Perette's Journal: 2010

Contents

1. Sennheisers, fixing stuff, wondering how others think about their stuff

2010-12-21 23:32 (Tuesday) journal

I've had a set of Sennheiser 570 headphones for maybe 12 years now. I remember the day I bought them: I went into Circuit City, saw the $139 headphones and thought I'd try them on just to see how the other half lives. They fit beautifully, and the sound... And while I would refuse to spend good money on a product that had a permanent cable that would just break in a few years, the Sennheisers had a detachable cable. It sold me.

Their sound has been one of the pleasures of my life. In all honesty, they're better than my stereo speakers. The 570s are open-air– that is, the ear cushions pass sound so you can hear what's going on around you. It has its ups and downs; they don't work well in noisy environments. (This may seem ridiculous for consumer purposes, but imagine a studio environment where folks in the booth need to talk to one another.) They're incredibly comfortable even for long periods.

Craftsmanship wise, they're mostly excellent. Everything is meant to be servicable, going together and coming apart fairly easily. There's nothing glued together and no bitch screws. The one real weak spot the 570s have had: the cables.

Sennheiser uses some beautiful oxygen-free cable (OFC). I don't really understand the big deal with OFC in an electrical sense, but the cable is beautifully flexible and the conductors physically pretty, laquered up in differently tinted but all transparent insulators. The cable has a band of fibrous material to help prevent damage if it gets yanked. But I've had at least one "regular" cable, one of the ends on the internal cable, and one of the speaker's connections fail. The outside cable wasn't reparable, I was able to resolder the speaker connection, and the internal cable I cut shorter to get rid of fraying and then resoldered. To be fair, the latter two failures occured while replacing worn-out acoustic foam– but that both failed, and with such minimal invasion, seems weak to me.

I continue to be impressed with the crisp sound they deliver. And overall, they've had a great track record. The only real weak spot has been the solder points with the fancy OFC cable.

I like having nice things. It's funny, because I think a lot of people equate nice things to new things, but I don't, at least not necessarily.

We had one of those fancy "cyclone" vacuums at RKS for a while, and it failed to suck– which was the problem. And a few years back when my ancient Eureka gave out, I bought a little Kenmore from K-Mart. It was a bagless, with a cleanable filter. It was a major pain in the ass, and last month the hose busted for the third time (just like a similar unit I picked up on the street). I'm glad to have found an ancient Eureka, similar to my old one, at a second hand store. But I'll keep my eyes out for vacuum hoses on the curb and scrounge them, use a rubber pipe joint to adapt it to the Kenmore, and keep it around for back-up.

I keep wiring stuff together on the Fishie Car, the latest being wrapping muffler bits up with some sheet metal and copper wire. It's half-assed, but it's working. And I love my Fishie Car: the way it handles so well in the snow, the pretty good sound (not as good as the headphones) and a sunroof.

I disassembled Mugenshi and resoldered a questionable joint when she was crashing earlier this year. Since I added a new power strip, she's been stable again, waking me up in the morning, playing local music and Internet music via Pandora, playing DVDs when we want to watch something, and running protein folding simulations for disease research in her spare time.

I limped the old furnace along for 5 years, learning a lot about heating systems in the process. If it hadn't been for the government offering so many incentives it would have been ridiculous for me not to replace it this year, I'd have gladly kept it going a few more years.

I've never had to fix my cell phone or my mp3 player, and they're both fairly plain by current standards, but they're both perfect good (good sound, do their respective jobs adequately). Sure, there are fancier versions of both out there. But what's that fanciness give me? Nothing that I can see worth upgrading over.

There are several points that seem strange about other people in these respects. Foremost is their inability to fix things. When something breaks, most people throw it out and buy a new one without even trying to fix it. They say it's because they don't know how. For me, when something is broken, not under warranty and not worth a paid service call, that's my cue to take it apart and find out how it works. Sometimes I break things, but if they needed replacing anyway, what's the difference? They're just more broken. In the process, I learn how things go together, and I might fix something. If I fail, maybe I'll have learned something for next time.

