I'm putting together an article about personality types and the kinds of people who tend to read hard science-fiction. This is also an excuse to play with polling software of which blogpoll seems to be the simplest (surveymonkey is more powerful but more complex). Anyway, please feel free to have a go.
The answers correspond to the Keirsey temperament types NF, SP, NT and SJ for those people who are into that.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Monday, November 28, 2011
Newton's Collapsing Universe
"Sir Isaac Newton was possibly the greatest scientist who ever lived. But even great men can make mistakes – it’s just that their errors are more interesting than other people’s.
Newton’s law of motion (force equals mass times acceleration) is taught in every high school. Newton’s law of gravitation (the inverse-square law) is precise enough to be used by NASA for space mission design and was used by Newton himself to determine the motion of the planets. Given the wide applicability and accuracy of his theory, it was natural that Newton’s questing intelligence would turn to the question of the structure of the universe itself."
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
Newton’s law of motion (force equals mass times acceleration) is taught in every high school. Newton’s law of gravitation (the inverse-square law) is precise enough to be used by NASA for space mission design and was used by Newton himself to determine the motion of the planets. Given the wide applicability and accuracy of his theory, it was natural that Newton’s questing intelligence would turn to the question of the structure of the universe itself."
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
Book Review: ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson
Biographer Walter Isaacson talks of ‘Good Steve’ and ‘Bad Steve’ but the latter was more frequently in evidence. Take the engineer who’d been working 80 hour weeks (how do you even do that?) for ten months and had the misfortune to meet up with Jobs one Friday afternoon for review. Jobs fell into a typical fury and began abusing the engineer, calling his work ‘shit’: shortly afterwards the engineer quit. This sounds terrible, and it is, but without ‘Bad Steve’ there would have been – nothing.
When engineers design a product it is typically efficient but clunky; over-functional and under-integrated. When accountants are in charge you get what the engineers wanted, but on the cheap. In most product companies, designers are humble artisans, serving up a ‘user-friendly’ wrapping over what someone else decided to produce.
By contrast, wherever Steve Jobs went the designer was in charge: Jobs was the super-user, the ambassador of the user experience. But when design is king, everyone else is required to move mountains to meet the central design concept. Naturally they consider this to be utterly unnecessary if not outright wilful.
Jobs’s reality distortion field denoted the triumph of ‘unrealistic’ design excellence over ‘good-enough’ engineering practice. Yet design is inherently subjective, there are no algorithms or equations that can tell you what Steve Jobs knew. The triumph of the apparently-arbitrary requires the power of a tyrant, yet that power was not (in general) wielded for personal reasons, but in the service of the design.
The design is not to be messed with. The Apple walled garden of total integration and control is the antithesis of the modular mix-n-match we associate with PC and Internet culture. But when the user (or the manufacturer) simply integrates a solution from market-available components there can be no over-arching design concept: flexibility, of necessity, breeds clunkiness. So which is best?
Everything in life is a trade-off. If you want a seamless, elegant and intuitive digital experience, then Apple will give it to you at a price, provided you stay within the Apple universe. Outside it you will have wider, cheaper and perhaps more innovative options, but the systems are uglier, harder to use and prone to odd failures. That’s what you get when there’s no adult supervision of the user experience.
Apple’s talented chief designer, Jony Ive, was dismayed by talk that Apple was (in the longer term) doomed to become just another company after Jobs’s death. ‘Many of the ideas were mine and I’m still here’ seemed to be his position; and with Tim Cook as the supportive CEO what was to stop the show going on? Just the missing ingredient of ‘Bad Steve’, the tyranny which breaks the resistance of all those reasonable voices from engineering and finance who can find a million excellent reasons for not entering the reality distortion field.
—
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs , despite its door-stopping 600 pages, has been a runaway bestseller. Based on meticulous research (more than one hundred interviews) you get page-turning fly-on-the-wall access to the key episodes in Steve Jobs’s personal and business career. This is also an insider’s history of Silicon Valley high-tech from the dawn of the PC-age.
For several days while I was reading it I was boring my family by reading aloud amusing and frequently horrifying anecdotes of Steve Jobs’s behaviour, not all of which reflected badly on him. It’s highly recommended.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
The Tramp in the Church (redux)
We've been here before.
As Clare led the way into the church this morning, she spotted him occupying the pew just before the back one, the one where we usually hang out on the right hand side of the aisle.
"Where would you like us to go?" she whispered back to me.
"On the other side," I replied, meaning the other wing of the church, the one facing the Holy Land rather than the north-facing wing where we currently were.
Clare mistook my meaning and we continued to the rear pew on the other side of the aisle, where I was able to keep watch on the somnolent tramp from the corner of my eye. With no little schadenfreude I kept count of latecomers, who were forced by overcrowding into the empty pews in front and behind him.
During the service he stayed crouched down, occasionally turning in one direction or another. Finally we approached the part of the Mass where the congregation make the "sign of peace". I didn't think he would venture as far as me but I had prepared a little script involving bowing to him and whispering 'pax vobiscum' in a detached kind of way. Hopefully that would save me from having to use Clare's wet-wipes afterwards.
