Geoff Arnold

Assuming no last-minute hitches, 31 hours from now I’ll be heading off around the world. It’s not quite the longest trip I’ve ever taken, but who’s counting? Seattle to Beijing (via San Francisco) on Sunday; then Beijing to Hyderabad (via Singapore) the following Friday; then a mere hop down to Bangalore on Tuesday 17th; then the really weird bit: Bangalore to London, via Frankfurt, leaving at 1:55am on Sunday 25th and arriving at 10:40am the same day; and finally London to Seattle via Chicago on May 27th.

The planning for this trip has been more than a little crazy. First, I was supposed to be going with a colleague; then he cancelled out. Next I had to obtain a replacement passport, and (obviously) I couldn’t get my visas for India and China until it arrived. Then there were some minor changes in visa processing. (Why do changes never reduce the processing time?) Then a Seattle meeting appeared on my calendar for May 28th, and I decided that I really, really needed to be there, so I shifted my return flight from Thursday to Tuesday. The final curve-ball was that yesterday I found that I needed to upgrade to Office 2008 to cope with a particular document I’m working on, and I finally got that taken care of later this afternoon.

Anyway, the upshot is that my passport (with visas) is supposed to arrive tomorrow, Saturday morning, less than 24 hours before I depart. I was chewing my fingernails (metaphorically, OK?); now I’m just checking the FedEx tracking page every few minutes.

Tomorrow I pack¹, and Sunday I fly. After the mad scramble to get ready, I’m actually quite confident that the trip will go smoothly. I’ve replaced the 1GB SD card in my camera with a 2GB, because I’m planning to take plenty of pictures, but I probably won’t upload them until get back. This might seem to be the perfect trip to exploit the weightlessness of my MacBook Air, but in fact I’m bringing “Black Beauty”, my Amazon-supplied MacBook (freshly upgraded with Leopard and Office 2008). I’ve had my shots, and I’m packing the necessary meds to cope with the unexpected.

Let’s see… my passport is currently in Oakland. Time to fly.

UPDATE: One bonus, one glitch (resolved). The bonus is that I was able to purchase an upgrade to Economy Plus for SFO-PEK, so rather than being stuck in a middle seat at the back of a 100% full Economy section, I’ll now have a decent window seat and some legroom. The glitch was that FedEx tried to deliver my passport too early this morning, and didn’t bother to call the number on the waybill. I checked in with customer service, twice; when I realized that they weren’t going to deliver the package until Monday, I went down to the FedEx office to collect it. Not want I wanted to be doing, but never mind.

1. Actually, I’ll get my hair cut, pick up my dry cleaning, then pack, and if time permits I’ll go to the Sounders game. Maybe.↩

Over at Debunking Christianity, John Loftus has published a list of books from Ed Babinski which illustrate the importance of skepticism about what we believe to be true. Here’s the short list which John hyperlinked; Ed’s list includes many others.

• On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
• A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives
• Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
• The You You Don’t Know: Covert Influences on Your Behaviour
• Don’t Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking
• Knowledge and Its Limits
• Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology
• What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty

I think that the last of these is the only one on my bookshelf¹, although I’ve dipped into others (including Dan Ariely’s excellent “Predictably Irrational”). I wonder how many of them are available in Kindle editions? This could get expensive….

1. Of course, I could be wrong about that!↩

Thought-provoking: Adriana (and Tim) on disintermediation. It changes more than you realize.

I just received my pre-release copy of the new No-Man album, Schoolyard Ghosts. It’s abso-fucking-lutely brilliant - their best work ever. I ripped it onto my iPhone, and I’ve been wandering around all day with the album stuck on “Repeat”. (Actually, that’s not quite true: some of the time I was watching the videos on the DVDA that’s part of the pre-release package. You can get a taste of it here - click on video.) The album is being released in Europe in just over a week, and in the USA next month. The pre-release special package is still being advertised at Burningshed, although the bonus CD of alternates and edits has sold out.

I really love No-Man’s music. These days Steven Wilson’s band Porcupine Tree is so popular that it’s easy to forget that PT started out as a side-project from his main work with Tim Bowness in No-Man. I first started listening to PT back in 1999, when they released Stupid Dream, but it took me another three years to discover No-Man, when I bought their fourth album, Returning Jesus.

I’m not going to try and categorize their work: you can do that for yourself. It’s the kind of music that I usually listen to with my eyes closed - a private, personal experience. Of course YMMV. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch the video for “Truenorth” again…

Here’s one of my very favourite TED presentations: Richard Dawkins on how we understand the world. How we evolved in “the Middle World”, why the intentional stance works, and what it may be like to be a bat.¹ It’s so obviously true that it’s quite beautiful.

(Tip o’ the hat to In Search of High Places.)

1. So much for Thomas Nagel.↩

I’m busy planning a business trip later this month that will take me around the world… Beijing, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and London. Here’s the route:

Apparently the best route from Beijing to Hyderabad is via Singapore. If only I could spare a day…

From Marc Andreessen’s blog: robot self-reassembly:

One of my favourite bloggers, Greta Christina, attended a church service at which a friend of hers was being installed as a minister, and wrote up her reactions. She captures many of the feelings that I have had on similar occasions, although I don’t think I’ve ever experienced what she describes as “church envy”.

