Snowy random 10

I’ve been sitting in my apartment this afternoon, restructuring several gigabytes of archived email on my PowerBook, playing Civ4: Beyond The Sword on my Windows box, and watching the snow fall. When at last the mail was done, and the CPU that had been pegged at 100% for the last hour dropped to idle, I fired up iTunes and put on the headphones. And this was what the “random 10” playlist delivered to me:

  • “Animal Ghost” by No-Man (from Flowermouth)
  • “Comes A Time” by Neil Young (from Live Rust)
  • “Shintaro” by Men at Work (from Men at Work ’81-’85)
  • “No Man’s Land” by Fairport Convention (from What We Did On Our Holidays)
  • “Cherish” by Madonna (from Like a Prayer)
  • “Alone” by Heart (from Alive In Seattle)
  • “The Coldest Winter In Memory” by Al Stewart (from Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time)
  • “Dhanno Ki Aankhon (In Dhanno’s Eyes)” by Asha Bhosle & Kronos Quartet (from You’ve Stolen My Heart – Songs from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood)
  • “For A Thousand Mothers” by Jethro Tull (from Stand Up)
  • “Gorecki” by Lamb (from Back To Mine: Dave Seaman)

Random enough for you?! As I finish this posting, I’m listening to Heart’s “Alone“. I’ve always thought that this was a remarkable expression of the raw hunger of unrequited love, and the live version sounds incredibly vulnerable.

"If You Weren't An Atheist…"

Here’s a fascinating piece from what’s becoming a favourite blog: Greta Christina wondering “If You Weren’t An Atheist, What Would You Be?” She considers four religions: the Quakers, Judaism, Baha’i, and Wicca ((But not Buddhism. Perhaps, like Sam Harris, she doesn’t really think of it as a religion.)), and realizes:

I’m finding this a fascinating exercise. For one thing, it keeps leading me back to atheism. Every religion I look at has some reason why it just doesn’t work.
But it’s also interesting because of the clues it’s giving me about what I’d like to see in the atheist movement — about what’s missing in my life that religion traditionally offers and that I’d like to find elsewhere.

Uh-oh – are we going to get Harvard-style humanism? I have very mixed feelings about that. But no. She looks at the kinds of things people get out of religion, and religious community, and realizes that she already has various ways of fulfilling each of them:

So maybe this vague yearning for some atheist equivalent of church doesn’t make sense. In the same way that I stopped trying to get all my emotional needs from one Capital R Relationship, maybe I should stop looking for one place to meet all my needs for shared epiphany and transcendence.
Maybe that one place is just my life as a whole.

Amen to that (if you’ll excuse the terminology).

Soulcalibur Legends

[Repeated from my Amazon.com review.]
It’s a long way from the Dreamcast to the Wii….
The Nintendo Wii was the first game console that I didn’t buy to play Soulcalibur. Back in the day, I bought a Sega Dreamcast Console just to play the original Soul Calibur. Then Soul Calibur 2 came out on the PlayStation 2, so I bought one of those. Next came Soul Calibur 3, which tried to add some RPG elements and wound up being a step back. Oh well. Then earlier this year I bought myself a Wii on the strength of its immersive sports games. And now, to my delight, we have Soulcalibur Legends on the Wii. This should be the ideal platform for a sword-fighting game, right?
The original Soul Calibur games were all about best-2-of-3 timed head-to-head swordfights in a variety of closed arenas. This game pits you against single and multiple opponents in what look like open RPG-like settings, but they still seem to be relatively episodic. You move with the nunchuk and fight with the controller, which works OK; I’m still getting the hang of the way that moving the joystick and moving the nunchuck itself interact. Spinning 180 degrees is essential, but tricky.
Above all, this game is going to be a good workout. No more sprawling in front of the screen, button-mashing your PS2 controller. You play this game standing, moving, feinting, jabbing, slashing. This is going to be fun – energetic fun.

Fisking Davies' metaphysics

John Wilkins has just posted an elegant take-down of that silly “science depends on faith” op-ed piece in the NYT:

I have a rule (Wilkins’ Law #35, I think) that if any scientist is going to draw unwarranted metaphysical conclusions, it will be a physicist, and in particular a cosmologist. Witness Paul Davies in the New York Times.
Davies wants to argue something like this:
Premise: there are laws of the universe and we cannot explain the existence of laws
Premise: the assumption that laws are to be found is the basis for doing science
Conclusion: Ergo, science rests on an act of faith

As Wilkins points out,

This is what Alfred North Whitehead once called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, also known as the Fallacy of Reification (by me, anyway). Take words and declare them properties of the universe.

I’ve always felt that this fallacy lies at the heart of the Bible-based religions Christianity. Take, for instance, the very first sentence in their book. “In the beginning was the word.” Rubbish. In the beginning was the world, or the cosmos, or whatever you want to call it. Recently, certain organisms evolved a capacity for language, and used words to describe the world. Sometimes the descriptions work well enough that we can treat them as law-like. Mostly not. Their accuracy, or otherwise, doesn’t affect the facts of the world. Wilkins again:

As Maynard Smith used to say to lunchers in his cafeteria, “Are you discussing words, or the world? If it is the world, I will stay, but if it is words, I will go”.

