Category: Cosmography

Science, philosophy, art, life.

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Cosmography Humour

In Which I Hit A Tree

As if of its own volition, the car darts to the left. A skid? I know how to deal with that. Stay calm, don’t overcompensate. And yet I am lurching drastically to the right now. My feelings are oddly not of panic and fear but puzzlement, disappointment. The steering, something I’d come to think of almost as a direct expression of my will, had suddenly decided to have its own opinion. Parents of teenagers must feel like this, as their world spins out of control.

A ditch. No wait, a tree. A slow, sickening crunch. I’m athwart the driveway, nearly facing the way I came. But I’m relieved. That tree saved me from the ditch, that’s good. I’m a whistling kettle of shock and adrenalin, but I seem to be uninjured.

So what was that sickening crunch, exactly?

I turn off the engine. My glasses have flown off in the impact, I know not where, so I get out and inspect the damage without them. Even with the glamorising effect of soft focus though I can see it’s not pretty. The right wing is crushed like foil, the water tank displaced and leaking, the wheel… doesn’t look right at all.

My glasses turn out to be under the passenger seat. So, can I drive this thing? The engine starts. The power steering does move the wheels, though the noise it makes is like insurrection at the bacon factory. I select first gear, let out the clutch and…

Nothing at all. It’s a front wheel drive car, and the front wheels don’t. That… is probably not a good omen. The damage goes well beyond one corner.

What the hell just happened? I was on the driveway to Cregg Castle, an old colonial manor house that’s being converted into an artists’ residence. It’s covered in slippery mud. The drive I mean. It’s also pocked with holes so thickly that they’re practically impossible to avoid – indeed I’d just failed to avoid one seconds before the accident. Had I simply skidded on the mud, or had the impact broken the steering? It had felt more like the latter. And indeed the two front wheels pointed in different directions now, though of course that could be effect rather than cause.

Sudden steering failure. Imagine if instead of a driveway that had been on a main road. At 95kph, with oncoming traffic. It would have been almost certainly fatal, for me and for others.

And yet I find myself hoping it is the explanation. I mean, skidding off a driveway. That’s just embarrassing.

So first problem would be getting the car off the road. I was near the gatehouse and knew the people who live there; fortunately someone was in. We couldn’t move the car between us, but soon more people came down the driveway in both directions and they stopped to help. They pretty much had to, but I’m sure they would’ve anyway. Two women tipped the balance, and we got it lined up to the point where it could be towed off the road. Thanks to James, “Lorraine Micra”, and all the cooperative people from Cregg Castle. And to the couple who were just passing by to take a walk in the woods but offered me a lift without knowing my mother’s house was only a mile away.

Now it’s the next day. I’m a little achy, though that will be mostly from trying to push the car. I await the insurance report which hopefully will tell me what happened, though I expect it will also bring the sad news that the car is a write-off. The first car I’d ever owned – and that for only about two months. It wasn’t all that much of a car perhaps. A red Nissan Micra that had been my mother’s before me, and several other people’s before that. Thirteen years old, but a tough and feisty little car. Useful, pleasant, reliable – well, it was only unreliable once. I will miss it. I may well buy another like it; I don’t think the write-off value will cover the Land Rover I really want. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it didn’t cover the excess. But I will need something if I’m going to college next month.

And you know what’s even more annoying? Literally the day before I was full of joy because I’d finally got my resident’s parking permit, the magic sticker from the city that means I never have to pay for parking near my flat again. Freedom at last! It’s almost like receiving full citizenship; finally I was a paid-up member of Galway’s horrendous traffic problem, and could park anywhere I liked in the part of town that has no parking.

But seriously, just taking the car into town for an afternoon had been costing me six or eight euros. Having it overnight was pretty much unthinkable. So since I’d got the thing it had continued to reside at my mother’s place. Now at last I would be able to make proper use of it.

Oh well. Taking a bark rubbing with your front end is another way to avoid parking fees I suppose. But the irony, it is bitter.

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Cosmography Politics

Scarlet Fever

Cover of "The Fever (Evergreen original)&...
Cover of The Fever (Evergreen original)

I can recommend Wallace Shawn‘s play The Fever. I recommend it this way: Want a really harrowing time? Go see Wallace Shawn’s The Fever!

Another moving performance by Jerry Levy, but wow – this play is a lot more intense and depressing than Marx in Soho. Good though – in the way heavy theatre can be. Cathartic. Though I’m never sure about catharsis. Is it not just the feeling of pleasure you get when someone stops hitting you over the head?

