This was one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, oddly only up until people started dying. Somehow it became more comfortable then-- then one was no longer in an innocent world about to be shattered, but in the world we inhabit today.
Made me think of September 11, obviously. So here's my September 11 story: My professor was late to class. We were all twitching and wondering if the 15 minute rule would apply. He then came in and told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I remember thinking, in a disinterested way, "so this is history". He went on with the lecture. After class, I happened to meet a girl I knew from high school in the engineering center. She told me they had hit the Pentagon. That was just too surreal to sink in. She asked if I was ok. I said I was and went on with my business, I had to get some form signed, I got on my bicycle, went downtown, and got it signed. I marveled at the fact that life was going on as normal. The newspapers on the stands still said everything was alright. Then I went home, and like everyone else turned on CNN and watched the planes crash into the towers and the towers collapsing over and over and over again, as if sheer repetition was the only way to get something that big into our heads. And then made brownies. The next day I was sitting on the porch and dropped a teacup when a military plane flew overhead.
After seeing this movie I feel sort of lightheaded almost. It was very well done. The thing that came across the best that I hadn't remembered very well was the fact that no one knew how far it would go. Once there were four planes, then how many? How powerful was this enemy? No one knew.
And the Islamic prayers at the beginning and throughout are very beautiful. Almost too beautiful.
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(4)
10:23:20 PM,
Monday 19 June 2006
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That's twice in the past week I've been asked for directions. This happens to me a lot. My theory is that I must look particularly non-threatening as a passerby. That and it's easy to get lost in Cambridge. I know, I got lost the one time I tried to drive to work. Tried being the operative word. I did make it in the end, but it's not an experience I would want to repeat. It turns out to be only five minutes faster than the T (if one were not to get lost), and infinitely less pleasant. Unfortunately I'm not a terribly useful passerby, having a practically non-existent sense of direction. Though I was able to point out the Museum of Science, which one could see from only a few feet beyond where I was standing.
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12:47:00 PM,
Friday 16 June 2006
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one who encounters
configuration issues
seeks one stubborn bit
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(2)
12:37:47 PM,
Tuesday 13 June 2006
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I thought having a 45 minute commute each way would be burdensome, but since it consists of half walking and half reading on the T, it's actually one of the bright spots of my day. Especially when the weather is good. Much better than my fifteen minute commute to Tufts, which involved driving down crowded city streets with much honking.
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08:31:57 AM,
Monday 12 June 2006
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Feather is my latest song. Also, I put up a directory of songs.
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08:49:40 PM,
Saturday 10 June 2006
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Having just read a book about Alberto Santos-Dumont, the Brazilian flying pioneer, I am wondering if there is anything now that could possibly be as exciting technologically as flight was then. Is there anything that should obviously be possible, that would be really nifty, but that we haven't worked out yet? There's just something really charming about the nineteenth century experiments in flying, so innocent somehow.
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10:43:32 AM,
Friday 9 June 2006
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The top of the tall mirror-glass building across the river is lost in a cloud this morning. I approve of clouds doing such things.
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08:47:11 AM,
Friday 9 June 2006
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Cat Power is awesome in concert.
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(6)
08:20:22 AM,
Thursday 8 June 2006
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Goldfish crackers now have smiley faces. I feel betrayed.
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(2)
03:40:52 PM,
Tuesday 30 May 2006
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I just noticed after a week of work that I can see the Charles from my office. I have to be standing up, and look through the windows of several offices, and between slats of blinds, but there it is, a little patch of river, right from my office.
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03:18:37 PM,
Wednesday 24 May 2006
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Ha! I was so right to be afraid of deer
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(7)
02:52:08 PM,
Tuesday 23 May 2006
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Books seen on the T: A People's History of the United States, A History of Higher Education in 20th Century America, Emma, The End of Faith, The Davinci Code
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01:14:08 PM,
Friday 19 May 2006
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documentation
dry syntax and semantics
filling up my head
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10:29:59 AM,
Thursday 18 May 2006
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So I just read these two books, What is Life by Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, and Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead, the former for a church book group.
