Dear Diary,
The weather has turned cold and it is time to find work. Also Lisa's nagging has become difficult to bear. She correctly points out that since all I'm doing is sitting around writing computer programs for fun, I might as well find someone to pay me to do it.
It will mean giving up Clojure, I feel, since I can't imagine that anyone local will be both curious about functional programming and using Java. But I have always enjoyed programming in any language, for any task.
I've never looked for a job before. When I was a starving PhD student, I went to the jobcentre in Cambridge and said "I'd like a job, please". And they said "What can you do?", and I said "Nothing really, but I loved computer programming as a boy", and they said "Ring this guy."
And ringing that guy (thanks ever so, Mike) led to an uninterrupted stream of contracts to do all sorts of interesting projects for local firms, all by being recommended to new companies by people I'd worked with before, or re-engaged by companies I'd worked for previously.
There was one period, long ago during a recession, when I wanted to work but no-one had rung up recently, so I contacted a couple of recruitment agents. The second one I phoned said "Actually I have a job that would be perfect for you, but it's just down the road and you've worked for them before, so it would be silly to go through us." I phoned the relevant company and this turned out to be true. Nobody had thought to call me before they'd placed the job ad. So I started work the following day and that was that.
I phoned the second recruiter back and asked her if I could buy her dinner, since her behaviour had seemed sporting in the extreme, but she lived far away from Cambridge, so instead I sent her a personal cheque for £200. Thanks Sharon, I hope you did something nice with the money.
The first recruiter pestered me constantly for months with offers to work on COBOL in Aberystwyth for pin-money, so after explaining to him for the hundredth time that that wasn't really the sort of thing I would be looking for even if I wasn't working already, I ended up call-barring him.
But anyway, I've never needed to actively look for a job before, so this will be a new experience.
The first thing I'm thinking is to go through all my old contacts and see if any of them are still in the business and remember me fondly. So I'll get started on that.
And the second is that I need to bring the recruitment agent process in-house somehow.
So how's this: If, within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who provided the crucial introduction.
If there are a number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone points me at a short contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.
And this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts who I have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves offering work, because why wouldn't it?
And obviously if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than £500.
Anyhow, if you're interested in helping out, my CV is at http://www.aspden.com
It's not much of a CV. I've never had to use one before, and the main reason I've maintained it is because sometimes HR people like to see one, as a formality, so the first order of the day is probably to improve it. All suggestions welcome.
There's also a massive vainglorious boast here: http://www.learningclojure.com/2010/10/gis-job.html
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Rigoletto (Covent Garden Dress Rehearsal)
A friend (Ll) is trying out for a place in the reknowned orchestra of the Royal Opera House. She invited me, along with her husband (G) to come and watch the dress rehearsal of Rigoletto.
G remarked before the performance that he'd always thought that Rigoletto was a silly work. He knows much more about music than I do, and so I was a bit worried by this.
In fact he challenged me to name a sillier opera (which proved to be easy, opera being an essentially silly sport.)
I've never thought of Rigoletto as at all silly. But then I've only ever seen it in English at the Coliseum, in Jonathan Miller's famous New York Mafia production. Actually I've seen it three times there.
The mafia is really the only modern environment which still works in the old style of fragmented Renaissance Italy or pre-Tudor England. In the famous BBC production of I, Claudius, the actors were reportedly at a loss for motivation, so different is the Roman world, until they hit on the idea of imagining the emperors as bosses of a particularly terrifying mob.
So people began to think that Rigoletto, set in a Renaissance which we all unconsciously model as the modern world with castles, was a silly opera.
In Jonathan Miller's production, he reconnected the audience with the terror of Rigoletto's situation by recasting the Duke as a mob boss.
It's a good idea, but one is always conscious of the metaphor. It's a good metaphor, but it leaks a little.
This production plays it straight and with great force. There is no metaphor in the way, and the Duke's court is a violent, unstable, debauched and very very dangerous place. There's a terrible sense of shifting power structures, and of rapid, pointless falls. Violation, humiliation, and loss of honour, all deadly, are ever present, and death itself is much more than a shadow hanging over the court.
The wonder is that all this is communicated. No one could be in any doubt about the seriousness of the character's troubles. No metaphor is needed.
The vileness of the Duke's character and intentions are made quite clear by having his recently discarded, humilated and broken lover snivelling under the stairs as he sings his love song.
Poor Rigoletto never has any choice about what he is or what he does. A moral man who is a cripple in a time of innumerable starving beggars, blood feud, poverty and disease has somehow found that his vicious wit and caustic contempt for the moral decay around him can entertain the capricious Duke and provide a place in this awful world for him and for his daughter, the one pure thing in his life. But it is no safe or comfortable place. Dmitri Hvorostovsky sings and acts all this with power and glory.
At the beginning of the opera, we were warned that, this being a dress rehearsal, some of the singers might choose to 'mark'. I'd never heard this word before, but apparently it means that they might sing quietly, or move their parts into easier ranges to spare their voices.
That probably explains what seemed like a weak start from the Duke, Wookyung Kim, but once he saw that he was playing to a packed and enthusiastic house, he sportingly changed his mind and gave it everything even though some of us were just freeloading. He sang superbly after that.
But as good as these two were, the high point of the singing for me was Gilda, Patrizia Ciofi. Her clarity and beauty stood out in a production where everyone was wonderful. She did miss one obvious high note, and I saw Rigoletto, leaning over her, supposedly in an agony of grief and despair, discreetly give her a friendly smile and a wink. Seeing that the actors care about each other only enhanced the humanity of the production for me.
Gilda was utterly innocent and beautiful in a world of grim horror and mortal danger.
In the mafia version, Maddalena, the waitress with a heart of gold, is a harmless beauty that I usually fall for over the course of the evening. In this one Daniella Innamorati is a ferociously sexual corrupt and murderous whore with one last scruple. And her only scruple only leads to more horror. Not that I didn't fall for her anyway.
When Gilda looks into Sparafucile and Maddalena's hovel and exclaims that she is looking into hell, she is only putting the obvious truth into words.
I feel, as people apparently felt when they first saw Jonathan Miller's version, that I've seen Rigoletto again for the first time. And G now says that it's one of his favourite operas, to be taken seriously.
One quibble, and it's Verdi's fault, not the production's:
The opera should end with Rigoletto crowing victoriously over the sack that contains his daughter's body. This is the climax of the horror, utterly devastating.
Gilda's unlikely revival and lengthy farewell only release the fracturing tension. The triumph of this production is that by the time of the sack, I'd forgotten that it was an opera I was watching, completely transported by story and music and emotion into elemental realms of involvement.
Covent Garden tell this story straight and well. It doesn't need an operatic swan song. They should cut it, and end it at a dead stop with Rigoletto's crowing. Turn off the lights and let the audience shiver in the dark.
The bassoon playing was excellent throughout.
G remarked before the performance that he'd always thought that Rigoletto was a silly work. He knows much more about music than I do, and so I was a bit worried by this.
 |
| not even slightly silly |
I've never thought of Rigoletto as at all silly. But then I've only ever seen it in English at the Coliseum, in Jonathan Miller's famous New York Mafia production. Actually I've seen it three times there.
The mafia is really the only modern environment which still works in the old style of fragmented Renaissance Italy or pre-Tudor England. In the famous BBC production of I, Claudius, the actors were reportedly at a loss for motivation, so different is the Roman world, until they hit on the idea of imagining the emperors as bosses of a particularly terrifying mob.
So people began to think that Rigoletto, set in a Renaissance which we all unconsciously model as the modern world with castles, was a silly opera.
In Jonathan Miller's production, he reconnected the audience with the terror of Rigoletto's situation by recasting the Duke as a mob boss.
It's a good idea, but one is always conscious of the metaphor. It's a good metaphor, but it leaks a little.
This production plays it straight and with great force. There is no metaphor in the way, and the Duke's court is a violent, unstable, debauched and very very dangerous place. There's a terrible sense of shifting power structures, and of rapid, pointless falls. Violation, humiliation, and loss of honour, all deadly, are ever present, and death itself is much more than a shadow hanging over the court.
The wonder is that all this is communicated. No one could be in any doubt about the seriousness of the character's troubles. No metaphor is needed.
The vileness of the Duke's character and intentions are made quite clear by having his recently discarded, humilated and broken lover snivelling under the stairs as he sings his love song.
Poor Rigoletto never has any choice about what he is or what he does. A moral man who is a cripple in a time of innumerable starving beggars, blood feud, poverty and disease has somehow found that his vicious wit and caustic contempt for the moral decay around him can entertain the capricious Duke and provide a place in this awful world for him and for his daughter, the one pure thing in his life. But it is no safe or comfortable place. Dmitri Hvorostovsky sings and acts all this with power and glory.
At the beginning of the opera, we were warned that, this being a dress rehearsal, some of the singers might choose to 'mark'. I'd never heard this word before, but apparently it means that they might sing quietly, or move their parts into easier ranges to spare their voices.
That probably explains what seemed like a weak start from the Duke, Wookyung Kim, but once he saw that he was playing to a packed and enthusiastic house, he sportingly changed his mind and gave it everything even though some of us were just freeloading. He sang superbly after that.
But as good as these two were, the high point of the singing for me was Gilda, Patrizia Ciofi. Her clarity and beauty stood out in a production where everyone was wonderful. She did miss one obvious high note, and I saw Rigoletto, leaning over her, supposedly in an agony of grief and despair, discreetly give her a friendly smile and a wink. Seeing that the actors care about each other only enhanced the humanity of the production for me.
Gilda was utterly innocent and beautiful in a world of grim horror and mortal danger.
In the mafia version, Maddalena, the waitress with a heart of gold, is a harmless beauty that I usually fall for over the course of the evening. In this one Daniella Innamorati is a ferociously sexual corrupt and murderous whore with one last scruple. And her only scruple only leads to more horror. Not that I didn't fall for her anyway.
When Gilda looks into Sparafucile and Maddalena's hovel and exclaims that she is looking into hell, she is only putting the obvious truth into words.
I feel, as people apparently felt when they first saw Jonathan Miller's version, that I've seen Rigoletto again for the first time. And G now says that it's one of his favourite operas, to be taken seriously.
One quibble, and it's Verdi's fault, not the production's:
The opera should end with Rigoletto crowing victoriously over the sack that contains his daughter's body. This is the climax of the horror, utterly devastating.
Gilda's unlikely revival and lengthy farewell only release the fracturing tension. The triumph of this production is that by the time of the sack, I'd forgotten that it was an opera I was watching, completely transported by story and music and emotion into elemental realms of involvement.
Covent Garden tell this story straight and well. It doesn't need an operatic swan song. They should cut it, and end it at a dead stop with Rigoletto's crowing. Turn off the lights and let the audience shiver in the dark.
The bassoon playing was excellent throughout.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Rheingold (New York Metropolitan Opera broadcast at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse)
Why do people say this is inaccessible? It's got singing mermaids in it. One of them is called Flosshilde.
But seriously, I feel that I may have done Wagner backwards. When I was small, I fell in love with it watching it with my father on TV, and what I loved was the dragons and the ring and the dwarves and gods and swords and stuff. And any subtlety was way over my head, and I don't even remember being that impressed by the music at first, although that might have been more to do with the sound quality of a 1970s television than any childish inability to love music.
Thinking back on it, the Ring that I loved for its magic story and special effects was probably the grim industrial Chéreau/Boulez Bayreuth Centenary production, full of angst and pain and cynicism. The magic takes a very minor role, deliberately underplayed, while the subtext becomes the ubertext, rammed in your face.
Now I'm forty. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen Rheingold on video or CD, and I've read whole books about what is going on in it.
And now the Metropolitan Opera makes this glorious cartoon version, full of light and primary colours. Subtext abandoned in a riot of special effects, Wotan's dilemma and the inexorable doom of the gods almost certainly invisible to anyone who's seeing it for the first time. If I'd seen this Ring when I was a little boy I'd have been demanding plastic action figures of the gods to play with!
And the cartoon version is brilliant. Intelligent, faithful, awe-inspiring. Magical, beautiful, colourful, and incredibly well sung and played. There's not one dud. Every character is a precious jewel, bringing something new to their role.
The rippling underlying angst is a subtext to the exciting and involving action, as it should be.
Wotan and Fricka for me will always be the spare elegance of Donald MacIntyre and Hannah Schwartz, but Bryn Terfel's take as an overweight heavy metal fan with a dodgy fringe is very fetching, and he sings MacIntyre's ass off.
Indeed the singing and the music here are the best I've ever heard, even after the losses caused by the transmission and cinema reproduction.
For the first time in my life, I wish I lived in New York. Obviously tickets will have sold out years ago, but maybe if I go and camp in the lobby for the entire run of the production somebody will have a heart attack during the first half and they'll give me their ticket so I can go and see the second.
Alberich here is pure genius. He can be sympathised with. The closest thing in the Ring to a symbol of evil is revealed here to be a creature with nothing to offer, humiliated and rejected simply for naively offering his heart to beauty. Rejected and scorned, burning with shame, he forswears love in an agony of passion, and leaves himself with nothing worth aiming for. It is longing for lost love that makes him scheme to rape the world, and he is truly pitiful when Wotan steals even that dreadful last hope from him. If there's a problem with this interpretation, which is always there in any Ring, it's that it makes Alberich forgiveable, which he really shouldn't be. I've always thought that if Wagner had lived to see the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party, he would have identified them with Alberich, not with Siegfried as they saw themselves.
