“John Moffat is not crazy.” These are the opening words of Dan Falk’s new review of John’s book, Reinventing Gravity, which (the review, that is) appeared in the Globe and Mail today. It is an excellent review, and it was a pleasure to see that the sales rank of John’s book immediately went up on amazon.ca. As to the opening sentence… does that mean that I am not crazy either, having worked with John on his gravity theory?
The Piano Tuner
Years ago I went to a bookstore at Zurich’s international airport and picked up a book to read on the flight, Daniel Mason‘s The Piano Tuner. I began reading then, but I kind of drifted away, never finishing it, putting it aside after I got back home, I never even got halfway. The book was sitting, forgotten, on top of an ever growing pile next to my bed.
Until last week, that is, when I picked it up again. I had to start from the beginning, as I didn’t remember much, just the uniqueness of the story and its atmosphere. This time around, it didn’t take long to get to the last page… despite the 19th century feel and pace, it turned out to be a page-turner after all.
And an unlikely story it is, set in Victorian England, telling the tale of a shy, self-absorbed London piano tuner who gets the most unusual commission of his lifetime: a request by Her Majesty’s War Office to travel to the remotest parts of Burma in order to tune and repair an Erard grand piano.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one who was mesmerized by Mason’s story. Now I hear that a movie is in the works. Not bad for the first novel of a medical student!
A full nine years after the Y2K bug was to end civilization as we know it, it appears that Microsoft has yet to discover leap years. It seems that many of their Zune music players died a premature death yesterday (though they’re expected to come back to life today) because they were not prepared to deal with years that are 366 days in length.
Not only is this a remarkable case of sloppy programming and quality control, it also highlights why devices with digital rights management are such a bad idea. They’re designed not to serve you, the person who owns the devices and pays for the content played on it, but to serve third party content providers who view you as the enemy. And you actually pay good money for such garbage?
This is why I have yet to purchase an iPod, Zune, or indeed, any other device or software that is designed to police my non-existent file sharing habits.
… and CBC Radio 2 is not faring well. After the cultural vandalism by its bureaucrats last September, the ratings of Radio 2 here in Ottawa are down by a full one third compared to the same period last year: in 2007, the market share of CBOQ was 5%, now it’s down to 3.3%.
The theory behind the revamping of Radio 2 was that by going for the lowest common denominator, pop music, Radio 2 will attract a bigger audience and will better represent Canada overall. What was forgotten was that it is not the mandate of a public broadcaster to be popular… commercial radio already does that. The public broadcaster should be the guardian of high culture (and if that sounds elitist, maybe it should be) not a promoter of pop culture.
The ratings prove my point.
Ratings of CBC RAdio 2 in Ottawa
By the way, some people argue that it’s wrong to promote music written by middle aged white men. (Not that the CBC was exclusively about music written by middle aged white men. I learned a lot about jazz, Canadian folk, South American music, African music, and more on the “old” CBC.) Anyhow, when I hear that argument, I feel the urge to respond by asking, are you also upset that science classes teach the physics or math of middle aged white men? That engineering schools teach the engineering of middle aged white men? For better or for worse, much of our world’s science and technology was developed by Europeans, and until recently European civilization was very male-oriented (some argue it still is.) This doesn’t change the validity of, say, Boltzmann’s thermodynamics, Einstein’s gravity, or Feynman’s QED. Why should it be different when it comes to music? Is the music of Beethoven less valuable because there weren’t that many symphonic orchestras in the 19th century (or even today) in sub-Saharan Africa? I don’t think so. In any case, if we think that an area of science or culture is dominated by middle aged white men, the correct solution is not to banish their contributions, but to make sure that they become accessible to others… which is precisely what the CBC is no longer doing. Now that’s real “elitism” in the most pejorative sense of the word.
At last, Google News is now available in Hungarian.
This is not what I usually expect to see when I glance at CNN:
CNN and integrals
It almost makes me believe that we live in a mathematically literate society. If only!
The topic, by the way, was a British Medical Journal paper on brain damage caused by a dancing style called headbanging. I must say, even though I grew up during the disco era, I never much liked dancing. But, for what it’s worth, I not only know how to do integrals, I actually enjoy doing them…
The other day, David Letterman had a segment called The Ten Most Hated Christmas Songs. They were well known Christmas tunes with twisted lyrics. All of them were funny, but two I found especially memorable. The first said,
“Joy to the world, George Bush is done.”
The second one was really creepy:
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
“Nineteen-twenty-nine…”
Indeed.
Sad news today: at the age of 76, Majel Roddenberry, aka. Nurse Christine Chapel from Star Trek and Lwaxana Troi from Star Trek: TNG, has passed away today. My she rest in peace.
Her husband, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, passed away over 17 years ago, on October 24, 1991. That date is memorable to me for another reason: it was on the morning of that day that I became a wizard of Richard Bartle’s classic multiplayer computer game, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), aka British Legends, a game that I have ported to modern 32-bit platforms nearly a decade later and that I have been hosting ever since.