And The Fever hits you over the head repeatedly. It also punches you in the kidneys and kicks you when your back is turned. It concerns a wealthy Westerner going through a crisis of conscience while suffering a fever in a Third World hotel. In fast succession, his unfastened personality swings from tortured liberalism to fascistic rage as he both realises that his pleasant life is a root cause of injustice, torture and death in places he once avoided even knowing about, then pities himself for being burdened with this  knowledge.

No, we’re not really expected to like him.

But is this dream a moment of clarity? In his febrile vision, the world is a giant zero-sum game where wealth only exists because it is wrested from the poor by violence, where every surplus means someone else goes without a necessity. You can draw different conclusions from that. One of course is that the only possible solution is a radical, total equalisation of humanity.

Another is that there is no solution, and all you can hope for is to be on the winning side. And fight tooth and nail to keep your advantage because the alternative – that the poor and oppressed might someday get to exact their revenge – is too horrific to contemplate.

Or maybe that’s just me. The Fever is a rambling play for sure, it loops and leaps, and yet there seem to be patterns in it. A Rorschach blot – Shawn spills the ink but leaves conclusions up to us. And you will see yourself in this play. Just perhaps not the best of yourself.

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Cosmography Politics

Marx Sells Out

Cover of "Marx in Soho: A Play on History...
Cover of Marx in Soho: A Play on History

A moment before he walked on stage I was gripped by an unexpected fear. Can professors of sociology actually act?

Sure, they can act in the sense that they can get things done; the guy who lectured me is President now. They can certainly talk – well, the good ones can. But playing a role is a whole other proposition, and the notion of an actor-professor suddenly seemed very incongruous. Were we about to sit through a thinly-disguised lecture on a dry historical figure?

I worried needlessly. Jerry Levy is an actor, and Karl Marx – in the script by Howard Zinn at least – a warm, living, mischievous human being.

And, just a man. A thinker, a writer, an honest man angered by injustice of course. But no colossus and no antichrist, not the towering figure envisaged by both his followers and his detractors. A person, by turns kind and foul-tempered, drunken and diligent, who achieved much yet whom we might hardly have heard of if he hadn’t befriended Friedrich Engels or fallen in love with Jenny von Westphalen. Zinn’s play, among many other things, illuminates the fact that great lives are really just ordinary lives with unusual consequences.

Marx In Soho is in a lot of ways a simple play. You could almost call it predictable – until you remember it was written in 1999. Back then it would have seemed overly pessimistic to say an unchallenged capitalism would become less constrained by democracy, ever more greedy and unjust. Now that seems obvious.

But this was almost a passing observation. The larger point was that the divisions between people are mostly false dichotomies, artificial distinctions drawn between countries, religions, classes, ideologies, even right and left. The only real division is that between justice and the absence of justice. And there is no justice where people do not have the basic things they need to live.

In the second play of the double bill – The Fever by Wallace Shawn – we go from the broad and theoretical to the immediately personal. How do you live in an unjust world? 8.30 tonight in the Town Hall Theatre. Book now – Marx In Soho sold out.

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Cosmography Politics

Marx In Soho

Want to see a play about Marx? I’m serious. It’s time to look again at capitalism’s most famous critic. Was he onto something? Clearly it has its faults – the main one being, the way makes all the money gather at one end. But does Marx offer any solutions?

On the face of it, his approach to the problem hasn’t worked out well. Any country that called itself Marxist seemed to end up being a pretty crappy place to live; authoritarian and restrictive. On the other hand, these states bore not the slightest resemblance to what Marx envisaged. There’s only one major one left now, and somehow we all owe it money. On yet a third hand, the stateless workers’ paradise he did predict seems to be taking its time materialising.

With a track record like that, you might fairly wonder why anyone still pays him any attention. Was he just an eloquent guy with a compelling vision and a terrific beard? Maybe so. But he was an interesting guy.

What’s more, he’s being played by an interesting guy. Actor-director Jerry Levy is a sociology professor back in Vermont, but at an age when most would be retiring he began touring the world with Howard Zinn‘s “Marx in Soho”, a one-actor play on the idea of Marx returning to see the modern world.

It’s on today Thursday in the Town Hall Theatre Galway, and will be followed tomorrow with Wallace Shawn‘s “The Fever”, a darkly comic piece about the pitfalls of owning a conscience. Both shed moving, humorous light on the times we’re living in. See you there?

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Cosmography

I Qualify To Be American

The passing grade is just 58. I could be an American! I hadn’t been planning to apply, but maybe they do an honorary membership.

Just sad it’s not a perfect score. I need to bone up on the achievements of James Madison. Sure we’ve all heard of him, but what exactly did he do? No idea.