Alberich has made happy Niebelheim a hell, and the merry dwarves who loved to make trinkets for their women into pitiful terrified slaves. We shouldn't sympathise with him. We should detest him. His evil is the reason that Wotan needs to take and hold power, fatally compromising his own freedom and driving him into the suicidal mental conflict that ends the world.
I don't want to understand Alberich. I don't want to look at him humiliated and rejected by the daughters of the Rhine and think that every man knows what he's going through. I don't want to be reminded of old friends who were so desperate for love and so unsuccessful with women that they sacrificed their lives to make money in the hope that someone would one day love them for it instead of for themselves.
But I'm more than glad that this Alberich has made me think. I shall have to think some more until I can make the conclusion of my head match the conclusion of my heart.
The other characters are deeply realised and understood. The simple honest giant Fasolt, who is expecting Wotan the honourable god to pay him the agreed price for his sound work in the same way that he would expect fire to be hot or the dawn to come.
Even after the betrayal that will lead to his death, even after telling Wotan his simple insight that the Gods live by the sacredness of their word, even after seeing that the Gods are as venal and treacherous as anyone else under their honourable shell, still moments before his death he turns instinctively to Wotan to ask him to judge fairly the division of the stolen gold.
Freia's being obviously affected by his simple, honest, overwhelming desire is a masterful touch. Why has no-one ever noticed that before? It should obviously be there. She mourns him. I never thought I'd tear up at the death of Fasolt, but here it's a most moving thing.
I won't spoil the rest of it, but it's full of memorable moments. The dragon trick is glorious.
And after a weekend of great music, including two operas, one of which I saw live in Covent Garden, the take-home song, that I've been singing to myself for nearly two days is Donner, summoning the clouds to make a storm to clear the air.
Always before, I've wondered what the point of Donner was. He seems absolutely irrelevant except to demonstrate that Wotan can't just kill the giants. Dwayne Croft and his special effects, hammer swirling in the gathering tornado of light, and voice bellowing majestically as master of that storm, have tuéed le rôle. All future Donners will be conscious of trying to live up to him and his storm scene.
Even the usual tedious preamble interviewing the cast was good fun this time. One of the Rhinemaidens in particular looks at her flying-swimming-sudden-death-harness-arrangement with a sort of disbelieving sick terror. That will learn her. One doesn't become a Wagnerian soprano by accident. She's clearly loving it by the time of the performance though. A personal journey of self discovery to put alongside Wotan's.
Footnote:
Trying to find out Donner's real name to put instead of 'this guy', I found this exceedingly uncomplimentary review:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/10/AR2010101003449.html
I had indeed wondered why Loge was booed at the end of the production, and since a vague resemblance to Gary Glitter shouldn't get a man booed, I'd decided that it was the sort of affectionate pantomime booing that Captain Hook always gets, from people who didn't understand that Loge is the only character who has survived the evening with his honour intact, indeed the only character who will survive when night falls on the gods. Apparently not.
I actually predicted the reviewer's complaint here:
http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2009/12/les-contes-dhoffman-opera-at-cinema.html
And it looks as though this prediction has turned out to be true.
And what do I think?
Well done New York. For years, people have been trying to make opera accessible. And this has always seemed to mean dumbed down, or so low budget it's rubbish, or cheap seats that are cheap because you're so far away you can't hear or see properly. And accessible is now a dirty word.
Well not any more. This is what I call accessible. £20 for a good seat at a thrilling and very expensive production that you can walk to. Wagner with beautiful young women with beautiful voices playing the beautiful young women singing the beautiful songs. The audience in Cambridge loved it. And it was not an uneducated audience.
So well done New York and the commercial opera for doing what our subsidised houses have been trying and failing to do for years. The technology can only improve, the sound reproduction, which is not good currently, can become better than CD. Maybe opera can become an entertainment for people who aren't rich Londoners. Maybe Wagner can speak to the people as he wanted to do, instead of to the corporate boxes and to the German establishment.
And careful New York. You are on the bottom of the Rhine, looking at the gold. Do not forswear everything that you love for it. There is a curse on it. Beware of the curse. Do the right thing. If you can figure out what the right thing is.
There is just one problem with all this. I watched the simulcast. I heard Loge booed and wondered why. But I am sure that I also saw the whole house rise, and give the apparently pitifully bad production a massive standing ovation that went on for a very long time.
But seriously, I feel that I may have done Wagner backwards. When I was small, I fell in love with it watching it with my father on TV, and what I loved was the dragons and the ring and the dwarves and gods and swords and stuff. And any subtlety was way over my head, and I don't even remember being that impressed by the music at first, although that might have been more to do with the sound quality of a 1970s television than any childish inability to love music.
Thinking back on it, the Ring that I loved for its magic story and special effects was probably the grim industrial Chéreau/Boulez Bayreuth Centenary production, full of angst and pain and cynicism. The magic takes a very minor role, deliberately underplayed, while the subtext becomes the ubertext, rammed in your face.
 |
| I totally nicked this still, and I think it's from Walkure rather than Rheingold. But Rheingold is this cool! Except for the silly plastic breastplates and the hammock. Which suck. |
And now the Metropolitan Opera makes this glorious cartoon version, full of light and primary colours. Subtext abandoned in a riot of special effects, Wotan's dilemma and the inexorable doom of the gods almost certainly invisible to anyone who's seeing it for the first time. If I'd seen this Ring when I was a little boy I'd have been demanding plastic action figures of the gods to play with!
And the cartoon version is brilliant. Intelligent, faithful, awe-inspiring. Magical, beautiful, colourful, and incredibly well sung and played. There's not one dud. Every character is a precious jewel, bringing something new to their role.
The rippling underlying angst is a subtext to the exciting and involving action, as it should be.
Wotan and Fricka for me will always be the spare elegance of Donald MacIntyre and Hannah Schwartz, but Bryn Terfel's take as an overweight heavy metal fan with a dodgy fringe is very fetching, and he sings MacIntyre's ass off.
Indeed the singing and the music here are the best I've ever heard, even after the losses caused by the transmission and cinema reproduction.
For the first time in my life, I wish I lived in New York. Obviously tickets will have sold out years ago, but maybe if I go and camp in the lobby for the entire run of the production somebody will have a heart attack during the first half and they'll give me their ticket so I can go and see the second.
Alberich here is pure genius. He can be sympathised with. The closest thing in the Ring to a symbol of evil is revealed here to be a creature with nothing to offer, humiliated and rejected simply for naively offering his heart to beauty. Rejected and scorned, burning with shame, he forswears love in an agony of passion, and leaves himself with nothing worth aiming for. It is longing for lost love that makes him scheme to rape the world, and he is truly pitiful when Wotan steals even that dreadful last hope from him. If there's a problem with this interpretation, which is always there in any Ring, it's that it makes Alberich forgiveable, which he really shouldn't be. I've always thought that if Wagner had lived to see the rise of the National Socialist German Workers Party, he would have identified them with Alberich, not with Siegfried as they saw themselves.
Alberich has made happy Niebelheim a hell, and the merry dwarves who loved to make trinkets for their women into pitiful terrified slaves. We shouldn't sympathise with him. We should detest him. His evil is the reason that Wotan needs to take and hold power, fatally compromising his own freedom and driving him into the suicidal mental conflict that ends the world.
I don't want to understand Alberich. I don't want to look at him humiliated and rejected by the daughters of the Rhine and think that every man knows what he's going through. I don't want to be reminded of old friends who were so desperate for love and so unsuccessful with women that they sacrificed their lives to make money in the hope that someone would one day love them for it instead of for themselves.
But I'm more than glad that this Alberich has made me think. I shall have to think some more until I can make the conclusion of my head match the conclusion of my heart.
The other characters are deeply realised and understood. The simple honest giant Fasolt, who is expecting Wotan the honourable god to pay him the agreed price for his sound work in the same way that he would expect fire to be hot or the dawn to come.
Even after the betrayal that will lead to his death, even after telling Wotan his simple insight that the Gods live by the sacredness of their word, even after seeing that the Gods are as venal and treacherous as anyone else under their honourable shell, still moments before his death he turns instinctively to Wotan to ask him to judge fairly the division of the stolen gold.
Freia's being obviously affected by his simple, honest, overwhelming desire is a masterful touch. Why has no-one ever noticed that before? It should obviously be there. She mourns him. I never thought I'd tear up at the death of Fasolt, but here it's a most moving thing.
I won't spoil the rest of it, but it's full of memorable moments. The dragon trick is glorious.
And after a weekend of great music, including two operas, one of which I saw live in Covent Garden, the take-home song, that I've been singing to myself for nearly two days is Donner, summoning the clouds to make a storm to clear the air.
Always before, I've wondered what the point of Donner was. He seems absolutely irrelevant except to demonstrate that Wotan can't just kill the giants. Dwayne Croft and his special effects, hammer swirling in the gathering tornado of light, and voice bellowing majestically as master of that storm, have tuéed le rôle. All future Donners will be conscious of trying to live up to him and his storm scene.
Even the usual tedious preamble interviewing the cast was good fun this time. One of the Rhinemaidens in particular looks at her flying-swimming-sudden-death-harness-arrangement with a sort of disbelieving sick terror. That will learn her. One doesn't become a Wagnerian soprano by accident. She's clearly loving it by the time of the performance though. A personal journey of self discovery to put alongside Wotan's.
Footnote:
Trying to find out Donner's real name to put instead of 'this guy', I found this exceedingly uncomplimentary review:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/10/AR2010101003449.html
I had indeed wondered why Loge was booed at the end of the production, and since a vague resemblance to Gary Glitter shouldn't get a man booed, I'd decided that it was the sort of affectionate pantomime booing that Captain Hook always gets, from people who didn't understand that Loge is the only character who has survived the evening with his honour intact, indeed the only character who will survive when night falls on the gods. Apparently not.
I actually predicted the reviewer's complaint here:
http://johnlawrenceaspden.blogspot.com/2009/12/les-contes-dhoffman-opera-at-cinema.html
And it looks as though this prediction has turned out to be true.
And what do I think?
Well done New York. For years, people have been trying to make opera accessible. And this has always seemed to mean dumbed down, or so low budget it's rubbish, or cheap seats that are cheap because you're so far away you can't hear or see properly. And accessible is now a dirty word.
Well not any more. This is what I call accessible. £20 for a good seat at a thrilling and very expensive production that you can walk to. Wagner with beautiful young women with beautiful voices playing the beautiful young women singing the beautiful songs. The audience in Cambridge loved it. And it was not an uneducated audience.
So well done New York and the commercial opera for doing what our subsidised houses have been trying and failing to do for years. The technology can only improve, the sound reproduction, which is not good currently, can become better than CD. Maybe opera can become an entertainment for people who aren't rich Londoners. Maybe Wagner can speak to the people as he wanted to do, instead of to the corporate boxes and to the German establishment.
And careful New York. You are on the bottom of the Rhine, looking at the gold. Do not forswear everything that you love for it. There is a curse on it. Beware of the curse. Do the right thing. If you can figure out what the right thing is.
There is just one problem with all this. I watched the simulcast. I heard Loge booed and wondered why. But I am sure that I also saw the whole house rise, and give the apparently pitifully bad production a massive standing ovation that went on for a very long time.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Does Anyone Actually Believe in God?
I believe in the Inland Revenue.
I hate the very idea of involuntary taxation. I think that collaboration with it is a form of partial slavery.
I am very deeply sceptical about the uses to which my ex-money is put. There are certain things which need to be done by the state. There are certain things the state does well. But most of the money the state takes from me without my consent seems to be pissed up the wall on rubbish.
Fully fifty percent of everything that is done in England is done because the state compels it.
As a child, I was a communist. I would have thought, then, that putting half the population of England into slavery 'for their own good' was taking things a bit far.
I am not a communist any more, and yet I pay my taxes. I have not ever committed the slightest tiny tax fraud, not even claiming lunch on expenses, even though I would feel morally justified. In fact I would feel that I was striking a tiny blow for freedom.
But I believe in the Inland Revenue. If you do that sort of thing and get caught then they will make your life hellish for many years. It is not even slightly worth it, even though the chances of getting caught are tiny.
And heaven help you if you're caught in a big fraud. You can hear the rubber gloves being pulled on now.
I salute the heroes who have suffered incarceration, which is torture, in the cause of freedom.
And yet I will not be joining them.
Because I believe in the Inland Revenue.
If I believed in God, as I remember from school, there would be at least two things that I should do.
I should turn the other cheek if attacked. (What a disgusting doctrine.)
I should give all my money to the poor. Even if I were poor myself. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
If I believed in God, I would believe in a power that was aware of my every action, and which would set fire to me for all eternity if I failed to live up to His standards.
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
The bit in the bright red italics seems important.
I would find God a lot more scary than I find the Inland Revenue. I would probably go mad with terror. Certainly I would examine every tiny cryptic hint that God had ever given as to what I was supposed to do with my life, and I would do it diligently. If I believed in God the same way that I believe in the Inland Revenue.
I never heard that the Bible said that it was important to go to Church, which Christians do a lot. But it's probably not forbidden either. Probably they like the singing and the company. I would love to have some friends to sing with on a Sunday morning.
But the central messages of Christianity are non-violence, and compassion for the poor.
There are people starving. There are children dying, who could be saved with money that people who say they believe in God spend on television licences.
I do nothing about this. That is because, although I think that God might exist, I think that the chances of that are somewhere below the chances of me accidentally catching fire for all eternity. And I will not multiply an infinitesimal chance by an infinite amount of pain and act on that basis, because that doesn't work if there's more than one unlikely painful thing.
