We went to the Showbox last night to see Amanda Palmer and friends. They’re touring in support of the new album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer? I first encountered Amanda’s work with the Dresden Dolls through the Legendary Pink Dots connection, but I haven’t seen her on stage for many years. From her DVDs and YouTube videos, I was prepared for a theatrical experience, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Oddly, the purely musical highlight wasn’t Amanda’s new songs, but the solo contribution of cellist Zoë Keating. She uses a foot-controlled computer to lay down complex delay loops that she can then sequence and play against; her cello becomes a complete string ensemble, with percussion. The effects are quite thrilling.
Other “friends” included The Builders and The Butchers, a band from Portland, OR that would have been excellent if their kick-ass energy and instrumental prowess had been applied to some songs that weren’t so similar (and uniformly depressing), and the Danger Ensemble, who provided theatrical interpretations of many of Amanda’s songs. (There was also a local guy whose name I forget, who improbably wowed the packed house with a drinking song, accompanied on accordion…)
Overall verdict: a bit uneven, but tons of fun. Check out the new album (and use it as an excuse to dig out the old Dresden Dolls stuff you haven’t listened to in a while).
Songs You Like That You’re Pretty Sure No One Else Does
John Scalzi posted a twisted little piece today, entitled “Songs You Like That You’re Pretty Sure No One Else Does”. He chose a track from David Bowie’s Tin Machine side project, which sets a pretty high bar. He also linked to the track on Imeem, which posed a bit of a problem; none of my obvious candidates were available on Imeem. (We’re talking about things like Jon Astley’s “[Let’s Take Off Our Clothes And] Put This Love To The Test”, and Tracy Ullman’s version of “I Don’t Want Our Loving To Die”.) But then I found it: a priceless example of the so-called “Boss-town Sound”. It’s “Mind Flowers” by Ultimate Spinach, from their second LP “Behold & See”. The names, the lyrics, all sound like a satire on the worst excesses of pretentious hippie narcissism – and yet I still like it. Goes down perfectly with a recreational hallucinogen… or at least it did 40 years ago! It takes its place alongside other psychedelic masterpieces from groups like Arzachel, Man, H.P.Lovecraft, and Country Joe & The Fish.
"The Dark Side" reviewed
I recently read Jane Mayer’s brilliant book “The Dark Side”, about the way in which the Bush regime embraced and justified a policy of torture. I kept meaning to blog about it, but now (via Appel, standing in for Sully) I see that Publius has written a review which says pretty much what I would have said (but better).
In reading Mayer, one striking aspect of the administration’s anti-terrorism policies is how completely haphazard and impetuous they were. There was practically no deliberation within the government, particularly among the branches who (1) actually knew something about this stuff; and (2) were, you know, statutorily authorized to do something.
Instead, a lawless cabal of ignorant people – Yoo, Addington, etc. – decided to craft national anti-terrorism policy having basically no experience in the relevant fields (military, terrorism, etc.). The disparity between (1) the magnitude of decisions being made, and (2) the relative ignorance of the people making them is simply staggering.
Please check it out.
Vatican would rather gay people were executed than married
The National Secular Society reports on the increasingly anachronistic and regressive regime in the Vatican:
When France proposed a resolution seeking all nations to decriminalise homosexuality, the Vatican immediately said it would oppose the resolution. This is despite the fact that up to 70 nations still have legal punishments for gay people including, in some instances, the death penalty. In a number of Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen, homosexual acts are still a capital offence.
The UN resolution is due to be proposed by France later this month on behalf of the 27-nation European Union. But Archbishop Celestino Migliore said the Vatican opposed the resolution because it would “add new categories of those protected from discrimination†and could lead to reverse discrimination against traditional heterosexual marriage.
And so, rather than speak out against Islamic states which execute gay people, the Catholic Church insists that its right to discriminate remains “protected”.
But it ‘s not just gays.
Meanwhile the Times has revealed that the “Holy See†also refused to sign a UN document last May on the rights of the disabled because it did not condemn abortion or assert the rights of foetuses with birth defects.
I wonder if the newly-converted ex-PM of Britain has any comments…
File under "Doh!"
From the WSJ.
Merrill Lynch chief John Thain has suggested to directors that he get a 2008 bonus of as much as $10 million, but the battered securities firm’s compensation committee is resisting his request, according to people familiar with the situation.
The committee and full board are scheduled to meet Monday to hear Mr. Thain’s formal bonus recommendations for himself and other senior executives of the New York company. No decision has been reached, and it isn’t known what Mr. Thain will recommend, but the compensation committee is leaning toward denying the executives bonuses for this year, these people said.
Evidently Thain is one of these idiots who hasn’t caught up with the new reality. The question is not “how much bonus does he get”, but “does he keep his job, or get chucked overboard with no severance or pension”. A little humility would seem appropriate….
UPDATE: Alex has more at The Debatable Land.
Being British: a humanist perspective
The British government are gathering various points of view on “what it means to be British”, and the Humanist Philosophers’ Group (part of the British Humanist Association) recently submitted their position paper, A British Statement of Values. It begins: “The core value which we believe can bring people together in this country is the ideal of an open, inclusive and cooperative society from which no group or individual is excluded, and from which no group deliberately excludes itself.” The whole thing is worth reading, and reinforces my sense that, even after all these years in the US, I’m still essentially British in my views and values.
