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Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
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1:28 am - Stress sucks.
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Enter a period of psychological stress, and your organs release a steady river of hormones, telling the cells in your body to burn more energy. After a few days of this feedback, your cells begin sending signals to all the mitochondria living inside them, telling them to divide, increasing energy capacity. This is important because when the energy production system is bottlenecked, little chemical packets called "free radicals" are released inside your cells, especially from the struggling mitochondria. Free radicals are quite damaging to the DNA in your cells, including the DNA of your mitochondria. So having the right number of mitochondria for your energy needs is important.
Unfortunately this creates a paradox. Free radicals are the signal that you need more mitochondria. When they are released they damage the DNA in the mitochondria you already have. The only way to correct the balance is for the mitochondria to divide, making more of themselves, and as an unfortunate consequence, the damage done by the free radicals gets magnified. Eventually, there are more mutated mitochondria inside your cells than clean ones, and the whole operation of the cell becomes degraded because of the extra resources this consumes.
As the mitochondria decline in efficiency, the cell will shift across the spectrum of genes it can express, to devote more resources to mitochondria recycling. This reduces its effectiveness as part of a functioning organ. (Stem cells and heart cells do not divide their mitochondria, and therefore are not directly under the influence of this cycle, but they can still suffer from the decline in other organs.) Each cell also has a feedback loop of signals inside it, designed to detect this degradation. When a cell in your body realizes it has dropped below a reasonable efficiency level, it commits suicide, removing itself and its damaged mitochondria from your collective internal gene pool.
Here's what this means for you, on a human scale: When you pass through a cycle of stress, part of you dies off while the rest of you decides to repopulate, spreading slightly less efficient mitochondria throughout your tissues, resulting in a subtly decreased energy level. You really begin to notice it in middle age.
This effectively cannot be reversed, because you can only work with the genetic supply of mitochondria that you have. Your best hope for renewed health is to maintain a higher set-point for energy capacity, via a higher standing population of your current mitochondria, so that when you are pressed into other capacity modes - higher stress modes - you do not logjam your energy supply chain and create damaging free-radical elements inside cells.
In other words, sufficient sleep, complete nutrition, and consistent aerobic exercise places your body into its most long-lasting mode. It delays the onset of virtually ALL late-life diseases.
This may seem like common knowledge, but now you understand why it is so... And why there is absolutely no product, service, or diet that can turn back the clock. Your very best outcome is to slow it down.
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| Friday, May 11th, 2012
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9:46 pm - Toolkit
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I'm sure this has been thought of before... But I've never run across it in my obsession with armchair-grade anthropology and evolution books, so when I thought this question up and shared it with Erika over dinner, it got us both fascinated and took up much of the discussion as we ate.
Ravens have been observed in the wild doing things like bending bits of wire to get at food in small spaces. My question is this: If you had a human mind, but the body and weight of a raven, and you were employed as a plumber, what would your toolkit look like?
Screwdrivers, hammers, levers, wire cutters, wrenches, knives ... how would they work? What would they be made of?
I think this would be an interesting question to pose to high-school scientists, or even college students taking a design course.
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| Thursday, May 10th, 2012
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12:06 am - Cobra II
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Right now I'm about 2/3 through "Cobra II" and enjoying it. The initial chapters building up to the war are hard reading, with lots of faceless names, but once the authors dig into the movements of troops and the bizarre encounters with the enemy, it gets really interesting. I'm listening to it as an audiobook, with the iPad constantly open to a map of Iraq, so I can place all the city names and look up pictures of the equipment used.
This kind of surprises me, since I'm usually not the type to read anything with a military history theme.
I'm at a part where a battalion of tank drivers was asked to secure a bridge over the Euphrates river, in a city called Kifl. But it turns out the city is actually called Qaryat, and Kifl is actually 2 miles away and called Al-Kifl. The maps the battalion had been given were incorrect, or out of date. The maps also claimed there were two bridges, but there was in fact only one. Bridge crossings were very important strategically, and the US expected Saddam to blow up most of them when he learned the invasion had begun, to vex their journey to Baghdad.
But Saddam knew that every bridge be blew up would prevent him from transporting Fedayeen troops, both during the war to fight the US, and after the war - theoretically when he had driven the US out - in order to quash the Shiite rebellion he was expecting to occur when they perceived that his rule was weakened by the invasion.
So the guys in the tanks rolled up to the bridge and began to cross it, and got most of the way across, and a few even made it to the other side, and then there was an explosion and the support struts on the near side nearly collapsed. Turns out some men had been watching the bridge and waiting for some US troops to actually start crossing it before they blew it up. Saddam's idea was, apparently, only blow up the bridges that the US actually tried to cross.
Then there was a kind of boondoggle involving confusing confrontations with the residents of Qaryat, for most of a day. Eventually the tank drivers inspected the bridge and discovered that the far side had wires strung beneath it, as if the Iraqis had been meaning to blow up both ends of the bridge, not just one.
They still figured the bridge was disabled - blown off its moorings on one side such that a tank trying to cross would crush it - so they had some reinforcements come up through Qaryat to assist the few tanks caught on the city-side of the bridge. They brought an engineer along with them, who took a look at the thing. Turns out the other side had wires installed, and also hollow spaces inside all the support columns where explosives could be placed for easy detonation, as part of the design.
The engineer followed the wires and found that they led nowhere. Nearby were several fresh crates, stacked out of sight, containing thousands of pounds of plastic explosive. The Iraqis had apparently received all the materials to wire the bridge but then decided - for whatever reason - not to complete the job before the tanks actually showed up.
The engineer also looked at the damaged side and said it was probably stable enough to get the remaining tanks over, so one tank captain stepped out and began walking in front of his vehicle, guiding it across, but suddenly his own tank sped past him (several people were still inside operating it), joining the others on the city side to help defend, because just then a car was spotted zooming down the road at then at 60mph.
The nearest commander had strict orders not to shoot anyone unless they were confirmed hostile, but he figured it was a suicidal Iraqi trying to crash the car into a tank so it would be pinned in place, and thereby vulnerable to rocket fire. So the nearest tank shot at the car with a small caliber weapon, destroying the engine and causing it to crash into a telephone pole. The car then took more than three hours to stop burning, which the commander thought suspicious.
Then night fell, and some of the tanks were asked to move through the city, trying to keep the road secure for other support vehicles. They took up stations but had to keep moving because armed men kept trying to sneak up on them and hit them with small arms fire. The tank drivers could see in the dark, and eventually their attackers caught on to that. One guy crawled on hands-and-knees toward a tank by concealing himself in a pack of wandering dogs.
It's kind of a surreal read. Highly recommended!
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| Saturday, April 21st, 2012
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4:29 am - Thinking back
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Even with all the adventures I've had since, I still think back to that time in 2010 when my world turned upside down.
Among many other things, I remember how unexpectedly and intensely I fell in love with a woman named Monica.
I've had time to pick apart my feelings and understand why, and I've come to understand that the biggest factor in that intense attraction was my desire to be like her. I was not happy where I was, and had no idea what or how to change, and her sudden appearance catalyzed me. After our time, when our attempts to salvage some kind of connection fell apart, I realized that my pathway to healing and my pathway to becoming the new version of myself - whatever that was - lay at least partially in taking what I most appreciated in Monica and developing those qualities in myself; for myself. This realization was so important to me that I took a piece of paper and hung it by my bedroom door for a while, and wrote large letters on it spelling out, "If you can't do it alone, you can't do it with someone else."
