Author: geoff

CD of the week: "Four Sail" by Love

This is not a new album. And it’s not Arthur Lee’s masterpiece Forever Changes. So why is it my album of the week?
Lee had finished up Forever Changes, and the original band was falling apart (mostly due to drugs), but the contract with Elektra was unbreakable. Arthur Lee owed them one more album. So he hired three studio musicians, power rockers who were clearly hooked on Blue Cheer, Spirit, and Moby Grape, and they recorded “Four Sail”. (For some reason, Amazon.com calls it Foursail. Whatever.) I bought it the day it came out back in 1969. I still have the vinyl, but a year ago it was finally re-released on CD, so now everyone can enjoy it.
What makes the album work so well is the interplay – and the tension – between Arthur Lee’s songs – wistful, sardonic, pensive lyrics over jazzy, Latin-influenced melodies – and the power rock trio behind him. Michael Fremer’s review on Musicangle gets into the details better than I can, but the result is a glorious album of rock’n’roll. It can stand up to any of the great rock albums from the late 60s by folks like Steve Miller, Spirit, even the Stones. Sadly, it’s been largely ignored because it isn’t Forever Changes – but it doesn’t pretend to be.
Four Sail is one of those albums that I find myself slipping into the CD changer in my car every few months… and then no matter what else is in there, Four Sail is what I listen to. It’s a “roll down the windows, crank it up and cruise” kind of album. And that’s what I’ve been doing this week….

Things that leave you speechless

On Tuesday, according to the Washington Post, Bush uttered the following absurdity: “Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion.”
If any other politician had said this, there would have been an uproar. With Bush: nothing. Its the kind of inanity to which we’ve become accustomed. How pathetic.
P.S. Given Bush’s recent attempts to tell the EC what to do about Turkey, it’s worth noting that the USA would not qualify for EC membership. No state that employs the death penalty is eligible to join. The 13th Protocol of the ECHR is the operative text. [And thanks, Gene, for pointing out my Freudian slip.]

Killed on the next zebra crossing

Remember the old HHGTTG quote about proving black is white and….? Well, on Lisa Rein’s Radar she has QuickTime clips of the 6/21/04 Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart shows exactly how Cheney contradicted himself over The Mythical Connection Between Saddam And Al-Qaeda. (Of course this was the same show in which Stewart nailed Stephen Hayes, author of the mind-bogglingly stupid book The Connection.)
I wonder what Cheney’s reaction might be? (And apropos of Cheney’s new attitude towards Congressional decorum, Juan Cole suggests that if a $275,000 fine is appropriate for Howard Stern, it should be good enough for the Vice President.)

Partying like it's 1999… on the other side of the galaxy

Space 1999 Eagle modelOK, I admit it: I was a fan of the 70s sci-fi series Space 1999. And I always thought that the their spaceships, the Eagle class, really looked the part – much more so than Gerry Anderson’s earlier designs, such as Fireball XL5 and the Thunderbirds. I even preferred the Eagle to Matt Jefferies’ original Enterprise. (Heresy!)
The Eagle looked as if it had been designed by a mechanical engineer rather than an artist. No swooping curves, bold colours, or mysteriously pulsing “warp coils”: the Eagle was a grey, utilitarian, tubular framework with a series of uncompromisingly functional modular assemblies bolted on. This utilitarian style soon appeared in other 1970s sci-fi films and series, exemplified by the U.S.S. Cygnus in Disney’s disastrous Black Hole, the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. It’s probably no coincidence that this was the period when the Pompidou Centre was being constructed in Paris, with all of the plumbing, pipework, cables and service ducts on the outside of the building. Be that as it may, I thought that the Eagle looked just right, as did the Hawk variant that appeared in one episode.
Over the years fans all over the world (but especially in Japan) have kept the Space 1999 series in syndication, and I see that it’s now out on DVD at (ouch) $199. I know, I know, it’s 48 episodes on 16 discs, but even so…. Anyway, an unexpected package arrived today from the BBC America shop: a detailed, foot long, diecast Eagle. Cool! And thanks….
(Yes, the transporter pod does snap out. And I see that a Rescue Eagle version is now available. Hmmmm…)
(Update: It seems that medical and freighter Eagles are on the way too…..)

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance: A feeling of tension experienced when certain cognitions are contradictory or inconsistent with each other
For example, in this morning’s news:
“I think the bitter differences over the war are over,” said Mr Bush. [iC SouthLondon]
While at the same time, the level of peaceful demonstrations – and threats of violence – is such that:
About 4,000 police and 2,000 soldiers ­ more than a third of Ireland’s security forces are being deployed… In addition, 700 US security personnel and four naval ships are being called in…. In Istanbul… Turkish police are expected to deploy more than 23,000 officers for the Nato leaders’ summit. [Belfast Telegraph]
I’m definitely experiencing “a feeling of tension” about contradictory cognitions. How about you?