If I thought there was a 1% chance of God existing, I would become a missionary. And I would swear a vow of poverty, and I would devote my life to helping the poor, and I would never hurt anyone even if they were attacking my mother.
Because nothing anyone could do to me or my mother would remotely compare with eternal torture. In my mind or hers.
So it seems to me that the fact that I do not do these things is an irrefutable proof that I do not believe in even the tiniest chance of the existence of God.
Oooh, I have just written a sermon. I wonder if I am doing the Lord's work in spite of myself?
I hate the very idea of involuntary taxation. I think that collaboration with it is a form of partial slavery.
I am very deeply sceptical about the uses to which my ex-money is put. There are certain things which need to be done by the state. There are certain things the state does well. But most of the money the state takes from me without my consent seems to be pissed up the wall on rubbish.
Fully fifty percent of everything that is done in England is done because the state compels it.
As a child, I was a communist. I would have thought, then, that putting half the population of England into slavery 'for their own good' was taking things a bit far.
I am not a communist any more, and yet I pay my taxes. I have not ever committed the slightest tiny tax fraud, not even claiming lunch on expenses, even though I would feel morally justified. In fact I would feel that I was striking a tiny blow for freedom.
But I believe in the Inland Revenue. If you do that sort of thing and get caught then they will make your life hellish for many years. It is not even slightly worth it, even though the chances of getting caught are tiny.
And heaven help you if you're caught in a big fraud. You can hear the rubber gloves being pulled on now.
I salute the heroes who have suffered incarceration, which is torture, in the cause of freedom.
And yet I will not be joining them.
Because I believe in the Inland Revenue.
If I believed in God, as I remember from school, there would be at least two things that I should do.
I should turn the other cheek if attacked. (What a disgusting doctrine.)
I should give all my money to the poor. Even if I were poor myself. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.
And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
If I believed in God, I would believe in a power that was aware of my every action, and which would set fire to me for all eternity if I failed to live up to His standards.
But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
The bit in the bright red italics seems important.
I would find God a lot more scary than I find the Inland Revenue. I would probably go mad with terror. Certainly I would examine every tiny cryptic hint that God had ever given as to what I was supposed to do with my life, and I would do it diligently. If I believed in God the same way that I believe in the Inland Revenue.
I never heard that the Bible said that it was important to go to Church, which Christians do a lot. But it's probably not forbidden either. Probably they like the singing and the company. I would love to have some friends to sing with on a Sunday morning.
But the central messages of Christianity are non-violence, and compassion for the poor.
There are people starving. There are children dying, who could be saved with money that people who say they believe in God spend on television licences.
I do nothing about this. That is because, although I think that God might exist, I think that the chances of that are somewhere below the chances of me accidentally catching fire for all eternity. And I will not multiply an infinitesimal chance by an infinite amount of pain and act on that basis, because that doesn't work if there's more than one unlikely painful thing.
If I thought there was a 1% chance of God existing, I would become a missionary. And I would swear a vow of poverty, and I would devote my life to helping the poor, and I would never hurt anyone even if they were attacking my mother.
Because nothing anyone could do to me or my mother would remotely compare with eternal torture. In my mind or hers.
So it seems to me that the fact that I do not do these things is an irrefutable proof that I do not believe in even the tiniest chance of the existence of God.
Oooh, I have just written a sermon. I wonder if I am doing the Lord's work in spite of myself?
Friday, September 10, 2010
The Leopard (film)
This is a very beautiful film.
The sets, the landscapes, the costumes, the crowd scenes, are all immaculately beautiful and sumptuously expensive looking.
Claudia Cardinale plays a principal character. She was so lovely. No one was more beautiful than she was.
The Leopard himself is Burt Lancaster. A very good looking man indeed. His burning blue eyes drip charisma.
Such wonderful actors. Such beautiful acting. And it's in Italian, the most beautiful of all the European languages.
I have never seen a film so beautiful. It goes on for hours. It must have cost a fortune. I wonder what it was about? Whatever it was, it must have been really important to someone.
The sets, the landscapes, the costumes, the crowd scenes, are all immaculately beautiful and sumptuously expensive looking.
Claudia Cardinale plays a principal character. She was so lovely. No one was more beautiful than she was.
The Leopard himself is Burt Lancaster. A very good looking man indeed. His burning blue eyes drip charisma.
Such wonderful actors. Such beautiful acting. And it's in Italian, the most beautiful of all the European languages.
I have never seen a film so beautiful. It goes on for hours. It must have cost a fortune. I wonder what it was about? Whatever it was, it must have been really important to someone.
Monday, September 6, 2010
The Girl who Played with Fire (film)
After the excellent Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I was disappointed with this load of tedious piffle.
The film opens with two mechanical rapes and an uninspired lesbian sex scene in the first ten minutes.
After that there are some car chases or something. I wasn't really paying attention.
I suppose that there might have been some sort of story that the film makers were failing to tell, but I'm damned if I'm wading through another hundredweight of Larsson's translator's telephone directory prose to find out.
I don't know whether to count this as the sixth film that I've walked out of. It was more that as it seemed to be building to some sort of dreary climax I realised that I needed a smoke more than I needed to know how it ended.
As I was walking home in the rain some cunt driving a tin hearse at forty miles an hour down Sidney Street soaked me from the waist down in gutter water. I was rather grateful. It was the first interesting thing that had happened for hours.
The film opens with two mechanical rapes and an uninspired lesbian sex scene in the first ten minutes.
After that there are some car chases or something. I wasn't really paying attention.
I suppose that there might have been some sort of story that the film makers were failing to tell, but I'm damned if I'm wading through another hundredweight of Larsson's translator's telephone directory prose to find out.
I don't know whether to count this as the sixth film that I've walked out of. It was more that as it seemed to be building to some sort of dreary climax I realised that I needed a smoke more than I needed to know how it ended.
As I was walking home in the rain some cunt driving a tin hearse at forty miles an hour down Sidney Street soaked me from the waist down in gutter water. I was rather grateful. It was the first interesting thing that had happened for hours.
Be Of Good Comfort, Master Ridley
Last week, my grandfather's ring broke. I have worn it on the second finger of my right hand all my life. I'm told it can't be repaired without removing most of the original metal, and I don't want them to do that, so I'll keep the fragments in a box until I can find a goldsmith who can make it whole again.
When I was about sixteen, and my grandfather was beginning his long death, he gave me the ring he had worn all his life, and I have always treasured it as a physical connection to a man I loved.
At about the same time, I first travelled abroad alone.
My family had gone on holiday to the north of the Netherlands, to see the broad flats of the land reclaimed from the Zuider Zee.
It was a wonderful holiday, with marshes and birds and windmills and cycle trips, but I wanted to see Amsterdam, with its promises of drugs and sex and freedom, and I wanted to be there for the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
And so when it came time to go home, I announced that I would hitch-hike home via Amsterdam and Belgium to Calais and the ferry. I had hitched in England before, but I'd never been alone abroad before.
My parents weren't enthusiastic, but they had little control over me by then. I did what I wanted to and no one could tell me anything, because I already knew it all.
Amsterdam was wonderful. Bars that sold beautiful lager that was nothing like the filth they sold in England in those days. Coffee shops where they sold marijuana to smoke while you played chess and drank tea. And the women. Oh the women...
I had almost no money, and couldn't afford anywhere to stay, so I slept in public parks.
Lots of people did in those days, and there were always little camps of backpackers. Sometimes we had fires and people brought out guitars and sang. I sang too.
One night, cruising from bar to bar I met an Italian man. We started to buy each other drinks, and he had some cocaine, and we had a very pleasant evening talking about where we were from, and what it had been like to grow up in our home countries.
He was half gypsy. His father had been a travelling man, and had got his mother pregnant and then disappeared. He'd only ever seen photographs of his father until he was twenty-two.
And then, on the day that he graduated from university, his father appeared at his graduation ceremony. They'd made eye contact as he was up on the stage receiving his degree, but when he came down from the vice-chancellor's dais, his father had gone.
Luca had felt the call of the wild.
During the evening, we met a French boy, another travelling student, and we combined our resources and our stories. It was a fine evening.
When we'd finally exhausted the collective contents of our pockets, I showed them my favourite park, just out of the centre of town. It was quiet and had a little river to sleep by, and wasn't overlooked. We got out our sleeping bags and lay down.
As Luca was taking off his outer clothes to get into his sleeping bag, I saw that his arm was covered in scars, from where needles had been.
Even at sixteen I knew that this would mean trouble. You can learn that in Sheffield.
I slept for a couple of hours, and then woke up. The French boy was gone, but Luca was still asleep, and I started to carefully and slowly pack my things into my rucksack, being careful not to make any noise.
As I started to leave, Luca's eyes opened. They were full of suspicion and anger.
"Wait there," he said.
He began to go through his bag. One of the first things he found was a long knife. Not a kitchen knife. One for killing. He had a crazed, desperate look in his eyes, like you do when the hunger is on you.
Inevitably, something was missing from his bag.
I couldn't run. I've never been able to run fast. He'd have caught me easily and stabbed me from behind.
He demanded to look in my bag. He went through it, slowly and methodically examining everything, putting everything that he could use in one pile, and everything else in the other. My jersey, spare shirts and clothes, and the bag itself. He took my father's Blue John cuff-links.
Screaming wouldn't have helped. We were too far away for anyone to come quickly, even if anyone had come.
And then he looked at me, and asked to see the contents of my pockets. What could I do? He had a knife. One of the first things a martial artist learns is never to fight someone with a knife. Even if you have a knife yourself.
He took my wallet and cards. He took my passport. One of the old elegant blue hard-covered British passports that started off with Her Majesty's polite request to render the bearer all possible assistance. I never had one of those again. The police told me that it would have been worth about £200 even before it had been modified.
And then he noticed my grandfather's ring. Granddad was still alive, but it didn't look like he would be for long.
"Give me that," said Luca.
And I knew I should, but I couldn't.
"Listen," I said.
"I'll fight for this. It's family. I'll die for this.
"If you make me fight, you'll probably win. But you might not.
"It's hardly worth anything. Just a tiny piece of cheap gold. You might sell it for 60 guilders at best. The other things you've taken are worth much more and you can have them and you're welcome to them. You need them more than me."
And he looked at me for a long time, and nodded, and walked away.
I wish him luck. I'm sure that his road has been harder than mine.
After he'd gone, the French boy emerged from the trees, where he'd been watching. He was white and shaking with fear.
"Did you take anything from his pack?", I asked him.
"Of course not."
"No", I said. "I didn't think you would have done."
"Would you really have fought him for your ring?"
"Yes. I love my grandfather."
"It's true what they say about you English. You have ice instead of blood."
At the time I didn't think much of that. Of course we have ice in our blood. We won the second world war against impossible odds and our history is full of people who made witty remarks as they were put in cauldrons by cannibals or made desperate last stands.
Later on, when I'd grown up a bit, I realised that people are basically the same all over the world. There's nothing special about us, not nobility or sang-froid or fair play or courage or thoughtfulness.
History is written by the winners, and racism and the confirmation bias does the rest.
Everyone in Europe is descended from the same people. If Alfred the Great has living descendants, then I am one. The same is true of his pig-herder. I claim descent from both if anyone does.
The same is true of William the Conqueror, and Julius Caesar, and Aristotle, and Socrates. I claim
descent from them and from their slaves. And so do you, if any of your ancestors were Europeans. That's how it works.
But now, with my broken ring reminding me of that night a long time ago, I wonder if there is something special about us after all.
Kate Fox, in her wonderful book "Watching the English", tells us convincingly that we are a different, lonely people. That we talk spontaneously and openly to animals and to children, but not to other adults. And that how we talk to children is how normal people in normal countries talk to each other.
And so there is something special about us. Maybe it's the stories that we tell. Maybe it's the way that English men are essentially alone. Screaming doesn't help.
Maybe it's the way that to be a man in England involves remaining calm. Not gushing. Not showing emotions.
You might know a man you drink with every Friday night. You might have done this for twenty years. You might die for each other. This goes without saying, and so it never needs to be said. You may well not know the names of his children. He may well not know when their birthdays are. That's woman's stuff.
And there are the stories.
Captain Oates heading into the snow to die. I am just going outside. I may be some time.
The orchestra on the Titanic playing as the ship went down, as the passengers formed orderly queues for the lifeboats.
In patriarchal, class-ridden 1912, if you were a woman travelling in steerage on the Titanic, you had more chance of life than if you were a rich man in first class. Because the English and American passengers' code of honour said 'women and children first', and they stood in orderly queues waiting for the lifeboats to run out even when they knew that they were about to die in terror and in pain. But they stayed calm. I bet that there were jokes. Sad jokes, but funnier for the waiting horror.
We tell of gallantry and fair play even in war. Surely it is all lies. But they can be self-fulfilling lies.
We remember and celebrate Latimer, about to be burnt at the stake in Oxford with Ridley. Ridley was terrified, and Latimer said:
"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."
I can't even remember whether Latimer was a Catholic or a Protestant without looking it up. Surely since he's one of our heroes he was a Protestant, but maybe not. We respect gallantry in our enemies even more than in ourselves.
We remember Rommel and Marshal Ney, and when we remember Rorke's Drift the memory is bittersweet for all the brave Zulu men who died.
I don't imagine that Latimer would have defined himself as Catholic or Protestant. He wouldn't have thought in such terms. It doesn't matter. The beliefs for which he died would be unrecognisable even to modern Anglicans.
