Stable or TARDIS?

Some Ingredients Not Included

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 07:52:00 +0000

Aldi is a place to find many wonderful and oft unusual items. Knock-off Cinnamon Toast Crunch is a good sign; I'm the kind of guy who isn't picky about the name on the box so long as there's the requisite amount of sugar-per-serving.

DIY almond bark... That's a step farther down the dark alley. It's not like Aldi is Ikea--I expect my plastic-wrapped chocolate to be pre-assembled, even at a quirky discount chain like Aldi.

What separates my encounter with the almond bark construction kit from my other Aldi encounters is that there didn't seem to be any almonds in the package--neither slivered, nor sliced. It was, so far as I can tell, a package of baking chocolate with carefully-targeted packaging, expertly placed among holiday decorating and baking paraphernalia to attract unsuspecting novice almond-bark-makers.
I don't know if that's brilliant or diabolical.

The Trial of Henry Devereaux, part the 1st

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sun, 28 Feb 2016 20:50:00 +0000

“You should call Henry.”

The headlights started dimming at 11PM; about 5 miles from home, but only half a mile from Randy's. Randy is a BMW touring bike owner, a close friend, and while he doesn't always have space in his driveway he's usually willing to move one of his kids' cars to give you a spot to park for the night.

I was stopped at a light when I noticed the flashing “something's wrong, knucklehead” indicator, and I went through the list of known electrical issues that could cause a dimming headlight. Starter-switch corrosion is a known issue (the starter switch also contains a normally-closed headlight switch, hitting the starter kills the headlights so there's more juice for starting), so I thumbed that gently a few times to see if it was just a bad contact: no joy. The stoplight was going to turn green soon and in a panic I wiggled the kill-switch, hoping it was a bad contact there. I over-enthusiastically killed the engine (along with any hope I had of a restful sleep that night.) When it was clear there wasn't enough juice to turn the engine over, I pushed the bike onto the sidewalk and ran a more thorough check of vital systems: the hissing battery was basically all I needed to give up hope of getting the bike started again. I called Randy and rolled up to his driveway at 11:23.

Randy had a beer ready as I stripped off the riding leathers, and asked all the pertinent I-own-a-motorcycle questions about switches and components. We stared at the bike for another five minutes before he scratched his head and invoked the name of Henry Devereaux.

Untitled 7-2014

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 04:57:00 +0000

I saw a face in an open window
She looked back with strained compassion
"Are you really so much like me?" I asked
She did not give an answer

I walked on, then, and left her
The one whose face I recognized
But did not expect to see again

Some years later, I passed that way
Saw the same window, still open,
Though perhaps the house was different
The face I saw in that open window
Was as much a reflection as ever

Life

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 20:13:00 +0000

Life is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. What is going on, what is growing and resting and straining, is so much more than we can ever know — and even that is only one face of life, one side of a door.
Life contains so much, and is yet itself wrapped up in much more. Frankly, thinking of an unknowable and unchangeable future simultaneously bores and frustrates me. My devotion to the ideal of free will, however, leaves me with a stark reflection at the end of 32 years: so little in our lives is freely chosen, and that which is inside the sphere of "choice" is usually not what you think it is. Children, for example, are often lumped into "chosen" or "a surprise." Yet despite willfully pursuing pregnancy, my wife and I felt very little sense of control over any of the things that happened in the last year. Now that we have our baby, the baby we "chose" to have, I can't help wondering if anything would have been at all different with a "surprise" baby, a scenario several friends are facing.

Looking into the eyes of my newborn daughter, I am beginning to understand that in many parts of life—not all, but many—the choice is not what (or even whom) but how. Is it even fair to say that my wife and I chose each other? Whatever your take on that, we (eventually) chose to welcome each other into a new life—further up, further in.

I did not choose my daughter, but I have chosen to welcome her into my life, and I must welcome her again each day. Pooping, screaming, vomiting, and smiling. In time, she will welcome us into her life (or not) in a different way. Our life: beginning, continuing, day by day, together.

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 04 May 2015 21:04:00 +0000

Whales: not as innocent as you thought.

