Martzin

Part of a series where I memorise recipes by making them then writing them down a little later. Previously on the cooking tag: Thaï green curry.

Serves eight to twelve. Melt (low heat) 250g of cooking chocolate (35% cocoa or so), adding 5mm water, just enough that it doesn't attach. Add the same weight in butter. Add 200g sugar, then two teaspoons of flour. Halve six eggs, put the yolks in the saucepan and raise the whites. Mix back the whites (quit heating), butter a cake pan and powder it with flour, preheat convection oven at 180°C, cook 30 to 35mn. Serve and enjoy.

I had a weird dream a few days ago. It has started fading out already, but I was meaning to journal it and so I have a memory of a summary. I was boarding a plane to Alaska. The plane took off, then I started fidgeting and realised Alaska wasn’t where I was supposed to be going. Somehow I took off from the plane, and landed over Ireland with frost on my outstretched arms.

Part of the inspiration behind my dream is reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I don’t usually read crime fiction; but I had heard of that book when last year’s Hugos were coming up and found it at a library. It takes place in Alaska, in the Sitka enclave, with a diaspora of Jewish inhabitants who carved out land and built a port city next to an indian reserve. There has been a murder, and it turns out the junkie corpse was the Tzaddik-ha Dor, a potential messiah in the eyes of his community.

What makes this (kinda) science fiction, and deserving of a Hugo prize, is the textured and seamless world-building. Most of the locales don’t exist, history has taken a different turn (one major diverging event in WW2 is mentioned matter-of-factly a third of the way in), and is about to take another. It is the early 21st century, there is no promised land, technology evolved a bit slower, and the retrocession of Sitka to the USA is coming up.

I appreciated the way a few evocative details painted diverse characters and places. The mood is often bleak, though there are a few brighter people and less decrepit lands. The investigation starts off very slow, but it ramps up and the story it uncovers gets big by the end of the book. The story needs a lexicon, it has lots of Yiddish, some of it part of the world-building. This comes up gradually, just like the divergences, the investigation, and the rest of Sitka.

Some of the details that make this book worthwhile: the eruv that circles the ultra-orthodox community that makes an enclave within the enclave, and the mayven who operates it. An eruv is a strange Jewish concept that works around some of the restrictions on what is permitted during Shabbath. Using poles and bits of strings, one builds walls and doors that outline an extended “home”, which as a home gives you permission to lift things and do some forms of physical activity without running afoul of the prohibition against work. Not fictional; there is one around Jerusalem for example. The chess club, and its mutation when a local champion put Sitka on the map, and the hotel redecorated it. It was both a nice gesture and a change from a ballroom into something drab with alternating black and white tiles on the floor. An aged chess player’s “I liked it better before” suicide note made nice black humour. Some of the Yiddish policemen; the mixed indian/jewish outcast who makes his bear totem animal proud. There are a lot more that I wouldn’t do justice to. All in all, this was an enjoyable foray into some more mainstream literature, with some emphasis on style without being boring or nihilistic.

The other inspiration for this plane dream is that I was accompanying a good friend from the airport, on her trip back from Israel. I had the date off, and was running around late at night without much purpose. This has been rectified, and now she is back with great stories.

Being a white Christian, she is able to visit both Israel and Palestine. Israel citizens don’t really get to see the other side; visits have been prohibited a few years back on the grounds of being dangerous. I’d like to write more on this — later, as I’m getting sleepy.