Easiest one I got wrong: What is the national anthem? You see I knew it was a trick question – The Star Spangled Banner is not officially the US anthem!

Or it wasn’t in 1929, when my copy of the collected Ripley’s Believe it or Not was published. Important lesson there: Weird and interesting facts may be subject to change. When the thing that everyone knows is actually wrong, sometimes people alter reality to make it conform to their misconceptions.

You can take the “Test of Americanness that many actual Americans would probably fail” test here.

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Cosmography

Attack Of The Spider-Attacking Spiders

Urgh. Suffering from advanced brain death, and a mild cold. The weather’s been so heavy recently. Feels like I have feet of clay, and legs of logs.

I’m actually only just very, very slightly sick. But with the weather and a long day on the conveyor belt of other people’s problems, looking for small pieces of necessary equipment, checking every place twice and then checking them twice again in case I’d only checked once, up in the attic inhaling the dust and soot and cutting myself on the cheesewire threads of cellar spiders, it has built up into general malaise.

What about those cellar spiders? These are the beasties that are all legs and almost no body –  one of the three unrelated species that get called Daddy Longlegs, though I think that’s mostly in America. (In Ireland it seems to be the crane fly that gets to use the sobriquet most commonly, in Britain I think probably the harvestman.) It weaves – if weaves is the word – messy, patternless webs of quite amazingly tough and elastic (but thankfully not very sticky) threads which it seems to use less as trap than as a defence mechanism. Bother one, and it will set itself vibrating in its elastic cradle so rapidly that it becomes a blur. Quite disturbing the first time you encounter it.

Its victims include other spiders, so if you live in a place where many species are dangerous – or where people just think they are, as in much of the US – it’s often thought to be poisonous itself, a sort of serious spider badass. It’s not; it’s entirely safe to pick them up and throw them out – if you can catch them. It’s been claimed that they’re capable of a small, essentially harmless bite, but I’ve handled them without feeling anything.

I do suspect them though of endangering the cute little house spider, which they seem to be ousting as most common indoor species. I would swear the cellar spider was rare in this country even twenty years ago. They need a place that doesn’t get too cold in winter, apparently because they’re subtropical in origin and only spread as humans thoughtfully built them nice warm shelters. (Who knows, perhaps this is our true purpose in the ecosystem.) Is it climate change, or have I simply never lived in a house warm enough until now?

It’s being a weird summer for insects too. I saw my first wasp today! Seriously, first I’d seen all year. No bad thing in some ways, but a little worrying. You think of wasps as a tough species, but this summer seems to have been too harsh even for them.

On the other hand, it’s being an amazing year for dragonflies, a species I once thought of as endangered. Now the beautiful monsters are back, bigger and more iridescent than ever, and it’s the all-too-common wasps that seems to be waning.

Hey, maybe dragonflies are eating the wasps. That would be cool.

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Cosmography

Writing On An All-Screen Phone

What’s the best way to enter text on an all-screen phone? Some would say there is no good way, that nothing remotely compares to physical keys and screens are no good for anything much longer than a Tweet. I don’t agree, but it has to be admitted that on-screen keyboards like the default ones on iPhone and Android are no pleasure to use. Simply put, you’re never going to touch-type on keys you can’t feel, and the addition of “haptic feedback” – the fancy name for a buzzer that goes off when a key is pressed – does little to help. The old T9 predictive texting was faster.

Prediction can be used here too of course; a system like autocorrect on the iPhone helps – just not much. (And it can go famously wrong.) It’s very much a band-aid for a flawed approach. Far faster, because they play to a screen’s strengths, are systems that work by drawing a line through letters instead of tapping each one, like Swype.

So effective is it unfortunately that Swype has some exclusive deals with phone makers, meaning it comes pre-installed on certain better Androids but is unobtainable for the rest (though you can get a beta version). It’s not yet available for iPhone either, though curiously it is for Symbian.

But why write with one finger? Typing with both thumbs is much quicker, especially if you have a big screen. And there are some nice keyboards designed especially for it, split in the middle to be more literally under your thumb. Again though the lack of feel slows things down. Logically a good combination should be a thumboard and prediction – Swiftkey is probably the most famous example – but I’ve yet to find one that I really enjoy using.

So what about handwriting recognition? Writing with a pen is never as fast as typing of course, but that’s comparing it to real keys. The great thing about a pen (or stylus) for a screen is that it doesn’t require tactile feedback. So it’s a perfect fit? In theory, I think so.