Sepulveda Vista Point

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 20:04:00 +0000

There are nice parks on the hills south of UCI's campus (heading toward the high-priced zipcodes of Newport Beach coastal canyon condo complexes) that give an amazing lookout over all the rest of Orange County. Most of them close at 6PM or "dusk", and the one I rode up to yesterday was already closed at 5:30.
I find this baffling, since the sunsets from such a vantage are really very lovely. I suppose the residents of Turtle Ridge and Summit Park want to maintain their exclusive ownership of the sunset views?
Or, perhaps yesterday's early closing was an isolated incident, simply because the city employee responsible for locking the gates was in a hurry to get home and watch the Grammy Red Carpet coverage...

I'm on PM shifts this week so it'll be a while before I can get up there around sunset again, but we must find a way.

Chapter 2015

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 19:45:00 +0000

This is not a blog

about a motorcycle

but what if it were?

I've been unsure of how to write on this thing for quite some time now.

I've missed writing, even if I can't remember what structure or schedule produced that writing back when it was frequent. Plenty of drafts are buried in this thing, half-finished ideas prompted by news stories, happenstance in my wanderings, or just reflection on things I've seen or heard. None of them made it beyond outline or first paragraph, though; I stall haven't figured out why, but I don't have to know why to know that I can change it.

"I don't have anything to write about anymore!" is always a lie. I don't know what I'm going to be writing, exactly, but I need to write, so here it is.

Genocide

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 17:13:00 +0000

...Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
from Mere Christianity, Part 51
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952; Harper Collins 2001) 118.

Musings on DHL

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 22:38:00 +0000

To consider: in my old life, if I were sick and spending a day at home, a knock from a courier usually meant something exciting was about to happen. A book I ordered two weeks ago? A replacement part for a nearly-abandoned project being shipped from Hong Kong ($0.99 and Free shipping!) via the slowest route possible? In my new life, packages I order come from "the Amazon" and arrive a few days later, with barely a knock on the door; the courier who knocks on the door is delivering a priority-express-document package from some third-world country with important documents for my wife to look over (pertaining to the immigration case of some desperate individual.) [sigh]

Friday, the 13th (part n.)

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 08:01:00 +0000

The thirteenth is a day of Christmas choir performances, half-watched DVDs, and reading obscure novels during long drives.

It is a day of not-quite-functional washing machines, gas heaters that blow themselves out, and toaster ovens that don't quite hold all four slices of pizza at once.

The thirteenth is a day of leftover pizza, stolen french-fries, and chocolate chip cookies that were freshly-baked when you left home and invisible by the time you go to bed.

It is also a day of "I'm tired let's sleep in", of "it's too cold for t-shirts but much too warm for sweaters," and of "I think I might still be fighting off that stomach flu, maybe the pizza was a bad idea."

The thirteenth is, in short, just another Friday. But *what* a just-another-Friday it is.

Posted via Blogaway

22 November

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 21:47:00 +0000

It's been 50 years since Jack said farewell. He was 64.

Arise my body, my small body, we have striven Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven. Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go, White as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow, Undress with small, cold fingers and put out the light, And be alone, hush'd mortal, in the sacred night, -A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up, Faded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness By dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness. Be not too quickly warm again. Lie cold; consent To weariness' and pardon's watery element. Drink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death; Soon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.

Professor Lewis was granted a space in Poets' Corner today; while some think he's not exactly a poet, I think the description is just fine.

Tradeshow Games

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:16:00 +0000

Making it through the not-terrible eggs, half-decent sausage, and really-nasty hashbrown without getting ketchup on anything while at one of those standing tradeshow-floor tables feels like a real accomplishment.
Proceeding to the post-breakfast-coffee tables and getting your hands sticky from the quite-good danish, now without recourse to the paper napkins you felt so good about not needing only moments ago, feels a defeat worthy of Sophocles.

Diamantine

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 20:49:00 +0000

Although I walk in dead of night
My mind in places far away
The snowflakes glint in pale moonlight
Now absent fear, joy remains

To Thine Own Self Be True

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 17:33:00 +0000

Alone.
Alone, in the dark, far from home.
Home.

Definition. The last bastion against meaninglessness. When all seems upended, perverted, and mistaken, we define our world with defensive reflex, write a song of lament for what is, was, could have been.

And so, in throes of desperation,
When all else resists my definition,
I turn my weary words inward
And cry out to define myself

Alone, in the dark, far from home.

