No good title
History has been revised. Thank you.
posted at: 21:22 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
The conspiracy to keep children quiet
Thanks to Steven
Hanley, I read Paul
Graham's essay "Lies We Tell Kids". His basic point is that adults
often don't tell children the strict truth - either by omission or by
fabrication - because some questions are hard ("Is there a God?") or
destroy the innocence of childhood ("What is a prostitute?"). To my mind
his essay parallels Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen and Terry Pratchett's
observations in the "The Science Of Discworld" series that we simplify
complex stories by abstracting or leaving out details - "telling lies" by
omission.
I'm lucky enough to have four nieces; since Kate and I have decided not to have children we have focussed our "raising the next generation" on these four (although I tend to be catholic, if not necessarily orthodox, in playing with any children). They are all reasonably well-adjusted, normal girls in my opinion and I think that, to varying degrees, their parents have tried to be fairly honest with them. On the Tuesday before the Armstrong family went away for a six week trip around the world, they had their family dog put down because of its extreme ill health and the likelihood that it would die while they were away. This was done by a vet in their back yard with the family and their cousins watching and supporting them through that terrible time, so Paul Graham's section on how we lie to children about death particularly resonated with me. These girls haven't suddenly become morbid, or afraid of death, or casual about it, because of that experience - they're still quite normal even after we've exposed them to something that other parents would go to great efforts to hide.
The girls know me as somewhat eccentric, partly because I play running and card games with them, partly for my collection of evil laughs, and partly because I'll bore their ears off with science and technology if they let me. I send them coded messages and make special hiding places around the house for when we play hide-and-seek. I'll tell them when I don't know something, or when I'm glossing over details in an explanation in order to make it twenty words rather than a hundred. I do think that a fair bit of my behaviour is related to keeping them behaving as children - or rather as young adults - rather than making them conform to one or the other but not both at the same time. To me, spending ten minutes talking to one of the girls when she's in trouble with her parents and explaining that I understand why she did the things she did - even though they were wrong - is far more valuable to her than being left with a sense of injustice that "you just can't win against your parents" and "no-one understands my side of the story".
Paul Graham talks at the end of his article about a sort of 'truth debt' built up by all the elisions, fabrications and contradictions the adults have told around children as they reach adulthood. "There's never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you," he observes. My way of dealing with this is to start early, be honest about the things you can be, and tell them when you're not being honest about the things you can't be. I hate telling lies, especially when I know that sooner or later I'm going to have to tell the truth later and then explain why I told the lie. Sure, I don't intend to freak kids out by telling them things that shatter their illusions of how the world works too quickly, but neither do I intend to shore up that illusion with even more outlandish fabrications.
I do hope that this little essay doesn't warn too many parents off from allowing me to talk to their children :-)
posted at: 12:26 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Stupid Quote of the Day
Andrew
Donnellan quotes Albert Camus rehashing
Pascal's
Wager as if it's some kind of useful way to affirm what one
believes. The certainty that the god that they believe in is the
god that will be actually judging them is ... amusing.
I would counter with the Atheist's Wager: "You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in God. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent God, he may judge you on your merits coupled with your commitments, and not just on whether or not you believed in him." Perhaps a reading of the relevant chapters of Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" might also useful debunking of this warped logic.
And I would also add that any God that requires my belief as a
"jealous God" is a pretty poor god by even human standards. If a
human required constant devotion and commitment in spite of complete
and utter disdain and ignorance of the devotees, we'd call them
wishy-washy or vain at best and spiteful or megalomaniac at worst.
Why do so many religions then excuse their god of these emotions,
coming up with ever more convoluted ineffabilities in order to
justify a tyrant? I wish I could find what I thought was a Robert
A. Heinlein quote on this, but it wasn't in
this otherwise excellent collection.
posted at: 14:00 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Dancing With A Will
Staring at my beer at 8PM on Monday night, it seemed like a crazy idea.
Get eight people (preferably four men and four women) to do some Irish
Set Dancing (a traditional social dance form with little connection to
Dance Dance Revolution or other computer games) in a pub I barely knew
on the first night of Linux Conference Australia? No-one from
the
group who'd signed up was there, the pub was full of Uni students
drinking and socialising in their own groups, and I was this complete
unknown who'd lugged a small but heavy guitar amp (generously lent by
Andrew Naughton) down there. At least the pub owner had been keen,
but it looked like I'd bitten off more than I could chew.
