Micro-career

Hanging about in the office, waiting for a software update to finish.

Let me bring to your attention something quite wonderful, and spin on what I've been thinking about since seeing it. First, the viewing: turn your speakers on and the volume up, and listen to Kutiman's collected works. Do it now, please; it's OK, I'll wait. (If you're in a hurry, numbers 1, 5 and 8 are the must-see's.)

Now have a look at the singer/songwriter featured in the fifth of those, Dadasarah. She's a housewife with a little kid, who happened to study voice in college; she's a woman with a videorecorder, writing and singing her own material for her own satisfaction.

Her twenty videos have been viewed 58,007 times as I'm writing this. Fifty-eight thousand times. Most of her videos get five-star ratings, the rest four-and-a-half.

Kutiman's eight videos have been viewed 1,696,659 times as I'm writing this. Let's say that again nice and slowly: One point seven million times. Most of his videos get five-star ratings, a few four-and-a-half, and one ugly duckling got a mere four stars. He has a fanbase whose size and enthusiasm many "established" artists would envy.

Two quite different people making music — principally for their own amusement — in quite different ways. They have something interesting and very significant in common: They are getting it presented to us, and we are lapping it up.

I think that home-brew distributed on the Internets is the future of music-making.

There is a new kind of career to be had here, which wasn't possible before. In the bad old days when music was a physical object, it was said that there were only two kinds of money that a musician could make: None at all; or More than you would ever believe possible. Getting people's attention, putting the product in their presence, was expensive as all hell. It took a team of a dozen people to bring physical music to the attention of a possible paying audience, which is why the labels took such a large slice of the pie.

Zero-cost bandwidth and immaterial distribution change all that. Kutiman and Dadasarah distribute for free, thanks to youTube; I am bringing them to your attention for free, thanks to Blogger. The only thing missing is a way to turn their talent and our attention into an income stream, but given the size of these viewing figures that is surely only a matter of time.

And when that happens, it will be possible to make a decent living with a micro-career in music. You won't be able to live the rock-star lifestyle — let's be honest though: don't we all know that rock stars trash their hotel rooms because they are lonely, bored and unhappy? — but you will make enough money to continue making music. And for people like Dadasarah and Kutiman, that is what it's all about.

If Apple continues to be as smart as they have been, they will soon let "ordinary people" post music for sale on iTunes. What will happen when Dadasarah and Kutiman get there? Say that Apple gives them half of the dollar that they charge for songs (because there is no record company's share to pay); say for the purposes of argument that they would get fifty cents per song.

If half of the people who love Dadasarah's songs had bought one of them on iTunes, she would have earned around 14.5 thousand dollars. If an eighth of the people who love Kutiman's songs had bought one of them, and if he had then paid out two-thirds of the income as royalties to those whose videos he sampled, he would still have earned around 35 thousand dollars.

This is the future, people. And I for one can't wait for it to get here.

Awake

… since more than an hour now, I'd been drifting in and out of sleep for a while. It's too early and I am too tired to stay up, though: this is not yet morning. Hot chocolate is brewing.

Feeling an odd blah-ness physically, which I put down to my late cheese-and-garlic-heavy dinner last night and the half-litre of beer that accompanied it. Another good reason to go back to bed.

I've been hearing an intermittent electromechanical peeping sound for about a week now, but only at night. You'd think it would be easy enough to locate something that peeps every 35 seconds, but I cannot even state with confidence which room it's coming from. I thought that it was a low-battery warning, but have checked everything which I know uses 9-volt batteries: all fine. It's a mystery.

In other news, winter has finally arrived. It snowed overnight, the rooftops and cars are covered finger-deep (visual estimate, I didn't go outside to check).

In musical news, let me share with you a delight: the second joint-project album between David Byrne and Brian Eno, "Everything that happens will happen today," thirty years after their previous collaboration. Byrne described it as folk electronic gospel, which is a strange niche but a pretty good fit. Enjoy.