My point was, it was time to stop thinking that the right kind of relationship - the right kind of partner - would magically resolve all my personal struggles and compensate for my deficiencies. I had a vision of what a truly awesome person was - of course I did, I'd been using it to seek romantic partners - and now it was time to inhabit that vision and live it, not live in its shadow or watch it from a distance.
So today, on the Friday of the week when I've started a new job, I think it's time to sit down and think about where I'm at, where I'm headed, and how I'm doing. Am I taking hold of that icon image, and claiming it for myself? Am I really getting my own idea of my own personal crap together? Let's take stock.
This Easter, for the first time ever, I got a chance to sit down and have a nice solid conversation with the husbands of both my sisters. Just us "men folk" talking and catching up! It was only afterwards that I realized it was long overdue. I've always felt that my extended family is a resource I haven't explored enough, and this is a step in the right direction. It will be good to make more steps.
A year ago, I was working at a job I thought I loved, but didn't really. I had become consumed by a kind of restlessness, a sense that life was passing me by, and it only grew worse despite huge life changes and long vacations. I left that job in defeat, rather than triumph, and I began to question everything about the way I made a living. The self-knowledge I had to uncover was bone-head obvious in retrospect: I like helping scientists! Four short words, and suddenly I knew what to do. It's good to be working again.
My house and my workplace are separated by two miles of busy Oakland street. Yesterday I rode those two miles on the recumbent in 13 minutes. Today I rode the recumbent home through mild traffic in 11 minutes flat, even after waiting at three stoplights. I hit 19mph on the straight section of San Pablo Avenue. I have no doubt that I am reaching my health goals. There is of course even more I want to do here, but consistent bike riding is a great foundation.
For the second time in two days, my oddly-shaped bicycle prompted a conversation in the parking garage, and I made a new friend. On the Bart platform two days ago my folding bike inspired a conversation with a guy who turned out to be a 20-something undergrad computer geek who lived in Fremont and had just finished an internship at a real-estate company. I shook hands with him and told him about my fancy website. Today at Pho 84 my iPad attracted a comment from a 60-something retired teacher at the next table, which turned into a half-hour conversation about technology, innovations, and the effect of handheld text communication on relationships and romance. As we were talking, a couple of young kids went walking by with their Dad, and one of them stopped to say hello. Turns out the retired teacher was tutoring the kid. Introductions all around, and I learned that the Dad was a co-owner of the restaurant. I don't know if I'm more approachable these days or what, but it's been easier than ever to meet new people. Maybe it's my new pants.
Yesterday after work and dinner, Erika and I made the long drive down to Sunnyvale to do karaoke at the King of Clubs. Bruce gave me a big hug when I appeared. Timmy, the fabulous bartender (it's a mostly gay bar after all) set out two icewaters, for Erika and I, without even being asked. Love that guy. My first song of the evening was a tossed-off performance of "Take The Skinheads Bowling". After that I did a Weird Al favorite, "A Complicated Song". The bar loves Weird Al.
Karaoke has been a kind of miracle for me. I'd always wanted to share my singing but never felt anywhere near the threshold of talent to perform in a band. Karaoke takes all that external pressure off. People clap even if you sing like a gargling ostrich. Sometimes I've felt like I did just that. But I'm pushing myself, to go up there and sing things I enjoy, even songs that have been very special or privately important to me. Yesterday I passed another milestone.
At the bar, Erika began texting with Megan, who was literally home in bed in pajamas, and our appearance was so exciting that she decided to get up, get dressed, and drive out to the bar just to see us. When she arrived, she hugged us both, admired my new pants, and then took the microphone and gave a rousing, full-on performance of a KT Tunstall song. Then she presented her pile of song cards to me and said, "pick your favorites and I'll perform one of them next." So I sorted through the pile and encountered "Silent All These Years" by Tori Amos, and placed it on the very top of the stack.
Megan saw the card, and said, "this one, really?"
I replied, "Hell yes. I love that song. In fact if you sing that song, I'd love to sing it with you. I can harmonize to it."
She grinned. "It's a deal!" she said, and handed the card to Bruce.
So half an hour later, I found myself standing next to Megan, under the cheesy sparkling lights of the dance floor, singing "Silent All These Years" alongside her, leaning in to hear her timing and match it as much as I could. My voice wasn't warmed up and I didn't control my distance from the mic very well, but damn it, I sang that song. I still remember the very day, 20 years ago, when I first heard that song, and in fact I remember that day only because it was the day I heard that song. It's quite special to me, for reasons difficult to explain. Now, one random spring day of 2012, I've gone and performed it as a duet, with a new friend, in front of a dozen strangers. Utterly bizarre. And also - I am totally copping to this - kind of triumphant too.
We got a big round of applause, and when I sat down at the bar, the guy next to me complimented me on my harmonizing.
Why should brave people I admire get to take all the embarrassing risks, while I sit pie-eyed in the audience, clapping my hands? Why should a warm, effortlessly caring partner be the only one, of the two of us, to devote time and attention to my adorable nephews, and get to know the children of my friends, when I can - and should - and must - drive myself to deepen my own relationships with them? Being partnered to an excellent caregiver is no excuse to let those skills atrophy or lay fallow in myself. Why should I hide behind the outgoing nature of a partner who makes friends easily and constantly, using it as a shortcut or a shield, when I can develop and profit from my own outgoing nature instead? And, just as importantly, why should I fulfill my needs for private time in the gaps created by my partner's overt demands for it, when I would be much better off learning to make my own needs known, and respected?
I've spent a long time - a lot of my life - gathering information and learning from my mistakes. It feels fantastic to be putting so much of that to real use now.
During my big project meeting today I managed to cross-cut and shape a debate between a program director, a lead developer, and two frustrated scientists, to get them all on the same page, causing the director to exclaim, "Wow, we should have had this conversation two years ago." Don't get me wrong - they are all brilliant people, with evident talents that I am in awe of - but they were all talking over each other, too rapidly, and too excitedly, and no one was really listening. I came out of that meeting to a realization: People like me are very useful to people like this, not because I'm talented in the same way or know the same things, but because my personality is somewhat orthogonal to the kind of driven intensity of the scientists around me. I've written about this before; last year I think. There's something in me that loves to build consensus - is bent on it, eager for it - even if that consensus is that the given problem is intractable and no one can solve it and it's back to the drawing-board. And now I get to exercise that, plus my skill in interface design and programming, plus my fascination with a science I'm helping to pioneer.
Don't tell the HR department, but ... I would totally do this, even for half the pay. It's freaking awesome.
One of the things I admired most about Monica was the way she seemed to be bursting with energy and enthusiasm. It was like she was a natural battery, seething with chemical potential. By comparison, I was often exhausted, and felt unable to change that. Now that I'm riding my bike every single day, settling into a reconstructed diet, taking my vitamins (thanks to a few well-placed kicks from Erika and a new pill organizer I bought on Amazon), and doing Yoga, ... and now that I'm involved in important work and enjoyable play, with a stack of untried new challenges lined up for me, I feel that same spark of energy inside myself. Having it inside me feels much better than any amount of exposure to it from another person, near or far. I move differently. I engage with people differently.