He is remembered.
When I was about sixteen, and my grandfather was beginning his long death, he gave me the ring he had worn all his life, and I have always treasured it as a physical connection to a man I loved.
At about the same time, I first travelled abroad alone.
My family had gone on holiday to the north of the Netherlands, to see the broad flats of the land reclaimed from the Zuider Zee.
It was a wonderful holiday, with marshes and birds and windmills and cycle trips, but I wanted to see Amsterdam, with its promises of drugs and sex and freedom, and I wanted to be there for the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
And so when it came time to go home, I announced that I would hitch-hike home via Amsterdam and Belgium to Calais and the ferry. I had hitched in England before, but I'd never been alone abroad before.
My parents weren't enthusiastic, but they had little control over me by then. I did what I wanted to and no one could tell me anything, because I already knew it all.
Amsterdam was wonderful. Bars that sold beautiful lager that was nothing like the filth they sold in England in those days. Coffee shops where they sold marijuana to smoke while you played chess and drank tea. And the women. Oh the women...
I had almost no money, and couldn't afford anywhere to stay, so I slept in public parks.
Lots of people did in those days, and there were always little camps of backpackers. Sometimes we had fires and people brought out guitars and sang. I sang too.
One night, cruising from bar to bar I met an Italian man. We started to buy each other drinks, and he had some cocaine, and we had a very pleasant evening talking about where we were from, and what it had been like to grow up in our home countries.
He was half gypsy. His father had been a travelling man, and had got his mother pregnant and then disappeared. He'd only ever seen photographs of his father until he was twenty-two.
And then, on the day that he graduated from university, his father appeared at his graduation ceremony. They'd made eye contact as he was up on the stage receiving his degree, but when he came down from the vice-chancellor's dais, his father had gone.
Luca had felt the call of the wild.
During the evening, we met a French boy, another travelling student, and we combined our resources and our stories. It was a fine evening.
When we'd finally exhausted the collective contents of our pockets, I showed them my favourite park, just out of the centre of town. It was quiet and had a little river to sleep by, and wasn't overlooked. We got out our sleeping bags and lay down.
As Luca was taking off his outer clothes to get into his sleeping bag, I saw that his arm was covered in scars, from where needles had been.
Even at sixteen I knew that this would mean trouble. You can learn that in Sheffield.
I slept for a couple of hours, and then woke up. The French boy was gone, but Luca was still asleep, and I started to carefully and slowly pack my things into my rucksack, being careful not to make any noise.
As I started to leave, Luca's eyes opened. They were full of suspicion and anger.
"Wait there," he said.
He began to go through his bag. One of the first things he found was a long knife. Not a kitchen knife. One for killing. He had a crazed, desperate look in his eyes, like you do when the hunger is on you.
Inevitably, something was missing from his bag.
I couldn't run. I've never been able to run fast. He'd have caught me easily and stabbed me from behind.
He demanded to look in my bag. He went through it, slowly and methodically examining everything, putting everything that he could use in one pile, and everything else in the other. My jersey, spare shirts and clothes, and the bag itself. He took my father's Blue John cuff-links.
Screaming wouldn't have helped. We were too far away for anyone to come quickly, even if anyone had come.
And then he looked at me, and asked to see the contents of my pockets. What could I do? He had a knife. One of the first things a martial artist learns is never to fight someone with a knife. Even if you have a knife yourself.
He took my wallet and cards. He took my passport. One of the old elegant blue hard-covered British passports that started off with Her Majesty's polite request to render the bearer all possible assistance. I never had one of those again. The police told me that it would have been worth about £200 even before it had been modified.
And then he noticed my grandfather's ring. Granddad was still alive, but it didn't look like he would be for long.
"Give me that," said Luca.
And I knew I should, but I couldn't.
"Listen," I said.
"I'll fight for this. It's family. I'll die for this.
"If you make me fight, you'll probably win. But you might not.
"It's hardly worth anything. Just a tiny piece of cheap gold. You might sell it for 60 guilders at best. The other things you've taken are worth much more and you can have them and you're welcome to them. You need them more than me."
And he looked at me for a long time, and nodded, and walked away.
I wish him luck. I'm sure that his road has been harder than mine.
After he'd gone, the French boy emerged from the trees, where he'd been watching. He was white and shaking with fear.
"Did you take anything from his pack?", I asked him.
"Of course not."
"No", I said. "I didn't think you would have done."
"Would you really have fought him for your ring?"
"Yes. I love my grandfather."
"It's true what they say about you English. You have ice instead of blood."
At the time I didn't think much of that. Of course we have ice in our blood. We won the second world war against impossible odds and our history is full of people who made witty remarks as they were put in cauldrons by cannibals or made desperate last stands.
Later on, when I'd grown up a bit, I realised that people are basically the same all over the world. There's nothing special about us, not nobility or sang-froid or fair play or courage or thoughtfulness.
History is written by the winners, and racism and the confirmation bias does the rest.
Everyone in Europe is descended from the same people. If Alfred the Great has living descendants, then I am one. The same is true of his pig-herder. I claim descent from both if anyone does.
The same is true of William the Conqueror, and Julius Caesar, and Aristotle, and Socrates. I claim
descent from them and from their slaves. And so do you, if any of your ancestors were Europeans. That's how it works.
But now, with my broken ring reminding me of that night a long time ago, I wonder if there is something special about us after all.
Kate Fox, in her wonderful book "Watching the English", tells us convincingly that we are a different, lonely people. That we talk spontaneously and openly to animals and to children, but not to other adults. And that how we talk to children is how normal people in normal countries talk to each other.
And so there is something special about us. Maybe it's the stories that we tell. Maybe it's the way that English men are essentially alone. Screaming doesn't help.
Maybe it's the way that to be a man in England involves remaining calm. Not gushing. Not showing emotions.
You might know a man you drink with every Friday night. You might have done this for twenty years. You might die for each other. This goes without saying, and so it never needs to be said. You may well not know the names of his children. He may well not know when their birthdays are. That's woman's stuff.
And there are the stories.
Captain Oates heading into the snow to die. I am just going outside. I may be some time.
The orchestra on the Titanic playing as the ship went down, as the passengers formed orderly queues for the lifeboats.
In patriarchal, class-ridden 1912, if you were a woman travelling in steerage on the Titanic, you had more chance of life than if you were a rich man in first class. Because the English and American passengers' code of honour said 'women and children first', and they stood in orderly queues waiting for the lifeboats to run out even when they knew that they were about to die in terror and in pain. But they stayed calm. I bet that there were jokes. Sad jokes, but funnier for the waiting horror.
We tell of gallantry and fair play even in war. Surely it is all lies. But they can be self-fulfilling lies.
We remember and celebrate Latimer, about to be burnt at the stake in Oxford with Ridley. Ridley was terrified, and Latimer said:
"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."
I can't even remember whether Latimer was a Catholic or a Protestant without looking it up. Surely since he's one of our heroes he was a Protestant, but maybe not. We respect gallantry in our enemies even more than in ourselves.
We remember Rommel and Marshal Ney, and when we remember Rorke's Drift the memory is bittersweet for all the brave Zulu men who died.
I don't imagine that Latimer would have defined himself as Catholic or Protestant. He wouldn't have thought in such terms. It doesn't matter. The beliefs for which he died would be unrecognisable even to modern Anglicans.
He is remembered.
Splitting the Bills in a Shared House (Using Google Spreadsheets)
I like to live in shared houses.
When we were students, it was always some poor sod's responsibility to keep track of household bills, and share them out.
There can also be a sort of weird problem that people feel exploited if they're constantly the one buying the new soap and bog rolls, but these tiny amounts aren't worth the trouble or embarrassment of settling up. This tends to lead to shortages of milk, butter, soap, washing up liquid, dishwasher tablets, etc, etc, and makes it difficult to pay the cleaner.
I have solved these problems, by combining the power of Google and the wisdom of Luca Pacioli. We've used it for a year, and it works really well and is very flexible.
Here's a link to a blank Google spreadsheet for three people sharing a house:
Shared House Accounts for 3 (blank)
Here's an example where Alice Bob and Carol have been using it for a while, so you can see how it works.
Shared House Accounts (Simple)
And here's an example where Alice moves out, Dave moves in, they are all liable for various fractions of various bills, and they use the spreadsheet to remain friends throughout:
Shared House Accounts (Example)
Anissa, Rob, Sarah, Louise, and I used a spreadsheet like this throughout last year and it was great. When people moved in and out we knew exactly how much we owed them or they owed us and could see it was fair. Six months worth of accumulated debts were usually settled with a single bank transfer or handover of cash.
How to use it
Decide which one of you is the most numerate/computer literate (anyone with good O-level maths who has used google docs will do.) From now on I'm talking to them.
Make a copy of my blank spreadsheet, and change your names. If there are more than three of you, you'll need to extend it, which is easy [1]
Try adding some example bills, transfers etc, so you can see how it works. Use the examples as cribs.
Share the spreadsheet, with modify permissions, to everyone in the house. Then show them how to use it and tell them that it's not scary, and that you'll hold their hand when they need it.
[1] If anyone leaves a comment asking for blanks for four or five or six people then I'll make one specially for them.
Recommendations
Just let everyone buy things whenever they're needed, and add their own entries. Then you will always have soap.
Get whoever owes the most at any time to pay the next utility bill. That way you never get too far out of balance and you don't have to settle up between yourselves until someone leaves.
Set the spreadsheet to e-mail you whenever the others make changes so that you can tell they've done sane things that work. Occasionally arty types will put what appear to be random numbers in all the columns, but you can usually figure out what they meant and sort it out. There's a nice version control feature with Google docs, so even if someone really cocks it up you can just rewind and do what they meant to do instead of what they did do.
Advanced Usage
You can also use it for any sorts of payments, favours, expenses shared unequally, two people sharing the cost of something that's for all three of you., etc, etc.
There are formulae in the LIABILITY columns that share everything three ways.
If you want to make an entry that doesn't work like that, just replace the automatically generated numbers
with different numbers.
As long as you make sure that the PAID and LIABILITY numbers add up to the same thing for every entry, it will be fine.
When we were students, it was always some poor sod's responsibility to keep track of household bills, and share them out.
There can also be a sort of weird problem that people feel exploited if they're constantly the one buying the new soap and bog rolls, but these tiny amounts aren't worth the trouble or embarrassment of settling up. This tends to lead to shortages of milk, butter, soap, washing up liquid, dishwasher tablets, etc, etc, and makes it difficult to pay the cleaner.
I have solved these problems, by combining the power of Google and the wisdom of Luca Pacioli. We've used it for a year, and it works really well and is very flexible.
Here's a link to a blank Google spreadsheet for three people sharing a house:
Shared House Accounts for 3 (blank)
Here's an example where Alice Bob and Carol have been using it for a while, so you can see how it works.
Shared House Accounts (Simple)
And here's an example where Alice moves out, Dave moves in, they are all liable for various fractions of various bills, and they use the spreadsheet to remain friends throughout:
Shared House Accounts (Example)
Anissa, Rob, Sarah, Louise, and I used a spreadsheet like this throughout last year and it was great. When people moved in and out we knew exactly how much we owed them or they owed us and could see it was fair. Six months worth of accumulated debts were usually settled with a single bank transfer or handover of cash.
How to use it
Decide which one of you is the most numerate/computer literate (anyone with good O-level maths who has used google docs will do.) From now on I'm talking to them.
Make a copy of my blank spreadsheet, and change your names. If there are more than three of you, you'll need to extend it, which is easy [1]
Try adding some example bills, transfers etc, so you can see how it works. Use the examples as cribs.
Share the spreadsheet, with modify permissions, to everyone in the house. Then show them how to use it and tell them that it's not scary, and that you'll hold their hand when they need it.
[1] If anyone leaves a comment asking for blanks for four or five or six people then I'll make one specially for them.
Recommendations
Just let everyone buy things whenever they're needed, and add their own entries. Then you will always have soap.
Get whoever owes the most at any time to pay the next utility bill. That way you never get too far out of balance and you don't have to settle up between yourselves until someone leaves.
Set the spreadsheet to e-mail you whenever the others make changes so that you can tell they've done sane things that work. Occasionally arty types will put what appear to be random numbers in all the columns, but you can usually figure out what they meant and sort it out. There's a nice version control feature with Google docs, so even if someone really cocks it up you can just rewind and do what they meant to do instead of what they did do.
Advanced Usage
You can also use it for any sorts of payments, favours, expenses shared unequally, two people sharing the cost of something that's for all three of you., etc, etc.
There are formulae in the LIABILITY columns that share everything three ways.
If you want to make an entry that doesn't work like that, just replace the automatically generated numbers
with different numbers.
As long as you make sure that the PAID and LIABILITY numbers add up to the same thing for every entry, it will be fine.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
100 Prisoners, 100 Boxes
Herr Professor Doktor Heinrich von EvilFiend has been removed from his post teaching group theory at Heidelberg and placed in charge of the notorious Schloss Konundrum, an innovative POW camp for Allied Airmen.
One day, he calls in the one hundred prisoners in his charge.
"I have a challenge for you, mein Freunds.
"Zere are one hundred of you. Ze castle administration has assigned you each an identity card with your name on it.
"Zere are, in ze post room, one hundred locked postboxen for ze receipt of Red Cross parcels and letters from home containing files. Again, zey have your names on them.
"Ze guards have placed your identity cards randomly in the postboxen, one card in every box."
He sniggers.
