Hit

A more satisfying recommendation from Viridian Notes is When Things Start To Think. I'm actually gonna finish this one. It's coming right on the heels of Emergence, so that'll make two tech/society books in a row, though from different angles.

Neil Gershenfeld gets to play at the MIT Media Lab, and as a result gets to think about how technology works, and how it doesn't. Most importantly, he gets to think about why it should work when it doesn't. Up to this point I've read the chapter about electronic ink, where he posits that 'electronic books' will only overtake paper books when they become better than paper. Not a clunky computer, but a sheet of paper which can be taken anywhere, and can change it's contents on demand. I already knew about this technology, but his philosophical take is interesting as well.

The other chapter I've finished describes his experiments in creating advanced computer instruments in collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma. This is actually a very interesting chapter, further expounding on the goal of only using computers when they can do a better job than the original physical artifact. He notes that Ma and other musicians are not sentimental about instruments, do not rail against technology, and get quite excited by what his computers enable them to do. But in the end, Ma elects to continue using his Stradivarius cello, since it fits in a single case, is ready to use immediately, and requires no power. This in opposition to the several cases of equipment that Gershenfeld requires for his supercomputer equipment, the minutes it takes to boot things, and the power cables trailing off stage. But Gershenfeld speculates that by the time the book is published, he will be most of the way toward fulfilling Ma's requirements.

So I'm not done, but I'm committed. I'll keep posting info as I dive deeper into the book.

Miss

Bruce Sterling's website, Viridian Notes has a list of books recommended by members of his mailing list. A few of them, on the face of it, seemed interesting, so I reserved the ones I could from the library. I just finished scanning one, and I'm disappointed.

Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic {The Aesthetics of Consumerism}, by Daniel Harris, held some promise, on the title alone. But it turns out the guy just rubs me the wrong way. I admit to enjoying writing a snide essay now and then, but this book is one long snide diatribe. As an example, he treats the notion of 'quaint' by giving his views of the Society for Creative Anachronism. They are unflattering, but they are also unfair:

If historians seek to know the past intellectually, those who revel in that most ahistorical of aesthetics, quaintness, seek to know it sensually, not through knowledge but through atmosphere, stripping it of facts and mining it for sensations. Quaintness focuses squarely on the physicality of Olden Times, on their creature comforts, and is therefore set more often in the nineteenth century than the Middle ages, which bring to mind cold flagstone floors and drafty, smoke-filled dining halls draped with mildewed tapestries, whereas the nineteenth century conjures up images of toasty Christmas interiors, brisk sleigh rides and cups of piping hot cocoa.

Sure, read the SCA homepage, and you get the full-blown rhetoric of "researching and re-creating pre-17th-century European history." But talk to people who actually partake of their activities, and you see it's a lot more varied and complex than that. Friends I knew who were in the SCA were avid hobbyists. They knew the era SCA dwelt in, but when they participated in events, it was recreation in the restorative sense, not the historical one. They knew this. None of them was dumb enough to think that the Middle ages was a picnic. Conversely, their SCA outings were just that, and they knew it. So Harris basically takes the marketing pamphlet and has a field day with it.

This book reminds me of the time I was reading The Socratic Dialogues lo these many years ago. I found myself becoming ever more irritated the further I got into the book. Finally I asked my wife, "how come these guys never ask him any smart questions?" In other words, it's easy to make the other guy look like a rube when you are the one putting words into his mouth.

Bloodlines

At Saturday's NOVA meeting we got to talking about members we haven't seen in awhile, including Jeff Milburn, the founder of the club. Whatever happened to him? I know I ran into him in the airport for about five seconds a couple of years ago, and I know an email address he used to use is still 'attached' to the NOVA mailing list, but that's about it.

Seque to work, in what at first seems a non sequitur. I keep running into a guy in the elevators who thinks he knows me from somewhere. Every time I see him he asks, "did you used to work at Tektronix?", or some such question. I always answer no. And if he was ever familiar to me in any other context, these repeated elevator meetings have overwhelmed that. So this evening I run into him, and he appears about to speak. I get ready to say "no", when he says, "did you ever go to an anime club around here?"

I said, "yeah, a club called NOVA."

He said, "I knew I'd seen you somewhere before. I'm Jeff Milburn's brother!"

