (she's not nocturnal like me), and muttered, sleepily, honey, could you please go pick it up, thanks?

And so, dutiful husband that I am, I did, notwithstanding that I'm about as tired as a lot of other people of hearing about somebody who's outselling every other novelist on the freakin' planet (oh no, no jealousy here, dahlink). And saw a line full (musta been a few hundred, I'd say) of people, waiting at midnight to read a book, of all things. And thus concur, roughly, with those saying: that's probably a good thing, even if the prose is a bit flat, the plot a bit predictable (six books in, same characters, go fig it's getting a bit repetitive), the whole thing getting a bit old...

Okay. Okay. Enough slashing at tall poppies. Haven't read it yet. Probably won't get to it for some weeks at best, so can't say. Leaving the subject, now.

(*Holly points out, perceptively as always, it really is no such thing.)

Fussing, fiddling

2005-07-21T09:50:00.000-04:00

About every third time I crack open The Manuscript That Wouldn't Die to cross off one more thing from the to do list, I wind up messing with something else entirely.

Almost entirely dialogue. I really obsess over dialogue, if I let myself. Keep doing these stupid, fiddly little things to scenes, here and there, convinced that naw, that's not quite right... she/he would say it this way...

Thing is, it was certainly arguable some of the scenes getting said treatment did benefit from the attention—and each time I'm sure it's at least an incremental improvement. But then, there's this little matter of priorities. And in honesty, I strongly suspect I'm bumping up against the law of diminishing returns, in a lot of places.

But I can't seem to help myself. It's like scratching an itch or something.

Gonna have to get some discipline here. Pick next thing on the list. Open file. Find that thing. Fix that thing. Save the file. Close the file. Cross thing off list. Repeat. Don't even look anywhere else. Do fiddly polishing stuff, if you still must, after you've finished with the list of stuff you actually know must get done.

Discipline sucks.

(Might note: there's a very similiar phenomenon in the world of software development. It's a truism that the developers never actually want to release the software: they'd keep right on polishing and refining 'til doomsday, if permitted. An architect with whom I used to work used to say 'There comes a time in the life of every project when you must shoot the developers and ship the code.')

Red Sails in the Sunset

2005-07-21T09:47:00.000-04:00

A propos of an earlier post, in the end, I hadda order it used. Seems it's out of print on this continent, at least.

Hell, I only had several years when it woulda been so much easier. Procrastination, it's a bad thing. Cross your fingers for me, please.

What I'll be missing over the next few weeks

2005-07-21T09:43:00.000-04:00

Mentioning it for you Ottawa denizens: The chamber music festival starts Saturday. My daughter's violin teacher just reminded me.

Always seem to be missing stuff like this, lately. Kids, work, sleep, you know. Gotta try to catch a few things this year, tho'. Mebbe if I can talk our young violinist into coming, it'll be a bit more practical.

Doh!

2005-07-20T12:36:00.000-04:00

Poured a substantial portion of a coffee into a laptop this morning.

Was working out of a coffee shop, when it happened. Figured it was a gorgeous morning, why go sit in a hermetically-sealed high tech office? So I stopped, fired up wireless, sat down to answer some email...

And then splash. Woman who'd served it to me looks at it, says, "That doesn't look good."

Nope. Doesn't. Good news: hard drive and motherboard will probably survive. Bad news: keyboard might not. Guess we'll see.

I've been in this biz so long (and others before it involving laptops and their ilk) and this is the first time I've done this. But damn, I did it good when I got 'round to it.

No, context doesn't help

2005-07-19T10:49:00.000-04:00

(From the sent mail file... with hopes Michel won't mind that I take bits of the weirdness that always seems to happen when we correspond and excerpt it for public consumption, now and then.

And no, knowing the context of this probably wouldn't help.)

I keep thinking, I need to write some of those 'well blow me down' type expressions. You know the ones—the ones ninety-year old great grammas who've just discovered their husband had a sex change just before their marriage use? 'Well dip me in castor oil and use me as a chimney brush for Inco's highest waste stack.' The kind of entirely incoherently weird thing only someone who's been through the great depression, both world wars, and the several years during which the Osmonds had their own TV show could formulate, and probably only because either malnutrition during the depression and/or excessive exposure to the Osmonds ate holes in their brain resembling those left by Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease.

But whatever it is this actually takes, I don't think I've got the circuitry for it. Keep trying, but so far all I've come up with is:

'Well dip me in honey, roll me in oats, wrap me in cellophane, print the nutritional information and incredients on the side, and sell me for 49 cents.'

... and ...

'Well shave off all my body hair, crazy-glue the pelt of a dead fox to my back*, and chase me through the English countryside blowing a hunting horn.'

... aaand the ever popular ...

