An introduction

This is a semi-public place to dump text too flimsy to even become a blog post. I wouldn't recommend reading it unless you have a lot of time to waste. You'd be better off at my livejournal. I also have another blog, and write most of the French journal summaries at the Eurozine Review.

Why do I clutter up the internet with this stuff at all? Mainly because I'm trying to get into the habit of displaying as much as possible of what I'm doing in public. Also, Blogger is a decent interface for a notebook

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Red Toiry

I like Jonathan Raban, and I've not read Phillip Blond's Red Tory. Still, I'm more than a little dubious of the former's critique of the latter. It seems to be mainly based on a cultural affinity for the city over the country, and on a disbelief that institutions run by stodgy and self-isolating small-c conservatives can ever do social good.

what meaning they might have for people on sink estates or in sprawling, ethnically diverse conurbations, like those of the Midlands and the North, is beyond comprehension. Like his literary predecessors, Blond, when he thinks of England, sees mainly its church-spire-haunted countryside.


Well, yes, but so what? If Blond can get rural tory do-gooders actually doing good rather than tut-tutting over the neighbours, I'm all in favour. Let's make a more radical urban variant, and build an odd-couple alliance of urban anarchists and rural reactionaries.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

GTD repeating

I'm an intermittent fan of GTD. That is, I tend to ignore it for a while, and then

This largely depends on what's happenign in my life; there are long stretches where I only need to deal with one or two large projects. Since GTD is optimized for managers needing to track a large number of small tasks, it's not much use for me. But then live spins out of control, and I return to David Allen for some imitation of control.
Within GTD, the big problem is that it doesn't handle big tasks very well. Often a project consists of "Do this. Then do it another 850 times, over the next 3 moths". Sure, I can keep adding each chunk to my next actions, but it doesn't really help. What I need is something to remind me that I need to work on the task, show and recognize the work I'm putting into it, and otherwise keep out of the way.

So, I took a look round online to figure out how to deal with the problem. Turns out there isn't one; everybody has bolted her own system onto it. Sucks, really it does.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Kings (U.S. TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This seems too good to be true. In fact it was, and got canceled pretty sharply.

Kings is a television drama series ....loosely based on the Biblical story of King David, but set in a kingdom that culturally and technologically resembles the present-day United States

Long-grain pontiff

I'm less than overwhelmed by Michael Bracewell's book England is Mine. I do have to admit, though, that he has a nice turn of phrase -- even if it is in a style that must have landed him in Pseuds Corner:

So pop, despite itself, became arty. English society, high on the new convenience foods, allowed English culture to develop a kind of boil-in-the-bag popism as the successor to the beans on toast of social realism. [80]


[slightly less entertaining on re-reading, when I realise that "boil-in-the-bag popism" probably means music rather than the Bishop of Rome]

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Sasha Frere-Jones on Patti Smith's autobiography:
It’s refreshing to read a memoirist so dedicated to telling a version of her life that is more about ideas than bedpost notches, though sad to think that only someone like Smith could push this past her editors. The New Irony: only a rock star has the moxie to be a prude now.


Naturally, though, I'm more inspired by what the other Sasha finds in it:

It’s a love story, in every sense; not only an account of a love affair, but of a connection that goes beyond sexuality and familiarity into true understanding and devotion....
he pair were the cutting edge of late 60s and early 70s creative New York, and the energy and belief and idealism surrounding them practically wafts off the page.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Widows

Widowhoood is one of those facets of historical experience that I can't really grok. Widows throughout pre-modern history have been subject to such a weird mix of fear and acceptance, left a socially precarious position but also one in which they have more freedom than married women. Biblical examples would be Ruth and Judith; historical ones can be traced through land and tax records. Laurence Fontaine argued in a recent issue of Esprit that widows in France had more access to markets:


Dans la France de l’Ancien Régime, le droit des femmes évoluait selon leur statut social et les phases de leur cycle de vie ; les veuves étant, par exemple, plus libres que les femmes mariées qui restaient soumises à l’autorité des maris. Toutefois, la charge qui leur incombait de s’occuper et de nourrir la famille leur a donné un accès au marché.


What I can't figure out is how much this peculiarly, perversely privileged position of widows was general, how much just a situation which enabled a few personally strong widows to run with it, while the majority ended up in much more difficult circumstances, practically and socially.