This was not a hasty reinvention. The first spastic six months after my life turned upside-down - those were a hasty reinvention. And the cake that came out of that oven set the smoke alarm off for most of the next year. This is something else; something better. You know those t-shirts that say "self-rescuing princess"? This is me, a self-rescuing prince. This is me, picking my own ass up, and discovering, with great relief, that I don't have to find someone else to find myself. In the past I've defined myself by where I live, who I know, what I like, where I work, and who my partner is, but what the last two years have proven to me is this: Take all that away, and there is something left.
Ahem. Also, while this talk of self-actualization is grand, I must add that I dearly appreciate the advice and support I've received, especially these days from Erika. For example, I would not have found karaoke or Yoga so easily, without her enthusiastic sponsorship and encouragement. You rock, sweetie!
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| Thursday, April 19th, 2012
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12:34 am - Day three.
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My brain is bursting with crazy-ass amounts of information!
Third day of work: This time the bike ride went even smoother. I still had trouble locating space to lock my recumbent, but that's a minor annoyance. I trooped upstairs with my saddlebags, stowed them under my desk, and went to the bathroom to change into my "work clothes". This trek is amusing because it involves cutting through a lab storage area, so I need to put on big plastic goggles for 15 seconds and remove them once I reach the other door, and repeat the process when I come back.
I sat down at my desk for about 30 seconds, then Hector came over and walked me across the building to his cubicle, where he gave me a 45-minute personal presentation, jumping from one slide show to the next as the subject changed in the conversation. He explained the JBEI's objectives, and the state of the research environment. One of the things he showed me was a chart on a piece of paper, made of hundreds of lines and arrows connecting little bits of text, in graceful curving lines.
Each piece of text was annotated by a cluster of icons and colored symbols. There was an almost overwhelming amount of information packed into it. The chart, Hector explained, was a map of all the known metabolic pathways in a single tiny organism, with references back to the actual pieces of the organism's genome that were responsible for each step along the path.
Essentially, each piece of text represented a variety of molecule, and each arrow represented a conversion from one molecule into another. Every conversion was triggered, or facilitated, by a protein catalyst, that was transcribed from some known and documented part - or parts - of the genome of the organism.
To me, it looked like the circuit diagram inside a microchip. It was easy to imagine a little roadmap like this inside every cell of an organism, including the cells inside my own body, and in a way that idea was accurate, but in another way it completely failed to describe what really goes on. Each of the steps on this labeled map of pathways is actually happening all at once, all together, crammed inside the three-dimensional volume of a cell like a blizzard in a snow-globe.
Perhaps a better way to imagine it would be like cooking popcorn. You have unpopped kernels and popped ones - call them U and P - and at first you start out with all the kernels unpopped - 100% U - and by applying heat you convert them all to popped ones - P. You could describe this as a pathway, by drawing an arrow between U and P on a piece of paper. Looks pretty simple if you draw it that way. But what is really going on, when you put the popcorn in the microwave? The kernels are going "bang!", one at a time, in random places all over the bag. It's a crazy, complicated phenomenon happening in 3D space.
Now imagine that the bag is the size of a football stadium. And now imagine that instead of one kind of popcorn, it's filled with one thousand different kinds, all popping at once.
Now imagine that instead of the kernels popping, they actually change into different varieties of popcorn instead.
That's about what it's like inside every cell of our bodies. The input for this thunderous conflagration would be heat, in the case of popcorn. Inside a cell, the input is oxygen, and electrons. A controlled burn.
So anyway, I got a huge brain-ful of this, and the various methods they used to refine the metabolic charts - radioactive carbon tagging, for example - and then I got an overview of all the software pieces that various departments were working on to facilitate this research.
My head was practically spinning by the end of the hour.
I returned to my desk, and sat down and poked at code in my piece of the project for about an hour and a half, then Hector came by again and walked me across the street to another lab, affiliated with the JBEI, and introduced me to eight more people, who were all working on a huge software project called "kbase".
I talked for almost an hour with those guys, getting an idea for how my project integrated with theirs, and where it might go in the future. Kbase is apparently an attempt to create a consolidated repository for all the data and methods being generated by different research facilities worldwide. An attempt to unify data in Genomics, Proteomics, Transcriptomics, Metabolomics, and Exomics. The project is related to JBEI the same way a librarian is related to a non-fiction writer.
Based on those conversations, in a few weeks I may end up redesigning, or completely scrapping, the project I'm working on - a sub-component called the Growth Curve Data Measurement System - and integrating it into either Kbase or GLAMM. I may even move next-door to merge with the programming team there. We'll see!
In the meantime, I'm re-architecting some of the bits of my project that were not coded very well. Today I stayed almost two hours late to finish a rewrite of the authentication scheme, disentangling it from the Javascript user interface code.
Two days from now is my first meeting, and if I'm lucky, I'll have a modified prototype to show off. It'll represent proof that I can really walk the walk.
And now it's time to switch the laundry!! Then, I shall hurl myself into the bed.
I'm a bit surprised at myself. I'd barely written a single line of code since last July - nine months ago - but for the past three days I have been cranking it out. It feels like my brain has gone from 30mph to 130mph, all at once, and it is a great relief to know I still have my talents.
Now comes the challenge of pacing. This is not some week-long mini-project. This is an entire organization, and a years' worth of work, in a relentless march of eight-hour chunks. It will not stop. So, getting adequate rest, adequate food, good exercise, and meaningful leisure time is as important as ever. Important as it was five years ago, when I dove into my work at Apple.
I am bringing my A-game. I refuse to bring anything less.
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| Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
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12:50 am - WHOOOOO JBEI ('tis pronounced jay-bay!)
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Biking around Oakland all day like some punk-ass deadbeat hipster has been lots of fun.
Also, visiting my parents and sisters and nephews during my time off has been totally awesome.
Don't worry, there was no permanent scarring. Heh heh heh.
Not to mention the vacations with Erika. She took a picture of me finding ... (band hit) ... A SHRUBBERY !!!
Our adventures also reached the dizzying heights of ... (wait for iiiiit) ... SHOPPING FOR PANTS !!!
In total, I can surely say it was an Excellent Adventure and a Bogus Journey.
But lesson learned: I need to work on big things I believe in, or I feel rudderless. That is why, after a few rounds of interviews, I began working at the Joint Bio-Energy Institute in Emeryville. Contrary to what the name implies, they do not spend all day rolling joints and flailing about spastically. It's all about alternative fuel research and genetics, yo.
The JBEI is a 20 minute bike ride from my house. Flippin' sweet. Yesterday I picked up my badge:
I also got a tour of the place. You know those tacky commercials where some actress puts on a white lab coat and stands in front of some complicated beeping machines and glassware to convince you that Bob's Double-Nose Enhancement Pills are the one true path to enlightenment and skipping merrily through fields of pollen, and also they are definitely not rat poison? The grain of truth in the stereotype is that the white lab coat and the hardware convey REAL SCIENCE, right?
Well, I am now apparently surrounded by REAL SCIENCE.
