Cognitive assonance

Cognitive dissonance is the distress and confusion that sane people experience when they discover that they are holding two beliefs which contradict each other.

We need a word which expresses the opposite of that for people who hold contradictory beliefs while experiencing no distress or confusion whatsoever, either because they don't understand the contradiction or because they are actively ignoring it since both beliefs serve greater ideals (using the word loosely) which they cannot bear to have examined.

A particular subset of Americans justify their ideal of reducing the power of government through the belief that their government is incompetent, ill-informed, slow to act, and clumsy when it does act.

The same people justify their ideal of freely bearing arms through the belief that their government is supernaturally competent, omniscient*, swift to act, and brutally efficient when it does act.

Discuss.

* Not that they would know the word, generally.

Zatsuroku

That's Japanese for "miscellany," or so Google tells me, and who would know better? I have quite a lot of odds and ends left to report from my trip to Japan, though I've been home for nearly two weeks and will be flying to Canada on Sunday (weather-gods willing).

Many of the oddities that one notices in Japan are social, differences in the way people move and behave within society. Social space and touch are prime examples of this. All humans (at least in large cities) project an "I am alone" field when they are forced into close proximity with strangers. It's what lets you share a park bench with somebody without having to hear their life's story (garrulous drunks and Forrest Gump not withstanding). These fields are different between Westerners (by which I principally mean Anglo-Saxons) and the Japanese. Our fields say "You are not really here, you cannot touch me. I am safe." Japanese fields say "I am not really here, I will not touch you. You are safe."

Body contact is another prime example. We all know from films that the Japanese bow constantly, instead of touching, and that is actually true. The Westerner in an interacting group of Japanese (at a store, for example) is reminded sometimes of a flock of pigeons all nodding and ducking at each other. The depth of the bow is significant and finely calibrated: whether from the head or shoulders or upper body or waist; whether a subtle nod or a full right-angled bend. When I saw what I presumed to be the first presentation of a new boyfriend to the girl's parents, they bent about 30° from the shoulders, but he bent stiffly from the waist, and went so far down that his head nearly bumped the table. The opposite is also surely true: that one can express a subtle but biting snub in giving a shallower bow than is appropriate. It strikes me that the Japanese have a far greater bodily facility for expressing social relations (for want of a word), there isn't nearly that much variety in handshakes even if you count the doublehanded or biceps-clasping options.

I was never on a subway train in central Tokyo in rush hour so I didn't experience the "pushers" who force people onto the trains, but buses and subway in Kyoto were dense enough. There too, social space is very different. The Japanese differentiate between intentional and accidental touching, in a way that we don't. The head-to-toe all-around full-body contact that you get when 50 extra people get on to a bus that was already overfull by my German standards, is perfectly acceptable in Japan. Because it's inevitable and in a way impersonal, it doesn't count as contact. As a consequence, it's acceptable to push your way quite forcefully between people to get on or off of a bus.

There would have been bloodshed on a New York city (or German) bus before it got to 80% of the density that I rode home from Ginkaku-Ji in, because we don't distinguish between somebody deliberately pressing against us and somebody who is forced against us by the people behind them: after a certain point, it's all offensive to us.

But intentional touching is taboo in Japan, whereas we allow it (depending on context and the bit that gets touched and what we infer to be the toucher's motives). I realized this on the bus, after it started to empty out. At one point we went around a corner at speed and hit a pothole. The bus rocked and a schoolgirl near me staggered and started to fall. I reached out to catch her, then stopped myself in time. She recovered, simply bumping into her friends who simply stood still and broke her fall. I'm sure that she would have been shocked and offended if I'd grabbed her arm, whereas a German or Canadian would not. They would understand that I acted to save them from harm, and would be pleased and grateful.

I'm afraid I mislead you when I stated that Japanese is read from right to left. That is not generally true. Normally Japanese is read from left to right, so the streaming-text signs in the Shinkansen were correct. The exception to this is fascinating. Single-horizontal-line Japanese is read right-to-left when it is a religious inscription in a temple or shrine! The reason for this is that the inscription is visualized as an entire page of text (which is read in top-to-bottom columns, from the right margin to the left), and the single line of characters represents the first character of each column of that conceptual page. So you read at the right margin a column of one character, then move left and read the next column, and so on.

