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An Outlet for Possibly Misplaced Rage

Feb 8th, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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The door in the library cafe this post is about.

See that little sign? MOST PEOPLE CAN'T.

Today, somebody nearly opened a door into me.

This was immensely irritating for two reasons:

  1. This door is made of glass. Not frosted glass, either, but honest to goodness clear window glass. You have to be a really extreme species of troglodyte to not see somebody on the other side of a goddamn glass door.
  2. This door has a sign next to it saying it’s not an exit. Furthermore, it has a sign on it saying that it shouldn’t be used as an exit. People go ahead and use it as an egress anyway. To express my rage at this I’m sadly going to have to break out of the confines of this numbered list.

Ah, that’s better. Anyway, if there’s something I absolutely fucking hate it’s when people decide that instructions like that are not for them;  people who commit such hubris, who believe that such instructions are for somebody else, not somebody wonderful and important like themselves.

Get the fuck over yourselves and spend the damned thirty seconds walking the long way around.

Oh, and what’s worse is when bottom-feeding scumbags use that door and then not close it after themselves, letting in a continual draft of glacial air. Pack of absolute selfish twats.

To  the transgressors I say this:

You are not special. You are not important. Your time is not more important or more special than mine. You do not have the right to decide that rules do not apply to you in order to satiate your own laziness.

Oh, and look where you’re fucking going! There’s a fucking pavement on the other side of that door!

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Music Piracy and Star Trek

Feb 3rd, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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This is one of those absolutely bizarre ideas that one has completely inexplicably, but then feel the need to share with the world.

Once upon a time, music was scarce. It was all bound up into a physical item: a vinyl record, a tape, or a CD. If you wanted a copy of the music, you’d have to physically remove that item from the possession of someone else. There was no such thing as piracy; there was only theft.

What has happened since then is that technology has ensured that music has become a post-scarcity commodity; once a piece of music is in existence, it costs almost nothing to reproduce and transmit it. As most of you are aware, this has caused the music industry to collectively shit itself; it’s not their fault, really. The people at the top were too old, and too stuck in their ways to understand that the economics they were used to were fundamentally gone, replaced by something that nobody had ever really seen before.

Which makes me wonder what will happen if something like Star Trek replicators are ever invented. To the uninitiated, a replicator allows any item to be duplicated as long as one possesses the raw materials. This of course leaves some scarcity, as the raw materials will still be hard to come by, but it raises the spectre of a world in which, say, an Audi or an iPhone can be duplicated as easily as the latest Muse single.

I have no conception of how such an economics would impact society. Imagine if the histrionics of the music industry were repeated everywhere, from every sector and corner of society.

The shame of it is that living in a truly post-scarcity society would probably be like existing in utopia. Although, there’s probably a reason that “utopia” means “not place”.

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iPad

Jan 30th, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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As is customary amongst our people, I am going to tell you what it is I think about stuff that’s been going on.

On Wednesday, Apple announced, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that they were going to release a new tablet computer, monikered the iPad.

Gallons of ink and… what the fuck is the collective noun for pixels? I mean, you have a murder of crows, a parliament of rooks, a school of fish, a clutch of eggs… regardless, a lot of pixels have gone into describing every nook and cranny of the thing, so there’s no need to re-hash it; I always find that Engadget does a good job of coverage.

The real question is: is the iPad a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing?

I must confess that my initial thought process was, “Oh, it’s a giant iPod Touch. Who cares?” The iPhone OS is limited in a whole bunch of ways that are annoying if you’re used to desktop computers: there’s no filesystem, no multitasking, you have to get all your applications through the App Store, etc. and I felt that was just too limiting for a device that size. I also had ergonomic concerns, is it good for typing, for instance?

Then I sat down and watched the keynote video, watched the thing in action.

And I just can’t be cynical. I’ve wanted a device like this for probably more than a decade. And it’s better than the dream could ever be.

The iWork apps on there were, oddly, what finally convinced me. If you pair it with a USB keyboard, this becomes a practical work machine. It’s not a toy, it’s not a joke, it’s a perfectly-crafted touch device in a way you could never get by retrofitting multitouch into an existing OS, because every aspect of the experience is geared towards interacting with it with your hands. It’s utterly marvellous.

