The latest release of Apple’s OS X, 10.4 (a.k.a. Tiger), includes a dictionary application as standard. Among its claims to fame are that it’s accessible as an application or a Dashboard widget, and that it’s integrated into the parental control system, so little Sandy or Chris can look up crap and find that it means “a losing throw of 2, 3, or 12 in [the game of] craps” and nothing else! Yeah, right. Meanwhile it completely fails my rough-and-ready test for being a usable dictionary: it contains neither quinquereme nor cerulescent. The latter is perhaps understandable (cerulean is certainly more common, and quite adequate), but ignoring the opening of Masefield’s wonderful “Cargoes” is completely inexcusable.
Author: geoff
The Closed Circle
Following The Rotters’ Club, I’ve now finished Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle. Excellent. So many circles: of understanding, of relationship, of power. Circles to get trapped inside, impotently, and circles to carry you inexorably forward, like great wheels. [OK, that’s enough of that. – Ed.]
Anyway, it’s a wonderful two-part novel. Even though Coe includes a synopsis of The Rotter’s Club at the end of The Closed Circle (“just in case you’ve forgotten it”), the two books really have to be read as a single work. For those who bought the first book two or three years ago, the wait must have been unbearable….
What next? Based on Amazon.com reviews, I think I’ll try The Winshaw Legacy next. (Mind you, I’m supposed to be reading up on M&A practices and storage virtualization….)
One can dream….
Daily Kos on Karl Rove on Plame….
Riverbend nails it as usual
The latest posting to Baghdad Burning about Bush’s recent speech is essential reading. Money quote – first Bush, then Riverbend:
“We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard and rebuilding while a country is at war is even harder.”
Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics. Though he fails to mention it, prior to the war, we didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time. We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that much.
Remember what Tip O’Neill said: All politics is local. Bush can blather on about 9/11 and freedom and terrorists and 9/11 and democracy and 9/11 and Bin Laden all he wants; to people in Iraq that don’t have fresh water or electricity to run the air conditioners when the temperature goes over 100F, it’s simple: “Fix this stuff or get the fuck out of our country and let us fix it!”.
On being swept away by a book
My son Chris and his wife Celeste are visiting, and yesterday evening we all went out to dinner at Lucy’s. After the meal, we walked across Coolidge Corner to the Brookline Booksmiths, our favourite local independent bookshop. I’m not sure why, but I picked up a new book by an author I didn’t recognize: The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe. Although it focusses on Blair’s Britain in the period 1999-2003, the story begins a generation before that: it follows the lives of the characters in Coe’s earlier The Rotters’ Club. That book was about a group of teenagers in Birmingham, growing up in the strange world of the 1970’s – Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, strikes, IRA bombings, platform shoes, punk, and so much more. OK, now I was hooked. Clutching The Closed Circle firmly, I headed to the back of the store to find a copy of The Rotters’ Club.
When we got home, I settled down to read The Rotters’ Club. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer put it: “A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love’s mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned.” And I was hooked. After the “surprise”, I put the book down, stunned, and went to bed. This morning I picked it up immediately after breakfast and read the next 300 pages without a break. It was one of those rare stories with which one has no choice in the matter; I felt as if I was being swept down a turbulent river, clinging onto a branch for support, and then finally being deposited on the bank, breathless. The last 32 pages are a stream of consciousness that is at once urgent and timeless.
Having finished, I did two things. First, I ordered an audio CD edition of the book for my mother in England; even though she is blind, I couldn’t let her escape this tour de force of a story. And I went out to buy the necessary supplies to prepare enough gin and tonic to fortify me for the next chapter in the lives of these characters….
What I love about the web
I was searching LinkedIn, idly looking for network connections in the UK, and at fiona robyn’s blog A Small Stone I found: “No time for being today – too busy doing.” A sobering reminder, or a celebration? It’s hard to know. Being or doing. To be is to do. To do is to be.
Ten commandments that are worthy of respect
With all this blather about if and when it is proper to display the (Biblical) “10 Commandments” (but which version? there are so many), it’s worth remembering that the “Ten Commandments” which truly underpin our system of ethics, democracy, and law come from a very different source. The commandments in question are those of Solon the Athenian. He lived from 638 BCE to 558 BCE (approximately), and in 594 BCE he was chosen to draw up the first written civil constitution, something that no prophet or rabbi did. Solon is the founder of democracy as we know it, and his commandments have stood the test of time. They don’t include prescriptions that apply only to one small sect, nor do they include ideas (such as sabbath-keeping and proscribing graven images) which few acknowledge and vanishingly few actually pay any attention to. The only reference to religion is the good advice to be appropriately respectful of everybody’s deities:
- Trust good character more than promises.
- Do not speak falsely.
- Do good things.
- Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
- Learn to obey before you command.
- When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
- Make reason your supreme commander.
- Do not associate with people who do bad things.
- Honor the gods.
- Have regard for your parents.
See Richard Carrier’s The Real Ten Commandments for the whole story – including Solon’s claim to fame as the author of the RKBA! If any set of ancient commandments deserve a place in our courtrooms, it is those of Solon.
Were there subtitles?
Pressure of work meant that I missed Bush’s televised speech on Iraq, so I was forced to rely on the transcript and the pronouncements of the pundits to determine what he said. And that’s a pity, because I’m sure I missed something – a subtitle, or an ad-lib that wasn’t captured in the transcript. How else can one explain the following juxtaposition?
First, Bush promised that “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job.” So the troop levels are a matter of military judgment, right? And since quite a few officers have been saying that they don’t have enough troops….
But wait. The President then said “Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever – when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave.” Huh? So now we can’t send more troops because that would undermine the strategy and send the wrong message? So it’s a political decision then.
Well, no. Maybe Bush realized that he was speaking in front of a military audience, because he later said, “As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters – the sober judgment of our military leaders.”
So which is it? Did they explain in the subtitles that I wasn’t there to see? Or did the President manage to flip and then flop in the course of a single speech? Inquiring minds, etcetera…
How far we've come
Earlier today, I posted a little piece about a classic children’s book on computing. When I got home, I found in my inbox an announcement of the latest edition of The Edge. It begins with a simple and thought-provoking assertion:
One aspect of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the most significant developments in the sciences today (i.e. those that affect the lives of everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented through advances in software and computation.
The piece that follows is a conversation with J. Craig Venter, Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks on biocomputation. It’s fascinating as always. The Edge has become essential reading; I highly recommend it. In the meantime, I’ve just re-read the Ladybird book on computers from 34 years ago. Hmmm.
Michael Shermer channels the Intelligent Designer
Check out Michael Shermer’s delightful creation myth parody over at the Huffington Post: all the way from:
“In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
to a satisfying conclusion:
By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.
The scary thing is that there are people out there that might take it seriously….