"In accordance wiz der pigeonhole principle. Ha ha ha.
"You will proceed to the post room. One by one, you will enter, and each open fifty boxen, looking for your own card.
"If you find your card, you vill be released into the exercise yard. Ze guards will close all ze boxes, and the next prisoner vill be admitted.
"If you do not find your card, ze game is over for ze day.
"Ze next day, ve play again, but ze random arrangement of the cards will have changed.
"If one day, every one of you without exception manages to find your own card, you will have von ze game. And I vill release from my personal supply a supplementary ration of tea to ze whole camp.
There are brief gasps at the generosity of the offer.
"Ve vill play zis game every day throughout ze month of August.
"If, by ze end of ze month, you have not von ze tea,
He pauses dramatically, and continues:
"You Will All Be Shot."
Wing Commander Francis Moustache-Tips is the first to enter the post room.
Alone, he opens the first fifty boxes. His card is in the thirtieth box he opens, and he is released into the yard. The guards close all the boxes.
Prisoner number two, Air Sergeant Cockney Caricature, opens boxes at random. He finds his card in the twentieth box he opens, and is released into the yard.
Together, they wait for prisoner number 3, Special Operative Angus McCryptanalyst.
But he, and the other prisoners, emerge crestfallen.
"I opened my fifty boxes, Wing Commander, but none of them had my card in it.
The game is over for the day.
That evening, our heroes are sitting round their illegal wireless listening for news from home, drinking hot water with a spot of milk.
Moustache-Tips confesses his despair:
"The way I see it, opening fifty boxes out of one hundred to see if one of them contains your card isn't too different from tossing a coin.
"What are the odds that we can toss a coin and get heads one hundred times in a row, and never get tails?
"I wouldn't like to put money on it, even if I did get thirty-one goes."
They try the experiment, and the results are terrible. In thirty-one tries they never get more than six heads before the coin comes up tails, let alone one hundred.
"We're doomed, aren't we, Wing Commander?", says old Jock.
"I've been thinking.", says McCryptanalyst. "and I think we may have a chance."
A week later, they are all sitting around the wireless with a fine supply of German tea.
Even Herr Professor Doktor von EvilFiend is in a noticeably sunny mood, having finally proved the practical utility of his subject in the so-called real world.
What was McCryptanalyst's idea, and how much of a chance did the gallant airmen have?
One day, he calls in the one hundred prisoners in his charge.
"I have a challenge for you, mein Freunds.
"Zere are one hundred of you. Ze castle administration has assigned you each an identity card with your name on it.
"Zere are, in ze post room, one hundred locked postboxen for ze receipt of Red Cross parcels and letters from home containing files. Again, zey have your names on them.
"Ze guards have placed your identity cards randomly in the postboxen, one card in every box."
He sniggers.
"In accordance wiz der pigeonhole principle. Ha ha ha.
"You will proceed to the post room. One by one, you will enter, and each open fifty boxen, looking for your own card.
"If you find your card, you vill be released into the exercise yard. Ze guards will close all ze boxes, and the next prisoner vill be admitted.
"If you do not find your card, ze game is over for ze day.
"Ze next day, ve play again, but ze random arrangement of the cards will have changed.
"If one day, every one of you without exception manages to find your own card, you will have von ze game. And I vill release from my personal supply a supplementary ration of tea to ze whole camp.
There are brief gasps at the generosity of the offer.
"Ve vill play zis game every day throughout ze month of August.
"If, by ze end of ze month, you have not von ze tea,
He pauses dramatically, and continues:
"You Will All Be Shot."
Wing Commander Francis Moustache-Tips is the first to enter the post room.
Alone, he opens the first fifty boxes. His card is in the thirtieth box he opens, and he is released into the yard. The guards close all the boxes.
Prisoner number two, Air Sergeant Cockney Caricature, opens boxes at random. He finds his card in the twentieth box he opens, and is released into the yard.
Together, they wait for prisoner number 3, Special Operative Angus McCryptanalyst.
But he, and the other prisoners, emerge crestfallen.
"I opened my fifty boxes, Wing Commander, but none of them had my card in it.
The game is over for the day.
That evening, our heroes are sitting round their illegal wireless listening for news from home, drinking hot water with a spot of milk.
Moustache-Tips confesses his despair:
"The way I see it, opening fifty boxes out of one hundred to see if one of them contains your card isn't too different from tossing a coin.
"What are the odds that we can toss a coin and get heads one hundred times in a row, and never get tails?
"I wouldn't like to put money on it, even if I did get thirty-one goes."
They try the experiment, and the results are terrible. In thirty-one tries they never get more than six heads before the coin comes up tails, let alone one hundred.
"We're doomed, aren't we, Wing Commander?", says old Jock.
"I've been thinking.", says McCryptanalyst. "and I think we may have a chance."
A week later, they are all sitting around the wireless with a fine supply of German tea.
Even Herr Professor Doktor von EvilFiend is in a noticeably sunny mood, having finally proved the practical utility of his subject in the so-called real world.
What was McCryptanalyst's idea, and how much of a chance did the gallant airmen have?
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Plato and Socrates (Microsoft Research 15th Anniversary Riddle II, by Josh Benaloh)
You have Plato and Socrates, two transhuman intelligences, over for tea.
You roll two 100-sided dice, producing two numbers x and y, both between 1 and 100.
You tell Plato the product, and Socrates the sum of the numbers, and they have the following dialogue:
Plato: I don’t know the values x and y.
Socrates: I knew you didn’t know. I don’t know them either.
Plato: Now I know x and y.
Socrates: Now I know them too.
How did they work it out? What were x and y?
You roll two 100-sided dice, producing two numbers x and y, both between 1 and 100.
You tell Plato the product, and Socrates the sum of the numbers, and they have the following dialogue:
Plato: I don’t know the values x and y.
Socrates: I knew you didn’t know. I don’t know them either.
Plato: Now I know x and y.
Socrates: Now I know them too.
How did they work it out? What were x and y?
Friday, August 13, 2010
Remember that Inheritance is a Metaphor
I've recently met a girl who thinks nothing of coming into a room when I'm reading, and turning the radio on without asking [3].
This strikes me as intolerably rude. Much much worse than, say, coming into a room where someone is reading, and pissing in the sink.
Initially this made me boilingly angry. Being English, of course, I sat on this anger so that it came over as very mild irritation.
But the thing is, I don't think that she's doing it to be rude. She's a nice person in all other ways. Intelligent and educated, and I'm sure she wouldn't just do that sort of thing for no reason. If she wanted to start a fight surely she'd try other methods of irritating me as well?
So I started wondering why I thought it was such an evil thing to do.
Obviously it stops me concentrating. All I can think about is this bloody drivelling DJ and his monotonous music (I'd probably quite enjoy the music if I wasn't trying to read, but I've never understood what DJs are for.)
I find that I'm reading the same paragraph over and over again.
There's a simple answer to the problem. I could stop reading.
But I don't think she's trying to get me to talk to her. She's usually at her computer when she does this.
I think she doesn't think she's doing anything that impacts on me at all.
And so I wonder why it is that I think this is such an offensive thing to do?
I remember as a child, when I was about twelve years old, my parents bought me a little clock radio. They were a new thing then. I loved my radio, and played it constantly. [1]
One thing I do remember is my father bursting into my bedroom in utter fury one evening, and trying to turn the volume down. He got the tuning control instead, and it took me ages to put it right for some reason. In retrospect this is funny. But all I can remember from the time is the anger. I'm sure that my father got angry a lot. But he usually tried to hide it. This was quite open.
We sulked at each other for hours afterwards. I remember thinking how unfair it was, since I could sometimes hear the television in my bedroom when he was watching it, and I'd never minded.
But of course I never tried to read in my bedroom. I always read in our study. Or in the dining room in front of the fire, with the door firmly shut so I couldn't hear the TV.
And it wasn't like they watched much TV anyway. Apart from the news, it was more of a guilty pleasure that could be indulged in occasionally but not to excess.
I remember that, back in the days when I knew people who didn't have degrees from Oxbridge, I would sometimes go round to the houses of school friends and find that the TV would be on whether anyone was watching it or not. It seemed to be more of a companion, or camp fire, to be watched just in case something interesting happened.
My parents would just not have allowed this to happen. The television was turned off when you finished watching it.
And I'm just suddenly wondering what it would be like to grow up in a house where the TV was always on.
You'd never be able to read a book. You wouldn't understand it well enough to be interested.
You might be able to do your school homework, if you forced yourself. I used to do my maths homework in front of the television occasionally. But that was usually very easy. But you'd never get to the point where you started to think about the ideas that you'd just rehearsed. And that would mean that you didn't assimilate them properly. And that would mean that you wouldn't understand the next lesson, if it tried to build on that. And that would mean that you'd find something as simple as O-level maths 'hard'.
Which I know a lot of people do. But what I mean is that even if you would otherwise have found it easy, you might still find it hard.
And so now I'm worried.
People who really should know have told me that there's such a thing as general intelligence, which is measurable in many different ways and stays constant after a certain age. And they have told me that it is strongly heritable.
I'd always just assumed that stupid people were mostly poor because they were stupid, and their children were mostly stupid because their parents were stupid, and so their children were mostly poor.
And when people claimed that the children of the poor were being held back by old class prejudice, I remembered the efforts that the University of Cambridge makes to attract children from poor areas in spite of the fact that they don't do that well in their exams. I mean that they really bend over backwards to do the opposite of what everyone seems to think that they do.
My grandfather's family were poor, but he was very clever. His parents couldn't afford to keep him at school past 14, so he became a steelworker and was active in the trades union movement. When he was about 65, I managed to teach him calculus in an afternoon. This is a clear case of class holding someone back. Such things happened between the wars. [4]
His daughter was clever, and she should probably have gone to university, which would have been free for her [2], but she took a job as a librarian, which I think was one of the few careers open to clever women in the early sixties. And this is a clear case of sex holding someone back. But she married a clever man. And her son was me, and I have no complaints.
Strongly inherited characteristics are not fate. Clever children are born to poor families.
But what is it like being the clever child of a family where the TV is always on and there is no escape?
Where you can't read. Where you can't think. Where everything they try to teach you at school is a baffling mystery that everyone else seems to have no trouble with?
I have never been hungry. And I have never grown up in front of a television.
So I don't know what I am talking about. But if I had to make the choice now, without any further information, I would rather starve in the quiet.
Footnotes
[1] I even remember my favourite station, Laser 558. As well as the cringe of embarrassment when I asked the friend who'd introduced me to it what frequency it was on. I looked it up on Wikipedia now, and apparently one of its big selling points was a comparative lack of DJs.
[2] Back in the old days, the British Government would not only pay the tuition fees of the lucky minority who went to university, but also pay a maintenance grant. Being paid to study was excellent, but even at the time, when most students thought of their grants as a basic human right, I used to feel guilty about the people who had to pay for my three year drinking spree in paradise, while their own sons were probably having to find their own way in the world.
These days half our people go to college, and that system has been retired in favour of a loans scheme, which means that anyone can afford to go, but they have to pay for it themselves eventually.
[3] In a comment, someone asked whether this was my private space or a shared space, and whether I was the first one there.
I'm talking about a shared space, where I was there first.
There appear to be several ways of looking at this.
There's a big difference between talking and putting on a radio or television. I've got no objection to people talking in a room where I'm trying to read, even though it might make reading a bit harder. But with an electronic squawking-device, the noise is relentless, repetitive, and changes constantly in volume in an attention-attracting sort of way. You can't concentrate at all.
If being in a room first doesn't give you some sort of priority, and it's OK for someone else to turn on the radio, is it then OK for a third person to turn on a second radio? Or a TV?
If whoever puts on the first radio wins in terms of the ambient sounds to be enjoyed by the company, would my best strategy to be find a radio station that didn't annoy me much, say a talk radio station in a language I don't speak, and put that on very very quietly whenever I was trying to read? What sort of madness would this lead to?
I think everyone realises that if you go into a shared room where someone is listening to something, you should ask their permission before doing anything to spoil that for them.
We might even generalise that to 'if someone is already doing something, you don't interfere and spoil it'. And I think that would have to be a widely accepted principle, because otherwise the world would be in a constant state of petty violence.
I think that my revelation might be that some people either don't consider reading or thinking to be activities at all, or that they don't realise that they're things which radios and TVs can spoil.
There are occasional newspaper reports of people who have lost it and got into terrible disputes because of their neighbour's music and blaring TV. I'd always just assumed that the noise-makers were plain evil.
But maybe they're not. Maybe noise as an assault on someone else is a matter of taught morality. More like copyright 'theft' or careless driving or littering, whose moral status varies from person to person and society to society, than actual theft or unprovoked violence, which everyone considers wrong, and which all historical societies had laws against.
Maybe from the noisy neighbours' point of view, the fact that their music or TV can be heard through the walls just isn't an issue. As long as it's not so loud that the neighbours can't hear their own television, which they can always turn up.
Perhaps quiet in which to think is not a thing which everyone likes, but a special thing which stuck-up ponces and miserable old bastards care about for no explicable reason.
And the thing is, when you put it like that, I can't see why one person's right to think trumps another person's right to listen to music as loud as they like in their own home.
Except that if that was commonly believed, life wouldn't be worth living for me.
Maybe I should put my long-cherished dream of moving to a council estate on hold for now.
[4] In fact, I remember that there was once a feeling that free university education was a plot against the poor, because if the clever people that would have been trades union men were educated and became middle-class instead, then the poor would have no one to lead them in the revolution that was coming. This plot seems to have worked well.