People say that it’s just a bigger iPod Touch. And it is, they’re not wrong. But then a Blu-Ray is just a DVD with more pixels. A Core 2 Quad is just a Duo with 2 extra cores. Heck, it’s really just a faster 486! The step up in experience that the simple doubling of the dimensions provides for is just going to be an order-of-magnitude better. Saying it’s “just” a bigger iPod Touch is like saying a Microsoft Surface table is just a bigger iPod Touch. The very nature of the form-factor makes it different.

So yeh, I’m very excited to head down to the Apple Store in 2 months and have a go at holding one in my hands. I might even go crazy and buy one, like a big sucker buying a 1st gen product.

There are niggles; it should be able to run at least one app in the background. Honestly, that’s all I need, or want. One background app for something like Spotify, and one foreground app to actually work in. The second thing is, they need to loosen App Store approval guidelines. There’s only one route to get software onto it, so it needs to not suck.

As far as Flash goes, I really don’t care. HTML5 Video and Canvas are going to wash it away, and the lack of support for Flash in the iPhone ecosystem is going to hurt Flash, not anybody else. Adobe looks pretty scared.

Still probably not ever going to get a Mac, though.

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Of the Sun and Streetlights

Jan 19th, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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Did you know that we can measure the magnetic field on the surface of the Sun?

That is something I find absolutely marvellous, that we can measure magnetism on something over 92 million miles away from here, on a surface that’s over 5000 degrees celsius. It’s one hell of a trick, for sure.

It’s accomplished by using a phenomenon called the Zeeman effect, and just a pinch of quantum mechanics. Electrons orbiting the nucleus are only allowed in a set of distinct energy levels, so they can only absorb energy to jump from one level to another. Photons of light have only a certain energy related to their wavelength (or colour); this means that to jump from one given energy level to another, only a very specific colour of light will do.

This means that when certain colours of light hit that atom, they’ll be absorbed and cause electrons to jump into higher energy levels. This causes certain colours of light to be missing when you look at a rainbow (or spectrum) of the light. You can calculate where these lines would be from quantum mechanics. This is how we know what the Sun is made from, for instance.

Now, when you add a magnetic field to the mix, things get a little more interesting. The magnetic field affects the orbit of the electrons, and splits one energy level into many more. This means that there are now more ways for electrons to jump from one level to another, so your neat little spectral absorbtion line will split into many lines: this is the Zeeman effect. You can tell from how much the line has split what the magnetic field strength is.

All these results can be calculated from quantum mechanics, and the Zeeman effect works just as well here on the ground as it does in the Sun. It’s brilliant!

Extra: Spectral lines work in reverse, too. Electrons in higher energy levels in an atom can only lose energy and go into a lower level by emitting a photon of a precise colour. Streetlights, for instance, work by exciting electrons in sodium, which then emit a photon of a very particular orange colour as they drop down into a lower level. This means that streetlights are almost exactly monochromatic (i.e. a single colour).

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When is a TV Show About Time Travel Not About Time Travel?

Jan 13th, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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When it’s Doctor Who, usually. For a TV show where the lead character is a time traveller, there is very little regard for the implications inherent in time travel, and they’re usually presented in contradictory ways when they are mentioned.

For instance: I was watching The Shakespeare Code, wherein the Doctor explains to Martha that if they fail to foil the Carrionites’ plan, the world will be destroyed right then and there in 1599 and Martha’s world will cease to exist. This is surely in contradiction of the Doctor’s assertion in the Waters of Mars that some points in history are fixed, and must stand no matter what; if the world had ended in 1599, Adelaide Brooke and her base on Mars would surely have been wiped from history too. I realise this is probably a pedantic point, but it reaches to the heart of one of the really major failings of the Russell T. Davies (RTD) era of the show: that logic and consistency would be thrown out of the window in favour of whichever plot mechanic was found most expedient at that point. It’s an ultimately unsatisfying way of telling a story.

