Unabashed nostalgia

For some reason, the comments on yesterday’s piece about Procol Harum triggered a paroxysm of nostalgia. I decided to put together an iTunes playlist of my favourite 45s from my last year at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. That would be September 1967 to June 1968. The charts are online at Everyhit.com which made it easy. Most of the tracks that I wanted were either in my iTunes collection already* or available from the iTunes Music Store. The only real frustrations were that I couldn’t find anything by the Herd or the Honeybus. (No, you won’t have heard of either group.)
The result – 21 tracks – fits nicely on a CD-R. Here’s the playlist. It wasn’t a bad year, was it? Of course I had to slide over such chart-topping marvels as Richard Harris’s “Macarthur Park” and Pigmeat Markham’s “Here Come De Judge”!

  1. Flowers In The Rain / The Move 2:25
  2. Homburg / Procol Harum 3:56
  3. San Franciscan Nights / Eric Burdon & The Animals 3:24
  4. Kites / Simon Dupree And The Big Sound 3:50
  5. Hello, Goodbye / The Beatles 3:29
  6. The Mighty Quinn / Manfred Mann 2:53
  7. Nights in White Satin / The Moody Blues 4:26
  8. Pictures of Matchstick Men / Status Quo 3:11
  9. Green Tambourine / The Lemon Pipers 2:27
  10. (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay / Otis Redding 2:39
  11. Lady Madonna / The Beatles 2:18
  12. Lazy Sunday / The Small Faces 3:06
  13. Mony Mony / Tommy James & The Shondells 2:53
  14. This Wheel’s On Fire / Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & The Trinity 3:31
  15. Lovin’ Things / Marmalade 3:10
  16. Baby Come Back / The Equals 2:30
  17. Hurdy Gurdy Man / Donovan 3:18
  18. Jumpin’ Jack Flash / The Rolling Stones 3:43
  19. Fire! / Crazy World Of Arthur Brown 2:59
  20. Mrs. Robinson / Simon & Garfunkel 4:04
  21. On The Road Again / Canned Heat 3:26

(And why did I include “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers? Am I just a sucker for phasing**? I actually have a soft spot for them: they produced what I consider to be one of the finest rock-raga hybrids ever, a 9 minute 10 second opus entitled “Through With You”.)
—
* Often as part of a compilation CD. I don’t think I’d actually buy anything by the Marmalade these days (Although I did back in 1968.)
** Actually I am. You’ll notice that quite a few of these songs use, or abuse, what was undoubtedly the sound effect du jour. Check out “This Wheel’s On Fire”, for instance.

Quick music plug: Procol Harum "Live at the Union Chapel"

A few days ago I bought the DVD+CD release of Live at the Union Chapel, recorded by Procol Harum in December, 2003. I listened repeatedly to the CD in my car (and on my iPod), but it wasn’t until tonight that I sat down to watch the whole 139 minute concert video.
Brilliant. Just wonderful.
Gary Brooker’s voice sounds just the way it did back in 1966, and Matthew Fisher’s Hammond organ playing is as magical as ever. As Gary described in the “bonus interview”, the programme tends to be 40% new material (promoting the latest album), 40% of the songs that they have to play, and 20% of whatever takes his fancy. Highlights for me were “Shine On Brightly”, “An Old English Dream”, “Wall Street Blues”, “A Salty Dog” (boy, that one takes me back!), “Whiskey Train” with a stunning drum solo (remember those?), and “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” with the rarely-performed third verse.
Emphatically recommended.
(I only saw them once in concert – High Wycombe Town Hall, 1969, I think. What a strange venue that was! It’s been over 3 years since they last played in the USA….)

Busy weekend

In brief:

  • Saturday: Getting stuff for the apartment: 5 hours at IKEA (most items to be delivered on Tuesday), 2 hours at Macy’s, 1 hour at Office Depot.
  • Sunday: Recovering from the above: playing Civ3, exploring more of Seattle, and getting my Amazon laptop to play with my WiFi.

Five quotations

There’s a new blog-meme floating around: I’ve seen it at Good Math, Bad Math and Pharyngula among others. The idea is to create an account on The Quotations Page and go through adding quotations to your page until you have five quotations which capture the essence of YOU. Here are mine:

  1. The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. H. L. Mencken (1880 – 1956)
  2. Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. John Archibald Wheeler, American J. of Physics, 1978, 46, 323
  3. Ignorance is not innocence but sin. Robert Browning (1812 – 1889)
  4. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)
  5. A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5×11 inch paper cannot be understood. Mark Ardis

In progress

My first blog post from inside Amazon, on my corporate laptop (HP/WinXP/Firefox). Curiously the WordPress UI looks quite different on FireFox; I imagine there are some features which don’t work correctly on Safari. Oh, well.

