Balafon

The Winter Olympics start in two weeks, and there is much activity at the Vancouver airport. The sound of high-powered turbine aircraft engines fills the air.

My office is right under the approach path to runway 26L, so I see CF-18 Hornet fighter jets

CF-18

and CH-146 Griffin helicopters

CH-146

flying around several times a day.

Rumor has it that two Halifax-class frigates

HMCS Vancouver

will be anchored offshore to provide extra air defense.

So I’m on the bus this morning, not riding, because I’ve been under the weather for the past few days, when I hear the following. I figure that calling at volume on your cell phone on a crowded bus puts your conversation in the public domain.

Note that this side of the conversation is female, and in a loud and business-like tone. At first I thought that it was a business call. The tone did not vary at all, even at the end.

Hi, I’m calling for Achmed. Is he there?

…

Achmed. Is he there?

…

I know he’s there.

…

Hi! I bet you didn’t think I’d be calling you!

…

So you’re not in Morocco after all . . . you’re in Italy? Who are you staying with?

…

I miss you. Do you miss me? … Do you miss me?

…

I’m doing ok, thanks for asking. Things are looking up.

…

I have a bill here from Revenue Canada for $250.00.

…

I guess I can go myself.

…

No, I paid him some more money to stay, because I don’t know where to move.

…

He didn’t call me, I called him. But I think he has some problems of his own, I think he might have a drug problem or something.

(followed an extended discussion of the merits of the drug problem theory)

…

Listen, now that I have you on the phone, I need to ask you something. Do you still love me?

At that point I was eternally grateful that my stop had arrived, as I couldn’t bear to listen any more.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling.

The Market for Liberty, Linda and Morris Tannehill.

The Body in Yoruba, Mark Dingemanse.

Reading Greek, Joint Association of Classical Teachers.

I’m finding my study of Attic Greek also helping a lot to get back into Koine. Shortly after reading some discussions of diglossia in modern Greece, I was reading the Didache, and came across the following conclusive proof-text:

παγὶς γὰρ θανάτου ἡ διγλωσσία

There you have it. Diglossia is a deadly snare :-)

Update: even better:

τέκνον μου, μὴ γίνου … μαθηματικὸς … εκ γὰρ τούτων ἁπάντων εἰδωλολατρία γεννᾶται

“My child, do not become … a mathematician … for from all that comes idolatry.” Could have used that advice before I went to university!

I have signed up to ride my old bicycle 50km in this year’s Ride for Refugees. This is an international event to raise awareness and funds to support and advocate for refugees all around the world.

I know a tiny bit about being a refugee — my family and I lived in the small West African country of Liberia until a few months after its civil war began in late 1989. We left with only what we could carry. We were priviledged to have Canadian citizenship and a network of friends and family in Canada to help us rebuild our lives.

Most of the 67 million displaced people around the world do not have those luxuries; they must endure endless waiting in camps, wrangling with faceless bureacracies, and starting a new life in a strange land with no resources.

If you would like to sponsor me, visit my sponsorship page.

Canadian donors will receive a tax receipt.

I have added a new page to the site talking about some of my interests, projects, and hobbies.

I have also changed themes. I’m working on adding tags to old posts so the tag cloud on the sidebar reflects something of the topics of this blog.

The New York Times has an excellent antidote to the recently much-linked-to paean to narcicism and high time preference in Atlantic Monthly.

The Atlantic writer exemplifies values that seem to me unfortunately all too common these days:

* The tendency to evaluate one’s life and the life of others in light of archetypes: the ideal metrosexual husband, the career wife, the suburbanite, the rage-against-the-Man radical. If we think we wouldn’t fit into a slot in Central Casting, we feel like failures. Why not evaluate our lives as unique and valuable in their idiosyncracies, rather than as instances of shared templates whose main purpose seems to be competition? I’m a better Ideal Husband (TM) than Joe, so I must be doing OK. If the Atlantic writer’s marriage is humdrum, and she becomes attracted to another man, then she switches parts, from the Ideal Wife to the Liberated Woman of Eat, Pray, Love (whose behavior, by the way, if indulged in by a man, would elicit universal condemnation).

Who cares if I’m the Prototypical Hacker or the Ideal Husband? I enjoy playing with computers at home and at work, my wife brings me happiness and I hope I bring some to her, we have a little girl who is bright and energetic and growing and changing every day. Who cares if our life might not make a prototypical Hollywood domestic drama?

* The idea that one’s feelings must be acted upon immediately to obtain some nearby pleasure or avoid some current pain. My perspective on this is informed both by being an introvert prone to introspection and having experienced lengthy periods of depression. On any given day I have to evaluate my feelings in light of the whole context of my life. What would happen to me, and those people and things I am committed to, in the long run if I acted on those feelings?