"Above all beware of excessive day dreaming, of seeing yourself in the centre of a drama, of self pity, and, as far as possible, of fears." The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis V1: Family Letters 1905-1931

in lieu of originality

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 17:18:00 +0000

IF you were coming in the fall,
I ’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I ’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I ’d count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time’s uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

-Emily Dickinson

You Don't Need to See His Identification

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 23:58:00 +0000

Went to Star Wars: Identities at the Edmonton Space & Science centre today (yes, that *is* the correct name, corporate sponsors can jump in a snowbank...) with my protege, "Z." The prop and motion-control-model displays were very, very cool to see, and probably worth the price of admission, while the multimedia/interactive aspects of the presentation were only fair to middling.

The show is really set up to showcase a few ideas about identity, some of which I thought bear comment:
(For those who haven't heard of this thing before, it's a travelling exhibit of Star Wars props that incorporates ten interactive kiosks which allow you to build an "identity" profile based on the traits and factors discussed in the educational talk-along and supplemental video.)
First, the consideration of genetic factors is limited to asking participants' skin/fur colour and force ability. I find this strangely comforting (no asking about heritable dispositions toward addiction, psychiatric disorder, etc.? How quaint...) and at the same time somewhat ironic, given that it highlights the biggest cop-out in the whole Star Wars scrip process. (I.E.: if Anakin is predisposed to force-use because he was "fathered" by the force, Lucas wasn't forced to make force-use into a caste-type social scenario, and was also able to write a character with no personality strengths whatsoever and still make him the most intuitive/powerful force-user in the universe.) Thus, your genetics selections at the beginning of the show have no effect whatsoever beyond appearance, unless there's some kind of adaptive stat-checking in one of the other stations that factors force-power before presenting you with options.

Other factors include native culture, parental style, intellectual/physical aptitude, traumatic events, occupation, personality, value system, and the inevitable "dark vs. light" decision.

Personality seems to be the station with the most forethought put into it, basically it's a big-five / OCEAN model for personality traits. Again I didn't feel like the choices were really important to the "result" at the end of the tour, but it was clear the people who put this thing together were at least familiar with the commonly used personality assessment tools (even if they put no effort into the statistical instruments usually used to get some verifiability into vague test questions like "how much do you like people?")

The most interesting thing about the entire tour was seeing how much importance some people place on the decisions, or more specifically how *little* weight Z. gave any of them. Z.'s mom tagged along with us for the day and she practically begged him to let her watch as he selected his 'personality' answers. She tried to let him choose without steering his selections, but couldn't help questioning a few of his decisions. Z., being the impulsive twelve-year-old he is, retaliated in a few places by flaunting his ambivalence toward the meaning of such questions as "are you efficient and organized, or easy-going?" She clearly put a great deal of weight into the "results" of his answers (which, in a battery of questions so limited, are simply a read-back of the input you give...) while he didn't even bother to read them.

I've seen this in Z.'s attitude before, in the slightly-but-not-entirely different realm of Role-Playing Games. Z.'s history with games, up until about a year ago, centred on the simplistic (if in some cases well-designed) action-shooter genre. In the past year, he's played Fallout 3 and it's difficult for me to get a sense of what he really wants out of a role-playing experience. (I'll not that I've always expressed concern over the suitability of some of the games Z's parents have bought him, but it's a losing battle and so long as he's not playing them during our outings or telling me blatantly unhealthy things about them I try not to be overly negative about it, since it *is* something we can actually have fairly deep conversations about.) This really shouldn't surprise me, since I often have similar problems on a lesser scale (how do I collect all the best stuff in the game without resorting to outright burglary and banditry???) but it's funny hearing about his slowly-developing cognitive dissonance:
"It was really hard buying supplies or anything, since every town I went into everyone started shooting me on sight."
"Really? What did you do to get them that mad? Usually they only do that if you shoot first..."
"Well, the first time I went into a shop I picked up a rocket launcher and started blowing things up..."

RPGs are still quite limited in terms of the moral possibilities they offer (non-player-character scripting is still pretty limited in terms of motivation and response to binary and obvious triggers like being hurt by the player, political allegiance of the character, etc.) but in contrast to the magazine-quiz format of typical personality profiling tests, I think they offer real potential. Sure, gamers who are focused on winning will always use the "min-max" approach and create unrealistically one-dimensional characters to make the game easier to play, but in a way that's *more* indicative of real personality traits than even the most honest answer to "on a scale of one to five, how honest are you?"--if my only goal in the development of a character is the ability to win more battles (at the expense of exploration or social skills) I've expressed in a very clear way my intention and priorities. The trick with RPGs, though, is that they give people the option to explore multiple possibilities on different playthroughs. You can't look at the decisions a player makes in a video game as a definitive or reductive evaluation of values or even traits, but you *can* pull qualitative correlations from multiple playthroughs together with post-play interviews about player motivation and problem-solving strategies. Not saying the RPG should be the next thing in personality trait assessment, just that it's a very interesting tool that could probably be put to work in a laboratory setting to get a much different kind of result than the typical self-reporting (and thus only marginally verifiable) multiple-choice results.