Somebody commented on an earlier post (perhaps in the bowdlerized version under my real name on Faecesbook) that the Japanese are very ecologically-minded, and in regard to water usage that may be true; though paradoxically water is one of the few natural resources that are not scarce in Japan. They have a very different attitude to paper, wood and plastics. Take as an example the little moist hand-wiper towelettes that we typically know from airplanes. Almost all restaurants and cafes in Japan will give you one of those before your meal or snack. I gradually became very uncomfortable with this because of the huge amount of waste it generates. Consider: The wrapper weighs say one gramme, so each thousand people who use one generate a kilo of plastic waste. The population is 127 million, and let's say that on average every fourth person uses one a day; this is probably a low estimate since I was given up to five of them per day. That adds up to 32 tonnes of plastic waste every day, just from the wrapping around moist hand-wipers. Factor in the towelette itself, plus the meta-packaging that those packets are shipped in, plus the carbon cost of delivering the packages and collecting the waste … I don't see how that can be sustainable, or why this status quo should be maintained.

Disposable (wooden!) chopsticks are another example. I read that twenty-five billion pairs of them are used and thrown away every year, "enough wood to build 17,000 houses" it says in the Lonely Planet guide (which by the way I can recommend). How many trees per day does that equate to? I got sick of that almost instantly, and bought a rather nice pair of chopsticks and a carrying case, and earned amused and curious glances by producing them in restaurants for the rest of my stay.

It's getting too cold to type (the boiler/central heating unit is being replaced as I write) so I will post this and update it later on.

Fukuoka - eighth day

I'm trainblogging live on the Shinkansen, on the way to Fukuoka to have ramen noodle soup for lunch with a new friend from SL. How cool is that? [This was written on Sunday, but I was too tired to post it when I got home.]

I'm actually using my laptop on my lap, for perhaps the first time ever: there is a tray at each seat, but the spacing between rows is so remarkably wide that it's too far away to use as a base for typing. The Shinkansen is a strange beast to European eyes: it feels like a hybrid cross between a train and a widebody aircraft. It's nearly a metre broader than the ICE, with five seats across (3+2) and an aisle that is also significantly wider than ours. All seats face in the direction of travel (like Amtrak and VIA Rail in Canada, they swivel so they can be reversed at the end of the line. That means that there are no facing groups of seats, as in the ICE: I guess people travel alone or in triads at most, or they simply sit apart.

I had an unusual and rather charming dream early this morning: I was giving sex lessons in mime to a pair of shy but enthusiastic Japanese teenagers. The richness of my gestural imagination amused me, I was chuckling as I woke. The chuckles faded when I realized that it was 3:30 am, but that's another story. (It occurs to me to wonder whether this observant meta-self enjoying the entertainment was "lucid dreaming" or just me slowly waking up. I've heard the term often but never really arrived at a definite understanding of it.)

The Bishonen phenomenon is something typically and strangely Japanese. It's not cross-dressing and certainly not transgender, they dress male and don't appear to be gay (insofar as I would be able to detect the local clues and cues which are probably quite different to Europe or America). It seems to be almost a kind of cosplay, a joy in playing at a particular style of looking good. As far as I can see they are treated as normal guys by society and by their almost-always-female companions (who are usually equally well made up); I probably wouldn't detect sneers or rude comments if they were expressed without gesture and in a polite tone of voice, but the fact is that I've never noticed any kind of reaction to them at all.

Hiroshima. A brand-new city, obviously and unusually. I suddenly feel very obviously Western, though nobody seems to care.

I'm figuring out a few things about the language, both spoken and written. One oddity is that although Japanese is read right-to-left (ads, posters, most signage) or in top-to-bottom columns from right-margin to left-margin (books, newspapers, magazines, handwritten menus), single-line electric signs scroll from left to right! It must be very hard to read. There's no good reason for it, the text could just as well be set to scroll rightwards. (Yes, most such signs are bilingual, but English and Japanese are never on-screen at the same time; it could easily be made to switch direction when it switches language.)

I'm amused to note that there are exceptions to the linguistic rules here too, for all the claims of simplicity and straightforwardness of pronunciation. It is said that n is the only consonant that can exist on its own without a vowel (it has a conceptual silent vowel: Shinjuku is a four-syllable word); but the ts pairing is common and not intervowelled (e.g. Fujitsu). Actually, having written that I now wonder whether that is perhaps just an artefact of transliteration: whether there is in Japanese phonetic script a specific character for that pair. This is perhaps my long-awaited "Lost in translation" moment: not being unable to order food and drink, but being unable to satisfy my geeky curiosity.

Also, u is so clipped as to be almost silent unless it's a consonant-less syllable, e.g. Fukuoka is pronounced "F'k'oka." Ei and ai are barely distinguishable from plain "e" and "a:" the trailing "i" is just a grace-note, a barely-vocalized upward inflection. I confused everyone by making three syllables of the name "Eiko," when it's properly about two and an eighth. Another common mistake, from sheer linguistic habit, is to see ing as a single syllable, an English diphthong, whereas it is really the core of three syllables: Ji-n-gu.

