The Unforgiving Minute

It’s difficult to know which is more amusing. First you have the original interview with the greatest living Slovenian, with gems such as:

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

That it makes me appear the way I really am.

Then you have the comments on Marginal Revolution, which range from clueless:

He sounds like a grumpy and possessive old man.

to tragic:

I am a mainstream philosophy professor in an very prestigious American university, and I have never heard of this guy.

to brilliant:

“Does he have a blog?”

One might be forgiven for thinking that he actually maintains every LiveJournal in existence.

This interview format is ridiculous, and a gift to an absurdist such as Zizek. The point of it is not to be informative but entertaining, and so Zizek entertains. I like the idea of Zizek with his own blog, but it’s hard to imagine how he could beat the absurdity of blog posts and comments like these…

One of the remarkable effects of a smoothly fitting public surface is that it protects one from the sense of exposure without having to be in any way dishonest or deceptive, just as clothing does not conceal the fact that one is naked underneath.

- Thomas Nagel, Concealment and Exposure

To be perfectly honest, the Shadow Robot Company sounds like an evil corporation from a 1990s anime - maybe Mobile Suit Gundam: Hoxton. ON THE OTHER HAND (wait for it, that phrase becomes pretty important shortly) they actually design and make robot components, so the name is fairly appropriate. Plus, two of my friends work for them (or with them, or around them, or something) so I have a vested interest. Actually I don’t have a vested interest, but I wish I did, because robot parts are going to be big in the future. Not big physically - although they might be, especially if that whole Gundam thing has a revival - but big in a pop-cultural sense. Trust me, you heard it here first, or you read it somewhere else first, which seems more likely. Anyway, Michael Pollitt (yes, one of those friends and my ex-flatmate) circulated some press coverage to me a while back, which I managed to ignore. In a spirit of reconciliation, here are the videos:

They build robot hands, you see? That’s why I said “On the other hand”!

Truly my time is wasted on you, the reader.

The Shape of Music by Dmitri Tymoczko covers fascinating ground in suggesting that the human affinity for mathematics is bone-deep, as long as the bone we’re talking about is the malleus. Tymoczko offers a jumping off point for a wider discussion about the way that humans receive the world while talking about the way chord progressions using the analogy of musical notes positioned on a clock face:

The reason these chords all sound alike is that the human ear is more sensitive to the distances between notes than their absolute position on the clockface.

So in music humans are more sensitive to the relative than the absolute; likewise the visible universe in general is more sensitive to the relative (acceleration) than the absolute (speed), as Newton’s bucket showed. Humans have been in love with the idea of absolutes since at least Plato, but perhaps it’s time to throw away our dreams of perfection and accept that relative values are the only ones we can rely on. An absolute morality makes no more sense than an absolute music.

A fascinating article which I have shamelessly hijacked for my own purposes. Read it all, and while you’re at it read Music in Concentration Camps 1933–1945 by Guido Fackler, for a reminder of the perplexing role of music in human history. (HT the latter: Norm!)

UPDATE: Well, gosh:

This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education.

I feel a thesis coming on.

I try to explain to him what it means and how it feels, and while I’m talking I wonder whether those two things are the same.

Imagine that you speak a language that only one other person in the world speaks. You don’t even think about it as a language - it’s just the world you inhabit together. One day you wake up and that person is gone, and that means that your language is gone, as if it never existed. You can’t capture or call it, and words start to fade from the pages of your memory. People tell you - there are other languages in the world. Losing this language - why, that gives you the opportunity to learn one of these other languages instead! It’s true, you can learn another language - but it won’t be the language that you’ve lost, and your tongue will still be silenced. The worst knowledge of all, though, is that as the language leaves you like rain soaking back into the earth, you’re also losing the memory of the person that you spoke it with, the one person who shared that world with you.

I watch his face to see if he understands, but it long ago ceased to matter. I’m dreaming of words that I will never hear again, and inside I weep for the voice that is gone forever.

Things you need to know:

• This computer is really ancient and has been through several disaster zones. As a result it hates me.
• I’ve had a really terrible couple of weeks, so it makes sense that it would choose now to strike at me.
• I know people, see? People who know things. People who know things about computers.

I try to avoid going online at the weekends, but on Saturday I tried to open my email. I use Thunderbird, which is usually very reliable, but to my surprise ALL MY MESSAGES HAD DIED AND GONE TO EMAIL HEAVEN. I mean all of them - every last message. Gone. Needless to say, emotions raced across my face: shock, anger, disgust, hunger (I missed breakfast) and finally resignation.

