Pandora discovery!

The following song, by Greg Brown, is best understood in its historical context, that being 2003.

Homeland (I Want My Country Back)

I want my country back
and a good dream to stand up for.
Got my hand over my heart,
but I don't feel at home here anymore

Big, big flag above the big, big mall,
and the shake rattle and roll to the core.
Things sprawl after they fall,
and I don't feel at home here anymore

Homeland of Sojourner Truth
and Chief Joseph before,
Many quiet words of wisdom drowned out by TV
and I don't feel at home here anymore.

Blind engineer, war train on the track,
many many a heart is sore.
We want our country back;
we want to feel at home here once more.

I want my country back.

Beautiful. Perfect tone for delivering its message. Singing voice reminiscent of the last, oldest, tiredest version of Johnny Cash.

First time I heard that song, I had no idea who Sojourner Truth or Chief Joseph were. I don't know if that makes me an ignorant freak or not, but I've looked them up now. Interesting choice of figures to represent his version of America-Ideal.

Interesting trivia: both of them tried to escape to Canada. Truth made it, Chief Joseph came excruciatingly close. Perhaps their stories could also serve to structure a version of Canada-Ideal.

He chose poorly

I knew I should've held out for UT Austin.... Look at what I'm missing!

(With photographic evidence.)

(Link via Dadahead, who also provides a link to a different article that you just might not want to read.)

Kierkegaard

I received an email from Amazon. The subject line was:

Save up to 58% on Christian Magazines!

I had to know how I in particular was targeted by this targeted marketing. So I read on:

As someone who's recently purchased Christian books at Amazon.com, you might like to know that we offer a large selection of Christian magazines as well. Subscribe now and save up to 58% on the cover price.

It took me a while, but eventually I recalled that (way back in November) I'd ordered Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript off of Amazon. And, as Amazon is well aware, there is no way I could possibly be interested in the works of Kierkegaard unless I were Christian. Even so, I find myself ill-inclined to accept Amazon's offer for cut-rate subscriptions to such periodicals as New Man Magazine.

Before I make a final decision on the matter, though, I should probably take a look at what I would be missing.

Healing 'Father Wounds'

The muscular young man poured out his soul to me as I sat listening intently. The frustrations and hurts cascaded out of his heart as tears streamed down his face.

And now I know. If I ever feel the need to learn about young men and their tears, feelings, and muscles, I know where to go. Until then, moving on....

(Actually, I did read on, and at least part of the article seems to be about how a man's relationship with God can fulfill emotional needs that are left unsatisfied by his imperfect relationship with his father. Coincidentally enough, I recently reacquainted myself with Freud's claim that religion is an illusion maintained by the transference of infantile insecurities onto a posited replacement father-figure. Illusions, for Freud, were not necessarily false, but, still, this is generally considered an unflattering portrayal of religious motivation. There are good reasons, including ones internal to psychoanalytic theory, to doubt that Freud's account can be applied as a general critique, but sometimes people make things far too easy for old Sigmund.)

In other Kierkegaard news, the old boy just got made fun of on the Daily Show. Stephen Colbert laying the smackdown:

Way to sock it to Denmark, Jon. It's the cesspool of Scandanavia. Hey, did you know that Kierkegaard was Danish? Yeah, listen to this: "faith is a matter of the individual repeatedly renewing his passionate subjective relationship to an object which can never be known." Whatever, bitch.

Precursor to Nietzsche my ass, Søren!

Ooh, nasty.

Actually, I looked up that quote, and I don't think it actually came from the pen of Kierkegaard. It would appear that it was lifted directly off of the Kierkegaard entry of the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For shame!

And for more on the connection between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, see here.

Battlestar Galactica Updates

New Ron Moore podcasts 'enhanced' - and new blog posts to boot. :D Gonna need it to tide us over to October! Season 2 dvd's are apparently to be released in September some time. What luck!

The internet is hereby legitimated

Pandora may well be the single coolest site on the entire web. Here's what you do: you enter the name of a musical artist or a song. The site calls up a song by that artist, or a song similar to the one named (not the one named, due to licensing restrictions). You listen, and, if you like, give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The next song comes up, and, again, you can give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The program tries to pick out musical features you seem to like, and chooses subsequent songs based on that.