Kokura, and we have reached the sea. Half an hour to go. The Shinkansen doesn't mess around, some of these station stops have been barely a minute long.

There is a conductor (who is evidently not a ticket examiner) who walks back and forth in search of something to do. When he walks from the front of the train to the rear (facing us) he enters the car without fuss; but when walking from rear to front (with his back to us) he pauses as he reaches the head of the car, turns around, and bows to us before proceeding.

(Later, homeward in the dark at 5:30 pm.)

Well, that was fun. The noodles lived up to their billing, and Fukuoka seems a nice enough place. Far fewer temples than in Kyoto, and fewer older buildings generally, probably because it was bombed and burned flat during the war. The city has something of an inferiority complex, apologising for not being as exciting as Tokyo or as historically-cultural as Kyoto, defensively proud of its (for Japan surprisingly high degree of) multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity. Being at the far end of the train line in a highly centralized country is probably plays a role in that.

The Tojoji shrine/temple (have to check which is which) surprised me: It was clearly buddhist, with golden statues of the Buddha and lotus blossoms etc; yet it also had what I thought of as Shinto elements, like an orange-painted pagoda and little guardian-stones (have to find out their proper name) wearing red bibs. Perhaps it's multi-denominational? or perhaps the divisions are less hard and fast than I thought.

I didn't get to see the famous thousand-armed Buddha (aka Kwan Yin), nor the statue of the reclining Buddha (one of only two in Japan, it says here). Next time.

A word of warning about JapanRail passes as I change trains in Shin-Osaka. The pass seems to be a steal: a week of non-Nozomi, non-Green carriage travel cost me 250€ plus 35€ handling fee, which I'm told is not much more than the cost of a single return trip from Kyoto to Tokyo. So if you plan to go farther than that or more often than once, it seems like a real bargain.

There are several kinds of passes, which let you on different types of train and classes of carriage. In my humble opinion the Green (first class) carriage pass is in itself unnecessary, "ordinary" carriages are good enough; however it does let you take the Nozomi trains. Given that these make up the great majority of intercity trains, the convenience of travelling whenever you like may be worth the difference in price. In the current case it would have meant two fewer changes and being home nearly an hour earlier.

Kyoto - first impressions

Clean. Remarkably clean, in fact, although I have yet to see a single garbage can (neither domestic garbage disposal nor public litter-bins by the side of the road).

This cleanliness has a funny side too. As you enter a Japanese house (or a temple/shrine, or particularly formal restaurants), you step across the threshold into a transitional zone which is not-yet-inside. It typically has a tiled or raw-concrete floor, and is one step lower than the wooden floor of the house proper (to be clear: this isn't a room, it is just a section of the entry which has a different, lower, floor). Conceptually this is "outside" and therefore filthy, though in practice it is as clean as any other part of the house. You take off and leave your shoes here, stepping onto the wooden "indoor" floor to put on your house slippers — which never touch the outdoor floor. This rapidly becomes automatic, and so deeply ingrained that I found myself taking off one slipper to step on the outdoor floor with my bare foot when I checked that the door was locked. Interestingly, there is never a chair in the entry to sit in while you do this: I guess people wear slip-on shoes and/or learn to balance on one foot. How the young women in their knee-high tightly-laced fancy boots cope is a mystery. (More about fashion and appearances another time.)

But it goes further still. The toilet (separate from the bath-room) is particularly filthy (conceptually) so it has its own set of slippers! You don't wear your indoor slippers into the toilet, nor do you wear the toilet slippers indoors. So there is a little ballet that occurs: you open the door, stand at the threshold and take off your indoor slippers, leaving them on the indoor floor; then step forward and into the toilet slippers which are waiting on the other side of the threshold. When finished, you reverse the procedure, leaving the toilet slippers at the threshold with their toes pointing into the room.

Both toilets that I've used so far have had heated seats. In both cases, there was no sink in the toilet room, but here in my bed&breakfast (more later) there is a really neat feature: The top of the water tank is depressed to form a kind of basin; when you flush, the tank is refilled from a tap that flows into this basin. So you rinse your hands in the water that will be used to flush next time. (There is no soap, as there was none in the washroom of the rather fine restaurant that we ate lunch at yesterday. Apparently conceptual cleanliness is culturally more important than combatting real germs.)

Time for breakfast. I'll be putting up lots of short posts rather than my usual lengthy monologues.