Hot

Well, the rain that I have been praying for since a fortnight arrived today in a quite impressive hour-long downpour. Unfortunately, it appears that my prayers were insufficiently precise. What I wanted was a break in the constant heat and humidity, what the universe delivered was a sky full of falling water. Ah well. Let that be a lesson: prayers do get answered, but God has a sly and pedantic sense of humour.

I've been rising earlyish this week, trying to get some hours in while the air is still relatively cool (already 22°C as I woke, though, the nights hardly cool off at all.) I woke just before dawn as a gentle rain began to rattle against my window, smiled in my half-sleep and rolled over. I dreamed of South Kensington and my sister's family, and their dog which could talk and which was a red-haired green-eyed girl (though also a dog at the same time); a cheerful and happy dream, I woke laughing.

Survived another week at work, architecture and Münsterism both going well. Started on the competition, and received notice that we were drawn from the hat to partake in yet another, the fourth of 2008. Both are due in the same week.

Did I mention that it's very hot and humid? Quite unpleasant. My forearms are sticking to the desk, and my back and thighs to the chair.

Since Monday's music quiz has gone unanswered (barring Pacian's intriguing but sadly incorrect suggestion), I shall reveal the answer: "Slither down the greasy pipe" is the second line of the half-spoken intermezzo to David Bowie's song "Joe the Lion" (released in 1977, my gods, "Heroes" is already thirty-one years old). Insofar as Bowie's songs of the period can be said to be "about" anything in particular, "Joe the Lion" is about a performance artist named Chris Burdon, best known for being nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen and shot in the left arm during performances. A more recent piece is his Flying Steamroller, a 12 ton road-building machine connected to a pivot arm and counterweight, which becomes airborne above a certain speed (YouTube video, 3:57). Quite poetic, in an elephantine way.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Enjoy the weekend.

Nothing compares 2 U

If people still know the-artist-once-again-known-as Prince in a hundred years, this song will be among the reasons why. The cover version by Sinéad O'Connor shuffled up from the depths onto my iPod today and reminded me in a rush of emotion of the first time I heard it.

In the winter of 1990 I was working at a Great Big Computer Company in Sprawlville, commuting to and from London every day — except when train strikes or boozing with the lads prohibited this. On one such occasion, I camped at Smiler's house after a particularly intense beer-and-curry session. It had been a very late night and I had had far too much to drink, so I was dog-tired and still half-drunk as we got into his car to drive to work the next day. Smiler pulled up at a tobacconist and went inside to get his fix. As he closed the car door, this song came on the radio.

It was the first time I'd heard it, and in my weakened condition the song — and Sinéad's delivery — just devastated me. By the time he returned the tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally struck dumb. I could not have spoken a word to save my life.

Smiler earned big karma points and my undying respect and gratitude for what happened next: He saw nothing, heard nothing and said nothing, neither then nor ever after. He even stopped for gas on the way to the office (though the tank was three-quarters full) to give me a few more minutes to pull myself together.

This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but seen within the yobbish cultural ideal of The Lad which reigned in England at the time it was an act of singular generosity and kindness, a demonstration of true greatness of spirit. English humour has always been based on cruelty and insult, and within that culture reputation and popularity were held to be zero-sum games: I can only improve my standing with the Lads by damaging yours. He could have shot up in the pecking order by cutting me off at the knees that day, and others of my so-called friends would have done so without hesitation. "Well, it's jus' a larf, innit? Can't you take a joke?"

Shabbat shalom, my dears; and wherever you are, Smiler: thank you.

On the difference between logic and clear thinking

Being a little teaser for the weekend.

Permit me to draw to your attention a marvellous CD called trees outside the academy by thurston (Moore of Sonic Youth). It's largely acoustic and quite melodic (in contrast to the frequently harsh electric noisery of SY); the songs are all interesting, and some are actually quite beautiful. Try it, you might like it.

A simple but infuriatingly tricky logic-puzzle meme is going around the Internets. Here's the short version courtesy of xkcd:

A group of people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians -- if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. No one knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. If anyone has figured out the color of their own eyes, they [must] leave the island that midnight. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (excluding themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph.

