The Persistence of Folly, Removing All Doubt

Alain de Botton's Atheism 2.0 TED talk

2012-01-24T17:19:00.000+08:00

Everyone seems to be missing the point here. Jerry Coyne scoffs, PZ Myers mocks teaching by repetition. Admittedly there are some clangers, but the basic idea has merit. Seems inevitable, really, that secular humanism will evolve its own traditions, so why not get started now? And I loved Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I'd sign up for a Unarian stint in a heartbeat. What cog sci's learning about debiasing and "mental hygiene" indicates a kind of monk-like asceticism can be useful.

2012-01-20T18:09:00.003+08:00

Watching The Secret World of Arrietty. Studio Ghibli, purveyors of the finest, most wondrous... Luddite propaganda on the planet. Of course I love Totoro and Spirited Away, but still. Cognitive bias hath power to assume a pleasing shape. After rationality and narrative fallacy, what are we left with? How do we get from magical thinking to the magic of reality? What's left of Watership Down, after we unweave the rainbow? Well, maybe we're left with Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, or close enough. Closer to realism, our plugs fit.

In Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan, the charaters on a distant space station are 2 millimeters tall, to save space and resources. Justification. Already, watching Arrietty, I think, eh, water droplets and sugar grains don't work like that at that scale.

Marginalia, then and now.

2012-01-16T08:44:00.000+08:00

So, Okular works for PDF commenting, even better than Foxit. Annotating's a big deal for me, my books always have underlinings and scribbled comments. Like Heinlein said, once an editor pees on the work, then he likes the smell better.

I learned the trick from an old copy of Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, found an old yellowing hardcover edition when I was a kid, used to belong to an aunt or a grandfather, had a lot of notes. It was fascinating, going through Durant's text itself, and seeing the marks and traces of a sharp mind that had gone before me.

Currently reading Transmetropolitan, and annotating my way through Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

2012-01-07T10:06:00.003+08:00

Pride of lions, exaltation of larks... blizzard of torrents? Anyway, been pulling down a lot of downloads, mostly books, some comics.

No PDF commenting on Ubuntu? Boo!

2012-01-05T12:26:00.000+08:00

I wanna comment on PDFs, great way to find your way around a dense text and maintain your train of thought. But apparently there aren't any Ubuntu PDF readers with commenting features. Foxit reader for linux, no commenting feature; Adobe Reader 9, no commenting feature. Google results for Ubuntu pdf comments kicks up stuff from 2007, 2008.

Bleah. Shouldn't be fidding with software while drunk. Tanduay Ice is tasty. Seems I can type okay though.

Parrondo's paradox and evolutionary group selection?

2012-01-05T09:41:00.000+08:00

Was reading the haystack model of group selection, and it struck me that Parrondo's paradox seems applicable.

2012-01-04T14:58:00.000+08:00

The new 100 peso bill is so very violet, looks like play money.

2012-01-04T12:40:00.001+08:00

Cubao from National bookstore.

2012-01-02T08:19:00.001+08:00

From right before I merged Blogger with Google+:

2011-12-31T08:07:00.000+08:00

Reading through R. Scott Bakker's The Prince of Nothing trilogy. I'd heard of it years ago, typically with a sort of tagline like "Spock in a fantasy setting." Too many neologisms make it hard to read, but there are gems that make it worth the effort. Also reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

Counterpoint, came across Tyler Cowen's TEDtalk on the narrative fallacy, which I agree is huge and pervasive, second only to confirmation bias.

Breaking in new shoes, running most mornings, and walking around a lot.

Nueva Vizcaya trip

2011-12-22T13:27:00.001+08:00

Pic album

Imugan falls was beautiful. I have moderately-bad acrophobia, and one interesting effect was I was nervous on the 40-minute hike on foot up to the falls, but on the walk back I was so tired and hungry that I didn't care anymore. Maybe low blood sugar and mild exhaustion is a good way to desensitize. And I learned that the phrase "clear as a mountain stream" is totally for real.

Got to Barangay Malico around 3pm. Everyone kept saying "its gonna be cold up there" and I'd go, I brought 2 jackets, it'll be fine. Started raining a few hours after we got there, power went out the first night, and damn it was frakkin' COLD. Woke up shivering, put on both jackets, stayed bundled up the next 2 days.

2011-12-16T16:59:00.002+08:00

Finishing up on packing. Going to Nueva Vizcaya, back on Monday.

2011-12-15T13:03:00.000+08:00

Ok, Goodreads emailed me, my shelfcount's fixed. Will rebuild posthaste.

2011-12-15T10:00:00.000+08:00

Tried to get passport, DFA doesn't accept postal id as valid identification. NSO birth certificate and NBI clearance are not enough. Screwed, have to wait for SSS id probably sometime in January. Wasted trip, and about an hour waiting in line. Bleah.