Thought for the day

One day, while staying at a friend's house, Nasrudin peered over the wall into the neighbor's yard and saw the most wonderful garden he had ever seen. He noticed an old man patiently weeding a flower-bed and asked,

“This is a beautiful garden. I'd like to have one just like it. How do you make a garden like this?”

“Twenty years of hard work.”

“Never mind,” said Nasrudin.

Indeed.

July already

Odd to think that I will be somewhere in North American airspace at this time in a week. Booked several flights, about two years' worth of flying by my usual measures.

The itinerary is unnecessarily complicated, due to North America's inability to offer sensible and convenient train travel. Case in point: Milwaukee (destination two) and Regina (destination three) both have train stations, but one is Amtrack and the other is VIArail. Their networks connect at precisely three points, none of which is in the Midwest. So I will fly from one city which has a train station to Toronto and there take a connecting flight to another city which has a train station. Absurd. This hub & spoke arrangement might make economic sense for the airlines but it is hell on us passengers.

In case you are curious, the list of places I will voluntarily visit is: Chicago, Milwaukee, Regina, Durham NC, and New Jersey. I will pass with gritted teeth and not-only-subvocal expressions of dismay through: Toronto, either Calgary or Edmonton or Denver, and possibly Raleigh NC.

I have started reading Infinite Jest by the late DFW, responding to the challenge/invitation issued by the crew at Infinite summer: to read the whole damned thing, all 981 pages (in this edition) and 388 endnotes, some of which have footnotes of their own. I'm up to page 212 and endnote 74* and am loving it.

I can't for the life of me think how IJ stayed below my radar for these thirteen years***, because it is very much the kind of book that I love: Excursive, discursive, voluble, laconic, fond of words as things in their own right, curious about and amused by the whole world. Probably I was put off it (or DFW, as I hadn't read anything longer than a magazine article by him) by the enormous hype. In this case, surprisingly enough, it was justified. IJ is quite marvellous, it's sure to be one that I keep and re-read.

Other than that life has been going on much as it usually does. Lots of panic this week, with an average of 10.5 hours a day on the first four days. Tomorrow will be easier, Fridays are always only half-days for me (because Susan hosts a meditation session in the mornings) — but architects' half-days are often six hours long anyway.


* I think I've had that one already. It's hard to be sure because I tend to keep reading beyond the end of the note that I flipped** back to read.

** Well, I say "flipped" but in fact I have a second bookmark set in the notes.

*** Actually this should be no surprise at all that I didn't read IJ when it was new and highly praised, as that is my usual response. I assume that the reviewers are in fact praising the item's fashionability and up-to-date-ness, and further assume that it will be seen as nearly worthless once the fashion changes and the calendar has shed a few leaves. This spares me having to read a buttload of dross, but means that I occasionally miss out on significant delights. Ah well, better late than never.

Blather, Monday edition

Alone in the office, after hours; sun's still up but the day is drawing to a close. It has somehow devolved to me to be the office dishwasher (except Fridays, when the cleaning lady comes), presumably because I am the least afraid of water and the most annoyed by dirty dishes. I wish that someone else might gather the courage and the wit to wash up once in a while, but I don't actually mind doing it and I do enjoy being alone in the office in these bright evenings.

<rant> for a friend who will never read this: Peel the bragging-labels off your damned glassware, already. It doesn't impress anyone, it just looks really tacky and nouveau-gormless. If the glasses are pretty, then we will admire them no matter how cheap they were, but if they are ugly, then our scorn will only be increased by knowing how much you paid for them.</rant>

Walking home the other day, I discovered a positive proof that time travel will be possible (and actually used) in the future: I found a door where there had never been one before. I have walked past a particular blank stone wall every other day for the last fifteen years, and until then it had always been blank. Now, there is a door in it. The door is clearly very old: the stonework is weathered and crumbling, the paint is chipping, the wood is shrinking with age. Nonetheless, regardless of how old the door may be in world-time, in the personal time of my memories I know with absolute and unshakeable certainty that it is new. Somebody travelled back in time and had the builders put that door in, for reasons that I cannot know.

This is what the results of time travel look like: Something changes around us, in a way that is both new to us and much older in the world. We presume that it must have always been there, chuckle over our presumed obtuseness and say "Oh, how can I have not seen that every other day for fifteen years?" But that's not true, we were aware and observant. It was not there yesterday, though today it has has been there for decades.

We are surrounded by time-travellers, meddling in the past in ways that seem trivial to us, although to them the reward of getting this doorway put in clearly outweighs the expense and bother of finding and persuading the stonemason. Perhaps it will be used by somebody's yet-unborn grandmother to escape from a future fire?