There were many wonderful things about the service, and it clearly offered something of value to the members of the church. There was joy, community, celebration of life, transcendence and ecstasy, wonderful music (really — the choir was something special), a shared sense of purpose and meaning, etc. etc. But all the things that I liked about the service, all the things I found meaningful and moving, were all things that I can and do get from other areas of my life. I can get them from dancing, from music, from good food, from good conversation, from reading, from writing, from nature, from art, from sex.

And the things I didn’t like… well, those were all the actual religious parts. And I don’t want them. I found them alien, and alienating. They didn’t make sense to me — not intellectually, not emotionally, not viscerally, not in any way. I found them baffling and mysterious, and not in an enticingly mysterious way. (Or, obviously, in a “beautiful holy mystery” way.) They weren’t unpleasant, exactly. They just completely failed to strike any chord in me whatsoever. If there’s an opposite to striking a chord, that’s what they did.

Greta Christina’s Blog: Going to Church

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. […] When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself.

John Derbyshire on Expelled on National Review Online

According to the NW Asthma: News & Resources site, the current pollen count here in Seattle is really low (although it spiked up to “high” last Wednesday). Doesn’t matter. For the first time in years, I’ve got the classic symptoms of a rip-roaring hay fever. The 24 hour time release OTC Claritin tablets only seems to help for about 12 hours. However I’m hesitant to double up. the dose, because I find it difficult to sleep with that stuff in my system….  

This is a test post to check out the QuickPost Wordpress Plugin which I’ve just installed.

There’s a fascinating piece in the latest New Yorker by James Surowiecki on the difference between rules-based and principle-based regulation:

It’s something like the difference between football and soccer. Football, like most American sports, is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more principles-based game. There are fewer rules, and the referee is given far more authority than officials in most American sports to interpret them and to shape game play and outcomes. For instance, a soccer referee keeps the game time, and at game’s end has the discretion to add as many or as few minutes of extra time as he deems necessary. There’s also less obsession with precision—players making a free kick or throw-in don’t have to pinpoint exactly where it should be taken from. As long as it’s in the general vicinity of the right spot, it’s O.K.

The focus of Surowiecki’s piece is financial: he notes that

… a principles-based system has real virtues. It can make life easier for honest corporations, since they have to spend less time complying with overly complex rules, and also thwart dishonest ones, since regulators can spend more time looking at the substance, rather than the minutiae, of corporate bad behavior. It has been argued that Enron might have found it harder to get away with its shenanigans under a principles-based system, since many of the company’s gambits, while following U.S. accounting rules, nonetheless violated fundamentals of financial reporting.

But I really think this reflects a much deeper difference between the U.S. and (particularly) Europe. I see it in the legal systems, in politics, in education…

In any case, as Surowiecki notes, the bottom line is inescapable: good regulation requires good regulators. And that’s true worldwide - just as any Premier League fan about the state of refereeing!

As I was returning home this evening, I got off the bus and saw that everyone was gazing up into the sky. This is what they were looking at. (Click to see it in the Gallery.)

I don’t know how it got there, nor exactly how big it was… it looks to be a couple of seven or eight hundred feet up. It dissipated over a period of about a minute from when I took this.

Odd, innit?

UPDATE: I guess it was due to fireworks. (But who lets off fireworks in daylight hours on a cloudy day?) Check the comments for a link to video evidence.

My blogging rate has dropped way off in the last few weeks, and I was wondering why. First, I’ve been pretty busy: not just with work (about which I rarely blog - Amazon is very different from Sun in this respect), but also on family stuff that has taken me back to the East Coast a couple of times this year. Second, I don’t feel that I have much to contribute to the Three Big Topics of the hour: the US election, the war, and the recession. The election seems to be just bringing out the worst in people. (See the Robert Reich piece I cited recently.) The war is in a ghastly kind of “holding pattern”, with Bush’s puppet Petraeus spinning things out until the next President can actually make some decisions. And what can one say about the the economy, except that it took rather longer than I expected for Gordon Gekko’s chickens to come home to roost. (Thomas Frank’s comment about “plutocracy” is also right on the, er, money.)

But the biggest reason my blogging has dropped off is this wretched WordPress upgrade. I’ve already blogged about the way it screwed up the post composition window, making it much more inefficient to actually prepare a piece. I’ve fixed a few of the issues - I now have my category list to the right of the editing pane - but it’s still pretty painful. More seriously, WP2.5 broke the “scriptlet”. In the past, I often began a blog piece by noticing something interesting on the web, highlighting the text of interest, and then clicking my “Blog It!” bookmark. This ran a bit of JavaScript which opened the composition page for my blog and dropped the title, URL, and selected text into the right places. This made the workflow from seeing something of interest to posting a comment on it very efficient. Various alternative scriptlets have been posted by WP users, but none works exactly the way I want. As a result, I’ve tended to tag pieces of interest in Google Reader, which makes them show up in the “Items From Other Blogs…” sidebar. However I doubt anyone reads that. Maybe I should start doing a “links of the day” piece.

And finally, WP2.5 broke the elegant mobile admin interface that I had been using from my iPhone. This makes it more or less impossible to blog on the move. I suppose I could try to roll back from WP2.5 to 2.4, but that feels like more work (and risk) than I have time for right now.

UPDATE: I’ve improved things a bit (quite a lot, actually) by installing the Fluency admin plugin by Dean Robinson. It fixes the awful menus, which gives us back some screen real estate to actually do some composition, but it can’t do much about the inefficient layout of the controls on the writing page. (And - sob! - it can’t give us back our drag and drop widgets.) But it’s a start.