'Well break into my home, murder my significant other with your artificial limb, frame me for it, and chase me around the country with a posse of several hundred state troopers, all while uttering staggeringly vapid monologues.'

No. Guess I ain't got it.

(*Yes, it looks like dead animals and glue are becoming a recurring theme with me. Apparently the therapy isn't working.)

Visuals

2005-07-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

Also from Nature today, a gas giant discovered in a triple star system:

Konacki's planet is in the triple-star system known as HD 188753, which lies about 149 light years from Earth, in the Cygnus constellation. The star at the centre of the system is very much like our own Sun. Its planet, which is at least 14% larger than Jupiter, orbits the star once every 80 hours or so, at a distance of about 8 million kilometres, a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Two more stars, whirling tightly around each other, orbit the central sun at a distance that would put them between Saturn and Uranus in our own Solar System.

— The triple sunset that should not exist, Nature news, 13 July 2005

Yeah, the ramifications for current ideas about solar system formation are interesting—but I'm more struck by the thought of what the view must be like. And it looks like someone at Nature feels the same way: follow the link for a movie (though the one playing in my head is much better).

Looking for grains of truth in old legends

2005-07-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

Nature's got a neat bit today about a research project using aboriginal tales of a malevolent spirit called a'yahos to suss out damage done by an earthquake that occured in the Seattle area around 900 AD. See North American folklore points to dangers for Seattle.

No, not really

2005-07-18T10:01:00.000-04:00

Someone just asked, a propos of an earlier post, whether I'm seriously losing my hair and/or wearing a rug.

Answer: no to both, not so much as I've noticed—the 'Herr Pieszc' bit was just an odd bit of randomness—though, I suppose it might well reflect not entirely unreasonable anxieties: my maternal grandfather did eventually go quite bald, and my understanding is male pattern baldness is an autosomal trait, with the gene acting dominant in males, so my odds are probably about one in four I'm carrying his... So far, at any rate, the odd hair's gone a bit grey, is all.

And, for the record, if I do start to lose it, there's no way I'm gluing a dead squirrel up there. Hell, I'd shave it all off, first.

As to what I look like these days, why, just like this.

Oh, okay, no, not really...

No, of course not. That's an old picture.

Jonesing

2005-07-17T23:00:00.000-04:00

Realized just now that I haven't heard the Oils' masterful Red Sails in the Sunset in several years now.

Thing is, my (very well-worn) tape (yes, tape; it was another era, people) got munged a long time ago, and I kept saying: oh, I'll see it in a store somewhere on disk, and I'll grab it.

That hasn't happened. And now I'm almost physically shaking with the need to hear 'Jimmy Sharman's Boxers' and 'Who Can Stand in the Way?'... This album used to be bread and butter for me; got no idea how I made it this far.

Time to make a phone call, I guess.

I'll be here all week, folks

2005-07-15T17:07:00.000-04:00

In an IM chat with a colleague just now, he asks me what I'd call my hair (as to why, no, it didn't make much sense in context either). I responded, within about five seconds...

"Toupee Shakur"

...aaaaand...

"Rugsputin"

... and some minutes later, also came up with "Herr Pieszc".

Yeah, I think I'm pretty funny.

The trouble with poet

2005-07-14T10:11:00.000-04:00

... is how do you know it's deceased?

Stick to priest.

This Sondheim interlude is brought to you by the good people at The Scientific Indian.

Saw Sweeney Todd in Arlington in reprise lo these many years ago with my lovely wife. Fun show. A bit disconcerting, tho', to be warned that sitting too close to the stage 'might get messy'.

It's coming

2005-07-13T14:27:00.000-04:00

I know I promised certain old friends I know read this they'd get a look at the manuscript I've been shopping around a while right after I'd done some necessary work on it, and that it shouldn't take too long. This is just to say to you folk: it's coming, I'm sorry it's taken longer than I told you.

There's a type of dialogue in it that's particularly labour-intensive—in which one of the speakers is learning a language, and that language doesn't, actually, exist, so keeping it believable in these scenes is serious work—half the work's keeping the language itself believable, half is the usual complicated method acting of trying to keep speakers in character—in this case in a situation in which mutual comprehension between the speakers is particularly constrained, and the POV character itself is having a hell of a time working out what's going on. Work on that stuff is proving painfully slow. And while I've finally settled on some of the larger structural issues I'd identified some weeks back, working the necessary modifications smoothly back into the narrative is delicate work.

Another week, probably, before I've got the still rough but cohesive long version I'm happy to let a few eyes view. Provided I stay healthy this time.

Typical male

2005-07-13T11:49:00.000-04:00

... mostly, anyway.

So I took the BBC's Brain sex test thingy, following a link at Judith Berman's LiveJournal.