That'll have to do for now, my dearies. I am still alive and mostly well, I hope you are too. There is another post in the works, the second in the occasional series of What Second Life Is Really About; it'll be up sometime this week.

Postmortem

Harry: So this is the list of winners and losers, and the model photos. Which do you think won?
Udge: Well, G already told me that the winners were all groups of little pseudo-houses, so ...
(Looks at the models, considers carefully.)
Udge (pointing): Not this, but either this one or that.
Harry (grinning): Why "not this?"
Udge: Because it's ugly as shit.
Harry: That was the winner.
Udge: Bah.

Catching up

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

Fuck yeah. Watching the Inauguration made me happier than I have been in quite a while, and I'm not even an American. How lovely to be given a reason for optimism again, after eight years of being shat on.

Will he disappoint us? Well, yes, he probably will. He is human after all, and the problems are immense and complicated, and he is President not Czar: he cannot simply issue instructions to the serfs. But as Zhoen rightly said, "If Obama just doesn't keep us going at top speed down the mountain to the cliff, I'm calling it better."

The inauguration address was a model of grace and decorum, as all of Obama's speeches have been. One thing that strikes me on reading it, is how seldom he used the first person singular. If my count is correct, there were only three "I"s in the entire speech, all in the first five paragraphs. It was all "we", "us", "our". Good.

I spent a day in Zürich last week, giving an introduction/training to some new database customers. Oddly enough, one of them turned out to be a very old nearly-customer, who had been in the audience when I gave a demonstration at A Very Large Bank Indeed five years ago. They didn't buy, but she remembered me and proposed us when her new company needed a database.

Zürich is a lovely city, big enough to be interesting but small enough still to be pretty and comfortable. And they make very good chocolates. I'll have to go back sometime with a few hours of daylight to wander around in.

The trip home, however, was a … well, I nearly said "disaster" but that is not how it felt. What should have happened, is that I boarded the last ICE of the day at 19:10 and was comfortably home with tea and slippers at about 22:15. What did happen, is that a half-dozen of us stood at the entry to platform 11, whence the train should have departed, looking at a blank indicator board. The main signboard (in the station hall) said "Wait for announcement" so like the good little Germans we are, we waited. And waited and waited and waited.

And then, quite suddenly, without any announcement or explanation, our train disappeared from the signboard.

We looked at each other in wild surmise, then stormed the Information kiosk. The woman behind the counter said that the train had been cancelled, and stated that it was our own fault that we had missed it. "Why did we not ask her for advice before it was cancelled?" Well, really. We explained, politely I thought under the circumstances, that her statement was unacceptable, and after a few minutes of "Yes it is" "No it isn't" she directed us to the Customer Service Desk hidden away at the other end of the building. They, bless them, immediately apologised and sprang into action, finding connections and rebooking our tickets. So we (by now a highly integrated team) went out to platform 16 and boarded the express train to Basel.

Arriving there, we found another messup. We were supposed to change to a train from platform 5, but there too the indicator board was blank. An SBB employee was standing in front of it, talking on his cellphone and gesticulating. When he hung up, he turned to us and said that he didn't know where the train was or when it would leave — and with that, tried to walk away. It was explained to him, politely I thought under the circumstances, that his statement was unacceptable, and after some grumbling he tried again, discovering as though by magic that the train was on platform 9 and on time, i.e. about to leave during the next 50 seconds. So we ran.

The train in question was a sleeper to Prague via Berlin, which we were going to take up the Rhine as far as Karlsruhe, for the second connection to Stuttgart at 23:18. We settled ourselves in one of the seating carriages (not beds) and went to the bar, which was actually quite nice. Comfy chairs, a true bar with a footrail and music, tiny LED lights in a Milky Way sprinkling along the ceiling, fine food and very good beer. The catering in the SBB is miles ahead of the Deutsche Bahn's attempts.

We arrived in Karlsruhe at 23:25, seven minutes after the connection left, and found the station deserted but for the McDonalds and the cleaning ladies. There was one more train to Stuttgart, at 00:30 the next morning, arriving at 02:45. Since we should already have been at home for over an hour, little enthusiasm was expressed for the idea of waiting an hour for a slow train. Six of us hired a minibus taxi to take us all home for a flat rate of 200 Euros. The bus took half an hour to arrive at the station, and an hour and a half to get from Karlsruhe to my doorstep (I was second off the bus).

The trip had taken six and a half hours.