In practise, not always. Decent recognition of cursive handwriting was only achieved on desktop computers a few years ago, so it’s a lot to expect from a phone. Users of Samsung Galaxy phones will probably have tried the inbuilt handwriting recognition – and given up again sharply. It’s tedious to use, thanks to low accuracy and an overcomplicated interface. There are other apps in the marketplace of course, but some of them are pretty expensive.

And then there’s 7notes with Mazec. Let’s face it, the name could’ve been more informative. A lot of people will overlook this because it’s presented as a note-taking app, and there are countless note-taking apps on Google Play and iTunes. 7notes doesn’t even seem a particularly good one – though it has the unusual ability to store handwritten notes and convert them to type later. Its ‘secret’ however is the Mazec text entry system. This installs like a keyboard and so can be used to write with any app, not just 7notes. Only it takes pen strokes instead of key presses.

Perfect it’s not – could handwriting recognition ever be? – but it can convert scrawl to type with impressive speed and accuracy, comparing well to the pen input in Windows. Obviously it’s ideal for use with a stylus, (and to any other owners of the Galaxy Note out there I say simply: Get this now), but it works very well with a finger.

And it’s cheap. Despite its Japanese-language sibling costing an astonishing (for an app) €9.70, the English version is only 99c for Android and Kindle Fire, and free for the iPhone and iPad. Best cost-to-usage ratio I’ve ever found in an app. It’s my default ‘keyboard’ now.

I just wrote this with it.

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Cosmography Politics Technology

The Return Of The Google Stalker

Sebastian Thrun, Associate Professor of Comput...
Sebastian Thrun, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s been an extraordinary day here at I Doubt It. An article I wrote eleven months ago was mentioned in comments on The Atlantic. I stared fuzzily at the hit counter for several seconds this morning, thinking that somehow the decimal point was in the wrong place.

Then someone followed up with a post to Reddit, and all hell broke loose. So far today there have been more than 6,000 visitors to the blog. I won’t lie, that’s better than average.

The article in question concerned the – let’s be clear from the start about this – apparently deranged accusations being levelled against Eric Schmidt and Sebastian Thrun, both of whom have held leading positions at Google and at Stanford University, by a man calling himself Peter Cao. (Posts that seem to be by the same hand have appeared under the names M Cao, PeterCaoFruit, and Cao Ming.)

He does this by a strange form of stalking: Whenever these men are mentioned in a forum open to comments, Cao will turn up to make his accusations. Search on his name and either of the others and you will see it, again and again, relentlessly. Often he’s the first to comment, giving a distinct impression that he spends a great deal of time on this. His claim, or at least the most specific claim among vaguer accusations of crime, is that Thrun and Schmidt are somehow implicated in the murder of a Stanford student.

What some people have asked – have had to ask – on comments here and on those other forums, is whether there could be anything in this, though I don’t think anyone who actually reads Cao’s words entertains that idea for long. It would be wrong however to dismiss him as a raving madman simply because he writes like a raving madman. Perhaps he sounds less coherent than he really is because of poor English skills. Even if he is unbalanced, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that he is telling truth.

And if it were true, well, what a story. The man notorious for saying “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” caught in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice! And who could better orchestrate a cover-up than the CEO of Google? It would be easy to ridicule such a Perfect Crime, but we can’t dismiss it purely on the grounds of being dramatic. The unlikely may happen less often than the likely, but it happens.

And on the face of it there are questionable aspects to the official story. As briefly as possible: The dead person is Mengyao Zhou, an apparently excellent young Stanford doctoral student who suddenly disappeared in 2007. Some days later her car was found almost a hundred miles away, in Santa Rosa. They found her in the boot (trunk).

Now one’s automatic assumption in those circumstances would be murder, but with more detail the picture changes. Her head was resting on a garment folded up for a pillow (paywall protected, full text here). With her were several empty bottles of a sleeping pill; receipts and CCTV showed her to have purchased the pills. The coroner described the level of the drug in her system as potentially fatal, and an email that Zhou sent to her 16-year-old sister as “consistent with a goodbye note.” A coroner’s verdict of suicide was reached in 2008.

It remains puzzling that Mengyao Zhou should lock herself in the boot of her car, so far from home, to commit suicide by overdose. But then you can’t expect someone killing themselves to make choices that appear rational to others. If it’s not tasteless to speculate, perhaps she felt ashamed and wanted to hide herself.

The only evidence of foul play that has been offered by anyone is a second autopsy, commissioned by her father two months after the death. He claims that it found signs of blunt force trauma. This hasn’t been made public as far as I can find, but the original examiner, Dr. Kelly Arthur of the Sonoma County coroner’s office, reviewed it and said she stood by her original finding that there were no signs of trauma.