There are huge rooms here at the JBEI where people in white lab coats stroll around in front of complicated beeping machines and glassware. Tons and tons of glassware; acres of it, with strange liquids writhing inside. There are other rooms filled with thunderous air-conditioning and rows of industrial freezers, with digital readouts saying things like "-80 C", and signs tacked on the wall reading RADIATION HAZARD and MUST USE PROTECTIVE EYEWEAR.
While I was getting the unofficial walkabout tour from one of my co-managers, I heard a polite voice behind me calling, "Excuse me! Please; excuse me!" I turned around to see a short woman in a lab coat and glasses, with a huge embarrassed grin on her face, and an enormous glass bottle cradled in her arms with some mysterious clear liquid tumbling about inside. She said:
"Can you open this? Like, just loosen it, but not take the lid off? Please?"
Then she handed the bottle. It took a few seconds of careful macho twisting, but I got the cap to turn, and handed the bottle back to her. "You got it! Thank you!" she said, grinning some more, and then turned around and strode back into the lab.
A charming omen for a first day. Like my first day at Apple, when I encountered Steve Jobs in the cafeteria. This omen illustrates the general tone for this new chapter in my working life: I like helping scientists!
The rest of the day was spent setting up my build environment, then diving straight into a thorny mess of code. Afterwards I was dead tired, but Erika gave me a ride to the Soup Restaurant of Deliciousness, and I perked up over the meal. We had an excellent time.
That night I prepped the recumbent in the living room:
Inflated tires, oiled chain, tightened bolts, and reattached storage bags.
The bags contained items to customize my work area:- Six dark chocolate peanut butter cups.
- A box of dark-chocolate covered walnuts.
- Three Hawaiian shirts with matching plastic hangars.
- A framed painting of a striped kittycat that has been on all of my office desks since 1998.
- A pair of shoes
- A hefty bike lock
- My newly minted badge
- A toothbrush
Some time after I packed it up and rolled sleepily into bed, Erika sent me an Emoji version of how my next day would go:
She got it spot on. The ride next morning went perfectly, and the recumbent sparked a conversation in the parking garage, and I made a new friend, then another in the elevator on the way up to the fourth floor.
The second day: Eight hours of A-game hacking. By the end of the session, I'd learned a ton of new things about Java, Tomcat, Ant, and Indigo, and I'd come up with a good strategy for untangling the design flaws in the my newly-assigned project.
Awwww yeah.
Then I rode home, fed the cat, grabbed some laundry, rode to Erika's, and we dashed out to catch yoga. An hour-and-a-half of balancing, stretching, and serene, focused movement. An excellent Tuesday ritual. Between this and the bombastic expression of Karaoke I think I have a good thing going.
Let's see where it takes me!
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| Thursday, April 12th, 2012
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12:17 am - Art idea!
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| Monday, March 26th, 2012
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3:48 pm - An interesting interview question
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This morning in the shower I came up with this question for interviewing a web developer: "How many ways can you come up with, to draw a circle in a web browser?"
Here's my list:- Declare a canvas element and draw a circle on it using JavaScript.
- Construct one artificially in HTML from scaled table segments.
- Use inline SVG code to describe a circle inside a div.
- Embed an object - Java, Flash, video, etc - and draw a circle using that.
- Print a unicode character of a circle, really really large.
- Reference an image of a circle, in HTML or in an associated stylesheet.
Any I missed?
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3:43 pm - Things I learned today:
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The Google Web Tools dev environment actually translates Java into Javascript for running on remote web browsers. No sandbox or embedding is invoked, no java runtime is called. It's all javascript. That's why the javascript in client-side apps looks like obfuscated crap to a tinkering end-user.
It's really quite clever. The browser is basically a big sandbox for translated java, and the toolkit acts as a gateway to all the browser-based things you need to do, like manipulate CSS definitions and shove DOM objects here and there, changing the layout of the page. Under the hood it's messy and ugly, however. If the cross-compiler is doing something you don't expect, or if it just can't do something you want, you have serious problems.
It's possible to work with Adobe's SVG (scalable vector graphics) in this toolkit, and do neat things (the GLAMM project is a fine example) but if you want to do stuff with Adobe's Flash, you may as well douse yourself in gasoline and dive into a campfire. Less painful.
The "final" indicator in Java is used to declare that once a variable has been defined with a value, that variable cannot be changed to another value for the life/scope of the variable. You can declare a variable as "final" without actually assigning it anything, which means you can then assign it one of several values based on logic later on, but once it gets any value, that value is fixed. The compiler will kick you in the head if it discovers you are violating this rule, because it does a few handy optimizations based on it. It's like "const" in C but it can be applied to more things.
Is it possible to create and code a class that handles an object of "unknown" type, and then declare what that type is when you instantiate that class. For example you could write a "list" or "tree" class that puts objects of some unknown (but consistent) type at each node in the list or tree, and then indicate that the type will be "integers" when you instantiate the class in your code. Java will then make sure that whenever you are passing an object into that class to be stored in the tree, it will be of the correct type ... or it will barf on your head and put you in the pillory and tell other developers to throw vegetables at you.
The documentation for various parts of the Google Web Tools appears to be written by people who do not know the difference between documentation and a wiki. Most pages appear to be a dumping ground for whatever the author personally had difficulty with when they were attempting to use their own toolkit, or explain it to someone else. For example: "The methods are then called in sequence," declares the page, and then brainfarts and forgets to describe what the sequence is. The language is usually a disorienting combination of technical jargon and ambiguous articles. "Each callable asynchronous method corresponds to a method in the correlated service interface," says one page. The only parts that aren't jargon in that sentence are "each", "corresponds to a", and "correlated". But woe betide you if you can't figure that out after ten minutes of staring at the surrounding paragraphs.
The whole architecture I was working on for the test system, back at Apple - the architecture of Python and Perl driving Apache and RPC calls to present a web service - was inane, for the scale we needed to achieve. For my build system it was perfectly appropriate, though there were still some things that I did the hard way. But for the test system? No. We needed to move to an architecture that would allow us to keep a lot more data dynamically in ram, and share that data between sessions intelligently. This Eclipse environment, plus the Google toolkit, is an excellent platform for that. The only thing Apple has that's similar is their long-in-the-tooth WebObjects platform.
Biologists looking for work are a bit irritated at us programmers. The job openings for programmers at labs are plentiful, and listed right alongside the scant, difficult openings for biologists. It can appear as if us programmers are Terkin Der Jerrrrrrbbbs.
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| Saturday, March 24th, 2012
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10:51 pm - Turing test: FAILED
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cutiereagan892@yahoo.com hi Garrett yo, bot cutiereagan892@yahoo.com No i am far from a bot Garrett Pull the other one. cutiereagan892@yahoo.com Hey whats up. 23 female here. You? Garrett 89 space alien, and bugger off. cutiereagan892@yahoo.com Hmmm. Have we talked before? Garrett No. Go away, script. cutiereagan892@yahoo.com Oh ok. Sorry I wasnt sure. Anyways... Whats up? Garrett If you're not a bot, then tell me a story. Involve dragons. cutiereagan892@yahoo.com NO i am not a bot Garrett I just told you what it would take to prove it. Get started. cutiereagan892@yahoo.com Im like sooo bored. There is nothing to do. cutiereagan892@yahoo.com Ohhh wait! I have GREAT idea. Have you ever watched a sexy girl like me strip live on a cam before? Well.... Would you like to watch me strip? Garrett How does that work? Do you, like, deallocate chunks of memory, slowly, until there's nothing left but an entry in the process table? cutiereagan892@yahoo.com Ok well my cam is linked through this website so I cant be recorded so you will have to sign up there Garrett And then you, like, wiggle it? cutiereagan892@yahoo.com But dont worry it only takes a minute and it is free. kk? Garrett Into the blacklist you go ...