The program has done an amazing job of zoning in on at least two strains of my musical taste. I seeded once with Smashing Pumpkins, and then with Bob Dylan, and it introduced me to a few artists and songs I'm going to have to acquire on my own. For example, a German band called Eisbrecher (not only do I like the style, but I'm a sucker for German lyrics). Or a live cover of Masters of War by Pearl Jam (OMGOMGOMGZZZ!!!!). Or this song that's probably fairly obscure, given that I could barely find the lyrics on the web:

Rod MacDonald: Who Built The Bomb? (That Blew Oklahoma City Down)

So who denied the bomb that blew Oklahoma City down?
"Not I," said the people, eyes glued to the screen
   as they pulled the bodies out from the scene.
"Those Arabs shouldn't have done what they done;
   what do you mean it was an American?
They should've gone on Oprah for
   'Guys who can't stop making war'
There's nothing I hate more than violence;
   if you ask me it would've made more sense
to let our boys win in Vietnam
   or drop the big one on Iran;
but killin' Americans, it ain't the same.
   No, you can't say we're to blame."

So who built the bomb that blew Oklahoma City down?

You can also arbitrarily specify new music to add to a developing playlist. I'm going to throw something purposefully cross-genre at it (Temptations and Nine Inch Nails?) to see if it can make anything out of that. (The program tells me that I have a propensity for "minor key tonaliy" and "extensive vamping", whatever that is, in both rock-ish and folk-ish contexts. So maybe it'll be able to figure something out.)

Schedule paradise

The earliest any of my courses start this quarter is at 12 noon. I definitely have Wednesdays off, and might have Mondays off, too.

Courses I'm shopping (the list will be cut):

Analytic Philosophy
Hegel's Phenomenology
Philosophy of Language Seminar
Wittgenstein Seminar
Psychoanalysis and Political Authority

Some trivia.

1. The prof for the Analytic Philosophy course is going to take attendance, and factor it into the calculation of final grades. Wow.

2. Hegel courses are like rock stars at this university or something. For the first meeting, in a lecture theatre with a 60-student capacity, there were so many students packed into the room that they were sitting up and down the aisles and nearly spilling out the doors. A similar phenomenon was witnessed for the first few meetings of a seminar on Hegel last quarter (I had to sit on the floor, which made my bum hurt). How can so many people be so keen on studying a guy who's so impossible to read?

3. I think maybe half a dozen profs at this university do work with Wittgenstein in some form or another. It's kind of A Thing here. But this seminar appears to be the first course dealing exclusively with Wittgenstein since at least 2002. (Though he does pop up frequently in courses, and there have been reading groups and whatnot.)

4. The Psychoanalysis and Political Authority course is not actually in philosophy, and, at the moment, looks to be the one I'm most likely to drop. (If nothing else, it would free up my Mondays.) But the idea of the course is fascinating: to explore whether psychoanalytic ideas of transference can apply in the political sphere. For example, do people relate to their political leaders in ways which are systematically deformed by the unconscious persistence of infantile attitudes to authority? Upon first entertaining that question, I meditated briefly on the quality of political debate and reflection, and found the tempting answer to be: "Duh".

Sectarian splits: made or found?

On the left and on the right, people are talking about the deep sectarian splits in Iraq. Here are two fairly random examples.

On the left, Prof. Edmundson on Leiter Reports:

But the fractious Iraqis--forming as portmanteau a category as "the Yugoslavians"--won't cooperate in forming a client goverment unless it suits their several, incompatible, bitterly sectarian aims.

That's right: we're talking bitter sectarianism, which is possibly the worst possible flavour of sectarianism.

On the right, someone I've never heard of on WorldNetDaily:

From the get-go, "Iraq" was a Western invention. The further one moves from the thin veneer of secular governance in Baghdad, the weaker becomes the notion of national identity.

The terror and corruption of Saddam's regime was insufficient to produce an "Iraq" from what the British invented.... This is why no central government has been formed in Baghdad.