People tell me I'm outstanding because I am so good at fixing things, whether it's correctly or improvisational. I'm not outstanding, really: I've just tried enough times that I've learned. I think anyone can do it, they've just got to try.

The second thing that mystifies me is people's preference for new things, like they're inherently better just because they're new. Sometimes, new things are improvements: my new furnace is more energy efficient than the old one, and my new windows make my house noticeably less drafty. But my experiences with modern vacuums suggests they're mostly pains in the ass, so I prefer the old. And Fishie Car may be theoretically less reliable in her old age, but she's still got an excellent track record and gets great mileage. And my Sennheisers still provide superb sound.

So if most people equate nice with new, what do I equate it with? I don't think there's a simple answer, though part of it is definitely familiarity– once I become accustomed to a thing, I often don't like change. But my phone was an exception– when I started to learn about it, I quickly found new stuff my old phone didn't do but was useful. (Though I probably would have kept using the old phone indefinitely if I hadn't lost it.) I am also known to replace (upgrade) computers occasionally, though not on the manufacturer's perceived obsolescence schedule.

Could it be minimal hassle? You wouldn't think so given I have to fix half the shit in my life, but hassle-free operation is part of my preference for the bagged vacuum. I always disliked the Kenmore because of its nuisance filter.

Reliability? I do get very frustrated when things behave unpredictably. I was very upset at the prospect of having to replace Mugenshi, and I hope she continues to run reliably for many years.

Maybe it's just that something does what I want it to, and I don't care how it does it or how it looks, just that it performs its task well? That seems to fit the simple shuffle MP3 player, the vacuum, the old furnace, Fishie Car, my mobile phone.

My guess is it's a combination of these, and maybe a few other factors. Whatever it is, it's pretty clearly not nearly as simple as new=good.

I should probably just be happy to have my Sennheisers with their beautiful sound working again, and with reconditioned ear covering (recycled speaker fabric from some speakers on the curb). But I want to understand others. Why would they just throw away $139 worth of speakers and spend more money when they liked what they had? Or are they that fickle that just because it breaks, they hate it? And how can they go through life lacking the ability to fix anything?

2. Bullshitting

2010-12-15 13:10 (Wednesday) journal

Bullshitting: Speaking Politically

3. Installing Windows

2010-11-12 18:20 (Friday) journal

installing windows

I started installing windows yesterday. I'm still not done, although the end is in sight. I hope. Then I have to make it all look pretty.

4. My take on The Prisoner

2010-10-27 09:25 (Wednesday) journal

I just finished watching The Prisoner, the original 1967/1968 Patrick McGoohan series in what is known as the "6 of 1", arrangement in which several episodes are reordered so the escape plan episodes (Dance of the Dead, Checkmate) are more up front.

It's a strange and charming series, although I do find the first few episodes where No. 6 keeps trying to escape a little trying. I find it picks up around episode 5. It's a really weird blend of storytelling. Sometimes, we're seeing what's actually going on, other times we see the world being imposed on No. 6 with drug-included hallucinations or machine-generated virtual realities. There's also allegory throughout, especially toward the end.

Realizing no two people will agree on the meaning, here's my take:

Arrival, Free For All, Dance of the Dead, Checkmate, The Chimes of Big Ben:

In the beginning, while his captors try to indoctrinate him to The Village, No. 6 is bent on trying to escape. This continues up until The Chimes of Big Ben (5th in the order I watched), where he manages to escape only to be returned to The Village after warning his former employers of its existence.

This represents our own belief in our individuality, our trust that we can control the world around us. Only when confronted with incontrovertible evidence do we begin to accept that we have a limited degree of freedom in own lives.

A. B. and C., The General, The Schizoid Man, Many Happy Returns:

Whereas the Village had previously been "gently" working over No. 6, in these episodes they more aggressively manipulate him, trying to break him. But he knows they're devious and underhanded, managing to outfox them.

