Looking Out To Sea

We did eventually see something in the Edinburgh Film Festival, though it was pretty last minute. We saw WALL·E on the last day of the festival at the midday screening at the Filmhouse.

The audience was full of parents and little kids. I was fully expecting to see someone from my work there. It was exactly the intersection of geeky interest and child-friendly that I’d expect to draw my colleagues, who all seem to have kids. But no!

The film was great though. It managed to take the central character of a robotic can crusher and create a romance. Pixar’s ability to create emotion and expression never ceases to amaze. Not to mention our own ability to fall for their animated charms as if they were real people.

Also, contains the most intelligent cockroach ever to appear on the silver screen.

I’ve had less time to read since we moved house. I’m now within walking distance of work so I don’t have the chance to read on the bus while commuting. But I have managed to finish A Life Stripped Bare: Tiptoeing Through The Ethical Minefield by Leo Hickman.

He’s a writer for the Guardian who wrote about his attempts at living the “ethical” lifestyle. The difference being that he was not a green activist or eco-warrior type. It’s interesting to see how the changes he tried to put in place conflicted with his pragmatic needs and his usual way of doing things.

Ethical Audit

The story starts with a trio of “ethical auditors” coming to his house to interrogate the family and show them all the ways in which their lifestyle was unethical. I admit to disagreeing violently with most of what the auditors said, and being in violent agreement with the rest.

At the time it was just a dislike of their claims. For instance, suggesting that the contents of the medicine cupboard (painkillers and cold remedies, I suppose) “only treat the symptoms”. As if that wasn’t the point! Then they had the gall to suggest homeopathy as an alternative (slogan: “it doesn’t even treat the symptoms”?).

The auditors were not above implying imminent danger for the couple and their young daughter — toxins in the cleaning products, in the baby’s bedroom, in the food and so on. And I began to wonder what was supposed to be ethical about the “ethical auditors” — it was surely not their behaviour. I don’t consider it ethical to exaggerate or lie about the risks of whatever chemicals we are exposed to.

The unexamined life is not worth living. —Socrates

So with time I realised it wasn’t just that I disliked the specific claims they made, but that I rejected the auditors’ whole idea of an ethical life. It was unjustified and vague, and seemed to be just as uncritical as the author’s own lifestyle before they arrived.

The advice given was a mixture of typical pro-recycling, waste reduction advice, using public transport and walking more, etc, combined with more reactionary ideas about Big Pharma, GM, chemicalz!!1 and nuclear power. I feel quite content in my view that the auditors had little real idea what they were talking about, extrapolating from their demonstration of ignorance in the wide range of areas they did cover.

The idea of the book was interesting, in the same way that life-swapping reality shows are interesting: watching people living by other people’s rules. But there’s no way we can tell if what they are doing makes any difference. Everything was incredibly important/ dangerous/ relevant without qualifiers.

Good shopping, Good living

I have a copy of the Good Shopping Guide around here somewhere, from a few years ago. It also suffers from the same problem. Each company is given a score for its ethics, but they aren’t effectively weighted to take account of things that matter. Running nuclear power stations is just as liable to affect a company’s rating as having slave workers. That’s not really equivalent in my mind.

At least the Guide gives a breakdown for the different categories, so choosing things which matter to you is easier. I would rather be given real information, and valid reasons, to make up my own mind than the approach shown by the auditors of Leo Hickman’s book.

Saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls on Saturday. Spoilers if you follow the link…

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I mentioned that Helen bought REM’s new album Accelerate last week. It’s been a while since I’ve said this but I’m really enjoying their new stuff. For a start — and this has proved to be a good sign in the past — Michael Stipe is angry. His lyrics have bite and his singing does too.

Peter Buck and Mike Mills have given up farting around with their E-bows and keyboards and started making some loud noises with their instruments again. There’s real distortion on some of these songs! Angry chords! I’d say their current style is an amalgam of Monster, Automatic for the People and Up in all the good ways: political, loud, tuneful, energetic and alive.

It’s so good to hear them back on form again. We’ll just politely pretend that this is their first release since Up and all will be well.

Let this be a salutary lesson on the dangers of impulse buying. If you don’t spend a few minutes reading reviews on Amazon you might accidentally buy Amir Aczel’s The Artist and the Mathematician, the “story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed”. And that would be a mistake.

Nicolas Bourbaki was the pseudonym of a group of French mathematicians who attempted to formalise mathematical thinking in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the author’s opinion Bourbaki’s publications had important influences on the structuralist movement that would spread from linguistics and anthropology to many disparate areas of science.

Well, I wouldn’t know about that; and I still feel like I don’t know about it. The book is filled with tedious and trivial details where it should provide only impressions — and sketchy and vague where it should be exact and clear. In fact it exemplifies everything the Bourbaki group were pushing against. Aczel takes whole chapters to explain the minute detail surrounding the early life of one mathematician (including the life of his parents when they were young…) though this has no real relevance to the work he did. In fact, now I think on it I can’t even remember which mathematician gets all the boring backstory.