When most of the people in the group that had signed up arrived, it looked even worse; they were keen, but I knew that trying to convince two older guys to dance with eachother (meaning no offence to them) was going to be a hard sell, no matter how keen they were about the dancing idea. Reluctantly but with the boldness of the lunatic I plugged the mike and music player in, stood up and started giving some instructions. My quick 'one two' test of the mike received a few friendly but off-putting heckles from the guys at one table. But Rob and Jen were willing and learning, and with nothing to lose I called out "any of you people willing to get up and learn some dancing?"
John, the owner of Naughton's Hotel, gets the credit for what happened next. He knew the students - they'd been coming down to the pub for a while, it seems - and called out to them, "come on, you lot, get up an dance!" Soon one couple got up, then another, and then a fourth, and in astonishment I was teaching a complete set the basic steps and the first bits of the South Galway Reel Set. I started them on a nice slow hornpipe and they got into it, and I swear I have never seen a group of people who've never seen set dancing or even done much traditional social dancing before do it so well! All eight of them were really great, getting around a house in just the right time and still laughing and carrying on.
They responded enthusiastically to suggestions that we do it again at the regular speed, and I taught the first two figures easily. They had a break and I was afraid of losing them again, but they all came back eventually and we did the last three figures. There were a few flailing feet and the 'stomp the ground' action associated with mocking hillbillies, but they were still all having a great time and the rest of their peers were applauding and cheering on. And they were all dancing really well (given the above caveats) - keeping in time and not going too fast or slow. They grasped the geometry of the set quickly and were still laughing away and having a great time. The set finished with a massive cheer and everyone (including me) sat down tired but happy.
And you could have knocked me over with a feather when one of the other guys that had been watching on came over and said "'scuse me, sir, but would you have the music for the Heel And Toe Polka?" Well, anyone that keen cannot be denied, and for the first time in my entire existence I can honestly say that I was sorry I didn't have the Heel And Toe Polka on my music player. I rustled up something that was a reasonable approximation of it and grabbed a partner and soon five couples were polka-ing up and down in the available space. It was, in a word, awesome.
I'd love to do it again on Friday Night. All I have to do is get some
of the women around at LCA - especially the organisers - to find some
partners and I'm pretty sure we can get another set done. I'll check
with the organisers though to make sure that this is both a sanctioned
activity and isn't going to get too much in the way. But after that
experience on Monday night I am more convinced than ever that Irish
Set Dancing needs to move beyond the older people that currently do it
and be shared with the young and enthusiastic. How can anyone not
enjoy teaching such a excited, able group of people?
posted at: 06:51 | path: /personal/setdance | permanent link to this entry
What A Week
I'm now sitting in the common room at St. Mary's college, having
registered at LCA and bumbled my way around getting a room and
accidentally leaving my schwag bag at the pub. Since we're still
waiting to have the wireless networking connected, I now actually
have time to reflect on the last week.
I've been staying with friends of mine in Brunswick, and it's been really great to spend some time with them after a long time of talking via email. Playing a game of Go with Mark was a long-held desire and, though I still got badly beaten, I managed to take a couple of stones off him and gain territory where early on he had a definite lead. So while I'm certainly no master I think I'm ready for the Go BOF at LCA.
I did my Red Hat Certified Engineer training during the week, finishing with the exam on the Friday. Unfortunately, I found out on Saturday that I had failed that exam - still achieving my Red Hat Certified Technician qualification but it seems like last place now. It has only increased my appreciation of just how capable and expert the people that have those four letters after their name. Now I have to figure out what I did wrong, a task made more difficult by the fact that they aren't going to actually tell me.
I sort of finished my wooden laptop case cover and am aiming to give a lightning talk about it at the end of the conference. Given that it only barely fits on the back of the case it's hardly a good example of what I'm aiming for, but with a coat of polyurethane sealer on it it does look nice, if I do say so myself. Hopefully it will amuse people somewhat to have a project where they can actually hand around a sample.
Now here at the Fedora Miniconf waiting for Steve to get the wireless
network going.
posted at: 09:00 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Broken by design?
One of my less desirable habits is to leave things to the last minute.
The more critical the result, or the more complex the procedure, the
more I seem to prevaricate. The psychological reasoning seems to be
that if I fail afterward I can always say, "well, I didn't really put
any effort into it," as an explanation of why it failed. This leads
to a reputation of failure and minimal effort I am keen to avoid.