Mostly, no real surprises. It seems to think I'm a typical but not extreme male, at 50 overall toward the male end of the scale, which is apparently average for my sex. Extremely strong spatial ability. Probably nothing surprising there, given my background.

The one really odd result: it found I'm an unusually accurate observer of emotional states in others (9/10, apparently). Unsurprisingly, this is thought to be a female trait, though it looks like their own averages don't actually support this (both sexes average 6.6).

Cool. That's gotta be useful for something.

Other odd thing: a finger length metric which kinda contradicts the theories. It's supposed to indicate testoesterone levels in the womb during your development, and this is, apparently, generally higher for males, highest for those with lots of brothers.

I've got one sister, two brothers. But my fingers, for what it's worth, suggest lower prenatal testosterone exposure than is average even for females.

Go fig. Averages and deviations, you know.

Breathing again

2005-07-13T03:46:00.000-04:00

... provisionally, anyway. But aren't we all.

Yeah yeah, I'm feeling a bit morbid this morning. Natural enough side-effect, I expect, of reading through the rest of John M. Barry's history of the 1918 pandemic while in the throes of a thoroughly unpleasant (if vastly less unpleasant and deadly) viral invasion yourself. Don't you just hate it when it actually hurts to breathe? I mean, I really like breathing.

Anyway. It seems to have stopped hurting. Life goes on.

As to the Barry book: it was comprehensive, well-paced, but the prose style got a bit grating by the end. He had this recurring motif: 'This was influenza, only influenza'... which could be pretty dramatic applied to some of the more grisly and dramatic things that virus happened to do. But it did get on my nerves, after a while.

In fairness, I think the basic trouble is the horror of this thing is pretty hard to grapple with for anyone. Barry tried hard to do so, tried to work some of the more effective old staples of horror writing to make it fly—the leaden, understated sentence summing up each new misery, dropped onto the end of a more descriptive paragraph with the air of a coup de grâce, the leading 'It would get worse, still...' or equivalent at the end of each chapter leading to the next bit of nastiness—and, naturally, it comes off as a bit melodramatic—but then, the pandemic was one dramatic bit of business. Not sure what else he was supposed to do.

As to my own reactions, as a guy who's spent a bit of time in rural areas, I found the descriptions of what it did to Inuit and Amerindian populations in Alaska and Labrador particularly chilling... the image of being in a tiny, isolated settlement, having that thing tear through, killing just about everybody, leaving no-one strong enough actually to keep wood on the fire, after which the dogs tear up the corpses, that's got a level of terror for me somehow more unsettling even than the scenes from urban areas—piled corpses and mass graves recalling the worst of the plague years.

Anyway: full marks for the scholarship, which was comprehensive. Full marks for the narrative arch, which was positively self-indulgent (and I'm all for that) at following numerous side-currents in the lives of the researchers trying to work out what the disease agent was. And suspended judgement for the prose style. Like I said, I don't know what else you're supposed to do with this subject. Criticizing it as a bit heavy on the pipe organ music almost seems petty. Like complaining to the captain of the Titanic as he tearfully addresses his crew for the last time that he's overacting, or something.

Palast cuts through the crap

2005-07-12T19:29:00.000-04:00

Judy, Karl Rove ain't no "source." A confidential source -- and I've worked with many -- is an insider ready to put himself on the line to blow the whistle on an official lie or hidden danger. I would protect a source's name with my life and fortune as would any journalist who's not a craven jerk (the Managing Editor of Time Magazine comes to mind).

But the weasel who whispered "Valerie Plame" in Miller's ear was no source. Whether it was Karl Rove or some other Rove-tron inside the Bush regime (and no one outside Bush's band would have had this information), this was an official using his official info to commit a crime for the sole purpose of punishing a real whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for questioning our President's mythological premise for war in Iraq.

— Gregory Palast, Mr. Rove and the Access of Evil

He slices... He dices... Look at 'im go!

Should also mention: I'd be about the last guy on the planet to deny the player currently talking through his lawyer's got some serious chops, conniving weasel-wise. But in case anyone's wondering, no, this particular set of shenanigans hardly qualifies as anything original or clever. My reporting experience ain't mostly big league, but at any level of politics, I can assure you there are any number of two-bit wannabe hatchetmen in ill-fitting cheap suits who'll happily bound off the record to take a few shots at a rival, offer up anything to damage them. Ain't nothin' new. I knew lots of 'em, in the day, and most of those were low-rung types who only got elected 'cos they called slightly more neighbours than their rivals. Otherwise, they probably couldn't strategize their way out of a wet paper bag. Smart reporters learn not to become such low-life's tools.

Smart reporters, I repeat and emphasize.