The General is an interesting episode. The Village has a computer that can answer any question about behavior, but the question that makes it overload and blow up in 1960's computer-malfunction manner is "Why?". But that's nothing new: the captors knew so much about No. 6, they'd analyzed his personality and behaviors, yet "Why?" was the big question about his resignation. I think this is a comment about individuality: we can know what others do, what they will do; but we can never know their reasons. Even if we ask and they tell us, we have no way of knowing if we're being told the truth.

In Many Happy Returns, the Village goes to the extreme of letting No. 6 go. After The Chimes of Big Ben, it seems strange he'd return to his former employers again. But given that that trip had occured right before the dream-induced manipulation of A. B. and C., maybe he wondered if that experience had been a dream in retrospect. Or maybe after everything he'd been through, the Village's overnight abandonment made him question his own sanity and experience, wondering if any of it had happened at all.

This batch of episodes is all about ownership of one's life. We believe we own our lives and our freedom, but to what degree is it coloured by society around us? By the rules, etiquette, preconceptions that society has programmed into us. Even if we can leave the environment where we were indoctrinated with these, they're already wired into us– we will never escape society's reach entirely.

It's Your Funeral, A Change of Mind, Hammer into Anvil:

At this point, No. 6 starts to wisen up. Whereas he'd started by bucking the system, then been worn down and manipulated by it (though he didn't give up), he now begins to work from within. He knows they are underhanded and sneaky, so rather than being overt about escaping and bucking the system, he begins to work in more subtle ways.

It's Your Funeral is an exploration into information/disinformation, what is vs. what we know vs. what we believe. No. 6 takes pity on an outgoing No. 2 who is scheduled for execution because he knows too much, although he's in denial about it. No. 2 ignores evidence of the plot because of the volume of disinformation already circulating in the Village. And although No. 6 arranges him to leave unscathed, whether No. 2 really gets away is questionable– the helicopter, as we've seen before, can be remote controlled.

How much are we social creatures? What if we're denied membership in society? Change of Mind examines these ideas as they try to pressure No. 6 into conformance by making him an outcast ("unmututal"), going to the extreme of setting up a sham lobotomy for him in hopes he'll feel comfortable overcoming his free will. But he sees through the sham, turns the tables, and sets up the latest No. 2 to be declared "unmututal".

When near everything is propaganda, how do we know what is truth? In Hammer into Anvil, No. 6 reaches the pinacle of understanding the Village operations and drives No. 2 mad with paranoia using the same techniques they've been using on him. He's still being himself, at some level, but playing the game their way. How much is he tainted if he's willing to revert to their methodologies?

In these episodes, we see No. 6 picking up some of the traits of his enemy. Being a prisoner of the Village, but must accept that he is no longer the purely free man he insisted at arrival. Yet, he is still retaining his individuality, avoiding becoming one of the sheep of the Village. He's forced to make some compromises in his behavior to maintain that individuality. In a way, he isn't quite the individual he thinks he is or aspires to be.

Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling: I'm not sure what to make of this episode.

Living in Harmony: An aggressive attempt to break No. 6's individuality, they use his desire to protect a pretty face to drive him into a job he doesn't want. But despite their efforts, they can't get him to do it their way– they can control his major choices, but they can't crush his individuality all the way. But since he won't 100% cave, others get hurt. In the end, the attempt results in driving several of the scheme's participants to madness. Nobody escaped unhurt.

The Girl Who Was Death: Some stories are just fairy tales.

Once Upon a Time, Fall Out:

Like a lot of Anime, the last few episodes is where it gets good.

We've learned the village is a hierarchical power structure, with No. 2 being the one in charge. Sort of– No. 1 is really in charge, but he's behind the scenes and we never see him. So everyone in the village really is just doing what they're told, with the exception of No. 6 and No. 1 (wherever he is).

Nothing else has worked to break No. 6, so the only option left is to put the Village's best individual up against him. Although No. 2 has always had a goal– breaking No. 6 to gain information– how to do it has been up to the various No. 2 characters. Everyone else has followed orders. Thus, the Village "employee" with the strongest individuality with which to challenge No. 6 is No. 2, though he's really not free either, just taking orders from No. 1.

