bwilder

Apparently, the Somerville Theater used to play the movie Alice's Restaurant in the Somerville Theater for folks who were in town, or so I heard yesterday. They no longer do this, and I wonder why not; I think it would be a blast to go to that during the day before Thanksgiving dinner. The 30th anniversary edition of the song was played at the event I attended yesterday, and it was actually quite a lot of fun to listen to it along with folks who had never heard it before. Who knows, maybe they will bring it back...

Happy Thanksgiving, folks:)

It is the day after Thanksgiving, it is rainy and miserable outside, and I am at work. Early. It will be a day where nothing gets accomplished - lots of "I'm sorry, you've reached the answering service" and "Wait, you guys are working today?" I've got a long day ahead of me, and I need your help, internet.

Entertain me.

Tell me a story, a joke, a secret, whatever. You can post anonymously if you've got something particularly good. Just tell me something.

As of now, cooking commences. Shawn has gratefully allowed me to blast Springsteen while I start on my pies, green bean casserole, and noodle kugel. This is the first Thanksgiving I'd had a big hand in, so I'm nervous and excited. Here's to winning!

Subject line says it all.

Comment away!

Referencing a conversation we had on Monday:

So, I was wrong about the parts of the Trans-Labrador Highway that were finished.

Here's the situation, as best I can determine:

Phase I, from the Quebec-Labrador border to Goose Bay, NL, is finished:

Phase II, from Cartwright, NL to Blanc-Sablon, QC, is also done:

Phase III, from Goose Bay, NL to Cartwright, NL, is under construction. The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador's own website contradicts itself as to when it will be open.

(Lots of environmental impact info:
http://www.env.gov.nl.ca/env/Env/EA%202001/Project%20Info/1012.htm)

In the meantime, the ferry will take you from Goose Bay to Cartwright.

Google Maps remains a bit confused about that ferry, which according to the ferry website does actually stop in Cartwright on its way to Lewisporte.

A couple of good sites on driving the TLH:
http://amxfiles.com/stoneji/97trip/tlh_notes.htm
http://www.artistic.ca/dteed/labrador.htm

More links: http://www.tlhwy.com/travel/links.html

A picture of the start of Phase III.

P. S. palmwiz, I think I lack a current email address for you.

I'd a craving for 干炒牛河, a.k.a. Beef chow fun. As I mentioned in azulita's journal recently, my food cravings often last for a few days, so I sometimes just wait until I have a good opportunity. However, having tried last night at dinner with digitalemur, only to be told by the waiter at Great Wall that they were out, I felt I was overdue. So tonight, even after bedfull_o_books decided to go to bed, I thought I'd go find some.

Well, I went in to Chinatown to see what was open at 1AM. Peach Farm Restaurant had it, and though the waitstaff were brusque, I figured I'd eat there.

The chow fun was on the oily side, but it was passable, and $7.25 including tax is an entirely reasonable price around here. However, I was eager to get out of there because of the guests at the next table.

It was a party of four: two clean-cut white boys, two thin Asian girls, all drunk, all twenty-something. One of the Asian girls was so drunk she was weaving to the table when she walked up, and occasionally leaning against the mirrored wall as she sat. Their conversation was loud, profane, and vapid. The first conversation I heard was the two girls--both dressed in black--screeching at one of the guys in disbelief that he could possibly fail to own a black shirt. This went on for most of my meal, although they did progress to harassing him about not owning a black suit, and how if he were to accompany one of them to her company formal she'd want him to arrive wearing a black suit. Then some incoherent argument followed about the meaning of the term "semi-formal", and how it applied to company events.

It was difficult to avoid hearing their argument, even in a fairly noisy basement restaurant, because they were the loudest table in the place.

When I came back to the table to leave a tip after settling my bill, I saw the drunker of the two girls lifting a teetering plate to the mouth of one of the boys to shove noodles with her fingers into his mouth. He was somewhat feebly resisting, while the other girl whined about how she had never seen anything so disgusting. "I think I'm going to puke," she said.

I fled before I got to see that.

But at least I got my chow fun. And a show to go with it.

i'm going backwards. rather than upgrading my mac laptop, i'm looking to downgrade it to osx 10.4 (tiger).

does anyone know where i can find a copy of an older apple operating system?
almost everyone i see in the cafes with macs are running updated leopard or snow leopard. if anyone has upgraded lately, and no longer needs their original osx 10.4 disks, maybe we can work out a deal ($, box of kickass cupcakes, ?).

ideas? thanks!!

Somerville Police Chief Anthony Holloway is one of a dozen short-listed candidates for the post of police chief in his hometown of Clearwater, Fla.

