Confront This
“I don’t believe that you should ban wearing headscarfs but I do think the full garb is confronting and that is how most people feel.
(Emphasis added. Bigotry left as is.)
Right. Muslim clothes: confronting. War based on lies: not confronting. Election based on lies: not confronting. Got it. Glad to know how most people feel.
Brunswick Floods
Sitting at Cafe 3A on Edward Street in Brunswick this afternoon, I grabbed my camera to take a photo of a sad looking geranium and three cacti in teapots, put out on the footpath to gather rain from a sudden thunderstorm.
Soon aftewards, things got a bit more serious, as rising water started lapping the doorsteps of shops along Sydney Road near the Cornish Arms.
The boom gates were stuck down all the way along the Upfield line, and cars played a game of triple-chicken to get across (bluffing the timid car at the front of the queue that has decided to wait; cars coming from the other direction who are trying to weave through the intersection at the same time; and the trains themselves, which continued to run).
I played my own game of chicken with the storms, which the storms won when a bolt of lightning struck one of the old brickworks chimneys next to the Upfield bike path as I rode underneath, and I decided to take refuge. I had to get home, though, so I still found myself cycling through the floods, quickly reaching saturation point, passing through the critical stage where it’s still marginally worth raising your feet from the pedals as you plough through another foot-deep puddle.
From the radar, it looks like there were two storms that went through in a sort of hourglass shape, with a narrow isthmus of heavy rain in between, and we copped both the storms and the isthmus as the system moved from the north west to the south east.
Bloody Mary
Just watched the episode of South Park that SBS deicded they had to ban. (Yes, was prompted to watch it by the controversy. No, probably wouldn’t have watched it otherwise, although I do catch SP from time to time. Meaning of censorship in the age of bittorrent, discuss, etc).
I’d say it’s more icky than offensive. Probably more offensive, actually, to Alcoholics’ Anonymous than to Catholics, unless the ickiness of a menstruating Virgin Mary translates into something more than just ickiness. Certainly, it went easier on the Church than last week’s episode went on the Scientologists. By South Park standards, it wasn’t anything exceptional.
Then again, I thought the Danish cartoons were pretty lame, too, so what do I know?
Redmond Barry
The State Library of Victoria has a cavernous reading room called the Redmond Barry Reading Room. The ceilings are lofty, the floor is wooden, the atmosphere is quiet and studious.
(The scholarliness of the place is profaned, it seems to me, by the neon display mounted above the doorway, directly below a domed surveillance camera. “Library Card Not Working??? Please Contact the Staff at the Library Centre Bookdesk”. While you’re at it, ask them why this announcement has to be there, displayed as if on a railway platform, and why it has to be in Title Case.)
There is a central walkway, a wide, straight path fringed by vacant bollard silos, covered and made flush with the floorboards. It seems designed for maximum self-consciousness on the part of those walking it. The squeak of shoes and the rustle of trousers are amplified, each swish and clack given a three-second reverb and a guaranteed 18db above the noise floor.
While sitting here reading, trying not to be distracted by the Fox News-style marquee that keeps drifting into my peripheral vision, I’ve instead been distracted by the peculiar artifacts emerging from people’s gaits as they try to stride shrinkingly along this echoing catwalk, aware no doubt of the twenty-or-so pairs of eyes (presumably as eager for distraction as mine) which peer from the top edges of books and laptop screens as they pass. People walk quite normally from the lifts outside the room, then all of a sudden begin to lurch to one side, or quiver uncontrollably, or pitch forward in a sudden acceleration, or start flailing their arms, the moment they step through the twelve-foot high oak doorway and become suddenly aware of the impact they’re making on the silence. (And that Photocopy Cards Can Be Purchased from the Information Centre).
Counterfactual Computing
(No, this isn’t a post about John Howard’s brain).