Information overload

2005-07-12T16:00:00.000-04:00

Bob Harris made an interesting observation, just now:

Right this minute, on the BBC World service: a lengthy report on humanitarian efforts in Africa. No news crawl. If you didn't know the London bombings had happened already, you wouldn't even know.

Right this minute, on CNN International: a lengthy report on anti-terrorism efforts in other countries, so far specifically framed as a series of successful trades: decreasing freedom for increasing surveillance, with greater security supposedly as the net result. Along the bottom, a news crawl repeats bombing-related headlines constantly.

— Media after the London bombings: compare and contrast, at Bob Harris

He's got a point. There's a larger one to be made about the very format of US news (and some of its imitators) of late. That whole jet cockpit-like 'let's bombard the viewer with multiple streams of trvialities' approach, it fosters neither reflection nor calm.

24 degrees Celsius, 70% RH, feels like 34

2005-07-12T00:53:00.000-04:00

...feels like trying to breath underwater. And that's at midnight. I'd rather not comment on what it was like in the afternoon, when it was 33 degrees without the humidity effects.

Oh, okay, I'll comment: Yech. Blech. Bleah. Ugh.

I'm basically an Arctic critter. Dry and cold equals good. Ain't cut out for this shit. 'Specially not with the delightfully timed virus that just moved into my upper respiratory tract. This kinda nonsense is why I left DC. But whereinhell am I supposed to go from here? This is Ottawa, fer cryin' out loud, people. Clean air, cool climate. Or so I heard.

Currently listening to

2005-07-08T13:15:00.000-04:00

... The Tragically Hip's Fully Completely. Or, at least, mostly.

Always feel bad saying this, as I'm pretty sure they were trying, but they never topped this one.

Elizabeth lives

2005-07-07T23:06:00.000-04:00

Alive and well and a proud Londoner, now.

Phew.

Why so much of it sucks: a unified theory

2005-07-07T14:38:00.000-04:00

Commented at Holly's blog and on Judith Berman's LiveJournal on the subject of why a lot of SF (and literature) is unsatisfying, of late...

Yes, you can comment, if you wish, that for a guy who's published precious little fiction (and, actually, hasn't even been reading that much) lately, I've got a lot of opinions.

Yes, you can. But I'll delete it.

Kidding. Mostly.

Let's hear some hubris

2005-07-07T10:43:00.000-04:00

(Alternate title: Do not taunt happy space slushball)

... duly noted in this week's Nature, UCL researcher Andrew Coates, talking about the Deep Impact mission, commented:

We used to be afraid of comets. The dinosaurs should have been afraid of comets. Now it is the comets' turn to be afraid.

— Nature, Vol 436, July 2005, p. 10

...a quotation the august journal drily tagged as getting 'a little carried away'...

To which I've little to add. I mean, it's durned impressive and all that they actually hit the thing (hey, this is rocket science), but since folks commenting on any potential effects on the orbit described the probe's encounter with Tempel as being 'like a bug hitting the windscreen of a bus', and since the actual practicality of shifting or destroying one of these things (a la a certain bad Hollywood movie) if it actually comes looking for us is seriously questionable right now, we might want to keep that in mind before we actually go taunting them.

(Looks up nervously)

What I'm reading next

2005-07-07T10:10:00.000-04:00

I know this isn't how it's usually done, but my reading schedule's kinda slow, of late.

(Not good, I know. That old dictum 'never write more than you're reading', that's a pretty good rule of thumb, actually.)

Anyway: when I get to it, the next on the stack is James Randi's The Faith Healers.

There's a practical research reason for this, but I've also always had a perverse fascination with cons of all persuasions, their victims, and the human dynamics (hope, gullibility, desperation and sometimes greed on the part of the marks, self-delusion both on the part of the con and the mark, and a mix of motivations running finally to craven greed on the part of the con) that make the phenomenon possible. And in the religious sphere in particular, from Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard, through Peter Popoff and Benny Hinn, there's a whole rich vein of material on the machinations of the self-described prophets and healers that play and have played in that space.

I've probably read too much on this stuff already, s'true. But what can ya do? It's a vice of mine.

Prescience

2005-07-07T09:54:00.000-04:00

Find myself thinkin' of David Rees this morning.

No reason.

Expect I'll defer all other comment on London to those who were there.

Revenge

2005-07-06T10:23:00.000-04:00

In a radical departure from my standard operating procedure, here's an excerpt (PDF) from actually current work—a little taste of Carrion Birds.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I do share some of Berke Breathed's oft-stated hostility to bad, vapid, and painfully repetitive so-called 'humour' strips that go on for decades past their creators actually having anything remotely interesting or entertaining to say. So yes, you might consider this a bit of revenge.

Currently reading

2005-07-04T15:17:00.000-04:00

John M. Barry's The Great Influenza.