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 16th, 2012
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11:23 pm - okCupid et al
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The range of sexual morality appears, in part, to be charted along the course of population growth. That is, the denser the population, the stronger the push towards sexual freedom.
For example, in 17th-century England, most people lived in rural communities of 100 persons or less, and if two unmarried people were caught having sex, they were whipped until bloody and cast permanently out of the area, isolated from their friends and family.
In 19th-century England, 200 years later, most people were collected in towns, and London was the largest city on earth. Urban residents did not have to take a personal interest in the social lives of their neighbors to ensure the stability of their own lives, and even if they wanted to, strict rules of sexual conduct were much more difficult to enforce.
Now we're on the edge of another leap in accessibility: Database-driven location-aware matchmaking sites.
How are these going to affect sexual morality?
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, March 8th, 2012
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11:48 am - Kevin's Drawing
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| Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
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5:11 pm - Russian Film Music
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About fifteen years ago, while trolling the newsgroups, I came across a pile of MP3s that were claimed to be "Russian Film Music". I was intrigued, so I downloaded the whole set, and dumped them into WinAMP to see what I'd found.
It turned out to be quite a treasure. There were bombastic operettas, plaintive torch songs, moody stretches of piano music, and brassy, rousing folk guitarists and singers, all jumbled together with confusing or missing tag information. I suspected that some of the films had been made in the 1970's, because I found strange instrumentals that wove together light jazz with a humming chorus, strongly evoking an aesthetic of lounge-music, like what Ennio Morricone did for a while with his film scoring. Other pieces in the collection felt like an earlier era, the 1950's perhaps, with classy orchestral arrangements. Many of these had been produced with a lot of ghostly reverb coloring the singers, anchoring them far in the past, when sound engineers had intentions and standards very different from those of today.
I was transfixed - by the music, and also by the mystery presented in the collection itself. Where had these songs come from? What original movies, what vinyl records or CDs, what distribution channel? I didn't have a lot to work with. The few tags that came with the music had been inexpertly transliterated into latin, and since most filesystems at the time still used the restrictive ASCII character set, all the accent markers had been stripped off, or replaced with colons and apostrophes wedged sideways into the text. The tags and the filenames had also been truncated in places, and only a handful of the files had track indexes, so there was no way of grouping them by the track order of the original CDs ... if they were from CDs at all.
This was the mid-1990's, and automated translation services were still crude, and search engines didn't have a lot of scope, especially for foreign material. I remember searching for hours and coming up with absolutely nothing, and repeating the search every year or so, until after three or four years I gave up. In the meantime, I adored the music.
I made three large playlists, with my favorites at the head. They also made delicious contrast with techno and rock music in long-form mixes. The music was passionate and otherworldly, and I loved it even though I had no idea what the various singers were actually singing. In a way, that was better for me, because it did not penetrate all the way through the language centers of my brain, and I could keep programming or reading while it played. The music became part of my library, and fifteen years went by.
Yesterday I realized that perhaps after ten years, it was time to make another search. I started with my very favorite track, a lilting piece called "Gusi-lebedi", with an album tag of "Zjenshshiny". No artist, no track number, no commentary. The song evokes dark forests and fairy tales and cold winter nights, and the confined soundstage of the old mixing equipment and style gives it a constrained, secret presence, like a tiny voice in my head.
Here, have a copy of the mp3 and see what you think.
I knew that "Zjenshshiny" was a latin phonetic transliteration from Russian. My first boon from the modern era of search engines was that Google auto-suggested the more appropriate transliteration "Zhenshchiny". Google's language translation tool stubbornly refuses to translate the phonetic version of a single Russian word into English, so I couldn't figure out what it meant yet. But I dumped it into a search engine and came up with this article from the Moscow times, titled "The Essence of Russia: Devushki, Zhenshchiny, Babushki". Now we're getting somewhere. Even I could recognize the word Babushki. I dumped the whole phrase into the google translator to confirm my hunch, and got "Девушки, Женщины, Бабушки", or, more or less, "Girls, Women, Grandmothers".
That was interesting, but not helpful, because all it did was show me that the track I was trying to identify had been tagged with the word "women".
Okay, what's the other piece I have to work with? "Gusi-lebedi". Excellent. The third hit on that search phrase is a film on the Internet Movie Database. But wait, this is a short animated film from 1949. Could this really be the source of the track I love so much? The track is in stereo. Were they even recording soundtracks in stereo in 1949?
Googling with the name again plus the release date brings me to the film itself, hosted on a video streaming site in Russia. It's a remarkable film, for the production value and for the interestingly dark tone. The little girl's brother gets hauled away by enormous evil swans, and she plunges into the forest after him, and encounters a series of plaintive forest spirits in need of human intervention. Sure, this was 14 years after Disney's Snow White, but it somehow feels more authentic.
Watching this was interesting. In the end, the litte girl traps the evil geese in an outdoor oven, and the blackened geese spew out of the chimney and fly feebly away in defeat. I can't help thinking that in the original tale, the geese get burned to death. A variation of the story is collected in an even older book called "Народные Русские Сказки, - "Russian Folk Tales" - first published almost a hundred years earlier in 1855. In the earlier variation, the little girl childishly refuses to help the forest spirits.
The title of the cartoon was given on the page in Cyrillic, as "Гуси-лебеди". Searching with the original Cyrillic turned up some neat results, but no good leads. The Google translation of the phrase was "Geese and Swans". I suspected a more appropriate phrase might be "The Magic Swans", or "The Wild Swans", and trying those led me to a 1962 animated film called "Дикие лебеди", shot in widescreen and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsekhanovskaya.
A savagely edited version of the film was released for home screening in the US, and I found it posted on YouTube. A few minutes of that compelled me to find the unedited version. I lingered for a while, falling under the spell of the movie.
At the six minute mark it totally stole my heart, and impressed me at the same time, in one 60-second scene. The scene begins with all the young princes having a pillow fight in their room. They dive back into bed when they hear their sister coming. When she arrives, she sings them a lullaby that effectively ends their rambunctiousness. It's a sequence that conveys a multitude of important things very artfully: The brothers may be high-spirited but they all adore and obey their sister, and she in turn clearly adores them and has taken on some of the mothering role left vacant by the deceased Queen. Her song is accented by loving touches on the heads of her brothers and their blankets, woven into dancing moves that evoke a ballet while also conveying the improvisations of a small child. (The emphatic forward nod of her head to assert one syllable, the exaggerated lifting of her arms evocative of a doll, et cetera.) It's well-crafted and I can't think of any domestic (that is, USA) animation house that would do it in this straightforward, unironic way. Maybe Pixar, if you caught them in the right mood.
Watch it snug in bed with the lights off and some cocoa nearby!
