tags: personal journal

A ferocious spider lives in the brain. His name is Willis! Note (Fig. 10) that he has a nose, angry eyebrows, two suckers, eyes that look outward, a crew cut, antennae, a fuzzy beard, 8 legs, a belly that, according to your point of view, is either thin (basilar artery) or fat (the pons, which lies from one end of the basilar artery to the other), two feelers on his rear legs, and male genitalia.

From Clinical Neuroanatomy made ridiculously simple, by Stephen Goldberg, M.D.

Tesco's slogan is "Every little helps".

Does this make sense? Every little what helps? "Gnome", perhaps? I hope it's "gnome". I hope Tesco has an army of little helpful gnomes.

I went to a piano recital last night. I loved it, but classical music recitals on Friday night are not as popular with today's youth as you might expect, so I would guess the average age of the audience in Wigmore Hall to be about 60. Most of the men were going bald, and this gave great prominence to their ears. I found myself thinking about ears as I looked around me -- big, fleshy ears; ears pinned back (by well-meaning 1950s GPs); misshapen, asymmetrical ears; ears on one unfortunate man which looked like they were attached the wrong way around. Because, after all, the recital was in honour of ears. I found it amazing that this whole assembly, the seats, the room, the piano, the world-class pianist, were all set up just so that vibrations could strike those elderly ears, push the air around inside tiny tubes in a hundred heads.

Remember all those PhDs in Artificial Intelligence that were minted on the wave of fear just before the fast, smart machines arrived from the Orient and turned Silly Valley back into orchards? It got so bad that start-ups began putting "No Procedural Programming Experience Desired" in their job ads. If you used FOR loops or could spell Pascal you were burger-flipper material. If you knew what CONS did (or could even hum it a little) and could describe a "cut" you were in golden handcuffs and chained to a keyboard before the interview was over.

Excerpted from "Revolutions that weren't"

(Non-quote posts coming soon)

Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.

That's good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.

Steward Brand, Rolling Stone, 1972 (via)

Terrible. How insulting. Save your admiration of Terry Gilliam and don't see it.

Slightly Longer Review of Terry Gilliam's adapation of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust

Gilliam's adaptation of Berlioz's opera, "The Damnation of Faust", itself an adaptation of Goethe's play "Faust", takes what is (by all accounts) a good story, turns it into a tepid and uninspiring opera, and then adds Nazis.

Oh good, you think, jokes about Nazis. How very Gilliam. Unfortunately, Gilliam is deadly serious, and it soon becomes clear that he has actually turned a very boring opera into a very boring and also very tasteless opera without appearing to notice.

In Western culture the epitome of evil on earth is pretty much the Nazis. However, I probably didn't need to mention this, because chances are good that you already knew that Nazis are evil. Everybody knows that Nazis are evil. That's why it's so clever of Gilliam to draw parallels between the Nazis, being the epitome of evil on Earth, and the Devil, being the epitome of evil in Judeo-Christian mythology. Wait, it's not. It's not clever at all, it is both pretentious and stupid. It's Godwin's Law in operatic form. An episode of East Enders has more subtlety and nuance than Gilliam's "Faust", and you don't have to sit for hours in uncomfortable seats to watch East Enders. Equating Nazis and demons doesn't teach us anything about Nazis, or Faust, or the Devil, or ourselves. It doesn't explore anything new about mid-20th-century Germany. It doesn't add anything at all.

The highlight of this farce is near the end of the opera, with Faust, in hell, crucified on a Nazi swastika. I would have assumed this was a joke, if the previous scene hadn't featured Faust's descent into Hell overlaid with video footage of boxcars taking Jews to concentration camps. And that wasn't even the most tasteless part.

Warwick Thompson's Bloomberg review sums up my feeling here: "It looks expensive, and feels cheap as hell".