Whatever: the point is that the writer doesn’t bother telling you why any of this matters. He name-drops mathematical ideas without context or explanation. They have no more relevance to the reader than the endless litanies of people and parents’ occupations and meetings and so on. Amir Aczel insists that Bourbaki was incredibly influential in whatever it was they did, without bothering to reveal whatever it was they did. And that many other fields borrowed these ideas to do whatever it was that they did, again without explanation or detail. And then eventually we find that Bourbaki became less relevant — though again, without explanation.

It’s quite satisfying to say that an author who talks about abstract algebras and category theory is “over-generalising”. If only the book were as satisfying. Instead, I can heartily recommend Mario Livio’s The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved — a proper tribute to genius mathematics.

I’m sitting on my comfy sofa right now, typing this post in a Firefox browser window, on a cute blue Eee PC 4G Surf. It’s very small — about the width and length of a hardback book, and a couple of centimetres tall — and incredibly light too. I haven’t had to travel anywhere with it yet, but I don’t think it would be a hindrance. (It comes with a little black pouch that feels a bit like a wetsuit.)

The typing is still a wee bit awkward, but I don’t do a great deal of high-speed typing as it is. By far the biggest bottleneck is in my head.

I set up the Skype stuff last night, so I might get to chat with my brother in China before long. I’ll have to remember to keep it on though! It even has a webcam built in, so I might even be able to use that (maybe video conferencing from here to China would not be very effective; I don’t know).

Er, not sure what else to say. Haven’t really done much with it yet. I’ve changed the hostname from the default of eeepc-owner (where owner is the username you first put in on setup). It’s called barnacle to keep in with the sea theme of all my computers. (I’ve mentioned this in previous posts though I can’t remember where. Even our wireless network is named after a sea…)

More information when I can think of something to say! Or if you’ve got any questions that would be good.

Went for a wander down to Stockbridge via the Water of Leith yesterday, and got caught in the rain while we were out. Thankfully we were both wearing spring-weather clothes and the rain was quite light.

We ended up in Avoca on a little side street, which was friendly and had excellent pub food. The steak ciabatta Helen had looked very tasty, and my chilli con carne was excellent, and the rice really fluffy too. Helen also had a sticky-toffee pudding which was very fluffy and oozing the volume of syrup Nigella would be proud of.

We met Sarah out there and she gave us some fake fur (more on that in a later post). It also turns out she didn’t realise we had a new flat, so that was pretty cool to have a chat about. We’ll need to get her round to our current flat for pudding some Sunday night, before we move away.

We’re just back from an adaptation of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. I had been a bit lax and hadn’t really noticed that it had received a comedy award rather than a drama award. I was expecting a somewhat-straight rendering of the story, but it was straight in the same way that The Muppet Christmas Carol is an accurate retelling of Dickens’ story.

I had also only read the book, so I didn’t realise that none of the three films were anything like the book. This stage version apparently uses the Hitchcock plot but hams things up to an incredible degree. That’s not to say it’s difficult though; suspension of disbelief is definitely required for the book and it doesn’t take much to highlight the inherent silliness in the story. With a cast of four, including the hero and one woman, the two supporting males have a really hard time of filling out the full cast of policemen, villains, magistrates, theatre-goers and hotel owners.

There was a bit of slapstick and lots of visual comedy, mostly playing on the conventions of drama and bad theatre — sound effects that don’t come in at the right moment, really badly hidden puppeteers and so on. It surprised me, all this humour, but it didn’t take me long to get in to different style.

Tonight was also a signed performance so that added an extra interest, though it was really hard to keep an eye on the visual stuff on stage and the interpreter at the side. But there were bits and pieces I could follow reasonably well.

I’d definitely recommend this version if you can see it — it seems to have been all over West End and Broadway so it might appear near you soon.

This evening we saw Helen’s mum sing with the Garleton Singers at St Cuthbert’s — they did some Brahms love songs, there was a piano duet by Schubert, and then after the interval the all-conquering Carmina Burana. It seems you are allowed to sing about drinking and hot sex in church, as long as you do it in Latin.

I enjoyed this one more than previous trips to see the Garleton Singers. It really helps to know the tunes so we’ve been listening to some of the Brahms in the last couple of days. And of course everyone knows Carl Orff, right? He appears in enough football/car/deoderant adverts.

It was pretty rockin’ anyway, and the reprise of O Fortuna had a little extra excitement because the timpanist’s music kept falling off the stand. But, quite frankly, if you play timpani and don’t know how O Fortuna goes then you’re doing it wrong. She just kept playing through…

The full title of this little gem of a book is Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, written by Paul Carter. He’s a slightly jaded oil rig worker who’s been to a lot of terrifying and absurd places in the name of Big Oil.

There isn’t much in the book about the process of digging or the oil industry. Mostly it’s tales of derring-do and idiocy. For instance, you learn what happens if you sneak into a mosque at night and change the pre-recorded call to prayer for a recording of Ring of Fire. (The answer, in this case, is get thrown out the country as a religious undesirable.)

But you also get a picture of some of the scarier ends of the nearly civilised world — where you need a code word to exchange with your driver to ensure he’s not some random person who wants to rob and kill you.

I can’t pretend this is the best written book in the world. A somewhat scattergun approach to punctuation and the like. But it’s certainly entertaining.