This was all very good, but it wasn't helping me find my track, because that 1962 film didn't have any matching music. So I decided to get crafty. I did a web search for "Gusi lebedi" and "3:15", which is the length of the track. That eventually brought me to this page, where I learned that the track was very likely included on a compilation album called "Kogda vesna pridet, Pesni iz kinofil'mov". Dumping that into the translator gave me an auto-suggestion of "Когда весна придет: Песни из кинофильмов", or "When spring comes: Songs from films".
A direct search with the Cyrillic led me to a full title and tracklist for the album. According to that, the track I was trying to identify was from a movie called, simply, "Women", and it was performed by a "Soviet traditional quartet". Searching for the movie title alone was fruitless, but that plus the song brought me to an excerpt from the film itself. Entering "Женщины" straight into the search box on that site brought up another hit, for the entire film this time. The link went to YouTube, and the resulting page was blank due to a copyright complaint, but the metadata in the link gave me a clue: The film was made in 1966. Searching with that took me to the Russian wikipedia entry for the movie.
Directed by Pavel Lyubimov, music composer Ian Frenkel - or John Frankel...? The movie appears to be about the struggles of the women who are left behind to work while their men - husbands, sons - are called off to war.
Switching gears and searching for that compilation album brought me to a Russian torrent site, where it was being hosted in lossless format, with complete scans of the liner art. Hot damn! Time to download that sucker.
When the album arrived I transcoded it and verified that yes, this was the track. Now I had it in sweet lossless format. The liner notes were an even better reward: They contained lyrics for the song!
I fired up the translit website and began to transcribe the Cyrillic visible in the scan to actual Cyrillic characters, using the virtual keyboard. Rather than convert the entire song this way, I just did the first line, and then dumped that into Google. Sure enough, someone had pasted the text of the song into a web page, and now I had the entire thing. This is it:
Гуси-лебеди
Сказки попусту обещаются -
Принцы золушкам не встречаются.
Наши девичьи года были - не были,
Улетели в никуда гуси-лебеди.
Припев:
По-над улицей и в чистом полюшке
Стайка тянется, белым-бела, -
Гуси-лебеди роняют пёрышки,
Чтобы сказка на земле жила.
Добрый сказочник много видывал,
Тот, что первую сказку выдумал.
И когда нам тяжело в были-небыли,
Подставляют нам крыло гуси-лебеди.
Припев.
Further searching revealed that it was also a poem by a Russian named (roughly translated) Michael Tanic. I converted it into English with a few rounds of automatic translations and guesswork, and the best I could get was:
Swans and Geese
Fairy tales promise vainly
The princes of Cinderella did not occur
Our maiden years were, were not
Flown away on wings of wild swans ...
Chorus:
Po-nad the street and in the pure Polya
A flock of white-on-white stretches ...
Wild swans drop their feathers,
To live a fairy tale on the Earth ...
The good storyteller had seen much,
who first thought up the tale.
And when we were in a difficult-nebyli,
We substituted the wings of wild swans ...
(Chorus)
If anyone wants to contribute a better translation (or maybe berate me for my crude sleuthing tactics), feel free!
I am not sure if the poem was written for the movie, or if the poem existed beforehand and was turned into a song for the movie, of if the poem existed as a traditional folk song already and was just performed for the movie. In any case, the lyrics accentuate the sad tone of the scene, recalling what I've learned about the fairy tale of the swans and geese, how they may carry our sons away, or how our brothers or princes may be cursed to fly away as swans.
I'm continuing the treasure hunt. So far I've discovered that I have tracks from Человек с бульвара Капуцинов, Сильва, Семнадцать мгновений весны, and Служебный роман (ripped from vinyl, so the mix is different).
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| Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
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11:45 pm - Interviewin'
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Tomorrow I interview for a position at the Joint Genome Institute. I shall wear a brand-new silk tie!
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 6th, 2012
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5:24 am - Moviesplosion
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Last Thursday I went hog-wild and spent an entire afternoon and evening at the movies, watching a bunch of dumb things back-to-back. There's something meditative and otherworldly about the big-screen experience that compels me think in lateral ways about my own life. ... It's like stepping outside of myself and my world, and then stepping back in again.
Often I wonder if there has been any serious study of the similarities between the modern theater and, for example, ancient traditions of meditation. I also suspect there is a subtle bias - or perhaps an overt one - against cinema, in modern intellectual circles. Cinema is seen as passive, unsophisticated, unchallenging, puerile...
Come to think of it, I bet these things are related. I think cinema is criticized as anti-intellectual because there is a lack of good analysis of its purpose and appeal. When I go to the movies, I'm totally aware that the dialogue is bent into a story arc and the actors are just pretending, and that there's no way a car can simultaneously fall into a river AND explode. Nevertheless I find in each chain of shots some interesting observation to make about the way things are in "the real world".
Anyway, I'm rambling. Here's a hard-nosed review of all the stuff I saw on one ticket.
Haywire
The lead actress is clearly an astounding athlete, and it was fun to watch her various acrobatic takedowns and jump-kicks and showy wrestling moves. It helped to make up for her limited range as an actor, something that the director had the good sense to play to when constructing the tone of each scene.
The plot was coherent but it seemed to pass in a blur, towards an ending that felt anticlimactic. There was no real resolution between "the bad guy" and "the good guy". They had been former lovers, or at least that's what I thought I saw early in the film when the man was trying to open the woman's apartment with the keys on his own keying and discovered that she'd changed the locks. Despite this intimate past, they barely had a conversation at the end of the film. He went running, she chased him, she beat the crap out of him, and that was it. Roll the credits.
Even though the main character was an obvious movie trope of "female badass", she did seem to be in actual danger every now and then, taking a bad fall or failing to land a punch. She showed visible bruises, but they always evaporated in less than 24 hours. I'm glad I didn't pay full price for this, instead splitting one ticket across six films, which comes out to about a buck fifty per film, which is about what I might pay for a rental, if I weren't a low-down filthy pirate.
I saw this first because it was all action, and made a nice warm-up.
The Grey
This turned out to be the most thought provoking film of the day, which surprised me. It reminded me of Seraphim Falls, and not just because that was another film with Liam Neeson in it. The bleak tone and the episodic structure felt similar. The ending was pleasantly ambiguous and managed to switch a lot of our perspective around with a one-second reveal shot, which was clever.
Aside from the narration, the script is composed entirely of bickering amongst the survivors of an accident, and it draws some skin-deep parallels between them and the animals that are hunting them. Audience members get a few good beats in the editing to ruminate on what kind of pack animal they might be. I reckoned I was most like the man who fell in the river: Comfortable in the middle of the pack, motivated to make people cooperate, motivated to save people, but clearly opinionated about who should be in charge to best serve that end. What does that make me in corporate land? A middle-manager? Hmm.
Also, the wilderness is awesome, even if the wolves depicted are rather unnatural. When this comes out on blu-ray I'll rip the wolf howls out of the foley track and mix them into something, I'm sure.
Man On A Ledge
The reviewers were right; the plot was more holes than plot. Nevertheless I was kept interested for the full running time, so "mission accomplished". Always nice to see Ed Harris, of course, though he looks a bit ... dehydrated in this film, for some reason.
When ya get right down to it, this movie was not worth seeing. Snappy dialogue from supporting characters and a lot of impossible to believe MacGyverisms didn't cut it for me.