I get the impression that this idea is more popular on the left than on the right. Still, there seems to be fairly widespread agreement that, once the old regime was toppled, the rise of Sunni/Shia violence was a natural and unavoidable expression of the underlying sectarian nature of the Iraqi populace. Of course, there is a divergence of opinion concerning the conclusions to be drawn about responsibility and blame. The conclusion on the left is that the Bush administration should have recognized this fact, and realized that the plan to reshape Iraq was doomed from the very start. The conclusion on the right is that, given that the invasion was necessary (or, if the reasons for invasions were lacking, we ought to leave that in the past and deal with the present situation), the outbreak of conflict was a natural consequence for which nobody ought to be held responsible.

Now for a dissenting opinion from Riverbend, who actually lives there (and, incidentally, is up for a book award):

I read constantly analyses mostly written by foreigners or Iraqis who’ve been abroad for decades talking about how there was always a divide between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq... but how under a dictator, nobody saw it or nobody wanted to see it. That is simply not true- if there was a divide, it was between the fanatics on both ends. The extreme Shia and extreme Sunnis. Most people simply didn’t go around making friends or socializing with neighbors based on their sect. People didn't care- you could ask that question, but everyone would look at you like you were silly and rude.

If sectarian splits have been there all along, pervading Iraqi society, why did so many Iraqi Shia and Sunnis coexist peacefully for so long? The standard explanation, I suppose, was that the oppressive rule of the Baathist regime kept everybody in line. But if that oppressive force kept them from killing each other, what was it that made them move next door to each other, become friends with each other, intermarry? Raising a family with someone towards whom you harbour deep and long-standing religious animosity is quite the undertaking, and seems a bit supererogatory: perhaps Iraqis were trying to really impress the Baathists by doing the opposite of sectarian trouble-making.

Edmundson compares the Iraqi situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines following the death of the dictator Tito. The comparison may be apt for reasons other than those that Edmundson has in mind. It's been a while, but I have some vague recollections of reading Michael Ignatieff's Warrior's Honour. As with Iraq, many saw the brutal fighting in the former Yugoslavia as a result of long-standing and deep ethnic hatreds, but (as I recall) Ignatieff disagreed. Those hatreds did not precede the fall of Tito, when a stable social and political order was maintained in Yugoslavia. Rather, when the protection afforded to a populace by a state is taken away, and the spectre of anarchy looms, superficial differences--such as those between ethnic groups, or between religions--cease to be thought of as superficial, and are transformed into sources of deep conflict. (I remember an account of a member of one militia explaining his feelings of hatred towards the people he was trying to kill. He waved a cigarette and declared that, over on that side of town, they smoked an entirely different brand of cigarette.)

And one might think that this is what is happening in Iraq. Not the expression of pre-existing sectarian differences, but the spread and intensification of such differences, ones which previously played a minimal role in the consciousness of the average Iraqi. But then we have to reverse the standard order of explanation which accounts for the failures of government in terms of presupposed sectarian divisions. And we have to come to terms with the idea that, in addition to the concrete loss of livelihood and lives, the war is taking a toll on something else entirely. Riverbend writes, "It’s difficult to define what worries us most now." I think she's talking about the mutilation of the very structure of Iraqi society. It's unclear how that sort of damage could be repaired.

Reason to miss Vancouver #703

Scott provides pictures and video footage documenting an episode of Vancouver hooliganism.

(sigh)

This is pretty much the best picture ever

When nations grow up, they grow apart

You build a nation, hold its hand as it forms a government, blow up its militants... well, a lot of the militants... some of the militants get to run the government or control large swathes of the nation outside of the government's sphere of influence... that sphere being the capital city and also the outskirts of the capital city and, uh... but, look, you blow up a whole bunch of militants for this nation, spend all this time and money and love and blood and sweat and tears on it--and what thanks do you get?

So the nation has growing pains, like it's going to execute someone for converting to Christianity, which doesn't make much sense however you look at it, and you find out, and, of course, you make a call, you ask what the problem is, you try to give advice, but you don't tell it what to do, because that's not your place any more, but you know you were trying to raise a democracy, which is maybe compatible with, say, executing children or black people, sure, but this is really beyond the pale.