Both books start out with the need to reconcile matter and mind from a scientific perspective, and both end up with rather flaky interpretations of evolution (why does everyone want to think that matter wants to evolve? I don't want to evolve, thank you very much). And the Margulis book has some interesting chapters on the five kingdoms of life and the wonders of bacteria, but philosophically it is rather unsatisfying and falls into vitalism as much as it protests against it, whereas the Whitehead book has a fascinating and coherent critique of materialism which anyone interested in science should go read now now now. I suppose it's not really fair because Whitehead is actually a philosopher, but anyway.
I mean one can't just say "matter and mind are one" and leave it at that, because there's a paradox involved. Whitehead has a good description of the general scientific concept of matter is something "senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being". He argues that mind simply cannot arise from such stuff; one must reimagine matter in a more humane and organic form. He has some ideas for how to do this reimagining, he ends up with something like monads. I'm not completely satsified with it, but it's certainly worth a try. But it seems that modern scientists like Margulis are still floundering around without a coherent, philosophically grounded understanding of matter which allows for will and consciousness. I suppose it's safe to say it's a really hard problem, but reading books written 70 years apart I might have expected to see more in the way of progress. I think this is a symptom of the other problem Whitehead writes about, which is that scientists and philosophers don't talk to each other much.
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(6)
03:41:43 PM,
Sunday 14 May 2006
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particles
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(2)
11:57:43 AM,
Friday 12 May 2006
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goose heads
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(3)
09:09:07 AM,
Wednesday 10 May 2006
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paint
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08:57:10 AM,
Wednesday 10 May 2006
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lamp post
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(6)
05:35:12 PM,
Saturday 6 May 2006
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green
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05:33:59 PM,
Saturday 6 May 2006
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I dreamt last night that I was shooting ducks. Whoever shot the cutest duck would win.
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(2)
12:18:57 PM,
Tuesday 2 May 2006
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Beach today. I may be simple-minded, but I like what the water does to the sand. I like the way it bunches up into waves that are almost linear but then have little breaks and whorls, like fingerprints. I especially like it when you can see the particles of sand being carried away by the water in tiny little streams. It's like there's this big complicated system that you can see happening but can't quite understand.
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(6)
08:42:10 PM,
Saturday 29 April 2006
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Try writing an email with the word "internet" in it in gmail, and then spellcheck. (The punchline is that it wants the word internet to be Capitalized).
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(3)
04:28:26 PM,
Wednesday 12 April 2006
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I dreamt last night that it was already early winter again. Horrifying.
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02:18:30 PM,
Sunday 9 April 2006
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Say you have a machine that can predict the future with perfect certainty, and outputs this information in some fashion. For any such machine it is possible to design a Contrary Machine, which takes its own predicted future output as input, and outputs the opposite. Therefore even in a perfectly deterministic world it is impossible to perfectly predict the future.
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(6)
07:14:42 PM,
Friday 7 April 2006
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Food of the month: fennel root. Uses so far: salad, pizza. Good stuff. One of those things I'd never heard of so never tried, until I came across it in a recipe.
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(3)
11:11:16 AM,
Friday 7 April 2006
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The latest version of Java has a foreachish sort of thing: for(Object o: objectCollection). Which is nice. The thing is, you have to check manually whether objectCollection is null before using it. I can see no reason why this should be so. The end result is that this lovely new feature creates a whole new set of bugs.
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(1)
12:33:15 PM,
Thursday 6 April 2006
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When I was a teenager I somehow got it into my head that I should read Kerouac. Apparently no one had told me what Kerouac, so I picked up his dream diaries. Bad choice. This year I decided to give him another chance.
The book is sad. Sad is Kerouac's favorite adjective. Everything is sad.
Dean Moriarty's madness is, in the end, sad, even if it is, to the narrator anyway, impressive and fascinating:
...standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were... He was BEAT-- the root, the soul of Beatific
I don't know. I just don't know. Dean's "yes" is appealing but awfully destructive. He abandons his wives and his children, he abandons the narrator twice, once sick, once starving, he steals and wrecks cars, he generally spreads chaos around him wherever he goes. He is exhausting just to read about. But one hesitates to make a moral judgement about Dean. Or, rather, the judgement is very easy to make: he's bad, he's awful, he's a con man and a complete and utter bastard. But that's irrelevant, knowing that isn't going to help Dean escape from the mania that's driving him relentlessly and giving him the incommunicable mystic revelations that the narrator is so awed and inspired by. If it were written today I suppose the moral for Dean would be to take his meds. And that would be less sad in a lot of ways, but something would be lost-- more for the narrator than for Dean though, I think.
