Thursday, July 30, 2009

Hey! There is lots of cool stuff on the web!

The Battle” from Nerduo, via The Daily What

Hey! There is lots of cool stuff on the web! I've been looking at it today! And yesterday! And some other days! It is a good time to be a web reader. (Web reader reminds me of "web slinger" aka Spiderman but I can't think of how to make a clever joke out of the similarity. Perhaps I just did but I letting you in on my lack of cleverness? Hmm, perhaps not.) Anyways, everyone in like the media (journalism, television, ...) is going crazy about how much cool stuff there is on the web, and that it is pretty much all for free, and how now all the media institutions are losing money. The New York Review of Books has a good article about this, "The News About the Internet". I realize that the current status quo is completely unsustainable, but it is nice all the same. I hope that whatever solution comes out of all this keeps the affordable, (sometimes) world-view-enlightening information coming. Also, I wish that the guy going on all the talk shows advocating the information-wants-to-be-free position wasn't such a plagiarizing, snobby ass hat. (By the way, my greatest and only Flickr honor was having a photo invited to the group "Ass-hat".).

Here are some sites that regularly post cool stuff to look at. None of them are terribly outre, but lists are funs. I like lists. Also, this list is now either relevant or uncool, as the AV club posted their "Favorite time-wasting websites" today. But I started writing this yesterday!! Man, I hate it when people go into the future and steal my ideas! And it was such an original idea!! Anyways, here's my list, I say in an utterly dejected, soulless manner.
Okay! So I'm tired of making my list now! But now you know what I waste time reading! And you know what they say! You know, knowing is half the battle! That is a good quote with which to end every everything you could think of writing! Same with exclamation points with regard to sentences! Toodle-oo!

P.S. I usually hit the "Note in Reader" button when I likes stuff, so you can see articles I liked in my Google Reader feed, which is on the right somewhere. Or here. Ta ta ta!

Monday, July 20, 2009

what i remember from the wind-up bird chronicle




I just finished reading Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I wanted to record what it meant to me. The most direct scene for me was the zoo story, in which the Japanese soldiers were performing ridiculous, unpleasant, violent tasks based on absurd orders from unseen superiors. The world they were in was so beyond what their minds knew how to deal with that they were just murdering in a daze.

To me, the rest of the book had a bit of this theme as well. We live in an industrialized world where most of us don't have to directly work toward creating objects necessary for survival (e.g. food, shelter). So we have created this fairly absurd, alien structure of stuff to do. What we end up filling our days with is based on a lot of stuff we don't control -- the hand that is pointing us in some direction, winding us up, and letting us go. Case in point, I have spent the day performing regression analyses to determine whether fruit flies have souls (to put it loosely). So the absurdity is more exaggerated (maybe) in Mr. Wind-up Bird's dream-like world, but still he has various random tasks to do. Climb in this well, watch these people's faces, classify their baldness, ...

Mr. Wind-up Bird's world is maybe more benevolent, though, with there being some kind of order and final goal to everything. The world makes some/more sense to the narrator at the end, even if the means to the end don't. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but some kind of ending. So, I'm jealous of all the meaning in Mr. Wind-up Bird's world. He has some goal that is ultimately good, and he has people telling him how to get there, or he somehow knows how to make the right decision when he must. Of course, if I make a wrong decision and say, perform a quadratic regression when really a linear regression is the thing to do, I will not be brutally murdered by the imaginary, knife-wielding alter-ego of an evil politician out for world destruction, so maybe we're even.

I suppose, though, in the end, it is not the ends that are stressed in the book. Mr. Wind-up Bird and other characters cling to individual, vivid memories of peaceful moments (sometimes not so peaceful ... let's just say vivid ... and sometimes not exactly memories ...) to gain balance and stability in their world, and I suppose those are the most meaningful things for them. The characters make connections by sharing these structured moments with stumbled upon kindred souls. And these connections are real, substantial, and destined. It is all very weird. I'm not sure I get it.

Also, for some reason I've identified Noboru Wataya with Paul Krugman, I guess cuz they're both economists-turned-famed-politicians, so now I'm scared of Paul Krugman. Great. Okay, those are the thoughts I can think of for now.

PS I was listening to Dark Night of the Soul for the first time while reading this book, so the album evokes the book for me now, particularly the track "Revenge".

Friday, July 17, 2009

sound card not working?