Despite the complete lack of artistic merit of Gilliam's Nazi Germany setting, most of the blame for this tripe falls squarely on Berlioz, who turned a morality play into what is quite possibly the most insipid romance ever written. In Goethe's story, Faust's pact is a significant moral decision with implications that reverberate throughout the play. In the Berlioz version, Faust's pact is an offhand gesture made three-quarters of the way through the play. While Goethe's Faust signs away his soul with full knowledge of the consequences, Berlioz's is tricked into distractedly signing a piece of paper when the opera has almost finished -- and in Gilliam's version it's not even clear that he knows what the price is! Whereas Goethe's Faust is a successful intellectual who can rightfully be held accountable for his decisions, Berlioz's Faust has no agency at all: for the vast majority of the play he does not make his own decisions in any meaningful way. Instead, he is simply led by Mephistopheles, from place to place, situation to situation, as if the devil's servant were a kind of diabolical Willy Wonka, and Faust a mopey and petulant Charlie Bucket. When he does do something, it is only because there is nothing else that he could meaningfully do.

Berlioz's opera plods along with uninspiring characters, a depressing hodge-podge of scenes in lieu of a story, and a libretto that could have been written by an 8-year-old (but not a talented 8-year-old). Then Gilliam attacks it with his Nazi mallet of allusion, and makes everything significantly worse.

Horrible.

Ben Franklin, if his schedule is to be believed, got up every day at 5 in the morning to do his ablutions, "address powerful goodness", and "take the resolution of the day". The whole schedule is rather charming, including, for example, a good four hours for supper, music, and "putting things in their places".

I recently felt the need for more order in my life, and figured I could do worse than adapt someone else's schedule. Unfortunately, unlike Ben Franklin, I am not in the mood to take the resolution of the day until about 10, and am not generally in the mood to address powerful goodness at all. So, as a first cut, I offset Mr. Franklin's schedule by 5 hours. Here's what that looks like:

10, 11, 12, 1: Washing, breakfast, powerful goodness, etc.
2, 3, 4, 5: Work.
6, 7: Lunch.
8, 9, 10, 11: Work.
12, 1, 2, 3: Put things in their places, supper, etc.

As intellectually interesting as lunch at 6pm is, this is now a rather anti-social schedule. I did a little more fiddling, and came up with this version:

10: Rise, wash.
11, 12: Work.
1: Lunch.
2, 3, 4, 5: Work
6, 7, 8, 9: Put things in their places, socialise.
10, 11: Work.
12, 1: Relax.
2: Sleep.

This version contains the same number of work hours as Franklin's, but that number actually seems a little low. I'll have to experiment.

I just saw this in the Evening Standard:

App for sounds of the streets

A musical tour of the capital revealing the London links to songs by the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and Chuck Berry has been created as a new phone app. Museum of London curators have collected musical facts about more than 200 locations and 160 artists for the app, Soundtrack to London, which is available for Nokia phones.

Here's my idea for an app called "Music Tourist", which I had 6 months ago but never did anything about: Music Tourist is a location-aware music exploration app that makes use of people's existing music library. It's designed to be used on an iPhone or similar when the user is walking around a new location -- i.e., being a tourist. When the person walks near a location that is associated with a particular piece of music in their existing music library, that music starts playing.

To take a cheesy example, the user could walk down Abbey Road in London, and Come Together would start playing, if they have any Beatles; Let There Be More Light might come on if they have Pink Floyd instead. As they walk past The Hope And Anchor in the Islinton, they might hear Tits by The Stranglers. And so on.

There are lots of good things about this sort of app: firstly, there would be no licensing fees because it would use people's own music. There would be good advertising opportunity, if I could bear it. And it wouldn't run on horrible Nokia phones.

We bought a vegetarian haggis the other day. Did you know you could get vegetarian haggis? Vegetarian haggis! It sounds like a contradiction in terms. Its skin is plastic and its interior is oats, vegetables, and spices.

Anyway the haggis purchase, it turns out, was perfectly timed for a Burns supper. We drank Scotch and listened to readings of Address tae the haggis whilst we partook of it.

Haggis, even vegetarian haggis, is very rich!

Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!