So the only interpretations really possible are (a) a suicide, and a father who, quite understandably, refuses to accept that, or (b) a murder and elaborate cover-up, involving two police departments and a coroner. While the latter isn’t impossible, what makes it unconvincing is the absence of any motive or a credible suspect. No one seems to have suggested who would want to kill Mengyao Zhou, or why.

Except Peter Cao. He asserts that Mengyao Zhou was murdered by or with the help of Schmidt and Thrun of Google, or by people “on their side”.

Why? Well Cao claims that in 2004, while a Stanford student, he was assaulted by a female colleague. There is a detailed account of his side of the story in what appears to  be a statement to college authorities or campus police, here. It seems that later she accused him of sexual assault, though again I must emphasise that I can find no account except his to go on (and yes, I’ve tried search engines other than Google…). That could mean anything from a perfect cover-up to the whole thing being a fantasy of Cao’s, but I assume the most likely explanation is that the matter was dealt with on campus and no formal charges were ever brought.

So we have no way to judge who was in the right here, but perhaps that’s not relevant. The important point is that Cao asserts that Thrun, or a faction he believes to exist in the faculty supporting Thrun, took her side because they are both German. While it sounds highly unprofessional, there’s nothing impossible about that. There can certainly be groups that work within institutions to discriminate against non-members. It is plausible that Cao was a victim of injustice, discrimination or even blatant racism.

What Cao goes on to allege is that this group forms part of a Mafia-like collaboration of fascists which had Mengyao Zhou murdered as a personal demonstration to him that they could get away with killing any Chinese Stanford student they liked.

I leave the reader to decide how probable they think that is.

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Cosmography

Dive, Dive, Dive

From a book by Oscar Wilde's dad
From a book by Oscar Wilde’s dad

Maybe it was Katie Taylor‘s victory, making me feel like doing something physical. Maybe it was the weather; sunny after days of mugginess. (Yesterday I broke into a sweat adjusting the phone holder in the car – and I had the blower on cold.) But for whatever reason, I knew it was time to jump in the lake.

Every day I should thank my lucky geography that I live near Lough Corrib. It is not every day I can jump in it mind; far from that. But knowing it is there waiting for when the sun comes out adds greatly to the sum of reasons to get up in the morning.

It’s strange to make a fuss about one of the few lakes in Ireland when I’m not long back from Finland, a country that is mostly lake, but the Corrib is a good one. It’s pretty, dotted with islands covered in trees. It’s vast – with the exception of Lough Neagh in the North, larger than any other lake off the coasts of Europe. But it’s not very deep. Consequently, it can get remarkably warm, even in a summer that’s threatening to drown us all.

I didn’t dive straight in off Annaghdown pier. The water was very clear, and thankfully I could see that it had fallen to dangerously-close-to-large-boulder level. So I sort of gently fell in.

And I couldn’t believe how warm it was. Well all right, more not-cold than positively warm. But after the “It’s OK once you’re used to it” warmth of the Baltic this was almost amniotic. Great for doing some actual swimming practice.

I’m working on the legs. I was never properly taught how to swim with my legs as a kid. “Kick,” they’d tell me, “kick harder!” Well I kicked the living shit out of that water, but I didn’t move anywhere.

The problem is I was quite a literal kid. Hell, all kids are literal. We make the naive assumption that adults actually mean what they say, and are not just blurting out some vague impressionistic nonsense that we’re expected to decode. Adults are very lazy in the way they talk.

Kicking water doesn’t work. Waving your legs up and down, that seems to get you moving forward.

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Cosmography

Birthday 2012

One reckless owner. Bodywork in need of attention, could use a respray. Good mileage, but refuses to start when cold. Will need a lot of work done on the suspension.

I’ll be darned if I’ll write anything today. It’s my birthday! I will sit around ruminating on fantastically old I am. And yet, how still very unfinished.

I didn’t plan anything much. Last time, you might remember, I took a walk in the Burren, but I’m not trying to impress anyone this year. I’d already had dinner a couple of days ago with a dear friend who couldn’t be here today, so I just met up with one of my bestest buddies and went out for a non-drink. She’s being healthy too, so she drank rice milk while I had what I’ve come to call artificial beer, or Toybräu. I tried to drink so much and so fast that it would give me a sort of simulated sensation of getting out of it, but I can’t honestly say that it worked. Then I was so busy talking I only managed four pints of the stuff. What’s happened to me? There were times when I would have had four pints – of actual beer – before breakfast.

Not good times, no. But times. Anyway, good night!