Locked in "Degree Absolute", the two battle it out, one of them trying to break the other of his individuality. "Pop goes the Weasel" is a theme through the series, but especially in this episode; it's a nursery rhyme of utter nonsense, raising the idea that maybe there aren't always reasons. What if things don't have reasons? Things just happen sometimes– any why should our behavior be any different? What if No. 6 just resigned for no reason? Why does there need to be one?

No. 6, of course, wins. He's allowed to see No. 1, but only after some ritual.

First, there is a trial for the rebels, the first being youth in the form of No. 48. No. 48 keeps singing "Them Bones", representative of the way the hierarchy of the Village or the members of any society work as one, all connected. One is not an individual, one is part of the whole; a bone is nothing on its own, it's part of the body, and without it it is nothing. In singing the song over and over, youth is repeating its brainwashing but probably also trying to work out an alternative. It's also rebelling, using the allegorical song to interrupt the proceedings and in doing so asserting its individuality.

Next was No. 2, who felt he'd given in too easily when he'd been indoctrinated into the Village. I'm not entirely clear on No. 2, but he recognizes the loss of his individuality more than the rest.

Then No. 6 gives a speech. But every time he speaks, the Villagers are so busy applauding and chanting "Aye" (or is that "I") that they can't hear him. They're so busy celebrating his idea of individuality that they don't hear him talk about how to be themselves. Or are they doing it intentionally because they want to be lead, want the ease that comes with being told what to do rather than being able to make the choices themselves? Despite their inability to hear/listen, No. 6 gives a short speech anyway– showing he's not immune from societal conventions, and/or that he's not able to understand the conformers either.

Finally, No. 6 is taken to meet No. 1, and after unmasking him twice, see that it's himself– albeit a mad version of himself who runs away and locks himself in the nose-cone of the Village's rocket. I think we have to take this as metaphor: No. 6 saw in No. 1 his own situation: an individual, who had been put in a position of power over everyone in the Village.

Back in Living in Harmony, No. 6 refused to fully conform to Harmony's expectations, and people got hurt as a result. Now, No. 6 is in the same position: he was offered the opportunity to take over the village, and to fix the way it is run. But how do teach people individuality? You can teach maths and language, but you can't teach someone how to be themselves. We have to wonder if the last No. 1 was in this conundrum, driven mad by the inability to succeed at creating individuals, especially given the need to keep the Village operating long enough to develop oxymoronic lessons in being an individual. Maybe he thought if he'd just tightened the screws down too tight, they'd have to rebel, yet every time he tried they just obeyed more; something impossible for an individualistic person to understand.

No. 6 then has the choice: take over as No. 1 and run the village, or destroy it utterly. The choice is whether to try to work within the system, or to abandon it entirely. But you can't teach a class in being yourself, and so No. 6 chooses destruction. With the unnumbered Butler, youth, and the former No. 2, they put the Village on autodestruct (sort of) and abandon ship.

In the end, they all find their way back to where they belong. Youth hitchhikes away, searching to find its place in the world, trying to define itself. The former No. 2 returns to the bureaucracy of the secret service where he has freedom within structure. The Butler returns home, and No. 6 hits the open road in KAR120C.

The Butler is an interesting character– he seems to show up and serve, even though I don't think he's ever got a number and I don't think he ever speaks. I wonder if, out of everyone in the Village, he's the only one who's comfortable with his subservience and through it that he has found himself. The rest of the Villagers want to be individuals, but they're all too scared to try, accepting their roles as cogs in the machine.

Related:

  - The Prisoner Fall Out Theory
  - Troyer interview with McGoohan

5. The God Delusion, the importance of debate

2010-10-10 18:44 (Sunday) journal

I recently finished Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. I've seen Dawkins referred to as a "fundamentalist atheist", a title suggesting a position so aggressive that it's irrational. Although most of the times I've heard this used it's been from Pagan friends bent on defending the sillier aspects of faith, Arcadia also complained of this– and she is typically very considered in her thoughts and conclusions. And so, going into the book, I expected some kind of diatribe.