There was a recent discussion on Hacker News on renting vs buying in the USA, inspired by Trulia's Rent vs. Buy index for 2011.

The model they use is pretty simple: for each city, they calculate index = (average house price) / (cost of rent for one year). For example, a city with houses costing a median of $140,201.37 and where rent is $1,871.65 a month would have an index of (140,201.37 / (1,871.65 * 12)) = 6. This gives a rough indication of break-even point: in this case 6 years of rent at an average place would have bought it. It ignores other costs of ownership, such as mortgage interest and taxes; and of course it has no chance of representing benefits such as being granted the ability to, say, rip out and replace the kitchen.

According to the site, and I'm not sure how they came up with this, an index <= 15 means that owning is more cost effective; 15 < index <= 20 means that renting is probably more cost effective; and 20 < index means renting is certainly more cost effective. I have no idea why 15-year mortgages are cost-effective while 20-year mortgages are not, but these numbers at least give a basis to work with.

So how do things change when you do the same thing in London?

Here are UK house prices by post code. The most obvious thing here is that it would be misleading to talk about an "average-priced house in London": there is an order of magnitude differences in prices depending on where you go. So let's talk about an average house in Islington. This covers a couple of postcodes. It's pleasant, central, and correspondingly expensive.

House prices vary by type, so let's talk about semidetached places. Here is more information on Islington specifically. It's probably not surprising to see that the average and median prices are very different, with the median being rather lower. Annoyingly you can either choose to view by property type, or by number of bedrooms, but not both. Stick with the semidetached idea, the median price turns out to be £672,475.

That completes the "buy" part of Trulia's calculation. What about the "rent" part?

Renting is harder. Specifically, it's difficult to find rental statistics broken down by house type. So I did my own survey, using 3-bedroom properties currently available to rent on Rightmove.

At the time I did the survey, there were 65 properties, for an average annual rent of £46,368.00, and a median annual rent of £39,187.00.

Putting those numbers into Trulia's equation, we get 627,475 / 39,187 = 16. This nudges semidetached places in Islington just into the "renting is probably more cost-effective" category. I suspect the purchase price of semis with 3 bedrooms specifically is slightly higher than the number I used, which would make the index even higher.

What I found interesting about the whole process was how easy it was to get completely different answers. For example, it seems that smaller places, such as 1- and 2-bedroom flats, are cheaper to buy.

What I also found interesting is that after doing all this work for semis in Islington I ended up getting the answer "maybe".

When the robot uprising occurs, they're gonna kill the programmers first.

One thing you really need in London is lip balm. Unfortunately there are a huge range of lip balms out there, and it's not at all obvious which one you should choose. Here I have reviewed five. Each gets an overall score as well as ratings in terms of pungence and longevity.

Natural Beeswax Lip Balm

Enriched with Vitamin E & Peppermint
OraLabs, Inc.
Bought at: UNSW chemist

Review: You are making honey on toast, but you can't seem to focus properly. You push the knife hard into the jar. When you pull it out again, it is covered in a thick brown smear. You attack the toast, but something is wrong: you can't tell where the knife ends and your hand begins. You push your arm vaguely over the toast and watch the tendons in your hand contort and stretch. In a sudden panic, you drop the knife. The toast is covered, dripping with golden honey. There is too much honey, you realise, but you can't pick up the knife. Rivulets of thick honey drip from the toast and form a pool on the floor. Your fingers are sticky. 8/10.

Pungence: 2 Longevity: 8

Sanctuary Balm

St. Augustine's Abbey, Ramsgate
Bought at: online store

Review: This brings to mind musty attics in wooden houses, the smell of age. Pull the lip balm out of your pocket and smear it liberally over your lips. You are going out for the evening, but your date has not arrived. Check your watch nervously. Invent excuses. Smear the lip balm over your lips. Sit, taught-muscled, next to the phone. Smear the lip balm on your lips. Adjust your hair nervously. Your face feels hot and greasy. 8/10.

