In the fourth volume of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”, we learn that just before the Earth was about to be destroyed by the Vogons to make way for a new interstellar bypass, the whales left. They left behind a simple parting message: “So long and thanks for all the fish.”
Which makes me feel rather alarmed now that I am learning that hundreds of North Atlantic right whales went missing. I hope it’s not a bad sign.
And just when you least expect it… Russia celebrates its victories in Syria over ISIL with a class act, an amazing concert by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra of St. Petersburg, held at the ancient amphitheater that is at the center of Palmyra’s Roman era ruins, badly damaged (not to mention desecrated with barbaric public executions) by the Islamic State.
Russia, of course, intervened not for reasons of altruism but because American indecisiveness offered them an opportunity to prop up Assad’s regime. Nonetheless, I much rather watch an amazing concert like this than public beheadings.
And the music was, in fact, amazing. It included a piece titled Quadrille, from contemporary Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s opera Not Love Alone. I think I ought learn a little more about contemporary Russian opera.
The concert was carried live (of course) by RT, complete with a televised greeting by Putin. Not unlike a similar concert that the same orchestra held in South Ossetia, after Russia’s brief war with the Republic of Georgia a few years ago.
I have been, and will continue to be, critical of many of the policies of Israel. I think that the policy of occupation, while tactically perhaps important, is a political dead end in the long term. I think it is in Israel’s best interest to help create a viable, strong Palestinian state, as any other solution leaves the Palestinian people in perpetual misery, and may ultimately lead to Israel’s own destruction.
That said… anyone who suggests a moral equivalency between Israel’s policy of occupation and Palestinian terror ought to look at such artistic gems like this Hamas cartoon from yesterday:
Line Jerusalem-Hell
I don’t think even the most rabid far-right press outlet in Israel would find it suitable to publish a cartoon that ridicules the suffering of Palestinian civilians. The fact that Hamas (and many other Arabic press outlets) think it’s okay to publish stuff like this speaks volumes.
I have little doubt that Netanyahu’s government will retaliate. I also have little doubt that they will not target civilian buses on Gaza; on the contrary, they will make quite an effort to avoid civilian casualties. I also have little doubt that they will not be successful, and given Israeli firepower, a number, perhaps a sizable number of Palestinian civilians will die, and Israel will be the target of severe criticism, much of it well deserved.
But as you wonder who the real injured party is in this never-ending conflict, look at that cartoon again and ask yourself: who is it who actually glorifies violence on civilians, who is it who believes that the indiscriminate killing of civilians is something to be encouraged and celebrated?
And in case this one cartoon is not sufficient, do yourself a favor and search a little bit on Google. Some of the published anti-Israeli cartoons are so depraved, even Hamas disowns them. No, not because they have any sense of remorse, simply the explicit depiction of the rape of an Arab woman by a Jew was too much in conflict with their, oh, Islamic sense of modesty I guess, and they were also concerned that they may have offended their West Bank brethren by making them appear too submissive. Ah, here it is:
Lovely artwork, isn’t it? Shows a deep concern for humanity, civil rights and all. Dr. Göbbels would be proud.
I just finished reading an online-only novel, Armageddon, part of The Salvation Wars series, originally planned as a trilogy by author Stuart Slade.
The premise: God gave up on the Earth, and let it be known that from now on, it all belongs to Satan. However… Earthlings fight back. And pity the poor demon with his pitchfork when he is confronted with machine gun bullets, cluster bombs, incendiary bombs or Sarin gas, brought about by an impersonal modern military machine that is designed to destroy and annihilate its enemy… and then they haven’t even seen the worst of it yet.
And just as I was finishing the book, I came across this GIF meme: a machine, crucifying Christ at a rate of about one crucifixion per second. And suddenly, I started to feel really sorry for Hell’s demons.
OK, I may be the stupid atheist here, but I find this short clip more than creepy. It speaks volumes about the human race, about what we became and where we are heading, and none of it is nice.
Today is a remarkable day. I spent more than the usual amount of time peeking at either CBC Newsworld or CNN, and I have yet to see the face of a certain American real estate magnate turned reality TV show host turned politician; not that I particularly miss the sight of his toupee.
The reason why Mr. Trump didn’t appear on screen is the multitude of other things happening.
For us here in Canada, the most consequential news are the federal budget, the first by Justin Trudeau’s recently formed liberal government. As promised, it’s a budget about spending and spending some more; the projected deficits are huge. The premise of this budget is that deficit spending is necessary in order to help the stagnant economy.
