The Accidental Weblog

Or do we need to invent it?

So I was listening to the CBC’s The Current this morning, and caught a piece of a segment on Biblically correct¹ tours. My comment on a piece of this episode is here (Pharyngula).

I got to thinking, as I often do, that that particular form of argument is so common in areas where empiricism and rationality bump up against superstition that there should be a specific name for the fallacy.

You know the ‘argument’ (though dignifying it as an ‘argument’ is, really, entirely too kind). Goes like this:

1. Ultimately, nothing² outside one’s own existence is entirely proveable (Descartes’ proposition, or the solipsistic insight)
2. Therefore your belief that Elvis’ corpse is decomposing in the grounds of Graceland may no more be proven than can my belief that Elvis is alive and living on the far side of the moon in an invisible lunar city with little green men perpetually singing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’
3. Therefore, both views are equally valid

… at issue, of course, is the weight of evidence, and the actual value of the solipsistic insight itself. The insight holds on its own, of course, but using it that way, the ramifications for all thought are that any lame-ass theory can be held up against any idea that contrasts with it as ‘equally valid’ by the same reasoning, and there are no available critieria by which two constrasting ideas can be weighed against each other.

… which, of course, is why certain moron creationists and their ilk are so fond of it. Got a really, really stupid idea? Got no real evidence? Can’t, actually, construct a valid hypothesis without contradicting yourself six ways from Sunday?

No prob. Bring in solipsism. Everybody’s on equal footing, now. No one knows jack.

Most sane people who don’t have such an axe to grind can grasp intuitively there’s something very wrong with this argument, so it’s almost redundant to critique this. But what the hell—I’m okay with redundancy (I work with engineers; goes with the territory). So, critiquing away:

One of the many problems with this is that solipsism only achieves that levelling effect if you’re prepared to discard almost everything that you observe as illusion. So what if, so far as you observe, there are thousands of people on the planet apparently capable of agreeing on certain obvious empirical statements (there’s a bright thing in the sky, seems to cycle at roughly 24 hour intervals… it’s been doing it a while… banging your head against a wall generally hurts… I could go on…). I could be imagining that…

So, in short, using the solipsistic fallacy to gain equivalence for a really fantastically poorly supported idea has to deny so very much to get around it, that it becomes a rather costly endeavour. It willy nilly tosses out the whole framework of shared experience just to attempt to get that equivalence.

Such arguments more obviously show up as absurd if you start stating the premises on which that alleged equivalence hangs more explicitly. What we’re assuming, for example, in concluding that the natural history of life on Earth is principally the story of evolution and natural selection shaping descent from a common ancestor over more than three billion years to the variety of life today are things like: 1) those mineral-heavy chunks of things that look like bones are fossilized remains of the bones of living things that lived a very long time ago, 2) the half-lives of unstable isotopes do not change over time, 3) the apparent similarity between a chimpanzee’s skeleton and our own occurs due to common descent, 4) the remarkable parallels between the species trees we derive from gross homologies and those we deduce from comparing nucleotide sequences aren’t just coincidences either, 5) the fact that fossils of a given type tend to appear within a given type of strata isn’t a coincidence, either, and so on.

Contrast that with what the creationist trots out. From inscrutably whimsical invisible men planting fossils to deceive us to radio waves popping into existence 6,000 years ago already enroute to Earth in just such a fashion to give the appearance that they left a galaxy a hundred million light years away a hundred million years ago, it does tend to get… well… stretched, in character as a logical argument.

That’s the problem. All ideas, however loopy, are technically possible, given sufficiently contrived premises—this is all the solipsistic argument allows. But generally, if you state the premises, it becomes less about whether or not the possibility is finite (you can always make it this; so what?), and more about how much work you have to do to construct premises consistent with the claim. And when you start having to rewrite all of what the rest of existence seems to be trying to tell us collectively just to make the millenia old writings of a desert tribe that knew little of fossils, radioisotopes or radio telescopes just possible, well, maybe you’re going about it the wrong way.

Anyway. Like I asked at the beginning: anyone know if there’s a general name for that argument? ‘Cause I think it needs one, now.

¹ It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine whether the term ‘biblically correct’ is itself an oxymoron.