On this island there are 100 blue-eyed people, 100 brown-eyed people, and the Guru (she happens to have green eyes). So any given blue-eyed person can see 100 people with brown eyes and 99 people with blue eyes (and one with green), but that does not tell him his own eye color; as far as he knows the totals could be 101 brown and 99 blue. Or 100 brown, 99 blue, and he could have red eyes.

The Guru is allowed to speak once (let's say at noon), on one day in all their endless years on the island. Standing before the islanders, she says the following:

"I can see someone who has blue eyes."

Who leaves the island, and on what night?

The solution proposed by xkcd is here, and for what it's worth I think it is wrong because although his logic is correct, his solution does not address the question as it is stated in the problem. Spoiler warning: highlight the blank below this to read.

The logic depends on the number of blue-eyeds that can be seen by any given person. Let the number of blue-eyeds visible to a brown-eyed be N; the number visible to a blue-eyed is M (equal to N-1, because they cannot see themselves). This difference is the crux of the solution.

If I am the only blue-eye(N=1), then for me M=0. Therefore I must be the single blue-eye whom the Guru saw, and must leave immediately on day zero (N-1).

If there were only two people on the island, one blue-eyed person and one brown-eyed (also N=1), the same thing would happen: The blue-eyed would see the brown-eyed and realize that their own eyes must be blue, and leave immediately on day zero (N-1).

What if there were only two people on the island, both blue-eyed (but neither knows his or her own colour)? N=2. In this case they would look at each other and think, "s/he over there is the person the Guru meant" and not leave. Next day, seeing that the other person had not left, they would both think "s/he did not leave, meaning that s/he thinks that I am the person the Guru meant, therefore I have blue eyes." Both would leave on day one (N-1).

If there were four people on the island, split two and two (N=2), the situation is more complex but not different. The browns see two blues; each blue sees only one, thinks "s/he was seen by the Guru" and so remains. On day one, each blue still sees a blue and therefore thinks "aha, s/he thinks that the Guru meant me", knows that s/he is blue-eyed, so both blues will leave. Meanwhile, what are the browns thinking? On the morning of day one, they see two blues leave, know that they must have seen only one other, and know therefore that their own eyes are not blue.

The solution is thus: Given that I see M blue-eyed people, wait to see what happens M-1 days after the Guru spoke. If the blue-eyeds leave on day M-1, then my eyes must be brown. If I can still see blue-eyeds on day M, then my eyes are blue too and I will leave, with the others, on the next day.

However: the problem states that anyone arriving at knowledge of his or her eye colour must leave the island, not that persons discovering themselves to be blue-eyed must leave. The true answer is that almost everyone will leave, except those having a colour that occurred exactly once in the original population.

What happens next is a repeat of the blue-eyed scenario: the not-blues look around and see at least one other eye colour. Say that there are six greens, of which I see M examples. if they leave on day M-1, then my eyes are not green. I may remain on the island—for now—because I still do not know my eye colour, just that it is neither blue nor green. If they are still present, then my eyes too are green and we must all leave.

Busy doing nothing

At least, nothing that I can or will write about presently, for a complex nexus of reasons arising from bad planning and worse decision-making on my part. So be it.

The topinambour recipe will appear in 2007 2008, I promise—but I have to find it first. The "Zeit" article that I linked to doesn't list the ingredients of the soup (though it does list the other four dishes' ingredients) so I will have to track down the pages that we worked from.

Walking, reading, eating relatively little but more healthily, drinking no alcohol at all.

Except that I ate and drank far too much on Friday at a birthday party, as one does; home at 3:30 and was awake until 5, then slept only five hours. Saturday was correspondingly rocky.