People seem to think that one is being “untrue” to oneself by not immediately acting. But what if the feelings go contrary to those things that bring me good in life, and those ways I am committed to bringing good to others?

The author of the New York Times article recognized that her husband’s emotional pain was in fact untrue to his whole self — the self that was defined by the trajectory of his life — that it was blinding him to those things that had been for the good in the past and would again.

This is of course predicated on the idea that all parties are of good will. The writer’s husband was not an habitual abuser of their relationship, in which case, good riddance. His feelings were temporal and contingent and a form of displacement, and what he needed was exactly what the writer gave him: time. So often we want to resolve things right now. This is natural — we don’t like living in uncertainty and irresolution.

But sometimes we need time to evaluate and let our “self” — the sum of the trajectory of our experiences and choices — and our new experience of pain or desire, settle into a new synthesis, as it were. When they did for the writer’s husband, he realized that those things he had found valuable in the past about his marriage and family were in fact still valuable to him.

Nobody hates software more than software developers.

All too true.

Google Maps/Earth has a new pic of Congo Town and Paynesville. Shows ELWA in great detail, but stops short just before Duport Road, unfortunately.

Emily at three months has begun to communicate about things that are not immediately related to her physical needs.

The other day I was bouncing her on my knee and singing a song, she was paying attention and sort of giggling. When I finished, she began waving her arms and vocalizing, so I started singing another song, and she smiled.

Very exciting.

Mia edzino kaj nia bebineto ekvojaĝis hodiaŭ al Kalgario por viziti la gepatrojn de Andrea.

Kompreneble mi profitos dum la tri sekvaj tagoj de la ŝanco rigardi perfortajn filmojn, kaj komputile ludi, kaj manĝi tiujn, kiujn la obejendino ne kutime ŝatas.

Estante introverto, mi ĝuas ĉiun maloftan kaj malmultan momenton de soleco.

Bebineto Emily videble estas kreskanta ĉiutage. Hieraŭ kuŝante en ŝia liteto ŝi klare kaj cele frapis ludileton pendigitan je la lita flanko. Poste dum mi nutris ŝin de patrin-lakta botelo, ŝi uzis sian brakon movi la botelon al pli konvena loko.

Baldaŭ ŝi ekparolos!

Nun staras la demando: kiun linvon paroli krom la angla? Ne estas demando ĉu uzi aliajn lingvojn! Sed estas multaj lingvoj, kaj nur iometo da tempo.

Mi kompreneble unue pensis pri Esperanto, ĉar mia Esperanta povo pligrandas ol mia Klingona, la sola alia lingvo, kion mi esploris en iom da detalo. Mi studiis la Klingonan antaŭ dudek jaroj, do mi forgesis la plejparton.

Mia preskaŭ sola kritiko de Esperanto estas, ke ĝi retenas malbonan patriarkan econ. Ekzistas reformoj, ekzemple riismo, sed mi ne scias ĉu ĝi subteniĝas.

Legi nuntempe la mirinda In the Land of Invented Languages, per Arika Okrent, memorigis min pri la lingvo Láadan. Ĝin kreis Suzette Hadin Elgin por esplori virinajn aferojn, kiujn ne povas facile esprimiĝi per niaj aktuala patriarkaj lingvoj.

Inter multaj interesaj trajtoj, en Láadan la ina estas la nemarkata sekso, kaj Láadan ankaŭ estas tona lingvo.

Do mi pensas, ke estos interesa provo. Sed mi (elble ni) devu lerni Láadan rapide!

Loĝante en Vankuvero, Emily certe lernos la Francan kaj la Mandarenan. La Francan per siaj gepatroj, kaj la Mandarena espere per la najbaroj.

Oni ne povas koni tro da lingvojn!

Arika Okrent’s long-awaited (by language geeks, anyway) book, In the Land of Invented Languages, is out. LanguageHat has a very nice review.

It goes without saying that my Amazon copy was pre-ordered months ago.

I’m sure most everybody who would like to know has found out from email or on Facebook, but Andrea’s and my daughter Emily was born last Tuesday. She is the cutest little thing in the world.

Labour took about 18 hours, but went quite well, all things considering (Andrea might disagree, of course :-). After an hour of pushing, out came Emily all wide awake and squalling.

There were a few pretty sleepless nights since, but she’s now sleeping longer periods, and we are settling into something like a new pattern of life.

Saw another article about atrial fibrillation just now, saying men who were tall (not necessarily overweight!) in their 20’s are at a higher risk of atrial fibrillation in their 40’s.