I just restarted my machine (running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy) after the latest kernel update, and my sound card driver managed to disappear ... I don't know. Anyways, this site was useful in getting it back:
Comprehensive Sound Problem Solutions Guide

The solution for me involved the following steps:
  1. Try running:
    aplay -l
    and get the failure message:
    aplay: device_list:221: no soundcard found...
  2. Run
    lspci -v
    and succeed in finding my sound card:
    00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
  3. Figure out through googling that the driver I want is snd-hda-intel.
  4. Compile the ALSA driver using alsa-source:
    1. sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) module-assistant alsa-source
      sudo dpkg-reconfigure alsa-source
    2. Within the blue dialog box displayed, answer:
      1. Yes for ISA-PNP
      2. No for debugging
      3. Deselect "All" and select the correct driver "hda-intel".
    3. sudo module-assistant a-i alsa-source
    4. Get no errors ... good luck with that one :).
  5. Load the sound card driver just compiled:
    sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel
  6. Within this terminal, "aplay -l" now works.
  7. Ensure that the sound card driver is loaded for all sessions by adding snd-hda-intel to the end of the file /etc/modules.

Friday, July 10, 2009

joy division

I think you should listen to some Joy Division. I hadn't heard their music before watching the movie Control, but they are rocking. Here is what Bono has to say about Joy Division:
It would be harder to find a darker place in music than Joy Division. Their name, their lyrics and their singer were as big a black cloud as you could find in the sky. And yet I sensed the pursuit of God, or light, or reason...a reason to be. With Joy Division, you felt from this singer, beauty was truth and truth was beauty, and theirs was a search for both.
Here are some playlists from imeem:
And here are some live performances on Youtube:


Transmission


Shadowplay


She's Lost Control

And, if you're going to be post-punk and rock out with some Joy Division, you might as well go punk too and listen to the Clash:
Here is K's favorite scene from Control:


I do not like hot dogs!

worry about crows

We should be worrying about crows. I always thought they were ugly, creepy birds, and had the vague sense that they were up to no good. Plus, according to a very reputable source, "birds are like little dinosaurs", and we all remember those Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Now, I hear that they are smarter than you think. Here are some creepy videos of crows doing things they shouldn't be able to:



Tool-Making Crows (read a summary of the experiment on National Geographic)



Smart Crows and Ravens

Also, they can apparently do face recognition, so they can memorize your face, and come after you in particular. Not good.

Saturday, July 4, 2009

missing my book friends


i am not good at separating reality from fiction, i think. i mean, i know which is which, but i still tend to bond myself to fictional characters, particularly in books, as much as to real people in the real world. so i was sad this week when i finished reading "river town" by peter hessler (i read "oracle bones" also by hessler a couple months ago). i had a similar feeling when i finished reading "infinite jest" a few years ago, and pretty much any kurt vonnegut book. (to make matters even more confusing, "river town" is a nonfiction narrative, so the narrator is in fact peter hessler, a real person, but nonetheless my relationship with him is unidirectional and fictional.) here is what i think it is. first, the writers of these books are tremendously talented and interesting and wonderful at expressing themselves. second, their craft is to express their most profound emotions honestly and effectively. this contrasts with my relationships with real people in the real world, where the goal is quite the opposite -- to make small talk so that i can go on existing without thinking about my most profound emotions honestly and effectively. in this sense, i feel like i know the authors/characters better than i know my acquaintances in the real world. of course, like small talk, these narratives are just the fraction of the authors' thoughts and self that they feel like putting down on paper for public consumption. they don't even have to be honest, tho i think the books i feel this way about are those that smack of honesty. they also do not have to write in the stream of consciousness, linear motion with which we in the real world must pass through time. the narratives can have complete, well-organized thoughts and emotions. reading these narratives linearly is highly satisfying, then, because everything is well-thought out and complete and purposeful. being a forgetful person, it is nice that i can reread these books, go back in time and re-intake the moments captured in these books. so, in that sense, the characters/authors are never completely gone, just memories, like many friendships i've had growing up that have been somewhat deeper than small talk. still, there is something permanent and sad about finishing a book. to quote some guy on newsweek paraphrasing holden caulfield:
The test of a great book ... [is] whether, once you finished it, you wished the author were a great friend you could call up at home.

my left foot


my left foot

This is a picture of the preparations I made to my left foot before my run this morning. The blue thing is a piece of a sponge, cut into an annulus, that protects the bruise I have on the little bone that sticks out of the top of my foot. Here is the story. I have been running more lately. My feet are not happy about this, particularly my left foot. I tend to run on my toes, which I'm told is excellent for sprinting but less excellent for everyday jogging. This causes me to get blisters, so I tie my shoes extra tight to try to avoid them. I managed to tie my shoes too tight, I guess, and ended up with the most annoying bruise. Anyways, taping a sponge to the top of my foot works wonders! I highly recommend it.