So what happens? Does the nation say "Yes, you're right, good advice, thank you so much, I'm so glad I have you to turn to for help with this sort of thing"? No, no, there's humming and hawing and "Look, I'm busy, there are harlots to stone, we'll talk later, K?"

But then, finally, thanks be, there's apparently some sort of a decision, and what does the young nation do? Sure, maybe friends get to hear assurances (for whatever that's worth) that there will be no execution, and nobody would deny that it's great for a new nation to make friends and all, I mean, when you build a nation you want it to get out and about a little, but, really, it pains a nation-builder to hear about stuff like this second-hand.

(Well, maybe the phone call was during Dubya's nap time. Harper could have conference-called it, but, come on, nap time is nap time.)

Triangulation and abortion and the regressive Y chromosome

A bit of stream of political consciousness.

1. Molly Ivins really doesn't like the Democratic establishment and its strategy of "triangulation". For example:

The majority of the American people (55 percent) think the war in Iraq is a mistake and that we should get out. [And similarly for health care, minimum wage raise, repealing tax cuts, the environment, etc.] That is the center, you fools. WHO ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

And:

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there.... You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.

2. And the very idea of "triangulating" the "values voters" suffers from a fatal blindspot. In an excellent post, even by his standards, Slacktivist tells us why the "values voters" don't like liberals:

The answer, frankly, is that we're baby killers. ...this is how we are perceived.

Recognizing that means recognizing that lame euphemisms like "values voters" are misleading and confusing. It's not about generic "values," it's not even about religion -- the whole liberals-and-spirituality sideshow is an irrelevant distraction. It's about abortion. Period.

Speaking at religious gatherings, or making a show of religiosity, or some half-assed Saletan-style triangulation to "moderate" (i.e., abandon by degrees) support for abortion rights does little to alter this perception.

He makes this attitude terribly intelligible by comparing it to the attitude that the Good Guys have to pro-torture politicians. Read the post!

3. So we know that "values voters" are passionately opposed to abortion. But it's hard to make sense of that level of passion. Simply saying that they believe that it's murder gives their point of view a label, but I still wonder how you can get so very worked up about a clump of cells (whether they're genetically human or not).

Via Dadahead, here's one possible answer:

Almost none of their [prolife] policies make sense if they really see no difference between the death of a fetus and the death of a four-year-old. However, nearly all their policies make sense if they're seeking to make sure that women who have sex are punished.

And there's a pretty chart to back up that interpretation.

I'd go along with the idea that some (who knows how many) prolifers are straightforward misogynists, but I think it would be a mistake to attribute that motivation to prolifers generally. Then again, that pretty chart does seem to call for some sort of interesting explanation, and at the moment I don't have a compelling alternative.

4. From the same Dadahead post:

Abortion rights seems to be treated as something that women are supposed to worry about; as long as liberal men are on the record as being pro-choice, they feel they've done their part. The only time I ever get questioned about my gender is when I write about abortion; the notion that I could be a woman (I'm not) seems to cross people's minds only when I pay an unusual amount of attention (for a male) to the issue.

Surely not, I thought. But then, in an online discussion, two supposedly liberal men declared that they wished that Roe v Wade would get struck down, on the grounds that it would undercut a significant source of Republican rhetoric and allow the Democrats to focus on other political issues where they can make better progress.

Before I freak out a little, I'd like to note that that obviously wouldn't work. At the moment, the constitutional protection of abortion rights limits the scope within which Democrats and Republicans can fight over abortion. Strike the constitutional protection down, and the political battle over abortion will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

OK, now for a brief freak-out.

W.

T.

FUCK!
Look, I, too, have had occasion to wonder if the abortion issue is really worth it. But I didn't have to spend much time wondering. What's there to wonder about?

These guys agree that a woman has the right to control her own body. They just don't give a damn whether she can actually exercise that right or not--it's just not their concern--they don't have wombs. So, hey, might as well make it a strategic sacrifice in the political game--a pawn, if you will.

These two guys apparently arrived at the same conclusion independently. One can only assume that they are not alone.