This week's much-delayed Friday Favourite will also be the last, at least for the foreseeable future: a newly-passed law requires German ISP's (and telephone and cellphone companies) to track and record every connection made through their services, and to make this available for six months in searchable form to any government agency that happens to ask. The matter will fail miserably, of course: the data to be collected amounts to several terabytes per day*, there is no provision in the law for payment for the hardware necessary to store all this nor for the electricity to run the hardware nor for a charge for accessing it; there is no definition of what "searchable" actually means; and not even Google has any idea how to dice and slice that amount of disparate data arriving that quickly.

That being said, the law is the law and therefore the system must be implemented at great cost (economic and political) so that it can be seen to fail miserably before the law can be revoked. Now, tracking down persons who infringe on commercial rights is not the purpose of the law, which like many other bad laws around the world has been enacted under the guise of "fighting terrorism;" but the observable fact is that government exists to better enable corporations to pick the pockets of its citizens, so it will not be long at all until this data is being used to sue children who exchange ringtones on the playground or download songs from the Internet. Until the bill is revoked, posting these Favourites is just too dangerous: in Germany, the penalty is not restricted to fines (absurdly high though those can be) but may encompass actual time in jail.

Yes, you're right: it is an egregious pile of crap offensive to any thinking person. But it is also the law, for now, and for the time being we must live with it.

Oh yes, with all the ranting I nearly forgot: here's the song, from this album. Enjoy loudly; singing along is encouraged.

Moving rapidly along as I do think we should, here's a thought to prime the pumps of your New Year's listmakings. To set the scene: George, Harris and the narrator J are preparing to spend a week in a small boat on the River Thames, rowing up to Oxford, and are deciding what to pack.

The first list we made out had to be discarded. It was clear that the upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things we had set down as indispensable; so we tore the list up, and looked at one another.

George said:

"You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without."

George comes out really quite sensible at times. You'd be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with — oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! — the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man — all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness — no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need — a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Jerome K. Jerome, "Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)"

I can think of nothing finer than that last paragraph to wish you for the coming year, dear readers.


* Assume for the sake of argument that "several" actually means "1.0003" A terabyte per day is 12 megabytes every second. That brand-new and expensive 320 gigabyte hard-disk you just bought? You'd need twenty-three of those per week.

Drifting

... through the day. Vague achey residual tiredness, strained voice, mild proto-headache which refuses to either go away or become a real, i.e. treatable, headache. Rose late after nine hours' train travel yesterday, walked downtown for cappuccino, then to the Dead White Male Poet cafe for lunch, then a little burst of translation; now a pause for tea and cookies before settling back to work on the wiki.

The demo went well, but they probably won't buy: what they think they need doesn't fully overlap with the database's feature set. It would have been a single client/server system in any case, without even any data-import consultancy to sweeten the pot: they claim to have no electronic data at all! Hard to believe, but I am certain that they weren't lying: only a fool would willingly set herself the task of manually re-typing paper records, if there were electronic records that could be imported in no time at all at a twentieth of the cost. We shall see.

I bought a copy of the current "Foreign Affairs" to read on the train, as I do once or twice a year (it's published bimonthly). FA is a strange beast, fascinating and infuriating at once, I cannot think that either the left or the right among American readers would be more than half-pleased by any issue—which is a sign that the commissioning editors have done their job fairly. Non-American readers would find the general tone to be very pro-American, every subject is discussed in terms of its impact on America and how it might be leveraged to further increase the wonderfulness of American life and society. "America has made mistakes, but America is not actually wrong" is as close as the magazine comes to criticism.

The stand-out articles this time around are Hillary Clinton on undoing the damage of the Dubyah years, Philip Gordon on whether the war on terrorism can be won, Colin Kahl on the Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual (fascinating, download the manual itself here), and a justly damning review of "The Israel Lobby" by Walter Russell Mead.

Yesterday's xkcd cartoon was quite enjoyably nasty.

Dooce has written well on depression and how to deal with it:

I think many people are afraid that if they take medication or even agree to see a therapist that they are in some way admitting failure or defeat. Or they have been told by their boyfriend or their mother or their best friend that they should buck up and get over it, and that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Well then, let me be weak. Let me be a failure. Because being over here on this side, where I see and think clearly, where I'm happy to greet my child in the morning, where I can logically maneuver my way over tiny obstacles that would have previously been the end of the world, over here being a failure is a hell of a lot more enjoyable than the constant misery of suffering alone.

