2022-01-01
Readings
- There are some inaccuracies in this (most notably, that Viol-family instruments have an inconsistent number of strings), but it’s a nice intro to the sound and history of the Viol famil of instruments:
- I’ve mentioned Bach songs with BWV numbers before, but I’ve never known much about the system; apparently it’s a lot like the dewey decimal system of his pieces, organised by content rather than chronology. It also reminds us that some of Bach’s works are lost, but leaving behind works like this, worthy of extensive external cataloguing, is an achievement for any human. One minor annoyance; when describing one of the movements of a composition, I used a dot and then a supplemental number (BWV1048.1 for the first movement, for example); apparently that notation is already used for something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis
- This is a great historical build-up to a result - heuristic approaches to complex systems, narrowed on a particular problem. https://phys.org/news/2021-12-drunken-solution-chaotic-three-body-problem.html
- The design for Google Docs sync is not novel; it’s the kind of thing a systems geek would have tremendous fun designing. But it’s also a fun read seeing how someone approaches it (and to compare it to the much harder problem of generalised version control a la git) https://drive.googleblog.com/2010/09/whats-different-about-new-google-docs.html
- More gradual progress in cultivating and managing stem cells and their differentiation, which longer term will have a lot of applications: https://phys.org/news/2021-12-closer-human-transplantation.html
- I never thought much about how cells move food materials across their membranes. https://phys.org/news/2021-12-high-resolution-lab-cells.html
- Coverage of the history of Gambia (the country):
- A video on what happened in the early years of our planet before life became interesting:
Unprompted Thoughts
- For awhile I’ve daydreamed about alternative or future forms of life. A challenge: imagine a system that would dwell in the body of a star that would be a reasonably stable environment at reasonable temperatures, somehow using the energy gradient in the star to push the material and energies of the star outwards. reliably enough to create life. You have far future technologies at your disposal but must sketch them and how they might work.
- More realistically, we can imagine space stations orbiting our star closer than Mercury does, city-sized, retrieving energy and occasionally material from the star. This takes a lot less imagination, but may be in the long term how our distant descendants live.
- It’s strange how AlJazeera, which bootstrapped significantly off the BBC, has avoided the BBC’s recent descent into human interest story rubbish (recent example: “My son’s not a picky eater; he’s scared of food”, on the front page of BBC News). I understand the BBC had some politically forced reorienting which led them down this path, plus they’re aiming for a domestic audience, while AlJazeera is Qatar’s hope for cultural prominence; doing journalism right is their mission (at least on their website). Unfortunate how motivations and politics can impact news orgs.
- I use drop-off laundry in NYC; one bags all one’s laundry, drops it off one day, and usually picks it up the next. I’ve been wondering if it’s heavier on the deposit or retrieval (assuming nothing is lost). One could argue for the deposit because dirt and dust is present during packing that’s removed, both in the cloth fabric and elsewhere in the bag. Or for the retrieval, because extraneous fabric fluff may be added during wash, or residual moisture is (maybe) higher on the way out. Water weight is probably a big factor, even given that things come back fairly dry. It’s hard to know which way it leans.
Current Events
- We saw a number of fairly high-profile deaths over the last week; Betty White (whom reminded me of my grandma on my mom’s side), Desmond Tutu, Harry Reid, EO Wilson, and so on. EO Wilson’s death got a strange send-off from Scientific American, where they let a progressive extremist write the obituary and it led to a lot of gnashing teeth. I hope the editors learned their lesson and will avoid the fringe.