I’ve been 6′4″ since I was twelve years old. I weighed 180 pounds when I was 20, and was skinny as a rail. I gained 50 pounds of solid muscle in the next five years by working out, doing martial arts, and not having much of a social life, and then I started having atrial fibrillation at 25. I was in the best shape of my life.

Not tolerating exercise very well in the 9 years after that, I’ve put on 50 more pounds of not so much muscle, but I haven’t had any atrial fib since I started using a CPAP. Go figure…

But I’m not in my 40’s yet, so I guess there’s still time.

As many of you know, Andrea and I are expecting our first child any day now.

What we can reveal today is that our daughter has been part of an ongoing experiment into the future of human evolution. In collaboration with research labs around the world, we have embarked on the creation of a new hominid species with natural capabilities far in excess of our own.

Our daughter was injected with a customized package of nano-assemblers and artificial ribosomes in the sixth week of gestation.

As cell division and development of organic tissue proceeded normally, the supplemental nanomachines modified and extended the natural structures to provide the following upgrades:

• Optical channels in nerve axons: As axons grew, their growth cones were extended to replace the underlying structure with molecularly assembled fiber-optic channels, complete with solid-state monochromatic modulators in the neuronal soma and organic repeaters at each synapse.

  This allows for the transmission of neural signals at speeds up to 200 million meters per second, as opposed to the baseline tens of meters per second. This allows for a vastly increased “clock speed” in the brain, as well as preternaturally fast motor reflexes.

• Auxilliary cortical processing: the large fissures of the cerebral cortex were filled with graphene subprocessors using a networked architecture that interfaces with the cortical columns at the surface of the brain.

  These provide vastly increased scope for the formation of cognitive nections, allowing for greatly expanded memory and linguistic ability. In addition, they allow for conscious control of various autonomic systems, including temperature regulation, the fight-or-flight reaction, the mammalian dive reflex, and reproductive hormone levels.

• Electro-activated polymer actuators: woven into muscle fibers as they grew was a matrix of fullerene actuators providing increased strength and faster muscle response. Tendons and ligaments were supplemented with borosilicate woven fibers — which include perennial self-repair in order to provide swift recovery from joint injuries — to accomodate the increased stresses, and the calcium matrix of bone structures was likewise replaced with a bio-inert titanium honeycomb.
• Lens flexibility, retinal inversion and photoreceptor augmentation: the natural lens and surrounding muscular structure of the eye was replaced with a far more capable system, allowing for 100x telescopic or microscopic vision. The retina was inverted, putting blood vessels behind the receptor cells, which were modified to respond to an expanded spectrum far into the infrared and ultraviolet ranges. The density of photoreceptor cells was also increased by three orders of magnitude.
• Nictitating membrane: perhaps the easiest modification was a reactivation of the pre-existing mammalian DNA for developing a nictitating membrane to protect the eyes from foreign matter or the stresses of situations ranging from deep ocean pressures to the vacuum of space.
• Subcutaneous endosymbiotic organelles: dermal cells were augmented with a new organelle derived from cyanobacteria of genus Prochlorococcus. This allows for closed-cycle anaerobic respiration in conditions of low ambient oxygen. In addition, the outer layer of skin cells now incorporate a variety of chromatophores specifically tuned to reflect infrared at levels similar to full sunlight in a vacuum. These modifications, along with the nictitating membrane, allow for full function outside of a planetary atmosphere.

Our daughter’s original genetic material was fully sequenced, and a new set of chromosomes was created that incorporated all these modifications. This new DNA was then injected into her existing ova, allowing for unlimited reproduction of the new traits.

Unfortunately, this renders her infertile with the rest of baseline Homo Sapiens Sapiens. We are therefore soliciting volunteers to gestate corresponding male specimens in order to provide for the continuation of this new and glorious race.

Spoilers Ho!

Hurried home to catch the BSG finale last Friday. The first hour was vintage BSG: the old girl goes in guns blazing, with Adama squinting, Tigh scowling, and Lee and Starbuck leading infantry assaults like the good pilots they are; Boomer changes her mind one last time; Torey gets her comeuppance.

My disappointment began when the reality behind the opera house vision (I have sung on the stage of that opera house, by the way :-) turned out to be utterly irrelevant to the plot. We’re chasing Hera through the ship; Baltar and Caprica steal her, and then . . . everyone walks onto the bridge as if nothing has happened. Whoop-de-do.