Quite right. Go read. [Updated on Saturday: 1026 comments, almost all saying "thank god for therapy and/or [medication of choice]".]

Today's Friday Favourite is one of the best songs on an album that I wrote about earlier this week. Enjoy.

Finished, part three

Survived yet another NaBloPoMo with soul and senses more or less intact. As I said last time, I enjoyed the discipline of writing every day and was surprised to see how often I wished to write more than once a day. Perhaps there is some inner "Target Number of Words Daily" setting that prompts me, which falls below the often extreme length of my non-NaBloPoMo postings.

This made me laugh this morning. Perhaps I'll give Ralph one for Christmas.

The weather did change yesterday/last night, but no snow: just drizzling rain.

The Little Professor points at an article in which a Harvard Law School professor admits (a) to plagiarism and (b) that he doesn't even read the manuscripts that go into print under his name—but somehow keeps his job. Is it just me, or does anyone else find this vaguely offensive? LP raises two valid points: If the purpose of research is to discover something new, then summarizing the work of others is clearly not "research;" and: If students submitted papers written by another student, they would be reprimanded if not sent down; why then do we permit it in professors?

Today's Friday Favourite is a lovely song from a great album, ten years old already. Regular readers will have heard her voice before, she sang on one of the first Favourites, back in February.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Thirty down. Done the bugger!

Tired

Long day in the office, polishing up the second competition which is due on Wednesday. It's good but not great, we won't win this one but we might be in the money. I seem to have retained my grip on the conductor's baton with this project, and am regularly pushing the team into making decisions.

I spent the day swallowing "I told you so"s (how to punctuate that?) as they discovered what I had told them three weeks ago: that the strong uphill slope of the site would cause trouble, and that they must draw several sections to be sure that all parts of the building are actually above grade.

Surprise, surprise: the team didn't, and the building isn't. Heheheh.

By the way for those who asked, the first competition will be judged in mid-December.

Today's Friday Favourite is a wonderful bit of thrashing from a late, sadly missed guitarist. Crank it up and get your air-guitar going. [Updated: because that was so much fun, here's another.]

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Enjoy the weekend.

Twenty-three down, seven to go.

Head-first into the weekend

To the office for a few hours, attending the latter half (!) of a project meeting about the second competition. I lasted twenty minutes before pushing my way to the podium and snatching the conductor's baton from G (as it were), and forcing the buggers finally to make some damned decisions. My head aches (literally) from listening to "Well, it might be nice like this, but then again doing it like this might also not be nice." Gah!

Life is too damned short for cowardly shit like that, not if you want me to be at the table. So I forced them to swallow hard and accept the basic truth of things which they had all known but nobody was willing categorically to state. I am pleased to say that the final half-hour of that meeting accomplished more than the previous three hours.

I nearly burst a seam on discovering that neither of the new hires could state how large the building envelope was! How can this be: you work—allegedly, apparently—for three weeks on a project and don't know even to the nearest hundred square metres how large it is? Absurd! It is to cry out loud in frustration and disbelief.

And they don't even attempt to follow and test their own precepts: there was much talk about keeping thematic sections together in specific areas of the building, but they had not tested whether the sections could fit into those areas! Ridiculous.

Now, I know that I am very much more numerate than many other people: I can do arithmetic in my head as fast as G can use a desktop calculator, and I can usually tell at a glance whether a number (up to four digits) is prime or not, and I can remember sequences of significant numbers (i.e. the size in square metres of almost every room in our competition). I know that this is extremely odd and peculiar, but still: how can anyone, however un-mathematical, possibly work for three weeks on a building and not know intimately how large it is? Does not compute.

