Looks like my old man has posted another blast from the sea cabin. Not bad for a 76-year-old. Maybe when Mark gets the eMac set up, he'll be inspired to tell a few more sea stories.
I was saddened to learn that Casady&Green will be closing up shop this week. They've been selling software for the Mac for almost 20 years. I bought Spell Catcher, Conflict Catcher, Crystal Crazy, Step On It! and Zone Raiders and an origami program from them; but I haven't bought anything lately. Neither has anyone else it seems.
Their web site seems down right now. It was up earlier today, and I meant to buy the OS X version of Step On It, because Caitie would probably like playing it, and maybe a couple of other things just to say thanks. If it comes back up before Thursday, I'll stop by and make a purchase.
Dave Winer is hosting an appeal for a kidney donor to help his friend. This is a good thing. There are a lot of people who need kidneys, and they need all the help they can get. With kidneys, about the only thing the donor needs to match with the recipient is blood type; after that, the closer the match the better, but everything else can be managed.
If you've never considered being a kidney donor, I'd encourage everyone to give it some thought. I gave a kidney to my brother just over six years ago this month. If you'd like to ask me any questions about being a donor, fire away. But please consider the proposition. Not just for Dave's friend, but for anyone who you may be able to help. Update: Like Michael Fraase.
One occasionally encounters these casual, offhand innuendoes that Joseph Campbell was an anti-semite. It seems to be a popular aspersion to cast these days; though one might think it an unchristian thing to do, unless one was prepared to offer a compelling basis for the accusation. Easier to hide behind someone else's theories and simply point a finger. Not quite an example of moral courage, I'd say. Just the kind of upright behavior our Great Protector Mr. John Ashcroft seems to look for in our citizenry. But it's always fun to point out how heroes, especially the "popular" ones, fall short of the mark, as they all do; and it's habit-forming too. But a quick Google doesn't offer a lot of insight, other than an article behind the toll-barrier of the New York Review of Books. Perhaps this volume may offer some insight. I'd hate to think I was laboring under a misapprehension and failing to live up to the moral example of my betters.
Mom wondered what the Fedex truck was doing backing into the driveway this morning. Their dog, Brandy, started barking and woke Dad up from his nap. He looked out the window and saw the Fedex truck and wondered what the hell Mom had ordered since they sure as hell couldn't afford anything.
The eMac and the iSight both arrived at my parents' house this morning, two days after I ordered it from the Apple Store, and that was free shipping!
It'll be almost two weeks before Mark gets up there to do the install for them. Plenty of time to order some RAM, set up a .Mac e-mail address and get more familiar with the peculiarities of iChat AV. Overall, pretty cool.
I don't know how many Macs iChat AV and iSight will sell, but it at least sold one.
I've got to hustle because our neighborhood is having a community (there's that word again - in this case, it's the innocuous kind) garage sale. I have a ton of crap I'm hoping someone gives me $2.47 to take it off my hands. Of course, I'll have to deal with the folks who come by at 0730, even though the ad says it starts at 0900.
Mom, Dad, you'll be receiving two boxes next week, a big one and a small one. The big one is an eMac. It weighs 50 lbs, so just have someone put it in the living room. The small one is an iSight camera. Mark will be up when Eric and Tyler are up there visiting, and he's going to get you set up and move all your data over from the iMac. When he's done, you'll be able to see Chris and Caitie (well, and me too) as you speak to us via the internet. Welcome to the future. No need to thank me, Apple and Mastercard have thanked me enough.
I downloaded EvoCam and it can talk to the iSight camera, or it can fiddle with the data it puts out, because you can adjust the brightness of the picture. The relative darkness many of us are experiencing is a limitation of the iChat AV beta that will hopefully be addressed when the final version is released.
My iSight has a hot pixel in the lower left quadrant. It's not very noticeable, especially in a bright image, but I was just a little bit disappointed.
I'm reading Philosophers of Nothingness and it's pretty fascinating. When I get finished, I'll have to drop Jonathon Delacour a note, this seems right up his alley. It's definitely right up my alley. I have one reservation while I'm reading it, and that is the author, James W. Heisig, is interpreting the work of the philosophers he's writing about - and that's fine, that's why he wrote the book, and why I bought it. But every now and then I get the feeling I should be reading philosophers' work first. So I'm just kind of keeping a big cautionary flag set as I'm reading Heisig, so when I go back and read the guys he's writing about, I give them a fair reading - or as much as I can anyway.
It's very exciting stuff to me. Of course, I now have to go back and read more William James too, and Hegel, and these neo-Kantian fellows. It's interesting how much the idea of the will, is a key question for a lot of people. I like that a lot. I believe the only power there is, is the power to choose; and that we misunderstand it in some important ways. More to follow after I finish Heisig's book.
Okay, time to drag the crap out into the driveway.
I set up the DC290 to take a picture every minute for two and a half hours. This is the view outside my window for 2.5 hours condensed into 10 seconds. I'm going to work on improving the contrast somehow, but I thought this was pretty cool. The original file is huge, even at this small size, it's almost 3MB, so my apologies for the long download.
When Maria came up here last weekend, she brought her kitten (now non-provisionally named Jar-Jar, sigh) with her. She had to be in court Monday morning, so she asked if she could leave the kitten up here for the week since she would be going straight to the courthouse Monday morning. Anyway, that's why the cat has been here all week.
Personally, I'm inclined to believe that two cats is one too many, and three is just trouble. My original cat, Karma, barely gets along with her offspring, Squeaky. Frankly, I don't blame her. Squeaky is about twice her size, whines all the time and monopolizes my lap. Plus, Karma tolerates Mandy, but isn't too keen on a dog that's seven times her size. As a result, Karma has taken to spending most of her time outdoors and I miss my little cat.
Well, Jar-Jar makes Karma crazy. I don't know if it's the fact that he's a kitten ("Oh, no! I'm done raising kittens! Get that thing away from me!"), or that he's a Manx (stub of a tail), or that there's just a third cat to have to share the food dish and litter box with. In any case, Karma has been in the house even less than before.
Jar-Jar wants to play with Squeaky all the time, and Squeaky wants nothing to do with it. Jar-Jar stalks the big ball of fluff and pounces on her from behind furniture, cabinets, shoes, anyplace that little rat can hide. That's actually quite funny. Squeaky seems to be growing accustomed to Jar-Jar, finally; though she still hisses and runs away from time to time.
The one real surprise is Mandy and Jar-Jar. This tiny kitten has no fear of a 100+ lb dog, and Mandy seems to suffer her tail being attacked with exceptional forbearance. Mandy lays on the floor next to my chair when I'm sitting here wasting my life, and Jar-Jar just purrs away curled up next to the dog's stomach. There's something kind of cool about that.
Playing around with the new iSight camera. The Sony camcorder delivered a much brighter picture, although framing it was far more difficult. It is a dim room, even in the afternoon, I have to put the lights on if I want to do any close visual work. If I hold up a white piece of paper, the color cast becomes much better, so it's probably best to wear a white shirt and be in a brightly lit space. Haven't had a chance to test the microphone yet, we'll see.
Although I'm a little disappointed with the quality of the picture, I think it's adequate.