News of the budget were almost dwarfed by news of the death of Toronto’s larger-than-life former major, Rob Ford. Rob Ford was intensely disliked as a politician, but I think few people wished him to die a miserable death from a rare form of cancer. As Ford himself said, his tenure as major, for better or for worse, will be remembered.
Then there is, of course, that terrible series of coordinated attacks in Belgium, with dozens dead. In addition to an impotent, and likely excessive response by inept authorities (I just saw that the airport in Brussels will be shut for three days), it will also likely trigger a new wave of islamophobia, xenophobia. A message that, thankfully, has few followers in Canada, as splendidly evidenced by the negative response in Quebec to French far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s visit, which is coming to its conclusion.
What was supposed to be the big news of the day is the end of another politician’s trip abroad, namely Barack Obama’s historic visit to Cuba… but the CNN anchors broadcasting from Havana are talking mostly about the Brussels attacks and their aftermath.
The other big news of the day was supposed to be the “winner-take-all” Arizona caucus… but with all the other stuff going on, I have not yet heard this mentioned on CNN or CBC Newsworld today. Thus, no Donald Trump on my television screen either.
All this news makes me wonder if The Globe and Mail tomorrow might end up being published with not one but maybe three consecutive cover pages.
Recently, it was proudly announced that Canada now has a state-of-the-art emergency preparedness system, with the participation of major telecommunication companies like Bell or Rogers.
The problem… well, here is an example of the problem:
This is what was on my television screen a little earlier this afternoon, in place of CNN, for something like a full minute or so.
And not just in place of CNN. In place of every channel. Even if I was trying to watch a recorded show on the PVR.
What’s wrong with it, you ask? Well, I live in Ottawa. That is more than 400 kilometers from Toronto, and the last time I checked, a 1997 Toyota Camry is not a hypersonic jet aircraft.
But even if the abduction happened next door… I don’t mean to be heartless, but this kind of dramatic alert is something I would expect to see if World War 3 was imminent, or if my city (not Toronto!) was about to be hit by an F5 hurricane. Not in case of a domestic abduction (which, in the vast majority of cases, is just a family member like an estranged father, taking a child without permission.)
The last time this happened, I wrote to the CRTC, who told me that it’s not their responsibility (even though they were the ones who mandated it!) but that of provincial agencies and the telecommunication companies that implement the system.
Today, I wrote to Rogers. I do not expect a meaningful reply*.
As if I didn’t already have enough incentives to cut the cable.
*Update: A day after I sent my e-mail complaint to Rogers, a gentleman by the name of Aaron called me from the “President’s office”. He very patiently listened to me as we discussed not just the emergency alert system but also other issues related to the digital transition, the cost and limited choice of decoder equipment, and other topics. We spent more than 20 minutes on the phone. I still don’t expect anything meaningful to happen, but I appreciated it that my complaint was taken somewhat seriously.
Recenly, there was a particular piece of music that caught my attention on CBC’s The Signal: Sapokanikan by Joanna Newsom.
The song begins with the lines,
The cause is Ozymandian
The map of Sapokanikan
is sanded and beveled
The land lone and leveled
By some unrecorded and powerful hand.
This made me re-read Shelley’s timeless poem about the ruined statue of Ozymandias in the desert:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look at my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
And then here is a real-life Ozymandian tale from a few days ago, from China: A 37-meter tall golden statue of Mao erected in the middle of nowhere.
The ending, however, is different: After the statue has been ridiculed on Chinese social media (with many quoting from Shelley’s Ozymandias) the statue was hastily demolished. Wisdom has not yet departed the Middle Kingdom, it seems.
Everyone, meet the early 5th century saint, Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine of Hippo. This is the oldest surviving portrait of him:
Why am I so impressed by Augustine? Well, some 1600 years ago he gave the perfect answer to anyone attempting to read science into holy texts. In his opus, The Literal Interpretations of Genesis, Augustine wrote:
“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about [science] and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics […] The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and […] the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.”
Of course, you could replace the word Christian with, say, Muslim and [Holy] Scripture with [Holy] Koran, and the meaning remains exactly the same.
As a curious footnote, when I checked my blog to see if I might have written about Augustine before (I haven’t) I noticed that the only other occurrence of “Augustine” here is in the context of the US space program, which was reformulated under the Obama administration in response to the recommendations by the Augustine Commission. Even more curious is that there were two Augustine Commissions, set up 20 years apart, chaired by the same Norman Augustine, former CEO of Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. Nothing to do with St. Augustine, of course.