[as is probably obvious, this is mainly a marker for a topic I find interesting, but which has presumably already been the subject of multiple books, and which I don't anticipate having anything new to say about]
I love that this article questioning the opening-up of Belarus is all about dubious industrial figures, with nothing about it being a repressive police state.
Johann Hari on good form:
something stranger still is happening in The Election That Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Every day in this country, two big forces artificially drag the British government way to the right of the British people, making it enact policies that benefit a small, rich elite at the expense of the rest. We are not supposed to notice this, never mind try to change it. Yet suddenly, in this election, those forces have been exposed.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Comment on post-election PR in the UK:
I’m afraid that this has been predicted in every close-looking election since … well pretty much since Labour rose to power a century ago, without ever coming close to occurring.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Heh. I'm also a little baffled by the love of Betahaus, which in the end is Just An Office. But even stranger is the terror people seem to have at absolutely safe parts of Berlin:

Das Betahaus liegt zudem abseits neben einer Autowerkstatt und ist eine ansonsten unvermietbare (imho) GSW Immobilien. Absolut keine Gegend wo man Abends alleine durchgehen möchte (Kottbuser Tor ist nicht weit).
ACTA text due for release today:

Overall, therefore, there was a general sense from this session that negotiations have now advanced to a point where making a draft text available to the public will help the process of reaching a final agreement. For that reason, and based on the specific momentum coming out of this meeting, participants have reached unanimous agreement that the time is right for making available to the public the consolidated text coming out of these discussions, which will reflect the substantial progress made at this round.

It is intended to release this on Wednesday 21 April.

The end of the world as we don't know it

Ken Macleod:

"Global warming is real, it's happening and it's serious, but it's certainly no reason to believe there's more than an outlying possibility of the world coming to an end in this century."

Charles Stross:

I've lately been trying to project possible futures that don't include any kind of singularity, be it a minor one (like the steam engine) or a massive one (strongly superhuman A.I.s that are to us as we are to cats and dogs). Mostly they require either a malthusian collapse, or repressive legislative/political forces. So, to that extent, any SF that doesn't try to address the issue is either a dystopia or a fantasy.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Takedown downfall fail

A worrying example of how brittle and centralized a lot of our culture is:

A recent wave of takedowns affecting many of the Hitler “Downfall” parody videos has resulted in their removal from YouTube.

Wang Hui and plagiarism

I've previously mentioned Wang Hui, as a particularly interesting Chinese intellectual. Now he's being accused of plagiarism -- which might be politically-motivated, or could be a gase of someboy finding him with his pants down. Or both.

A great many things keep happening

Since hearing it mentioned on In Our Time, I've been entranced by the start of Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks:

A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad. The inhabitants of the different countries keep quarrelling fiercely with each other and kings go on loosing their temper in the most furious way. Our churches are attacked by the heretics and then protected by the Catholics; the faith of Christ burns bright in many men, but it remains lukewarm in others; no sooner are church buildings endowed by the faithful that they are stripped again by those who have no faith. However, no writer has come to the fore who has been sufficiently skilled in setting things down in an orderly fashion to be able to describe these events in prose or in verse.


Alas, that seems to be more-or-less an invention of the translator. The Latin text begins:

Decedente atque immo potius pereunte ab urbibus Gallicanis liberalium cultura litterarum, cum nonnullae res gererentur vel rectae vel inprobae...


Which This translation renders more literally

With liberal culture on the wane, or rather perishing in the Gallic cities there were many deeds being done both good and evil


ah, well, it's still a glorious opening line, regardless of authenticity.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

I'm going through a period of over-the-top enthusiasm for unconferences -- they're just at that confluence of anarchism and practicality where you can imagine the possibility of improving the world by worming our way out of the zombiefied social rituals which usually trap us. Apparently, actually attending one that doesn't quite live up to the ideals isn't much of a damper on this.

Just wish I could find a calendar for the things...

Saturday, April 17, 2010

predicting open-source community development

Here's a thought. If you're developing something that relies on an open-source project, one of the big uncertainties is what is going to happen to the community in the future. Is this project going to wither away next year?