- Interesting experiment in France with free contraceptives for women of certain ages. It’d be nice to see more countries do this, across all ages. The costs to society in the long term of people having pregnancies they’re not ready for is pretty high, and while unlimited free contraception for everyone may be expensive, it’s far less expensive than the results of its lack. Seems like a clear policy win with potentially broad political support to me. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-france-free-contraception-women-aged.html
- Another interesting policy shift in Europe; Austria legalises assisted suicide in some circumstances. In principle I support this, but I worry about possible family (or other) pressure that might create situations of soft coercion (e.g. insurance company offers the family a pay-out if prolonged care would be too expensive): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59847371
- Since the recent military coup in Burma, military forces have returned to scorched-earth tactics against their opponents. I don’t think the answer is to idolise Suu Kyi or her lackeys (who was on many metrics quite bad). https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-massacre-burnings-military-satellite-images-f85384acc41462314a95551af1797462
Reviewlets
- Superhot MCD (game) - This is a sequel to a game that turns combat sims into a puzzle; it’s mostly the same as the original if I remember it correctly, but that’s fine. It’s nice to have something that doesn’t take a lot of involvement that’s still fun.
- Aeon Drive (game) - Cute, fast-paced action game with some puzzle instruments, but it’s taking a long time to show more depth than what it started with.
- Dream Cycle (game) - Deeply weird, with wonky mechanics and a nice set of ways to get around, and fairly difficult. I don’t think this game will be a hit, but I’m enjoying it anyhow.
- Chilling Effect (fiction book) - An amusing light scifi book with comedy elements, it’s been compared to Douglas Adams (which I don’t see), but manages the interesting feat of having romance between humans and aliens with the aliens still being reasonably alien. I was annoyed recently to bump into part of the book where the viewpoint character sides with another character who has deep emotional problems and attacks people because a conversation went wrong; this bugs me ethically (I generally don’t think norms or laws of society should bend for the benefit of the mentally ill, beyond offering generous therapy programs). I write people off pretty rapidly (at least for purposes of company and often for purposes of seeing them as an adult) if they can’t regulate their emotions within certain bounds, and I think society should. Still, this reaction made me think, and perhaps the author did it deliberately. The book also has gratuitous Spanish (which I usually understand). I’m a little over halfway through this, and I believe it has a sequel which I’m likely to get.
- Night Land (fiction book) - I recently gave up on trying to read this; it’s well-regarded, and has a certain dark poetry with dreamlike Lovecraftian themes embedded, but it’s become too hard for me to return to it. There’s a lot of substance but not enough draw.
- Dichronauts (hard-scifi book) is another I gave up on by Greg Egan; he’s pretty hit-or-miss for me, and the baseline premise of this book involved an alternate take on humans that have strange breeding requirements and which can rotate into other dimensions based on their subspecies, or something like that. Mixed with some body horror. Not for me.
Amusements
- Sperm Whales sleep vertically, which leads to some very strange visuals: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/sperm-whales-nap-sleeping-photography-spd
- I’m not big into weapons (did some martial arts in high school, but it’s not that interesting to me), but some out-there theory can be pretty interesting and I liked this examination of the Bat’Leth weapon used by Klingons in ST:TNG.
- Cross-species friendships are as perplexing as they are adorable, from the Capybara (which seems very good at it) to animals humans keep as livestock:
- I admire the social relations people can have with Magpies:
Recent Music
- This rendition of BWV1052, modified towards jazz with an accordion, is amazing. I also was not aware of Ksenija Sidarova before this - very cool musician (she also did a TEDx talk that you can look up separately).
- Lost Signal’s “Absence” is a Darkwave song that I never heard (to my memory) in the clubs; I think it would’ve been better with VNV Nation vocal stylings, it’s a strong song as it is.
- New Order’s “True Faith” is a great song for which that I have a lot of strange added associations; I never got much into AMVs (anime music videos), but there was one for Neon Genesis Evangelion (a great Anime that, like Lain, was a bit of a mindfuck) that stuck in my mind.
- Aztec Camera’s “Release” sounds like a Billy Bragg song (also go listen to “Tank Park Salute”).
- HelloGoodbye’s “Shimmy Shimmy Quarter Turn" is one of those weird electronica computer-styled punk songs that digs right into obsession and musical themes that ordinarily would feel shame-tinged.