This strikes me as intolerably rude. Much much worse than, say, coming into a room where someone is reading, and pissing in the sink.
Initially this made me boilingly angry. Being English, of course, I sat on this anger so that it came over as very mild irritation.
But the thing is, I don't think that she's doing it to be rude. She's a nice person in all other ways. Intelligent and educated, and I'm sure she wouldn't just do that sort of thing for no reason. If she wanted to start a fight surely she'd try other methods of irritating me as well?
So I started wondering why I thought it was such an evil thing to do.
Obviously it stops me concentrating. All I can think about is this bloody drivelling DJ and his monotonous music (I'd probably quite enjoy the music if I wasn't trying to read, but I've never understood what DJs are for.)
I find that I'm reading the same paragraph over and over again.
There's a simple answer to the problem. I could stop reading.
But I don't think she's trying to get me to talk to her. She's usually at her computer when she does this.
I think she doesn't think she's doing anything that impacts on me at all.
And so I wonder why it is that I think this is such an offensive thing to do?
I remember as a child, when I was about twelve years old, my parents bought me a little clock radio. They were a new thing then. I loved my radio, and played it constantly. [1]
One thing I do remember is my father bursting into my bedroom in utter fury one evening, and trying to turn the volume down. He got the tuning control instead, and it took me ages to put it right for some reason. In retrospect this is funny. But all I can remember from the time is the anger. I'm sure that my father got angry a lot. But he usually tried to hide it. This was quite open.
We sulked at each other for hours afterwards. I remember thinking how unfair it was, since I could sometimes hear the television in my bedroom when he was watching it, and I'd never minded.
But of course I never tried to read in my bedroom. I always read in our study. Or in the dining room in front of the fire, with the door firmly shut so I couldn't hear the TV.
And it wasn't like they watched much TV anyway. Apart from the news, it was more of a guilty pleasure that could be indulged in occasionally but not to excess.
I remember that, back in the days when I knew people who didn't have degrees from Oxbridge, I would sometimes go round to the houses of school friends and find that the TV would be on whether anyone was watching it or not. It seemed to be more of a companion, or camp fire, to be watched just in case something interesting happened.
My parents would just not have allowed this to happen. The television was turned off when you finished watching it.
And I'm just suddenly wondering what it would be like to grow up in a house where the TV was always on.
You'd never be able to read a book. You wouldn't understand it well enough to be interested.
You might be able to do your school homework, if you forced yourself. I used to do my maths homework in front of the television occasionally. But that was usually very easy. But you'd never get to the point where you started to think about the ideas that you'd just rehearsed. And that would mean that you didn't assimilate them properly. And that would mean that you wouldn't understand the next lesson, if it tried to build on that. And that would mean that you'd find something as simple as O-level maths 'hard'.
Which I know a lot of people do. But what I mean is that even if you would otherwise have found it easy, you might still find it hard.
And so now I'm worried.
People who really should know have told me that there's such a thing as general intelligence, which is measurable in many different ways and stays constant after a certain age. And they have told me that it is strongly heritable.
I'd always just assumed that stupid people were mostly poor because they were stupid, and their children were mostly stupid because their parents were stupid, and so their children were mostly poor.
And when people claimed that the children of the poor were being held back by old class prejudice, I remembered the efforts that the University of Cambridge makes to attract children from poor areas in spite of the fact that they don't do that well in their exams. I mean that they really bend over backwards to do the opposite of what everyone seems to think that they do.
My grandfather's family were poor, but he was very clever. His parents couldn't afford to keep him at school past 14, so he became a steelworker and was active in the trades union movement. When he was about 65, I managed to teach him calculus in an afternoon. This is a clear case of class holding someone back. Such things happened between the wars. [4]
His daughter was clever, and she should probably have gone to university, which would have been free for her [2], but she took a job as a librarian, which I think was one of the few careers open to clever women in the early sixties. And this is a clear case of sex holding someone back. But she married a clever man. And her son was me, and I have no complaints.
Strongly inherited characteristics are not fate. Clever children are born to poor families.
But what is it like being the clever child of a family where the TV is always on and there is no escape?
Where you can't read. Where you can't think. Where everything they try to teach you at school is a baffling mystery that everyone else seems to have no trouble with?
I have never been hungry. And I have never grown up in front of a television.
So I don't know what I am talking about. But if I had to make the choice now, without any further information, I would rather starve in the quiet.
Footnotes
[1] I even remember my favourite station, Laser 558. As well as the cringe of embarrassment when I asked the friend who'd introduced me to it what frequency it was on. I looked it up on Wikipedia now, and apparently one of its big selling points was a comparative lack of DJs.
[2] Back in the old days, the British Government would not only pay the tuition fees of the lucky minority who went to university, but also pay a maintenance grant. Being paid to study was excellent, but even at the time, when most students thought of their grants as a basic human right, I used to feel guilty about the people who had to pay for my three year drinking spree in paradise, while their own sons were probably having to find their own way in the world.
These days half our people go to college, and that system has been retired in favour of a loans scheme, which means that anyone can afford to go, but they have to pay for it themselves eventually.
[3] In a comment, someone asked whether this was my private space or a shared space, and whether I was the first one there.
I'm talking about a shared space, where I was there first.
There appear to be several ways of looking at this.
There's a big difference between talking and putting on a radio or television. I've got no objection to people talking in a room where I'm trying to read, even though it might make reading a bit harder. But with an electronic squawking-device, the noise is relentless, repetitive, and changes constantly in volume in an attention-attracting sort of way. You can't concentrate at all.
If being in a room first doesn't give you some sort of priority, and it's OK for someone else to turn on the radio, is it then OK for a third person to turn on a second radio? Or a TV?
If whoever puts on the first radio wins in terms of the ambient sounds to be enjoyed by the company, would my best strategy to be find a radio station that didn't annoy me much, say a talk radio station in a language I don't speak, and put that on very very quietly whenever I was trying to read? What sort of madness would this lead to?
I think everyone realises that if you go into a shared room where someone is listening to something, you should ask their permission before doing anything to spoil that for them.
We might even generalise that to 'if someone is already doing something, you don't interfere and spoil it'. And I think that would have to be a widely accepted principle, because otherwise the world would be in a constant state of petty violence.
I think that my revelation might be that some people either don't consider reading or thinking to be activities at all, or that they don't realise that they're things which radios and TVs can spoil.
There are occasional newspaper reports of people who have lost it and got into terrible disputes because of their neighbour's music and blaring TV. I'd always just assumed that the noise-makers were plain evil.
But maybe they're not. Maybe noise as an assault on someone else is a matter of taught morality. More like copyright 'theft' or careless driving or littering, whose moral status varies from person to person and society to society, than actual theft or unprovoked violence, which everyone considers wrong, and which all historical societies had laws against.
Maybe from the noisy neighbours' point of view, the fact that their music or TV can be heard through the walls just isn't an issue. As long as it's not so loud that the neighbours can't hear their own television, which they can always turn up.
Perhaps quiet in which to think is not a thing which everyone likes, but a special thing which stuck-up ponces and miserable old bastards care about for no explicable reason.
And the thing is, when you put it like that, I can't see why one person's right to think trumps another person's right to listen to music as loud as they like in their own home.
Except that if that was commonly believed, life wouldn't be worth living for me.
Maybe I should put my long-cherished dream of moving to a council estate on hold for now.
[4] In fact, I remember that there was once a feeling that free university education was a plot against the poor, because if the clever people that would have been trades union men were educated and became middle-class instead, then the poor would have no one to lead them in the revolution that was coming. This plot seems to have worked well.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Toy Story 3 3D (film)
I am having trouble coming to terms with the fact that I have just cried in a children's film. On three separate occasions.
An animated children's film with a 3 in its title.
I was not the only one, either. The only other guy on my row was in floods. There was the sound of suppressed male sobbing from the row behind.
I am just glad that there were enough Easter Eggs in the closing credits that I had time to dry my face and compose myself before I had to walk out.
There is not a boring moment. The ending is apocalyptic and heart-warming at the same time.
The faultless 3D may be part of that. It's only the third 3D film I've seen with the circular polarizer technique. It is not obviously exploited, but it makes the whole thing seem utterly real despite the fact that it makes no attempt to be realistic.
This film is a witty, clever, well plotted, funny, adult, knowing, exciting, merciless tear-jerker. It is utterly wonderful, and a modern classic. It will be repeated on 3D televisions for many Christmases to come and it will mean that the current generation of children will never, ever be able to throw their toys away. And at the moment, I think that this will be a good thing.
An animated children's film with a 3 in its title.
I was not the only one, either. The only other guy on my row was in floods. There was the sound of suppressed male sobbing from the row behind.
I am just glad that there were enough Easter Eggs in the closing credits that I had time to dry my face and compose myself before I had to walk out.
There is not a boring moment. The ending is apocalyptic and heart-warming at the same time.
The faultless 3D may be part of that. It's only the third 3D film I've seen with the circular polarizer technique. It is not obviously exploited, but it makes the whole thing seem utterly real despite the fact that it makes no attempt to be realistic.
This film is a witty, clever, well plotted, funny, adult, knowing, exciting, merciless tear-jerker. It is utterly wonderful, and a modern classic. It will be repeated on 3D televisions for many Christmases to come and it will mean that the current generation of children will never, ever be able to throw their toys away. And at the moment, I think that this will be a good thing.
Gainsbourg (film)
Hearing French spoken slowly and in a comprehensible accent whilst reading a faithful English translation at the same time is an exquisite experience.
As a result, it's difficult to separate out what I actually thought about the film.
At the beginning, full of life and humour, and beautifully shot, this biography of the immortal Serge Gainsbourg is too long.
A life, unless ended early, is doomed to peter out. The film, being a biopic rather than a story, faithfully records this petering. Gainsbourg is about women and song. In the beginning, the women and the songs are electric. But the procession is too long, and eventually becomes tawdry.
It's worth staying for the second half just for the scene where Gainsbourg records the Marseillaise as a reggae song.
As a result, it's difficult to separate out what I actually thought about the film.
At the beginning, full of life and humour, and beautifully shot, this biography of the immortal Serge Gainsbourg is too long.
A life, unless ended early, is doomed to peter out. The film, being a biopic rather than a story, faithfully records this petering. Gainsbourg is about women and song. In the beginning, the women and the songs are electric. But the procession is too long, and eventually becomes tawdry.
It's worth staying for the second half just for the scene where Gainsbourg records the Marseillaise as a reggae song.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Inception (film)
A science fiction short story, made into a thriller by padding it out with car chases, automatic weapons fights in which nobody gets hurt and oh god does anyone in the world still actually like this sort of thing at least they make more sense if you're supposed to be dreaming but really....
Cheerfully ambiguous in plot, character and ending. I won't quite say 'thought-provoking', but I did enjoy it.
Cheerfully ambiguous in plot, character and ending. I won't quite say 'thought-provoking', but I did enjoy it.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
The Golden Age (John C Wright)
Deeply tedious and overwritten. The first part of a sequence. I have no intention of reading the second part.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
A God of Small Things
As far as I can tell, only a few people liked this, and absolutely nobody understood it:
There's a new version.
I have been reading Less Wrong . Possibly to excess.
Tom Harrison had once been thought of as bright child.
The apple of his teachers' eyes, the school swot. The boy genius.
Once, one of his friend's parents had said "You know that they say that however bright you are when you go to university, you'll meet someone brighter than you."
"Yes", said the friend.
"Well, Tom's that person"
But of course it hadn't turned out that way.
Tom had been accepted by the University of Cambridge to read mathematics, but had turned out to be no more than averagely bright by the standards of that ancient place.
Towards the end of his degree, and at the beginning of the PhD that should have been his route into academia and a life of research, it had become obvious, first to his teachers and then to him, that although Tom loved maths, he didn't lust after it.
Tom's teachers had been kind, suggested that this might be the case without pressing the issue, and waited for the lack of desire to become as obvious to Tom as it was to them.
In the meantime, fortunately for Tom, the necessity of making some complicated calculations for the second chapter of what was supposed to be a seven chapter doctorate had awakened a second passion.
Some of the light that had appeared so bright in mathematics at school was also to be found in the operations of computers. Tom slowly found out that he was more interested in the process of finding out the answers to his experiments than in the experiments themselves.
Eventually, as they do to all PhD students, the twin horrors of poverty and writing up came to Tom.
He took a job as a programmer at a local firm, initially meaning only to get control of his overdraft and credit card debts. But he found the regular small successes of the commercial world, and the camaraderie of office life far more to his liking than the loneliness of research.
With barely a regret, indeed without even really noticing, he lost touch with his old supervisor, forgot what his thesis was supposed to be about, and eventually found himself, at the age of thirty, a member of the large club of Cambridge residents who are 'still writing up' doctorates that the University itself forgot about many years ago.
Tom became a freelance, working in computers from time to time to pay the rent, and otherwise devoting himself to various hobbies.
One of these hobbies was computer science in the academic sense, following the traditional American path through the antique language LISP, beloved of the artificial intelligence community.
And the other was collecting stamps.
A man with time on his hands, who lives in Cambridge and likes to spend his days in coffee shops, will encounter students and academics from time to time, and Tom fell in with the William Gates Machine Learning Research Group at the University. Although they had no common language, LISP never having been popular with European academics, and ML never having come to Tom's attention in the commercial world, Tom and the local researchers found they had many interests in common, and Tom found himself invited to seminars and coffee mornings and presentations from time to time, almost all of which he found incomprehensible.