We could gather a lot of data on this. Mailing list use, code commits, blogposts, google hits, etc, etc, etc. Then we can try to see characteristics which are correlated with growing/declining projects, and develop a quantitative prediction of the likely future of a project.

not just datamining

Currently at the Berlin Open Data Hackday. Mentions David Eaves, who has just launched a Canadian government data transparency project

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:
1. If it can't be spidered or indexed, it doesn't exist
2. If it isn't available in open and machine readable format, it can't engage
3. If a legal framework doesn't allow it to be repurposed, it doesn't empower


I'm not entirely convinced by this focus. Data-mining is good, but there are plenty of other important areas that will only be identified by a competent journalist or activist asking the right questions.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Pipi Le Pew, flushed down the loo

Hebrew/greek confusion:
In Hebrew the word YHWH looks like this: יהוה — read from right to left. But by the time of Jesus Hebrew had become virtually a dead language even in Israel. Someone encountering this Hebrew word in a Greek text might well have thought it looked like the nonsense Greek word πιπι — read from left to right, that’s pipi. According to St. Jerome this is exactly what happened

Kyrgyzstan: 2005 reloaded

Sean Roberts, unsurprisingly, has a decently-informed take on Kyrgyzstan:

The news coming out of the country looks all too similar to that which we saw in Spring of 2005, only more violent. In general, the events of the last several days taken together with those of March 2005 suggest two things about this country in the twenty-first century – 1) that the Kyrgyz people, unlike most former Soviet citizens, are unwilling to allow a corrupt government to stay in power through its control of the political system and are ready to risk personal safety in order to prevent this; and 2) the elite of Kyrgyzstan has yet to demonstrate that it is capable of establishing a viable government that meets people’s demands and moves Kyrgyzstan’s development forward.

The ultimate weapon

Last night, to a reading by Catherine Hales. [a few of her poems -- some of which she read -- are online here, here, here, and here.

Back, and unsure about the whole enterprise. Hales seems to be pretty good at what she does -- as far as I can tell, the poems work pretty well on her own terms, and the reading went much more smoothly than I would have expected.

But it makes me realise just how adrift I am when it comes to poetry. I go to readings from time to time, hoping to find something that will describe, explain or enrich the world. Instead I just end up feeling baffled, stupid, underread, and resentful about the entire enterprise.

Partly, this comes down to my old grumble that poetry would be much improved by footnotes. When I don't understand the origin of a quotation, or the significance of an allusion, entire sections devolve towards being just patterns of meaningless words. There's little way to know what you're missing; just a requirement that you spend a lifetime reading the language whose fragments are regurgitated into the poetry. This I won't do, any more than I'm willing to inhale the canon of Star Wars and Doctor Who so I can follow in-jokes on Livejournal.

It's a different feeling of stupidity to what comes from not understanding science. There, every moment of ignorance has a solution; understanding some area is mainly just a matter of reading textbooks and papers until it makes sense. Maybe it'll take more time than I'm willing to put in, but I always know that the answer is out there.

Whereas, poetry? [I mean, this kind of poetry, academic poetry. Poetry that gets listened to by non-poets is a different matter] I have the sense that the only way to understand it is through slow cultural acclimatisation, spending years bouncing around the English department of some anglophone university. And I have plenty of ways to waste my life already, without going down that route.

This shouldn't irritate me as much as it does; I should be able to accept that poetry is just an enclosed, self-referential world, that I can amicably sidestep in the same way I do Warcraft players. But I can't; I'm somehow still hooked by the cultural status, by the feeling that I *should* be able to grok poetry, by the wariness that people are doing things with words that I can't even work out how to comprehend.

The saving grace is the knowledge that, even if I did acquire understanding, perhaps through years of rigorous training in some remote poetry-temple, it still wouldn't do me any good. As CH describes her work:


‘Look in vain for (linear) narrative, for anecdote, for epiphanies, for messages, for making-the world-a-better-place: the world is a mess and language is messy and the world is language and any attempt to tidy it up with poetry is falsification. There is no utopian vision…’


But what is the use of a book (or anything else, for that matter), without epiphanies and making the world a better place? I'm well aware of the messiness and meaninglessness of the world; the challenge is to tie it into some kind of plausible structure, to give yourself a reason to carry on living. Catherine Hales, by her own aims, isn't going to do that.

