Archive for July, 2009
Television watching for the lonely
July 30th, 2009 popscience
McCabe: Are you bored, fat and lonely? Watch BBC television. They put the more in moron. (From Absolute Power – radio series)
Television watching provides some emotional relief. Not exactly groundbreaking news – but explains why really bad Taiwanese drama or reality television get followers.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress b Robert A Heinlein
July 30th, 2009 books
A week ago, when my brother saw the book in my room he said, “You read Robert A. Heinlein?”
“Not yet.”
“BUUUUUUUGS!” he made his eyes large and held invisible guns in his hands.
“Eh?”
“Starship Troopers? Remember? Robert A Heinlein – he wrote it.”
“Oh my God! BUUUUUUUGS!”
Hyuk-yuk-yuk went the both of us. “Crap, is he going to do something like that in this book?”
Heinlein did do something like that. Right at the end, Man said to the computer, Mike, “Do it, Mike, throw rocks at ‘em! Damn it, big rocks! Hit ‘em hard!” YAAAAY!
~
I really enjoyed the novel. It was engaging, cheerful and had a adorable supercomputer call Mike. I kept thinking about what Stephen King once said about writing, that he would let the reader have the puppy, let the reader stroke it, then kill the puppy. I was worried with every turn of the page Mike was the puppy and Heinlein would make the adorable supercomputer do something heartbreakingly cruel because it wanted a laugh. Then, I’m surprised when Mike didn’t do a thing like that. What did I miss? Mike seems to understand loneliness and loyalty. As a computer, it shouldn’t because it has only processing power and artificial intelligence to guess the next step – it doesn’t have motivation to be loyal or to be social. A computer doesn’t fear being pushed out of a pressure lock and has no need for other computers, unlike human beings.
I think Heinlein is conducting a thought experiment with this story. Let’s have a few intelligent, loving, capable people in the mix, give them a bit of trouble with the authority. What do they do? Like all intelligent folks, they begin with ideals – let’s do away with government. Then, they end up with the machine rigging the votes so they remain in power, propaganda and all other bad habits of governments. I didn’t feel cheated and let down at all because Heinlein is so readable, so friendly a writer.
This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
July 28th, 2009 books
Perhaps that I am sick and hence short of patience. The book is all over the place. He keeps explaining everything in music theory or neuroscience terms without saying anything new or interesting. I stopped halfway where chapter talks about studies showing that the 10,000 hours of practice makes a person an expert. I’m not sure if he wrote it wrongly but the idea is stupid in the extreme. First, there must be pleasure in practicing music – which provides the motivation to improve. Second, to a certain extent, we take the path of least resistance – generally speaking, musicians who become professional, doing music for them is relatively easier when compared with the rest of ordinary folks. So, if there is no dopamine spike, and doing it is relatively difficult, a person could practice 10,000 hours and still won’t become an expert. This can only explain that a person can’t coast on talent alone. Scanning the rest of the chapter, I find the chap trying to talk about talent in music, saying it could be genes or social conditioning, or a bit of both. If you have nothing to say…
On Time
July 26th, 2009 radio
Think about it this way, if I say a long time has passed, in fact I have used two metaphors because time cannot literally be long or short – not a piece of string. We’ve used a description from space and applied it to this abstract notion of time. When I said time has passed, that’s also metaphor because what really passes is a train or ships at night, not time. Time doesn’t literally go somewhere. So it’s not just that we need metaphor from space to talk about time, we need it to think about time cause we have not other way of conceptualising it, of visualising it.
Fry’s English Delight – Metaphors at 22:58
Dune by Frank Herbert
July 24th, 2009 books
Every writer has a flaw and it is the flaw that makes them interesting as a writer because with every work, the writer strives to resolve the flaw. I haven’t read all of F. Herbert’s work but I can see his particular flaw. He’s not a novelist. He’s, at heart, a schizophrenic who sees all the things in his head and has to write it down or his brain will explode from containing everything in it. He doesn’t create the emotional link between the reader and the characters very well – the people are there so that he doesn’t go mad thinking about Dune. His tricks to pretend that the hero young Paul can see the future, the insight of his mom Lady Jessica, downplays the propaganda machine in Duke Leto’s popular leadership are not very effective. I keep seeing him, the writer, planting these tricks everywhere. Perhaps the problem of his narrative? I don’t know.