Goodreads glitch

2011-12-13T19:51:00.003+08:00

I'll post about books again eventually, warming up to it. But while I'm on the subject. I used to catalog my books on Shelfari, but then went on semi-hiatus cos the house burned down. Luckily I already had the majority of my library in ebook form. Then the consensus started to look like Goodreads was better, so I started up there, also as a way to catalog and differentiate what I still have, even with the ebooks I lost a lotta books.

Recently I noticed Goodreads said I had 42 books read, but 44 books total. I don't categorize book except to toss them into the default "read" pile, so I tried different options, even manually counted them, still only 42, not 44. Started to get OCD about this, where are those 2 missing books? So screw it, deleted em all, it's just 42 (or 44) I can rebuild that no problem. Goodreads STILL says I have 2 books.

Blah. Did the Help thing, bug report sent. There OCD, are you happy now?

2011-12-13T08:58:00.001+08:00

Integrated blog with my Google+ profile. And I'm using a Google Chrome extension, SGPlus, to cross-post from G+ to Facebook.

The Mana World

2011-12-12T11:49:00.001+08:00

I was looking for a free top-down Zelda-style rpg in the Ubuntu software center, found The Mana World. I'm playing as "ZoneSeek," straight-Dex archer. Still in alpha testing, but a small playerbase has its charms. I've casually played a couple of mmorpgs before, but The Mana World has the most helpful, non-dickish players I've ever seen. The other day a stranger saw me hacking through a tough quest and babysat me through it; pulled aggro, healed, killed the boss and handed me the drop. On the next quest, in odd, possibly Google-Translated English he offered to lend me a high-level set of armor to get me through the dungeon. This was an amazing, unheard-of level of trust between strangers on an mmorpg. So okay, farmed for a bit, and after a while, I gave the armors back. Thanks again matto!

2011-12-11T10:13:00.001+08:00

Trying to get Brain Workshop's Dual N-Back working on Ubuntu. But I don't wanna learn Python. :(

Derpy derp derp, derpy derp derpy afternoon

2011-12-05T20:22:00.001+08:00

Testing. Fiddling with the blog settings again, need a big block of text to get a sense of the width. Noony noony noo. Learning how to touch-type, harder than I thought. I wonder if it's worth the effort to learn to type with the Dvorak layout? Easy to switch the keyboard settings in the software, but then that's another setup to memorize. Then I can't rely on the actual qwerty keyboard lettering. I actually made a Dvorak keyboard years ago; took an old keyboard apart, looked up the Dvorak layout, rearranged the keys to match.

Reductionism FTW!

2011-12-01T19:47:00.001+08:00

Cartesian theater = Chinese room.

Occupy RH part 3

2011-11-26T15:44:00.002+08:00

Occupy for RH, Serbisyong Bayan Park

2011-11-26T15:26:00.001+08:00

Yay for netbook. There's a couple of unsecured wifi networks here, got connected to a "wi-icts."

2011-11-26T15:10:00.001+08:00

Filipino Freethinkers at Occupy for RH, Serbisyong Bayan Park.

Overconfidence is for hot cognition scenarios

2011-11-12T09:04:00.000+08:00

Hypothesis: Overconfidence effect was more of an evolutionary advantage in the ancestral environment, for raiding, hunting, fighting. But it's often a disadvantage in a technological setting, thus we get the planning fallacy, confirmation bias, etc. So going "beyond the impossible" might work for things like a bar brawl, but you don't want Kamina planning your long-term strategy.

Finally starting to understand Go

2011-10-27T19:20:00.001+08:00

Tinx and I tried playing on software a while back, got stumped on "ladders," ie what's to stop us from just forming long chains of stones constantly trying to snake around each other? We should've just kept going for a bit more, it works out, either ladder chains hit the edge or other stones cause complications.

The other day I found FlyOrDie Go at the Google Chrome Web Store, got in, got to see how the game plays out. Still kinda floundering, it's a big open board and I don't understand what constrains stone placement in the first few moves of the early game. I look at midgame positions and wonder, what considerations formed those pretty patterns?

Chemosphere

2011-10-26T20:09:00.003+08:00

Photo by Joshua White

You may remember the Chemosphere from such things as The Simpsons (Troy McClure's home) and Charlie's Angels. I didn't know it was a real house til just now. Way out of my league, but want, so awesome. You could walk around nekkid and who's gonna see? Apparently it was rented out a lot as a party place, but it doesnt really make sense as a site for bacchanalia; cut off and inaccesible except with a funicular. It should be a monk's retreat, an alchemist's laboratory, an observatory.

2011-10-01T08:45:00.001+08:00

10-01-11 in binary is what, 32 in base 10?

2011-09-27T13:35:00.000+08:00

Typhoon Pedring. No electricity here, no electricity in a lot of places throughout manila. Power probably won't be back for quite a while yet. A few hours of juice on this phone and the netbook. Blackout novelty rapidly wearing off. Bored. Listening to fm radio, it's horribly stupefying.

2011-08-25T15:18:00.000+08:00

Beetle on vines.

This Is Water by David Foster Wallace

2011-08-16T15:35:00.003+08:00

A while back I read this post about David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech. Seemed fascinating, though I can't stand Infinite Jest. Looked around, but couldn't find the text of the speech.