... all in keeping with my fascination with things small and deadly.

Visiting parents/Raccoons and pears

2005-07-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

Spent the July first weekend visiting my parents. Hence, little blogging last few days. You can connect to the net from their place, but there wasn't much time. Various folks who hadn't met our littlest one yet showed up; they kept us pretty busy.

Got back to catch some raccoons in the act of eating the pears from our trees. Pesky things. Between them and the squirrels, I haven't had a single pear off those branches yet. Chased 'em off, but the writing's probably on the wall for that fruit. I mean, it's not like I can sleep out there and lie in wait. And I expect they probably know this.

Still. Annoying. We've got so many apples, they could stuff themselves silly, we'd still have more. But no, they gotta go for the as yet rather meagre harvest from the still quite young pear trees. I'm beginning to think they're just doing it to annoy me.

In case of fire

2005-06-30T13:19:00.000-04:00

My one patentable idea today:

A case, mounted on the wall, glass-fronted. Stencilled on the glass: "In case of fire, break glass"...

In the case: a coupla coathangers and a bag of marshmallows.

Yeah, I got a million of them.

Yer one of them Enlightenment thinkers, aincha?

2005-06-29T13:09:00.000-04:00

In the company I keep, it seems I can't avoid the topic of post-modernism. Find myself reading Butterflies and Wheels' notes section pretty much twice weekly, at least, wherein the lovely and talented Ophelia Benson and her esteemed associate Jeremy Stangroom regularly take on epistemic relativism (not to mention certain related and equally flagrant abuses of reason certain purveyors of pseudoscience regularly commit). I usually drop in on David Brin's long rambling thing on modernism, post-modernism, the Enlightenment and just about everything else about half as often. And Holly Messinger, of course, who has her own occasional complaints on the subject, I read more frequently than any of them.

It was Holly, actually, who got me started on this particular post. Reading my comment that I found the plot in my current literary millstone (The Manuscript That Would Not Die) a bit too linear for my tastes, she took it upon herself to warn me away from any annoyingly pretentious post-modern non-resolution resolutions in the area of the climax of the thing. A warning, it must be said, she composed most eloquently.

I was able to assure her there's really no danger of that. I mostly like to know when a story's over, thank you very much, and preferably not just by my encountering the back cover. I'm pretty sure I mostly learned my storytelling techniques from such sophisticated and pretentious literary practitioners as nightclub comics doing racy standup, an awful lot of pulp fiction, and kids telling fart jokes in grade school. And very few of those were much for that non-resolving story line thing (there's one exception I can think of, actually, in the standup routine category, and actually it's pretty funny—remind me to tell it to you some time—though I digress). So yeah, the stuff I do does have a way of ending pretty clearly, no fear.

Somewhat more seriously, I've my own beefs with post-modernism, both within and without literature.

Without literature, I'd put myself firmly in the camp of those (Ms. Benson, maybe? I don't want to put words in her mouth) who mostly think that post-modern ideas about the significance of context to observations might be useful things to keep around, but anyone taking this so far as to suggest this implies there is either (a) no tractably knowable objective reality or (b) actually no objective reality is probably either (1) incredibly silly, (2) sadly deluded, (3) grinding an axe for a pseudoscience, or (4) all of the above.

More to the point: my one actually complete degree is in Biology (a subject I studied almost entirely out of love for the material, I might add; I'm terribly old-fashioned that way), and we were taught pretty much from day one that context is pretty durn important to observation. Hell, read any paper in any major journal, and it's usually about half establishing context (or, more technically, describing the experimental conditions), so the observations might actually prove repeatable. So it seems to me good empirical science has pretty much always got that context is important, and while yes, post-modern ideas about the pervasiveness and invisibility of certain assumptions might be useful toward understanding why science investigates what it does, the bleating hordes who natter that 'Western science' is parochial, or racist, or blinkered, or just terribly arrogant make me wonder if any of them have ever actually read any real research.

My message to these folks: yes, I get we all have our contexts, all make assumptions shaped by those. Yes, we get they're hard to notice, sometimes. Kinda knew that, already. But thanks for the insight anyway.

Now: got anything else?

No?

Alrighty then. Next.

Beyond these goobs, of course, there's the out and out apologists for unreason, hiding behind postmodernism's flag. You can't live long as an atheist without encountering at least one slackjawed evangelical preacher who insists his firm belief in an invisible sky fairy is somehow 'post-modern'... or justified because post-modernism sez there's no reality anyway, so he can believe whatever he durn well wants, thank you very much... Or somesuch rot.

True story: one of these I met, attempting to answer my ridicule of his rhetoric, responded to me with the line: "You're such an Enlightenment thinker"... as though, apparently, I was gonna take this as an insult or something.