To some extent Doctor Who has an excuse for poor continuity, with the consistency of past events with current ones; as Paul Cornell (writer of the excellent Human Nature/Family of Blood two-parter) point out, the effects of (to a greater extent) the Time War, and (to a lesser extent) time travel can re-write history, meaning that it’s not impossible to see two totally contradictory versions of events.

This provides no explanation, however, for the inconsistency in the nature of time travel itself; one would expect the laws of physics to be invariant under any sort of temporal abuse.

I’m greatly hoping that Moffat’s era will tread more carefully in this area, and the evidence presented by his old episodes show that he’s one of the few writers on the series who treats the time-travel mechanic as much more than a convenient plot generator; his first episode, The Empty Child, has a plot in which Jack Harkness runs self-cleaning scams, where the evidence is cleared away by a known historical event. Blink employs a non-linear narrative, where the Doctor invokes non-linear causality to justify him reading aloud from a transcript of a conversation he’s still having! This is all a great step up from the usual uses of time travel, which is to enter some historical period at the start of an episode, and then leave it again at the end.

Moffat’s stories show that it’s possible to tell compelling stories which are properly guided by their own consistent internal logic, requiring no great leaps of suspension of disbelief.

I was thinking about this in relation to an idea while reading the post by Paul Cornell I linked above, and combining it with my viewing of The Shakespeare Code; if time travel is re-writing history, would there have even been a threat to Earth in Shakespeare’s time if the Doctor had never gone there? Sure, he saved the day, but is just his presence in any point of history destructive to the timeline? Monsters and chaos and death seem to follow the Doctor, but is it coincidence or causation?

I think that would put a potentially interesting spin on the nature of the Doctor and the Time Lord’s policy of non-interference if the presence of time travellers was actually harmful. It would certainly put a dent into the Doctor’s otherwise impeccable morals.

I suppose this is slightly ruled out by Turn Left, in which we see the monsters would have come anyway, but I still think it would be interesting to explore.

You can tell compelling, emotional stories without totally fucking up your internal consistency. Y’know, unlike the ones told with unbreakable time-locks, for instance. Which are breakable if you want to risk going crazy. Or you can toss a diamond into a hologram as well as Timothy Dalton. I do know a lot of people who were confused by that reveal: “I thought the time lords were dead, not trapped in a bubble!”. The de-emphasis of the mechanics of time travel in the series is, I think, one of the contributors to that lack of understanding.

I do have to give RTD some credit, though. I am desperatly curious about what exactly the Could-Have-Been King and the Nightmare Child are. I suppose it’s easier to come up with cool-sounding names when there’s no requirement to ever actually have to depict them on screen!

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Bring me a dream…

Jan 10th, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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Sandman_Preludes

I had heard over the proverbial grapevine that The Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman (writer of the films Stardust and Coraline) was an excellent graphic novel, so on one of my regular visits to the fantastic geek-Mecca that is Forbidden Planet on Shaftsbury Avenue I picked up the first volume, then the second on my next visit, and then the third.

Then I just gave up trying to space them out and bought the whole remainder of the series from Amazon, and devoured them within a few days.

It’s one of the most astonishing, wonderful, imaginative, collection of tales I have ever read. To (probably mis)quote one of the introductions, “If this isn’t literature, nothing is.”

The central figure (I would say protagonist, but often he isn’t) is Dream, Lord of the Dreaming, Prince of stories; the very personification of the act of dreaming itself. The idea of dreams is at the very heart of The Sandman – the tales are often fantastical and nonsensical, but at the same time have a truth to them, a resonance that’s undeniable. There’s horror and humour, profundity and absurdity.

Neil Gaiman is the kind of person whose writing both simultaneously makes me want and not want to become a writer; his tales are so fantastic that it makes you fall in love with story-telling, but simultaneously despair that you would never be able to arrange words as wonderfully and as eloquently as he, or touch on so many themes, or make such excellent historical and mythological illusions, or have so many dazzling ideas.

