"Death At a Funeral"

Just got home from watching Death At a Funeral downtown. ((The trailer is here.)) It was very funny in a very English way, which means that some of the audience (including yours truly) were laughing hysterically, while others seemed confused and occasionally grossed out. It was good to see my favourite actors from “Spooks”/”MI-5”, Mathew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes, while Allan Tudik (whom most will remember as the pilot in “Serenity”) was inspired as the inadvertent victim of hallucinogenic “recreational pharmaceuticals”.
Geoff ArnoldGood fun. And then after lunch I celebrated by going up to Capitol Hill and getting (by my standards) a fairly radical haircut at Scream.

Why a gig?

The other day, I realized that I was surrounded by “gigs of flash”. Each one of these gadgets contains one gigabyte of Flash RAM:

  • Casio Exilim S600 camera
  • Kodak P850 camera
  • AT&T (HTC) 8525 cell phone
  • Sony PSP
  • Apple iPod Nano
  • Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
  • Nintendo Wii

Of course these seven “gigs” are packaged in five different form factors… And why a gig? For a camera or an MP3 player, 1GB means “big enough that the battery will die before you fill it up or listen to it all”. In many cases 1GB represented the “knee of the curve”, the best price-performance at the time.
The interesting question for me is when 120GB of flash is going to become price-competitive with a 120GB hard disk. Today you can get a 5400rpm 120GB disk for $80-100, quantity one. The first generation of plug-compatible flash replacements are still pretty expensive ($350 for 32GB), but the price per megabyte for flash seems to be dropping by around 65% per year, so we won’t have to wait long. In view of the benefits (reduced heat, better battery life, significantly better performance, robustness, etc.) I’d be happy to pay $300 for a 120GB replacement for my present laptop HDD.

Hats

I now understand why so many reviewers have said that Hats by The Blue Nile is such a perfect album to listen to through really good headphones, at night, with the lights out, with no distractions and no pressure of time. The only puzzle is how I managed to miss this since its release in 1989. (I only found it now because I was fooling around with liveplasma while checking out iWOW, and I decided to plug Prefab Sprout into both liveplasma and iTunes. Several clicks later, I landed on Blue Nile, and the rest is between me, the iTMS, and my credit card provider.)

iWOW!

The vast majority of my music collection is stored on my PowerBook, ((The CDs are archived back in Massachusetts)) and when I’m in my apartment I listen to it using iTunes. (I either use headphones or stream it via WiFi to my home theatre system.) The whole setup has been very satisfactory, but there was room for improvement. After a tip-off from Gene, I downloaded a plugin for iTunes called iWOW, from SRS Labs. I’d come across this company before; I have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones from Sharper Image which incorporate SRS technology.
I was blown away. The plugin allows you to manipulate the stereo separation, position, and definition in various ways; there are presets for various kinds of music and output devices. Try this: set iWOW up the way you want, then turn it off, start playing a familiar track, and turn iWOW on half way through. The effect is remarkable: a vast improvement over unmodified iTunes. There are also some cute tricks you can play: by turning down the “virtual centre speaker” you can eliminate most of the vocals, creating a kind of karaoke mode!
I used the free trial for a week, then shelled out $19.99 to register it. Well worth the money. Now if only I had an iWOW plugin for my iPod…

Why? Why not?

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean offers a nice piece on one of those annoying questions that keeps on popping up: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? Many religious thinkers have tried to weave this into an argument for the existence of God (or at least some kind of First Cause), but none of them stand up to serious scrutiny. There is, for example, the idea that non-existence would be “simpler” than existence, and so some kind of prime mover is necessary.

It’s easy to get tricked into thinking that simplicity is somehow preferable. After all, Occam’s Razor exhorts us to stick to simple explanations. But that’s a way to compare different explanations that equivalently account for the same sets of facts; comparing different sets of possible underlying rules for the universe is a different kettle of fish entirely.

And he points out that it’s critical to distinguish between “simpler” in the Occam sense and “simplicity” as an aesthetic preference:

And, to be honest, it’s true that most working physicists have a hope (or a prejudice) that the principles underlying our universe are in fact pretty simple. But that’s simply an expression of our selfish desire, not a philosophical precondition on the space of possible universes. When it comes to the actual universe, ultimately we’ll just have to take what we get.

As Sean concludes, the problem is that we’re making a kind of category mistake in even asking the question:

Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole.

Hitchens on Cantuar

Christopher Hitchens has a most enjoyable piece in Vanity Fair about the book tour he did to promote God Is Not Great. It sounds like he had a lot of fun, with Jerry Falwell’s death providing a real bonus. (I missed his appearance at the Town Hall in Seattle, which was a shame.) And then when he got home…

June 10, Washington, D.C.: It’s been weeks on the road, and after a grueling swing through Canada I am finally home. I tell the wife and daughter that’s it: no more god talk for a bit—let’s get lunch at the fashionable Café Milano, in Georgetown. Signor Franco leads us to a nice table outside and I sit down—right next to the Archbishop of Canterbury. O.K., then, this must have been meant to happen. I lean over. “My Lord Archbishop? It’s Christopher Hitchens.” “Good gracious,” he responds, gesturing at his guest—“we were just discussing your book.”
The archbishop’s church is about to undergo a schism. More than 10 conservative congregations in Virginia have seceded, along with some African bishops, to protest the ordination of a gay bishop in New England. I ask him how it’s going. “Well”—he lowers his voice—“I’m rather trying to keep my head down.” Well, why, in that case, I want to reply, did you seek a job that supposedly involves moral leadership? But I let it go. What do I care what some Bronze Age text says about homosexuality? And there’s something hopelessly innocent about the archbishop: he looks much more like a sheep than a shepherd. What can one say in any case about a religion that describes its adherents as a flock?

(HT to Dave for the correction to the title.)

Wii

My Nintendo Wii arrived today, and I’ve been checking it out. ((And for those who asked me how I got one, I bought it on eBay. When it arrived, the receipt showed that it had been purchased from Amazon.com, confirming my suspicion that a considerable number of those that we are selling are being snapped up by people using “sniping” software.)) I like the overall user experience, though I imagine that the relentlessly cheerful pieces of music that accompany everything could get tedious after a while. The online mode is completely seamless. And as for the games… well, I’ve only played one game of tennis, which I lost. I suspect that this is going to be quite addictive, and not a bad work-out either!

The one-dimensionality of political discourse

Good piece from The Barefoot Bum on Political dimensions. Take, for example, Iraq:

The trouble is that if you criticize the war along one axis, you risk by your silence on the other axes to be held in agreement. If you criticize the war as irrational, it sounds like you would approve of its aims if only they were being pursued competently. If you criticize the U.S. conduct of the war on moral grounds, you sound like you therefore approve of the morality of the opponents. If you criticize Islam, you sound like you’re in favor of the war. (I myself was accused of being pro-torture because I virulently criticize Islam.) If you try to criticize the war on all three axes, 90% of your audience will simply mutter TLDNR ((Too Long, Did Not Read)) and move on to something simpler.