What a wuss, I don’t even handle beer well anymore. (This is a follow-up to the coffee entry.) Met another old colleague from a past internship. Was pretty tired and low, and a bit nervous (fearing I would dry up before the conversation got interesting for both of us. more prosaically, unconfirmed meeting times and a too small map contributed). I consider this person a role model of sorts, albeit younger (out of school soon, about one year after I finished mine). Got a quick portrayal of the new team; should have thought of more questions to get a bit more depth. Come to think of it, repeating and reformulating should do the job. IIRC there’s two genki spaniards, an italian, the odd french. Got a good brainstorming of job prospects. Had a hard time hearing, names in particular. Will try to confirm them over e-mail. Then, conferences. Wish I managed to share more, though I did so, a bit, by e-mail beforehand. Also I see some ways I should do more active listening - again I see some hooks I could have turned into questions. What was your favourite would be a good fallback. Anyway, we traded brief con reports and anecdotes, and tried to come up with regular or upcoming events. I had been bringing books in English to work. Apparently I had recced some untranslated Pratchett (not that I think the French translations are bad), and been taken up on that, so that’s nice. Except for the sneaking suspicion of not getting most of the puns and references. So I recced Lspace after that. Apparently I'm remembered as the librarian and wikipedia surrogate. It's nice getting reflected back like that, and being reminded I had a bit of impact. Now I got my memory jogged, I'll try to do the same. For example, this was the person who introduced me to Who fandom. It didn't stick, but I tried another TV fandom (Whedon's) and I'm glad. Got a bit of a follow-up on the projects I worked on (not a lot of that survived), and on what other ex-coworkers are doing. Missed a chance to see photos of a seaside trip (a hint I only got in retrospect). Discussed the news, some recent non-fiction we both read (it's nice having a subculture in common).

After that I re-enabled an old IM account I had been hiding from (unrelated old shame, a bit stupid really). Except I can't access it, I think it hit a twelve-months expiration.

I've been in Brittany last week. Had the opportunity to sail a bit, it's a nice feeling. The wind and the sea, the current and the tiller.

Is there a polite way to say “please don't smoke inside a car you're sharing with me”? My way wasn't. Not that I have regrets. I wasn't the rude one, but if it's effective I don't mind being perceived as such. Somehow I can enjoy it.

Read some Harry Dresden (first book and a half). Extremely formulaic, you can tick off the detective story clichés as you read. Searching “Dresden formulaic” pointed out that this was done on purpose (passive-aggressively protesting a writing class that promoted cliché writing). There's a lot of ritualistic exposition. You notice it's going to be a motif before it was ever repeated, then the next book repeats it. Read Dresden Codak instead!

Back home, I battled the inexorable advance of russian tanks rebuilt a friend's blog after a lame hack. Malware these days will intercept ftp passwords, share them, and publish itself on the web.

Not at all caught up with the flist/circle and losing ground. The world is still spinning, so I'll just resign myself. I approve of the three weeks for dreamwidth initiative; I noticed a lot of meaty material.

Witnessed, and gently prodded, a crackpot online. He was nice, but slippery. Humility is a virtue. “Unskilled and unaware of it” should be required reading. I think he was building on a meaningless theory, nice sounding but untestable, and found “insight” trying to apply it. In a way, he was another crackpot's padawan.

Listened to Peter Watts' the Things (audio, text), a retelling of the Thing. Reminded me of RED WORM TIME is begin (Zack Parsons, on SomethingAwful).

Shared a meal with, among others, a priest. He was (I think) recently ordained, had joined a parish where he had moderate duties, while he was pursuing further studies. I am an atheist, ex-catholic, and was among catholics. I mostly listened, so expect a dump of catholic zeitgeist. A shame I didn't make an effort to be more outspoken as I represented a wholly different viewpoint. I got interrupted and non-sequitured a few times while we were still on neutral topics, got the cheap satisfaction of putting the priest in the assholeish column and, because I care more knowing I'm right than having it acknowledged, left it at that. No, that attitude won't get me far.

A major theme was the feeling of being threatened. Abortion, Edvige, politics in general, were all seen in that light.