² Or, more precisely, nothing which relies upon empirical observation. Fully internally defined systems from mathematics like Abelian groups do yield absolute proofs, subject to their assumptions. In case you care.

Some of you have noticed this blog doesn’t have one of those deck/tagline thingies under the main banner. No Hart Crane excerpts, no pithy quote, no summary of oh, say, what the content might actually be.

My apologies. I’ve been working on it.

The current list of possibilities includes:

• Tilting against windmills, spitting in the wind, and pissing up a tree. Since sometime in 2005.
• Topics? We don’t need no steenking topics!
• This blog ain’t got no video.
• The internet: the technical marvel via which you receive porn. And this site.
• She canna take much more of this, Captain! She’s only a blog!
• God does not hang fuzzy dice on the universe.
• We now resume irregular programming.
• Chaos and the void. In legal XHTML.

I’ll let you know when I decide.

…maybe you could thank the airport screeners with a hearty pat on the back. (Please do so slowly and after warning them)…

Call it the ‘black knight’ stage of a refuted claim.

Poor Michael Behe. The Darwin’s Black Box guy really seemed to have convinced himself, lo these many years ago, that he’d found his god in the butt propeller¹ of a bacterium. He was so convinced: the flagellum was too durned complex to have come about from anything but the activity of an intelligent designer. Jes’ look at all those cool little parts! Now where could those have come from the but the mind of a bearded guy in the sky?

Well, said a lot of people, who knows? Cooption of pre-existing ones, maybe? And, who’s to say all those pieces have to be there?

‘Pure hand-waving!’ said the ID cheerleaders. And never mind that evidence for co-option turns up all over biological organisms, never mind that there’s nothing particularly startling about it. And never mind that the ID folk themselves hadn’t, well, particularly demonstrated all those parts were exactly necessary for the structure to function in the first place.

Complicated, they said. Oooh, very complicated. Ergo: God.

Oops.

Yeah. About those two very things. Turns out that some 20 of those proteins (at most) are indispensable for the assembly’s function (as opposed to the 40+ Behe had once claimed)², and of those 20, we now know the coding regions for 18 of them have homologues elsewhere in the genome…

And that’s just so far. The remaining two, I’d expect, they’re working on those.

In other words: the flagellum rather obviously did evolve (as if this was news). And, rather obviously, it was cobbled together from pre-existing parts.

Behe’s response? Well, it’s kinda sad, if you think there’s nothing much sadder than seeing someone have his pet idea shredded to a fine powder before his very eyes, and then having him insist, all the same, that none of this matters…

Details at that link. But I’ll make it simple for you, if the details aren’t of interest. Paraphrasing, it’s pretty much this:

Oh! Had enough, eh? Come back and take what’s coming to you, you yellow bastards!! Come back here and take what’s coming to you! I’ll bite your legs off!

Like I said. Kinda sad³.

¹See also ‘The church of the butt propeller’, courtesy a commenter at at Pharyngula.

²See citations in Nick Matzke’s second Panda’s Thumb piece.

³And, actually, sadly typical. Look, now, for this claim to go the way of all Gishisms: it will be repeated, quite despite having been shown to be without merit, ad nauseum before credulous audiences unto the end of time by Brylcreemed frauds working church basements. Plus ça change.

Today’s mandatory McSweeney’s is Celebrity Biographies Written by a Guy Who Cannot Distinguish Fiction From Reality.

Yes, this is the standard blogger’s ‘non-post’ post. As in, I’m just doing this because I have no time to come up with new material of my own right now.

But the McSweeney’s thing is pretty funny, all the same.

Yes, yes, it’s a lovely interview, all that Kingdom of Heaven stuff is interesting. Yes, I might even go looking for the extended version, as I do very much fall in the group of people who thought the film was okay (despite being a bit haphazardly fictionalized), but a bit scattered. Something a little longer, filling in some blanks, I think I could be talked into watching that.

But hey, people, what’s important here?

As if it isn’t obvious. The important thing is that in this interview, Ridley Scott himself says Decker was a replicant.

Well. Nice to have that settled, finally.

Well, this is just bizarre:

The blood libel had been used against Jews in Europe well before La Guardia, but this version is believed to have been instrumental in stirring up support for the expulsion, a year later, of a people who had lived in Spain for centuries.