What interested me in this whole mess was to observe our reactions to it. I have been more affected by the meditation and discussion I've been doing in Second Life than I had realized, because I was able to "step back" from myself as we were arguing with the moron in the Info-kiosk in Zürich, and see that the situation did not determine our response. We had a choice of how to react to what was happening. I chose to see it as an adventure, and relaxed into whatever was going to come.

The group dynamics changed as we sat in our compartment on the way to Basel and then in the bar, without my arguing or trying to pursuade anyone. I simply acted on my decision that I was going to enjoy this unexpected adventure, and over time this quiet acceptance came to be the common attitude.

Fascinating.

Signs that you live in a small town, #1

I picked up a litre of milk and some cookies at the local corner grocery store and took them to the cash register, where I exchanged the usual pleasantries with the owner as she rang up my purchase (3.25 Euros). I reached for my wallet and discovered that I'd left it at home.

Now, a cashier in a big-city store would have called over a manager and cancelled the sale (muttering imprecations all the while). The shop owner handed me 6.75 Euros and said, "There. You owe us a tenner."

Lesson for the day

When attempting to locate and solve a hardware problem, start by testing the cheap components. Don't spend 70 Euros on a new external drive case, let alone 75 Euros on a new 500 Gigabyte hard disk, without first testing whether the 18 Euro connector cable is defective.

File under: Duh.

Mind you, 500 Gigabytes for 75 Euros is a pretty hot deal. I am certain that I can find a use for them somewhere, possibly inside that brand-new external drive case.

And file that under: Lemonade.

Business as usual

How quickly we humans adapt to routines, and how easily exceptional circumstances become routine. Still lumpy, still self-injecting heparin, still wrapping bandages around my leg. Ho hum.

On the balcony summer office again, taking a break from work; tea and telephones on the Braunes Rolltablett at my side but no biscuits. Maybe I should get a cheap deck-chair to sit in out here, to get my legs into a different position.

It's a beautiful day, mostly-blue sky with a few decorative clouds, a balmy 27°C with a gentle breeze from the west bringing the smell of the forest; the forecast is for rain this afternoon. Sparrows keep flying up to the balustrade intending to sit, then noticing me half-concealed behind the Benjaminas and darting away with a flurry of wings. The dull, soft, rattling sound of their flight is quite charming.

I've started working for the Münsters again, in 20-minute installments; this time I am programming rather than translating, extending a do-it-yourself report-writer system to cover all areas of the application. Great fun. It's a different kind of thinking to what I did on the architectural competition, and different again to translating. This stage of the work is almost purely conceptual: I am trying to understand what the application is doing by following the sequences of control and command through the actions, and watching as the data gets manipulated along the way. This stage of the job is somewhat like dumping the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle onto a table and organizing them by category: there's another edge piece, put it in this pile; here's more sky, put it in that pile.

I was thinking about happiness recently, and realized that nearly every hour I see or feel or hear something (a sunset, a rose, the breeze on my skin) which makes me think "I love <that which just happened>". This "I love" is my natural state of being, just as others are naturally pessimistic or angry or fearful.

In other news Dale has written amusingly about his massage practice:

"All those years I tried to get women
To take their clothes off, and to touch them,"
I said. "And it turns out all I had to do
Was charge them money for it."

Heheheheh, who knew?

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Be kind to yourselves and to each other, and enjoy the weekend.

How my day began

Telephone: Ring ring, ring ring, ring ring

Udge (mumbles): Hello?

Caller: Idiot! Bloody idiot!! Gah!!! Why didn't you call me?

Udge: Ah, good morning Lioness. How are you?

Spent the last days mostly at home, mostly in or on my bed. I've read a lot, dozed, even slept a few hours working off the effects of the competition last week. It's getting somewhat dull. I brought in my laptop which is now perched most uncomfortably on my purple belly as I lie propped up in bed, so this is not a long-term solution either.

Speaking of purple, I gave myself the first heparin injection (of three) this morning. I stood for a full minute with needle in one hand and a roll of belly fat in the other, before working up the courage to poke the needle in (but have to admit that it was in fact quite painless. This was subcutaneously administered (as we in the profession say), rather than injecting into muscle tissue which I now infer is the painful kind). My hand was shaking so much from the stress of the odd position and trying to push the plunger slowly and evenly that the needlepoint was waggling about. Lioness advised applying ice to the injection site immediately, which I did, and am pleased to see that there was no bruising there.

She gave me lots of good advice that the doctor didn't (e.g. avoid eating sources of vitamin K, which basically rules out everything but meat and junk food) and a few earnest warnings that I won't repeat. This condition is a combination of predisposition (low blood pressure, being very tall) and habits (sedentary, no exercise). Having got it, I shall have to be watchful (and active) for the rest of my life.