It would be interesting to read a comparable piece on “what it means to be American”. Any offers?
Spookily quiet
I just got back from a morning’s Christmas shopping at Bellevue Mall. It was eerily quiet, with the kind of traffic that I would have expected to see on a typical Saturday in March. I walked by several high-end shops (jewelry, perfume, that kind of thing) that were empty except for a couple of worried-looking sales assistants.
Apportioning responsibility
Yglesias skewers the notion that nobody is especially to blame for the financial crisis, that it’s just “human nature”. (And Ta-Nehisi Coates really ought to know better.)
After all, the underlying premise of our finance-led rush to hyperinequality has been that the rich are very very very very different from you and me and that it’s so excruciatingly important that we maintain adequate incentives for them to ply their trade that we should ignore the immense damageimmense damage rising inequality does to middle class well-being.
One we realize that that’s not the case, that there’s no “magic†at work in the financial field and people are just mucking around I think that has quite radical implications. If nothing the CEOs and top fund managers are doing makes them worthy of taking the blame when the crash hits, then they also don’t deserve nearly the share of the credit — and money — that they got while things were going up.
And Ross makes the “proportionality” point nicely:
But at a same time, our hypothetical homebuyer had very different responsibilities than a hypothetical Wall Street banker. His decision to buy at the height of the bubble put him at risk to lose, say, tens of thousands of dollars and perhaps the roof over his head. Those are high stakes, obviously, but they’re high stakes for him and for his family. Whereas the risky decisions being made the people running, say, Citibank had serious consequences for millions of people, in America and around the world. And this distinction ought to matter, both to how people should be expected to behave, and how they should be judged.
Meshing the ADS-B
Don Brown runs a nice blog on Air Traffic Control issues called Get the Flick, but unfortunately he doesn’t accept comments. So instead of responding to his piece on ADS-B Intel as a comment, I’m going to have to do it here.
Here’s the problem: how do we automate the tracking of airliners on oceanic routes? The technology in use today is the same as it’s been since time immemorial: pilots are required to check in via HF radio and make a verbal position report at specified waypoints (e.g. every 10 degrees of longitude). HF radio is unreliable and noisy, and the low frequency of position updates means that the controllers have a very crude and approximate view of what’s going on.
Over land, things are much better. Every airliner carries a “Mode S” transponder which for ADS-B is enhanced so that it “broadcasts the position of the airplane (and some other stuff) to the rest of the world 60 times a minute.” (This is called an “ES” message.) But Mode S is line-of-sight only, so once an airliner is over the ocean, the signal gets lost.
Don considers the satellite option:
If we could get the data relayed through satellites then we would have universal coverage. That would be a huge boost over the oceans where we currently run wide spacing between aircraft because we don’t have radar coverage. But […] it turns out that sending data via satellites is expensive. Prohibitively so. […] That data can be sent through a satellite but it won’t be (very often) because it is so expensive. I understand it’s about $2 per position report to run it through a satellite. That would be $120 per minute if it matched the refresh rates of the GBTs. Oh, and the big catch is that the airlines pay for the satellite transmission. In other words, we won’t get a lot more position reports than we do now (via voice) over the radios.
Bummer. But then he notes that because the signal is line-of-sight:
… any other airplane that is within range will receive the signal. In other words, over the middle of the ocean, controllers won’t know where airplanes are with any great accuracy — they won’t get frequent updates from ADS-B over satellites — but the pilots will know where the other planes in range are with the same once-per-second accuracy. I see an attempt at “pilot-based separation†in the future. How about you?
Well, no, I won’t expect “pilot-based separation” (and don’t we already have that, called TCAS?) But if there are enough aircraft in the air at a time, why not use a mesh network? In the simplest approach, each aircraft could simply rebroadcast the ES messages from other aircraft in its vicinity. If that’s too chaotic, it would be relatively simple (and cheap) to add a smart mesh network appliance to each aircraft, and route the ES data over this network. The FAA has deployed ADS-B transceivers on oil rigs to extend coverage in the Gulf of Mexico, so hybrid ADS-B networks are already possible.
Having said all this, I expect satellite networking will become the preferred approach. As more and more airlines offer wireless Internet access, the cost of satellite data transfer is going to drop. (See my piece First blog entry from 34,000 ft, posted nearly three years ago. How long before the rule is “Make position report via HF or email”?) But I’m a big believer in using redundant technologies which don’t share failure modes, so mesh networked ADS may well have a future.
Airbus assessment of the 787
Over at PlaneBuzz, Holly has posted a link to an extraordinary Airbus presentation entitled “Boeing 787 Lessons Learnt.” I have no idea how long it’ll remain online before some lawyer gets it taken down, so grab it while you can. It’s a detailed engineering analysis of the problems that Boeing has had (and will continue to experience) with the 787 program. It’s obviously a must-read for those of us who follow the commercial aviation industry, but I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in distributed engineering projects.