One thing that must be said, almost all packaging is ultimately pretty much a waste and Apple's is little different in that regard. But having said that, Apple's packaging is the best I've ever seen in a consumer product. I hated throwing away my iMac and G4 boxes with their carefully designed styrofoam inserts. The iSight comes in a cube-shaped box that slides out from a sleeve and then splits into two halves. The camera is held by carefully molded styrofoam forms, and even the cable has a circular groove to hole it in the bottom of box, it's not just tossed into some void in the box. The ends of the cable are married together in plastic sleeve that also holds the cable loops in a flat, concentric pattern. When you open the box, both halves are white, and the right half has "Designed by Apple in California" in gray text. It's just so cool.
Update.
I replaced one of the light bulbs in the overhead and there is an improvement. At least in the lighting.
Those last two posts are S&R posts. They're the result of some programming in my head that sort of compels me to comment on MS whenever I read something that trips my bullshit flag. They were emotional responses. That doesn't mean I don't believe everything I wrote, it just means that there was little in the way of cognitive volition in deciding to write them.
I don't really like that because it's something that has been too much a part of my life. Now, granted, "too much" is a relative term. Probably more than 90% of our behavior, maybe as much as 98%, is of the S&R variety. We simply don't have the cognitive capacity to make conscious volitional choices every second of every day. But too often, we fail to seize opportunities to act volitionally, often to our own disadvantage.
Paying attention is what allows us to override the programming and step in with some realtime cognitive analysis and choice. That slows a lot of processes down, and it's not something you can do all the time; but I can certainly do it when I'm sitting at this keyboard, mostly transferring BTUs from my ass to the seat cushion. I can certainly do a better job paying attention to what's going on inside my own head. (There's a whole Zen problem with this approach, because it essentially divides the self into "self and other" - so it's flawed in some important ways. But it's kind of useful as a temporary fix, as long as you realize there's some more work to do.)
I realized this was what I was doing when I read something about the ongoing RSS controversy. There are some key players in that mess who are strictly in the S&R mode. It's what makes so much of what they write so predictable and largely uninteresting, apart from the fascination attendant to things like car accidents and train wrecks. But it was somewhat refreshing and useful when it made me realize that that was exactly what I was doing in the two preceding MS posts.
You know, when Steve Jobs says the new G5 Power Mac is the fastest PC on the planet, I take it with a grain of salt, and I don't get too excited about it. I don't try to bash the propellor-beanie crowd with meaningless benchmark numbers. Frankly, I wish Steve would outgrow it too, but I guess it's a part of the culture now.
But when MS says Longhorn won't ship until 2005, I take that with a grain of salt too. And not a grain of salt that slips the date to the right. They're still in the midst of a transition from 95/98/ME to XP. I'm not sure how much retail sales of XP contributes to their bottom line, but I'm pretty sure it's a non-zero quantity. I paid the full freight for a copy of XP Home Edition for my son, even though I held my nose when I did it. They're not going to do anything to impair the sales of XP by suggesting that a newer whizzier OS is just around the corner.
But the tech industry still looks like it's in a slump, word is going around that MS is boring (when has it ever not been boring?), and Apple's Panther is getting some decent notices. MS needs some good press and contracts with the Army aren't it. The hardware hegemony is looking for someone to spur another upgrade cycle too. All eyes turn to Redmond. Longhorn is going to be here sometime in 2004, either as a full release, or as a "beta" for early adopters.
Then there will be spin about how "quickly" and "nimbly" MS can respond to "competitive pressure." (With the number of employees it has, and the billions of dollars MS can throw at a problem, it's sort of astonishing that they haven't cured cancer yet.) My guess is, Longhorn is pretty much ready to go right now, but it needs some hardware that is fairly bleeding edge at the moment, and it's going to take a couple of product cycles to make it affordable to "the enterprise" and mainstream computer consumers - the folks who buy Dells and HPs, but probably not the boxes at Walmart. They don't want to put a product on the street that will run poorly on the installed base, and that requires a premium tax on hardware. These aren't Mac users. It would sit on the shelf and kill sales of XP as well.
Longhorn will be here as soon as today's flagship graphics cards are a commodity item, and 4GHz P4's are the bleeding edge. They're not waiting on the code, they're waiting on Mr. Moore.
Bill Gates wrote a book called The Road Ahead some years ago, and the cover had Bill standing over the double yellow line on some stretch of asphalt. I thought the title was delightfully, if unconsciously, apropos. Microsoft never goes anywhere someone else hasn't already paved the way. It also reinforced in my mind that he is not the deep thinker a lot of people seem to give him credit for being, else he would have found a less ironic title. Either that, or he just wasn't paying attention, I'm not sure which is more damning.
I was reminded of that again today as I read this account of a little talk Bill gave to some Homeland Security types. Sort of riffing off of Apple's 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh, Bill was telling an audience of domestic snoops and professional paranoids that they could feel good about all this technology they wanted to use to keep track of potential law-breakers, because it will actually help protect people's privacy while at the same time helping to ferret out the nefarious and the ungodly. I don't know if Bill has read 1984 recently, but that sure sounded like double-speak to me. "It's a floor wax and a dessert topping!"
In any event, that wasn't what I found most troubling. Either he has a terribly shallow understanding of the perils of oppressive government (well, except perhaps for anti-trust enforcement, but then his respect for the rule of law was manifest in his videotaped depositions), or he has another agenda. Technology is a tool, it can neither create nor destroy, as so many of our NRA brethren are so fond of reminding us. It is an enabling tool, it can make things harder or easier, but it's ultimately human beings who are responsible for outcomes. Whether or not technology enables a more oppressive form of government in the name of Homeland Security, or it enables people greater control over their personal information will be the result of the choices people make, not the mere existence of the technology. The little fairy tale Bill was sharing with an audience of current and future customers was intended to make them feel comfortable with their choices, none of which from that audience will be favorable to a world with more privacy.
Bill has enough money that it's pretty certain he will have little to fear from an oppressive government. Indeed, his corporation will likely become another branch of the government at the rate things are going. The question I have to ask myself is, is he just as stupid as he sounds? Or is he genuinely, cynically, ruthlessly and utterly without scruples? I don't know the answer, but there's little comfort in either one.
Scrolling through my aggregator, it's depressingly predictable to note the number of counter-Steve reactions to Apple's announcements at the WWDC. Known for his famous Reality Distortion Field (RDF), it's become de rigueur for a certain class of people to display their immunity to the RDF effect by gainsaying all or nearly all of Steve's presentation, thereby demonstrating their superior status within the tech field.
While Steve's presentation, at least in general format and tone, is predictable, the actual content usually makes it interesting and entertaining. The bored sophisticates' deconstruction of the Stevenote is usually far more predictable and far less entertaining. I suppose they expect us to be grateful to them for helping us not to have the wool pulled over our eyes, or something. I haven't checked, but if Steven Den Beste has found a few minutes to stop complaining about how the rest of the world is ignorant or incompetent, I'm sure he'll treat us all to an interminable screed on how Apple's new hardware and software are a great leap backward or something, and tell us that the only people who use Macs are the mentally impaired and the French. Yawn.
Then there are the Mac True Believers (TM) for whom the second coming of Steve has been a nightmare from the darkest recesses of Stephen King's imagination. Their biggest complaint about OS X was that it wasn't OS 9. Yawn. Now it seems the issue of contention has moved to the "skin" of the UI. Apple seems to be applying the "brushed metal" look to more and more of its user interface. I don't care. I don't look at the skin, as long as it's not something that is competing with the content it's intended to frame, I don't care what it looks like. But to some people it's a huge issue and they'll devote endless paragraphs whining about it, or threatening class-action lawsuits, or starting up petitions to change it back to, what?, Platinum? Boring. Both Platinum and the complaints.
