Train Tactics

Like anything else that one is compelled to do repeatedly, while simultaneously being starved of cognitive sustenance (i.e. bored), riding public transport breeds odd little eccentricities and optimizations.

Many are about fares, tickets, routes, schedules, and other boring / commute-specific things, and as such constitute some of the most inherently boring-to-others thoughts it is physically possible to entertain.

Others are just Odd.

For instance:

  • The ten-kilo-backpack-head-check-and-swing, usually performed immediately upon alighting from one’s train/bus/tram, in order to minimise the knocking-off of one’s fellow passengers’ blocks.
  • The dubious-looking-seat-fondle, performed ever after that first time one sits in something unsavory on a train-seat, to assess if those black bits will potentially adhere to one’s pants, or if that long brown streak is dry and entrenched.
  • The lanky-kneecap-morris-dance, practised by any two people sitting opposite one another whose cumulative height is greater than 10’8″. I have observed variations on this dance where claustrophobia, religion, laptop computers, narcolepsy, large briefcases, toddlers, malice and alcohol have in their own ways enhanced this awkward ritual.
  • The ‘towers of Hanoi’ full-train-logistics-tango: when a train is standing-room-only, it is profoundly unlikely at any given time that all the people who are getting off at the next stop are nearest the doors. The only way around this is for everyone nearest the doors to get off, then for the people whose stop this isn’t to get back on. The awkwardness of this dance is enhanced greatly by passengers who both refuse to move to let others off and abuse those who are trying to get back on. Thank you folks. You know who you are.

But the best of all is probably:

  • The peak-hour-pole-dance, brought on by the knowledge of all those left standing that the train will soon be negotiating a set of points, and those not clutching a suitable upright or hand-grip will soon be performing an involuntary lap-dance for a stranger. Only so many total strangers can hang onto the one upright door-post, even if armpit odour isn’t taken into account.

With passtimes like these, I really can’t understand why more people don’t take the cheap, environmentally sound option that is our public transport system! Three cheers for Connex!

Long time no blog!

Those holidays went on forever didn’t they?

Uh, yeah, I’ve been lazy. As long as I don’t post, I figured, that last comment about being on holidays will still stand, right? Maybe not… 🙂

So far, 2008 has gone well for me, with very little exciting stuff to report. Christmas lunch for the whole Hatherell clan this year went spectacularly well, despite my persistent mental block about how long one needs to thaw a three kilo roast. E has escaped from the hospital system (just this last week) and is infinitely happier for it.

Apart from that there’s been plenty of fascinating news, but all I can think of is news about other people, all of it thoroughly public. I don’t even have anything interesting to add.

I will seize the opportunity to say (belatedly) Yay Mr Rudd! or at least, Yay not Mr Howard… just so that I can tick the ‘politics’ category box.

This post is really just a matching bookend to match the ‘On Holidays’ one . I will try to follow with some more interesting goop in separate, specific posts.

It’s quiet because I’m on holidays

…and I typically can’t be bothered blogging, as it involves using a computer, using my brain, and giving a stuff.

Also, blogging is easier when your computer works. Mine has decided to become unbootable for the second time in as many weeks, and in the same way as last time, so I am ignoring it, as the process of diagnosing and fixing it reminds me uncomfortably of work.

I still have this laptop, but it’s uncomfortable, and it reminds me even more strongly of work, so I may not touch it much either.

I may blog again between now and 2008, but don’t count on it.

p.s. On a completely unrelated note, I just want to say that desperate, failed, elitist neurotics like Andrew Keen and statistically uninformed doom-criers like Doris Lessing can, how shall I put this most succinctly, go fuck themselves.

The Zen of Wally

Today’s Dilbert from my desktop calendar portrays a distressingly deep insight into the human condition in a very very simple way. Naturally, this insight is brought to us by Wally, a man so shallow and indolent that he must have achieved enlightenment. 🙂

Scan from Dilbert day-at-a-time calendar, 22/11

Before enlightnment: Do as little as possible. After Enlightenment: Do as little as possible.

In all seriousness, it seems to me that there is a hugely useful insight to be taken from this comic: Wally likes talking to Asok because Asok is there to be talked to.

I like to take from this the understanding that you can choose to enjoy what you do, even if what you’re doing is not what you would choose to do. i.e. I don’t agree with many of the things I am called upon by my managers to do, but they’re there, so I do them. Stripped of context, there is no reason why I couldn’t enjoy doing these things, so why shouldn’t I?

The idea is that if enjoyment is subjective, it is within our control, essentially a matter of choice. I can choose to enjoy doing my timesheets, or I can give up that choice and find them tedious and frustrating, and hence, arduous. It all comes down to my attitude, and how much care and effort I put into appreciating where I am and enjoying what I’m doing.

“I’d rather be happy than right any day.”
SlartibartfastHHGttG

Are you an Invalid, citizen?

For those who haven’t seen seen Gattaca:DNA image licensed under Creative Commons from Flickr

  1. Go see it, it’s a great film.
  2. Skip this post if you don’t want to be spoiled.

For those who have, be very, very afraid: It has begun.

To sum up: Two companies in the USA are now offering to do you a gene-scan, scanning “about a million and 600,000 sites across the genome” (sic) to look for known genetic illnesses, potential susceptibilities and predispositions, and even more broadly, just ‘traits’. You can buy this service for about USD$1000 from deCODEme or 23andme. If you can buy it for $1000, it’s not implausible that you could get one done to add it to your resume: after all, if it says good things about your health and life expectancy, eyesight, maybe even your intelligence, dilligence or honesty, why wouldn’t you? If it says bad things, you can just leave it out…

…except that someone, somewhere, is going to get a scan that is unarguably better than yours, and they might include theirs with their resume. Then you may well be screwed. After all, who’s going to employ you with your predispositions to diabetes and heart failure when they could get someone with similar skills and no such genetic issues?