So yesterday I found the book version. And while it has plenty to think over, the presentation is iffy. Long before xkcd I'd decided that sciences/computers > liberal arts. The ideal Maslow-actualized techie would be baffled by This Is Water. Imagine how Spock or Sherlock or Sheldon Cooper would react to this.

I get what Wallace is saying, and he says it well. But I learned this existential stuff from Greg Egan, Bertrand Russell, Sagan, Heinlein, Asimov. You know, real nerds. Yes, I'm a science fiction snob too.

2011-08-16T15:13:00.000+08:00

Pirated Game of Thrones spotted at St Francis Square. I had to get my copy from a friend.

2011-08-15T12:53:00.000+08:00

Happy birthday, me. D12 and D20 dice, Greg Egan's Teranesia, and David Foster Wallace's This Is Water.

2011-08-13T14:40:00.001+08:00

Last night, my taxi had a model of the Burj Al Arab on the dashboard.

2011-07-31T11:06:00.000+08:00

2011-07-18T14:10:00.000+08:00

2011-07-14T08:28:00.000+08:00

2011-07-05T08:37:00.002+08:00

Transformers Dark of the Moon was looong, and too much of it focusing on meat people, not enough screentime for the cool robots. Also got Julie Taymor's The Tempest, and Salt.

2011-06-10T13:44:00.002+08:00

I've been in a quiet, bleak sort of mood lately. Hankering for some appropriate reading. My Bukowski books are gone, but I have Paul Auster's City of Glass on ebook. Still haven't read Kerouac's On the Road. Maybe it's time.

2011-06-10T13:17:00.003+08:00

Haven't been getting enough sleep. Started reading Rice Boy today, and wow it's long. Earlier in the week I've read all the way through the archives of Pictures for Sad Children and Hyperbole and a Half. Hm, good unintended contrast there.

2011-06-02T02:02:00.002+08:00

Stupid toilet keeps clogging up, if you so much as look at it funny.

Got some time off work. Surfing around, reading.

2011-05-29T09:33:00.001+08:00

Kitten in rat trap. It's almost Zen.

2011-05-26T14:49:00.003+08:00

Been reading Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, and in my head Feynman started to sound like Carl Sagan, it's that explainer thing they've both got going on. So went on Youtube to do justice to the great man, and it turns out Feynman had a slight Brooklyn accent, which is a great contrast.

Found the vid that triggered the Insane Clown Posse flap, it's wonderful. I've read stuff about the fundamental forces, I understand it a little bit, but I'm not Richard freakin' Feynman, Nobel prizewinner. There's classes and textbooks on this stuff for anyone who wants to advance to the higher levels, but to just close your mind go "Fucking magnets, how do they work?" is enshrining barbarian dimwittery and pretending it's a sense of wonder.

2011-05-25T12:41:00.003+08:00

In Nick Bantock's The Museum at Purgatory, various afterlife dystopias are intended to be beneficial for the souls sent there, by "forcibly discouraging indulgence and foppery." In one of John Le Carre's Smiley novels, operating under "Moscow rules" means working under the strictest level of discipline, as a Western spy going undercover there obviously had to be very careful.

This strikes me as a good thing, and a good story. Boot camp drill seargeants, or Zen monk training. And I do love bildungsromans. What would be the word for it? Eudystopia? A setting that by its nature made you harder, faster, stronger, smarter, better. Doesn't have to be threatening or fatal.

2011-05-25T12:36:00.001+08:00

reaching for honesty, authenticity. sometimes it's hard to keep track of who you're ultimately responsible to, when you're bound by the tyranny of small thinking, of the half-assed, pulled-punch effort.

all of life counts. you could never understand that. the way you do the little things show how you handle the big things. we are our algorithms, values, integrity.

i'm posting a bit on the neil gaiman board to warm up, getting back into the habit of thinking in sentences and paragraphs.

2011-05-22T07:38:00.001+08:00

Familyradio.com seems to be down. If anyone over there were clever, they should put up an "Error 404, file not found- presumed Raptured."

2011-05-04T09:41:00.000+08:00

2011-05-04T08:21:00.002+08:00

Going through newsfeeds a while back, I came across a teaser headline about how Facebook makes you stupid. As usual, there's a lot more to it further in. A small college volunteer sample group was tested, and heavy Facebook use correlated with low NFC, Need For Cognition.

And that's the main takeaway for me, shrinks have tests to measure NFC. I looked at one test where you agree or disagree with statements, some of which could be problematic: "I would prefer a task that is intellectual, difficult, and important to one that is somewhat important but does not require much thought"

Well, that depends. We need to distinguish intellectual laziness from cognitive efficiency. For instance the common nerd contempt for clothing and fashion is a net win. Likewise the typical disdain for social conventions of politeness, euphemisms, considering feelings etc. So considering wardrobe and smalltalk at a fancy dress company dinner might be mentally effortful, but it's awful, to be avoided, and shrivels the soul.