As was clear at the most recent celebration of the annual festival in late September, many people in this town of about 2,000 consider the legend literal truth. A plaque on the whitewashed wall of the Hermitage of the Holy Child, on the side of a mountain next to La Guardia, illustrates the legend, and carries a dedication at the bottom that reads, “The holy innocent child from Toledo, patron saint of this town, was crucified by various Jews out of hatred for our savior Jesus Christ.” The plaque is dated Sept. 1, 2004.

—The Story of a Child, and of the Lingering Tale of Blood Libel, Jewish Exponent, October 19, 2006

Yes, I’m still on about the Inquisition. I’ve always found it darkly fascinating. Coupled with the also very Protestant phenomena that were the witch hunts (in the old and new worlds), the notion that people could talk themselves into believing the outcasts within their societies were dancing in moonlit glades with the devil, crucifying children on bloody altars… and then the notion that they would torture them until they had confessed doing the same and had given up a few ‘accomplices’ for the next cycle of recrimination and viciousness, it’s such a brutal and lurid demonstration of mob mentality, hatred of the other, and bizarrely fantastical thinking… it’s a bit like driving past a train wreck, being reminded of it again. How can I not stop and stare?

The La Guardia story, in the one sense, I guess, is nothing surprising. Only a few years ago, in an online forum, I encountered a bizarre character from Latin America still convinced that Satanic cults were eating babies somewhere in the jungle near his home town. The parallels between his stories and those of a few hundred years ago were obvious; it could have been a tale from any century. And police departments in the US as recently as a decade or two ago were still freaking out over similar allegations, thanks to a dangerous reliance on hypnosis to solicit testimony from ‘witnesses’ of the alleged acts.

Yep. Satanists among us. Eating babies. And never mind that no one’s noticed a lot of babies actually going missing—buggers must be breeding them for the purpose. Those fiends.

So sure, folk have been believing weirdness like this for centuries, and no, it certainly hasn’t died out, not by a long shot. So in that sense, the La Guardian story is nothing new.

But in another sense, I find it rivetting for its historical connections. It’s a bit like discovering a living fossil. The Coelacanth of the psyche. The Inquisition-era blood libel, still alive and kicking, more than five hundred years later. Hysterical fear and hatred, apparently, can have an incredible shelf life.

There’s a letter to the October 5 Nature¹ getting some coverage. Being a bit swamped, I didn’t even notice it until the CBC’s The Current started talking about it the other morning. You’ve probably heard the outlines; it’s got some serious profile. Seems some University of Washington and CDC people put together a ‘reconstructed’ H1N1 virus (along with some related viruses engineered to contain only subsets of the H1N1 set of genes) infected some mice with it, and watched what happened.

Yes, H1N1. That would be Spanish flu. The pandemic strain that wiped out between 50 and 100 million people, back in 1918, and something of a theme, in the blog that preceded this one. Yes, it has, in a sense, been resurrected.

Now I could take a minute and say the first thing everyone is saying:

Yikes. They can do that?

Okay, now that’s out of the way, I should also say:

Cool. They can do that?

It is cool. Extract the viral RNA (these viruses use RNA for their permanent genetic store, such as it is, as opposed to DNA) from a corpse that’s been on ice 90 years, sequence it, build a whole replica virus genome from the fragments. Inject the result into suitably prepared and amenable cells, budda boom, budda bing, the virus genome does what virus genomes do: gets the cells to make a whole pile of fully intact, neatly packaged virus particles, protein coat ‘n all.

Bloody freakin’ brilliant. And one hell of a technical achievement. Not something (fortunately, I’d say) just anyone can do. So, ‘long as the thing doesn’t get out of containment and wipe out a tenth of the world population, bring every economy in the world to a screaming halt and generally reduce our civilization to a shattered, smoking remnant of what it once was, yes, I’m impressed.

Okay, that last bit—the notion of H1N1 being a potential civilization killer—that’s hyperbole, actually. No one seems to think that’s especially likely. H1N1 was a bad bug, but there’s immunity to the family all through the human population, now, even though there probably aren’t a lot of folk still kicking who were actually exposed to that bug in particular. So, presumably, even if it did get out, the percentages would be somewhat less horrific than they were in the tail end of the first world war. It might be pretty ugly—especially given widespread air travel, which wasn’t a factor in 1918—but it probably wouldn’t be quite the apocalypse.