I was slacking off this morning (it’s a Saturday, after all) and I decided to watch a DVD that has been lying around my desk for months. It’s an award-winning Hungarian movie, KONTROLL. No, it has nothing to do with Maxwell Smart’s CONTROL, fighting the evil agents of KAOS. KONTROLL, a movie about the lives of ticket inspectors, train conductors, a serial killer, and other strange characters, is set in its entirety in the Budapest subway system. A subway system that becomes a world by itself, with no daylight, no sunshine, and no contact with the outside world other than through the anonymous masses of subway passengers. I read wonderful things about this movie (it has won a respectable number of international awards) and all I can say is that its reputation is well deserved. Wow! I was in the second grade when the first modern subway line opened in Budapest (the city has a single underground line that is much older, built in 1896, but the first line of the new modern subway system was opened in 1970) and the subway has been part of my daily life until I left Hungary in 1986. Still, I don’t think that after watching this movie I’ll ever be able to look at those subways quite the same way as before.
I am sure this is a fine CBC journalist and her report about OPEC was interesting, but I do wonder: why did she have a dead Christmas tree (looks like leftover from last year) to her left in the background?
OPEC and last year's Christmas tree
Watching the pictures from Mumbai, I cannot help but wonder: when WW3 inevitably arrives, will we also be seeing live pictures and breathless news media coverage as major cities around the world turn into radioactive mushroom clouds and millions of lives are reduced to ash and smoke? Will there be a new Wikipedia article about the nuking of London, Paris, and New York City moments after they occurred, just as there is already an extensive article in Wikipedia on the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks?
I just looked at the channel lineup of Sirius Satellite Radio. They have three classical channels: Opera/Classical Vocals, Classical Pops, and Traditional Classical. 100% Commercial Free, they say.
OK, no commercials. How about commentary? How about radio personalities that inform and entertain, tell you stories about the music you hear?
And narrowly defined as they appear to be, do any of these channels have room for something unexpected? Say, a little Kurt Weill, a little Heitor Villa-Lobos? Astor Piazzolla? A surprise piece of Canadian folk music wedged between two traditional classical pieces, such as Norm Hacking singing about orange cats?
These satellite channels, just like the CBC’s own new Internet channels, seem nothing more than glorified playlists to me. If I wanted a randomized playlist, I have several hundred CDs to choose from… lovely music, all of it, but who will show me something new?
Not the CBC, not anymore. Yesterday, while I was driving somewhere in town, I was listening to CBC Radio 2, as my car radio is still tuned to 103.3 MHz out of habit I guess. What I heard was some hapless, untalented artist’s barely recognizable rendering of an old Abba song. I grieve for a world-class radio station that has been put to premature death by mediocre bureaucrats engaged in cultural vandalism.
In the year 1086, William the Conqueror ordered a survey of England. The result of this became known as the Domesday Book, a detailed account of the material wealth of England on that day of accounting, or reckoning, or doom (dom in Old English), i.e., on domesday.
900 years later, the BBC engaged in a cultural heritage project. The BBC Domesday Project was a multimedia survey of the United Kingdom, published using the latest technology: laser disc. Remember laser discs? Not compact discs, laser discs. 12 inches wide, big, shiny, designed originally to store near broadcast quality analog video.
The two Domesday discs contained professional video segments, numerous photographs encoded as single-frame analog video, along with a large amount of data (including geographic data and data from the 1981 census), as the discs could store about to 300 MB of digital data, a huge data capacity at the time.
All you needed to view the BBC Domesday disc was a specially manufactured laser disc player, along with an Acorn computer with specialized interface hardware.
Of course today it is a tad hard to find a laser disc player of any kind, never mind a specially manufactured model. As to the Acorn with the custom interface and coprocessor, good luck finding one on eBay!
The original creators of the BBC Domesday project knew about possible obsolescence; yet despite their efforts (they sent copies of everything to the UK National Data Archive, where apparently everything promptly disappeared) the data were almost lost.
Although it appears that the BBC Domesday project has been largely rescued, it highlights a bigger problem: what happens to our society’s written record if the medium on which it was written becomes obsolete? Some people speak of the digital dark ages, a period in history (i.e., the present) that will become inaccessible to future researchers, as our collective memory is written in a form that will not be compatible with the hardware of the future. Indeed, to some extent it has already happened… how many people have computers today that can read 5.25″ floppy disks, for instance? Or, what happens to Web sites when the people who maintain them are no longer around? Never mind 900 years, will any of our “domesday books” still be readable just 90 years from now?
It is always creepy when fact meets fiction. I’ve been watching the latest episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is a surprisingly good quality sci-fi series. I then checked on Google News if there are any news about the show’s rating or popularity. Instead, what I found was a story about a robot in Japan, greeting amusement park visitors, selling tickets, and using face recognition software to profile customers. Not only does it sound a little like Westworld, one commenter actually suggested that it might be time to call Sarah Connor to finish this one off, which is why Google News found this entry in response to my search.