Ubuntu Natty Narwhal tinkering

2011-05-02T03:55:00.002+08:00

The day 11.4 was officially released, I tried the download and it was impossibly slow, but then it came through all right the day after. ISO, boot flashdrive, test drive on my desktop and it set up ok, but no wifi. :( I think Ubuntu might not have the drivers for my wifi card. Haven't tried it on the Asus netbook yet, but that'll probably work fine, Maverick Meerkat was great on my old Acer.

Asus 1015PEM

2011-04-26T14:21:00.001+08:00

Bought an Asus 1015PEM. Overall, a solid netbook, did my homework and checked it out online of course. One thing is the arrow keys are ridiculously small. I hereby pre-emptively nominate this post for WhiteWhine.com. :\ Eh, i'll adapt. My first netbook years ago took some getting used to.

A rock of time

2011-04-23T07:24:00.005+08:00

Been busy lately. And in hectic periods, my vestigial humanity frays and what little patience I have for life's constant stream of interruptions evaporates. God how I hate the little things, so very much. Just want a space of time and silence so I can have a chance to try and think long, slow, deep thoughts. I want a bugger-off-I'm-thinking hat that says "Persons from Porlock will be shot."

And I'll tell and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'

But I'll know my songs well before I start singin'

-Dylan, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

I love Stephenson's Anathem because I would sign up for the Unarian math in a heartbeat, and I'm fairly sure I'd work my way up to a Decenarian stint. What William Gibson called opting out of the commodification of novelty.

Adult Hard

2011-04-21T09:28:00.001+08:00

But the riot inside moves on

2011-04-18T02:31:00.002+08:00

So, house burned down 3 months ago, almost all of my dead-tree books went up in smoke. Anywho, mostly I've been reading my ebook cache and online stuff, but the first hardcovers I re-bought were Neal Stephenson's Anathem and Iain M. Banks's Surface Detail.

Webcomics

2011-04-14T04:24:00.002+08:00

Ursula Vernon's Digger has ended. I read it partway through about a year ago, came back and saw The End, went archive-diving and got caught up. Amazing, harrowing epic, with a unique protagonist that's the perfect point of view for the story. Obvious parallels with Pratchett, but clearly its own thing. Hope it wins the awards and recognition it richly deserves.

The comments in Digger are pretty good too, nerdy and informative. Thats how I found TopWebComics. Finished reading Scandinavia and the World and Twilight Monk, trawling for some other stuff to read.

It's cool how Vernon didn't campaign for votes, Digger's (brief) spike in the rankings was real grassroots stuff coming from the commentariat. And Digger will stand as a milestone long after this year's popularity contests are forgotten.

2011-04-10T12:44:00.004+08:00

Bob Dylan "cover" of Rebecca Black's Friday still makes me laugh.
Wind and Mr. Ug: Didn't pay attention to the title at first, so I was 2 minutes into the video before it hit me and my head exploded. Greatest math nerd story evar.

state of the tech address

2011-03-29T06:49:00.004+08:00

Got a desktop at Gilmore a week ago: 3Ghz Athlon dualcore, 2gigs RAM, 16-inch LED monitor, etc. Fairly standard setup, nothing fancy. Next project on the wishlist's trickier: bootloader then dual-boot Ubuntu and Win7.

So, desktop, a chance to catch up to current standard specs. Got StarCraft 2 (took a while to find a bootleg that worked) and I'm about halfway through on normal difficulty with no cheats.

2011-02-27T13:16:00.001+08:00

Started reading George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Read a bit of his work before, seemed pretty good. Hoping for a long, enthralling ride.

2011-02-08T10:03:00.000+08:00

my pratchett reading's been on hiatus for too long. so, salvaged some ebooks, downloaded an epub reader, and i just finished A Hat Full of Sky. Moving on to Wintersmith.

Circles and circles

2011-02-02T10:18:00.003+08:00

was thinking about taoism while jogging at quezon circle. sam harris does buddhism, but bleah. "all life is suffering," i switch off right there. the taoism metaphor has more to go on. the way and its power. the tao that can be spoken of is not the true tao: the map is not the territory. and taoism is ostensibly the rationale behind the superhuman stuff of wuxia/kung fu. the path fits into the nerdy urge to optimize.

2011-01-18T13:34:00.001+08:00

Strange dream, had an early William Gibson flavor, like Burning Chrome. Tinx and I went up to explore and scavenge an old derelict space elevator. We decided to attach parachutes to the top structure, blow the support scaffolding, remote-control the slow-falling habitat to crash in Death Valley, then we could ping our transponders in the wreck to get our valuables out of the pile.

Ubuntu

2011-01-16T06:55:00.002+08:00

My Acer D250 netbook was one of the handful of things we got out before the house burned down. Ron gave me the hidden SSID and password for the office wifi next door. Yay, fast internet; download speed 1.96mbps, that's something. Worked fine for a while, then Win XP started freezing on the desktop right after bootup, when it connects to the net. But with fast, always-on (and free) wifi, at last I could wait out the long Ubuntu download and get off Windows.