In the event, as the moment came, he enthusiastically shook his dirty mitt with the family in front and the young man behind, then he scuttled across the aisle and shook hands with a lay official of the parish, just in front of me. Like a wave which reaches its limits amidst the pebbles, this marked the culmination of his efforts and he retreated back to his lair.
"We dodged a bullet there," I confided to Clare.
During the sermon the priest, Father Philip, confided that Mass yesterday evening had been disrupted by a man who walked up to the altar, started swearing and disrobing, and claimed to be Jesus Christ. Apparently the services of burly parishioners - and possible the police - were required to restore normality.
The priest's take was focused on the virtues of taking your medication: I had no idea that such excitement occurred in sleepy Wells. I looked at the tramp again, this time in a wholly new light, excited by the possibilities.
As Clare led the way into the church this morning, she spotted him occupying the pew just before the back one, the one where we usually hang out on the right hand side of the aisle.
"Where would you like us to go?" she whispered back to me.
"On the other side," I replied, meaning the other wing of the church, the one facing the Holy Land rather than the north-facing wing where we currently were.
Clare mistook my meaning and we continued to the rear pew on the other side of the aisle, where I was able to keep watch on the somnolent tramp from the corner of my eye. With no little schadenfreude I kept count of latecomers, who were forced by overcrowding into the empty pews in front and behind him.
During the service he stayed crouched down, occasionally turning in one direction or another. Finally we approached the part of the Mass where the congregation make the "sign of peace". I didn't think he would venture as far as me but I had prepared a little script involving bowing to him and whispering 'pax vobiscum' in a detached kind of way. Hopefully that would save me from having to use Clare's wet-wipes afterwards.
In the event, as the moment came, he enthusiastically shook his dirty mitt with the family in front and the young man behind, then he scuttled across the aisle and shook hands with a lay official of the parish, just in front of me. Like a wave which reaches its limits amidst the pebbles, this marked the culmination of his efforts and he retreated back to his lair.
"We dodged a bullet there," I confided to Clare.
During the sermon the priest, Father Philip, confided that Mass yesterday evening had been disrupted by a man who walked up to the altar, started swearing and disrobing, and claimed to be Jesus Christ. Apparently the services of burly parishioners - and possible the police - were required to restore normality.
The priest's take was focused on the virtues of taking your medication: I had no idea that such excitement occurred in sleepy Wells. I looked at the tramp again, this time in a wholly new light, excited by the possibilities.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
House Pictures
Here are some pictures of our house.
Our house from the road
The patio at the side
The back garden
Clare in the kitchen
The living room
The kitchen-diner
Bird-feeders in the front-garden
The owners on the couch
Wuthering Heights
We saw "Wuthering Heights" (2011) on Tuesday at the Wells Film Centre. The poster below is an accurate depiction of how dreary and tedious the experience was.
Given the ever-present torrential rain, the deep mud, leaden skies and howling winds it was immediately apparent that this movie had not been sanctioned by the Yorkshire Tourist Board. What really kills it, however, is that Heathcliff is played by actors so passive, charmless and lacking in any kind of sexual charisma that no conceivable woman could have been attracted to him.
The director has tried to make up for the zero chemistry between the leading players by all kinds of erotic imagery and Freudian suggestiveness: the risible awfulness of this unsubtle manipulation is the only thing which saves the audience from descending into the deepest Yorkshire depression.
Yesterday I was in Bristol visiting my mother, who was keen to show off her new coat, hat and gloves. One picture shows fine wares from Lidl while the other features M&S (which is which?). Both stores are apparently engaged in deep price-cutting: times are indeed hard.
Today I'm going to have a rest after I've fixed the wretched kitchen spotlight (there's a dodgy connection) which Adrian repaired with bluetack but which promptly failed again two days later.
And I feel impelled to write something about the superb Walter Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs.
The director has tried to make up for the zero chemistry between the leading players by all kinds of erotic imagery and Freudian suggestiveness: the risible awfulness of this unsubtle manipulation is the only thing which saves the audience from descending into the deepest Yorkshire depression.
Yesterday I was in Bristol visiting my mother, who was keen to show off her new coat, hat and gloves. One picture shows fine wares from Lidl while the other features M&S (which is which?). Both stores are apparently engaged in deep price-cutting: times are indeed hard.
And I feel impelled to write something about the superb Walter Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs.
Monday, November 21, 2011
The Cat's Gozzy Tooth
The days go by and the cat's gozzy tooth refuses to fall out.
The one good thing is that as he frightens the voles so much, he never comes close to catching any.
Meanwhile, Clare has decided to study Freud (this, I think, from watching a surfeit of "Waking the Dead" - the more I see of Peter Boyd, the Trevor Eve character, the more I think his personality is pretty much identical with that of Steve Jobs).
Clare reading Freud
Dr Freud was a sex-obsessed control freak: I've made sure she also has access to the kinder, gentler and altogether more profound Dr Carl Jung.