Anyway. Getting away from the scary what ifs to the actual results. The results of the mouse study were: (1) Well, yes, the mice died. (2) The mice infected with the ‘whole’ reconstructed virus got it worst—died fastest, had the most severe symptoms. (3) It looks like most of the damage was done by a severe general immune response—during the course of the illness (and even after the deaths of the mice) the team found extremely high levels of the mRNAs associated with the general inflammatory immune response the body uses to destroy tissues infected with potentially dangerous (but as yet unknown to the body) pathogens.

That last result, incidentally, is a confirmation of something that had been long suspected about H1N1 (and which is generally suspected about H5N1—or Avian flu—as well). That being that most of the damage done to the body isn’t done directly by the virus but by the body’s own immune system, which seems to overreact in extreme fashion when H1N1 shows up.

Oh, and (4) they’ve got a vaccine. Which is good, actually. Yes, it’s a vaccine for a pathogen that doesn’t (we think) exist outside the CDC’s containment facility, and it was tested on mice, but knowing how to do this, theoretically, gets us a step forward toward dealing with H5N1, should it go all pandemic on us one day too.

But getting to that ‘vicious’ thing: the team finished the study fairly sure they’d identified one receptor in particular that the virus proteins stimulated, and which might be the cause of the runaway immune response. And, interestingly, though certain of the virus proteins seemed more significant than others in terms of causing said stimulation, it was, remember, the whole viruses (with the whole genome) which were the deadliest.

So one guy, at least—a commentator on the radio program I heard—was speculating that, in fact, there might be a very good reason (good for the virus) it does what it does. That, in fact, that particular capability—causing the host’s immune system to panic and cause vast amounts of damage—might be to the virus’s advantage, natural selection wise.

He didn’t, however, go on about how having the host blow its lung tissues to pieces with its general immune response might be to the virus’ advantage. And I’ve been unable to find anyone else commenting on this, so I’m left to wonder if the notion was something to do with either (a) the general immune response creating conditions in which the virus could more easily spread through the tissues, or (b) the general immune response wreaking such havoc that the body couldn’t even marshall a more useful specific immune response.

Either way, it’s sort of a creepy thought. And while it’s not particularly logical to ascribe intentions or emotion to a virus—a bit of protein with a handful of DNA or RNA genes inside clearly has neither—I can’t help thinking this, picturing the bizarre image of how this one works. Considering the unsettling picture of the general immune system pounding the hell out of its own body in a misguided attempt² to stamp out the infection, I can’t help saying to myself:

Damn. That’s one vicious little bug.

¹ Kash, John C. et al, “Genomic analysis of increased host immune and cell death responses induced by 1918 influenza virus”, Nature, Vol 443, 5 October 2006, pp. 578-581

² I only just managed to restrain myself making the comment in the general body, but sure, as this is ‘let’s find ways to mix biology and politics’ week, I do find an odd parallel here with one of the issues du jour. Yes, the virus gets the host to destroy itself through a hugely overwrought defensive reaction… Which has some parallels with using violence to panic a population into accepting the enactment of regressive measures—thereby turning a relatively open society into a much more paranoid and unpleasant one, and drawing their military into bloody, expensive quagmires, costly to the economy and to political stability.

So the kittens apparently still have this unpleasant protozoan parasite in their guts. Not sure I want to get graphic about the symptoms. Let’s just say it involves strong odours. Stronger than usual. ‘Nuff said.

I say ‘still’ because they apparently had it when we bought them. We treated them, diagnostics seemed to suggest it was gone… Despite that odour still being ‘round.