Download took about 2 hours, looks like that's really the download servers and not the net connection. So I'm posting on Firefox for Ubuntu, internet working great and now I'm fairly malware-resistant.

house burned down part 2

2011-01-15T02:21:00.003+08:00

11 jan continued. tinx still had her phone, started calling people while we were watching the house burn down. my dad showed up, george, tito esmer. around 4am tinx and i put our pitiful pile of clothes in jules's car while we biked to tinx's house. still had my laptop that i'd just finished reformatting when the fire started. i had backed up files to a flashdrive, but that was gone now. one tiny bit of luck was i'd left my portable hard drive at tito esmer's place, most of my stuff was backed up there too.

felt peaky and numb, pulse still elevated. we biked back to the burned-out house when the sun came up, hoping momo got out. biked all over the neighborhood, whistling, nothing. went to tito esmer's place to get my hard drive, had a few movies and series in there. tinx and i watched big bang theory and got some sleep.

all my stuff, gone. couple of hundred books. all my anime, west wing, the wire, gone. talked to bank to withdraw money and replace atm card, thank god that was surprisingly painless as i now have no identification. my files, birth certificate, school records, gone. went to work to arrange for a few days off.

2nd night at tinx's place, couldn't sleep, watched fringe. we'd worked out that i would stay at my dad's old place at diliman. got there in the morning, tita beema got me some clothes, some cash. ron let us in, dad had partially cleared one room of junk. tinx went into obsessive cleaning mode, i helped.

past few days are a little blurred. replaced cellphone, shoes, some pants. we're cleaning up the rest of the house. still miss my cat. we've been back to the burned-up house 3 or 4 times, we've handed out and put up "reward for lost cat" flyers. having trouble sleeping, i'm restless but numb and desultory. sometimes i reach and touch the edges of my grief, and i'm amazed at how much of it there is. we love you, momo. loved you for as long as we could.

hourse burned down

2011-01-14T22:20:00.003+08:00

11 jan: around 1am, heard shouting from outside, thought maybe street fight or car accident, was going to take a look, picked up collapsible baton. then banging on gate, someone shouted "sunog!" saw flames coming out the front window of george's room. shit shit! ran back, told tinx to get momo, our cat. george room's always locked, but the door had a small glass window. used the baton to bash the glass. looked through the window, glowing orange inside. pounded on ernie's door, wake up. lights went out, circuit breakers blew, i grabbed a flashlight. got bucket of water from bathroom, tossed water in through window. back to bathroom for another bucket, toss, this isn't working. there was a fire extinguisher somewhere, but that was years ago and the fire's blazing now. started to think, this isnt just the room, whole place is going up. tinx got out, things getting dark. went back in for momo. remembered how smoke kills more than fire, stayed low, smoke already down to waist level. i hurled a cabinet aside like it was nothing, calling out for momo. went out for air, back in, getting thick, no time, pulled tinx out. anguish and fear, opened windows, hoped momo would get out. big tongue of flame in the way, coming out of living room window, had to duck, ran out.

that all happened in a space of about 10 or 15 mins.

outside looking at the house, place went up like the tinderbox it was. fire hazard deathtrap. front door was locked, we had to go longer way around the back. should've moved out. big fire, people shouting that maybe the cars would blow. things happened fast, full blaze by 1.30 when the first firetruck arrived. firehoses, water, a few more firetrucks came in, fire was out around 3am but the house was almost completely burned out.

tinx had gotten an armful of clothes and my acer netbook. neighbors got both our bikes out. other than that i had nothing except the clothes i was wearing.

2011-01-10T23:17:00.000+08:00

Actions speak louder than excuses.

2010-12-28T12:44:00.000+08:00

Reading William Gibson's Zero History, Tinx's xmas present. I got her rubber shoes. We just finished watching season 1 of Wonderfalls. Tinx hadn't seen it yet, I'd loved the series when it first aired on cable. I've been almost entirely off coffee for 36 hours. Feel wonky, but clearer.

2010-12-22T10:01:00.001+08:00

First you must snatch the stellated dodecahedron from my hand, grasshopper.

Planetes

2010-12-20T07:49:00.002+08:00

Just finished it this morning, got through all 26 episodes in about 3 sessions. Dang, wow. Well done. One of the best endings ever, and now one of my all-time favorite anime.

I found the manga last year, some Booksales have Volume 1, always and only Volume 1. It's great, a dense and satisfying read. A week ago I got the anime and finally found out how the rest the story worked out. So the series ran 6 years ago and is already, rightly, considered a classic. Again, well done. At least two specific shout-outs to the defining hard-sf classic The Cold Equations, an especially harrowing Break The Cutie night journey performed on the naive ingenue, and it all works out. Earn your happy ending, indeed.