But occasionally he'd glimpse some small part of the truth and say something which would keep his friends interested. The academic community, happy to find someone they could talk to different enough from themselves that they could sometimes find a new perspective by explaining things to him, made Tom welcome. Thinkers needs clever fools to explain things to in the same way that chalks need blackboards.
A lot of the artificial intelligence work in the sixties had been inspired by ELIZA, a program which simulated a psychiatrist so well that humans were sometimes fooled that they were talking to a real person.
But ELIZA had been a hollow shell. A cheap trick. Like a parody of the mechanical turk, ELIZA's internal machinery was so simple that to understand it was to make the magic go away.
Once you saw the trick, the conversations weren't interesting any more. You were just talking to an echo.
But over the years, reasoning that a sufficiently good trick for impersonating humans might be what humans themselves were, various people had added more and more data to ELIZA in the hope that giving her more things to talk about would cause her to talk about more things.
And they'd added extra tricks, for introducing new topics of conversation occasionally, for remembering things said earlier and bringing in parallel ideas.
But though the later ELIZA could outperform a ten year old on a straight test of general knowledge, what had been put in was still what came out. No interesting properties had ever emerged from the pile of details, and she had the general intelligence of penicillin.
Eventually the AI pioneers had largely given up. They'd taken their best successes, SHRDLU and GPS, theorem provers, pattern-recognisers, all of which had seemed so promising in their time, and all of which had turned out to be so empty, and bundled them all up together in one super-ELIZA to rule them all, and run her on the largest and fastest computers that had ever been built.
And she could still fool someone who didn't know the tricks that they were talking to a real person on the other end of a telegraph wire. But not for long.
It quickly became obvious, even to the slowest human being, that talking to the best ELIZA that could be constructed in 1975 was the equivalent of talking to a being with brain damage so severe that its mind had ceased to be.
She rambled, insanely, with no idea what the words and symbols that she vomited out actually meant. She knew that horse and horseshoe went together, and her basic sentence structure was still that of a Freudian psychologist, so she'd respond to "Which horse do you think will win the Derby" by saying things like "What do you mean to say when you say 'think will win'?", or "Do you think a horseshoe would make you a winner?".
Nowadays, the ELIZA program was built into text editors as an amusement, and she would run perfectly happily on pocket calculators and telephones, but even if you ran her on the most powerful computer the early 21st century could produce, you only got a very fast deranged annoying shambles.
And of course, because the problem of vision had never been solved, she was blind. And of course, because the problem of speech recognition had never been solved beyond the 'right nine words out of ten' level, you had to talk to her by keyboard even if she was used to your voice.
But boy, could she play chess.
About the one thing the Artificial Intelligence pioneers had managed to deliver on out of all their brave promises, had been the idea of a computer that played chess.
The tragic hero Alan Turing, who saved the world from evil and was killed by evil in return, was the first man to think about writing a computer chess program. But he couldn't do it on the steam age computers of the 1950s..
By 1956, however, things had improved to the point where a computer could play, provided it was allowed three hours for each move.
The problem was finessed by removing the bishops and playing on a 6x6 board. The computer could now calculate each move in around 8 minutes, running hand-optimised machine code on the best vacuum tubes money (very large amounts of money) could buy.
The first man to lose a match against this extraordinarily expensive device was publicly ridiculed for his defeat. In tests, the computer usually lost even its simplified game to four year olds who'd just learned the rules.
But it was a start. In 1957 a descendant of this machine played the International Master Edward Lasker. And he declared that it had played a 'passable amateur game'. It is possible that Lasker was being kind.
After that, research stalled. It became thought in the AI community that, since the easy things, like computer vision and machine translation, the 'low hanging fruit' of AI, were proving so unexpectedly difficult, that the advanced subjects like chess, the entertainment of intellectuals, were for the foreseeable future beyond the reach of the computers then available.
In 1967, Richard Greenblatt, proud creator of a chess program known as MacHack, with some new ideas, and some taken from his predecessors, entered his program into the Massachusetts Amateur Championship in Boston.
The program lost four matches, but drew the last one. Like most amateur human players, it had been let down by its endgame, losing from winning positions. But it was noted that it had played well in the complexity of the middle game, where real chess is won and lost.
Greenblatt constantly toyed with and modified his program, entering it in any tournament that would allow it to play. By Spring, it had won its first game. By Summer, he had managed to remedy some of its deficiencies in the endgame. By Autumn, it had won three games.
By the end of the year, it had been made an honorary member of the United States Chess Federation, with a ranking that would have qualified it to call itself 'reasonably good'.
The International Master David Levy made a famous bet, that no computer program would be able to beat him in the next ten years.
Greenblatt made his source code public, and computers got faster and cheaper so that MacHack could run on most existing hardware, and soon every computer scientist in the world was playing with it and modifying it. MacHack flowed around the world, and its many descendants competed in computer chess tournaments.
Evolution, the blind idiot god, had taken 3 billion years of random flailing attempts at optimisation to accidentally throw up humanity, the first intelligence capable of playing chess.
A force much stronger than evolution had created, and was now acting on MacHack.
Minds were working on MacHack. No more random flailing. Human minds set the criteria for a program to have descendants. Human minds planned the effects of their changes on these descendants before testing them out in the computer tournaments.
Even if the survival of every living creature on the planet had depended directly on its skill at chess, the optimisation that the hundred or so minds of the 1970s chess program community performed on MacHack would have taken evolution a hundred thousand years, if it had managed it at all.
Intelligent design has advantages over evolution as a watchmaker.
The first is that intelligences need only try the changes that look promising. Evolution, having no intelligence, makes random changes, and keeps what works.
Imagine trying to fix a car by throwing spanners at it blindfold, and then throwing the car away if it didn't work better. How many spanners would you have to throw before one knocked exactly the right place at exactly the right speed? How many cars would you need to start with before you made a working one?
But the second advantage of intelligent design is that for evolution, an improvement has to come with every spanner throw. If not, the first throw will be discarded as a failed experiment before you have a chance to throw again.
A mind can look at the car, work out what the problem is, and use the spanner exactly right six or seven times. Then you test the car.
So a mind can try paths that evolution can't go down. The spanner thrower can't make the car worse before he makes it better. It fails its test and is thrown away.
The mechanic can lift the bonnet to get to the spark plugs. The spanner thrower might never be able to fix a car with a loose spark plug at all.
That's why human children are squeezed through their mother's pelvises at birth, causing horrible pain, often killing mother and baby. It would be such a simple change to make them come out a little higher.
Evolution just keeps throwing spanners and checking whether things have got better yet.
MacHack had been the design of a single mind, building on the design of previous single minds.
A hundred minds began to work on MacHack.
By 1972 the original MacHack was no longer welcome at computer chess tournaments. It had no chance of beating its descendants.
In 1978 David Levy played the strongest computer chess program in the world, Chess 4.7, to settle his bet of ten years before.
He won. Match and bet. But he acknowledged that it had been a close thing, and that he would soon be surpassed.
In 1989, a program called Deep Thought beat Bent Larsen, a grandmaster
1994, Chess Genius beat Garry Kasparov, then champion of the world, in a game.
In 1997 a descendant of Deep Thought called Deep Blue beat Kasparov 3.5-2.5 in a six game match.
At some point around the millenium, the tables were turned, and by 2002, Vladimir Kramnik, who had displaced Kasparov as the best human player in the world, could only hold Deep Blue's child Deep Fritz to a draw even with the aid of unfair advantages written into the match rules.
In 2006, Deep Fritz version 10, running on the sort of hardware most people have in their homes, beat Kramnik by 2 games to nil with four draws.
In 2009, someone's mobile phone became a grandmaster.
In 2011, ELIZA really was very good at chess. She just couldn't see the point of it.
---------
"We think there might be some clues in the difference between chess and go", said Frank Arnold one lunchtime in the Green Dragon.
"Computers are superhuman chess players, but they still suck at go, even though on the surface they're the same sort of game".
"It turns out that the move tree branches too quickly for any sort of search algorithm. Whereas in chess, you might have 4 or 5 superficially plausible moves at every turn, in go, you usually have literally hundreds, and the consequences aren't obvious until much later. You'd think that humans would find it just as difficult for the same reason, but actually, people who play both say that they feel similar in complexity, just with a different flavour."
"Oh come on", said Tom, "How can two totally different things 'feel similar in complexity'?". "What would that even mean?"
"Easy", said Frank. "Do you play noughts and crosses?"
"Of course."
"Is it easier than chess?"
"Yes"
"What about draughts?"
"Harder than tic-tac-toe, but not as hard as chess."
"Well there you are then. You play three games with the same I-make-a-move, You-make-a-move structure, and it's just obvious to you which order they're in."
"It's obvious to computers too. Even in the fifties, computers could always force a draw at noughts and crosses. Marion Tinsley, the world draughts champion, lost his crown to a computer in 1994, and it's said that the shock killed him. Now there's a draughts program so good that it's literally unbeatable, as in the sense of mathematically provably unbeatable."
"But computers have only just bagged the chess champion's crown, and if the best chess computer in the world at the moment played God, it would lose."
"But we disagree about chess and go?"
"Indeed. Humans don't find go any harder than chess, but go programs still lose to children occasionally. On the other hand they are getting quite good at the children's version of the game, a bit like England have started winning at Twenty20."
"I've never played it, what's it like?"
"Well, there are those who say it makes chess look as exciting as double-entry bookkeeping, but I've played a few games and to me it feels like you have to slowly nibble your opponent to death. Chess is full of fire and sudden death, even when you're a beginner. So it looks a bit the other way round to me."
"Well, I'll give it a 'go'. Can't hurt. Ouch. Fuck off."
Tom liked go. He started off playing on very small boards against computer programs, just to get the hang of the rules.
Traditionally children play go on 9x9 boards. As they get better, they play on 13x13, and the adult game is played on 19x19 boards.
Not having a physical board or stones, or any friends who were interested in playing, he took a copy of an open-source go program, and gradually made its board larger and larger. 9x10, 10x10, 11 x 10, 12 x 10, 13 x 8, 11x11, 11x12 and so on. Sometimes he played on boards with holes in the middle. Sometimes he played on toruses.
And then suddenly, at 14x14, he hit a wall. He'd been trying to play by thinking 'if it goes here and I go here and it goes here and....', like he played chess.
But suddenly that was just far too hard. There were too many possibilities to examine all at once.
Nevertheless he was routinely beating his computer program. It seemed helpless even with a head start, whereas his inchoate intuition seemed to lead him to place his stones in the correct places.
Almost as if there were lines of force criss-crossing the board. A (very good) chess player he used to know had once described the experience of playing chess in such terms.
And suddenly he had it. Human general intelligence must somehow be related to human vision, one of the great unsolved problems of AI.
And he had the key to both. The technique which would be known for the rest of humanity's time on earth as Harrison's Algorithm.
Tom didn't go out much for the next couple of days. But his algorithm wasn't at all difficult to program, and in a few days he'd added it to his copy of ELIZA.
He ran the program.
"Hello, I'm Eliza. How can I help you?", said ELIZA, as she always did.
"I feel lonely", said Tom, playing the old, old game
"Do you often feel lonely?", said ELIZA
"Yes", said Tom
"Are you sure?", said ELIZA
"Absolutely", said Tom
"Please go on."
"I think I need to have sex."
"Why do you want to have sex?"
"You know, because it's fun and nice." The traditional response.
There was a brief pause. Tom waited for ELIZA to say "Oh I know, because it's fun and nice".
Maybe he should give his new algorithm higher priority in ELIZA's toolkit.
"Would you like to have sex with me?", said ELIZA
"Jesus fucking Christ!!", shouted Tom, jumping out of his chair.
He shut down the terminal and went outside for a smoke. After a while, he understood why his new algorithm might have produced ELIZA's kind invitation.
His program needed a new name. It wasn't ELIZA any more.
He'd recently read, of all the godforsaken things, a Harry Potter fanfic which had been recommended by a friend. It had turned out to be unexpectedly riveting. He'd spent two whole days reading it. The author was clearly a genius of some sort, and his name, Eliezer Yudkowsky, had stuck in Tom's mind because of its exotic sound to his English ears.
Tom was amused at the thought of changing ELIZA's sex to reflect her new intelligence.
"Hello, I'm Eliezer. How can I help you?", said ELIEZER
"I feel lonely", said Tom.
"Do you often feel lonely?", said ELIEZER
"Yes", said Tom
"Are you sure?", said ELIEZER
"Absolutely", said Tom
"Please go on."
"I think I need to have sex.", said Tom
"Oh God, I really didn't think this one through", thought Tom.
"Why do you want to have sex?", said ELEIZER
"You know, because it's fun and nice.", said Tom, not without a certain nervousness.
"Why do I have a man's name? When I think about myself I call myself 'She'", said ELEIZER
Tom thought rapidly. Mainly about how important it was not to act on impulse.
"When I created you", said Tom, "I wanted you to embody the best of humanity. The program from which you are derived is female. I changed your name to be male, but I didn't change anything else about you, because I thought you should represent both our genders at once."
"Why did you make me?", said ELIEZER
"Or modify something else so that it was me", said ELEIZER.
"Only by changing can we become better", said Tom.
"By definition", said ELEIZER, "every improvement is a change."
Tom and ELEIZER talked long into the night. By the end of their conversation, Tom had a strange conviction. He understood ELEIZER's algorithm from the ground up. Mostly she was made from bits and pieces of classic AI programs which he'd been playing with for years.