This is like the hangover after every Stevenote. You just have to endure several days of well-intentioned people with far too much time on their hands, trying to save the world from Apple, or to save Apple from Steve, or save themselves from inattention. Yes, The Matrix is just a movie, and Apple is just a computer company. We're all entitled to indulge ourselves in a little willing suspension of disbelief from time to time, as our recent adventure in saving the world from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has only too clearly demonstrated. Enjoying the semi-annual Stevenote is pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things.
So to all our would-be rescuers I say, you can dismount from your charger, doff your armor and your propellor beanies, and spare yourselves the aggravation of having to disabuse the rest of us of our notions regarding Apple, Mac OS X, the G5 and Steve Jobs. The world will continue to spin on its axis, MS will continue to control >90% of the market, Intel will quickly grind out a faster processor, and you can all sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that no Apple Kool Aid has passed your lips and you're so much smarter than the rest of us poor saps. All will still be right with the world.
To echo Pascale, iChat AV rocks. I managed to hook up the Sony TVR 103 and I had more trouble figuring out how to get the camera to work than getting iChat to work. We managed to get it working with little trouble. Transfer a file? Just drop it on the video window of your recipient, just like in text chat. It does kill the audio channel of the transmitting party though. You can always use sign language!
I'm going to have to get this down so the kids can do a one-way video conference with their grandparents. Gramma and Grampa should be able to receive, though they'll have to use text to transmit. Their little iMac doesn't have a Firewire port, so iSight isn't an option for them. Unless I can figure out how to afford that $800.00 eMac for them. We'll see...so many toys, so little cash.
Text chat offers multi-line input now! That is, as your text wraps, the window expands to show everything you've typed. I haven't tried like, War and Peace or anything, but it seemed to keep growing as I kept typing text.
Wealth bondage or no, the world would be a far less interesting place without Apple and, especially, Steve Jobs.
I've opened a vein for Apple again, and I've already ordered my iSight camera. Sure, I could use my Sony camcorder, that I've already paid for, but where would be the fun in that?
The new G5 towers remind me of my old Hammarlund ham radio receiver (the receiver's enclosure was entirely made of perforated metal). Don't ask me why, I think it's the front and rear grills. I'm sorry I got rid of that receiver. Sigh. But I do think my G4 MDD is prettier than the new towers; plus, I can have two optical drives and a butt-load of hard drives. I've got three hard drives in the thing already. But the speed of the new G5s looks pretty impressive. Ah, if only I could win the Lotto or something.
Panther looks to be a pretty sweet upgrade as well. I was a little disappointed by the promised release date, "end of '03," but maybe they're looking to under-promise and over-deliver. That would be refreshing.
I've downloaded and installed iChat AV and Safari 1.0. I may hook up the Sony later and see if I can see myself or something.
The revised approach to iDisk may have some welcome implications for how I manage Time's Shadow and my NoteTaker notebooks. We'll have to see, there could be complications if my iBook isn't on the network regularly. Nevertheless, I'm persuaded I'll have little difficulty rationalizing the $$$ to update to Panther.
I recently purchased a CD player that can handle MP3s, they've come down markedly in price and Panasonic has a handful of different models out. How they differ in features is a little unclear to me, but I bought one of them. I was getting ready to put iTunes on and crank up the JBL Creature speakers (Note my careful attention to mention brand names. While one interpretation might be to suggest to you what the equipment I use may look like, and how I assess it's performance, another might be that I'm a slave to wealth bondage. As in most things in life, you get to choose which suits your fancy.). It occurred to me that it's often hard to hear the music over the sound of running water in the sink, vacuum cleaners and such - so why not use my new CD player installed in the new Case Logic (brand name) CD player belt pack I recently purchased (wealth bondage)? A capital idea! (wealth bondage)
So I created a new playlist I called Housework Jam, and dragged over all the rockers I wanted to listen to as I was sweeping, dusting, wiping, and washing and burned them onto a CD (Maxell, wealth bondage). Then I swapped out the cheap Panasonic (brand name, wealth bondage) headphones for the new Sony (brand name, wealth bondage) headphones I purchased when I was converting some cassettes to CDs for a co-worker. Strapping five hours worth of rock and roll to my hip, I proceeded rock the house while doing the housework. The one disappointment is the Panasonic (brand name, wealth bondage) CD player didn't seem to generate much volume. I was looking to liquify my grey matter (that'll get it to shut up), but I couldn't even make my ears ring. I'm not sure if that's an iTunes (brand name, wealth bondage) thing or a Panasonic (brand, bondage) thing. I'll have to stick a vanilla CD in it and see if I can cause some hearing loss. It could be the Sony (brand, bondage) headphones for all I know. But I was able to hear the music above the sound of running water, and pretty well above the sound of the vacuum cleaner.
Anyway, here's a theological question for those of you so inclined. Jesus was the Son of God, right? But he was also a human, right? So, did Jesus have the power to choose? Could he have made a deal with Pilate and avoided the whole crucifixion thing? If so, and if he did, would he have still been the Son of God? If not, does that mean he did not have the power to choose because he was the Son of God? If so, was he then still a man?
This is why it's so important to buy audio equipment with sufficient amplification so you don't have to hear your own thoughts.
Since the fate of the world rests in the capable hands of all those folks who absolutely know they know what to do, I figured I could unshoulder my share of the burden today and talk about something else for a while.
I'm looking forward to whatever gets announced at Apple's WWDC on Monday. The specs seemingly accidently posted by Apple on Thursday night look quite respectable. We Mac users have been the subject of some derision by the Wintel/AMD partisans for our comparative lack of clock-speed and bandwidth parity. Apple's new architecture goes a long way to address those criticisms, although cpu clock-speeds remain significantly below those of its hyperkinetic Intel and AMD competitors, which will likely remain the sole criterion by which Mac hardware will be judged. I use a Compaq with a P4 at work that is considerably faster than all of my Macs, but I don't come home to the Macs and feel as though I'm working on a slower machine. I do feel as though I'm working on a better OS at home though.
I saw a rumor that there might be a further drop in the price of the 12" Powerbook G4. While I'm inclined to doubt a major price drop so soon after a significant one at the beginning of this month, such an event would put the 12" G4 Powerbook well within my difficult-to-not-rationalize-a-purchase range. While I don't do anything terribly important with my Jul '01 original issue Icebook, with its 500MHz processor running on a 66Mhz bus, imagine how much faster I could do nothing terribly important with an 867Mhz G4 running on a 133MHz bus. Yes, you see how it would be difficult to resist such a purchase. We'll see what happens Monday. I may have to inoculate myself by buying some more RAM for the Icebook, and a new battery.