One thing I've learned as characteristic about truly great art is that it makes mediocre art look lame in comparison. Firefly is next on the queue, and it simply cannot compete. Obviously Firefly's way off towards the softer end of sci-fi, but still, the realism in Planetes defines how peril works, how grandeur works, how people relate to each other and live their lives. God, I loved that bit near the end, how Nono unwittingly calls the terrorist out: "Countries? Oh, those old-skool Earth things. I'm a Lunarian." Glory.

Watchmen, The Wire, Planetes, you get a taste of the really good stuff, and you wonder why isn't there more like this? You look around, regurgitated variations of the same old fluff. Like eating nothing but icing and cotton candy. How can people live? Don't they long for substance? To be sated and made full, to grow?

Maybe that's unfair. We can't all be Alan Moore or David Simon. But it doesn't take genius-level talent to reach for truthfulness and authenticity.

2010-12-18T19:25:00.000+08:00

been going through some space pics, looking for a good, mostly-black wallpaper.

"local celebrity" is redundant. all celebrities are local.

2010-12-14T02:27:00.000+08:00

Watching Planetes and reading Iain M. Banks's Surface Detail. +200 nerd points!

2010-12-13T15:58:00.000+08:00

Squee, nerdgasm!

2010-12-12T09:51:00.001+08:00

PICC. Legs hurt. And then there's the bike ride back.

2010-12-12T06:31:00.000+08:00

Amnesty International's Bike for Rights starting in a bit. Red bike's mine, yellow one's tinx's.

velocigastropod haiku

2010-12-05T08:11:00.002+08:00

Small snail on my bike pedal
Dreams of going fast
Put him down, gently.

Gotta have soul

2010-12-02T10:50:00.002+08:00

Dirpy's closed up shop, so I'm trying Clipconverter. Ripping Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" and The Wire season 1 opening theme, The Blind Boys of Alabama's cover of "Way Down in the Hole."

2010-11-28T06:42:00.000+08:00

Heading for pansol with tinx and some people from work. Back on monday.

2010-11-27T03:39:00.000+08:00

Consider the cat. Imagine superintelligent aliens that look at us the way we look at cats: charming, inept. "Aww how cute, they can't even figure out fermat's last theorem!" lolhumans. I can haz string theory?

2010-11-25T12:16:00.000+08:00

2010-11-24T15:28:00.001+08:00

Sometime in the last few months, I've accumulated more ebooks than paper books. Ebooks: 850+; hardcopy books: <400.

2010-11-22T01:31:00.001+08:00

How come the default Philippine iGoogle page before login still says "Master rapper Francis Magalona, 44, passed away." That was over a year ago.

2010-11-21T19:55:00.002+08:00

Checking, ok cool, that worked. On netbook now, but previous test post via email from Nokia C3-00 came through. Nice little phone; relatively cheap, good features.

2010-11-21T14:24:00.000+08:00

Test

No excuses, no compromise

2010-11-10T08:52:00.002+08:00

I've been reading all the Cordwainer Smith short stories I could find online; amazing, singular stuff. I read that Iain M. Banks's writing was like Smith's, but I think Smith has more of a Jack Vance flavor, cadenced and quasi-mythical.

Memory card in my cellphone seems to be broken, doesn't save pics and "Reformat failed." Geh.

ghost in the shell 2: innocence

2010-11-03T09:38:00.003+08:00

the other day i got a pirated copy of ghost in the shell 2: innocence. didn't notice when i tried it out at first, but it's dubbed in german, with poorly-translated english subtitles lagging about 15 seconds behind the on-screen action. the first ghost in the shell's one of my all-time favorites, but this is meh. you can see they cobbled together 2 stories from the original manga, but not many movie fans have read the manga anyway, so i guess they thought that would work. there's some interesting architectural imagery once they get to "the north," but overall, pretty weak.

Obligatory Kitteh

2010-10-12T01:28:00.005+08:00

Pfft, Win XP...

Puss in boot

BourkaCat

I can haz China Mieville?

Mush, human!

2010-09-12T19:31:00.001+08:00

Back on night shift, still kinda adjusting. Reading The Princess Bride, borrowed from Tinx.

2010-09-09T12:03:00.002+08:00

Random thought: You know what would be cool? An anime version of V for Vendetta with Kaneto Shiozawa as the voice of V. Too bad Shiozawa's dead. :(

I'm trying to read the entire Sinfest archive, started from 2006 onward, and eventually the older stuff. It's amazing and generally pretty fair to all sides, and occasionally, utterly genius.

Red Queen's Court

2010-08-20T16:34:00.002+08:00

The Red Queen theory tells us that evolution is a harsh mistress. I've imagined mythologizing that, the embodiment of the evolutionary arms race as a blood-red Zerg Hydralisk hunter-killer, its red maw consuming the unfit, without mercy or conscience. Seems depressing, but might be a good idea too. The Dunning-Kruger effect says overconfidence is a systemic bias. Maybe an antagonistic memento mori would help us stay sharp and on our toes.

You could make up a whole pantheon of the demons of fail. Taleb's Black Swan dive-bombs down on the unsuspecting and complacent. Larry Niven already had "the dread god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy."