A quantum computer at a US University has solved a computational problem without running a program. scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gleaned the answer to an algorithm by combining quantum computation and quantum interrogation (a technique that makes use of wave-particle duality to search a region of space without actually entering that region) in an optical-based quantum computer through a process called “counterfactual computation”.
Utilising two coupled optical interferometers, nested within a third, Kwiat’s team succeeded in counterfactually searching a four-element database using Grover’s quantum search algorithm. “By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm,” said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper. “We also showed theoretically how to obtain the answer without ever running the algorithm, by using a ‘chained Zeno’ effect.”
Through clever use of beam splitters and both constructive and destructive interference, the researchers can put each photon in a superposition of taking two paths. Although a photon can occupy multiple places simultaneously, it can only make an actual appearance at one location. Its presence defines its path, and that can, in a very strange way, negate the need for the search algorithm to run.
“In a sense, it is the possibility that the algorithm could run which prevents the algorithm from running,” [Professor Paul] Kwiat said. “That is at the heart of quantum interrogation schemes, and to my mind, quantum mechanics doesn’t get any more mysterious than this.”
I once had a blog post that existed in each of two possible states, but it turned out just to be a corrupted database.
(via The Reg)
Implausible Deniability
Ritual
A liberal society will always tend to break free of its rituals. Independent, rational decision-makers will cast off societal expectation and weave their own increasingly divergent patterns as they try to make sense of it all. Happiness is (supposedly, hopefully) gained from an oft-repeated cost-benefit analysis, with low-yield activities discarded in the quest for a better-performing schedule, a life that pays maximal dividends.
What about the people who still go for ritual? What about all the festivals and pilgrimages and rites and initiations that still happen? I’d like to talk to some people who still do things just because. I don’t know whether they’d claim to be happier. I have a suspicion, though, that they might gain as much or more meaning from the way that they spend their time, as compared with ritual-free me. For one thing, ritual takes away the need for a continual happiness audit. You go to this place, do these things, recite these verses, paint yourself thus, inhale these fumes, face this direction, perform this ceremony, sing this song, dance this dance, kill this animal, adorn yourself with coloured powder and run rampant through the streets. You do it as a part of some continuity, but not because it’s part of that continuity. You do it because you do it, and you’re free to enjoy it (or not) without renegotiating its position in your life.
Sometimes it seems as if managing one’s own happiness is like trying to run the economy of a large country. You’ve got a few levers you can pull, and you can delude yourself into imagining that there’s a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect scenario in place, where your own agency is the cause and your eventual happiness (or lack of) is the effect. I wonder whether the pursuit of happiness is its own dismal science, doomed to failure by the chaotic interacting of unforeseen variables, by the individualistic, mechanistic fallacies on which it is conceived. I wonder whether rituals, which stand apart from the economy of happiness and exist on their own terms, might provide important navigational beacons, fixed points from which some kind of meaning can be triangulated. A release from the conceit that one’s freedom, one’s capacity to decide for oneself, is the sole critical determinant of a good life.
Novel Snob
I may not have the virtue of being consistently enthralled by highbrow novels, but at least I can lay claim to being periodically bored by lowbrow ones.
Stresshead
There’s a perceptible lack of effort on the part of the Head Waiter to disguise how stressed he is. The rest of the staff maintain smiles which sometimes wither just slightly - his is designed to be transparent. He wants you to know what a rough night he’s having; that although you’re suffering bad service, he’s suffering more.
Scenes from a Multiculture
Outside Barkly Square Shopping Centre in Brunswick, a forty-something Vietnamese man sings the verse to O Sole Mio to a couple of elderly Italian men who, it seems, he has just met in the street (I don’t know how - perhaps he approaches men of Mediterranean appearance and just breaks into song). The singer doesn’t quite pitch the octave going into the chorus, and the Italians are quick to congratulate him on his pronunciation and, in doing so, bring the performance to a halt. By that time, though, a small crowd has gathered, and fifteen minutes later the performer is still swapping singing tips with an overweight bald Anglo carrying a carton of VB.