Covered in Bees dot Org - 4 stars

Why is a Romanesque?

dan — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:59:39 +0100

I've been reading Seed to Seed by Nicholas Harberd, a plant-science populariser in the form of a diary. He studies the fruit fly of the plant world, Arabidopsis Thaliana (common name: Thale-cress), the same plant my girlfriend Sue spent her PhD examining. In it, he introduces the reader to plant biology and genetics in a way that conveys not only the mechanisms, but the wonder he finds in telling others about it. He also takes you through his day to day life as a scientist, and his struggle to get past a rut in the work:

Science is always like this. There are peaks and troughs. I've experienced both. But the problem with being in a trough is that it is a place from which the view is limited. There is the feeling of being trapped with no way out. And always the question of how long the entrapment will last. A self-sustaining state: at the time when new vision is most needed, it is most unlikely to come.

Fear and loathing in a box room

dan — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 17:28:12 +0100

A period of about five weeks passed between blog entries. What was I doing? Sitting right here at the laptop, arranging songs for a space-themed party. For five weeks. Obviously (he said, noting to himself that one of his supervisors reads this blog now and then) not all the time. Obviously, didn't neglect university work... entirely.

(Since Battlestar Galactica's come up recently, here's a Galactica-themed track that resulted...)

My housemate sent me a link to this song by Suburban Kids with Biblical Names -

Tonight I'm gonna stay in all by myself / I've found a reason not to go out tonight / I'm making out tonight with my computer / and there's really so many interesting effects / I wanna try them all on you / the neighbours can't complain coz I've got my headphones on...

That last line is spot on. I'd get some decent German monitor speakers, but I'd never dare use them. Someone might hear. Now, if I had a house in the country, maybe things would be different...

To tell everything is out of the question...

dan — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 23:39:34 +0000

Just asked, as a slightly sarcastic aside, on the Simsoc list:

Why exactly do we build models? What's the actual purpose?

(Not that I do yet, but...)

Someone responded:"Why do we build models? I have a quote. I have substituted theorist for artist."

The [theorist] will endeavor not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question; it would require at least a volume for each day to enumerate the endless insignificant incidents which crowd our existence. A choice must be madeâ€”and this is the first blow to the theory of â€˜the whole truthâ€™.

-Guy de Maupassant

xkcd dot com

dan — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 16:40:29 +0000

Found a new online comic blog today and went through every single entry. Oh God. On the plus side, I did laugh so much I was nearly sick on more than one occasion.

The site is xkcd dot com and features everything from Leunig-like musings (but slightly teenage, so both more optimistic and slightly more nauseating, but only coz I'm old and cynical) to computer science, maths and physics cartoons. Um. My favourites, annotated:

A maths joke

Schrodinger's Comic

Comics from 5.30am

Next time, make it work

dan — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 13:34:11 +0000

Diane McWhorter in Slate:

We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.

So, is there a new, post-election normal? A recent Google search turned up some impressive, learned commentary comparing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to the Enabling Act of 1933. A reader congratulated one of the legal scholars, human rights lawyer Scott Horton, for daring to defy Godwin's Law. Perhaps (to switch totalitarian metaphors) we are in the midst of a little intellectual Prague Spring.

Of course, that democratic interlude met a swift and terrible end. If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

dan — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 17:20:25 +0000

Some of my favourites bits from Roosevelt's inaugural address as president, March 4 1933.Though anyone who humbly 'assumes unhesitatingly' the job of leading his people to moral victory might attract a dollop of healthy suspicion, it's a reminder that some politicians have, in the past, tried to quell panic and terror, rather than fuelling it for their own political gain.

Also note how the sentiments about profit and money-lenders you would never, ever hear from a New Labour politician's mouth.

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself â€” nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

How and why and who and what do these things serve?

dan — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:22:08 +0100

From Alastair McIntosh's Soil and Soul:

The real ethical question of our times, then, is not which of biotechnology, organic agriculture, the motor car, heart transplants, fair trade or computers are, in themselves 'a good thing'. That is a meaningless question. The real question is, rather, how and why and who and what do these things serve? Do they free the spirit and feed the hungry? Do they honour the diversity of life on Earth? Or do they, somewhere or for somebody or something, mean enslavement?

p.103

Oliver Stone's 9/11 flick: just thinking about it gives me a headache

dan — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:48:38 +0100

When eloquent critics really, really hate something, it's always worth reading. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian today:

We intercut between this Stygian nightmare of dullness and the fraught drama of the lip-quivering womenfolk, and these people are like nothing on earth... These sleek Hollywood showponies are about as far from real human beings as Earth is from Alpha Centauri: they look like L'Oreal models in peril, twittering and wittering as the guys pull up outside in their squad cars and station wagons.

What a shaming spectacle. In this paper, Natasha Walter recently had a brilliant, sceptical essay, wondering if the big-hitting novelists of the English-speaking world had really done enough to imagine the terrorists' worldview. It's a good question - and one that could be asked of cinema. There have been some bold and honourable movies. Antonia Bird's The Hamburg Cell was a thrilling investigation of this subject. Paul Greengrass's United 93 was a head-on dramatic act of courage.

And Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, though deplored by many liberals who felt that complaisant fence-sitting was the more responsible approach, was a terrific polemic, and every day that goes past makes Moore look better, and his detractors more obtuse. But I fear all these movies are going to be temporarily bullied into the margins by this great big, malign village idiot of a film, which sets the bar very low, and which fatuously endorses the biggest political untruth of modern times. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

How to make logic out of an egg-box and some sellotape

dan — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 13:31:54 +0100

Had a day of thinking about the meaning of it all. Just been trying to find a Spinoza quote; failed but got this from Einstein:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

This isn't something I'm entirely comfortable writing about, because people either think you're a loony, or people who don't are loonies. But anyhoo here's what's been vexing me.

Kauffman argues in At home in the Universe that the laws of complexity can account for the emergence of life. On the mathematical boundary between chaos and order, the structures that life is built on appear. "We, the expected" - mathematics working through auto-catalytic loops.