[Ed.: I am beginning to see a strong correlation between the number of hours I'm awake, the amount of time I spend standing in lines, and the number of incoherent sentences I can type in one sitting.)

International Lettermail

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Several years ago, Canada Post decided that the easiest way to disguise the impact of rising energy prices and inflation on lettermail postage was to issue a generic stamp for domestic lettermail--if you buy a lot of stamps, you don't notice a difference at all, but if you buy a packet every decade or so you no longer need to supplement them with another penny's worth of stamps for every year you don't use them. The real benefit to this program is that most people are in the latter category, so the populace is far less likely to rise up and overthrow the postal system.
The interesting hitch is, what if you want to use them for oversize/weight or international postage? Turns out the generic stamps are basically commodities now, with a floating value based on current service prices. Thus, two domestic stamps are valued at $1.22, but next year they might be worth $1.24, or $1.50, or whatever Canada Post decides to value them at. This isn't a problem at present, but the simplicity of the 'one true stamp' system breaks down when you don't have any other stamps and need to figure out how to get $2.10 for US postage to cover the weight of heavy cardstock and a CD.
(Also: making "other lettermail" cost twice as much as "standard lettermail" just because it's slightly heavier is, in a word, extortion. Still better than what private couriers would probably do, and a luxury service in any case, but I reserve the right to be disgruntled.)

Luna Nova

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 07:41:00 +0000

The stars are full of memories
or so the poets say
the light that shines on us tonight
of distant past, so far away

My mind is full of wand'ring dreams
but hope... it keeps me here
what could have been, what might still be?
shall never be, because of fear

"Could I, then, have changed it?"
Is that the last torment?
Is this regret I feel tonight,
or just a pained lament?

To hope is but a curse, I think
when turned from now to then:
"so trust what is, shall be; no doubts!
Think not of how, but when."

In wand'ring thus, I feel less lost
and find more footing fair;
save nothing for the journey home
but trust it will be there.

Mem'ries are so full of stars:
they twinkle, glimmer-bright
and yet the darkness in between
is what I think on, here at night.

Perception and External Memory

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 04 May 2012 06:06:00 +0000

Don't know how many of you are familiar with the service called "Amazon Mechanical Turk," but here's an interesting application for it. (Thanks to Edward for the link.)
Basically, Matt Richardson has designed a camera that does what we've been jokingly describing to small children for years: allows the image to be interpreted by people trapped inside of it, and spat out in a new form.

When you press the shutter release on this camera, it uploads a digital image to one of the enterprising individuals contracted through Amazon's service, who types out a description and sends it back. The camera then prints the description, and perhaps more significantly, attaches the text as "metadata" to the digital image for use in catalog/search/database applications later. (The process can complete within six minutes of pressing the shutter release, a feat that's pretty astounding when you think about someone sitting on the other side of the world, working part-time typing descriptions for the images you take.)

Richardson's camera, it seems to me, could go a step further: he could contract graphic artists through A.M.T. who could "copy" the paintings in a variety of ways. This is so close to the idea of "tiny 'Polaroid Gnomes' inside the camera painting the picture" that it makes me giddy.

Rus and I were talking this evening about travel and the process of describing the places we visit to the people at home--he was recounting the story of someone he knows who re-traced the steps of his honeymoon and sent letters back to his terminally-ill spouse. This man didn't have a way to send images of all the places he stopped, but reflecting on that idea I'm pretty sure I'd rather *not* be able to take an album worth of photographs on a trip like that. Sure, a photo or two might be nice, and if you'd taken photos on your original honeymoon I'm sure you could make some very profound comparisons (if not of changes in scenery, the in the change of who's present in the photographs.) Describing the journey, though, gives an inherently reflective quality to the practice. Not that photos aren't reflective; I just think we're more likely to hide our perspective in photographs by slipping into the practice of taking "descriptive" or "journalistic" photos, capturing wide-angle perspectives in an attempt to remove ourselves from the scene. Sure, you can do the same thing with a written description--that's exactly what Richardson's "descriptive camera" system does, in a sense--but I think that a letter written to your wife about places you visited together in decades past would be hard to write in a passive voice.