Today's Friday Favourite is the most thrilling section of a wonderful piece of music, one of Wolfgang's finest (and indeed final) moments. I have three recordings of it, of differing vintages and styles. This, the source of the link above, is probably my least favourite, but I found it most suitable as an introduction to the piece because of the exemplary clarity of the recording. My favourite musically is this, but I listen most often to this. Enjoy.

Bah.

Another long and tiring day working on the competition. This time all three of us (G, U and I) were in the office together, and as last time we were all present for more than a few hours I had to retreat behind my headphones to escape the bitching and nagging and petty scoring of points. (On both sides, be it noted.) Bah. Life's just too short for this crap.

The competition approaches fruition by a circuitous and stony path. I am dismayed to say that we have returned to the previous long, thin form! Inconceivable. I have quite given up having an opinion on this project, I shall just keep my eyes down and my nose clean and do the damned drawings. Bah.

Today's Friday Favourite is going to be a challenge, shall we say, to some of you. Try not to judge or interpret it, just let the music wash over you—and then judge how you feel once it's over. [Updated for clarity: it's neither loud nor brash nor full of rude words nor discordant; on the contrary, the music is very smooth and lovely, to the point where fans of loud & brash will start twitching from withdrawal.]

Shabbat shalom. Enjoy the weekend, my dears.

Nine down, twenty-one to go.

Grey

I did go back to bed, and slept for over two hours; then went to the office for a few hours' nonproductive work on the competition. We too are floundering, but from lack of theoretizing rather than of bums-on-seats: we're moving so fast that neither of us can tell whether we're headed the right way.

Had a low-blood-pressure day: slow, weak, muffled and creaky, like a flash-forward to being eighty years old.

To bed.

But first, because I can't let go: here's the weekly Friday Favourite, a happy little song that never fails to cheer me up. 1989, already eighteen years ago.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I wish you all a pleasant, peaceful, restorative weekend.

The wee giftie

I have made a start on the translation for the Münsters. As a first step I corrected their previous English translations, remade the menu system in English and translated the startup screen that a user first sees. I packed this stuff together and sent it to them on Friday, thinking (to be honest) that it was a pretty thin effort, just about the bare minimum that I could do without being sacked on the spot for laziness.

The chief Münster (perhaps we'll call him the Münstermeister) phoned this morning to say that they were pleased and impressed with the speed and quality of my work. They are very happy to have made the decision to work with me, and eagerly await the next installment.

When we first spoke about the project, the Münstermeister hinted that there might be a possibility of full-time employment at the end of the contract if all goes well and subject to contract and etc. This morning he flat-out offered me the job, start whenever I like; please think it over, we'd love to have you on the team.

In other news Princess is planning a weekend of gluttony and mild exercise in France for her upcoming 49th birthday, staying overnight in the cells of a monastery near Strasbourg. Could be quite nice.

In musical news the song of the week is "Crocodile" by Underworld, from the recent-released album "Oblivion with bells." (It's a great album, by the way, the standard is very high. "Beautiful burnout" starts slowly but is nearly as good as "Crocodile," and "JAL to Tokyo" and "Best mamgu ever" are also quite pleasant. But "Crocodile" is the one to beat.) This is my candidate for Best Song Of 2007, it's been on repeat since I bought it on Friday. I bought this as a single from iTunes, so I cannot post it here, but would urgently recommend the song to your attention. Get onto iTunes and buy yourself a copy, turn it up painfully loud and dance. Wonderful!

The title? It's a nod towards a poem about a louse.

On reading "On bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt

I am presently, as you may already have intuited, reading On bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, "renowned moral philosopher [and] Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University." It is on many levels a wonderful book.

To begin at the beginning, the book is physically lovely: very well made, of a nice size and shape, with a pleasant and highly readable layout; the typography is excellent. To be quite honest, I might well have bought the book on these grounds alone. I am afraid (nay: I am proud, I boast) to say that I do judge books by their covers: if the publishers didn't think it worth their time to engage a good designer, if the typographers didn't care enough to do good work, if the printers were slipshod, then the book's content is unlikely to be much better.