5. Did you spot the sci-fi geekery in this post?

Breakin news!

Chicago is excitement! I feel overburdened by material possessions! Is there no larcenous soul out there willing to help me out?

It turns out: probably!

I just found out that the apartment two doors down was burgled sometime today. It probably happened when I was home, and I very well might have heard suspicious noises if I weren't so sleep deprived and / or idly bouncing off the walls.

By the way, the title of this post is a pun.

Vancouver

So far the weather has been awesome - all blue skies.

I met with an advisor at SFU and decided on doing the post baccalaureate in computing. I'm gonna start in the summer so the next thing to do is find an apartment and a job. :|

Don't look at me! No, look at me, look at me. Don't look at me!

Via Jessica Wilson, an article about a study suggesting a link between insecurity displayed in childhood (lack of confidence, whining to nursery school teachers) and political conservatism in adulthood.

[The researcher] reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

I find myself somewhat persuaded, plus or minus a few dozen qualifications. But, be that as it may, I'm not too keen on how Wilson follows this up:

Funny -- just the other day I was musing to Benj that a lot would be explained if grown-up right-wingers turned out to have been those creepy kids shunned in high school by all and sundry. Someday, they fumed in their lonely smelly rooms, I'll take my revenge!

Which she then qualified with the following:

Supposing you were shunned in virtue of having the unfortunate conservatism-correlated personality characteristics cited in the above study (and also this study), then I don't see that in being shunned you were a victim of social abuse (ignoring, of course, whatever factors led to your having these characteristics); otherwise, my remarks aren't intended to apply to you.

OK, time for some armchair social science / psychoanalysis.

Basically, I don't think that there's any positive connection at all between a lack of social status in high school (or any stage of life thereafter) and the sort of insecurity picked out by the study. Insecurity that is evident in the nursery school setting could survive the transition into adulthood as an underlying personality trait, without being expressed in any obvious social dysfunction.

Indeed, it seems to me that, as consciousness of social status develops, a person who is fundamentally insecure is going to be especially focused on gaining and maintaining that sort of status. While a relatively secure person could potentially make do with just a couple of friends, a truly insecure person will never be able to collect enough friends or enough social status; and skill at whining (and the closely connected skill of strategic gossiping) can certainly be an effective means to that end. (See e.g. American Beauty.)

Sure, there are also relatively secure people who are just naturally friendly and outgoing. (I think I've met some, and, oh, how I hate them.) But I wonder just how common they are. (My impression is that the social environments found in high school and the business world tend to promote specifically unhealthy forms of gregariousness. So, at least in those contexts, I'd suspect that popular people tend not to be just naturally friendly and outgoing.)

And, sure, an insecure and whiny person could also be a terribly unskilled whiner--in which case he will indeed be socially shunned.

But the point is: if a high school kid is both insecure and shunned, the shunning is not so much a result of the insecurity as it is a result of a failure to develop certain social skills. In high school (and elsewhere), you generally aren't shunned for harbouring deep feelings of insecurity; rather, you're shunned for failing to conform to social norms at the most superficial level possible.

A new taste sensation

I just cut myself an orange, but neglected to wash the knife first, which I'd used to prepare my dinner of absurdly garlicky green beans.

The point being, I just ate a garlic-infused orange.

It actually wasn't that bad, but my tongue was terribly, terribly confused by the experience.

On an entirely unrelated note, here are two cute misspellings:

1. "self-deceipt" -- found in my notes from a class on Hegel

2. "mutilingual" -- from a chat with Ben on MSN; I think this would be a decent neologism, which could of course apply to President Bush, but perhaps even better to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who is multilingually mutilingual

Chinese characters are cool!

Today is the day I discovered Hanzi Smatter: dedicated to the misuse of chinese characters in western culture. I am so happy that this blog exists, and so choked that it's been around since 2004 without my knowledge (especially considering that this guy's received a fair bit of media exposure).

From the introductory post:

I have been a fan of the website, Engrish, for years. To my surprise, there is virtually no website existent for pointing out the faults in Westerners’ interest of Eastern culture, especially the usage of Hanzi (汉字), Chinese characters.