What I found instead was a meticulously argued position for the non-existence of god. Yes, Dawkins is very passionate, especially in his concerns about religiosity interfering with scientific inquiry. It's also obvious he is in awe of nature, and of the universe, for all the splendor that he sees in it. And he's terribly worried about how religion impacts children, both in terms of content and quality of education but also the way religion can pass on hatreds from generation to generation (either as doctrine with some Islamic jihadists, or as a marker of identity as with the North Ireland Catholic/Protestant situation). But irrational, or a diatribe, or something else that might be worthy of a label of "fundamentalist"? No.

Yes, Dawkins admits that god's nonexistence is not 100% provable– but as he argues, it's not like the flip of a coin with a 50/50 chance. The odds, as he lays them out, are very skewed in favor of the non-existence of god. So if the probability of god is so unlikely as to be practically, asymptotically nil, why not just call it nil?

I could understand the aforementioned complaints about Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great. Hitchens lists numerous injustices committed in god's name to support his thesis that religion isn't everything its cracked up to be. I personally don't see a problem with this; Hitchens is making an argument against God, and while he may be one-sided, it's his prerogative as author of the book. If you want to hear the other side, buy one of the myriad of books out there by religious apologists that Hitchens is responding to.

I am worried about the "fundamentalist atheist" accusations thrown around recently for another reason though. These seem to most often originate from people who are "offended" by such "aggressive" standpoints as Dawkins' or Hitchens'; often it's said that they are "arrogant". I've personally received similar comments for expressing my thoughts too.

There's a problem when being offended is used as a way to quash debate. It's a strategy that's been used by the GLBT community with some success, and it's spreading to other realms now. (It may have been used pre-GLBT but I'm not sure. And for the record, yes, I have invoked it in the past-- and I question that use of it now.) My concern is that claims of offense are the short-cut to "I win":

        "I don't like Gay public displays of affection."
        "I'm offended by your homophobia. Therefore, you can't say
        things like that anymore.  Therefore, I win."

Except it's not a win on merits. It just buries the problem, and doesn't root out the underlying bigotry. It's a socially approved way to quell the opposition from expressing their opinions. But maybe they are just assholes who won't keep their mouths shut, and this is a way to deal with them. So okay.

But what about playing the "offense card" on this religious debate now? Or the related debate on evolution? And if the offense card can be used there, where else? If you're on about Cheryl Crow's great new album, and I think she sucks, can you invoke offense to silence my dissent about her? Where's the delineation between what's "protected" territory and what's fair game for debate and discussion? And is it fair that I should have to listen to praise for Crow (or god) and yet be expected to just keep my trap shut?

Discourse and (civil) argument are essential to going forward, to refining our positions and rooting out disinformation in our lives. Sure, there will be times we'll need to agree to disagree. And sometimes we'll be pissed off when someone questions an idea we've been set on for a while, regardless of whether we're forced to reevaluate it in the end. Other times we'll end up frustrated that we couldn't put an idea into words. Whether we "win" or "lose", debating can be exhausting. (I personally tend not to think of discourse as a win/lose scenario, as doing so is not helpful.) But if a discussion is worth having, then it's touching on ideas worth thinking about– and the more interesting the debate, the more we'll ruminate on it afterward. Ruminating helps hone our ideas, work out new ones, integrate new perspectives or nuances, and chuck out bad data and earlier erroneous conclusions. It's how we grow, how we build and refine knowledge.