This is why, with two weeks to get ready after I came back from visiting my family in Brisbane for a two-week sojourn in Melbourne doing a Red Hat training course and attending LCA, that I left my packing until 10PM the night before I was due to leave first thing in the morning. Thus I left my USB sound output, vital to the mixing I want to do at LCA, behind in my frenetic and near-random scooting around the house collecting ephemera.
This is also why, during the same period, with the promise I made to have a finished, good-looking version of my wooden laptop case cover for LCA 2008, I left the actual glueing up until two days before I was due to leave.
I had learnt a few things from the previous test run:
Then the problems started. The first problem was that it was slightly damp, it was the day before I left, and I wanted it to dry out. I left it sitting in the shade outside against a post. When I returned it had bent thirty degrees on that corner. I wet the outer surfaces again and pressed it in a rigged-up frame made of oven grilles and a heavy pot, since I still wanted it to dry out. Even now it retains a set of unusual and possibly uncorrectable bends which make it non-planar when not attached to the laptop.
The second problem is that the front metal piece is slightly further down than it should be - it overlaps the middle ply rather than being beside it. This means that the connection to the laptop top is going to be a bit more of a strain than it should be and is a side-effect of glueing up the whole thing in one go (because the glue isn't tacky when I'm putting it together and therefore the parts in the middle have less friction applied than the parts on the edge). I hope that this will turn out to be a blessing in disguise, but there's no obvious benefit to being one millimeter too short over one millimeter too long so it remains to be seen whether this will actually make the whole thing unusable.
So in my non-copious spare time between now and this Sunday I shall attempt to get some fine sandpaper and some good clear wood sealer and paint it up. If I can find some clever instructions for flattening laminated wood that don't require a week to implement then so much the better. And next time I may consider glueing up the back and middle before adding the front, and using a glue which actually binds to metal. Which may require Kate to be taking photos if the glue can't also be cleaned up with a wet rag (since I spread the glue with my fingers).
But I really wish I had given myself more time.
posted at: 18:28 | path: /personal/woodworking | permanent link to this entry
What The World Needs
When explaining to a friend that you are technically breaking the law if
you sing "Happy Birthday" in a public place without an appropriate
license, I realised that what we need is a new song to sing when
celebrating a person's birthday that has a Creative Commons license. It
should also be short, relatively repetitive, include a space for singing
the birthday person's name that can be extended or contracted easily,
and easy to sing.
In fact, "Happy Birthday" is remarkably badly suited to singing by large groups of inexperienced singers and amateur musicians:
Using people the right way
In preparation for LCA 2008 and the possibility for mixing at the party
on Friday night, I looked at my Creative Commons music collection. I'd
already bought pretty much all of the music on Magnatunes, and my
previous encounter
with Jamendo left me thinking it would take ages to
trawl through to find the good stuff amongst the dross. But the paucity
of tracks I had made making a coherent, melodic and thematically
consistent mix difficult. I had to stick my head back under the
waterfall again.
Fortunately, by chance this time when I went to Jamendo I noticed the "Browse by Popularity" feature, and suddenly it clicked. Of course! Jamendo is a "web 2.0" site, so it encourages listeners to rate the music and compiles those statistics. A further hint that I was on the right track was that Atomic Cat, which I'd previously identified as great stuff, was up there in the top three. I started downloading what turned out to be 3.52GB of music, and a sampling so far shows that all of it is pretty good quality. At last I feel a bit more comfortable about doing some CC mixing!
Now to go through and work out which have a 'no-derivs' license and
try to email them asking if a mix for which they get credit and which
will meet all the other terms of their license is OK, so that I can
actually publish the thing according to the terms of the license. I
don't know what these people were thinking but it was apparently along
the lines of "let's make music of a form commonly mixed by DJs and
then deny any DJ, even one that uses CC licenses, the chance to use
our music."
posted at: 00:46 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
I need a cheap hit-man - 001
I'm staying up with my Mum for this Christmas, and as part of that I'm
helping her out with various jobs around the place. One of these jobs
is to plant new trees at Chapel Hill Primary School, where she works as
a teacher aide - trees she's raised or bought herself, too. Why, you
might ask, would an ordinary teacher aide be coming
in on a holiday to plant trees when the school should be buying them
and getting the groundsman to plant them? Oohhhhohohohhhohhh. Yes.
The groundsman.
His name is Steve, and from all reports he is a shiftless, lazy bastard with the spine of a sewer. He refuses to do any work at the school unless it is mowing - hence we drive large stakes in around the trees (again, purchased by Mum without any help from the school) to protect them from Steve trying to mow over them as much as from the kids. And that's it - he refuses point blank to do any work that would require him to get on a ladder, or to do any work which could be classified as someone else's job, on 'demarcation' issues. "Not My Job" would seem to be his catch-cry.