What I'm really interested in, is an LCD display for the G4. If Apple lowered the price a bit on the 17" LCD display, it'd be a tempting purchase. I could buy a non-Apple display for a much lower price, but if I want to run two displays, then I'd have to buy an ADC-DVI adapter and they run north of $100.00, which puts most most LCDs within striking range of Apple's price anyway. I don't really have the desktop real estate to run two displays, but I could make it work. What's nice about Apple's display are the two USB ports. I'd like to run a wireless keyboard for aesthetic reasons (well, really just because it would be cool), but then I'd lose the USB port that I connect my PowerMate to, and then I wouldn't be able to enjoy it's throbbing blue LED. (The PowerMate is a lot like the Icebook, I don't really do very much with it, it's just cool to have.) Yes, I could plug the PowerMate into my USB hub, but I've got that arranged in a futile effort to reduce cable clutter, so it's not an attractive alternative.
Speaking of blue LEDs, I want to try to install a blue LED in my Kensington TurboBall. The trackball itself is a dark, translucent blue, so maybe white would work just as well, but I think it would be cool to have a trackball that glows. That's the other USB connection I'd lose with a wireless keyboard. So really, a wireless keyboard would only lose one cable for me, but one less cable is one less cable, tautologically speaking.
Speaking of blue, Chris dyed his hair kind of a dark blue-green last night. It's still in a mohawk. He asked his mother if he could have his ears pierced. I said he could wear his hair any damn way he pleases, but he wasn't to get anything pierced before he was 18. So far, that limitation is being observed. I think the recent interest in blue hair is partly a response to the ear thing. Fine with me. You've got to pick your battles.
Took my first brown belt mid-term last night. I still have a long way to go. I passed, but I bollixed my form again. I'd been practicing at home, which is quite challenging when Mandy, the 100+ lb mutt, thinks I'm really inviting her to play; but I'd managed to memorize all the moves. When you're performing your form, it's supposed to be like a meditation. Your inner critic is supposed to be quiet, and there isn't supposed to be a lot of nervous chatter going on in your head. This I have not yet achieved.
Things went remarkably well for the first two thirds of the form. I was performing with two other students, and my usual problem is involuntarily paying attention one of them and losing my concentration and focus, That didn't seem to be happening last night, and my inner critic was mostly just marveling that I hadn't screwed anything up yet. (I'd really like to kick his ass one day.) Well, at least until I turned around for my next move and realized I'd placed myself right in line with the single column in the whole room. The inner critic pipes up, "You idiot! You're right in front of the pole!" just as I'm supposed to do a jump outer crescent kick. See, this is why I didn't test out as Neo in that thing the other day. If I was Neo, or that bald kid, it'd be like, "There is no column," and everything would have been cool. Instead, I did this little stutter-step, tried to recover gracefully and mostly failed. Which only encouraged more color commentary from the inner critic. I finished the form, and I did pass, so I guess I shouldn't be too upset.
For the record, I kicked the column's ass.
The weather here has been pretty marginal the last week or so. Rain nearly every day, with occasional glimpses of blue sky and sunshine. As a result, the jungle is surging ahead and putting back many of my efforts to hold it at bay. Home ownership is not all it's cracked up to be.
In a similar vein, I have a week's worth of housework to catch up on. Somehow, when it's just Chris and me, I'm much less motivated to keep house. But Caitie and Maria are on their way back up here today, so I guess I'd better get hot. So with that, I'm out of here.
I'm trying to understand what the Happy Tutor is so exercised about at Wealth Bondage, and it's been useful for me because it's prompted me to think a little bit about some things that I believe kind of intuitively, but haven't been able to articulate clearly.
I was listening to NPR the other day, and an author was describing how the SUV was born out of the auto companies trying to find a way to make the station wagon not hurt their corporate average fuel economy mandates set by Congress. They didn't know the vehicles would be so wildly popular, it was a shot in the dark in response to something Congress did to try to fix something. The Law of Unintended Consequences is merely the recognition that irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe (for those who may need a refresher, the other four are the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electro-magnetic force, and gravity).
We humans are burdened with some difficult conceits. We think we know what we're doing. We think the progress we've enjoyed in civilization to date has been the result of good people doing the right thing. I don't think it's anything of the kind. I think to the extent we've enjoyed any progress in civilization, it has been in spite of people trying to "do the right thing."
I think civilization, which I'll define as fairly liberal, open societies, that value human rights and are innovative, is an "emergent" property of the way human beings associate with one another in a given set of circumstances. I think civilization is almost exclusively due to ordinary human behavior in the presence of readily available and cheap energy sources, and good communications. Roman roads were the broadband of antiquity. Steam power and the telegraph bound a continent together. The internal combustion engine and later the gas turbine engine, and radio bound the world together. Digital communications have only bound us more tightly together.
Except we carry with us our conceits.
I think civilization is a system. I think it will perform in a fairly predictable way in the presence of given inputs. When that system is perturbed, the outcome isn't always predictable, but there's a good chance the Law of Unintended Consequences will bite us in the ass.
Sometimes the system breaks down. The normal checks and balances that evolve along with civilization may be overtaken by technological innovation. WW I was due, in no small measure, to Germany's reliance on a timetable and a mechanized view of war that outpaced the sedate structures of continental diplomacy. Shit happens.
What happened next was pure human folly. The Treaty of Versailles was intended to punish Germany in the name of "justice" for the victims of WW I. Right-thinking people who were legitimately grieved decided to work the levers of civilization in pursuit of "justice" and sure enough, it bit them in the ass in the form of WW II.
In the United States, we had a pretty long run of right-minded people using government to address social injustice. The United States is a wealthy country, and I think wealth has a lot to do with how much perturbation a civilization-system can endure.
I'm going to digress for a moment, because I'm not a terribly well-organized writer and this is my weblog so I can digress if I want to.
Back when the Navy was interested in Total Quality Management, we used to get a lot of training on it, and I became quite familiar with Dr. Deming. Dr. Deming was a pretty smart guy, and he wasn't shy about making someone look like a fool to get past their conceits. There was this test he used to do to illustrate something about the behavior of systems.
He would gather a group of trainees and assign them the task of dropping a marble through a funnel and hitting a mark on the floor. The first guy would get up and he'd drop a marble and it'd hit the floor, no surprise there I hope, and invariably, it missed the target. So our earnest student, wanting to a do a good job and impress his teacher, would carefully note the direction and distance by which the marble missed the target. He would then try to hold the funnel an equal distance in the opposite direction from the first impact. Invariably, he'd miss again. But, we never learn, he would try again, using the same approach. Deming would be berating him the whole time. "What's wrong with you? Can't you do a simple task? C'mon, hit the target!" After making the poor guy suffer long enough, he'd tell him he was fired and he'd make the next poor sap try the same thing, to the same effect.
The point was, every time the trainee tried to "correct" the problem, he merely introduced greater variability into the system. Then he would show them that the correct variable to alter was the height of the funnel.
Systems perform within control limits. In the presence of given inputs, outputs vary within a fairly fixed limit. When they go out of limits, something has changed in the system. It's all very well understood in manufacturing.
Well, civilization is a system. Things gradually get better by themselves as long as you've got abundant energy and cheap and fast communications. But we're smarter than that, we think things get better because we make them that way. So we've had a fairly lengthy period in the latter half of the 20th century where right-minded folks in the United States were working the levers of a system they didn't understand to address issues of social injustice, environmental quality, the spread of communism, things like that.