One of my favorite science fiction novels is A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. In the distant post-apocalyptic future that is the setting of the novel, a piece of sacred memorabilia attributed to the founder of a monastic order, Isaac Edward Leibowitz, is in fact a 20th century shopping list.
As it turns out, something similar exists in real life. However, Gal Sal was no saint; he was the owner of two slaves, En-pap X and Sukkalgir. Their names are recorded on a more than 5,000 year old clay tablet that probably served as a receipt or title of sorts.
Though the dates are somewhat uncertain and there are other tablets of similar age, this trio may be the first people in history whose names have been preserved for posterity.
No heroic deeds. No epic battles. No dealings with gods or otherwordly spirits.
Just a receipt. Bureaucracy may, after all, be the oldest profession.
Today, someone sent me a link to a YouTube video of an old Hungarian language television program that featured one of our Commodore 64 computer games, Save Me Brave Knight.
Except that the program featured a lot more than just the game: It also featured Viktor Zámbó and myself talking about the game. (I am second from the right; Viktor Zámbó is on the right.)
I remembered this program vaguely, but I couldn’t even recall its title. My past attempts to search for it were in vain; in fact, I doubted that it even made it online.
But here it is, the two of us, being interviewed at length (starting at 16:48) about the art and craft of game programming.
Wow.
I’m saving a copy of this video on the odd chance that it is removed or muted by YouTube for copyright reasons.
So here I am, listening to, not really watching CBC NewsWorld, when they briefly cut to a live picture from the International Space Station where a spacewalk is underway, and I hear this:
Yup, that’s what the anchorwoman said: Scott Kelly has two pair [sic!] of legs.
You’d think that such a scary, dramatic mutation would have received more coverage already. But what do we know? Must be another liberal mainstream media conspiracy, hiding the facts from people.
Oops! The DeLorean time machine has been recalled by Transport Canada.
The recall has since been canceled though. Apparently, Doc Brown was good on his word.
Or could it be that upper management at Transport Canada (or whichever department was responsible for this recall notice) decided that a sense of humor is incompatible with the Department’s mission?
Today is the day when Marty McFly and the Doc find themselves in futuristic Hill Valley, trying to fix the future while accidentally messing up the past.
Too bad things are not quite as the film predicted. No flying cars powered by portable fusion generators running on garbage. No hoverboards either, nor free-floating holograms. No self-tying shoes, no self-adjusting, self-drying jackets either. And no weather service that can control the rain.
On the other hand… a Pepsi doesn’t cost $50. USA Today is still around and a newsstand copy costs “only” $2, not 6 dollars.
And while there is no Queen Diana, there may yet be a female President in the White House 15 months from now.
Oh, and while we don’t have a Scenery Channel on cable, we have three others in its place: a Fireplace Channel, a Sunset Channel, and an Aquarium Channel. All in glorious digital HD. Yay! Welcome to the future!
I finished this weeks ago but never had the time to post. My previous attempt to hack a Rogers cable decoder was only partially successful, so I gave it another try, with better results.
By “hack”, I don’t mean illegally obtaining cable signals or anything like. I was simply looking for a way to get composite video and stereo audio out of the “free” cable boxes that Rogers provides, as opposed to just a plain RF signal on channel 3. The reason is pretty mundane: I’ve been using a dual-tuner TV card in my computer for years, which allowed me to record one program while watching another. The transition by Rogers to full digital cable messed this up: the TV card has only one RF input, so it is impossible to attach two decoders that could supply two signals simultaneously. But the TV card does have two independent composite video inputs. So if only the decoders had the corresponding output…
Well, they do, sort of: the only problem was that the audio was an undecoded (multiplexed) stereo signal. To decode it, I first built a standard stereo decoder circuit, but that was before I learned that the NTSC standard for stereo also includes noise suppression.
Hence my second attempt, using an appropriate chip.
Once again, I used a custom printed circuit board of my own design, and once again, it worked like a charm. The only fly in the ointment is that this larger board no longer fits inside the original decoder casing without some “plastic surgery”; so chances are that if it ever comes to returning these boxes to Rogers, I’ll be paying for them instead. Oh well.
I recently came across some frightening images on the Interwebs: Frames from a 2000 episode of The Simpsons (Trumptastic Voyage) lined up with real-life images of Donald Trump.
The similarities are uncanny.