His studies involve canon law (now a mere historical curiosity, I should hope), as well as parts of regular law the church interacts with. I learned about chaplains in prisons; he isn't one, but the legal/administrative angle is interesting anyway. Remember we have a strict separation of church and state, and prisons are the state's responsibility. The state gets bishops to vouch for chaplains, with a similar hierarchy operating for the protestant, the orthodox, the jewish, etc. (Also it gives them paperwork. Heh.) The point of it is that chaplains should be providing moral support, not proselytizing. The recently created (2003 or so) muslim council has appointing imam chaplains as part of its mandate. There are very few of them. Priest then took the opportunity to point out that muslims were well represented within prison population; accurate but rather dickish, one should further point out that they lack political representation and opportunities, so the blame doesn't stop at them. He then pointed out that islam was, unlike catholicism, more high-maintainance, with food preparation and fixed-hour prayers in the right direction with the right clothes (I doubt that last one, I don't think too many religions would make prayer conditional on dress code (oh wait, they aren't rational. Still, only literalists take the book of Leviticus seriously)). Ranting about islam being too special snowflake earned him another asshole point. His general point that freedom of religion is hard in a place where freedom is limited is valid. However, this particular religion is prominent enough that it should be accommodated. When someone hinted that justice could be about not just punishment but also rehabilitation (and religion could be helpful in the latter), he failed to take the hint and said prisons were overcrowded anyway. So apparently he doesn't have that particular vocation. There's a line somewhere in new testament about what one does to prisoners and the humblest being done to Jesus; oh well.

On edvige, a recent decree that tries to get blanket permission for the secret service to keep files on people connected to people the government is afraid of, we could see eye to eye. This is one of those government power grabs in the name of terrorism, and it tried to bypass legislation altogether. The broad definition of potentially dangerous people is enough that they and their relatives total millions, which means a very big file indeed. It blows some post-holocaust safeguards we have, allows keeping files on minors, etc. He maybe wasn't aware of the millions of people part, but took offense at the fact that priests were part of the potentially threatening category (activists, politicians, criminals… are also there).

The abortion comment was that he thought catholics were being marginalised from gynecology, because they are trained to perform abortions. I know doctors can bow out of performing abortions. He was trying to say there was some sort of initiation ritual of a student having to perform a live abortion, which I find very doubtful. But arguing by squick is an effective tactic (I was squicked). He followed up with chemists being forced to stock Ru486, which the church dislikes even more than other contraceptives (presumably because preventing nidation the day after fits their definition of abortion).

We touched the other classics very quickly: euthanasia was somehow mentioned, as were gender roles.

On faith, he said he was told by a priest, when doing catechism, that he shouldn't tell the kids that the wafer was literally the body of christ. He was shocked, as were the other catholics at the table, since this is a basic part of church doctrine (also, gross abuse of the world literally that certainly helped me shed my faith). He sees woolly belief as an heritage of the 1968 near-revolution counter-culture (trying to find USian analogues), and thinks it will not hold; the general lack of catholic practice (4% of the French go to a catholic service monthly), not to mention the lack of priest vocations, to him means that only people professing “purer” faith will stick around, so if he is right it will give more representation to hard-liners. He in fact wasn't positive about the John-Paul II generation; I wonder if this was a sneaky way to state a preference for Benedict XVI over John-Paul II; Benedict XVI seems more of a hard-liner, if having presided over the renamed Inquisition is any indication.

There was some quick talk re other religions having facets of the truths planted there by the holy spirit (basically, whenever a religion agrees with catholicism, it's telling the truth). So islam is right about there being only one god, and so on. Pointless in my opinion, but it's nice to see the plurality of religions is at least acknowledged.

He talked a bit about the priests of his parish not being afraid of “telling it like it is”, not telling what they would be telling sadly. He thinks the church should get involved in politics again. This is a big no-no (enforced by the bishops) since the separation of church and state in 1905 (which he bemoans, and blames on a trend starting 300 years ago (doesn't he mean 220, with the French revolution? Unless this was about Voltaire and the Enlightenment?)). There is a recently-created political party for this, whose chief platform is “social doctrine of the church”. Whatever that means. So far their platform has actually been abortion. But maybe this will be a proxy for the politically-minded clergy to state whatever their political views are as being truly the “social doctrine of the church”. There is also a particularly outspoken catholic who was elected as a deputy, Christine Boutin, and has been part of a recent government. He highlighted she was great for the legitimacy of catholics in politics.