But the thing that started me booing and throwing spoiled vegetables at the television was when the dead hand of the Raptor pilot brushed up against the nukular trigger. A heavy sense of doom descended, as I foresaw that the rest of the plot, such as it was, would be driven by coincidence, rabbits pulled out of hats, and ultimately as quintessential an example of the deus ex machina as you could hope for.

I was not proven wrong.

At least they didn’t go through the black hole… But it’s like the writers were sitting around in their last meeting going “I am soo tired of thinking up ideas for this stupid show… Um, let’s just say God did it and go home, mkay?”

If post-crash Starbuck was just a head Starbuck, how come everyone could see her, and she could fly real planes, and shoot real bullets and everything? If she’s an angel, and so are Head Six and Head Baltar, then how do they differ from the other Cylons’ “projections”, and if they do, what plot purpose is served by having both angels and projections in the same show? Complete cop-out, especially as it’s obvious all through the show, right from the original miniseries, that Head Six is the same thing as what they started calling “projection” later on, because she doesn’t just appear to Baltar in the space he’s in, she creates virtual spaces for them both, viz. the nice house on Howe Sound. It’s only been in the last half-season that Baltar’s suddenly been ranting on about angels, which is just the writers being completely and utterly lazy.

I like the suggestion by someone on the Tor website that we just all agree that a lion ran by and ate Starbuck while she was out of frame.

Oh, and the producers leaked a rumour months and months ago that the last shot of the show would feature Six in New York City. So obviously the only possible way to accomplish this is for the hapless body count to land on Earth and then suddenly, utterly, and completely inexplicably give up all technology! The only demonstrably bad thing about the cities on Caprica (and New Caprica, for that matter) was that the Cylons came and nuked them. So what in the world is Lee suddenly on about?

But in utter defiance of any prior foreshadowing, theme, or semblance of logic whatsoever, forty thousand people who have bled and died and struggled to survive and hang together as a civilization for four long years are to abandon the ships that have been their cradles of life for all that time, and scatter around the surface of a planet to die alone of exposure, starvation, minor infections, dental abcesses, trivial sprains, and childbirth, not to mention being eaten by the aforesaid lions? I mean it’s not like the history of the human race was one of idyllic peacefulness and happy happy joy until somebody invented evil robots that all of a sudden screwed everything up. The primary cause of death for adult male hunter-gatherers is other adult male hunter-gatherers.

And poor Anders, having just discovered the perfection of unity with the machine, somehow coerced to suicide along with the other crazies? Why couldn’t he have, you know, taken an unbroken ship off to explore the galaxy? Or if he had to stay with Galactica, why not hide out on the far side of the moon, or Mars?

The ultimate lesson we’re supposed to learn from all this? ROBOTS are EEEEVUL!

Feh.

The first hour tantalized with the promise of a bang, but the second delivered a craven and terminally lazy whimper.

Saw an article today that confirms a correlation between sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation. We have sort of suspected this for a while, since I have not had any noticeable episodes of atrial fibrillation since I started using a CPAP over three years ago.

My desk at the new job is next to a row of windows. The foreground view is a busy highway, but I can also see planes landing on 26L and 26R at YVR. There are no pigeons defecating all over the window as was the case at my old job.

The transition is going pretty smoothly apart from the streaming cold I had. The first few days at a job are always just a lot of reading, anyway. I learned how to make IE Browser Helper Objects yesterday.

The biggest drama has been getting my old bike up and running. I felt justified spending a bit of money on it since I would no longer have to pay for bus passes, so I bought fenders and panniers and some riding clothes. But riding home on Tuesday one of the links on my chain seized up, causing problems when it went through the rear derailleur. So the bike is in the shop again.

It took me almost 40 minutes to ride on Tuesday, but I figure when I get in better shape and figure out the best route to take, I can cut that pretty much in half.

But the good news is that the bus ride to and from is only half an hour if I time it right (which so far I haven’t managed to), and Andrea has given me a lift a couple of times in the morning.

I should have noted this earlier, but the last month has been pretty busy. Turns out that the original research used to support the idea that vaccinations cause autism was based on falsified data.

That’s right. Made up out of whole cloth.

I feel tremendous empathy for the health-care professionals in places like the UK and Minnesota, where childhood diseases are making a comeback due to the idiocy of anti-vaccinators.

In case you wondered why we vaccinate, Jim McDonald has a whole list of reasons:

• Hepatitis B
• Polio
• Diptheria
• Pertussis
• Tetanus
• Haemophilus influenzae type B
• Measles
• Mumps
• Rubella
• Chicken Pox

You may not even have heard of these diseases, because we were this close to wiping them out. Now, thanks to a few noisy idiots, you may come accross them all to often in the future.

On tiny little gravestones.