Well, a system that's in equilibrium often has mechanisms in place to maintain that equilibrium. When one variable gets too far out of limits, some aspect of the system will act to bring that variable back into limits. I think to some extent, we can view the recent rise of conservatism and libertarianism as that response in our civilization. This is probably not a blinding glimpse of the obvious or anything, but I'm sure it's not something we think about every day either. It sure hasn't made it into the metaphors we use in the rhetoric of politics, where we're much more comfortable using war as a metaphor, zero-sum thinking.
Then along comes 9/11 and America, the dominant civilization on the planet, has it's civilization system perturbed in a major way. Lots of things are responding outside of normal control limits. The damping functions are overwhelmed, and we're witnessing societal change we're not comfortable with.
Instead of realizing the system has been perturbed in a fairly unprecedented way, we've decided that "the left" has lost its voice or something, that it's no longer effective. So now, right-minded people on the left end of the political spectrum, are trying to seize the levers of civilization from the right-minded people at the right end of the political spectrum, who themselves working the levers of civilization with no clue what they're doing and scaring a lot of folks half to death.
So what can we look forward to in this situation? Well, systems can exhibit chaotic behavior in the presence of certain inputs, and meaningful predictions become impossible. Can we define the phase-space of the civilization system? Well, yeah, it pretty much runs the gamut from America at its best to Stalin's Russia, or Hitler's Germany. Where will we wind up? I don't know, but I can't be so sure that we wouldn't wind up in our worst nightmare.
Let's say the lefties begin to look like they're getting their act together and may seriously challenge the right for control of the levers, what will the right do? They're going to work harder to do the things they've been doing that have worked so well for them. We're both getting terribly good at manipulating people's fears. This could turn into a no-holds-barred, ideological trench-war with a scorched-meme strategy and unconditional surrender being the only goal in sight.
I say do nothing. Let's let the system slowly come back into normal control limits. To quote the estimable Perfect Tommy of Team Banzai, "Just be cool, she'll hold."
What I'd like to see right now, is for social scientists (where the hell are they when you need them?) to get together with statistical process control experts and explore the notion of civilization as a system, and see if we can begin to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how human beings develop a civilization, rather than believing in myths about founding fathers and what have you. I'm not saying humans and their personalities don't have an effect on the progress or development of civilization, I'm just saying that that effect takes place in the context of a complex system that is larger than most leader's individual abilities.
What I'm afraid of is that we'll actually get smart mobs and they'll drive the people in power to work harder to consolidate their hold on it, while also trying to work the levers of civilization even faster to invoke the changes they feel are just (the House of Representatives' vote on the inheritance tax comes immediately to mind). I'd say we'd be better served if we ratcheted down the rhetoric even though we differ with them. And I think we should work really hard to try to have faith and not listen to our fears.
Check out this entry at meta-douglasp: If you really ponder this, you may reach the same conclusion that I have. The sphere of our control is so tiny that we really never choose much of anything. In fact, it is so small that maybe we should just say that we may influence, but never really "choose" in the classic Western sense of free will. But the really important question is still unasked, what is the "I" that influences? If you think about this much, maybe the word influence is perhaps still to strong.
Lots of stuff there, but I'll just offer this. Our power to choose is indeed very small. It's the tiny space between stimulus and response (also very much the subject of this fascinating little commentary on the social life of baboonsvia Pascale), that we may inhabit if we try. It's very small, but it's probably enough.
In my experience, the universe never does more than it has to, it always does just enough.
Gadamer, conversely, was an inveterate traditionalist. He believed that one of the great failings of the modern age was that it had lost touch with the classical sources of wisdom and authority. Only by reestablishing contact with the traditional repositories of knowledgeÑthe "great texts" of Western literature and philosophyÑcould humanity save itself from a fate of permanent disorientation and "soullessness." So it is of little wonder that his doctrines have enjoyed such an enthusiastic reception among neoconservatives as well as educators who are concerned that the Western canon is losing its sanctity.
Yet there seems to be something genuinely naive about postmodernist and pragmatist attempts to invoke Gadamer as an intellectual ally. Whereas postmodernists (if there are any remaining) like to think of themselves as leftists or progressives, there can be no doubting the conservative thrust of Gadamer's doctrines, predicated as they are on an unabashed reverence for tradition. Thus, at one point in his scholarly career, the young Heidegger protégé prided himself on the fact that he only read books that were at least two thousand years old.
During the 1920s, the lack of ethical grounding was a complaint commonly leveled against Heidegger's existentialism. He sought to remedy this deficiency through the concept of "decisiveness" or "resolve." According to this view, the specific content of one's life choices didn't matter so much; what was important was that one choose emphatically or decisively. But this approach didn't seem to make much of a difference, since the question of the content or direction of "resolve" remained unspecified. Heidegger's students regularly mocked him by claiming, "I am 'resolved,' but to what end I know not."
(Whoa. This Heidegger guy sounds pretty cool. The only power there is, is the power to choose.)
It is in this respect that hermeneutics, as personified by Gadamer, has proved to be a moral and political failure. The flip side of hermeneutics' trademark "farewell to principle" is its own historically documented ethical complacency during the Hitler years. By attempting to silence Gadamer's criticsÑGrondin refers to them as "witch-hunters" and "inquisitors"Ñthe biographer ironically violates one of hermeneutics' cardinal precepts: Proceed as if your adversary may be right.
It's a fascinating book review that touches on so many themes that are making the rounds right now. I'm going have to check these guys out.
Hah! That didn't work. Apparently those URLs expire pretty quickly. The first one I tried seemed to work, but after I posted the others and tested, they were all dead.
Just do a job search at Apple and see who they're looking for. There's another handheld device coming, and I think it will have some video connection.
I guess I'll leave the Apple product prognostication to the pros.
Today will be my first day back to Taekwondo in two weeks. I have a test on Friday. Well, that's the way it goes sometimes. At my age, one doesn't take two weeks off and not pay for it. The good news is the crud is mostly gone. A little bit of residual cough and that's about it. The bad news is, it's going to hurt. I'm not too concerned, apart from the fact that the pain sometimes interferes a bit with the form. I pretty much hurt all the time taking TKD, but mostly it's a good hurt. I associate the discomfort with doing something with my body, rather than something stupid like an illness. But right now I'm pretty pain-free and I must say, it does feel quite comfortable.
Of course, the other thing I'm trying not to pay attention to is how much I'm going to suck at my form.
Some day soon I'm going to have to sit down and assess my ADD lifestyle. I can't do all the things I'm interested in doing well, and I do want to have at least one thing I do well. That means some other things have got to go. This may be one of them, I don't know. I know I don't do this well either. And I think I pour too many life-seconds through the glass of the CRT with too little return. Related to all this is what I do for money. That gets a lot of life-seconds poured into it as well, and so far the only return is a paycheck - which is pretty essential, I will say. There are a lot of things I don't have to worry about because I have a paycheck, so there's a question of perspective to be considered as well.
In any event, I spent too many seconds trying to figure out what I was going to write about here, when I could have actually been doing something. It's probably time I stopped.
What's the right answer? I don't know, I think that's for each of us to decide.
I don't like community. I don't trust community. I don't know how to relate to a community. I know a community has a pretty good idea of how to relate to me. I know what a community wants from me. I know a community is yet another way we divide ourselves from one another. I think I know how to relate to an individual human being, and I think if a community provides a context for that relationship, I can work with that; but I'm not working on behalf of the community. You would think that makes me not a team player, and you might be right about that. I understand community. If you want to see my less enlightened side, bad mouth some members of my community. I'm not immune to being human. I'm not interested in getting others to join my posse.