As a Chinese-American（美籍华人）, I felt it was my duty and honor to educate the public about the misusage of Chinese characters, Hanzi（汉字）.

Thus begins a merry romp through various bits of kanji/hanzi nonsense, with special attention paid to tattoos proclaiming (for example) "healthy woman roof", "thank you, come again", "upstanding hottie would allow one lucky run-away to make love to my fertile body", and "hand warmer, air conditioner".

After this discovery, I took a look at what else the internets had to offer on this topic, and ran across this article, which also looks at Asian-Americans using such tattoos to express their Asian identity. For example:

Ken Arata, 25, is planning to get his family name tattooed down his spine in kanji to show that his Japanese heritage is the backbone of his existence even though he does not speak the language.

Besides not speaking the language, he apparently doesn't know much about the culture, either. Getting a tattoo is a poor way of expressing your Japanese heritage, unless your family history is one of organized crime.

Bookshelf demographics, in centimeters

Kant, & commentary: 26.5
Darwin, & commentary: 22
Kierkegaard: 15.5
Pittsburghers: 9
Plato: 9
Rorty: 8
Freud, & Lear on Freud: 6.5
Wittgenstein: 4.5

The large Darwin contingent is a result of a single course I took last quarter, which had a reading list so long as to be ungodly--as is only fitting for an inherently blasphemous area of science. This isn't really one of my interests, but maybe it could turn into an "AOC", as we say in the biz.

Rorty would be better represented, if only I knew where my copy of Rorty And His Critics was. The meagre Wittgenstein showing is probably pretty scandalous at this department. On the plus side, I spotted an old-school copy of Anscombe's Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus in Vancouver. I think it dates back to the 19th century or whenever my dad was in university, so once I claim that it should get me a lot of cred around here. ("Vintage" is still in, isn't it?)

Psychoanalysis is a new interest for me, thanks to Jonathan Lear, the same prof who got me hooked on Kierkegaard last quarter. I picked up two of his books on the topic, and they contain some of the best prose I've ever read in a philosophical context (setting aside Kierkegaard, who operated in a sphere of stylistic existence entirely inaccessible to mere mortal writers).

I'm back...

So I'm back in Vancouver. We'll see what happens next...:)

Computer games live!

It's been a long time since I've gotten really hooked on a video/computer game. Katamari Damacy was pretty good, but the variety of gameplay is pretty limited. My interest in games has really dimmed since the good old days when I would stay up for 30+ hours playing Civilization or Master of Orion.

But now Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, has cooked up a new game, Spore, where you start out controlling a single microbe swimming around in maybe a drop of water, get it to eat, reproduce, and evolve. And evolve, and evolve, so that it grows, gets a backbone, musculature, maybe some lungs, feet, claws or tentacles. Its brain grows, too, until the critter manages to form societies, at which point you stop controlling the single critter and start controlling a tribe of critters, and the evolution stops being biological and becomes cultural and technological. The tribe becomes a village, then a city, and so on.

At every stage in the game, you're playing in a world fully populated with other critters (other tribes, other cities), with which you can interact in more or less friendly ways. These Others are drawn directly from the games played by other players: when you create a critter or a city, your creations are uploaded to a server and used to populate the game-worlds of other players.

How far does the game go? Pretty dang far, as seen in this video of Wright going through a demo.

It belongs in a gallery

From Scott, an exquisite photo-essay (starring the new Buddhist Ken doll).

What does it take to get people worked up around here?

1. I basically missed International Women's Day. In my defense, there wasn't a whole lot in the way of celebration around here. And, really, what is there to celebrate? Has pay inequality gotten better over the past year? Is South Dakota the wave of the American future? (Of course, women are still around, which I rather appreciate. But I take it that's not the point.)

2. A University of Chicago protest against some Marine recruiters ended in four arrests. I only heard about this just recently. Which is a little odd. Back at SFU, the news of such an occurrence anywhere in the Greater Vancouver area would have been beamed directly into my head mere minutes after the fact.

Physics is Magic

Via Slashdot, some crazy cool physics news.