Contraband
Sometimes I think that Mark Wahlberg could be replaced with a wooden post, in almost every role he plays, with no ill effect provided you bolted a pair of big beefy arms onto the post. Every other actor in this film - especially Ben Foster - was more fun to watch than Mark Wahlberg, even though he was at the center of it. Perhaps the director just wanted a big neo-macho wooden post upon which to rotate everyone else, and everyone who could have put some personal flair into the role - like Colin Farrell or Jason Bateman or even freakin' Mel Gibson - was busy.
The plot was nasty and blurred the line between good guys and bad guys way too much for us to care at the end that the alleged good guys were now filthy rich. The only concession to their goodness that we are shown is that they refuse to deal in drugs, only counterfeit cash. Thanks guys; you're true-blue heroes.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
This was meant to be a potboiler, and had some nice ensemble acting. I missed the first 3 minutes, and lacking that, I felt adrift in a mélange of confessions and interviews and interrogations delivered in semi-random order, winding all around upon itself before pointing at one dirty dealer slightly dirtier than all the other dirty dealers.
Seriously, though: The order in which we are shown the pieces of the plot is geared mostly for tonal convenience and not for any sort of meaningful reveal. I call that not good enough.
Gary Oldman seemed to enjoy playing the role of a geriatric turtle poking out of a suit, wearing more pale makeup than most teenage vampires. ... But there's only so many long held shots of his face, stuffing the entire theater screen, that an audience can take in two hours before settling into a dreadful malaise. It crept over me about ten minutes into the second hour, and my mind drifted to a criticism of the film even as I was still watching it.
Every one of the films I saw today failed the Bechdel test, but this one failed it the most shamefully, when one of the two women with lines in the script gets gruesomely murdered as a capper to act II. I mean, yes, even Haywire failed the test, and that movie had a female in the lead role, but if you're going to bring in a romantic interest, and give her a story and a soul, only to kill her stone dead on-screen as a cheap jab at "atmosphere", well... Shame on you.
I guess if I gave a crap about the novel it was based on, I'd give a crap about this movie. Or maybe if it wasn't number five of the day, I would have been able to enjoy the slow-burn approach employed by the director. Sorry, no. Too much of Gary Oldman poking out of that suit like Mr Turtle licking his way to the center of a Tootsie-Pop.
I would like to pause here to reflect that five of the six movies I saw today featured men brandishing and shooting guns as part of the plot. I live in West Oakland for crap's sake, and I hear gunfire outside sometimes. But if the movies are any indication, I should be wading knee-deep in a river of loaded guns every time I walk to my car. I should be waking up in the morning to find my potted plants buried in heaps of guns, because it rained guns again last night.
Dear screenwriters: If you even mention a gun anywhere in your script, you need to admit that you are bored, and probably need another line of work.
The Woman In Black
For about an hour a half, we enjoy the spectacle of Mr Radcliffe wandering around the same five rooms of a mansion and occasionally straying to the edge of the frame to conveniently open up some space behind him, graciously allowing some random demon and/or mouldering item from the prop department to spring into our faces with an accompanying "SCREEECH" noise as though someone keeps flinging hot coffee into the orchestra pit.
I knew what I was in for when I walked in here, and I was amused to find it was like one of those rhymes you sing while jumping rope. The ghost is in a room, in a mansion, near a graveyard, in a forest, on a hill, in the mist, by the sea, at the end of a road, past a little village, tacked onto a distant train station. To light up every single peg on the Spooky-meter, it would just need a hedge maze and some pirate loot. To get any more remote, it would have to be sci-fi and involve rockets.
There wasn't much to the plot. The moral of the story appears to be: Don't help ugly ghosts, they'll just kill you for your efforts. Go with the pretty ones instead - they're, like, heavenly or something.
Again, good atmospheric sound effects, which I am sure to steal later on this year.
And now, I am totally movied out!
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(10 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
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4:28 am - Arthur C Clarke Round 5: When Clarkes Attack!
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Transcience, 1949
I suppose this would have been profound 60 years ago, but my eyes and ears have suffered a maelstrom of similar progressions expressed in music, television, novels, comics, and film.
The Lion of Comarre, 1949
Oh sure, perhaps it is naive with respect to lions and jungles and physiology, but I totally enjoyed it. It felt like the early stages of Clarke's long-running exploration of the 'uncanny valley', giving machines just enough of a sentience and soul to get the reader pleasantly confused.
I also really dig any setup where the character gets to explore a labyrinth that is operating to some mysterious purpose. (In this case, the underground complex.) It's fun to examine everything three times - first to see what it is, second to try and figure out the motives of whoever placed it there, and third to try and further deduce the grand purpose of the labyrinth.
E.g. "Oh look, a water fountain! How pretty!" "Now why in the world would the architect place a fountain here? Seems out of place... Oooh I see, this used to be a washing station for crew members to clean their boots!" "So this whole complex is a ... mining operation? Or some kind of medical facility?"
Clarke would later use this approach to smashing, award-winning success with his novel Rendezvous with Rama. Eventually I'm going to re-read that. I remember being captivated by it in the 8th grade.
The Forgotten Enemy, 1949
Saw the end coming a mile away. Heh. That's kind of funny...
Guardian Angel, 1950
The "action" scene and its breakdown in the middle of the story were the high point, because the big reveal at the end of the story has not aged well at all. First time while reading these stories that I've been really struck by the cultural divide of a half-century. A lot of what Clarke turned out was timeless, which I consider to be a hallmark of legitimate science fiction, but alas, the ending here was not.
Silence Please, 1950
The framing device was quite vivid and amusing for what has apparently been a one-time use. I can easily imagine a series of tales, five or six, spun by these nutty scientists in their cozy, atmospheric pub.
Perhaps Clarke did not receive a warm enough response from his editors and publishers to warrant it...
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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2:05 am - Techie Mixes 1 and 2, from 1997
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I put these together just as I was going nuts for Bjork and Meat Beat Manifesto, back in 1997. I ripped the tracks from CDs, squished them together in CoolEdit Pro 2.1, and then burned then back onto CDs for heavy rotation in the 5-disc carousel as I hacked and slashed away. No iPods back then of course. MP3s were just barely gaining traction.
Three of the tracks in these mixes are early compositions by my friend Zach, when he was a music major at UC Davis. 15 years later they still feel fresh to my ear, like I'd encounter them as backing to some YouTube cartoon show or documentary segment produced just days ago.
One track is a live recording done at Jack's house in Santa Cruz, when he threw a dinner party and decided to amuse us with his mandolin skills and deadpan profanity.
One track is also Zach and Jack collaborating with a drum machine to cover the song "Barbie And The Rockers". An instant classic ... if you define "classic" like, say, The Cartoon Network defines it.
Looking back, I find that the mixes as a whole suffer from a poor sense of pacing, due to the Meat Beat Manifesto tracks, which are all way too long but which I was obsessed with at the time. The transitions in tone are all pretty good though.