And even when it is his job - such as building up a terraced wall to stop erosion, he comes up with some bald-faced lie to excuse himself from it. In this case, he claimed that if he built up a terraced wall, kids might fall off it and hurt themselves - so instead it gets left as a six-foot scree slope, which kids would supposedly be safe on. If all that fails, he just lies about when he's going to do it. "Oh, I can't do that this week, ask me next week" is the excuse he foists on the enquirer; what he's busy with is a complete mystery, as he seems to rarely be in his shed and off doing 'banking' or something else.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the headmaster is a nice, kindly man who wouldn't hurt a fly - in other words, Steve has bullied him into never trying to get him to do any work. In the one instance that the deputy headmaster came in and gave him a direct order, Steve brought in the union to say that only the headmaster could tell him what to do. And my Mum is convinced that there is no other way to get him to change, in fear of the problems she would have when some bureaucratic Education Department investigator comes and questions her, Ross and Steve and makes it known (by their heavy-handedness) that she's the one that complained. I'm not convinced that's right, myself, but Mum's been there for nigh on thirty years and wants to just last out the rest of her working life there rather than have to find another job. (And my personal bet is that if Steve got wind of anyone trying to oust him he'd get the union to make sure that such an investigation was as loud and obvious as possible.)
The thing that hurts me so much is that my Mum is suffering under this clown, doing what she can, breaking her back and her purse, to make the school environment something that she loves, and this retarded boot-scraping is blocking her at every turn just to make sure that he never has to do a single thing. The grade 4's plant some screening plants so that they don't have to watch everyone go in and out of the toilets, but the holes are in the middle of a patch of grass and Mum's bitter experience is that they will get mown down by Steve rather than have to do more work getting around them. So she digs a trench the entire way along and fills it with mulch. Steve walks by and says, "I don't know why you bother with mulch there, they'd grow much better with just the grass around them." As if this horse-biscuit is suddenly an expert in gardening; it's easy to see that he'd rather not mow around the plants...
There's got to be a way of getting him out of there. I occasionally
say, "It can't be that hard to find a reasonably-priced hit man" in
situations like this, but the Muslim world seems bent on proving that
that's not the answer.
posted at: 08:56 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Deadline: LCA2008
I recently received a piece of good news in my wooden laptop case cover
project. The stumbling block had been trying to get the thin veneer of
burl bent into the right shape to go around the lip of the front edge,
when it was obviously too uneven in grain to be able to bend easily like
the prototype (Tasmanian Oak, grain along the curve) did. I had
considered steam
bending the wood but that required a steaming rig, which I of course
put off creating.
I was discussing it today at the ACT Woodcraft Guild, because they're building (of all things) a forge and wood steaming area in a separate shed. To my delight, I found out that with veneer, the thinness of the wood allows you to simply soak it in water and (gently) press it into the mould to form the required bend. Once dry, it should then hold its shape pretty well. This method is also used by cabinetmakers to flatten a piece of veneer that has gone wavy over time (wood warps as it dries out).
So, my aim now is to have a finished laptop cover by LCA, in just over
two months time. And, preferably, to then find the right venue for a
lightning talk on the process...
posted at: 23:09 | path: /personal/woodworking | permanent link to this entry
Too much time on their hands
Who decided that November was
(National) Blog Posting Month?
It's already
(National) Novel Writing Month,
where you need to put in at least 1,250
words per day in order to achieve their goal. And now we're supposed to
blog every day about something? Does the name of this blog, Too Busy
For Words, not mean anything to them? Fat chance of that happening.
Most of us have lives, and don't feel the need to comment on inane bits
of them every day just to fulfill some arbitrary challenge.
I've been working on improving the documentation for LMMS - in other words, writing documentation for it; turning earring holders for my nieces so that they can give them to their friends; trying to find a new job to replace the old one that runs out at the start of December; tending the vege garden - in other words, finding water to keep it alive; trying to find our old household budget and/or make a new one; and more. I don't have time to just witter on about anything in order to make someone else's arbitrarily set quota. I'll probably write a good portion of that 40,000 words in the documentation anyway, it just won't be a work of disjointed fiction like some of the worse NaNoWriMo contributions and software manuals I've seen.