It’s been a while, odour’s still there. Went back to the vet, and the damn bug definitely isn’t gone. So we’re treating them again. Much more aggressively this time. A suspension and a pill… The suspension, I can handle, been there, done that. The pill, well, damn…

Cats and pills, I’d heard stories. I’m not really a cat person, historically, but I’d heard stories. And coulda probably figured, even without having heard such talk that it’s not gonna be the easiest thing, getting a cat to take a pill. And now I (yes, I get all these lovely duties) gotta get these damned things into their guts twice a day, for eight days…

And there’s a bad sign. The vet has helpfully provided a sheet that describes how one pills a cat. On the front side, there’s the actual instructions, with photos. On the back, they’ve included the following bit of encouraging whimsy:

How to pill a cat

1. Pick up cat and cradle it in the crook of your left arm as if holding a baby. Position right forefinger and thumb on each side of cat’s mouth and gently apply pressure to cheeks while holding pill in right hand. As cat opens mouth, pop pill into mouth. Allow cat to close mouth and swallow.
2. Retrieve pill from floor and cat from behind sofa. Cradle cat gently in left arm and repeat process.
3. Retrieve cat from bedroom, pick up and throw soggy pill away.
4. Take new pill from foil wrap, cradle cat in left arm, holding rear paws tightly with left hand. Force jaws open and push pill to back of mouth with right forefinger. Hold mouth shut for count of ten.
5. Retrieve pill from goldfish bowl and cat from top of wardrobe. Call spouse in from garden.
6. Kneel on floor with cat wedged firmly between knees, hold front and rear paws. Ignore low growls emitted by cat. Get spouse to hold head firmly with one hand while forcing wooden ruler into cat’s mouth. Drop pill down ruler and rub cat’s throat vigorously.
7. Retrieve cat from curtain rail, get another pill out of foil wrap. Make note to buy new ruler and repair curtains. Carefully sweep up shattered figurines and vases from hearth and set on one side for gluing later.
8. Wrap cat in large towel and get spouse to lie on it with head just visible from below armpit. Put pill in end of drinking straw, force mouth open with a pencil and blow into drinking straw.
9. Check label to make sure pill not harmful to humans, drink glass of water to take taste away. Apply Band-Aid to spouse’s forearm and remove blood from carpet with cold water and soap.
10. Retrieve cat from nelghbour’s shed. Get another pill. Place cat in cupboard and close door just enough so that head is showing. Force mouth open with dessert spoon. Flick pill down throat with plastic band.
11. Fetch screwdriver from garage and put cupboard door back on hinges. Apply cold compress to cheek and check records for date of last tetanus shot. Throw tee-shirt away and fetch new one from bedroom.
12. Ring fire department to retrieve cat from tree across road. Apologise to neighbour who crashed into fence while swerving to avoid cat. Take last pill from foil wrap.
13. Tie cat’s front paws to rear paws with garden twine and bind tightly to leg of dining table. Find heavy duty pruning gloves from shed. Push pill into mouth followed by a large piece of fillet steak. Hold head vertically and pour 2 pints of water down throat to wash pill down.
14. Get spouse to drive you to emergency room. Sit quietly while doctor stitches fingers and forearms and removes pill from right eye. Call furniture shop on way home and order new dining table.
15. Arrange for RSPCA to collect cat and ring local pet shop to see if they have any hamsters.

Har har. Great. Inspires confidence, that does.

But hey. They didn’t lie. It was seriously ugly, getting to a method that works.

Putting the stuff in food doesn’t work—it’s bitter, they smell it. The chicken flavoured ‘pill pockets’ apparently aren’t to their taste, either. So we’re down to direct methods: pry the jaw open, put the pill in.

This, of course, as the above suggests, is hazardous. The kittens, they’re sweeties, really—got all their claws right now (the soft claws fell off… they’ve grown a bit… we’re putting more on in a bit when they stop growing quite so fast), but they’re not particularly vicious, don’t tend to scratch much (and I don’t make it easy, anyway). But they hate the taste of the drug. They squirm like crazy. And those claws, they do have them. And, because they’re kittens, everything’s a bit smaller than with a grown cat. Less skull and jaw to hold on to, smaller target to get the damned pill into.

And Louise especially is incredibly stubborn about it. Do the whole thing, wrap her like a burrito in a towel, pin her down, get that firm grasp on her skull and lift, and she just sets her jaw, refuses to open it, seems capable of sitting like that ‘til doomsday looking at you, determined expression in her eyes. Open it with your finger, and you have to use some force… which makes it bloody difficult to get the pill far enough back she can’t spit it out. And she does spit it out—five or six times, with her tongue. I’ve got decent reflexes, but getting the hand delivering the pill to her jaw quickly enough to clamp it shut and massage the pill down just isn’t on.