The next step, as explored in Gattaca, is kind of inevitable too: If you have the choice of guaranteeing no genetic defects in your child, why on earth wouldn’t you? If it costs $1000 to do a scan for 600,000+ known defects on a single genome, how much would it cost to scan half a dozen eggs and a dozen or more sperm? $20,000? I don’t know if this kind of thing is subject to economies of scale, but it seems plausible, especially when all the eggs and all the sperm are respectively from the same two donors. $20,000 is less than a university degree. I know people who spend more than this getting a single child’s teeth straightened. In today’s money, my own teeth probably come close to it. What if my parents had had the option of ordering ‘straight teeth that fit’ pre-conceptus?

In the simplest case, ask yourself how much you would pay, just to rule out the possibility of down syndrome in your child, a 1-in-1000 chance? This is a genetic test which already exists and is carried out in-utero.

Now look forward thirty years to a world that might resemble that portrayed in Gattaca very closely: Your child is applying for a job. As a routine part of this process, they have to have a genetic scan, or else their resume simply won’t be taken seriously. You either have, or haven’t, had your child through a genetic screening process. If you have, their scan can be assured of being better than average, an asset to their employability. If you haven’t, it’s the luck of the draw, but in a world where screened children are more and more common, your chances are less than 50/50.

The obvious question is: How severe can this really get? Obviously it’s a risk we can see coming, and there’s plenty of robust legal impediment already in pace to stone-wall this kind of discrimination, not to mention the technical barriers that make this kind of commonplace IVF unlikely for the time being. Then again, the average age of parenthood is still going up, bringing exponential increases in both genetic defects and infertility. Demand for IVF and genetic screening is already high. The likes of deCODEme and 23andme promise to supply it.

If this is a good thing, why does it scare me so much?

Assume the party escort submission position

Portal screenshotIt’s relatively out-of-character for me to post game reviews, since I so rarely pick up new games, but this game is itself entirely out of character, so that’s alright.

To be brief: Portal is fscking brilliant.

I’m an RTS (Real-Time Strategy) player by nature, with a strong leaning towards turn-based and puzzle oriented games. I do play FPS (First-Person perspective Shooter) games, especially with friends, but they’re not my favourite thing. I enjoyed Half Life 2, for example, but I didn’t go back and re-play it a second time, and it made me terribly motion-sick.

Then again, so did Portal. Motion-sick and dizzy and confused and falling off my chair with fits of uncontrollable giggles.

Portal is a bit of a holy-grail as far as I’m concerned: it’s a perfectly abstract puzzle game, built with an elegant first-person shooter as its interface. Apart from finding or setting your keyboard controls, this is a game which requires only one explanation: how to use the portal gun itself. Everything else is just physics, as intuitive as catching a ball.

And then there’s the computer. The computer is your friend. I will only make this one reference to Paranoia, the roleplaying game. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry about it.

The cake is a lieThroughout Portal, The Computer talks to you. Occasionally it says something helpful. Even when it’s not helping, it is entirely worth listening to. While I played this game, E kept asking me to turn the sound up, so that she could hear The Computer. That’s really all that needs to be said.

🙂

Apologetics

This post is partly a response to a post by the Mododrum herself. She points out the following link:

http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

Which talks about five “Geek Social Fallacies”:

  1. Ostracizers Are Evil
  2. Friends Accept Me As I Am
  3. Friendship Before All
  4. Friendship Is Transitive
  5. Friends Do Everything Together

…and she correlates it to certain social circles. Since those social circles aren’t entities subject to individual abuse or identity fraud, I’m going to go out on a limb here and take a stab at naming them openly:

(note: I count, or have counted, myself a member of all of these)

  • Korner (physical)
  • Korner (virtual)
  • FOME
  • MURP
  • The SCA College of Saint Monica
  • A miscellany of other Monash University social clubs and groups peripheral thereto.

The part I was getting to, in naming these groups, is simply that I agree.

…wholeheartedly. If I had read this article when I finished high-school and really let myself see my surroundings in the terms it describes, I might have had a much happier, healthier, saner life the past fifteen years. Pathological conflict avoidance and the unwillingness to criticize that which is plainly aberrant and unhealthy, these are not adult behaviours. In fact, doing this to your friends and peers is passive aggression, no different than the vicious sabotage of smilingly telling a friend that they look great and sending them out the door to a photo-shoot when they have visible food in their teeth. Criticism is how we grow. In its absence, we don’t just stagnate, we atrophy.

I can recall a time when I believed and lived by every one of these fallacies to a frightening degree. The cost of this behaviour has only really started to become clear to me in the last three years, and the damage is extreme. Every part of my life from my health and education to my work skills and my lifetime financial achievement has been grievously harmed by these beliefs. I shudder to think of the colossal damage I have done to others in the service of these delusions.

For what little it’s worth, I’m sorry.

I’m also more than a little angry,  but if you read the article on Geek Social Fallacies and recognized yourself in there, then I’m not angry at you, not any more. You probably did yourself at least as much harm as you ever did me, and you have my sympathy.

92,903 squares of Scottish Hunting estate!

…Square millimeters, that is. 🙂

Courtesy of E and Lochaber Highland Estates, I can apparently now call myself a Scottish Laird!

It’s odd, but until E bought me the right to do so, I can’t clearly recall ever having wanted to fish for salmon in the river Spean. What was I thinking? I certainly do now.

This is my little bit here, to be specific:

My Hunting Estate

…just a convenient amount to stand in.