The Eisenberg Constant

Eugene Egner's The Eisenberg Constant is a short story about a man who has paid to live in a fixed loop of time, and who is experiencing some bugs in his home installation. The story is quite simple: he waits three days until a technician can make a house call to troubleshoot the problems. It's also complicated --- since he is familiar with his fixed one-week loop, while he waits he wanders around, noting differences from the usual functionality and trying to stay sane and coherent, while time jumps and judders around him. It's a delightfully Philip K. Dick-ian story, which doesn't loop itself in the usual manner of time travel stories... after all, the apparatus is experiencing bugs!

I rate this story as suitable for a transoceanic plane ride and the accompanying musings about trusting your life to a piece of complicated machinery which completely encases your body for long periods of time.


This post's theme word is insalubrious, "detrimental to health". A survey of fictional literature produces the composite idea that time travel is insalubrious.

Alien husks

The ways in which the inhuman and transitory artificial environments of airports are decorated always suggest strange alien decision-making processes. What effect is the art supposed to have? To hold passengers' attention while they wait? To brighten their days? To give them something to contemplate other than the unusual fluid dynamics upon which heavier-than-air flight relies?

Mimi Bardagjy's sculptures call to mind alien husks, the discarded shells of deep-sea creatures, or abandoned multi-creature egg casings. They are lit in a clinical way that makes them seem creepy.

Close examination shows (and the description confirms) that the ridges and indentations are human-finger sized, so that the entire thing is like a tube of putty gripped in an impossibly-many-fingered fist.

They are creepy and delightful.


This post's theme word is calyculus, "a cup-shaped structure." Behold these discarded ceramic calyculuses!

2015 retroblogging

The curtain closes on 2015 and my furious, year-end sprint to clear my blog queue, or at least slow its rate of growth. I am trying to tag all the retroblogged posts with the "retroblog" tag, so that you can try to peruse them, although I recognize that the fact that they are interspersed with other posts, and with previously retroblogged posts, does not make this easy.

My project:retroblog tag is from 2012, which shows that I am very consistent in my lagging and also my resolution to catch up. There's a new tag, simply "retroblog", which gets applied to everything blogged vastly out-of-time, without marking it as my 2012 project which may never reach resolution.

Here are the posts that are newly, retroactively inserted into the blogging timeline since last we reckoned:

• Wolf Hall
• Tidepool textures
• Manhattan
• Sunflower year
• Saarbrücken
• This post itself.

I'm embarrassed that this list is so short, and also about that last item. But really, why? I fell short of a goal I set myself which no one else really cares about. Take that, internet! Take my confessional failure to succeed at arbitrary self-set goals, and churn on it. There, now it's gone, isn't the flash of internet information great? Squeeze some emotion out, and move on.


This post's theme word is discomfit, "to confuse or embarrass." or "to thwart the plans of." O! discomfiting blogging failure! Woe is me, etc., etc.

Traced against the sky

No matter where we walked in [the touristy part of] San Antonio, an orange squiggle followed us, always just catching the corner of the eye. It is La Antorcha de la Amistad,and it makes me think of a 3D-printed puzzle or unusual key. Maybe to a geometer's lair?

The color gradients across the sky and the sculpture were very appealing to me.

I'm not sure how the lock would work, exactly --- maybe you put the key in, turn slightly, move again in the z axis, turn again, then shimmy in a move given by a simple equation in polar coordinates?

Maybe it's the extrusion of some more complicated being into our space, and the intruder is trying to be polite and not move in the hopes that no one will notice.


This post's theme word is bidentate, "having two teeth or toothlike parts." Thank goodness the tentacle was only bidentate.

Austin dawn

The fact of living on a sphere, and gradually rotating to face a flaming ball of plasma and gas, is occasionally lovely and dramatic.

Just look at those early-morning colors, splattered across the bottom of the cloud layer. So neat. Plus, thematically appropriate: Austin orange, everywhere.


This post's theme word is purl, "to flow with a rippling motion," or "the sound or curling motion made by rippling water." The sunlight streams across the purling clouds.

Pinion

Elizabeth Bear's Pinion tells the story of people on a shipwrecked generational starship, and their struggles with each other and the starship's fragmented AI to try to escape their own demons (as well as the star system, whose binary star is about to have an explosively destructive event).

The book is permeated with biblical imagery and metaphors, as well as quotes from the "New Evolutionist Bible," which bears a certain thematic resemblance to the New Testament, although its contents and subject matter is different. The various AIs title themselves "Angel of X", as in: Angel of Death, Angel of Life Support Services, Angel of Knives, Angel of Memory, Angel of Electricity, Angel of Communication, Angel of Wires, Angel of Stars, Angel of Voids, Angel of Poison, Angel of Biosystems, Angel of Propulsion, ...

The humans, and their enclosed habitats, are not quite familiar --- they are the result of centuries of advanced bioengineering tinkering, a project whose original goal was to improve en route to the destination, and whose proximate goal has been to self-modify and selectively breed and improve in order to survive stranded in space. The biblical theme continues here, as many humans have wings, or space-hardening adaptations, or perfect memory, or echolocation, or other senses not easily tersely-summarizable.

The book is great, enjoyable, well-written. The characters are interesting, sympathetic without being helpless, smart without being geniuses, weak without needing rescuers, crafty without relying on deus ex machina. They each have limited knowledge, as do the AIs, as do we the readers, and Bear handles these deftly, gradually unfolding a comprehensive picture of what is happening throughout the (enormous, interstellar!) spaceship, as well as throughout the ship's remaining infosphere, and at a social and interpersonal level (and even internal, psychological level) with and between the characters. It is self-aware without being trite, or exploiting dramatic irony, but readily acknowledging the various points of the book that are internally consistent, but nonsensical to the reader, for example (p. 150):

Primogeniture is a stupid way to run a starship.