Just what did the creators of The Simpsons know back in 2000? Is it just coincidence? Do they have a time machine? And how many of their other predictions will come true in the years to come?
I am reading the latest “alternate history” book by Harry Turtledove: Bombs Away, which describes a world in which President Truman accepts the advice of general MacArthur in 1951 and responds to the Chinese invasion of Korea by deploying nuclear weapons. With predictably disastrous consequences for the whole world.
On account of this book, I looked up historical figures of nuclear stockpiles on Wikipedia, and happened upon a chart that I decided to call the chart of hope.
It depicts the number of warheads owned by the two major nuclear powers. (Other countries are not listed; their combined stockpiles never reached 1,000 warheads, so their contributions are too small to appear on a plot like this.)
Although the more than 10,000 warheads that currently exist are still more than enough to destroy much of human civilization (and arguably, the reduction is due partly to more reliable, more accurate delivery systems), just a few decades ago, the number was in excess of 60,000. A ray of hope, perhaps, that sanity might just prevail. One thing is certain: Back in my high school years in the 1970s, very few people believed that we would live to see 2015 without experiencing the horrors of a thermonuclear war.
In Douglas Adams’s immortal Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, someone builds a device called the Total Perspective Vortex. This device invariably drives people insane by simply showing them exactly how insignificant they are with respect to this humongous universe.
The Total Perspective Vortex may not exist in reality, but here is the next best thing: A model of the solar system, drawn to scale.
The scale of this page is set so that the Moon occupies one screen pixel. As a result, we have an image that is almost a thousand times wider than my HD computer monitor. It takes a while to scroll through it.
Thankfully, there is an animation option that not only scrolls through the image automatically, but does so at the fastest speed possible, the speed of light.
Oh, did I mention that it still takes well over five hours to scroll all the way to Pluto?
By the way, the nearest star, our closest stellar neighbor is roughly 2,000 times as far from us as Pluto.
Or, once again in the words of Douglas Adams, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Hey, I just noticed that our resolution of the Pioneer anomaly made it to an xkcd comic:
Wow. Who knows, if things continue like this, we might even end up on The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory.
Having grown up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, I had a thoroughly Marxist education in history during my grade school and high school years. A central tenet of Marxist history is the concept of “historical inevitability”: that great historic upheavals are a result not of individual heroism or foolishness, but of great socio-economic currents that create change.
I was reminded of this conflict between the “dialectical materialist” vs. the “romantic” view of history while I was reading a superb piece of historical science fiction, Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again. A story in which the protagonist time travels from 2024 to 1914 to change history, prevent The Great War, and make the world a better place. Things of course don’t exactly go as planned (or maybe they go according to plan a little too well?) but I cannot say much about the book without revealing the plot, so I won’t.
But the book, as well as one of the reviews I found on Amazon, made me think of how some of the most fundamental sequences of events in the 20th century were far from inevitable: rather, they were series of astoundingly improbable events, inept bungling that any half-competent publisher would reject as too incredible if submitted in the form of a manuscript of historical fiction.
First, the main event in Elton’s book: the Sarajevo assassination. Think of it: the Serbian organization, The Black Hand, positions not one, not two, but six separate assassins (some sources mention seven, but the seventh conspirator was the recruiter) along the arch duke’s planned route. Meanwhile, the arch duke arrives by train and immediately loses his security detail due to a mix-up as a result of which local police officers took their place in one of the cars.
The sequence of events begins when the first assassin fails to act. The second, too, fails to act. The third finally does act and throws his bomb, which bounces off the arch duke’s car, only to explode underneath the next car, wounding more than a dozen people. This would-be assassin swallows an expired cyanide capsule and jumps into the river, which happened to be only five inches deep at the moment… so he fails to die. The remaining three assassins, too, fail to act as the rest of the motorcade passes by them at high speed.
So then the Austrian general in charge changes the route for the afternoon… and fails to inform the arch duke’s driver. Who then makes a wrong turn, comes to a stop and stalls the car right in front of one of the would-be assassins from earlier that day, Gavrilo Princip. Princip was there ostensibly because he hoped to complete his mission during the arch duke’s return journey, but for all we know, he gave up already and was just getting a sandwich at Schiller’s Deli when the target was so conveniently presented to him. And then he took out his gun and managed to kill both Franz Ferdinand and Sophie with a single bullet each. And thus the life of an arch duke who believed in increased federalism, in modernizing the Monarchy, came to an abrupt end, along with that of his beloved wife, despised and routinely humiliated by the court in Vienna for being outside of the arch duke’s rank. Franz Ferdinand’s last words were, reportedly, “Sopherl! Sopherl! Stirb nicht! Bleib’ am Leben für unsere Kinder!” (“Sophie! Sophie! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!”)