I win, in the end. Yes, cats are beyond stubborn, but I’ve got a good and readily offended sense of smell, and am determined this protozoan is dying this time, dammit…

So I get one of those ‘cat piller’ things—sorta like a dry syringe, use the same technique, more or less, to get it between stubborn feline jaws, fire it home, so it’s well down their tongue, and we’re off…

Sort of. Still gotta get Louise’s jaw, in particular, clamped shut in something like half a second after the pill’s in, or she’s still quite capable of ejecting it with her tongue. But that, I can do.

The moral of the story: don’t mess with primates. Some of us are just as stubborn as any cat.

And we’ve got opposable thumbs. And tools.

… why, of course eventually I’d find some properly funny ‘blasphemy’.

Right now, I’m kinda fond of this one. But Ophelia’s list is awfully good, too.

Well, this cracked me up. Yes, it’s even funnier than the ID crowd’s real material…

Though not by much.

(Significantly more coherent, too.)

Mike the mad biologist asks an excellent question:

Pneumonia blows AIDS and malaria out of the water—and TB doesn’t even make the cut. When it comes to children’s health, it’s not the ‘Big Three’, but the boring, old Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria: diarrhea and pneumonia. So why is this issue neglected?

Yes, I know it was partly a rhetorical question. But I’ve never let that stop me.

Why is this issue neglected? For generally the same reason we freak out and vastly change the very character of our civilization through regressive security laws and ill-advised and at least occasionally profoundly unjust detentions allegedly aimed at thwarting ‘global terrorism’ when the actual risk to a given individual of dying in a terrorist attack isn’t even a blip in the pile of bodies pneumonia and car accidents pile up on this continent every year. Some 400,000 people in the US died due to smoking-related illnesses in the year 2000 (PDF), and some 25,000 from motor vehicle accidents. But a large pile of small tragedies doesn’t make good TV the way one large tragedy (and yes, the WTC attacks absolutely were an enormous tragedy) does. So we’ll sacrifice our civil liberties if we’re told some guy in a beard is after us with a bomb strapped to his abdomen—never mind that there are already a lot of measures in place to thwart him actually getting away with that, never mind that there are a lot more nasty viruses out there lurking than actual bearded guys with bombs. Never mind that yes, you can overdo it trying to prevent any given hazard, and there are other fish to fry.

Similarily, AIDS and TB have that cachet. You think of them, when you think of disease. AIDS, in particular, is new, still kinda exotic, and bloody dangerous to adults in the developed world, too, so we get what that means, and it’s interesting.

Pneumonia, not so much. It’s been around forever. Kinda like the common cold of public health planning—no one expects to get rid of it, exactly, and we know it’s going to exact some toll, every year. And a lot of what’s going to make it less trouble, though very, very doable, is probably, as Mike implies, more about capacity and infrastructure. More beds, more doctors, better-stocked fridges with more antibiotics. Not real sexy, and funding stuff like that doesn’t let you say ‘I’m part of the solution for scary, scary AIDS’, but ultimately, it’s (i) doable and (ii) almost certainly more effective in terms of actual lives saved.

So, ultimately, the reason is: we’re stupid. Or, more fairly, stupid in certain, specific ways. Got no sense of proportion, in certain areas. React in spectacularly ill-advised and disproportionate ways to dramatic visuals and causes de jour, when the numbers are ultimately far more informative. Go on and on about dirty bombs in shipping containers—which yes, could theoretically happen, and some prevention is thus probably called for… like, say, keeping better intelligence tabs on groups who might try to make such a thing happen—when better sex education (30,000 deaths in 2000 due to preventable diseases and disabilities due to sexual behaviour, according to the same study) would probably save more lives every year. Ironically, sex education, in PR terms, is unsexy.

So here’s to solving unsexy problems, anyway, to dealing with endemic diseases a little more aggressively and systematically. And to generally keeping a sense of proportion about things. And here’s to what Mike said.

… that I’ve only ever used one of these.

And it was Vivaldi. Used on wedding table place markers, done as a favour to a friend. Vivaldi was effectively required, as it had been used on the rest of their stuff already.