This morning I came back to my computer and found that my email had not magically re-appeared.¹ It was time to take action, which consisted of whining to my friends until somebody offered to help. Sure enough, Tom L. introduced me to Guru Stefano, who fixed things in about 40 minutes over Skype. In the interests of servicing the web, I explain everything here. Skip to the end if you find this sort of thing really dull - I’ve included a nice epigram to finish off the post.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. This is my usual approach to problems - go away for a few days and see if it all works out. You’d be surprised how frequently this is effective. [↩]

I’m not a particularly big football fan. I support Crystal Palace because their playing grounds are close to where I grew up, and I had a particularly 1970s Eagles school bag while I was doing that growing up. I’ve been to a few football matches, watched a few more on television and play football twice a week with a bunch of people who are clearly better than me.

In this fascinating article, Ryan Maher is talking about American football rather than real football, but I think the principles are the same. In fact he’s talking about how to discuss faith in a meaningful way with those of other faiths, in the context of his work in Doha.

This template for discussing religion and faith is fundamentally flawed. It presumes that different groups of faithful people approach their religions in the same way football fans approach their favorite teams: I cheer passionately for mine, you cheer passionately for yours, and we all agree to play by the rules and exhibit good sportsmanship. For people of faith, religion isn’t like that.

Actually, football isn’t like that either. That’s a very strange view of sport - a matter of etiquette rather than passion. I don’t believe that Chelsea are any good, not on the basis of the empirical evidence but because I don’t like Chelsea. I don’t believe that Crystal Palace are any good, but if people ask I’ll still say I support them. I don’t think that England are much good, but I’ll still be jumping out of my chair whenever they win a match with a goal in the last two minutes.

Good sportsmanship has its place on the pitch; off the pitch, the barracking that opposing supporters give each other is seldom good-natured and sometimes spills over into violence. So perhaps it would be more useful to see religion as exactly like sport - pursued by different people for different ends and in different ways, and occasionally with more agreement between people of different faiths than with those of their co-religionists?

Magic and language are practically the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive. Don’t doubt that for a moment. As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent – which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers – will have their lives altered and affected – seriously affected – by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is - nine out of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It’s like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a real occupational hazard.

- Alan Moore, Interview

The soaraway Sun: touchingly incompetent with Photoshop or just plain racist? You decide.

Not only has The Sun removed the skipper on the left, they’ve also removed the boat’s engine. Prince William, drifting around the Caribbean during a hurricane. Extra laughs:

Prince William’s campaign to try on every uniform Britain has to offer is a wow - next week it’s baker, then butcher, then cub scout, before a week as a traffic warden in Slough, then a few days as a Beefeater before ending the summer as a lap dancer.

HT: The Daily (Maybe)

Radovan Karadzic was arrested at the weekend - a great day for justice but a bad day for beards. Check out one of the most bizarre before and after shots ever:

Recent posts have exposed me as a big fan of the taste of “international justice” and Karadzic’s arrest fits right into my pot. The destabilising effects predicted by critics of the indictment of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan are minimal in this case; thanks to the passage of time, the Karadzic arrest is unlikely to be much more than another arrow in the political quiver of a particular section of Serbian politics, rather than a focus for mass mobilisation.

The news is more interesting in terms of the timing - shortly after the formation of the new Serbian government and the replacement of Bulatovic as the head of the intelligence services. Karadzic is just a pawn in the chess game of Serbia’s political rehabilitation, which is perhaps the hardest thing for his supporters - and him - to stomach. That’s perhaps part of the role of tribunals such as ICTY - not just providing justice, but also showing people that their “heroes” have feet of clay and their “monsters” are (in the end) a sad old man with a novelty beard.

However the most important aspect of this news is that Karadzic - under his pseudonym of Dr Dragan Dabic - had his own website, which I urge you to visit at http://dragandabic.com/. Turns out that the initial website that circulated via such illuminated truthseekers such as the BBC and Reuters was a spoof - Dabic’s real website was the New Age car crash PSY Help Energy. In spite of that, I still found the homilies at the bottom of the spoof page quite entertaining, this one was particularly poignant in light of his history of hair:

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.

He’ll have plenty of time to reflect on that in the next few years, and possibly to face in court some of the people from Bosnia who had very little choice about where the birds of sorrow built their nests.

POSTSCRIPT: In other news, Karadzic was my neighbour! Human Quantum Energy! Also smuggles endangered animals (in hat)! Ratko to go down swinging!