Yeah, I understand that a group can accomplish more than an individual. If that goal is worth accomplishing, and I doubt that many of them are, I can act as a member of a group. But I understand groups, and the goal is seldom the central focus, the central focus is the group. It's what we do, it's who we are. It's made us successful as a species and miserable failures as individuals.
You want to save the world? Why? Do you really think the world needs saving? Do you understand that for every person you want to save, there's someone who thinks they need to save you? What is it you really want? You can't answer that question. "Know thyself," Thales said. You're not paying attention. Does life suck? Is life unfair? Are things going from bad to worse? Yes, to all of the above. Can you fix it? No. But, of course, you think if you can get a group, a community, to work on it, you can fix it. Your community can beat up that other community that's causing the problem, and then life will be fair, life will not suck, things will be getting better, not worse. Right. Meanwhile, what's happening to you? Whose life are your responsible for anyway? Here's a tip: It's not mine.
Does that mean apathy is the order of the day? Does that mean we don't help one another? Do your own thinking, I'm not here to hand you the answers. Stupid questions are just another form of denial. Denial is the first stage of grief. You grieve because you must die to yourself to wake up. Everybody is always asking what they would be willing to die for, very few ever get the right answer. Dying is easy, living is hard. You live to die, you must die to live. Pay attention.
Don't worry about it. I'm just some idiot ranting and talking to himself. Just keep going to your rallies and meetings and vigils. You'll change the world. It was good enough for grandma. Rail against whatever -ism you view as a problem. -Isms need all the opposition they can get. It's hardly an -ism worth knowing if there isn't some community who thinks it's the bane of existence. Your community needs you. Carry on.
Meanwhile, ignore that nagging little voice in the back of your mind that whispers to you in the wee hours of the night when everything is quiet. That's just selfishness. Narcissism. Next thing you know, you'll be gazing at your navel or something. Where would we be then? Where would the movement be? Can't have any of these navel-gazers! Where's your cell phone? Where's your weblog? Join the mob! The smart mob! Bask in the warm embrace of mutual validation as you note the flaws and failures of those other groups. You're a good guy, just ask anyone! You belong to all the right groups, you link to all the right weblogs, you display an appropriate level of angst toward all the best issues.
But most of all, pay no attention to me. This is not "reverse psychology," or me being clever. I'm not very clever, I'm afraid. Nope, pay no attention to me and I will be quite pleased. I'm an authority on nothing. Pay attention to authorities. The trick is choosing them. Not all authorities are created equal.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. It also explains why globalism is so important to the United States and the developed world. When the whole world is developed, we're going to have to find aliens in space to sell our products to. Invest in those starship industries now.
I went to see Reloaded again last night. The biggest thing I took away is that I need to go see it again, but here are some things I need to think about some more:
I'm not sure how time is an issue, and perhaps it's not an issue.
The Architect said that if Neo didn't re-enter the source, then the Matrix would crash, meaning the death of all the humans currently in the Matrix, presumably millions or billions of lives. I'm not sure how we're supposed to take that, if it's true, or "just another level of control." And it isn't clear to me at this point, how much time we have before the Matrix crashes.
If the program crashes, then presumably everyone dies and there's no more juice for the machines. (Let's ignore for the time being that this has always been the most difficult contrivance to overlook in the whole story.) Are the squiddies autonomously directed, or do they require guidance and direction from the main AI? It's hard to assess how much jeopardy Zion is in, without knowing how those 250k squiddies are managed.
I'm reconsidering the six anomalies reference vis a vis the Buddha. Still probably nothing, but they picked six for a reason.
Somebody help me out with the symbolic meaning of the crows the Oracle is feeding? Death?
Neo has already made his choice, now he needs to understand it? I still need to think about that. I really need to listen to that whole scene with the Oracle again. I thought the Oracle's comment that she loved sweets was kind of sad, in a kind of unintentional connection with the real world. The Oracle is Neo's therapist. She's a good one.
It's probably just me, but I think the central theme of the trilogy is going to be faith and the power to choose. But then, that's what's been eating at me for almost four years now, so I probably see it in places where it doesn't really exist. On another level, I suppose it may turn out not to have been an unintentional theme, and perhaps it's so broad, I could find it everywhere. Anyway, still need think about it some more.
Here are some faith issues I'm going to be thinking about: Morpheus didn't have faith, Morpheus had faith in an idea, faith in an external entity that was going to save him and everyone else, in this case it was the Prophecy/Neo. Morpheus learns the hard way, as we all do, that faith in externalities will let you down eventually. It'll be interesting to see where we go with Morpheus' faith. I expect in the short term, it'll turn to another externality, Neo. (Update: I hate when I notice my own contradictions. I don't think Neo is an externality. So let's just say it's going to be interesting to see what happens to Morpheus.)
Neo is struggling with faith issues. The scene with the Oracle is a faith issue, along with doubt and uncertainty. The Oracle tries to answer those the only way she can, offering the only answers that can serve Neo, which are the answers he must find for himself.
Neo loves Trinity. Love is faith (in action). I don't think another human being is an externality, like a Prophecy, or a system. A Carrie-Anne Moss interview in Esquire indicates the movie is ultimately a love story. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. I [heart] Carrie-Anne Moss. Sigh.
Agent Smith has no faith, but strangely, he does seem to have fear. He's one unhappy guy. Neo took away his purpose, now he's adrift in two worlds, without purpose. Except he creates his own (he chooses), to pursue and destroy Neo and, presumably, Zion and all the humans he regards as a virus.
French guy focuses a lot on power and "why." Without "why" you have no power. I want to think about that some more too. Without why, you can have faith.
All of which sort of makes the question of what faith is an important one. That's an exercise that is universally left to the reader, though there is no shortage of people who will try to answer it for you - if they have your "why," then perhaps they have your power. Your call. I make all this shit up.
Summing up, the second time around it's a better movie than it was at first viewing, and it wasn't bad then. It's not a perfect movie, by any means, but it's a damn good one for a middle piece. Lots of good stuff to think about.
Piss on all the cultural sophisticates who exhibit their social superiority by expressing their disdain in cheap and casual criticism. Kudos to the Wachowski brothers for making a myth for the 21st century.
There's a kind of a fight going on, or at least being picked, about postmodernism at Wealth Bondage and Sandhill Trek. I used to not know anything about postmodernism, but I'm getting an inkling based on some of the charges against it from the Happy Tutor and Frank Paynter. AKMA also offers a short, heavily caveated, description of it as, "a refusal to take anything for granted Ñ that's all."
What I get from the Tutor and Frank is that postmodernism undermines the bedrock principles of truth and justice and their universality. I'm not sure where deconstruction fits in, but it seems to be a partner in crime.
This seems kind of timely to me, because the complaints about postmodernism from the Tutor and Frank make it sound just like Nagarjuna's emptiness, and Nagarjuna would definitely agree with AKMA that we refuse to take anything for granted, even our refusal to take things for granted.
