October 31, 2004
VALIS
I spent this long weekend in Phuket, Thailand. I was in a hurry not to miss my flight, so I spent no time searching for a book to read -- I just grabbed one off the shelf that had an orange "haven't read this yet" sticker on it and flew.
On the plane I looked at my selection, "VALIS" by Phillip K Dick. I started reading it. I wasn't five sentences into it before I said to myself, "oh fuck... not this book..." I started reading it four years ago. I barely got to the thirtieth page before I abandoned it. It was a nearly nonsensical collection of 1970's baked hippies carrying on about God. Now here I was stranded with nothing else to read, so I started working through it again.
Well, I finished it this weekend, but my opinion didn't change. Maybe this is really deep, has lots of vaguely autobiographical elements, pushes boundaries, etc. etc. but I hated it -- lots of very tedious religious babble, very little story line, and such a strange main-character device that I never gave a shit about anyone (not the least reason being you could never tell who the fucking narrator was...)
I spent about ten minutes trying to dream up a clever, sarcastic remark about what VALIS really stands for, but eventually I just told myself, "why waste even a single moment more on this book?"
p.s. Don't ask to borrow it. I abandoned it to the pool book collection of an obscure hotel along the Andaman Sea. It's almost like a landmine.... literally the only English book on a shelf filled with nothing but Mills&Boone romance novels translated into German. I'm sure some desperately bored English speaker will stumble on it sooner or later -- pray he also speaks German.
Update January 7, 2004
Oh great... someone auctioning off a set of correspondence PKD wrote about VALIS V.A.L.I.S. UBIK and U.B.I.K. I wonder if they're as tedious as the book?
October 28, 2004
October 23, 2004
First picture of Luke Blutig
Ling had her first appointment with the doctor after we found out she was pregnant... It's also going to be her last appointment with this doctor...
An industry friend of mine with similar attitudes and opinions recommended to me an expat ob/gyn who had lots of expat customers. I wanted Ling to try her out just because I want her to have the best progressive, western medical advice I can buy.
My friend told me, "expect ridiculous waiting times," so when I called up to make the appointment (they couldn't fit me in for two weeks) I mentioned this rumor of terribly long waits. The woman assured me, "oh, just call about an hour in advance and we'll tell you when to really come in, because we have a better sense of the schedule and disruptions." Ok, fine, that should work.
When I called them they said they'd let me know in an hour when I should come. Later they called Ling and told her to arrive at 1:30. Ok, so we showed up promptly. Ling filled out five minutes of paperwork.
Then we sat there for, literally, an hour.
In their crappy lobby with limited, uncomfortable furniture and nothing to read.
Then we sat there for another half hour.
In the meantime a western woman who also came at 1:30 started (politely) complaining, "why did you tell me to come at 1:30 when you knew I'd be waiting for hours?!"
The staff blew her off and then made jokes about her in Mandarin and local dialects (ignoring the fact that my wife understood exactly what they were saying about the lady -- mocking her for being (justifiably) irritated about having to wait so long).
It got worse. Soon there were at least a half dozen loud, rude staff in the lobby all carrying on (even including staff from other offices). It was as if the Doctor had lost control of the office to a mob of bullying clerks and an enormous Ogress chief-of-staff. It made Ling uniquely uncomfortable to hear them carrying on like that. They had no discretion. I'm now terribly familiar with the various bacterial manifestations and treatment regimes of one particular patient's vagina. Where was I? a locker room?
Finally, 1:45 minutes later we saw the doctor. It didn't matter, by now I had fully decided we'd never darken this clinic's doorway again. Even ignoring the madhouse environment of this clinic I would not care for this doctor. The other warning I'd received was that she did not like men and had no interest in involving them. It was certainly the impression I got -- she'd never look at me and could barely suffer to answer my questions. I snapped when she didn't listen to me clearly and tried to cut me off with a dismissive interruption. I came down with the most menacing Elmore Leonard voice I've ever spoken with and I think that snapped her out of the clinic's cloud cuckoo land long enough to hear me out.