But otherwise:

Yeah. Don’t use those.

Y’know what I absolutely love?

I love it when I find myself thinking, gee, wouldn’t it be great if such and such a piece of software existed…

Like, say, a sheet music typesetter that works from a markup language, sorta like LaTeX, but for music…

And then I think… naw, that’s too weird; I’m the only guy who’s gonna want something like that… I’m the only guy who gets why that would be so damned much better than screwing around with the mouse the way all the commercial packages require… No way someone’s already done it…

But then I think, damn, but that would be awesome software, all the same, maybe I should just do it myself…

And then I think, naw, no way. It would be so nice to have such a thing, but I ain’t got time…

And then I discover there already is such a thing?

And it’s open source, free, and freakin’ wonderfully done…

So wonderfully done the markup language is at once as obvious and as powerful as you could possibly ask. What? An A major scale, you say? How ‘bout just typing a b cis d e fis gis a?

So wonderfully done it already quite painlessly supports such useful stuff for my purposes as up and down bow marks and fingering notes…

So wonderfully done it actually makes considerably prettier sheet music than the annoyingly mouse-heavy commercial packages I already use…

So powerful, people are using it happily for full orchestral scores…

And there’s already a whole community of people publishing public-domain music in said markup language, free for download…

Like, say, Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites…

And because they publish the source, you can stick in your own bowings, fingerings, whatever the hell you feel like…

And contemplating this, I find myself thinking, damn, sometimes the open source community positively scares me with the odd little ways they change the world… In a mostly good way…

Yeah. I absolutely love that.

Lilypond. It’s just awesome.

Walks into grocery store. Sees woman with jogging stroller. In the stroller, where there would normally be a child, there’s an enormous pumpkin.

What he (barely) manages not to say:

“So… who’s the father?”

So Lister Sinclair is dead. It’s all over the radio this morning.

I was gonna link to one of the various obituaries being printed, but, frankly, the lot of them seem kinda pathetic, right now, against the man himself. I’ve found a handful that mention the outlines of his career, his Order of Canada, all rather boilerplate and obvious.

Sinclair just wasn’t an obvious guy. We need an Ingersoll to write something like he did for Whitman.

Obviously, that’s not me. So I’m just gonna say I’ll miss him.

Sadly true.

So it’s been my job to put the little guy to bed of late. He’s in a ‘want Daddy’ stage, still too rambunctious to stay in bed by himself, still a bit too young to reason with, so this entails lying down with him a bit (or, sometimes, a lot, as he can take up to 90 minutes to doze off, on a bad night) until he settles down.

This is awkward, as it’s one of those nice little wooden kiddy bed things—pretty to look at, great if you’re not yet two years old, not so comfortable otherwise. I have to fold myself up considerably to get in there.

Last night, I wound up there for the whole evening. Had gotten up at three the morning before, so last night I dozed off when he did. Woke up in the middle of the night, but then had to put him back down, anyway. He’d woken up screaming. I’m guessing he’d had a nightmare or something—whatever it was, it took a while.

Strangely, I seem to have survived. Scary. Apparently, I can sleep curled up in a ball.

The cats would be impressed. I must compare notes with them.

Sent by a former colleague this morning: Troops battle 10-foot marijuana plants.

How frustrating. Man. Giant marijuana plants, Taliban hiding in them, and they won’t burn… and when you do get them started, well… Umm… things get interesting for the troops downwind.

Well, ya know, there is some justice to this. If there’s anyone who can use a field full of burning weed, it’s probably those guys.

On the other hand, I’m a bit worried about cost overruns.

Think about it. Once the requisitions for pizza and potato chips come in, that’s it for the budget for the year.

Yes, this (PDF) isn’t exactly sweetness and light. But ya need a good, angry villain, now and then, don’t ya?

I was just trying to get to know him, pin him down for dialogue and the like. It’s a bit obvious, maybe, as background, but I believe it, anyway, and that’s a good part of the battle, really.

(Contains profanity, violence, etc.)

… pretty much. Sure, veils suck:

Salman Rushdie has enraged fellow Muslims by saying veils “suck” and condemning them as a means of subjugating women.