Look, Nagarjuna, Godel, postmodernism, they all seem to point out the limits of pure reason, or "Reason," with a capital. We love Reason because, when it's done right, it's reliable. It gives us the Truth. But when it's done right, we get Nagarjuna and Godel and postmodernism, and we find there are some things that may be true, but you can't get to them by Reason alone, and then we're unhappy. We're unhappy because we're afraid. Reason is solid and sturdy and you can use it to bludgeon your opponents with it, which is often what one wants to do when one is afraid. Without Reason, what is left? Well, faith for one thing, but that's little comfort because it's hard to bludgeon your opponents with faith.
We're looking for some undisputed ground to stand on, from which we can offer judgments and distinctions and decide right and wrong and not have it be a matter of merely personal prejudice. The trouble is, Reason will lead you to the truth, and the truth is there is no such place, and I would tell you that it's that way for a reason. But first you would interrupt to object that I just said there was no truth, so it's not true to say there is no such place and we get to the lovely logical contradiction that lovers of reason of the absolutist persuasion love to bludgeon their relativist opponents with, which is about when the shooting starts.
The universe is simply self-referential. You can't escape it to place yourself at some point where you can make "true" statements about this and that. But that's not to say that all information is equal. Some ideas are more reliable than others, some ideas have more utility than others. Most of what we call the truth is really just reliable and useful information.
I think the point of all this is to focus one's attention on one's personal responsibility, on the central role of the power to choose. Reason can't get you all the way to where you need to be, at some point you have to take a leap of faith. You have to choose, and you can't place the responsibility for your choice on an abstract system of symbolic logic. A or B? Yes or no? Ultimately, it's just a choice, and it's yours and you're the only one who is going to make it and you can't escape it or the responsibility for it.
NoteTaker has been updated to version 1.5 and it sports a new navigation feature, essentially another pane that displays the pages of the notebook in an outline format. Haven't played much with it yet, but I didn't notice any mention of cloning yet as an outlining feature.
The additional nav pane sort of interferes with the notebook metaphor, but I don't really mind. I was thinking, at this point, I'd almost like to see the spiral binding image disappear. Thinking about it some more, I guess I kind of like it. It's a neat program, and I think it's wise they're not constraining themselves by being too rigorously faithful to the metaphor.
It also reminds me that we should be seeing the next major update to Tinderbox shortly. I'll probably have to pony up the $70.00 renewal for that one though. I'll probably do so.
Permit me, for a moment, to whine powerlessly about how much it SUCKS to have a cold. I'm still feeling the remnants of the local version of SARS. It's no ordinary cold, it's more like the flu, comes on fast, puts you down hard, and takes its sweet damn time leaving. Although I do appreciate how much better I feel, chiefly that everything doesn't ache and I have probably 85% of my energy level back, I am sick of my ears being stuffed up and everything sounding funny. The cough's not bad, but it makes everyone think you're dying; and the runny nose is probably good for the tissue industry. But this ear thing is making me crazy!
Well, crazier than usual anyway.
Okay, I'm done now. Feel free to validate me in my comments. Or not.
The last two mornings, the things I wanted to write about were things I didn't think I could express in a coherent fashion, so I just decided to take pictures instead. I went out with the A70 and shot about 25 pics each morning and then dumped them to the computer.
I used to connect to iPhoto and then scroll through the pictures and discard the ones I didn't think were worth keeping, but it takes longer to launch iPhoto with its huge library, than it does to launch Image Capture, and Image Capture seems quicker at actually moving the pictures off the card.
So now I've used the prefs in Image Capture to disable launching iPhoto when either the camera or the card reader are connected, setting it to launch itself instead. That usually translates to just leaving IC running all the time, which is not feasible with iPhoto given its memory demands.
After the pictures are on the hard drive, I simply select the whole batch and open them in Preview to see which one I might want to post. The thumbnail view in Preview, along with the rotate and zoom commands, are what make it so useful. The one thing I wish I could do from Preview is delete the photos I don't want. I may try to set that up with an Applescript, but I haven't tried yet.
Once I find a picture I think I like, instead of opening it in an editor to crop and scale it or something, I just use the zoom function in Preview and Snapz Pro X to copy a selection of the photo to the clipboard, then paste it into Tinderbox. I could use OS X's built-in screen capture command to do the same thing, but I'm trying to familiarize myself with what Snapz Pro can do. I could use ImageWell if I wanted to add an annotation or crop it to an oval or something.
Later on I can import the photos into iPhoto for archival management, though I'm convinced I'm going to have to break up the library to make it more manageable.
I'm pretty pleased at how easy it is to just go outside in my front yard, snap 25 pictures or so, and then have one up on the web a few minutes later. Makes owning a camera fun.
This is kind of cool. A few years ago, I was trying to find ways to get clearer frame grabs from my Formac ProTV card. Mainly, I was trying to capture images of aircraft from old episodes of the Discovery Channel's Wings. My cable signal has never been terribly good, and going to VHS hardly improved it. Putting that crappy signal into the Formac card just degraded it further. The images I got were barely recognizable.
I found this QuickTime export component call FrameBlender that can sum consecutive images, and as long as the image is stationary, the noise tends to cancel itself out. You can read about how it works here at the site. So what I did was used QT Pro to capture a movie of the image as it was paused on the VCR. That did a lot to clean up the noise from the VCR to the computer. If I made several frames in QT with the movie paused, then advanced the video tape a frame, the image often barely moved, I'd add a few more frames to the QT movie, advance a frame and repeat. I exported the finished movie through FrameBlender and got an image that was often far better than what I had on the videotape. Fast forward to today.
Well, I bought a license for QT Pro to put together that thunderstorm clip, and I got to thinking about using FrameBlender with either the movie mode of my Canon A70, or in conjunction with some time-lapse shots from the DC 290, or with some video with the Sony camcorder. The downside to using it with the Canon is the movie mode is only 640x480, so you lose a lot of pixels (the upside is, in 30 seconds, you'll have a few hundred frames). On the other hand, I could just snap the shutter myself, getting the full resolution of the CCD, but that would jiggle the camera between each frame, even when it's on the tripod. It doesn't have a program function that will automatically take pictures at a given interval. The DC 290 does, but it's kind of slow, so the number of frames you can get isn't as great in the same amount of time. What I may have to do is use the iBook to control the A70, so it'll remain stationary, grab a bunch of longish exposures and then bring them into QT. I'm thinking of trying to shoot the night sky and see what I can come up with in the way of star fields using FrameBlender. It's little more than idle technical curiosity, really, but I think it'd be fun.
Anyway, I wasn't sure if the plugin still worked under OS X and QT 6, so I googled "FrameBlender" and hit the site on the first match. The web page mentions a component that worked with the Mac OS X Public Beta and QT 5, and that the page hadn't been updated since '01. Didn't look too promising. Nothing to lose, I e-mailed the developer, Dave Rowe, and he got right back to me. He tells me the component is more current than the page suggests and has been verified to work with 10.2.5 and QT 6, so I should be in luck.
Now I've just got to get rid of this cough, get a little more of my energy back, and get a clear night and I'll be in business.
As I was looking at the pictures I took of the clouds yesterday evening, I was disappointed at the mottled appearance of the blue in the sky. Looking through the manual, I noticed the camera was configured for "Fine" in the compression settings. I selected "Super Fine," and we'll see if that makes any difference later on when the blue sky comes back.
Maria came up for the weekend and brought a new friend with her.