Hardly. Me? An Enlightenment thinker? Awwww. Thanks. But I bet you say that to all the heathens, don't you?

Anyway, moving on: within literature, I guess I'm not far from Holly's camp. Though I'd say: I've read the odd piece with some arguably post-modern trappings that uses them to good effect. Brunner's mighty Stand on Zanzibar, to my mind, though it probably predates much of the 'fashionable nonsense' (thank you, Butterflies and Wheels) that is current post-modern literature, certainly does marvellous things with multiple points of view. But overall, my feelings about post-modernism informing art are much the same as are my views of a lot of other such once overly-fashionable movements: that most of these consist of nothing more than a few clever and only occasionally useful ideas taken vastly too far and promoted immediately to dogma.

So sure, there's a work or two out there that proves the idea can lead to good art, but suddenly, if you're not 'post-modern', or can't at least stamp it somewhere on the dust-jacket, you're not hip or something... Which, mostly, leads to a lot of really, really bad art, entirely overwhelmed by the weight of the ideology that drives it.

So, responding to that movement, I guess all I have to say is, umm, thanks, but I can live with being unfashionable, thank you.

I mean, hell, you should see the way I dress.

Anyway. That's all (except to say to all of you noticing my nattering about being overly busy inevitably comes on the same day I write three or more blog entries, yes, my time management and prioritization are incredibly bad, and thanks for noticing).

Finally, in case anyone's wondering, and like I told Holly elsewhere: my concerns with the linearity of the manuscript's plot were entirely with it being a bit too predictable, nothing more. Will ends nice and neatly, and almost certainly will whatever else I might do to it. Just like any good campfire story's supposed to.

Big science, big risks

2005-06-29T10:58:00.000-04:00

Found myself unsurprised to hear GreenPeace was less than thrilled to hear the Iter project is actually enroute to breaking ground in France.

I'm split on this. A bit sympathetic to the folk pointing out there are probably better immediate ways to spend ten billion Euros, if the immediate goal is cleaner power, yes. And there's little doubt in my mind that anxieties about how fusion technology might be used to enrich materials for nuclear weapons are quite well-founded. It's one of those aspects of human nature. If it can be used to make stuff to blow stuff up, seems to me, sure, it probably will be.

That said, nuclear fusion, long-term, has promises I figure make it so very worth pursuing. Done even poorly, the waste products are vastly more manageable than is the case with fission—with half-lives that make it much more practical to design and maintain programs for storage until they're benign. Done better, the waste could be close to nonexistent.

And at its fundamental level, the basic principle seems so very sensible. The thought that you can take a little mass and convert it directly to useful energy a la Einstein's most famous equation—and that the mass used can come from one of the most plentiful atoms in the universe, that's got the kind of elegant simplicity about it which, it seems to me, makes it madness not to look seriously into it.

It might also, though this is getting a bit ahead of things, get better still. I mean sure, there are a lot of stray neutrons to contend with in current designs (another problem which will generate waste products, and possibly a too-convenient way to make materials for bombs), but who's to say it's really so unmanageable? Theoretically, I'm hearing that it's not—that materials can be come up with that can take the flux without becoming too rapidly radioactive, and even when they do, the half-life is, again, probably manageable disposal-wise. So it seems to me getting hung up on that is short-sighted. Nothing about the basic process, I suspect, requires it be a long-term problem.

So reading the environmentalists' opposition, I find myself thinking it's a bit knee-jerk. As in: this is atomic power, and that's bad. So no, let's not go there.

I completely agree with them on fission. Always have, and have had the odd argument with folks pointing out that at least that technology doesn't have an impact on carbon emissions. The half-lives of the by-products just aren't manageable, given any kind of knowledge of human history. When what's left over is that dangerous, for so long—longer, remember, than most mass human civilizations have tended to survive—producing them strikes me as a really bad idea. I mean, bad with a hubris that's nothing less than staggering. And the very nature of the fission process—setting off a reaction that wants more than just about anything else to take off exponentially—has always struck me as playing with fire.

But fusion isn't fission. And just because it isn't economical today, doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to make it so. The economy is right there, staring back at us from fundamental equations. And, though this might also prove to be hubris, making it reality might prove even less trouble than we think.

So I guess I'm saying: good for Iter. Big science, big risk, sure. But one worth taking.

Unhealthy obsessions

2005-06-29T09:26:00.000-04:00

Realized recently I'm becoming increasingly obsessed by my fiction.

No, it's not an exaggeration. Find myself mulling edits, characters and plotlines quite continually, these days. And this is actually a bit of a problem, given as I've a full-time and not undemanding career, and a wife and two kids, both young enough to be full-time work themselves.