The author backed Jack Straw, the Commons Leader, who described veils as a “visible statement of separation” that impeded community relations and disclosed that he asks constituents to take them off in meetings.

Mr Rushdie said: “He was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck—which they do. Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family, or in their friends, who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.”

—Rushdie: veils limit power of women in The Independent

And yeah, yeah, merely saying this ugly, old, mediaeval form of subjugation is an ugly, old, mediaeval form of subjugation, has, of course, got him called an ‘Islamophobe’ by some schmuck who has a way of calling everyone who pisses him off such a thing.

Whatever. The veil is still (and do let’s say it again) an ugly, old, mediaeval form of subjugation. And if saying so makes me an ‘Islamophobe’, too, well, okay, I guess I’m one of those, all right.

Proudly so, even.

Sign of the times. Yes, there is a remarkable new technology out for viewing movies. 50 Gb on an optical disk.

And the first thing to come out on it is an Adam Sandler picture.

Our civilization is at its zenith.

Wow. Now they’ve done it. The spineless, craven, unprincipled schmucks who voted for the end of habeas corpus have gone and pissed off Garrison Keillor. Take it away, Gar:

Our enemies have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They have made us become like them.

Yep. They have. Good point, there, dude.

Y’know, I’d been trying to keep a little distance from US politics, lately. I get no vote for nor against these assholes. Whaddya gonna do?

But when the A Prairie Home Companion Guy starts sounding like he’s ready to join the mob in the street, hoist a torch, and head for the legislature, I guess it’s past time I restated my position on said matters.

I’m still around. Just had a busy week. Two concerts, a day in Boston, another helping a sister-in-law move.

The concerts were cool. Tuesday, we saw Yo-Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax doing a buncha Beethoven. Friday, it was the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Yeah, you could say there were contrasts. Notes on the differences:

1) When watching Ax and Ma, you are vastly less likely to get sprinkled with beer due to the drunk guys behind you moshing unstably, than you are when watching the Peppers.

2) At the NAC, the loudest noise from the audience will be the annoyingly bitchy octogenarian with an inflated sense of entitlement noisily shushing the seven-year old cello student seated next to you (the noise he supposedly made to earn this put-down is not, as you’d only expect, actually audible). At the Peppers, the guy two seats over with his shirt off wins. He’ll do so, incidentally, well before the band even takes the stage, screaming his head off already. “Premature screaming,” my lovely wife will comment. “Poor guy.” Indeed.

3) At both venues, it is expected the audience shall cheer loudly and lustily to coax the performers out for an encore. But at the Peppers, the encore will be their most popular material (Give It Away and Under the Bridge), saved up especially for just that purpose. Ma and Ax will throw in something short, just to be nice (I didn’t actually recognize it, but it was pretty). Also, at the Peppers, it seems expected the audience (or some of them, at least) shall scream their heads off actually before the show, just to get the band to come out in the first place. See also (2), above.

Okay, actually, that last bit sounds kinda hard on the Peppers. So, to make this clear: they started pretty much on time, and did play their whole two hours, no breaks apart from the gap before that contrived ‘encore’ call. Hardworking band, considering the energy that particular canon presumably takes to crank out.

But yeah, as is now the standard at shows of such scale, there was a blinding light show, huge video monitors wandering around showing the performers up close, and PA volumes which, frankly, seemed more than a bit over the top to this listener, anyway.

Yeah, I like the Peppers. A lot, actually. And yeah, I get that it’s kinda supposed to be loud music. But seriously, what’s the point to amping it so hard it actually mangles the sound? The Peppers’ stuff has that tight, precise, punchy quality, at its best—smashing it against the concrete and your eardrums so it’s all shattered and scattered reverb is just stupid. Lets try, oh, 15 db less, guys, next time, please?

Oh, and the lightshow. It was pretty, sure. Gilding the lily, a bit, too, but hey, yeah, I know, it’s what folk expect.

So I don’t mind so much that there actually is one. But hot white spotlights shining right into the eyes of the audience kinda make it kinda hard to see the show. Not to mention painful.

Just sayin’. Not, I’d think, that you couldn’t figure that out. People, if my watch is glowing brightly enough to notice under the house lights afterward, that’s too many photons for my retinae, too. thanks.

Anyway. Both good fun, in their respective ways.