Anyway, fortunately the baby, 5.5 weeks post-conception (due date June 5) appears totally normal. I got to see the remarkable sonar pictures shown above as well as listen to the incredibly fast heartbeat. The little chart in the picture is a heartbeat track.
Our next appointment (at a ob/gyn that Ling already knows and approves of) is in two weeks. That should be significantly more sane. Visits to this woman's clinic are like finding Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. No thanks.
October 21, 2004
Built a road bike
Last night I started out with this frame....
... and two hours later had this bike:
What happened? Recently I joined a club in Singapore called Tribob which provides services for amateur and professional triathletes. One of the benefits is that they can make custom fit titatnium road bike ideal for triathlons, and for prices much better than retail.
A month ago they took a series of arm, leg, and shoulder measurements from me. Software took that telemetry and derived the correct frame size and geometry for a competitive triathlon racing bike. Those instructions were sent off to an OEM in Taiwan and a month later they returned me a custom-welded titanium frame to those specifications.
It only took Mervyn at Tribob two hours to build up the frame into a complete bike using top-end gear including a complete set of Dura-Ace components. I watched the whole process and he made it seem easy.
One interesting note is that anywhere alloy components touch the titanium-alloy frame, it must be insulated with a copper-based anti-sieze compound, otherwise the two metals will slowly chemically bind to each other.
I got home at 1030pm but couldn't wait to try it out. One complication was that I have never used a clip-in pedal system. I briefly tried to practice clipping in and out while bracing myself against the wall, but got bored after thirty seconds. I ran outside, popped one foot in, rode four feet, and fell right to the ground. I hopped back on, started again with more momentum, and practiced taking my feet in and out as I rode, one foot in, one foot out. It actually was easy. Within two hundred meters I was comfortable with them and the clips were no longer any big deal.
Once I started cruising I was ecstatic. I've never ridden a high quality road bike. The bike is like a razor. It tracks the road very tightly and has very sharp steering. It's gearing is all huge and almost instantly accelerates to 20kmh. I was told that on high quality road bikes the rolling resistance is almost zero and more than 90% of the resistance is from wind. Since the bike is designed expressly for me, I naturally fall into a reasonably comfortable aerodynamic position. It really wants to go fast.
I've ridden it three times now. I need to toughen up a bit, my hands and ass get a bit numb after riding too long. Next weekend I'm taking three days away for a triathlon training camp in Phuket with the Tribob club. That's three days of hilly 100km bike rides, so I need to toughen up my butt and find some gloves soon. I also have a second rear cog set that has a few granny gears for the hills there.
October 17, 2004
Japanese Sunday
Ling's been at our friend's house much of today waiting for his Beagle to give birth to a litter. I was left to my own devices and ended up having what I can only describe as a day with a strong Japanese aesthetic -- quality food, drink, art, and literature.
Recently I got sick of making nasty scrambled eggs and decided to learn how to make a proper omelette as the French would. A couple lessons from the Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and now I can rip out a decent example. Admittedly I have to use the simpler of the two procedures. The one that involves using nothing but violence of pan movement to flip and turn the egg still exceeds me. The challenge now seems to be able to simultaneously prepare both the omelette and my latte. I'm picky about the preperation of both and don't want to let either sit cooling while I finish the other.
After breakfast I spent an hour with my digital camera (1dmkii) photographing some lilies with a 100mm f2.8 macro lens. All I can say is that I'm glad I didn't use film on most of these photos because I am still struggling with setting the shots up nicely. I was doing this in my living room, not out in the sun and wind like Stas does. How does he get such nice shots in those awful conditions?
When I grew tired of narrow focal planes and and fussy tripods I picked up the only truly Japanese thing of this Japanese-style day -- tore through the first half of Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Reminds me a lot of the Sea of Fertility series -- a simple story with characters who have terribly intense personalities (of which they're all painfully aware of). I have no illusions that this story will end in anything other than tears and the death of at least one, likely all, the major characters.