It's probably partly the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome. No time for this, a lot of other obligations, so of course I'm gonna wanna concentrate on the one thing I probably shouldn't be concentrating on nearly so much. Probably, if I were a full-time writer, I'd be obsessing about something else entirely. I'm perverse that way. It's my experience that a lot of people are, true, but I'm beginning to think I might be a more extreme case than most.

Have this idea in my head if I get a certain manuscript which has been hanging on my conscience back to a state where I can get it back into queries, maybe I'll feel enough of a sense of accomplishment I can start caring a bit more about the rest of my life for a while. But I only hope that's true. Honestly don't know.

Really is something a bit narcissistic about this, I know. Ain't like this should be becoming the most important thing in the world. It's only a manuscript, fer cryin' out loud, and there are a lot of those around...

Ah well. Gotta be me, I guess.

The good news: Holly very kindly gave me some pretty useful criticism on a substantial portion of it, and the one structural thing that had been hanging up edits I've now resolved, so, theoretically, at least, it could be done pretty quickly, again.

Who knows. In another week or two, I might even be able to pretend to have a social life again.

Breakthrough

2005-06-28T16:14:00.000-04:00

Had a brainwave re a certain stubbornly unsatisfactory element of a certain stubbornly broken manuscript just recently. One of those 'Eureka' moments. And one which should allow me to get the damn thing back into one piece, with the edits to be done again much less structural, more technical. Finally. After much pain. Etc.

No, I can't really go on about it here. Too much to explain, and explaining's probably kinda a bad idea even if it were interesting to anyone else, since it does concern one of those little twists in fiction that make the whole thing a lot more fun but only if you don't know what's coming (or, at least, are forced to guess). Jes' crowing, because I feel I need to, right now.

Hallelujah. About damn time. Etc.

Installation files are being copied to your computer

2005-06-28T10:31:00.000-04:00

... and, at about the same rate, sediment being deposited on the ocean floor is being compacted to form shale.

The servers carrying the installation stuff are a mite slow today.

Bob makes me laugh

2005-06-27T13:54:00.000-04:00

After the first two hours, as the flight attendants began feeding us for the third time, I began to wonder if Air Canada had abandoned the transportation industry altogether and decided to open a chain of extremely realistic failed-aircraft theme restaurants, to be positioned randomly around runways across North America, committed to force-feeding their customers while providing sullen incompetence in two languages.

— Bob Harris, Traveling again

While I have actually had relatively non-agonizing flights on Air Canada, Harris' bit captured the low end of the spectrum with grace and beauty. And made me laugh so hard my coffee came out my nose. Go. Read.

Rumours of my death

2005-06-27T11:01:00.000-04:00

... are also greatly exaggerated. But I have really been run ragged last few days. Blogging? What's that? I ain't got time for that.

Good stuff: was able this weekend to declare as reclaimed a piece of the lawn recently lost to weeds. Managed to get clover pretty well established in what had been a thoroughly difficult spot soil-wise despite the heat. I absolutely love what that stuff can do even in crappy, glacial soil annoyingly low in organics. If you can just keep the miserably barren stuff moist long enough for the leaves to start to spread and hold some of the moisture down on their own (which, yeah, can be hard), it's incredible what happens. This ain't so much gardening as terraforming.

Also good: the little guy's getting really strong. Can hold himself up on his forearms, though he hasn't worked out that rolling over thing, yet. And he likes to hold his weight on his legs, too, though he's far from being able to balance on his own.

Also also good: the not quite as little one is reading fairly independently now. Smart girl.

Not so good: I've got a ton of paperwork to catch up on. Really getting out of control. Some folks dream of getting rich so they can retire to a tropical island. Me, I just wanna be able to afford someone to do all this crap for me. That would be the life worth living.

Rumours of their death are rather exaggerated

2005-06-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

Well, the horse's mouth (James at Banbury Park, their rep at the record company) says the Silver Hearts have not, after all, contrary to this earlier post broken up. Rather, they're (1) about to release their Rain Dogs interpretation, in August, and (2) about to record another album. And they're still touring, though the plan is now to do fewer shows—I quote, to "play a smattering of great shows here and there".

I consider this ver' good news. Waits' Rain Dogs and the Hearts, all on one disk? A few of my favourite things.

Urmetazoan

2005-06-23T09:46:00.000-04:00

There's an article this week in Nature (Pilcher, Helen, 'Back to Our Roots', Nature vol 435, 23 June 2005), on research directed at working out the features of the ancestral metazoan (or 'urmetazoan', as the current usage would have it, but there's a word, really, only an etymologist could love)—this being the first organism to go truly multicellular, circa 600 million years BP.

Find this sort of stuff really interesting, and always have. There are two aspects of this issue I find endlessly engrossing.