“Chief Holloway has done an outstanding job during his first 18 months here in Somerville and we certainly hope he will stay,” said city spokesman Tom Champion. “His hiring was part of an ongoing reorganization and reform process on which we have made enormous progress. Of course, there’s still plenty of work still to be done and it would be great to have him here to help see it through.”

http://www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/news/x826021989/Somerville-Police-Chief-interviews-for-Florida-job-after-18-months

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/somerville/2009/11/somerville_police_chief_a_fina.html

11-25-09

What I’m Reading Now: Under the Dome, by Stephen King

In the morning, I woke up early and clambered into Whitney’s immense Army vehicle they’d bought at a government auction. It was Doug’s anniversary gift to her. I took my guy to Disney World. We have different lives, ( us and them. )

http://www.folded.com/bray/?p=1341

Look! It’s Colin Powell! And he is… It’s Colin Powell, and I think he’s… okay, it’s Colin Powell doing something to his…

In comments, reply with anything-- something silly, something in your head for no reasons, something dead serious-- and I will ask you five questions to post on your own journal.

Posed by retsuko:
1) What are your top five desert island classical music disks and why?
...Can't I just bring my 60-gig iPod?

1. Gotta be The Magic Flute, conducted by Roger Norrington:
http://www.amazon.com/Mozart-Die-Zauberfl%C3%B6te-Wolfgang-Amadeus/product-reviews/B000002RSC/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
I stole this from my parents when I went to college. I love the lightness and humor of the interpretation, and it may just be, minute for minute, the most *tuneful* piece of music ever written. It also makes me very happy, and if I'm stuck on a desert island, I'm gonna need that...

2. Pablo Casals' Bach cello suites. Yep, yep.

3. Verdi Requiem. I actually don't love-love the recording of it that I own, but *a* recording of the Verdi Requiem.

4. If I am stuck on a desert island and can't ever hear a Beethoven symphony again, I will cry. Of all of them, I'm afraid it's got to be the 9th-- much as I love #7 currently, the 9th is the only one that has actually moved me to tears. (I am cheesy!)
Thus demonstrating that my crying while stuck on my desert island is tautological.

5. No Ravel, Faure, or Debussy? No Shostakovich, no Tchaikovsky, no Stravinsky, no Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis? You're killing me here.
This morning, the last disk I would bring is Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije, with the Classical Symphony and the suite from The Love for Three Oranges. I think Ozawa has a recording of that.

2) Pirates, ninjas, or bureaucrats?
Pirates-- but only if it's the Merry-Go.

3) Describe your ideal lazy Sunday afternoon.

Shut in by falling snow without having to shovel it. Mulled cider with a kick. Friends drop by to play Puerto Rico or some other long-ass game; we laugh and at some point transition to a slow lazy dinner.

4) What's your cooking forte?
Summer salads of whatever ilk. I tend to have more cooking time in the summer, and the fresh produce inspires me. :)

5) Your three best Jeopardy categories.
I'm going to be no use to you here because I don't watch Jeopardy, but here are three categories I have completely made up that I think I would rock at:
1) Tolkien Trivia
2) Seven-Letter Word Jumble
3) Actors Who Have Been In Multiple Science Fiction Franchises

Charles Stross, author of Accelerando and other sci-fi books, wrote a fascinating post two weeks ago (thanks to Ari for linking it). He talked about the challenge of designing society for posterity: how to make a social order that could run a "generation ship" without falling apart.

Generation starships: they're not fast.

If you can crank yourself up to 1% of light-speed, alpha centauri is more than four and a half centuries away at cruising speed. To put it in perspective, that's the same span of time that separates us from the Conquistadores and the Reformation; it's twice the lifespan of the United States of America.

We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different.

[...]

I've been (inconclusively) batting around some ideas with Karl Schroeder — how do you design a society for the really long term? There are a couple of levels to consider: notably, decision-making and economics. And it doesn't look as if we've got any good solutions to either.

You should read the whole post; it's fascinating stuff. And if you think about it, there's a hidden question in there. A society that could remain stable aboard a generation ship - an enclosed biosphere hurtling through space - is, of course, a society that could remain stable aboard Spaceship Earth.

Too bad the question itself makes no sense.



Don't get me wrong: "how do you design a society for the really long term?" makes perfect grammatical sense. You can even start imagining along those lines, as Stross and his friend Schroeder evidently did, for several 'grafs worth of thought. But if you consider what those actual words mean - specifically, design, society and long term - the question becomes impossible. There is no way to answer it.

Let's say Stross, or NASA, or even you, come up with a way to answer the question. And let's say a generation ship - a vessel capable of interstellar travel along a lifespan of hundreds of years - gets built. Here's what it'll look like on Day One.