There are some bits I don’t like – how women are unimportant in this power playground and used mainly for breeding purposes or creating political allies, Also, that perverseness is the Baron asking for a nice boy is strange: would he be less perverse if he asked for a girl?
What I think Herbert did succeeded in this novel, is condense the drama of human history into a book and show us his world view. (I’m guessing that Arabic and Roman history is his background when he planned the rise and fall of the houses?) The development of the entire planet ecology, the conflicts between the houses, the habits of its people is impressive in its logic (water in the rites for death, marriage, Freman taking control of sandworms, spice trading). I have always liked finding Christian religion in a story. In this, I particularly enjoyed the effective presence of religion/superstition as a tool to gain various goodies:
Protection:
Jessica thought about the prohecy – the Shanri-a and all the panoplia proheticus, a Bene Gesserit of the Missionaris Protectiva dropped here long centuries ago – long dead, no doubt, but her purpose accomplished: the protective legends implanted in these people against the day of a Bene Gesserit’s need.
Power:
“Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said. “An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.”
Leadership position:
Jessica was fearful of the religious relationship between himself and the Fremen, Paul knew. She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him
…She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong – faster and fast and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a bland rush until it’s too late.”
…
“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.
“Nothing about religion is simple,” she warned.
But Paul, seeing the clouded future that still hung over them, found himself swayed by anger. He could only say: “Religion unifies our forces. It’s our mystique.”
“You deliberately cultivate this air, this bravura,” she charged. “You never cease indoctrinating.”
Soldiers: This startled me slightly – did something similar happen to all those who had gone to elite schools? Is this the worry of a brain drain a reaction to the waste of all that expensive conditioning? Is this why the breaking of a bond reimbursement of university fees is said to be framed as an immoral act since one can’t use a religion without upsetting another religion? How v interesting…
“How could you be sure of the loyalty of such recruits?”
“I would take them in small groups, not larger than platoon strength,” Hawat said. “I’d remove them from their oppressive situation and isolate them with a training cadre of people who understand their background, preferably people who had preceded them from the same oppressive situation. Then I’d fill them with the mystique that their planet had really been a secret training ground to produce just such superior beings as themselves. And all the while, I’d show that what such superior beings could earn: rich living, beautiful women, fine mansions…whatever they desired.”
I’m curious about one thing not dealt with in detail – the economics of spice trade. Spice is expensive because of its rarity so why would anyone increase the production of spice, or hoard spice? There would be more interest in maintaining the sustained rarity of spice, especially when spice is not perishable. If spice is just like any other resource, there will be a robust futures trade to regulate supplies. So, when a thing is in the ground and the prices are not good enough, to get profits, it would be better to leave it in the ground until the prices are better. Power, it seems, is the addictive spice consumed by the Heads of the Houses but the desire for power is the same as the desire for spice? I don’t know. Well, I suppose this is not very interesting at all to sci-fi writers.
Bullying the sibling
July 24th, 2009 Uncategorized
Watching the sibling pull himself up on parallel bars in the park and begin to press.
Me: Come on Linda, kill the terminator. Rwarrrr…..
Sibling: (Falls off laughing.) Don’t do that.
Sibling sits down. On the kitchen table, there is a tureen of porridge.
Me: You’re going to eat all that?
Sibling: …
Me: I want to watch.
Sibling: I’m going to get a smaller bowl.
Me: Don’t be self-conscious.
Almost Project 365
July 23rd, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20090719 
20090722 Having a laugh
20090722 Pinwheel & four wheels
Almost Project 365
July 20th, 2009 PicturesTags: Project 365
20090717 Someone finally translated the sign on the backs for them
20090717 What did I forget?
20090717 “Hand it over. Cat in a Hat is not just a story."
20090717 Lamp post
20090718 Idyll
20090719 View at sunrise
20090719 Dew on chair by the beach
20090719 Sea + Foam
20090719 Missing presumed drowned
Keith Jarrett
July 16th, 2009 music
Listening The Cure – in particular, Blame It On My Youth, which was also in The Melody At Night With You at work, I decide I much prefer the version in Melody. I don’t understand why everyone didn’t like this. There isn’t a lot of improvisation but I don’t mind it: I like his melancholy.
But Bremen (Solo concerts) is seriously hot stuff. The only piece of music I’ve heard that made me actually jump up, burst into applause and holler 好阿! like how old men in chinese movies shout at the wayang in the dead of the night while at work.