(Thanks to Steve Hanley for reminding me that NaNoWriMo is in November.)
posted at: 12:38 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Open Source Weaving
In a recent trip to Canada I spend some time on Cape Breton Island at the
correctly spelled Celtic Colours
festival. They have a great series of concerts, but also a huge program
of community and educational events which make it a great way to see the
island. I didn't involve myself in the two-day weaving workshop, which I
now partly regret as I've always been a textile enthusiast. A little-known
fact about me is that I can spin, knit, and weave on an inkle, card or
two-shaft table loom - one of Kate's prized possessions is a beanie that I
knitted from wool I'd spun myself. Apart from the workshop, however, there
were several gallery showings, open days and craft exhibitions where I got
to see people weaving.
This rekindled my interest in weaving, especially after seeing the overshot woven coverlets popular there. My first thought was "when I get back, I should buy a loom." My second thought, when my woodworking side kicked in, was "no, I'll build a loom!" I asked around some people at the ACT Woodcraft Guild if they knew of plans for a loom; their response was "Google should have it!" But my Google-fu is not as good as it could be: I can find plenty of plans for sale but no free plans online. My next step is to go along to a meeting of the Canberra Spinners and Weavers and see if they have any books on building looms, or people who wouldn't mind me documenting how their own loom was built, and searching through the books and magazines at the Woodcraft guild. Then I intend to post documentation online and make it available under an open documentation license of some sort.
I also dug out my piles of cotton thread and old
card weaving
frame made years ago, with the intent to weave myself a better belt than
my previous effort - in fact, my first effort, which is the one I still
use for holding up my woodwork pants. I might also try to teach my
nieces how to do card weaving - I've already given one set an inkle loom,
but that didn't seem to grab their attention...
posted at: 12:00 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Go team legs!
I had a really good day yesterday. I decided to put the money my Mum had
sent me for my Birthday on a day pass at Perisher, since I'm unlikely to
be able to get to any of the rest of the season due to trips abroad. I
went with Rob, Kate's brother, who's a snowboarder; so I had to hang
around for half a minute while he re-strapped his boots into the board.
Since he (for most of the day) would have to wait a minute for me to
make my rather cautious way to the bottom of the slope, I didn't make a
point of it :-)
Going to the snow during the week is a great idea - the crowds are almost absent. Apart from one keen Sydneysider who was taking advantage of the APEC summit to come snowboarding, it was pretty much just the people who were holidaying at Perisher who were there. Since about half of them were in ski lessons for the better part of the day, and we were on the Towers run on Mt. Perisher (a blue run normally not encountered by all but the most advanced of learner groups), we really only encountered the few who were capable, confident and determined.
It also gave me a really good chance to get a long time to talk with Rob, and since we're both people that like thinking about life, the universe and everything and discussing ideas, we talked for most of the day on everything from why CEOs, celebrities and national leaders should be forced to spend time outside their cossetted, five-star, divorced-from-reality lifestyle and actually do jail time or meet real people who might actually tell them what the real world was doing, the tactics of dealing with emotional doomsday devices, the problems of investing ethically, how to use software and more. A good bonding session.
Rob also gave me lots of good tips on how to ski correctly, since his wife Julie is a ski instructor and they've been teaching their two girls to ski. I tried, and in the end I think I regained the basics of the Stem Christie turn, but still wasn't getting the lift on the turn and the rotation of the knees that carving uses. By the end of the day I was able to almost keep up with Rob, and was really getting a feel for it again. Alas, I probably won't get another chance to ski until next year; however, my brother and his partner are planning to come down for a week or more to do some skiing so I'm already looking forward to that!
And despite my knees feeling pretty sore yesterday (due to my bad
technique), there's almost no soreness or pain in my legs today. Go me!
posted at: 13:28 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Not The Real Reply
Dear Jim,
Thanks for your unsolicited commercial email regarding the opportunity
to work at Microsoft, an email which would now cost you a hefty fine
and possible jail term under the US CAN-SPAM act. I'm sorry to tell
you that I cannot take up your 'generous' offer, as I am busy in my
new role as a Patagonian Prune Fisherman. However, I would like to
ask you to fill in this short survey I'm doing to see what kind of
recruiter you are. Keep in mind while you fill this in that I may or
may not be bothered to tell your supervisors about your lackadasical
and slip-shod approach to recruitment. Still, we all like a laugh, eh?
Paul
[1]: For people who recognise
this old chestnut, the answer is of course that Bill Gates calls up his
private helicopter that takes you all to the other side in four minutes.
posted at: 22:34 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.