"Our preposterous use of books"

Back on June 4th, I posted a piece about Arianna Huffington’s article comparing George W. Bush and England’s King Henry V (as depicted by Shakespeare). Of course politicians, advertisers, journalists and others have always mined the English literary canon for stirring sound-bites. (In Blood, Class and Empire, the alternately brilliant and insufferable Christopher Hitchens notes that William Safire went through a purple patch in which a third of his NYT op-ed pieces included Churchillian references.) And today Scott Newstrom, an assistant professor at Amherst College, sent me a pointer to a fascinating essay in which he looks in some detail at the various (and varied) ways in which Americans have exploited the “Prince Hal” character, particularly with respect to George W. Bush. Recommended.
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The title of this entry is from Emerson. Read Scott Newstrom’s piece for the connection.

Fond memories

Back on May 4th I posted a piece about colleagues who had been caught up in the most recent round of layoffs here at Sun. What some people didn’t realize is that the process was not completed back in May. For reasons associated with the reorganization of the systems business, some of the layoff decisions were deferred… until today.
I want to mention two people who were RIFfed today who had been at Sun almost as long as I have. Since I haven’t cleared this with them, I’ll just call them Dave and Don.
I worked with Dave on the 386i (“Roadrunner”) workstation in the 1986-1988 period. I did software, he did mechanicals. Where we came together was designing the keyboard. For those of you who have not experienced it, working on a keyboard design team is the most miserable job on the planet. Everybody, and I mean everybody, knows how to do your job better than you do. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will be satisfied with what you decide. Too soft, too hard, too clicky, not enough feedback, “you moron, how could you put key X in position Y”…. Dave was unfailingly patient in the face of all the brickbats (and the occasional compliment). In the end, I think we did a bloody good job, even if everyone hated us for it.
Don joined the PC-NFS team back in… oh, hell! I can’t remember: it’s like he was always there. He was the guy who made the mysterious stuff happen: that ineffable transition from the first alpha build all the way to getting it into customers’ hands. You know what I mean: the product stuff; training the network ambassadors; preparing the support organization; getting the part numbers; the alpha and beta and omega of making a software product happen. These days it all happens according to a tightly-scripted process; back in the 80s we were making it up as we went along. (A PC software product?! From Sun!?!@!? Hah!) Eventually Don even wrote a book about how to turn our product into a real customer solution. He had [HAS! What the hell, he’s not dead!] a sense of proportion, and of the absurd, which kept him (and us) sane through many releases, and millions of copies sold. Thanks, Don – for everything.
Just two names. Many other colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of mine left Sun today, some gladly, but most before they were ready. Thanks, everyone, and the very best of luck. You deserve it.

Blogspam redux

OK, the blogspamming on this blog is now reaching ~10 per day, which is enough to be seriously annoying. So I’m going to be spending the next few days installing and testing countermeasures. If this causes problems, please be patient…..

Visualizing systems

I’ve always been interested in ways of visualizing complex systems. Simply displaying a fairly literal graphical representation of a bunch of state variables seems unsatisfactory. The correlations and causal relationships are rarely apparent; on the other hand our pattern-seeking brains are all too likely to see relationships where none exist. I remember attending a conference on agent technology (specifically “social” software agents) in which a speaker said that her team was looking for ways to “construct a narrative” that corresponded to what was going on in the system. That feels about right.
But anyway… when I want to visualize a really complex system, I head over to Passur’s site for BOS, pick a good time of day (18:00 works well), and click Start Replay. (The reason to watch a replay is because then you can click on individual aircraft to display their information. That feature is disabled for the live feed, ostensibly for reasons of security. There’s also a random delay on the live feed.)
At the 10 mile setting you can watch the way the air traffic controllers set up the streams of aircraft for arrivals. (At that setting my house is in the lower left corner, below the “J” of Jamaica Pond.) Zooming out to 90 miles you get a nice sense of how the large-scale airways system feeds into the arrival streams. And each one of those icons represents an autonomous agent, with one or two independent planning subsystems, and less than perfect communications, interpreting the wishes of a bunch of ground-based planning systems….
(Passur’s Airport Monitor is available for a number of airports. You don’t have to watch BOS. But if you too have a soft spot for Logan, check out this article from Salon.)
[By the way, the applet doesn’t work quite right on the Mac. Not sure why….]