The story has an overall arc and theme, summarised by Gaiman himself as: “The Lord of Dreams learns that one must change or die, and makes his decision.” Twisted alongside that main tale are squabbles with his family the Endless, his brother and sister personifications, e.g. his older brother Destiny, older sister Death, and the particularly antagonistic Desire, who is simultaneously male and female and the tales of the lesser beings who come into contact with Dream and the rest of the Endless, like the cat who dreams and learns that once cats ruled the world before the dreams of men revised history, or the man in the Middle Ages who learns how to live forever, and meets Dream once a century for a drink in the same pub, or the Roman emperor Augustus who is told to pretend to be a marketplace beggar once a year.

The writing I literally could not have more effusive praise for; it is utterly magnificent. However, this being a graphic novel, writing is only half the story, which is part of the wonderful richness of the medium; there’s the art.

Sandman _50 Ramadan Gaiman Klein Russell This being a very long series there are a number of different artists who’ve worked on this series, so there might well be some you enjoy, some you won’t. There are some incredibly standouts; the work of P. Craig Russel in the story “Ramadan” is breathtakingly wonderful, for instance. Overall, they do a really good job of embodying the strange world of Dream.

I really couldn’t recommend The Sandman highly enough. Anybody who knows me can ask and I’ll lend you the first volume. Or second or third, and the stand-alone set of stories, Endless Nights; alas, that’s all I have with me.

All that remains to be said is that I really, really want Neil Gaiman to write an episode of Doctor Who. He’s British, he’s a fantastic writer, it needs to happen.

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The Diarist

Jan 5th, 2010
by aiusepsi.
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During one of my recent bouts of insomnia (and by recent, I mean last night, obviously) I found myself watching a series of programmes about diaries on BBC4.

The first was about a hoax set of Hitler Diaries, the second a dinner with Michael Portillo about political diaries, and the third an investigation into diaries hosted by Richard E. Grant, himself a published diarist.

The first thing I found myself thinking (after the obligatory: “There’s no way I’m sitting through anything hosted by Portillo!” despite the fact I then did) was that BBC4 is actually really very good; I think I may have been short-changing it by considering it solely as a vehicle for giving me access to (the excellent) Charlie Brooker.

I find  the concept of a diary incredibly interesting, keeping a written record of events and your thoughts and feelings lends a kind of permanence to the past which I often find slips through my fingers. I envy the people who have the time and patience to do it every day. I have a few volumes lying about with the occasional entries, often spaced apart by months; delving back into them is fascinating, and reveals often how little I’ve changed, in spite of how I may have thought I’ve grown or changed as a person.

The real vexing question at the heart of a diary is the purpose of keeping one; are they a private record, full of intimate thoughts, actions, feelings? Are they intended for publication uncensored, or do we censor ourselves to tailor to our eventual audience (even if that audience is only ourselves)? Are they an inherently self-indulgent exercise in the ego, or something our family and friends can use to remember us when we’re gone? Is a diary a record of the complete person, or just who they are in their most private moments?

Then just when that was hard enough, today we have the blog, Facebook, and Twitter. We can share our thoughts and feelings far and wide, if we like, and if anyone will listen. I know I’ve personally struggled with trying to find a soundbite to describe why I find a medium like Twitter valuable; there’s a lot of people out there who think it’s all about what was had for breakfast, or the like.

That’s the heart of my vexation: why the heck am I writing, and what about? What’s my manifesto? I realise that I have some unspoken parameters into which I confine myself. One of the guests at Portillo’s dinner was the former MP Oona King, who wrote in her published diaries about her feelings around being unable to conceive a child; I couldn’t possibly share that kind of emotion in anything public, at least not without being terribly oblique about the whole business.

I’ve certainly noticed that my output here has mostly become articles about my opinions and thoughts on politics, book reviews (incidentally, there’s probably a summary of my thoughts on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman coming up) and a very factual account of (selected) events in my life, with precious little analysis of what I actually feel about these things. I just don’t think that’s in my manifesto, the face I present to the world. I suppose for that kind of emotional catharsis I’ll just have to start writing a diary.

If you want me, I’ll be in the corner with a note-book and a pen with green ink.

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