This post's theme word is ruction, "an insurrection" or "a disorderly quarrel." A starship ruction is no small thing, mere "mutiny" is an insufficient descriptor.

Company cars as status symbol

Metafilter pointed me to a BBC documentary with a series of interviews with men, apparently travelling salesman, who talk about their [company-provided] cars, and the status they display, and empower, in situations of driving, and sales, and society. The power of conformity. Some of them explicitly mention wanting specific cars in order to exhibit a certain status, and others abhor those cars for being associated with that same status (because they want to be recognized as higher-status).

I found that I kept waiting for the punchline. It sounded so stereotypically consumerist, so hyperbolically, purely brand-oriented, that I was looking for winks to the camera. Modern insincerity.  (Or at least an explicit brand tie-in --- they relentlessly repeat the brand names and features and status --- apparently tie-ins are modern, too.) But it seems irony is a twenty-teens modernity, because these interviewees don't care about alienating the viewer. They frankly discuss the importance of cars-as-status-symbols in their lives in a way that I find appalling.

For example:

• One guy changed his car from the standard car that went with his job to something cheaper and more fuel-efficient, for reasons of economy: "What a disaster that was. My business failed, and I lost a lot of money, I lost my nice big house, and it was even a major factor in the breakup of my marriage." @44m30s Subsequently, he got a new job, which came with a Mercedes, and was trying to "rebuild" his life.
• Regarding different models: "The big difference between a GL and a GL-A is the A. Because the A stands for: I am bloody brilliant, I am quicker than you on the road. It is an extension of a man's ego. ... an A badge on the back, it means, 'I've got status,' that's what it means."
• On working up the corporate ladder in order to obtain a better car: "I'll die! If I have to work until I sweat blood and die, I'll get one of them." @31m

It's weird to hear people talk so earnestly about these markers of social/consumption status that are all (1) no longer relevant, and (2) so outstripped by today's markers. All the cars they are driving are old and unremarkable now --- clinging to them seems quaint. But of course we have modern equivalents (flashy smartphones come to mind) which will look just as dated to future critics. And as arrogant and insufferably classist as these interviewees sound, we produce much more abhorrent media in much greater volumes to repulse our future descendents (certain reality TV, youtube channels, vine ephemera, and whatever the latest thing is... micro-vine? snapchat?).

Part of me is worried that I am disdainful of these rapacious car-drivers because I think myself better than them, which is just as icky. I want to be incomparable to them. I don't have a job as a salesman, I don't worry about the letters on the backs of cars that indicate the specific luxury options. I reassure myself that possessing and identifying this worry means I don't actually compare myself to them, but then of course if I need reassurance it's because we are comparable. And so on. It's a vicious mental cycle, the sort of thing that reading too much LessWrong all at once can induce.

Basically they're all just signalling, which I am fine with. It seems like it should mean nothing, but then again, it means something precisely because they all care so much. Repeatedly the men talk about how they are more courteous on the highway to cars that outrank them, and how they spurn cars that are inferior. It seems a strictly enforced hierarchy, then: "better" cars pass ("You're just acknowledging that he's got more power than you." --- I think he means physical engine power, but of course it seems to be social power, too), and "worse" cars are not allowed to pass ("... his attempt at overtaking me has failed, and that's a success." 23m20s).

What I have condensed from LessWrong, SlateStarCodex, and elsewhere on the intellectually-self-improving, hyper-literate internet, is that identifying signaling is useful in finding a way to interact with the system that works towards your own goals, or helps reveal underlying truths. So, as with all slightly unpleasant experiences, I can perhaps focus on a positive takeaway --- learning by contrast --- from this variously unpleasant, infuriating, and unsettling clip.

Spoiler alert: there never was a punchline.


This post's theme word is parping "that makes a honking sound." Via Miéville's Kraken, p.257. I thought it was a tuba, but the unusual parping sound originated from a roadside dispute between cars.

Yule logs

The celebratory Christmas-themed rolled, frosted cake is called a "buche de noël", a Yule log.  

It comes in many flavors, sizes, colors, and options.

It is a fancier, dressed-up, high-quality Twinkie. (I'm guessing. I've never actually tried one, except maybe in French class in the US, so that barely counts.)

The tiny sizes are called "buchettes", loglettes.

This post's theme word is yare, "easily maneuverable, nimble," or "ready, prepared." The logs for Yule are yare. Yare Yule logs, come and get 'em!

An utterly perfect day

The day is clear and crisp, like an autumnal day, full of promise and energy.

The sky is full of clouds that are worthy of a fresco.

The light is diffuse, bright, soft, forgiving.

The weather, location, pressure, local cuisine --- it is all in wonderful synergy today. I feel ready to have my portrait painted, or to head an army and invade a neighboring country. I could levy a new tax, or break with the Pope. But probably this is a surfeit of reading historical novels.


This post's theme word is mondegreen, "a word or phrase resulting from mishearing a word or phrase, especially in song lyrics." Today is a perfect day to dance through the streets and belt pop mondegreens, leaving a wake of bemused locals.

Cue the pipe organ

The nighttime lighting on this church's gothic façade is dramatic. It nearly evokes lightning from the sky, except that it was cold and clear tonight, and simply pleasant all-around.

The Paroisse Saint-Eustache, near Les Halles.

I imagine the gargoyles frolicking in this junglegym long after all humans have gone to sleep.


This post's theme word is marmoreal, "resembling marble or a marble statue, as in smoothness, whiteness, hardness, coldness, or aloofness." The marmoreal rooftop inhabitants unfold their slow, alien lives just above our heads.