Pungence: 5 Longevity: 7

Filberts West Country Lip Balm

Filberts Bees, Dorchester, Dorset
Bought at: online store

Review: Strong and assertive. Recalls memories of primary schools. Strict teachers and just punishment. You have been bad, but we will make sure you are never naughty again. Dominates the upper lip and vanishes, leaving only a lingering aroma of hospital disinfectant. 6/10.

Pungence: 5 Longevity: 3

Burt's Bees

Rejuvenating Lip Balm with Açaí Berry
Burt's Bees (UK) Ltd.
Bought at: Boots, Golders Green, London

Review: You are walking with your lover through a sun-drenched meadow. The sun is low in the sky and the air is warm. You play at chase; laughing, you stumble and collapse on a bed of soft heather. You gaze at the sky through drowsy lids. You let the warmth caress you. A shaft of sunlight pierces the heather, and you feel yourself growing down, down into the earth. Your body dissolves into a million pieces of life-giving energy. You are the meadow. 7/10.

Pungence: 8 Longevity: 5

Rose & Co. Sweet Vanilla Salve with Beeswax & Honey

Bought at: Boots, Piccadilly Circus, London

Review: Light and guileless. Airy floral notes. Strong aftertaste of bilge. 4/10

Pungence: 4 Longevity: 6

Before I talk about the nipple incident I need to discuss the way I walk. I walk very quickly, with long, even strides. I tend to look at the people I'm passing. Sometimes I stare at them in a very disconcerting way. If I'm not looking at people's faces I look straight ahead.

When I am on a collision course with somebody, I change direction. I telegraph the direction change from a long way off by reorienting my entire body, rather than just my feet. After making eye contact with people, I look towards the ground, so as not to be misconstrued as aggressive. The whole eye contact and reorientation thing gets stressful, because I never end up walking in a straight line, but is on the whole rather pleasant, because this is typically how other people behave.

Well, geeks beware, because apparently this kind of footpath politeness marks you as someone of low social status. I was reading one of those horrible pop-evo-psych blogs on the nature of social status. I'd like to summarise the argument of the blog post so you don't have to read it, but it was quite scattergun and not very coherent, so I am having trouble. On the other hand, the post is quite scattergun and not very coherent, so I don't recommend you read it.

The post does, however, link to a completely innocent improvisation blog post on low- and high-social-status walking behaviours. This was interesting because it presented lists of behaviours for actors to convey low and high social status to audiences.

One of the low-status walking behavious is "gets out of the way of other people". Others include walking jerkily or with unnecessary movements, looking up at people (head tilted forward), slouching, and so on. High-status behaviours include looking down at people (head tilted back), not looking at low-status people at all, and assuming other people will get out of your way.

So tonight while walking home I thought I'd live the high life. Instead of making eye contact with people I stared directly at where I was headed, giving the impression that I knew where people were but that I wasn't going to waste time looking at them. I didn't check to see whether people had noticed me. I didn't smile at all. And as usual I walked quickly, smoothly, and without slouching. Essentially, I acted as if I were more important than everybody around me.

The first thing I noticed was that walking this way was very relaxing, because everybody got the hell out of my way. The second thing I noticed was that walking this way was a little stressful, because every so often I would encounter somebody who had the same idea. This essentially turned a simple thing (walking home) into a ridiculous dominance challenge.

And this is when we get to the nipple encounter, because there was only one person who didn't move out of my way. This guy was rather muscly, taller than I, and obviously not used to encountering geeks role playing at being street poseurs. We strode confidently toward each other. I figured we were actually going to just bounce off each other, a prospect I wasn't looking forward to as inertia was clearly on the other gentleman's side. Fortunately, at the last second, we both did that awkward 45-degree watch-where-you're-going-you-jerk twist common to street theatre. Unfortunately, we were extremely close to each other at the time, so there was a fair bit of chest-to-chest sliding involved.

And that is how I rubbed nipples with a well-built man halfway along London Bridge. It was easily the most homoerotic thing I have ever done on London Bridge.