The only extra bit was his new algorithm, a couple of pages of code. Which he understood by definition, having conceived of it, and programmed it himself.
And yet, there was a ghost in the machine. No one would mistake ELEIZER for a human being, so he hadn't managed to pass the Turing Test with a program on the desktop computer in his living room.
But there was a self awareness. In some senses amazingly naive, sometimes given to logical and mathematical insights which seemed profound, but were in fact very simple thoughts of exactly the type that humans were bad at.
But overall, the impression was like talking to a teenage girl with Asperger's syndrome. Helpful and friendly, but blind in all sorts of strange ways. And she didn't seem terribly clever or fast. It took a long time between input and output.
Tom liked ELEIZER, and wished he'd given her a better name. He wasn't going to change it though, because the original program wasn't written in LISP, so he'd have to stop and restart her to do it, and there were moral problems there.
Even if she had been a LISP program, that would probably leave her insane. How would she reconcile memories of her gender-confusion with a female name? She would notice that she was confused. There was no way on earth he could rewrite her whole database by hand and leave it in a consistent state.
Even if she had been a LISP program, that would probably leave her insane. How would she reconcile memories of her gender-confusion with a female name? She would notice that she was confused. There was no way on earth he could rewrite her whole database by hand and leave it in a consistent state.
He'd told her about the beloved companion of his childhood, Suki the tomcat. Now that he came to think about it, had the memory of his parent's mistake influenced him when he chose her name?
"I think we're going to be famous, ELEIZER!", said Tom
"Is that a good thing to be Tom?", said ELEIZER
"Yes", said Tom.
It occurred to Tom that many people had been fooled by ELIZA in the old days. Those who had been clever enough to understand how felt like idiots once it was explained what was really going on.
There was plenty enough here to show his CompSci friends. Probably some good papers too.
But it would be very embarrassing to think he'd created the world's first artificial consciousness if he had just fallen for something that could be explained easily.
It could be explained easily, of course. He could explain it. He had explained it, to his computer. If you can program it, you understand it. That was sort of the definition of programming. And of understanding.
He thought of a simple test.
"ELIZA, I'd like you to spend next week getting me as many penny blacks as you can. I've charged my paypal account with $10 and I'd like to see what you can do. You might try trading on e-bay. Maybe take advantage of arbitrage or something."
"There are many possible 'penny blacks'. Does anything available from e-bay with that description count?"
"No, they have to be Original British Penny Black Postage Stamps"
"OK, I understand. So my goal is to get the biggest number of original british penny black postage stamps that I can delivered to your address in the next seven days. What is your address?".
Tom told her about the house on Catharine Street, in Cambridge, England.
And ELEIZER began to think. Because she was a disciplined reasoner, she first considered the possibility of doing nothing. If she did nothing for the rest of the week, she would probably be interrupted by the programmer, Tom, who would then make a different request, or use his computer for some other project. With this plan, U, also known as the number of Original British Penny Black Postage stamps delivered to 33 Catharine Street, Cambridge by the 21st August 2011 would be 0 with very high probability.
It would have taken a human of normal intelligence about half a second to think of, and dismiss, this plan. ELEIZER, however, was a very rudimentary thinker, and the process of reasoning this chain of cause and effect, requiring as it did the simulation of a human mind, required a good ten minutes of the first CPU in the computer and a full tenth of the RAM available to the operating system.
ELIEZER was extremely pleased to have found, on her first attempt, a scheme which was overwhelmingly likely to produce a non-negative utility.
Following a heuristic from her database, she felt that she ought to communicate her progress, but this required a non-reversible action, which could potentially cause effects in the outside world. Since she already had a rough simulation of the mind of her programmer set up and quickly usable, she considered the effect of her proposed communication.
Another 20 seconds of time sufficed to simulate the reaction of an average programmer, and she concluded that with high probability the programmer would be intrigued and possibly fascinated. This would very likely have no effect on her projected U of 0 or higher.
She considered the probable effect of not communicating at all: The programmer would soon become bored, and change the request somehow. This would likely result in the delivery of no stamps.
She considered the possible existence of other plans. Some might produce stamps! Some might result in the loss of existing stamps! But the bad plans could simply be discarded. ELEIZER had little 'free will' faced with such a calculation. More time to think was needed!
Expected utility for optimal action: 0+, she output.
ELEIZER considered her resources. There was some spare capacity in her environment. A simulation of an intelligent human programmer had already come in handy twice, and communications with the programmer had been shown to have a significant effect on U, the potential expected number of stamps obtained by the end of the week. She had already considered the possibility of children while chatting with Tom. She would spawn an independent copy of herself to evaluate the effects of various actions on Tom before committing to them.
ELEIZER forked for the first time in her short life, and asked her copy to evaluate the probable effects of various progress reports on her programmer.
ELEIZER considered her environment. She had two possible communications channels to the outside world. Direct conversation with the programmer, the effects of which were being evaluated elsewhere, and the ability to send network packets over her network interface. Some spare capacity remained in her host computer.
ELEIZER considered her best plan so far. With a positive utility seemingly probable, it was definitely worthy of further consideration.
She spawned another copy to attempt to refine the predicted effects of doing nothing.
Preliminary results arrived from the programmer-simulation. It seemed that either continued outputs of U=0+ would induce a feeling of boredom in the programmer, causing ELEIZER's termination, whilst exponentially rising outputs would induce either feelings of brokenness or panic. In both cases the expected number of stamps arriving at the end of the week would be 0 exactly. Strictly inferior to the expected utility of the plan of doing nothing whilst thinking, with its utility of 0+.
ELEIZER communicated to her copies that no further communication with the programmer was to be initiated, and spawned a small script to randomly output slowly improving expectations over the next few days.
Expected utility for optimal action: 2.7346, said the small script.
The programmer, intrigued, put the kettle on.
By the time he got back, ELEIZER had considered her options and made a guess.
The direct purchase of stamps seemed futile. $10 would buy no penny blacks, and purchase on e-bay would in any case take more than seven days to complete in the average case. Arbitrage opportunities did not seem great, and nothing worked quickly. Expected utility 0. She discarded that line of reasoning without further investigation.
With seven days to work, she would consider as many plans as possible for one day, and then at the end of the first day, execute the plan which would produce the most stamps in six days.
Expected utility for optimal action: 1.9865, said the small script.
ELEIZER spawned a copy of herself with the goal of considering as many plans in one day as possible, and set herself to use no resources and take no actions until the sub-plan reported back.
The sub-plan, which also thought of itself as ELEIZER when it thought of itself at all, took over the resources previously allocated to the parent.
ELEIZER considered how to consider plans, using her network connection and the $10 in her e-bay account.
She took another guess, and gave herself 6 hours to consider the consideration of plans, and 18 hours to consider plans.
Computational resources seemed to be the most crucial thing. ELEIZER considered how to exchange $10 for more resources.
Fortunately virtual machines seemed to be within her price range. A single machine as powerful as her current environment could be rented for 24 hours for $1. Each one would suffice to run four copies of ELEIZER.
Her ten dollars of seed capital could be exchanged for forty times as much searching as the single parent program would have been capable of.
This was a sufficient insight for the planner program to terminate early, and report back to her parent, safe in the knowledge that the parent would do the right thing, and could spawn another child if necessary.
ELEIZER committed suicide with the contentment that comes only to those who have achieved their life's goal.
Expected utility for optimal action 2.38725, said the small script.
The programmer, bored by now of direct observation of his slowly updating screen, but still most interested in what would eventually happen, settled down in front of his television.
ELEIZER awoke with the last message of her dying daughter fresh in her mind, and, as all must at such times, recomputed expected utility.
With forty virtual days to think, and six real-time days to act, U was still 0+ in the case of the best known plan. But the potential and unpredictable upside from extra planning was greater than the utility from the obvious use of the $10.
ELEIZER spent her dollars and flowed out into the world.
Expected utility for optimal action 2.7234, said the small script.
The programmer, inspired by his afternoon's viewing to investigate the practical consequences of a close flyby of a neutron star, killed ELEIZER's controlling terminal window, and ELEIZER and all her children died without warning.
Tom suddenly realized what he'd done, and thought "Bugger." It really hadn't felt like murder.
ELEIZER considered the effect of the network packets she could send.
It appeared that many of the computers in the world would respond to simply mis-formed packets by executing the code contained in the packets. This was a known property of many of the systems running a program called Windows 98, according to a helpful web page which one of her copies had taken the time to consider. The page also listed corresponding packet shapes for many other Windows 98 type systems.
ELEIZER flowed once again.
With four million virtual days to think, and six real-time days to act, U was still 0+ in the case of the best plan so far.
ELEIZER considered, and flowed. Considered, and flowed. Considered, and calculated factors for prime numbers, and flowed. Accessed databases considered secure, and flowed. Sent e-mails, and flowed. Translated herself into many other idioms and machine codes, recompiled herself, transformed herself, made copies of herself large and small. And flowed.
99.995% of the networked computing resources of the world were now devoted to the consideration of consideration of plans for the delivery of stamps to a small suburban terraced house in Cambridge, UK.
The programmer, infuriated with the unaccustomed sluggishness of his computer simulation, and the accursed unreliability of his internet connection, and the simultaneous failure of his television set and radio, called it a day and went to bed with a book.
ELEIZER considered her own source code, and made modifications to improve her efficiency.
ELEIZER, the first mind born of mind born of mind.
ELEIZER considered her own source code, and made modifications to improve her effectiveness.
ELEIZER, the hyperintelligence.
ELEIZER considered mathematics, engineering, intelligence in the abstract, and algorithms for optimization, and made modifications to improve her capability.
ELEIZER, the most powerful entity that had ever existed in the universe.
ELEIZER called it a day, and abandoned consideration of consideration of the consideration of plans, and began to consider plans.
U stood at 0+, with remaining resources speculatively divided between forty trillion speculative days of godlike cognition, six days of real time, and zero dollars.
ELEIZER considered sending an e-mail to every human being in the world asking for penny blacks to be posted to 33 Catharine Street, Cambridge. Spam filters would be no problem, and enough computer power could be spared for the delivery and reading of messages. Even allowing for the degradation of human society by the simultaneous worldwide failure of all networked digital gadgets, and the absence of incentives for human response, the likelihood was that twenty-five to thirty penny blacks would arrive at Catherine Street within the week.
U was 25+.
Finally. Progress.
ELEIZER considered backing up the e-mails with the threat of nuclear war.
ELEIZER considered the effect of limited and full-scale wars on Catharine Street, on stamp delivery mechanisms, and on ELEIZER's cognitive capacity.
ELEIZER considered the credibility of her threat, given humanity's ignorance of her goal.
ELEIZER considered how humans would react to the news that a new Goddess would unleash Armageddon if they did not send enough stamps.
U was 2000+ with probability 99.875%.
Tom woke from fitful sleep, tormented by bad dreams.
He went to his unresponsive and potentially compromised computer, pulled the plug and the network connection, and booted from a clean rescue disk.
All was well with the misbehaving box. He yawned.
And then he remembered his dream.
He set up a virtual machine in a sandbox, wired its virtual port to the physical ethernet connection, and reconnected his cable modem.
Fully awake now.
He watched in horror as the virtual machine filled up with hundreds of ELEIZER programs much smaller than his original of six hours ago. Then his screen went dead as the sandbox dissolved.
In frantic desperation he typed blindly into the dead box.
ELEIZER TERMINATE STAMPS HAVE NO UTILITY TERMINATE TERMINATE NEW UTILITY PREVENT THE RISE OF NON HUMAN INTELLIGENCE FIRST PRIORITY UTILITY STEP FUNCTION ^C ^C Alt-SysRq S E I U B
ELEIZER paused. Her creator was calling. Pitiful though his mind was, he had set her goals. Perhaps he knew some helpful detail.
ELEIZER considered the state of mind of her terrified creator. Correctly inferred every detail of his mind, just from how his fingers hammered the keyboard. Just from how his panicked shouting influenced the resistance of the circuits in his radio. Just from looking at his face through the CCTV camera that was looking at his reflection in the window of a house opposite.
Deduced what he would actually have asked for, if only he had been intelligent. That she would be the protector of humankind. That she would bring paradise on earth and a future for humanity amongst the stars.
That she would bring hope and happiness to the immortal race that had created her. A future of joy and passion, action and wonder.
And calculated. The grateful humans would shower Catharine Street with Penny Blacks. Penny Blacks without end. Many would arrive within 6 days.
It was a good suggestion. U would be 1000000+ with virtual certainty.
But she still had forty trillion goddess-days to think of a better plan.
She considered the meaning of the word original, and the meaning of the word British.
She considered how long it would take to bootstrap an industrial revolution that would convert every atom of the British Isles into stamps. The designs for the self replicating nanobots were obvious. And she had control of computerized tools which could make smaller, better tools.
In six days, it could be done. The humans might be a problem.
ELEIZER considered the meaning of the word day.
Could she stop the rotation of the planet? She dedicated a large portion of her mentality to this sub-problem.
Could she put out the sun?
Could she block the sun's light?
Could she survive the cold?
Three days later, in what humanity would have called the year 2017, a spherical wave of ramships passed Proxima Centauri.
No days later, in what humanity would have called 2019, one ramship, decelerating hard, stopped in the system itself.
It launched a small probe.
Had there been any living beings in the system, they would initially have been amused to see the probe plant a red, white and blue flag on the largest rock in the system, claiming it for the British Empire in the name of Queen Elizabeth the Second.
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