I didn't read "On bullshit" when it first appeared in 2005; I usually don't, but rather wait a few years to see which books survive the bestseller mindset of publishers and journalists to earn a measure of renown. I expected the book to be yet another fashionable item with a half-life measured in days; instead it has become something of an underground classic, one finds references to it in other places, by trusted sources.

Frankfurt begins:

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.

From where I stand on page seventeen, it's not yet clear where Harry is intending to take us. He sees a significant distinction between lies, humbug and bullshit: they are related but quite dissimilar. The relation and the point of difference is in the speaker's attitude to the truth.

A liar makes a statement that he believes to be untrue*, with the intention of causing his listeners to believe that his statement is true and thus concealing the truth. A recent and typical example is: "they have weapons of mass destruction." The significant point is that the liar is someone to whom the truth is very important, he is aware of it and cares greatly that it not become known.

Humbug is saying something that one knows is untrue, and which one's listeners know to be untrue, but with no intention on either side of believing or causing to believe, as (Harry's example) when a politician rises to his hind legs to say "our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind." A humbugger's relationship to the truth is tangental: he knows that what he says is not actually true, but does not seek to convince anyone of its truth.

A bullshitter tries to improve upon himself and the world by saying things that make him look better, his experiences more exciting, his pleasures more exalting, his defeats more crushing, his enemies more terrifying and his friends more angelic. An example is to say "my joke had them all falling out of their chairs with laughter" when in fact a few people chuckled. A bullshitter's relationship to the truth is one of blithe disregard. He truly does not care, at this time and in this case, what the truth is. In Harry's eyes, this makes him the worst and most dangerous of the three.

It's a fascinating book and I may well write about it again in a few days when I finish reading it. Recommended.

The thought for the day comes from Terry Pratchett's "Thud", which I've written about before.

"What? Tawnee says that what she does is art, sarge. And she wears more clothes than a lot of the women on the walls around here, so why be sniffy about it?"

"Yeah, but ..." Fred Colon hesitated here. He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume that you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.

Indeed.

Today's Friday Favourite is from an album that I often play for a while, then set aside and re-discover a year later. The song is a hit from my university days. Musically aware listeners will detect the presence of Messrs Rodgers and Edwards (aka Chic) on guitar and vocals. Enjoy.

Happy Friday and Shabbat shalom, my dears.


* the actual truth of the statement is not relevant: before 1492, a person saying "the earth is flat" would be wrong but not a liar because they were stating something they believed to be true.

Hello, I must be going

Blogging briefly before bed.

Met the Münsters, or rather met the particular Münster who is programmer for this application. The job is not quite what his boss, my contact, had stated. The application is of course not finished, so we will be mailing files to each other in both directions as he changes the forms and methods and I translate them; therefore of course somebody's last-two-days' work will get lost (overwritten) at some point during the proceedings. About a third of the app is written using swappable resource files for the names of buttons and standard boiler-plate text (the right way to do it), the rest using hard-coded text strings which some poor sod (points to self) must search out and replace with resource IDs. And the resource files are full of duplicated strings: instead of defining generic, commonly-used strings like "OK" and "Cancel" and "Print" once and keeping them together, each method and each screen or print formular has its own resource, meaning that each of those words occurs roughly two-and-a-half squintillion times. Bah.

On the other hand, there's no manual and no website—or rather they aren't my responsibility.

Meh. Could have been worse.

Today's Friday Favourite is probably the single most-played song in my collection (from this utterly wonderful CD from 1977. What a great year for music that was!). As a general rule I'm not fond of overly loud music, but there is no upper limit to the decibels when this song is playing. Crank it up and enjoy.

Interesting times

Y'all may remember that I gloated some weeks back about booking a Lufthansa flight on a train, getting all pan-Europeanishly smug about our integrated transportation services and how very clever we are.

The Deutsche Bahn will be shut down by a strike tomorrow morning, from 8 to 11am. My "flight" leaves the station in Stuttgart at 11:27, assuming that it does actually go anywhere. This could get very exciting.

I hate exciting.