In either form of the "descriptive camera," it does bring something interesting to photography: it removes the photograph by one "degree" or "generation" from the subject. This is, interestingly, something that many people assume cameras do already--we let the camera do the work of "seeing" the world, holding it at our own height and distance from the subject and assuming "this is what I'm seeing right now, ergo if I hold the camera here it will capture the reality of the thing itself, and preserve that reality for posterity." "It's just like being there", we say, and call our photo albums "mementos" of past events, people, and places. Something that photographers grapple with is the fallacy of this "objectification" of images; it's not "just like being there", it's "just like" someone showing you the world through their eyes at a very precise moment in time and space. Even in a description of a scene, you're going to get a very unique, personal twist on the "reality" of that precise moment, and you'll then add your own perceptual shifts in the way you interpret the description or see the image. Adding yet another layer of interpretation shifts our attention to the process, almost forcing us to ask questions "what's being left out?" and "Why this and not that?"

In a sense, photography is very much like our cognitive memories: we remember details, "close-ups", smells and sounds that are pulled out of very specific places and times; or very familiar, even mundane places and times, which we then ignore like stock photos in advertisements, attaching little significance to their details. I think it's the external nature of photography that makes us trust it: "it's outside of me, thus it's more "real" than my perception or memory." Interestingly, the same applies to oral tradition in cultures that don't have the same ideas about writing or image-making that we do: Plato argued that it was far more accurate to receive a spoken account of an idea than a written one, if only because you could ask questions and pester the speaker with questions. Oral tradition leaves things out, to be sure, and emphasizes new details in each generation, but there's a sense of accountability in the fact that the storyteller doesn't believe he is inventing the story as he goes along. If one deviates too far from the tradition, people will notice--much like the obvious darkroom/photoshop trickery that makes for a good laugh or a moment of skeptical amazement in some of the photography that's distributed in our culture. Even the "flair" that an individual storyteller can add to a tradition will stick out, in much the same way that a confident photographer, or writer, will add a touch of personal perspective that becomes a kind of signature for their work. People recognize this "flair", and it pulls attention away from the "objective" nature of the subject being described/viewed.

It's late so I'm not going to come up with any kind of profound conclusion for all this, but if you've got this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to add your two cents; pennies aren't going to be useful much longer anyway. ;)

Ich und Du_Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:21:00 +0000

The reader's thrill of first discovery

although unknown, not unfamiliar

foreign is not the same as alien.

An introduction we are right to fear

translation threefold--body, mind, and soul

from soul to mind, from mind to pen, why more?

these words make some things clear, and others cold.

Songs of Innocence and Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:35:00 +0000

My friend posted an excerpt from his Theological Ethics paper today:

"Parents often fail to realize their complicity in maintaining the socially constructed 'adult world' their children are expected to enter."

Are parent also complicit in giving children unrealistic expectations
about the 'child world' they are expected to inhabit?

DMS

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 09:59:00 +0000

Dead Man's Switch is a great implementation of an idea I've thought about a number of times over the past ten years or so.

Basically, it's a failsafe way to create an 'e-mail will'--you write the e-mails you want sent when you pass, they're encrypted and stored, and you have to log in every month to stop those messages being sent. (If you don't log in for 30 days, you get a reminder every week for another 30 days or so.)

I can't remember specifically why I was thinking about this tonight, but I found it with a google search on my Droid while waiting for a very long train...

To be honest, the most frightening idea isn't that I'd die, but rather that there are so many things I feel I've left unsaid--and so many of those things that I don't know if I ever can say.

Men must endure their going hence...

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:14:00 +0000

Light 'em if you've got 'em. 48 years today, and still Mythopoeia trumps politicized religion, every time.

Do something epic today.

When

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:46:00 +0000

When will I ?

When I .

Three of Seven

noreply@blogger.com (Jack) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 07:55:00 +0000

The shooting star she saw shone bright

A blaze of blue and brilliant green

It dropped as in a dream-like sight

From whence to where she did not ween

A beacon, or, a baleful sign?

Significance was there, it seemed