Mind Reading
"Michael vectors the hidden camera to a wealthy-looking patron on his first course. A click on the joystick and the second screen lights up: this is the one that reads the client’s mind.
Mr. Rich-Guy seems happy enough according to the emotion-bar at the bottom of the display. It’s showing a lush, reassuring yellow with shades of soft green and pink. The main part of the monitor is interpreting the subject’s visual cortex: on the screen his mind’s eye view of the meal wobbles and occasionally morphs into something similar – the machine isn’t quite perfect. The prawn cocktail segues into a view of a tropical bay, a very long way from this rain-swept New York evening. The swirling yellows and greens show that this too is a pleasant association – the meal is still going well.
Michael wonders endlessly where his boss got all this stuff. As the lowest of the low in the restaurant hierarchy, he would never dream of asking though. From idle chat in the kitchen he’s discovered that the owner used to be in Military Intelligence. Somehow, some top-secret interrogation equipment managed to end up in his new venture. Behind the walls and above the false ceiling there are sensitive field detectors which can amplify the faintest swirls of an active brain."
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
It would be very difficult to detect brain activity at a distance - I think current experiments require the subject to be inside a scanner. I have no idea whether the signal strength is sufficient for cortical activity to be reconstructed even in principle from detectors behind a wall.
Mr. Rich-Guy seems happy enough according to the emotion-bar at the bottom of the display. It’s showing a lush, reassuring yellow with shades of soft green and pink. The main part of the monitor is interpreting the subject’s visual cortex: on the screen his mind’s eye view of the meal wobbles and occasionally morphs into something similar – the machine isn’t quite perfect. The prawn cocktail segues into a view of a tropical bay, a very long way from this rain-swept New York evening. The swirling yellows and greens show that this too is a pleasant association – the meal is still going well.
Michael wonders endlessly where his boss got all this stuff. As the lowest of the low in the restaurant hierarchy, he would never dream of asking though. From idle chat in the kitchen he’s discovered that the owner used to be in Military Intelligence. Somehow, some top-secret interrogation equipment managed to end up in his new venture. Behind the walls and above the false ceiling there are sensitive field detectors which can amplify the faintest swirls of an active brain."
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
It would be very difficult to detect brain activity at a distance - I think current experiments require the subject to be inside a scanner. I have no idea whether the signal strength is sufficient for cortical activity to be reconstructed even in principle from detectors behind a wall.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Adrian back to Canada
By now Adrian should be at Sun Peaks, British Columbia, asleep after a 24 hour trip which started at Reading station yesterday in the morning rush-hour. Once Western Canada starts its day he'll be zooming around to get lift passes and other bits of documentation ... he could be teaching ski/snowboarding classes as early as tomorrow.
While Adrian was in the air, we were in Bristol yesterday paying an exorbitant £6 car park charge to shop in the Broadmead city centre complex. I now have some outdoor boots - comfortable as trainers and waterproof as only a Gore-Tex liner can make it.
Next we lost ourselves in the labyrinth which is IKEA and I emerged like some dusty refugee with a heavy yellow bag slung over my shoulder stashed with household goodies. At least the cushions weren't too much of a burden to carry...
Next, with my mother, we were off to Lewis's at Cribbs Causeway where Clare ordered four new rainbow-striped dining chairs, which may even arrive in time for Christmas. We were home by 4.30.
While Adrian was in the air, we were in Bristol yesterday paying an exorbitant £6 car park charge to shop in the Broadmead city centre complex. I now have some outdoor boots - comfortable as trainers and waterproof as only a Gore-Tex liner can make it.
Next we lost ourselves in the labyrinth which is IKEA and I emerged like some dusty refugee with a heavy yellow bag slung over my shoulder stashed with household goodies. At least the cushions weren't too much of a burden to carry...
Next, with my mother, we were off to Lewis's at Cribbs Causeway where Clare ordered four new rainbow-striped dining chairs, which may even arrive in time for Christmas. We were home by 4.30.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Has Greg Egan gone too far?
"Once upon a time, one of our most noted authors of ultra-hard SF wrote a novel about a bunch of aliens living in the interior of an asteroid in close orbit around a black hole. The author, Greg Egan, was so incensed by one of the reviews of this book – by Adam Roberts at Strange Horizons – that he wrote a detailed rebuttal on his website (Anatomy of a Hatchet Job)."
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
This is another article which more repays careful reading than the oh-my-gosh appeal of an asteroid-impact piece. It segues from the style of literary criticism appropriate for science-heavy SF to the merits of exploring counterfactual physics. Mr Egan constantly stretches the link between the standard mechanisms of fiction and the conceptual intricacies of modern physics, inviting his literate fans to follow..
Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.
This is another article which more repays careful reading than the oh-my-gosh appeal of an asteroid-impact piece. It segues from the style of literary criticism appropriate for science-heavy SF to the merits of exploring counterfactual physics. Mr Egan constantly stretches the link between the standard mechanisms of fiction and the conceptual intricacies of modern physics, inviting his literate fans to follow..
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