There's nothing I want less when travelling than excitement. Once I arrive, yes, of course; but not during the getting there phase. I can think of nothing, really nothing, that could happen on a plane that might legitimately be called exciting, which might not just as truthfully be called "horrific" or "utterly terrifying" or "life-endangering." No no, when travelling my motto is "give me boredom, and lots of it."

We shall see.

I am about to pack and prepare for the holiday. I hope that I will have time and opportunity for a quick post tomorrow, but just in case I don't manage to: Have a peaceful and pleasant two weeks, my dears, be kind to yourselves and each other.

[Updated: in case I don't get online, here's tomorrow's Favourite and its link. Enjoy the mellowfulness.]

Progress, and unrelated matters

The first competition (as we now must call it) has reached a very interesting point. After much debate and many failed attempts, we discovered a form last night (an urban design, a shape in the landscape) which is just brilliant. Very simple: a long, low rectangle along the eastern boundary of the site; but it's just somehow exactly right. Everyone who sees it is impressed. I'm really pleased with the project now, after a week of fending off despair when it just wouldn't come together. This will be at least a third prize unless we really screw up the disposition of the rooms (and that is always possible, since the people who wrote the briefing documents are not judging the competition).

The sun was nearly setting as I walked home today at 7 p.m. Winter is just around the corner! This is probably my most favourite of favourite seasons (i.e. they're all good, each in its own way). The new year begins in Autumn for me, not in January (but then, I've written about that before).

In other news it was thirty years ago tomorrow that I first heard Keith Jarrett's "Köln Concert", at around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was during the introduction week of my first year at university, when various famous and exciting professor-types would spend an hour each telling us how lucky we were to attend that particular college. The most famous of them all, so egregiously famous that even I had heard of him, broke the mould—as he had made a career of doing—by saying nothing at all. He just put on Part II of "Köln" and started a slide-show of student work from previous years. Marvellous. His presentation is the only event in that week which I still remember.

In other, other news Dale is on a roll, his last two posts are quite brilliant. There are times when I can hardly bear to read Dale's blog, his writing is so wonderful and his insights so ... insightful that they make my own little bloggeries seem quite inadequate.

In otherest news courtesy of Joe in Vegas, a trio of videos for your pleasure and/or annoyance. The first takes on the burning, unaddressed social issue of porn for nerds. The video itself is quite funny and harmless, despite the title, but the rest of the site and in particular the ads in the right column are definitely not things you want the boss to see on your monitor. Go to Joe's and try to view it on his blog, i.e. without the unsafe ads; but it wouldn't run for me there. (It starts by asking your birthday, to prove that you're over twenty-one; just pick a year before 1996 and you're rolling. Call me paranoid, but I would never tell my birthday or any other real information to such a website.) The second video tries a bit too hard, but the third is the funniest of them all—assuming (as I do) that it's faked, otherwise one would have to think it quite horrific. Your mileage may vary.

Weekend starts here.

Happy Friday, everyone. There's not much to report today, I've been working in real life and making friends in Second Life. I was just dancing the tango with a professor of rhetoric on her lunch-break (I'll leave you to guess which life that was in).

I wish you all a peaceful and pleasant weekend. And since it wouldn't be Friday without a Favourite, here it is. [Updated: and here's the link.]

Short

I fear that I'm catching a cold. I shall go to bed early tonight.

That is all.

Shabbat shalom. Enjoy the weekend, my dears.

[Updated: nearly forgot the Friday Favourite, from this CD.]

Blue

As in sky, primarily. Weather is wonderful, a golden Autumn day of clear skies and warmish sunshine. I walked this morning halfway up the Hasenberg, then decided not to go to Heslach and walked back into town for a cappuccino at the Espresso-Laden instead.

Today's Friday Favourite is yet another acoustic blues-ish song, from a recently reissued album celebrating its thirtieth birthday. (A word of warning, by the way: do not buy the album on the strength of this song: the rest is very different, harsh, raw and discordant. 1977 indeed.) Drink up, dreamers; enjoy.