Sometimes people equate my desire to debate ideas with arrogance, especially if I'm questioning one of their ideas. I don't believe this is the case– arrogance would be believing my ideas are so good, they are untouchable, unquestionable. Maybe the world doesn't know, because they can't see it, but I am always questioning, correcting, qualifying, sorting, reconciling, and otherwise updating my knowledge. And it sucks when some critical pin of knowledge gets marked wrong, because it causes such extensive rethinking; David correcting my perception of privacy in January is the latest, and is still creating challenges that I'm not sure how to resolve. I'm frustrated by it. But I'm thinking about it, not ignoring it. Because my preference for some truth to be different doesn't make it what I want.

(I don't mean to oversimplify the problem of being unable to properly discuss issues properly– it's a much bigger problem than the "offense card". I don't see it as a reason we don't have proper political debates among citizenry, like progressive vs. conservative issues and how they relate to the rise and propagation of the current oligarchy. And maybe, in fact, the offense card is a result of the problem, a method to shut down and avoid difficult discussions that we've forgotten how to have.)

I truly wonder how others think. For me, when new data arrives, it gets triaged, considered in light of other knowledge, and marked as 'likely', 'unlikely', 'unverified', 'supported', 'credible', etc. These get updated when I encounter new information. I suspect I haven't always done this, but that it's a skill I learned over the years for managing information. And that makes me wonder if others don't do this, meaning their brains are like somebody poured all the urban legends from Snopes into them but without the assessments, so they're full of truths and bullshit and no idea of what's true or not, and such a mismash that it's hard to sort it so they leave it untagged, unsorted, in a heap of confusion and knowledge and lies in their head.

And I wonder how Richard Dawkins thinks: what other technique does he have for organizing ideas that allows him to manage such brilliance, and express it with such soft-spoken eloquence and precision? And if I could emulate the mechanics of his thought process, would it naturally lead me, or at least enable me, to become as brilliant as he?

6. Big f'ing heads-up on X-UA-Compatible

2010-09-01 16:41 (Wednesday) journal

The X-UA-Compatible setting for IE behaves strange when you request IE=8 or IE-8=edge. You would think requesting 8 & up would imply standards mode. In reality it may or may not, instead switching to quirks mode based on the DOCTYPE as follows:

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 strict, it uses the standard mode rendering engine.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
                          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 transitional, and the DOCTYPE is present in full,
    unabridged form, it will also use the standard mode rendering engine.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
                          "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

  - If DOCTYPE is 4.01 transitional but abridged, it will use quirks mode.
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

So what the hell was the point of X-UA-Compatible if it's ignored sometime? Don't ask me, it's Microsoft.

7. Time slowing?

2010-01-25 18:22 (Monday) journal

According to an article at the Daily Galaxy, scientists are kicking around a new theory for the bizarreness of our universe: time itself is slowing down.

Up until a few years ago, the expectation was that our universe's expansion was slowing, and the big question was whether gravity would win and in some billion years we'd go into the big crunch, or if things would just continue expanding into a cool, nearly-empty nothingness. Then someone proved that the expansion was accelerating, and everything sucked.

According to this new theory, though, maybe it's just our perception that it's accelerating, an effect of changing the rate at which time occurs. Sort of like if you record a film at one frame rate, and play it back at another– if you record at a high frame rate, things appear slower played back. As time escapes, the slowed playback speeds up to match our perception, creating the illusion of acceleration.

It is sort of bizarre in that I'd expect the change to be imperceptible, because it would effect us in the same way. But if time is slowing, a lot of shit in the universe starts to make sense:

        - If things slow down in our 3 dimensions, why not time?
          The idea that time would suffer effects similar to the
          other 3 dimensions seems very reasonable.
        - The problem of the inflationary period at the beginning of
          the universe might disappear.  If time happened faster, then
          sure, expansion would happen faster than the speed of light...
          because more time would be happening.
        - The acceleration of the expansion no longer needs
          dark matter, which is a nightmare of a theory.
        - Although it doesn't explain everything, returning things
          to the earlier question - will we go back into the big crunch? -
          makes me happy.  I like the idea of the universe repeating
          over and over, which eliminates the need for a beginning and
          end.

Occam's razor gives this new theory a lot of cred, and allegedly the math works out too. I look forward to hearing this theory's progress.