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12:55:58 PM,
Monday 27 March 2006
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So I got four gourmet cheeses from a cheese shop for my birthday. I'm going to list them here so I can remember what they were:
Pleasant Ridge Reserve, cow's milk, Wisconsin: This one is kind of similar to Gruyere. My food describing vocabulary is generally fairly limited, but the words that comes to mind for this are nutty and rich. It may be my favorite of this batch. 5 stars.
Delice de Bourgogne, cow's milk, France: This one is sort of a brie, but not as soft and melty, smoother, and more flavorful. Noticeably salty. 5 stars.
Queso Azul de Valdeon, cow and goat milk, Spain: An extremely sharp crumbly blue cheese. I've had better though. 4 stars.
Couronne Lochoise, goat's milk, France: This one is really weird. It's shaped like a doughnut. It's all melty like brie, but it's a goat cheese. I never thought I liked goat cheese, but I like this stuff. Still a little alien. 4 stars.
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(1)
01:17:51 PM,
Saturday 25 March 2006
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My latest song: Don't Feed the Lions
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07:40:19 PM,
Tuesday 21 March 2006
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Experimental cooking log (in which Erika reinvents the culinary wheel):
Chopping tomatoes up and cooking them in butter with a bit of garlic works pretty well for a sauce. Next time I will try peeling the tomatoes.
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(4)
06:32:58 PM,
Tuesday 21 March 2006
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Spring break! Nothing to do but read books and play guitar. Bliss.
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(2)
05:52:37 PM,
Monday 20 March 2006
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This is probably daft of me, but I was just tickled to see an equation I came up with end up in a grant proposal. Look ma, I named those variables!
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(2)
02:11:23 PM,
Wednesday 15 March 2006
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Saw an albino squirrel today.
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01:13:04 PM,
Monday 13 March 2006
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programming in C
tricky pointer logic: oops!
segmentation fault.
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01:54:27 PM,
Friday 10 March 2006
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The pond didn't freeze over to ice skateableness this year. Nor last year, though our local suicidal ice skating fiend claimed it did-- I went out that day and almost started skating before I noticed a huge hole in the ice right next to me. Somehow after the first year we were here I thought it always would. Apparently a long time ago people used to train for the Olympics on it.
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06:03:02 PM,
Thursday 9 March 2006
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This is in response to Ling's post on these lectures (I have only read the first so far).
When I worked in a restaurant, my boss one day got ahold of some foie gras. Delicious stuff. She was very proud of herself. The idea of the cruelty behind that substance was, if anything, only an added relish. It's a gourmet rebellion against propriety, putting flavor above all else. As I said, delicious.
When I worked for a neuroscience lab slicing rat brains, I got to witness the method by which rats are "sacrificed". It really is like some sort of ancient ritual. First the rats are given drugs to knock them unconscious. Then they are pinned by each paw to a foam board, a crucifixion in miniature. Then open heart surgery is performed, and their own hearts are used to pump the embalming fluid around their brains. I wish I could say that each brain obtained in this manner was treated as sacred, but they are not.
I like the basic worldview put forth in the Elizabeth Costello lecture. It puts quite nicely the idea that we are really animals, and of course animals suffer, perhaps plants suffer, perhaps corpses and other non-living things suffer, and of course we can sympathize with their suffering, and we immediately know how, it is not a mystery. But then besides the fact that comparisons to the Holocaust are almost always in bad taste (of course her bad taste is part of the author's intent), I can't follow her there.
The world is full of suffering. My potted ficus will never grow to its full height, will never bloom. It suffers, maybe as much as a rat in a cage. But I can't let this affect me, or I become (as I was saying to Julia the other day) like the person who sweeps the path ahead of him to avoid stepping on ants. His sympathy is extended so far that he can barely move. And everyone can see that he's just daft. We can't avoid inflicting damage on the world. We know what it means to suffer. A certain amount of ruthlessness towards suffering is only honest. The foie gras and the rats bother me precisely because they are at the boundary of sympathy and ruthlessness for me. I seem to err on the side of ruthlessness.
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(5)
10:32:13 AM,
Friday 3 March 2006
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