StarCraft 2

2010-08-19T18:21:00.002+08:00

Finished playing it a few days ago, though I just got as far as the Thors in campaign mode, skipped the Ghosts/Spectres and went straight to Char. Felt kinda meh about it at first; the voice acting was better before, it felt a little derivative with obvious nods to Firefly and changing Raynor into a Solid Snake type character. The Raynor/Kerrigan ship was a kluge; when they last parted in Brood War, Raynor swore he'd kill Kerrigan someday. Gameplay felt very Warcrafty, and while obviously there are limits to how realistic you can make a space opera (mutalisks flapping their wings in deep space), I still prefer my sf to be grittier than my fantasy.

It gets better past the hump, somewhere over halfway through. I quite liked the Protoss missions and their heroic last stand. Good foreshadowing. Sucks that they nerfed the Mothership though, Planet Cracker should have been the new nuclear strike, the ultimate-damage screen-clearing kaboom. And I wanted to play the Zerg, even if just for 1 or 2 missions. Here's to hoping Heart of the Swarm comes out next year. With LAN play, damnit!

The Battlecuiser captain is way more fun this time around. Yes RLY.

excerpt. the trap of Dharma. Choices.

2010-08-01T16:12:00.001+08:00

"The guardian of the lake was a lonely man, the more so because he had a wife. He showed me her picture in a plastic shield in his wallet, a prettyish blond girl trying her best to live up to the pictures in the magazines, a girl of products, home permanents, shampoos, rinses, skin conditioners. She hated being out in what she called the sticks, longed for the great and gracious life in Toledo or South Bend. Her only company was found in the shiny pages of Charm and Glamour. Eventually she would sulk her way to success. Her husband would get a job in some great clanging organism of progress, and they would live happily ever after. All this came through in small, oblique spurts in his conversation. She knew exactly what she wanted and he didn't, but his want would ache in him all his life. After he drove away in his jeep I lived his life for him and it put a mist of despair on me. He wanted his pretty little wife and he wanted something else and he couldn't have both."

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Down in the Hole: The Wire dive

2010-06-14T08:53:00.001+08:00

Got season 1 and 2 of The Wire at Home Depot. Been hearing for years about how this is the Best TV Evar, and yeah, looks good so far. I loved The Shield, so I'm down with the gritty. This Wire is more of a slow burn, but I can be patient. They say it's like a novel, I like the sound of that.

Donnie Darko and Sunshine

2010-06-08T18:00:00.004+08:00

Found Donnie Darko and Sunshine at the Home Depot near Robinsons. Good selection there, they had The Wire season 2 but I wanted to start right from season 1. I'll come back for more sometime.

Donnie Darko was okay, but Sunshine was more engaging for me, in part because Sunshine is the closest I'll ever get to watching Peter Watts's extraordinary novel Blindsight in movie form.

2010-06-05T18:25:00.004+08:00

I crashed my bike a while back, nasty wipeout, faceplant. The knee was the worst, still twinges sometimes. And it's made me a bit gun-shy on the bike. Speed-shy? I'm more cautious, I brake a lot, hold back on the downhill speed runs. Yeah, sometimes I imagine crashing again. Just need to get acclimatized I guess, and some mental discipline to not let imagination get in the way.

Trying to read The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction.

Lostenfreude

2010-06-01T17:58:00.004+08:00

lostenfreude: amusement and pity towards those who feel ripped off by the Lost ending.

i stopped watching Lost after the first season, but there was no escaping the buzz towards the end of the series. read about the finale on the rss feeds, so it was purgatory/afterlife, the fans called that years ago.

i've noticed that Lost apologists go something like, "well, it was about the characters, it wasn't really about the mysteries." hell with that. i watched season one and that was the hook: the plane crash, the polar bear, etc. and some people who liked the ending say they'd still watch the series again. but what if you didn't drink the kool-aid back when the series premiered? can the Lost faithful get new fans to sit through six (!) seasons of this shaggy dog? i don't think so. the tantalizing mirage of The Ending was the major driving force. now the jig is up.

i liked Alias more, at least it wasn't so pretentious. the outlandish and inexhaustible series of rambaldi artifacts, the rumblings about prophecy and destiny, no one took it seriously, so we could all just roll with it.

i'll never watch lost again, but if i did, i can easily imagine that whenever locke/the Others/etc. acted mysterious and knowing, it would be insufferably annoying. game's over, the emperor is naked. they just made it up as they went along, there was never any master plan unfolding piece by piece.

2010-05-03T11:56:00.003+08:00

a night out with people. ordinariness looms. fill your life with incident, such an easy trap. a night with so much of what i don't want in my life, had to get away and go as far as i could in the opposite direction. a night that made me long for hard edges and people who know what they're talking about.

why can't people just be interested? the first virtue is curiosity. and the first sin is complacency. "here are my vague thoughts, misquotes, false analogies, regurgitated cliches. i heard it on tv/read it on the internet, so it must be true. and even if it's demonstrably false or laughably ludicrous, hey, everyone has the right to an opinion. even evolution's just a theory."