Woven in with my reading was the consumption of several crisp, cold Cooper's Pale Ales (from a tiny glass to keep them cold), and work on my major lunch of the day, Roast chicken with lemon and rosemary potatoes, from the new Jamie Oliver's Dinners cookbook. This book has really pleased me. The recipes are smart and feasible. The photography is inspiring. While the Julia Child book is written very much as a text for professional French chefs, this is written much more to the "I have a real job, and very limited time to shop and cook but want a decent meal at home" reader.
My Japanese Aesthetic was disturbed when Ling came back and dragged me out to see the puppies. This involved a lot of waiting and watching as puppies with lots of shredded newspaper stuck to them with placental glue stumbled around their makeshift den. The Aesthetic was terminated when our friend's dad handed me a drink that was impolite to refuse but impossible to consume -- a revolting Tiger Beer served over crushed ice. Tiger Beer is horrible to begin with (has the burning sensation of a bumwine) and serving it over ice just serves to liberate the carbonation and stretch 12oz of swill into 16oz. Good grief. I tossed it in the bushes when no one was looking.
October 13, 2004
Evolution of Cooperation
In the Spring of 1991 I took a 300-series political science class labelled "Strategy" taught by Nobel-winning professor Herbert Simon (*). The course title described itself as a class on strategy, however most of it ended up being a dissection of various forms of voting and ranking and demonstrating how almost none of them work. The high point of the class was studying the book, "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Herbert Axelrod.
In 1984 Axelrod hosted a competition between various programs playing the Prisoner's Dilemma. The conclusion was that a strategy of "Tit for Tat" (doing whatever your opponent did last) was the best long-term playing strategy. His discussion of why it worked, and why other, more complicated strategies failed was eminently readable and interesting.
Fast-forward twenty years. Wired runs an article about a rehash of this competition. Effectively the winner of this year's game used a loophole in the rules to win -- the contest allowed you to submit as many agents as you want. So the winner entered a set of agents that colluded by port-knocking each other early in the game to identify one another, and then agreeing who would be the winner and who the loser, essentially fixing those results.
I don't know, Wired made a great deal about it, but I don't really see what it proves. So yeah, they found a loophole and won, but so what? On its own, one of those agents would not win, and I thought that is what the simulation was? It's not applicable, for instance, in a real world scenario like the trench warfare of WW1 where Germans and British evolved de facto agreements not to kill each other between major offensives.
(*) Stupid WikiPedia... Simon taught the class at University of Rochester, but I didn't see any mention of that university in the Wikipedia results. I tried to goto the 'discussion' pane of the Herbert Simon results to ask about this, but it just kept telling me, "There is no page 'Herbert Simon'" . I tried to submit a bug report on the page, but i had made five page clicks and still couldn't find out how, so I abandoned it. WikiWankers
October 08, 2004
October 07, 2004
Take that!
I went mad today and bought a Canon 1d mark ii digital camera.
The battery is still charging, and I don't know anything about high-end digital cameras, so I don't have much to say about it yet.
The only thing I've done is put it into high speed continuous mode and fired off a burst of something ridiculous like eight frames per second. The noise sounded exactly like a silenced submachine gun in The Bourne Identity. It's nuts.
Theoretically I'll be able to do better macro and weird-light-condition photography with this camera, as I can immediately see the results. (and lots of artistic nudes of myself using the camera's thirty-second timer)
October 03, 2004
We can see everything. Do not use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons.
I was flipping through my folder of psychological warfare flyers used before the start of the invasion of Iraq. Cannot decide whether this flyer wins the "Biggest Irony" award or "Biggest Lie" award.
Do not attempt to use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. The Coalition has superior satellite technology which allows Coalition forces to see the preparation and transportation of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Unit commanders will be held accountable for non-compliance.