Scientists have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

This is hotter than the interior of our Sun, which is about 15 million degrees Kelvin, and also hotter than any previous temperature ever achieved on Earth, they say.

They don't know how they did it.

Um. What?

OK. I mean for the overall tone of this post to be positive and full of wonder. But, for the purposes of my own peace of mind, I would like to think that scientists are generally able to control whether or not they produce substances 100-some-odd times hotter than the Sun. Now, I know that there's a wide area, and many shades of gray, between completely random and perfectly predictable, but I strongly feel that physicists ought to do their very best to aim for the latter when it comes to producing the hottest substances in the solar system here on Earth.

Setting that aside:

One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.

Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved...

I hope the article was understating things when it said the scientists were puzzled by this. It seems to me that an investigation into an unknown energy source is something worth investing a little emotional energy into.

"Huh. Well, I'm assuming the fundamental principle of the conservation of energy continued to function during this experiment. I just haven't the darnedest idea how. Well, now, that's mighty puzzling, that is."

I'm assuming the response wasn't much like that.

Randomalia

1. I spent some time tutoring this Iranian guy in programming back in Vancouver. About twice a month I would head over to his place, we would go over some Pascal code, and every once in a while he would take a break to complain about the Jews. Well, OK, he only mentioned the Jews once, and while I'm pretty sure he wasn't too fond of them as a group, he didn't even say anything about killing them or anything. He spent a fair amount of time telling me about Sufism, and complaining about fundamentalists and how they misinterpret the importance of the veil. And he never failed to serve tea. And so I was introduced to the Iranian way of drinking tea: rather than sweeten it directly, you place a lump of sugar in your mouth and drink the tea through it. Now, my student was a health-conscious fellow, and so he modified this method by replacing the sugar with these yellow raisins. Fabulous. But I have now kicked it up a notch, by replacing the tea with coffee, and the sugar with Hershey's semi-sweet Mini-Kisses (tm). This technique of drinking has thus achieved its apotheosis.

2. What would you expect from the website of a Department of Visual Arts--pretty pictures or Flash or something? (How did I end up at that page? Long, boring story.)

3. The 20th is only a couple of weeks away. That's not a lot of time left for planning, people!

4. I may be a cynical resident of the Ivory Tower, but when I found out one of the peeps back home has a chance at a job in Thailand teaching Burmese activists, I think I drooled a little.

Rice

Typically when I'm buying rice I look for a bag with Chinese characters on it, or (depending on my mood) maybe "Basmati", or possibly something involving the word "Thai".

A couple of months ago, though, I foolishly bought a 20 lb bag of rice, a bag devoid of any writing or names suggestive of Asia. I guess I was out to save some money, and I did indeed save some money, but the tradeoff was meal after meal chomping on countless vaguely rice-shaped pieces of moist cardboard.

Well, we finally made our way through that tiny piece of hell, and as of yesterday our rice is Japanese. Well, California-grown Japanese-style rice, but whatever. I ate a handful of the first batch, with nothing on it, and almost cried.

The Katrina briefing video

Link via Leiter Reports.

President George W. Bush, September 1:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

National Hurricane Center representative, with Bush online, August 28:

"I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not, but that is obviously a very, very grave concern."

There are a limited number of possible explanations for that pair of quotes. None of them are consistent with the idea that Bush is minimally competent to be the leader of a Boy Scout camping trip, let alone leader of the least of nations, or of America.

Sigh.

Song Tapper, via SFU

I randomly dropped by the old alma mater's website, and ran across this story:

The simple, rhythmic bopping of a finger has led a trio of SFU computing science students to solve a musical dilemma - how to name that unknown tune.

They've created Song Tapper, which can be found at www.songtapper.com. The website has been designed to enable users to identify songs by tapping the melody on their spacebars. The site has grown from a few hundred songs to well over 11,000 tunes and attracts as many as 10,000 hits a day.

I tried it out successfully on the following songs:

I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night
Instanbul was Constantinople
Yesterday
Billy Jean
Closer
Super Mario theme song
Creep

I tried out some songs that don't seem to be in the database, but the system does pretty well with the ones it knows. Way cool.