Substance for the Eagle

2010-04-26T11:56:00.003+08:00

What do I want? Enough time to think deeply and long about things that matter. Freedom from banality, the tyranny of the inconsequential.

Came across this study about how people with more substantive conversations and less smalltalk are happier. Then the scientists said the next step is to see if increasing the number of substantive conversations would affect happiness.

The skeptical scientist in me flashes the "correlation is not causation" light. And how do you discount the placebo effect? You could have the control group spout empty pomo litcrit buzzwords maybe.

PS, Food for The Eagle, Adam Savage's speech upon receiving a Harvard humanist lifetime achievement award. With nerds, it keeps coming back to the eating of brains. :\

haiku

2010-04-19T15:46:00.002+08:00

a few weeks ago i put some haiku feeds on my google reader, and meh, they're lame, took them off. everyone thinks that 5-7-5 is just fake doggerel, but hell, i like those more. the short moody evocative bits in vogue now seem like amusing sentence fragments that would just be part of the background in good prose writing. i've read a lot of basho and buson, and they didn't seem so... pointless, ephemeral, insubstantial. maybe they gain in translation? (part of the reason why i drag my feet over learning japanese is the fear that when i have full comprehension, the wonderful stuff i hear in anime and j-pop will turn out to be more of the usual banality.)

anyway. i think the big loss is over how people don't seem to do kireji or the "cutting word" anymore. (or the kireji's so subtle that it's barely there at all.) a lot of doggerel haiku are jokes, and you could think of kireji as the punchline, what makes it pop, instead of just being a weaksauce evocative description.

serendipity

2010-04-18T15:58:00.000+08:00

maybe serendipity is a confirmation bias, an ev psych hack to encourage exploration and experimentation. is it really true that learning naturally turns up more good than bad? or is ecclesiastes right and learning is grief and sorrow? could one set up a controlled experimental study to quantify serendipity? do i really want to know the findings? of course i do. as a duty, it's important. as frank herbert said: the open eye is better, no matter what it sees. but strangely i dread the answer.

2010-04-15T16:27:00.003+08:00

That's odd. I was wiki-wandering a few days ago, got from introspection illusion to the caloric reflex test and so on. I know there was a wiki page on "magical thinking" a while back, but now it just redirects to Religion.

PS, apparently the magical thinking page had text from a copyrighted source that had withdrawn permission, thus now gone. Still, the redirect to religion is a funny sort of backhanded Dawkins shot.

The Peter Watts Dive

2010-04-01T15:12:00.000+08:00

So, Canadian sf writer Peter Watts got worked over at the border, was found guilty of obstructing the border cops, and is now awaiting sentencing. It sucks, truly, but nothing I can do, except post about how it sucks, for what that's worth, which isn't much.

When I first started getting into online texts a few months ago, some of my first ebooks were the popular free Creative Commons ones, and Peter Watts came up right after Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Watts's stuff seemed cool, I read a bit of Starfish, but then other things in life intruded. Now with Watts waiting on the judge's gavel, I brought the files back up and read them. And damn, they're amazing.

Blindsight starts off with a childhood scene reminiscent of the raw candor in the first pages of Ender's Game. Then there's the team of scientists on a spaceship, like in the movies Sunshine or Alien, but this time with a crew of smarter, more extreme characters. And it's not just the story, which there's plenty of, it's also a real novel of ideas. And such big, important, fundamental ideas, about humanity and intelligence and sentience. What more can I say? Maybe I need more time to gain perspective, but I'm fairly confident in giving it a 5 out of 5.

Starfish has more damaged characters in extreme environments, maybe doesn't scale the same heights as Blindsight, but still top-class sf. I've read of half the short stories so far, Bulk Food and Flesh Made Word stand out.

Prayers for Stormbringer

2010-03-22T12:19:00.002+08:00

Please let the rains come, please let the rains come, etc. Just past vernal equinox, definitely into summer weather now. I've stopped running, switching to biking with Tinx. I'll get Big Bang Theory season 3 tomorrow. And yeah, re-reading my Elric books.

the kamuning run

2010-03-04T11:43:00.002+08:00

saying yes to little adventures is the way to keep from getting fat and boring.

got a cheap mountain bike from a little shop on kamuning road. rode it all the way home, which turned out to be way harder than i expected. i run twice a week, but this was different. biked along edsa then right onto east avenue, cut across city hall then took a break in the shade. heart racing, legs aching, and felt like i was gonna puke. drank 2 cups of sago, then hit the road again. circle around quezon memorial, then up commonwealth ave, then tandang sora and the home stretch.

afterwards, went to sm to look for a bike chain, but turns out they're way expensive. so i bought a dog chain and a combo lock.

tweak mode. wheel spokes were in a horrible state, tightened those up and took hours tuning them to true, level and straight. worked on brakes, they're pretty crappy and will probably be my first upgrade. lowered then raised the seat a bit. realigned the handlebars. now, riding around and breaking her in. i named the netbook molly, so maybe i'll call the bike danbala.