And thus, world history changed and The War to End All Wars began a few short weeks later. Empires crumbled, murderous ideologies were born. A second world war and at least a hundred million deaths later, the world settled into the uneasy but surprisingly long-lasting peace of the Cold War, a peace that lasts to this day, bringing unprecedented prosperity to billions. Who knows what would have happened if Franz Ferdinand did not die on June 28, 1914?
The second bungled event that came to mind was the accidental fall of the Iron Curtain on November 9, 1989. (Astonishingly for me personally, just over three years after I left Hungary as a political refugee, having concluded that I saw no chance of “regime change” behind the Iron Curtain anytime soon, certainly not within a generation.)
The events that led directly to the collapse of the Berlin Wall began in Hungary a few months earlier, when my country of birth decided not to intervene as thousands of East German citizens crossed the border into Austria. Initially, the East German government responded by tightening its regime of exit visas, banning travel for its citizens first to Hungary and later, to Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, unprecedented mass demonstrations followed in East Germany, with crowds rallying to the words “Wir wollen raus!” (“We want out!”) The East German government decided to take the bold step of allowing severely regulated private travel to the West.
The new regulations were to take effect the next day, but this was not communicated to Günter Schabowski, East Berlin’s party boss who was only handed a brief note announcing the changes moments before giving a press conference. Having made the announcement, in response to a question from a journalist, he stated that as far as he knew, the new regulations liberalizing travel are to take effect immediately, without delay, and involved border crossings along the Berlin Wall.
Almost immediately, crowds of East Germans began gathering at the Wall, demanding the opening of the gates. As no-one among East Germany’s leaders was prepared to order the use of lethal force, finally the commander of one of the border crossings yielded, and the border was thrown wide open.
Less than a year later, the state of East Germany ceased to exist.
What would have happened if Schabowski had been better informed? If the East German state had been able to assert its authority and managed to maintain order at its border crossings? Or conversely, what if they had the guts to give the order to fire? Would there have been a bloody revolution? Would Germany still be divided today? What would the European Union look like?
The date of November 9 is famous for another reason, by the way. It was on this day in 1918 that Imperial Germany ceased to exist with the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the ruler who probably bore the most responsibility for turning the 1914 Sarajevo crisis into an all encompassing World War.
Astonishingly, the last surviving member of the conspiracy to kill Franz Ferdinand, Vaso Čubrilović, lived to the ripe old age of 93 and passed away in the year of German reunification, in 1990.
The more I watch Donald Trump’s performance as an American presidential candidate, the more I admire him.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t identify with his views. I don’t want him to become President of the United States; in fact, I am quite certain that it would be a disaster for both the US and the world as a whole.
But I admire his performance, intellectually speaking, the same way one admires the flawless performance of a professional athlete or performer.
Trump’s performances are perfect. He radiates an “I am in it to win” attitude, making it clear that coming in second is not an option he would even contemplate. (Recently, a reporter asked Trump if he would consider a vice-presidential nomination should his bid for the presidency fail. Instead of answering, Trump just dismissed the journalist and moved on to the next question.)
His presence on the television screen is mesmerizing. He is not a politician reading a prepared speech in which he himself does not believe at some nondescript campaign location. He is having a conversation with you, the viewer, and he is passionate about everything he says. And he doesn’t care if his words are misunderstood or twisted.
In a certain way, Trump reminds me of Adolf Hitler. Not the Hitler of wartime or postwar caricatures, but the Hitler of the 1920s or 1930s, admired even by some of his opponents for his charisma, his abilities as a public speaker, the manner in which he almost hypnotized his audience. This is precisely what Trump does and oh, is he ever good at it!
And he is fearless and made of Teflon. It seems that no criticism can harm him. He even uses his billionaire status to his advantage (notably, his supporters are predominantly low-income) when he explains that because he is loaded, his campaign or for that matter, his presidency, will not be held hostage by lobbyists.
I have begun to consider seriously the possibility that not only will Trump be the Republican candidate but that he will actually beat Hillary Clinton in the general election. I like Clinton, but next to Trump, she will look like a junior apprentice in TV debates.
What will Trump’s America be like? I don’t know, but I expect the worst.