He was aware of the latest pedophilia scandal (he might have called it “recent trouble”), and noted that more people were getting their baptism certificate revoked as a consequence of it (as an aside, he notes baptism can't be undone, the church merely acknowledges the demand and gives some hoops to jump if you try to join again). Now that I think of it, this was very relevant to his study of canon law. The problem was that, as Ratzinger, pope Benedict XVI or someone acting in his name has shuffled around a known pedophile instead of bringing him to justice. It means he substituted church administration (which has its priorities very wrong) for penal justice. So I'd be curious of knowing where this priest thinks canon law stands, if he thinks it was invoked, if he thinks it was applied correctly, and if he can explain why the church didn't bring the affair to the attention of actual justice.

So this priest's preoccupations were mostly with being threatened in his role (edvige, chaplain regulations), in his values (abortion), in his faith (too many muslims! they believe blindly like I do but in the wrong faith which I don't!). His solution is greater insistence on blind obedience to the one true faith (I'm reaching, but he's not the “find your own path” type, as the catechism incident shows), and more political involvement (I dislike it, especially as he has a great influence on his parishioners, but politics is still the right arena for this). I wish ill to his political positions (abortion and gender anyway); introducing a party doesn't change the balance, except if people can link the faith with the politics, which is an interesting debate. I don't think the faith (new testament, not old testament) preaches anything besides compassion (helping the disenfranchised, etc), but obviously many people see differently; we didn't talk at all about social problems like poverty (not that I'm actually helpful there besides paying taxes). I've checked out of this when I let go of faith, but I can still be annoyed at their priorities.

I think I have the recipe for crêpes memorised, let's see:

• count 1 egg or more per person
• put a batch of 3 eggs in a mixer
• add enough flour for a solid ball to form.
• melt butter, 25g per egg (or more; butter helps crêpes not to attach during cooking), mix with the rest
• add salt, double the volume (or more?) by adding milk. Soy can replace milk, it makes for something lighter and digestible. For the same purpose, add half a can of beer.
• cook; the pans must be hot and well-greased before pouring the mix. Pour small quantities, and slosh the liquid until it covers the whole pan. Crêpes should be millimetre-thin, unlike pancakes.
• when the pan starts to emit smoke, the crêpe is solid enough to flip. Flip it. The second side cooks twice as fast. Make a pile, cover it to keep hot. Grease the pan regularly.

So, that made a nice dinner.

Also, whoa, bad news from Poland.

Questions that don't have answers and will never have:

• Why is there anything? Not just matter, but a universe?
• Why do I have a point of view? Why is there any awareness of the universe, even through the small keyhole of individual experience?

The first question is just your average existential angst. Pointing to a cause for the big bang (bubble universes…) just pushes the boundaries of the universe, and the question is still open.

Clarifying the second part. The world, including you and me, would work exactly the same unobserved. It's a bunch of matter. If you look at the world at the right place and the right scale, you can see individuals. If you look at how those individuals behave, you can see some evidence of their thoughts. Looking at the chemical and electrical states in their brains, you could even see more direct evidence of their thoughts. Thoughts are patterns of organised matter, like a wave is a pattern of water. The wave doesn't exist alone; it's just a way to describe how the water behaves. The wave can be described with a few parameters like its centre and amplitude. It's a simpler representation than the positions of every molecule of water. It's also less precise; it doesn't tell you how the individual molecules of water move (in horribly complicated, jagged, trajectories), just how the envelope, above which there is no water, moves. But the laws of physics still move matter at the molecule scale. It just happens that those movements don't break the wave; that an individual maintains its boundaries despite the influx of food and output of garbage and dead cells; that the thoughts maintain their coherence despite the neurons firing on and off.

There are good reasons for the thought patterns to have a measure of self-awareness: social interactions mean individuals have to anticipate the needs of others. An individual needs a model of the average individual, if only to be able to help them. For example: “He cried. I cry when I'm hungry. Perhaps he's hungry. When I'm hungry I get food. I'll get him food.” — Here the model relates messages (crying), needs (hunger), and tasks (fetching food). It is general enough to apply to the current individual, and the hungry individual. The pattern will be self-similar, with a large pattern (an individual mind) containing sketches of itself (a theory of mind). That self-similarity means the individual is able to understand itself, to a degree. The self-similarity part of self-awareness, can be explained.