I've been drinking a lot of what I am amused to learn is called "white tea:" plain hot water. Quite deliciously refreshing.

Shabbat shalom, my dears, and happy Will Smith Day to the Americans. Enjoy the weekend.

On the short-sightedness of customers

Had a phone call from a new database customer (my own database, for those keeping track) wanting to know how to import her collection of addresses. We couldn't figure out any easy solution (i.e. one that she could apply from her end without more involvement from me than telephonic hand-holding), so I had her send me the data in various formats.

Took a look at her data, figured out how to import it. Figured out a price, too: 2623 records à 0.25 Euros = 655.75 Euros plus tax. Called her to tell her the good news.

"Oh dear, so expensive, I'll have to ask whether we can pay that or whether I will just type them in by hand."

I am shocked and amazed, or rather: I would be had I not heard this nearly every time I've been asked to import data. I am truly amazed to infer how few companies perform any kind of cost/benefit analysis on what their employees do. Most seem to view salaries as a lost expense best ignored: the staff comes, we pay them, end of story: what the employees do is of no importance as long as they are present and awake. Bzzzzzt! Wrong. The salary dollar for a coffee break is of less value to the company than the dollar that went on a phone call that made a sale. The true cost of making a trained, experienced employee spend a day filing reports is not the day's wage, but the lost benefit that the person might have achieved if usefully employed and the filing were done by a temp.

Dear customer, permit me to help you make an informed decision. Retyping addresses that already exist in one electronic form into a second electronic form, is not useful employment. You should be spending your time on things that generate revenue, or at least on things that increase customer happiness.

But if that doesn't convince you (and it probably won't) the numbers might.

Find out your hourly rate, what it costs the company per hour for you to work there. (As a ballpark figure, that's your annual salary plus a third for overheads, divided by 230 days in a year, divided by 6 working hours in a day.) Now divide your hourly rate by the 0.25 Euros I charge per address.

That is the number of addresses you would need to type per hour to be cheaper than my import service. I don't need to know what that number actually is, to be quite certain that you cannot do it.

/me chuckles and waits for her to call back.

[Updated: she didn't call back, so I infer that she is retyping two-and-a-half thousand addresses by hand. /me shakes his head in disbelief.]

Thought for the day

The main question about strangelets concerns their stability. The known particles with strange quarks are unstable because the strange quark is heavier than the up and down quarks, so strange particles, such as the Lambda particle, which contains an up, down, and strange quark, always lose their strangeness, radioactively decaying via the weak interaction to lighter particles containing only up and down quarks. But states with a larger number of quarks might not suffer from this instability. This is the "strange matter hypothesis" of Bodmer and Witten. According to this hypothesis, when a large enough number of quarks are collected together, the lowest energy state is one which has roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, namely a strangelet. This stability would occur because of the Pauli exclusion principle; having three types of quarks, rather than two as in normal nuclear matter, allows more quarks to be placed in lower energy levels.

From the Wikipedia article on Strangelets.

On saving money, and matters arising

I phoned Lufthansa tonight to book my flights for my father's 80th birthday celebrations, and had to wait and wait and wait and wait (as one does). While waiting I idly surfed over to Lufthansa's website and started researching flights and prices there. The sales rep came on the phone as I was about halfway through the online process, so I carried on with that while talking to her. She and the computer both ended up with the same flights on the same days — but a 300 Euro price difference! Booking online was only 2/3 of the price she quoted me. So I explained the situation, thanked her politely for her efforts, and booked online. I can think of much better ways of spending the money than by giving it to Lufthansa. For instance, it's almost exactly the price of a 16Gb iPhone.

But anyway. That's the state of play. I am now booked for Toronto for early May. According to my mother, it'll be the first time that Sis and I have been in the house together with them since 1988.

I phoned my parents to let them know, and we talked of family and friends (as one does). Mom asked whether I had heard from Physically Distant Cousin's daughter lately? No, should I have done? Apparently yes: there are plans* in the brewing. As Mom tells the tale, PDC'sD's grandparents asked her at Christmas what she was planning to do after graduating from high school this coming summer, whether she had thought about university? "No way," she replied, "I'm going to go and live with Udge in Europe for a year, learn German and maybe French."

Ah. Okaaay.

Mom expected me to be contrite and apologetic at having lead her astray**, and also to be concerned about looking after this poor delicate flower (snorts) for a year, but I'm afraid I laughed delightedly. I think it's a marvellous idea and I support her fully. No idea how it'll work out, or even where I'll be living come September, but it will work out somehow. Good on yez, PDC'sD, more power to your elbow.