MarkCC tackles Erlang

This should be fun. Mark Chu-Carroll, best known as the author of Good Math, Bad Math, is “going to start writing a series of tutorial articles on Erlang”, probably the hottest language around right now. ((Ruby is so 2005, you know.)) I suspect we’re going to hear some fairly strong opinions…. Don’t miss ’em!

Apologies for temporary loss of service

Steve has been migrating all of the accounts on grommit to the new SuperMicro box, and it took a couple of hours. Everything should be working now (and working much faster!).
Apart from installing the new box, Steve made a raft of useful changes:

  • Installed OpenSolaris Nevada, build 75
  • Replaced uw-imap with Dovecot
  • Upgraded Squirrelmail
  • Moved from PHP4 to PHP5
  • Cleaned up and regenerated all keys and certs

Many thanks, Steve.

Slippery

From my favourite pilot’s blog ((Well worth bookmarking – only one or two posts a week, but always with a nice photograph.)), Flight Level 390: See what happens when you try to manoeuvre 75 tons of A320 ((“Fi-Fi” to her friends.)) on a sheet of ice:

After we loaded 150 passengers and bags, the tug crew pushed our aircraft shaped iceberg back while the co-pilot started number one engine. Ground control cleared us to taxi to the ice pad. As I advanced number one throttle, Fi-Fi slowly slid on the icy ramp in the direction of the thrust vector. Ooops! Not good… We are forced to start number two for symmetrical thrust. Slowly, very slowly, I taxied to the Ice Man’s ramp which was full of airliners being sprayed with hot de-icing fluid. Ice Man, actually a woman, asked us to proceed to spot #9 and configure the aircraft for de-icing fluid. Then, in a last second change of plans, she asked us if we could proceed to spot #7. I turned the nose wheel left but Fi-Fi kept going straight.
“Tell her we can’t accept spot #7.”

No kidding.

Kindle – first impressions

The first thing I did last Monday morning Amazon Kindle– even before having breakfast – was to order myself a Kindle ebook reader. I had seen a prototype some months ago, and I knew I was going to want one. At the same time, I ordered a 2GB SD card; I figure that should hold me forever. While waiting for delivery, I read the various “reviews” and blog comments, most of which seemed to be written by people who had never seen a Kindle, and who kept repeating the same rhetorical questions which they could probably have answered very easily if they’d bothered to think. ((History lesson for Cory: the first Apple iPod came out in 2001, priced at $399. It took another six years for the major music businesses to abandon DRM. See also Neil Gaiman’s perspective.))
Also while I was waiting, I arranged for some downloads to be in the queue when I powered up the device for the first time. I bought one book (“The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman), and ordered previews of two others (“Takeover” by Charlie Savage, and “Arsenals of Folly” by Richard Rhodes). I also practiced transcoding a couple of files into Kindle format using the free non-wireless approach. ((You mail a suitable file as an attachment to NAME@free.kindle.com, and Amazon emails you a link from which you can download the file to your PC or Mac; then you can transfer it via USB to the Kindle.))
At 5:45pm today it finally arrived. (Yes, I was like a little kid waiting for Santa.) I opened it up ((Admiring the gorgeous packaging – this is an area where I think Apple has raised the bar for the whole industry.)), turned it on, and found myself reading the pre-loaded user guide. By the time I located the “Home” key, the content I had pre-ordered was already installed. Then I turned it off, removed the back panel, and plugged in the SD card. At this point, I encountered the only glitch so far: when I turned it back on, I couldn’t get a wireless signal. I checked the various menus to see if I could see any wireless settings ((No, of course I didn’t read the manual. Who do you think I am??)), spotted a “Restart” option, clicked it, and the Kindle came right back up with an 80% signal. Not a big deal.
Reading on the Kindle just feels right. There are six font sizes, and I picked the smallest, which works for me. ((I could perhaps have used a seventh, even smaller, setting, but that might have been pushing it.)) People have described the design as “bland”, but for me that’s actually the point. After using the Kindle for a few minutes, you don’t notice it any more, which is as it should be. Intrusive, edgy styling would be exactly wrong for this kind of device. The controls work well, and I especially like the “silver strip” cursor.
I started reading “Arsenals of Folly”, and kept reading until I reached the end of the preview chapter… And that’s when it became expensively seductive. Because there’s a link there inviting you to buy the full book, and one click, $9.99, and 30 seconds later you’ve done exactly that. My advice: choose those previews with care, because it’s far too easy to buy. (Or perhaps I should just say that it’s a very compelling user experience!) ((Speaking of prices, the Amazon Kindle store has a remarkably long tail, priced from $0.01 (really!) to $1,079.96. And of course you can also get 20,000+ free titles from Project Gutenberg.))
This is easily the best ebook solution I’ve encountered. I’ve tried reading ebooks on my PC or Mac – wrong, wrong, wrong: reading a book is a “sitting back” activity, while using a PC is a “sitting forward” thing. (That’s a fundamental dichotomy, which is why you can comfortably watch a DVD on a laptop but not a desktop.) I’ve tried various PDAs, but the screens are too small and the fonts are always ugly. I’ve never tried a tablet PC, but that seems far too heavy and bulky. The Kindle just works. The size and weight are appropriate, I find the fonts “comfortably satisfying”, if that makes any sense, and the e-paper screen is unobtrusive, the way that the page of a book is supposed to be.
Things to try tomorrow: the New York Times, the dictionary, the web browser, and loading up Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall…”. Oh yes, and reading some more of “The World Without Us”. Because that’s what this is all about.