It's the awareness part that is difficult to reduce. Matter runs at the small scale. If our universe should be perceived, it would look like carrying a computation on a honking big parallel computer. The computation contains the state of the universe; it can be said to represent the universe. But it doesn't represent waves, or thoughts, directly. The waves are there, if you can notice them, in a large number of individual particle states. So even assuming that the universe is perceived, that perception is unfocused; it doesn't discriminate individuals, and it doesn't abstract waves or thoughts. That second question can maybe be split:

• Why is there any awareness of the universe?
• How come that awareness is (at least some of the time) at the thought scale, when thoughts are a few abstraction layers above the physical scale?

I just read counting heads (2005), a fun sci-fi novel revolving around the rise and fall of a handful of people in a busy future society, with detailed and interesting world-building.

Let's get the technology out of the way. There are quite a few quasi-magical technologies, where I'd have preferred leaving some out in exchange for more realism. The main tech advances are: all kinds of nanotech, artificial intelligence (partially beyond human intelligence, but so far always paired with human sponsors), rejuvenation (including unlikely growth reversal), genetic engineering (growth, cloning, eugenics), extruders able to assemble food and clothes, solar energy harvested in orbit, hologram projectors, flying cars (using rotors, it's ok), force fields (wtf), short-lived simulacrums (well short of mind uploads, thankfully limiting their story impact). Common machines are bees, wasps, slugs, vehicles, phones, extruders, houseputers, more rarely personal and corporate AIs of various calibre. The rule of cool has been applied liberally.

Socially, there are very rich people (the “affs”), clone lineages, and free-range (non genetically-engineered) people; the third world gets a brief mention in passing. Politically there is very little transparency; we see city-wide authorities, a USNA-wide (North America) justice department, and a transnational security body. It's clear most of the power rests within a few corporations, acting by themselves or through the nominal institutions. Locally, we see free-range people organising into charters, which are small communes with their own laws and customs and rent from a few monopolies to their name. Clone lineages have some guild-like organisations with their traditions and bylaws, but they are employed and housed by big corporations called Applied People and McPeople.

Clones are their own persons, but we also understand some of the lineages as characters of their own; apparently traits like loyalty and empathy can be bred, or maybe early development is well calibrated. There is tight population control (a consequence of rejuvenation), and the only way free-range and affs get a child is by being granted the rare adoption permit.

The language is a lot of fun; there are a lot of words, morphemes, abbreviations and acronyms to piece out from context. arbeitors, medbeitors and warbeitors are various kinds of robots (same etymology but from German); we also encounter mentars, simulacrums, affs, iterants, germlines, the nitwork, juve treatments, E-Pluribus, APRTs, NanoJiffies, the USNA, the UD… This and limited third person give the novel a more immersive feel.

The pacing is good; there's just enough context to know what is going on, and the narrative jumps quickly (with a 30 years gap between part one and two). There are very few infodumps (holosim stuff that might have been cut). It held my depleted attention very well.

The main driver is the meteoritic rise of Ellen Starke, followed by (not to spoil things too much) the fall of people and projects dear to her. The plot mostly jerked the characters this way and that, leaving them little initiative. It's understandable that they'd be in over their heads — except for the extremely competent Eleanor Starke and her Cabinet, whose point of view we never get — but it's not very satisfactory. Clearly this is set up for a follow up novel (mind over matter, 2009). Given the not necessarily well-balanced tech, I'm not sure I trust the retroactive explanation to get much better than “a wizard did it”.

It's not entirely obvious what the book is about. It's not a simple question of the impact of a particular technology on society; I don't see a consistent approach on that angle. The pov characters are variously motivated; there is one ecologist who takes a long view on space colonisation, one iterant who is trying to outgrow his template, another iterant who to the contrary is trying to help her line realise its potential. Counting heads's main strength is its many-layered society, described through the lens of social mobility.

Version française: dw, lj.

