Something like a Blog?

2008-05-02

Sanjay Ghemawat’s Ical is still my favourite calendar application for its incredible speed, convenience, and versatility. And Tcl/Tk 8.5 have finally made it into Debian Sid, which means that antialiased fonts have finally arrived. To compile Ical, get the package from the link above (I used Ical 2.3.3), install the packages tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev libxss-dev, configure it with

./configure --with-tclconfig=/usr/lib/tcl8.5 \
            --with-tkconfig=/usr/lib/tk8.5 \
            --with-tclhdir=/usr/include/tcl8.5 \
            --with-tkhdir=/usr/include/tcl8.5 \
            --with-tclscripts=/usr/share/tcltk/tcl8.5 \
            --with-tkscripts=/usr/share/tcltk/tk8.5

and you can now compile it and install it. Yay!

2007-12-12

Sitting here in lab, listening to a conversation about what a truffle is (with a certain amount of deriding of the chocolate “pretend” truffles), it strikes me that as we become more and more connected, the need for transmittal of knowledge via conversation is disappearing. Previously it was easier to work with whatever knowledge you had and piece it together into a coherent explanation, but the barrier to thorough research becomes more and more ethereal as time goes on and bauds go up. Whatever you want to know, trying to figure it out in the company of a flesh-and-blood person seldom yields the depth and balance of knowledge available in a trice from Google or Wikipedia.

Now I know I am a bit unusual, but many of my favourite conversations are ones in which we try to figure something out, guess how something works or must have transpired, or how to save or enslave humanity. Now all of these things are available on the web, which is a bit of a conversation-killer.

Even that age-old smalltalk standby, the weather, is not sacred. I still look for snow reports from my friends, which will contain more detail (“The snow was fairly heavy, pretty tracked out under chairs 1 and 2, but some good stuff around 8”) than weather sites. Not all up-to-the-minute information makes it online. But I scarcely need to say what the trend is. There’s only so much bullshitting that can reasonably take place before a good discussion reveals that what’s required is an injection of too readily available fact, and then conversation is exposed as game, trivial sport, at best a puzzle for which there is a solution in the back of the book, at worst merely a tool for social interaction no more rigorous and rather less satisfying than a hug.

Oh, of course the obvious solution is to discuss cutting-edge research, the boundary of the unknown: science. But even this is fraught with peril, since (as any PhD student can tell you) most things you can possibly think of asking have already been asked, and there are at least plausible answers out there, and a complete conversation really ought to include them, oughtn’t it? And the more advanced we become, the narrower the confines of any field, and the fewer pairs of people there are per capita who can really knowledgeably discuss the same bleeding-edge science.

What’s left? Inquiring as to the opinions of friends, getting to know people better. With conversation about facts rendered pointless by exponentially growing fact availability, perhaps it’s time we all started to wonder about who our friends really are, how they feel, what kind of day they’re having. Those facts aren’t online…yet. The Internet will make us all touchy-feely!

It’s geeks and engineers and scientists who have made all this information so readily available, and it’s we who love conversations that crawl with citations, nibbles of truth, statistics, research. How like a human to find yet another fun domain, play in it, and by playing in it, poison it.

2007-11-09

My brother is taking ballroom (*gasp*) tango with his girlfriend. When I told him that in Argentine tango there were no steps he asked me “if you can dance to any music and there is no basic step, then what defines what you call tango?” I retreated into the mountains to meditate upon that for 77 years, and this is what I came up with:

Tango is just a language. The dancers learn a way of communicating that is well suited to moving to music. There is a vocabulary, but it’s very basic: “put your weight on that foot, lean against me, extend your free foot to there, rotate…” Of course, those are just the phonemes, or words, or something. To carry the analogy way too far, making the dance into an art involves more than just grunting. The sentences one constructs, and what they say contrasted with what the music says, are what makes the dance into art.

This is probably obvious to anyone who has been dancing for a long time, but to me it is an interesting analogy. It means that Tango The Dance is just any conversation in that language, right? To traditional tango music, to jazz, to hip-hop, to Puccini, to John Cage’s 4'33"…

If I wanted to take this analogy even further, I would have to ask myself, “Do the neural mechanisms with which we acquire language come into play here?” This language doesn’t appear to have a semantics, although I could claim that correct syntax consists of a sequence of, um, words that do not leave either partner off-balance or uncomfortable.

Ok, that’s quite enough of that for now. Back to work before I do a thesis proposal involving this damned dance.