The most important things that I learned yesterday:

  • 90.3 KEXP
  • FX for beer
  • Lots of faces from the Distributed Systems Engineering all-hands, to which I now have to attach names
  • Remedy (internal tool) is the answer to 90% of questions. The other 10% are the really important ones.

    Must-read links:

Day 1

So, finally, my first day at Amazon. Four hours of orientation this morning, then being shown my office (no bookshelves! must fix that), then lunch with my manager, then wrestling my computers (WinTel laptop and Linux desktop) into submission, then diving out for an hour to sign the lease on my apartment and open a new bank account, then back to the office to see if the Exchange server has decided to behave itself, then provisioning my VPN device… all of this interspersed with greetings and introductions from dozens of people, most of whom I will come to know really well in the next few weeks, but right now my caches are spilling data as fast as it comes in, so I’m damned if I can remember any names, and suddenly it’s 6 o’clock, and I have to head across the street to get a shuttle bus back to the PacMed building where I parked my car.
Whew!
I knew I was in terminal overload when I returned to my desk after I’d signed the lease and opened a bank account, and suddenly realized that I didn’t have the apartment paperwork. It was still at the bank. Panic. Rush back to retrieve it. Resume breathing.
Speaking of banks, my account back in Massachusetts is with Bank of America. (Used to be BayBank, than BankBoston, then Fleet….) And my new account in Seattle is also with BofA. But in MA your ATM card can have a 5 digit pin, while here in WA the pin can only be 4 digits long. Go figure….
And to all my friends and family who asked about the employee discount at Amazon.com…. There is one. But it’s modest, and I can’t share it. Sorry. (Mind you, as a new WA resident I’ll have to pay sales tax on my Amazon.com purchases. So the discount will come in handy.)
But, you ask (well, some of you), what’s it like? What’s the gestalt of the place? Obviously it’s too soon to say, but one thing is very familiar after years at Sun. The people here are smart. Very smart. And they seem to be predisposed to action, which feels different from some parts of Sun recently.
This is going to be fun. More anon.

Weekend photography

As requested by Alec, here are a few photographs taken this weekend. Most show the comings and goings of Seattle’s busy port. My (temporary) apartment here in Belltown gives me excellent views southwest, towards the container terminal, and northwest, towards Bainbridge Island.
cruise ship entering port - Seattle

An elegant rebuttal of the "God as ultimate explanation" argument

Keith Parsons has come up with a beautifully-written paper entitled No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but this paragraph will give you a sense of the strategy that Parsons adopts:

[Varghese] does tell us that “It is as absurd to ask for an explanation for the existence of a self-explanatory being as it is to ask ‘Why is a circle round?'” (pp. 14-15). Well, yes, it would be absurd to ask “What is the explanation (meaning an explanation external to that being itself) of the self-explanatory being?” But we are still left completely in the dark about just how we are to construe God’s alleged self-explanatoriness, and, in particular, how it would differ from the condition of a putative original, uncaused state of the physical universe. Worse, until and unless we have such clarification of what it means to be self-explanatory, it is hard to see how God’s alleged self-explanatoriness really amounts to anything other than just being inexplicable. If God, by definition, can have no cause or dependence on anything else (since all else is caused or depends on him), then God’s existence is placed beyond the bounds of any possible explanation, account, or understanding. Ironically, therefore, Varghese and Meynell may have only succeeded in defining God into utter inexplicability, and so making him into precisely the sort of ultimate brute fact that they decry.

He also addresses a common theistic sleight-of-hand: the leap from logical contingency to ontological contingency.

But why should any nontheist suppose that the doctrine of creatio continuans has any rational credentials? Why, for instance, would a quark require any metaphysical props to uphold its existence and underwrite its powers and liabilities? Of course, all physical things are contingent in the sense that they might not have existed, but logical contingency does not imply ontological contingency. Just because something might not exist at a given time is no reason to think that in fact its existence is maintained by something else. From the nontheist’s perspective, the insistence upon an explanation of the universe in terms of creatio continuans is just another instance of the propensity of theistic apologists to create a mystery where there is none, and then offer God as the tailor-made answer to the pseudoenigma. As for why existing things remain in existence, nontheists just do not see any mystery here and no need for an explanation.

Indeed. Nicely done.
[Via Mark Vuletic, whose Subucula tua apparet is also well worth a read.]