- Mix number 1, in lossless format -
Tracklist for Mix 1:- Talula (Excerpts From Two Mixes) - Tori Amos
- Set Your Receivers - Meat Beat Manifesto
- Seibolds Theme - Zach Archer
- Mad Bomber/The Woods - Meat Beat Manifesto
- Nuclear Bomb - Meat Beat Manifesto
- Asbestos Lead Asbestos - Meat Beat Manifesto
- The Cheese Level - Zach Archer
- The Utterer - Meat Beat Manifesto
- Duende - Delerium
- Sub Unit One - Haujobb
- We Have Explosive (Remix) - The Future Sound of London
- One of Us - Niko
- Peace on Earth - Niko
- Hyperballad (Towa Tei Mix) - Bjork
- Dick In My Butt - Jack
- Love - Niko
- The Elephant - Niko
- Barbie and the Rockers - Zach and Jack
- Mix number 2, in lossless format -
Tracklist for Mix 2:- Possibly Maybe (LFO Mix) - Bjork
- Stereophrenic - Meat Beat Manifesto
- You In My Life (x2) - Zach Archer
- Enjoy (Outcast Remix) - Bjork
- Simulacra - Meat Beat Manifesto
- Silence - Delerium
- Solitudes (Heavily filtered and edited) - Dan Gibson
- Clipper - Autechre
- Ghost Town - Might and Magic VII OST
- Domino - Pizzicato Five
- The Cage Complex (Excerpt) - Haujobb
- Rotorblade - Juno Reactor
- Barrow Grounds - Might and Magic VII OST
- Zoolok 2 (Excerpt) - Jean Michel Jarre
- Trigger 2 (Anatomy of a Shot) - Front 242
Share and enjoy!
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, January 30th, 2012
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2:09 am - Occupy Oakland, last weekend
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| Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
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1:06 am
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"Hello my well-known friend Mike. What's your take on this http://reasonrally.org/about/ ?" "Not my kinda thing, anymore. The non-theist activism scene wore me out."
"What's your position these days?" "I'm still very atheist, still anti most religions. I believe all the same stuff, but the scene is exhausting, and the most active in it are largely self-important people with a bit of a persecution complex."
"Exhausting how? I've never been active in the "scene" except for a few forum postings, so I don't really know what it's like." "I led a large local group for 8 years, and was CA director of American Atheists for 2 years. You get to deal with good, nice people, but also with basement-dwellers and the poorly socialized, who all think religion is out to get them. The dork factor is high, which is fine if it's your friends, but when you're trying to get things done, it's not as much fun. The atheists themselves drove me from keeping up in the scene much more than anyone religious."
"So with the movement ceded to the antisocial and the paranoid, what's left for us, you/I, to do?" "Keep talking, mostly. Be out and loud and encourage others to do the same. Luckily that's pretty popular right now too, and I still meet a lot of people who are just starting to tell family and friends their beliefs."
"And activities like http://reasonrally.org ? Likely to be brimming with yahoos?" "They're organized by good people, and get good speakers. They're attended by mostly good internet denizens, with a high geek and dork factor. I had to see a lot more of the yahoos as a leader (people would come to me with all their problems), but an event like this would probably be fun. That said, I think there are more important things to fight for, though everyone's free to fight for their own stuff, of course. The majority of even harsh prejudice against atheists is typically only mildly irritating, and rarely are actual rights lost. None of us want to see a cross on public property, but honestly, it doesn't hurt us like not being able to get married hurts gays."
"Interesting. I have to admit, I feel largely the same way. It would be cool to see Mr. Dawkins speak at http://reasonrally.org , and I've never walked through the National Mall ... but I don't think I'd hear, or see, or talk about, anything that I haven't already thoroughly examined years ago."
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| Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
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11:19 pm - Melancholia
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The film "Melancholia" lets the audience spend some time with a woman whose life is corrupted by episodes of severe depression. Depression is depressing to watch, but thankfully the film has more going on: An inevitable apocalypse in the form of a gigantic stray planet on a collision course with the Earth, which all the characters including the woman must reconcile themselves with as the clock runs down. It's a handy metaphor because, like clinical depression, it comes from outside our world, and quickly becomes more influential than everything in it.
It occurs to me that the certain knowledge of everything we know coming to an inevitable and swift end is never actually very far from the truth; because even if the entire universe around us carries on after our deaths, it does so beyond our reach. To each of us as individuals, the expectation that our present deeds will have any lasting impact is ultimately an act of pure faith - totally beyond all direct verification, and bound instead to whatever materials and ideas we can hammer into our surroundings while we still draw breath.
That faith is more fundamental than any Western religion can touch. To get a decent view of it you need to dip into Eastern philosophy. Set the future - the "later" - aside ... instead you need to disassemble and then rebuild your idea of "now". It's utterly removed from concepts like judgement and piety. I find it a visceral exercise that tends to scrape away a lot of the things I've been constantly pressured to worry so much about. Success, victory, proper social appearances, fear of being foolish, the desire to build a résumé of accomplishments to justify my individuality and age, to place myself higher in the rankings of the stylish and the clever... A rat race. A vexing distraction.
Besides, I've already done - and nearly forgotten about - so many things that I would be an ass to demand more.
Not that I plan to stop...
But that's the thing. At my age, it cannot anymore be about building a résumé. A person who does neat things and contributes to the building of neat things is something to be, not something to finish with. And the being is about now. Sure, the world will end, and it's lights out after my death one way or the other, but it can't be about packing up my suitcase at the end of my run and saying, "yep, I sure did some stuff there". Oh no. It's about being here. In the way I want, for as long as now lasts.
I am very fortunate to have arrived at this now. Staying in it is a worthwhile challenge.
About depression:
Depression seems to proliferate in family or social situations where there is a large unspeakable truth being suppressed that everyone is better off knowing about and dealing with. It proliferates further, and takes deep root, when that unspeakable truth has been forcefully and desperately shoved out into the open by one person, only to be violently suppressed again by another. The force seems to build up, and then becomes free-floating, a condition divorced from its justified cause, a tsunami that can be triggered by any number of unremarkable ripples far out to sea, when there is massive stress pent up in the Earth below. And it drowns everything and is almost impossible to stop.
How can one locate the stress below, when the symptom seems to come from anywhere? How can one redirect the forces at work, when the necessary tools are being constantly washed away? When those who would help are threatened by drowning?
Some people will drag damaging secrets all the way to their gravesite, only to have them spill out anyway as their clenched bowels relax in death. Their suppression is your oppression, and they will drag you along, unless you pry their claws from your hide, by making the truth a piece of casual furniture in your daily life independent of their behavior. Generally this means you need to get away. Get far away; far enough that you can learn how to carefully slip through the tsunami of depression in your own style like a pelican cuts through the crest of a wave, and work hard to silence the echoes of the disapproving and angry voice you've internalized from your malefactor. Your only hope is continental drift - you need to slowly grow a new skin beneath the waves, a meter at a time, until the stress begins to abate.
Who gets the chance to do this? It certainly doesn't come free. Assuming you know what you have to do, you still have to fight for it. And often you have to wait until you're an adult, and can emancipate yourself from the horrors creeping around in your adolescence.
I count myself lucky to have had the privacy and the time and the support to regrow so much of my own inner terrain. I've been told that "life begins at 30", and I believed it at 30 because I felt totally committed to the adventure of my career and home. Five years later I realized it was, of course, more complicated than that: Life is the series of rounds and chapters that it's always been, and there really is no telling - for better or worse - where you will end up. What your heart will embrace - and what it will bleed to death upon.
Unspeakable truths have to be spoken regularly. They have to be watched carefully. They have to be handled gently.
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