First, there's the positively inspiring idea that you can develop a useful picture from contemporary evidence of something from a world so very long vanished. We get excited (or some of us do) when an astronomer announces they've detected another planet in a neighbouring star system—itself an incredible achievement, really, given the distances involved and the technical challenge of coercing elusive photons reflected from its surface or other equally difficult indirect evidence (such as the perturbations of the position of its primary) into a form that actually tells us something. Similarily, I find it remarkable to contemplate that by studying sponges, and looking at the biochemical mechanisms common to those and other extant metazoans, we can get a glimpse into a world from so unimaginably long ago—a world easily as distant, really, as Gliese 876—a world before true multicellularity, when probably the only macroscopic life of any organization whatsoever had arranged itself only into the relatively simple mats of blue-greens making a living as stromatolites.

Love contemplating that world, of course. It's not for nothing, I suppose, that when I got around to writing fiction, I occasionally found myself writing of other worlds. And then there's the matter of how many people like reading that kind of thing—there's something in a lot of us, methinks, that longs to explore distant lands. And the late Precambrian, that's pretty distant.

And what we look for there, this brings me to the second source of fascination: here, we look for the first living thing whose cells were not all quite alike—whose cells differentiated into tissues, and thus made up something new: a multicellular organism, which by dividing the labour involved, made the business of living that much more baroque and interesting.

Metazoans, when you think about it, have a whole new set of interesting problems to solve, versus single-celled organisms. There's the matter of differentiation in the first place—how the single cell from which each organism originally grows gives rise to differing cells within differing tissues. It's a neat trick, this, really, when you consider that in so much of the rest of biology, a single cell with a given set of genes always does, more or less, the same thing. In the metazoans, in contrast the cell with those genes gives rise to all manner of other cells—cells which mostly have the same genes (there are a few exceptions—a few odd cells like red blood cells have none, and the cells set aside for sexual reproduction, of course, have about half as many as the rest of the body), but which do very different things. From this single cell, we get neurons and epithelial cells, bone marrow cells, and B- and T- lymphocytes. All of which, in the course of differentiation and development, will be organized into tissues, the tissues then organized (in many metazoans like us, anyway), into organs.

Then there's the matter of coordination. It's complicated enough, actually, how single cell organisms respond to stimuli in their environment to go about their business. In organisms of tens of trillions of cells, it can get to be a whole new level of elaborate. So there are hormones and chemical gradients, and, in some of us, nerves (themselves remarkable tissues relying in part on both of the above mechanisms) to pass information around—get the signals from one end of the body to another—so that tens of trillions, in the end, can work together, and function as one.

And somehow, in the end, it all comes together. From that one cell, a body grows, and makes its way in the world. And apart from occasional hiccups like cancerous tumours (in which the normally carefully orchestrated business by which individual cells are coerced to divide or not goes awry), all its descendant cells play their roles in the different parts of that body, and, voila: metazoan life, in all its dynamism and near infinite variety.

Really going on here, I guess. Apologies. But it really is a thing.

The Nature article, anyway, necessarily doesn't get into that much of the whole business. There's some discussion of the discovery of metazoan-like 'transcription factors' in sponges—proteins critical to controlling differentiation and development—they regulate transcription of the DNA, and thus control which genes are, effectively, 'turned on' in a given cell (or how turned on they are), thus governing, in large part, what sort of cell that particular cell becomes. The interesting conclusion seems to be that the roots of multicellularity may have preceded its actual development, and there was something environmental about the era of 600 million years BP that finally opened up that evolutionary pathway.

As to that environmental feature, oxygen levels are a prime suspect, since geological records do suggest they rose dramatically around that time, and the higher, 'breathable' concentrations would then more easily diffuse through multiple cell layers, making it a bit easier for organisms to become more complex.

Worth a read, though regrettably subscription only. Looks like there's an online version here.

A murder of silhouette crows

2005-06-21T13:10:00.000-04:00

Been finding myself listening to Tom Waits' Alice a lot these last few days. Can't say why. It's just such a beautiful and beautifully strange thing, this disk, even a little outside of the norm for Waits (as if Waits actually has a norm). The publisher's blurb isn't a bad start, as a description:

A devastatingly beautiful atmosphere made of sorrow and reverie, insanity and resignation, rises like a mist in Alice. It's a lyrical melancholia, a feeling that creeps in on the arms of Stroh violins and unabashed poetry. These are songs to fall into, and sometimes, to keep falling. There are fragile, haunted musings, and laments, mad ruminations, and tales of unrequited love and anthems from beyond the grave.

...and that's about right, that is.

(Noticed, hunting for the link above, by the way, that a very legal MP3 of the entirely lovely title track is online from the label—here's the link, if anyone's interested.)