* Or at least: ideas and big talk.
** Educationally speaking, I hasten to clarify.

Trivia, Saturday edition

I bought a copy of Windows XP Professional today, the first money that Microsoft has ever had directly from me, largely because I was fed up with being unable to ask for assistance and worried about downloading updates for the—what shall we say?—borrowed copy I had been using on my old PC for the last few years.

I'm blogging now on my Mac Mini while installing Windows on that very same computer, to run under Parallels Desktop in parallel (as the name implies) to the Mac OS. I have my doubts whether this will be as fast or as smooth as running Windows in Boot Camp, but not needing to reboot when switching between systems is very appealing. We shall see.

Had a nice day yesterday, went downtown for lunch at a fish restaurant and permitted myself a glass of Blanc des Blancs with it; very pleasant. All manner of bloggable topics ran through my mind as I sat there watching the pedestrians, but none left traces deep enough for me to recover now. I guess I shall have to carry my Moleskine around town to record my thoughts in, as I did in Venice two summers ago. Doing so would be quite appropriate, in a way, because one of my first impressions of Germany (before coming here) was that everyone carried around a little black notebook all the time, to jot down the poetical and philosophical insights that crowded their day (of course). This idea came, as did many of my early ideas about what life was like and how the world worked, from the cinema, in particular from Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Herbert Achtenbusch and Rainer Maria Fassbinder (pretty much in that order). I was quite disappointed when I started visiting Germany, to discover that not one of my friends carried a little black notebook, and that some of them wouldn't know a poetical insight if it bit them in the arse.

Linden Labs has published the in-world economic and user-base figures for Second Life for 2007 in the official SL Blog, and a fine piece of sleight-of-hand they are too. Start with that first graph, titled "LindeX Volume Millions of USD," noting please the nice straight arrow leading smoothly upwards for eighteen months. Bullshit. It is a lie. Look at the grey bars behind it, the actual monthly figures, and you will see a different story: traded volume peaked in March and has been flat since. Bah. I can understand the impulse to massage information, but why would anyone be so blatant about it; how could anyone intelligent enough to make this graph be so stupid as to think that we would believe it? It's a mystery.

The Economic statistics page also makes interesting reading (this may be members-only, I can't tell because I get logged in automatically (it's a Mac, it Just Works)). I draw your attention to the second table, un-informatively titled "Linden Dollars." This does in fact show who earns how much in Second Life, and the executive summary is that 472 people earned US$ 2,000 or more in December '07. There are already more than 470 people active in Second Life who could close down their First Life businesses and still earn an adequate to very good living. I find this fascinating and very encouraging. But read on:

What I find greatly discouraging is the statistics on sign-ups and returning users posted on Dwell on it, the blog of a SL avatar who is keenly interested in such things (scroll down and look in the green column at the right). They tell a depressing story: the rate of new sign-ups is slowing and the number of residents who actually visit SL is declining. Attendance (let's call it that) dropped by 20 percent between July 07 and January 08. If I were one of the 472 lucky high-earners, and had actually taken the step of closing my First Life business, I would be getting worried.

To end with a laugh file this under "E-Mails that I didn't finish reading."

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated John Tavener: The Veil of the Temple [Hybrid SACD] have also purchased Greatest Hits by Spice Girls...

Ermmm, no, I'm fairly sure that they did not. You must be confusing two quite separate groups of people. But thanks for trying.

Getting closer

Finally made a decision on the competition this evening, as the culmination of a three-hour meeting. Could have been worse: we have had six-hour meetings that did not reach a decision. We won't be doing the long, thin version that I blogged about some time back: it remains the best proposal in terms of spaces in the city and use of the park, but is a very weak building internally. We (I) just couldn't resolve the constraints that the shape imposed.

I am amused by the way that (certain, possibly most) architects work, by the astonishing quantity of optimism and wishfulness that they bring to the task. G sees my drawings, on which a particular set of rooms is 3 centimetres long and two centimetres wide, and sets about to re-plan the building. He draws a rectangle two centimetres long and one centimetre wide, and says with a straight face "We'll put [that same set of rooms] in here." I am just staggered—but it's rather the rule than the exception. B2 would sketch so-called double beds that were 150 by 110 centimetres and plan a room layout around them, and then be angry with me when the room no longer worked with realistic furniture.

They are equally amused by the way that I work: with calculator, scratch pad and measuring tape, constantly rising from my desk to check the size of things against my own body and real-world examples. It would never occur to me to draw a hallway of an unusual width X, without having marked out on the floor how big that is and walked back and forth along it a few times. "How quaint."

Five down, twenty-five to go.