Well, we didn't talk a lot, as we were both heading to our cars, but Jeff is now a product manager at Intel, and has a house in Hillsboro with his wife and two sons. I'm sure I will get more info on the next elevator collision...

Sunday Movie

Jean and I have begun to set aside a regular time for watching movies together. Last week we watched Chocolat (hey look, they mis-spelled Chocolate! Tee hee!). This week it was A Beautiful Mind. And of course the genesis of this budding tradition (or revived tradition, thinking back to our pre-child life) was the recent viewing of A Taxing Woman.

I don't want to write full-blown reviews of each of these, so I'll just give capsule impressions. Of course I'd seen A Taxing Woman before, about a year after it's release. I liked it quite a lot then, and it led to my tracking down three other movies by Juzo Itami, The Funeral, Tampopo and A Taxing Woman Returns. I was saddened to learn that he died in 1997.

Chocolat is Magical Realism Lite. It was charming, feel-good, and funny, but felt like somebody had watched about fifty European movies and wanted to do one of their own, after reading the complete works of Jorge Luis Borges. I don't mean to come across too harshly, the movie is definitely worth watching. It just has a bit of a flavor of 'watch me, watch me!' to it.

Watching A Beautiful Mind I felt that Russell Crowe gave a fine performance as a mentally ill geek. Watching the film's handling of schizophrenia made me feel more certain that Philip K. Dick, a favorite author of mine from way back, probably suffered from something like this. His stories are all concerned with both what makes reality real and what makes us human. This movie is touching and human in a classic manner. Definitely worth seeing.

So that's the list of most recent movies worth mentioning. I recently saw Austin Powers in Goldmember, and can summarize it with: better than two, not as good as one. Most other movies I've seen recently were not worth mentioning here. That's it, gotta put the kids to bed!

Saturday Movie

After NOVA yesterday, we went to see Signs. If you are willing to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, it is a suspenseful and entertaining film. I was quite pleased at the level of humor mixed in with the creepiness. The final five or ten minutes left me feeling cheated though. WARNING: Spoilers in the next paragraph!

It seems to me that Shyamalan's never read any science fiction. At least, not in the Golden Age. And he seems to have little knowledge of comic book cliches, for somebody who did a critical reinvention of the comic book superhero. [Okay, spoilers ahoy!]

So aliens come to Earth in vessels which can hover in place, erect invisible shields, silently construct crop circles, and so on. The individual aliens can outrace an athelete, jump ten feet to the top of a roof, and have spurs which emit poisonous gas. Yet when they finally choose to engage, they attack hand-to-hand, and are defeated by water? What kind of incompetent boobs are they anyway? Can't they wear raincoats when they attack?

Then it occurred to me. This was not an alien invasion at all. It was hunting season. Earth supplies an animal which can potentially put up a rather challenging struggle. The Intergalactic Gaming Commission sets the rules. You may only hunt on Earth once every XXXX years. You may not take advanced weaponry. You must stay within XX miles of the preserve markers (signs). You may not wear flak suits. Sorry buddy, that's the challenge. It's a water world, the inhabitants are 80% water, and you just happen to have a severe allergy to molecular water. Cry me a river. Do you want the permit or not?

So there you go. The only logical explanation for the aliens' incompetent approach to invading Earth, and why they conveniently bailed after one night of actual aggression. They weren't actually 'defeated' by the 'primitive defense'. The hunting season was just one night. Everything leading up to it was just the tailgate party!

Silent Hill Finally Silenced

While waiting for Godot, er, the repair man, I fired up the PSOne and played Silent Hill. And I finished it! Overall rating: A-. I'd give it an A, but I'm still steamed at that arbitrary item I was supposed to divine that I'd need to get the good+ ending. But all told, it was a lot of fun, and made for a good little interactive horror-show!

No Bikeler

I took the morning off to meet the Bikeler repair guy. Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention that the darn thing's been out of order. It had a wretched squeak, which we took to mean equipment failure, and a call to the service number confirmed it. We've had to wait several weeks for back-ordered parts, but they all arrived and the repair man came today.

Long and short is that the parts won't help. There was a weld failure. Continued use will snap the axle so we're back to waiting. On the plus side, Nordictrack intends to replace the entire unit, no charge. In the meantime, I'll continue using my genuine bike to get exercise. Good thing this happened during the summer. I'm paranoid about riding it when the roads are wet.