So, in the end, I turn back to rabble-rousing slam poetry. Not only is it easier to understand, but it hints at the possibility of a life not based on continual self-doubt and self-examination, where it is possible to change the world rather than just passively complaining about it. I prefer my poetry weaponized:)

Monday, April 12, 2010

England is Mine

Bracewell's "England is Mine" turns out to be excellent page by page, but a bit of a letdown overall. He's taken as his basic thesis something entirely vagye and anodyne, namely nostalgia for the countryside within English culture and pop music. He calls this "Arcadia", although it's unclear what makes this a peculiarly English form different from the adoration of an imagined countryside that is present in just about every country in the world. Likewise, the breadth and commonness of the subject makes it hard to trace any intellectual ancestry for the views he describes: who is to say whether different longings for "Arcadia" are directly related, or just parallel expressions of the same common human urge?

That said, I'm only on page 37; all this could well be resolved later.

Speed

If we aren't quite living through the End of History, it's safe to say that it's taking a tea break. In Europe at least, there are no huge socio-politico-cultural movements flinging themselves at the organs of power. Whatever's interesting is happening in small pockets on the edges, or within the closed-off worlds of science and technology. Developments in Asia and the South are regularly noted as Big and Dramatic, but don't attract our daily attention.

And yet, despite all this, you can still find any number of writers obsessed with the speed of culture, even arguing that "Speed...has become the definition of the present" [Gil Delannoi]. "Internet speed" made some sense in the first dot-come boom, but has lingered as a concept even while the pace of online change has slowed to a crawl.

Where there is speed, it can be not an expression of change, but an alternative to it. So with twitter, which fetishes speed while limiting the possibilities of expression to little more than phatic self-stereotyping. Maybe this is the same as what is happening everywhere; fetishise speed to avoid noticing the (lack of) content.

And none of this is new. Both sides have been around since at least the Industrial Revolution -- the one fetishizing speed as a symbol of modernity, the other criticising its emptiness, how it robs us of the ability to appreciate the world. So some of the current obsession with speed (exemplified by this issue of Esprit) has a weirdly retro-futuristic feel to it. It's like a faint echo of Futurism ("A speeding car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." ) -- but stripped of optimism, anger and enthusiasm.
Legal abuse of statistics

On April 14, the most spectacular miscarriage of justice in years is coming to a conclusion in the Netherlands. The nurse Lucia de Berk was given a life sentence back in 2004 – and in NL that means life – for 7 murders and 3 attempted murders of babies and earlier of old people in her care. After a long hard fight the trial has been reopened and now it is nearly over. All the deaths and incidents appear to have been completely natural. [from comments]
Or, as Helen puts it: Your goal for this election period is to challenge apathetic non-voters. This has got to stop being a socially acceptable position to take.
remember, every time Cameron talks about disillusionment with politics, what he's really saying is "lefties, don't bother coming out to vote". I'd bet money that this is a conscious strategy to keep the left home on May 6th.
Why have I never previously encountered Pynchon as essayist:

historical Ned Lud was well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic nickname "King (or Captain) Ludd," and was now all mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human presence, out in the night, roaming the hosiery districts of England, possessed by a single comic shtick -- every time he spots a stocking-frame he goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Accelerando

Rereading the start of Charles Stross' Accelerando. It's exhilerating, because of how familiar it is: each year, the CCC is filled with proto-Macxs -- Stross is just giving the present a shot of narrative adrenaline. And lovingly mocking reality while he's at it -- samba-punk, clothing tics and all.

The later chapters are also good, but I stop caring when it stops becoming recognizably human. Guess I'm a near-future kind of guy, for the same reasons I'm a reformer and not a revolutionary: the utopia that appeals is the one attainable by nudging the present in the right way.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

Prospect gives Richard Florida a healthy battering:

Florida does not ignore the downsides of the shifts he describes; he just accepts them with a Panglossian shrug. Is income inequality increasing? Well, that's because the upper echelon benefits from "creativity," when in fact Florida's "creative class" is defined to include essentially everyone in the highest-earning third of the work force -- including the titans of finance, whose "creativity" has turned out to be deeply destructive. Are good factory jobs melting away? Sure, but that just means the country needs to make service jobs better paying and more fulfilling.
Dealing with shrinking cities in eastern Germany:

One of the IBA's more radical ideas is that of "city islands" in Dessau-Rosslau. The planners have "kind of disassembled the city into pixels and put it back together again using a cut-and-paste method," as Brückner explains. According to the concept, Dessau-Rosslau would abandon the model of a more compact central city, leaving only islands of houses. "Buildings will be cut out and in the empty spaces we will insert countryside," Brückner explains.