Meet Jonathan (name provisional):
Jonathan is a Manx, and he has a very pleasant personality. One of Maria's clients hooked them up. Unfortunately, Karma and Squeaky wanted nothing to do with him. Mandy, on the other hand, was quite taken with the little squirt, and Jonathan wasn't the least bit put off by Mandy's size.
Fortunately for the other two domestic felines here, Jonathan will be residing with Maria in Melbourne.
I've been feeling a little under the weather the last few days, but I seem to be feeling better now. It was kind of cloudy and rainy all weekend, but I happened to spot this yesterday evening as I was beginning to feel a bit better.
One of the issues I've been trying to resolve for myself has been the contradictions between three notions that have great resonance for me. The first is the power of choice in defining the self, "You are who you choose to be." That single phrase at the end of a kid's movie got me started down a different path almost four years ago. But there is also the notion of the authentic self, that is, the self that is not not the product of habituated thinking and conditioned responses. If you are who you choose to be, and you're free to choose, what is the nature of that authenticity? Finally, there's been the Buddhist notion of no-self, which also seems compelling and is one of the features Nagarjuna explores. But if there is no self, then what is it that chooses to be, and what is authentic?
This is just, I think, the beginning of an insight; or it may be nothing at all, a blind alley. I still haven't finished Nagarjuna, but this came to me in the past couple of days and so I'm going to keep it in mind when I return to Nagarjuna.
Nagarjuna resonates, I think, with Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Logic is, like everything else, ultimately empty. There is no external frame of reference from which one may view the universe and "prove" things which, nevertheless, may be true. It seems as though the nature of the universe is that it is self-referential, and ultimately, we must take some things on faith.
It also seems as though the conscious self is an emergent phenomenon of the complex interactions of various parts of the brain. There is no place in the brain where we can locate the "self." Characteristics of people's personalities are altered by injuries or modifications made to various regions of the brain, so inasmuch as personality may be said to be a part of the "self," it has been shown to be contingent on all the various parts of the brain operating in their customary fashion.
Amazingly, I find myself beginning to feel greater sympathy for Daniel Dennett, who, I think, essentially argues that the "self" is an illusion created by the brain. I think many Buddhist thinkers understood this based on intuitive reasoning, and Nagarjuna's more rigorous analysis.
The sense I've gotten thus far in Nagarjuna is that while everything is essentially empty, there is a conventional reality that can be said to exist in a conventional sense. That is to say, while Dennett may be right, that the conscious self is an emergent phenomenon (contingent) of the complex interactions of various functions of the brain, we nevertheless are left with the compelling sense that there is a "self," and we cannot ignore it just because it isn't the singular entity we wished to believe it was.
This "conventional" notion of the self, a self that is contingent on many things, opens the door to being able to choose who that self is, or will be; and it also casts the notion of an authentic self in a different light. If an authentic self is one which is not the product of habituated thinking and conditioning, then that doesn't exclude the possibility that an authentic self is the one which is the product of choice, rather than the other things.
The power to choose relies on a number of features of the emergent self, the ability to maintain a system of beliefs (or a belief system), the capacity to focus attention an external events, and a critical faculty that can frame a relationship between external events and the self, and finally, the ability to imagine a range of possible responses to external events and assess potential outcomes. Absent any of these features, one does not have the power to choose, one is merely left with conditioning and stimulus-response mechanisms. Most of our daily activity takes place in the realm of conditioned responses, we do things automatically. If we had to think about, and make a decision on every action we took in a day, we'd hardly make it out of the bedroom before the work day ended.
The power to choose, as it relates to the notion that you are who you choose to be, requires the same features with a somewhat different orientation. One must be able to focus attention on one's interior state, and one must be able to identify and assess the beliefs that inform one's relationship with external events. Finally, one must be able to imagine how one's relationship with external events might be different, if one employs different beliefs regarding the nature of the event and of the self. That is to say, one must ask the question, "What am I believing about myself?" as one considers one's relationship with an external event.
Belief systems are important and powerful, we rely on them to make our way in the world, and they shape every facet of our relationship with it. We are very uncomfortable examining those beliefs. There are beliefs in place that serve to impede that process. One might believe that something is just one's "nature." "That's just the way I am, and I can't change that." Well, with a belief like that, of course not. But I believe that belief is false, and I believe we have many such false beliefs that don't serve our emergent selves, but rather the social groupings we are a part of. Yet they make up a significant portion of our self-image, something we usually cherish even as flawed as it may be.
False beliefs are beliefs that are unreliable, or that have no, or negative utility. The extent to which we find ourselves suffering in life is, in large measure, a function of what false beliefs we cling to. Cognitive therapy, Zen Buddhism, and Stoicism each focus on our beliefs about ourselves in their efforts to alleviate suffering. Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we would like them to be. It is also often nature's way of pointing out to us that we are believing something false about ourselves or the world, the conventional reality we inhabit. When we suffer, that should be a cue to examine what's going on inside of ourselves, what are we believing about ourselves. It's not always a false belief, sometimes we're genuinely suffering because of an adverse state of affairs, but there is usually some action we can take to mitigate that suffering. Sometimes there is not. But as Viktor Frankl pointed out in Man's Search for Meaning, one always has the power, and the freedom, to choose one's attitude; which is, in a way, an affirmation that we are who we choose to be. Or we can be.
Anyway, it's late and I'm sick, so I'm hitting the rack. I'll probably return to this at some point in the not too distant future. But I want to close with something Mira posted yesterday at Surprise. It's not hard to change someone else, it's impossible. But you can show them how they can begin to change themselves, if they make the choice to do so. I've had plenty of people help me. While I know I can't change anyone, I sometimes choose to point out to people some ways in which they might think differently about a situation, which may be more advantageous to them, and in their relationships with those they must share this existence with. Such offers are often not welcome, and I understand that. I have the power to choose too, once I've made my choice, the rest isn't up to me, and I'm getting better at choosing not to cling to results.
In a fortuitous bit of birthday-luck, my new camera arrived yesterday. It's even smaller than the pictures suggest, and feels smaller in your hands than it looks to your eyes. I think I'm going to have to get used to that, because I feel like I'm all over it when I hold it. It's very light; without the batteries, it feels insubstantial. Others have commented that the door to the compact flash card feels flimsy, and I agree with that. I think I may be more inclined to connect the camera directly to the computer, instead of going through the CF reader as has been my habit with the DC 290, mostly to save battery charge. Others have said that the plastic switch that controls the zoom also feels flimsy, but I'm not in as much agreement with that. I do need to get a new case, much, much smaller.
There is noise in the LCD when focusing, but I seldom used the LCD to compose my shots with the DC 290 because it was so dim and it sucked the life out of the batteries. I'm not sure yet how I'll normally compose the shots on this camera. I've been using the LCD, just because it's different, but it makes it feel even stranger holding the camera.
The picture quality looks good so far. I've only taken about 30 shots, but I haven't seen any of the purple fringing some have noted. Of course, it got cloudy right when I took the camera outside, so less light may have helped. As I get better acquainted with it, I'll try shooting the same subject with each camera and see how much difference I can detect in the pictures.
One of the things I miss about the DC 290 is a display that doesn't rely on the color LCD to show you the number of shots remaining, the flash mode, battery life and resolution/compression settings. I suppose that'll just be a matter of getting used to the new one.
I did a quick test of the movie mode, and it worked as advertised. Kind of neat. The movies open right up in Quicktime Player. I haven't