NASA Project Director: Okay, guys, remember what we told you ...
Generation Ship Crew: Right, right, we remember.
NASA Project Director: ... you're an oligarchical commune with rotating leadership roles and multiple redundant judiciaries ...
Generation Ship Crew: Mm-hmm, got it.
NASA Project Director: ... lower the radiation shields every 400 days to prevent genetic drift ...
Generation Ship Crew: It's all in the three-ring binder. We've got it.
NASA Project Director: Okay. Just checking. Good luck, people!
(ship door seals; generation ship takes off)
Generation Ship Crew: SPRING BREAK! WHOOOO!

Okay, maybe things won't fall apart that fast.

But the entire premise of Stross's question ignores an obvious hurdle: if some social scientist theorizes the Perfect Society for a generation ship, who's to say anyone inside the generation ship is going to follow it? Especially once they're light years away from the home world? NASA can tell the crew, "The engineers are in charge; if what they say isn't law, the ship stops spinning and O2 stops filtering and you all die in six weeks." But that doesn't matter, unless every non-engineer aboard the ship also agrees.

To be fair, Stross isn't suggesting that the Perfect Society be dictated from on high. He closes the post with the question, "What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?"

But the question is still irrelevant. Stross can prove, using all the equations social science has to offer, that (say) an anarcho-syndicalist state where the Chief Engineer, the Head Gardener and the Captain of the Dodgeball Team act as a non-legislative judiciary is the only stable state for a closed, high-maintenance biosphere that has to have a population greater than x in 450 years. But that proof is irrelevant to the people inside that biosphere unless they believe it. If I scrub the oxygen filters, I might be convinced after a few years that I'm the most important person aboard the ship. After all, without me, everyone dies.

And even if NASA somehow indoctrinates every member of the first generation of the crew in their Perfect Social Theory, there's a reason this sci-fi construct is called a generation ship. It will take more than one generation to get where it's going. Four and a half centuries from here to Alpha Centauri at 0.1c; that's eighteen generations. Who's to say your kids will hold to the anarcho-syndicalist ideal with the same fervor you did? Or their kids? It only takes one generation to decide the reactor only needs sixteen control rods instead of twenty for the entire project to fail.

Far more important than the question of what should happen is the question of what will happen.



So let's say we lock 250,000 engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists and janitors inside an asteroid and slap it toward Alpha Centauri. We tell them, in the strictest language we know, what they have to do in order to stay alive. But once they get airborne, it's anarchy - not in the "jungle savagery" sense, but in the "no recognized law" sense. What form of social order will evolve?

My guess: the same ones we've seen throughout history. The human race evolved in an open biosphere with no set instructions on how best to live. A generation ship changes two of those variables, closing the biosphere off from mutation and leaving a three-ring binder of Best Practices. But otherwise, we'll probably see what we've seen throughout history: warring tribes, dueling factions, a period of disorder that leads to a strong preference for law and a powerful state that arises as a result. A quarter of a million of Earth's best and brightest go in; forty-five decades later, Augustus Caesar steps out.

# # #

I am going to read a little into Stross's post now.

I suspect that implicit in the definition of "Perfect Society" is stability. Stross hopes that the Perfect Society will in fact be so utopian that it will not change, because no one will ever have a reason to change it. Not only will it fulfill everyone's needs, but everyone within it will recognize that it will fulfill everyone's needs. It's a perpetual motion machine, requiring only its own input to keep going.

(The first question - if you discover this perfectly stable social order, why do you even have to leave Earth? - might merit another post)

This implicit premise - if I'm right in ascribing it to Stross - highlights a regrettable belief in technocracy. Technocracy is the belief that if we only put the right experts or the right rules in place, the social order will run itself. Our current problems, like poverty, corruption, ignorance and violence, do not well up from human nature. They're artifacts of an outdated culture. If we pass the right laws, we can get rid of anything we don't like.

Both conservatives and liberals are guilty of this.

Conservatives follow it in the form of "legislating morality." Outlawing abortion springs to mind. "If abortions are outlawed, then no one will have any abortions!", conservatives believe, contra all sense and experience. In reality, outlawing abortions means that women will terminate their pregnancies in dangerous, illegal ways. You cannot change the desire of a woman to own her own body by passing a law.

Liberals follow it in the form of "managerial liberalism." A recent example: the stimulus package! The federal government passes a $787,000,000,000 "recovery package" to distribute money to local agencies and companies. Shockingly, some of this money has gone to waste. The most recent example: four Congressional districts in Hawaii that don't exist received over $40,000,000 in stimulus money. Similar bookkeeping problems exist in Arizona, where the fictitious 86th Congressional District has already received $34,000,000. "That's not what we intended to happen," say liberal economists like Paul Krugman (who argue that there wasn't enough stimulus) and Dean Baker. Of course it isn't. But your intentions are irrelevant. You cannot change the desire of people to scheme for a little extra once the money faucet gets turned on.

Whether on the Left or the Right, technocracy supposes that human nature and cultural trends can be changed by top-down legislation. Draft the right rules, put the right people in charge, and the generation ship that is our world can sail on, untouched and unchanging, until we all turn into Star Children and join the galactic Overmind. In the real world, though, unintended consequences always crop up.

We're all trapped in this biosphere together, hurtling through the galaxy far below the speed of light. And if we don't learn a willingness to rule ourselves, throw out the systems that don't work and take responsibility for our own screw-ups, we're not going to reach Alpha Centauri alive.

Original post

From a commenter on Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog yesterday:

"I am tired of people -- any people, on any side of the grand liberal-conservative divide -- deciding that if you look like X, you must think Y, and if you look like Z, well then, you're a bag of shit.

"I contain multitudes, motherfucker!"

Not in Davis, but in Somerville and there are several Davis artists showing/represented.

On Saturday, Dec. 5, 11 am to 5 pm there are THREE art/crafts fairs in close proximity.
Somerville Museum, Union Square and Washington Street Studios are ALL having sales of original work by local artists.

On Sunday, Dec. 6 the Somerville Museum will continue for a second day with jury selected artists, mulled cider and snacks, and the Somerville Museum itself with it's current Mosaics show.

We'd love to see you here!

I use the term "Babysit" in reference to staying up late to watch a Sunday night or Monday night football game to ensure that your players give you the fantasy points necessary to win.

I love the term.

Current Word Count: Tangerine, 67, 991 words
What I’m Reading Now: Under the Dome, by Stephen King

Sane families are all the same; insane families are nutso in their own, unique ways. And at Thanksgiving, ( all families are insane. )

I appear to be uncharitable and anti-social, or at any rate, I have failed to be talked into "reserving" any sort of copy of the Oberlin alumnae directory, let alone including any actual contact information in my entry. I did finally call them, after the second "urgent" post card (delivered at monthly intervals), but I have not yet been able to think of anyone I might wish to track down who couldn't be found through someone I already have contact info for.

Meanwhile, I am a slacker and not only didn't write all weekend, but only wrote about 1k yesterday, and another 1 so far today, so I'm still at 52.5k total. (What is it about reaching the Nano goal that sucks all the motivation out of one? Grr!) I am within about two chapters of the end of this document, more or less, although that's leaving both the beginning and several parts of the middle in a complete muddle (but I will not quote mud puddle poetry at you.) I think I need to go on and write the last part before I know what's important in this one, though. And I do want to find out what sort of god it is in the sealed jar, among other things...

But I have been fencing (as those of you who've listened to the new rapier podcast will have heard) and I took the aquarium volunteer test and while I probably ought to have done better on it, I don't believe I did too horribly, and I've been indulging in things like vacuuming, and trying to buy a real ironing board. (Unfortunately, Target let me down on that one; all they had in stock were $60 ones with glamorous iron rests, and I was really not that desperate.) Also, I've been suffering from irritating headaches, and thus ignoring all the people I'm supposed to e-mail and things.

So I present you with pictures, instead:

I've seen through the fourth episode now, and I don't really get the disdain. It's not my favorite show by any means-- it's completely humorless and rather wooden, for one-- but in that it's not much worse than other SF shows I could mention (yeah, I'm lookin' at you, BSG and early SCC.) Robert Carlyle is an engaging actor to watch, and the episodes have fun High Stakes!TM drama. The high production values are kind of startling for this franchise, and there have been no really embarrassingly camp-awful scripts so far, unlike both SG-1 and SGA by this point (Planet of Gratuitous Misogyny! Vamps in Space!)

I'd give it, mm, B- for being not particularly interesting... but it seems others are finding it unwatchable, and I'm wondering why.

I do rather miss McKay. Oh David Hewlett, can you do no wrong?

...also, MALPs!

These aren't exactly from my recipe box, I took them from Brendan Brazier's book called The Thrive Diet. Basically these are small, easily digestable, workout fuel. You can eat them during a workout to provide energy in a simple form that goes to work immediately. The recipe for the bites are here.

The verdict is out on these. They are very tasty but I felt wrong eating straight up coconut oil despite that it's fine for you. Also, eating during running is not my friend so I'll be sticking to liquid fuel during long runs and having these before hitting the treadmill.



Full gallery here.