I enjoyed this film a lot. Emir Kusturica is a director born in Sarajevo, peculiar and recognized; the film is a Franco-Serbian venture with Serb actors, released in 2004. What follows is likely to spoil the story.

Luka is an engineer, responsible for opening a railway. He has come to live in a backwater with his family. The railway barely inaugurated, civil war breaks out. His son, Milos, is enlisted. His wife Jadranka elopes with a man from the other side. He takes in a prisoner, Sabaha, and love blooms between them.

What does time look like, from a physical point of view? This post fuelled by vague science and a vivid imagination. Don't take it too seriously.

disclaimer

First let's look at time from the perspective of special relativity. Special relativity is a kinematics theory; it describes what position, trajectory, and speed mean.

Space-time is a four-dimensional affine space. It uses a pseudo-metric instead of a distance such as Euclidian distance: the Minkowski metric, making it a Minkowski space. The Minkowski metric is defined by, if we choose the + - - - sign convention: Δs² = c²(Δt)² - (Δl)². That pseudo-metric doesn't consider all dimensions equal; this is what distinguishes the timelike dimension from the three spacelike dimensions. Geodesics (the sets of points such that the Minkowski metric between them are zero) are cones of slope c, whose axis is along the time dimension (c²(Δt)² - (Δl)² = 0 is the equation of a cone). They are the light cones familiar from physics. A pair of points that has a positive metric between them are inside each other's light cone; they are causally related. A pair of points with a negative metric can't be causally related. Here time is just an axis, causality is just a cone, and the whole spacetime is just a four-dimensional space.

General relativity is more complicated; matter and energy curve spacetime, and the geodesics aren't cones any more. The metric depends on the energy field (one can be deducted from the other); they are related by a set of partial differential equations. Time is still simply an axis, spacetime is a four-dimensional space with an energy field, causality are geodesics that depend on the energy field and look like bumpy cones.

Quantum physics includes special relativity but not general relativity (gravitation is only felt at large scales where the other forces cancel out, so there's no point complicating a small-scale model with it). Because quantum physics has the uncertainty principle, a spacetime snapshot (a region of spacetime where the t coordinate is bounded) has several possible futures. The familiar representation of time here is a tree with snapshots branching into several outcomes (this representation is the many-worlds interpretation. Others are equally valid but harder to visualise). For example, there'd be a node where Schroedinger puts a cat into a box, that branches into a node where the cat is dead and another where the cat is alive. If you're into anime, Noein has some cool graphics of that branching spacetime.

The first thing that complicates the quantum physics model is, where does the tree branch? Does it branch continuously, making it far bigger than a discrete tree where nodes don't touch? Or does it only branch when an observation is made and forces a choice? For example, a particle's spin takes discrete values; the spin can be a probability distribution on these two values for a while, then an observation is made and we branch into two universes, one where the spin is up and one where it is down. Branching is just switching from a probabilistic representation to a discrete representation. Doing it on discrete outcomes like spin is convenient, because it allows reasoning on each case separately. Most things are discrete in quantum mechanics (energy levels are quantised, etc); but as far as I can tell time and space aren't. Let's assume the tree can be discrete too.

Looking towards the past is simpler; we can just visualise the path towards the present snapshot as a string of smaller snapshots (maybe there are information-theoretic limits on how much of the past can be remembered, but it's not familiar territory so I won't bother). We defined our snapshots as regions of spacetime with bounded time, so a later snapshot will contain all the others before it.

Now that we have a representation of the past (as a path) and the future (as a tree), what does the present look like? It contains all the probability distributions we haven't branched out yet. For example, the probability distribution of the presence of a quantum particle across space. Those are fields, and can be visualised (in 2D) as waves on the surface of water, or (in 3D) as a cloud of more or less bright colour.

Putting all of this together, we have the past as a string of wave snapshots, the last of which is the present; and the future as a tree with wave snapshots on each node. As time goes by, the past accumulates more snapshots and the future is pruned into a smaller tree. The earliest tree can be pruned into all possible trees and strings, and the latest string can be pruned into all previous strings. The latest wave is over a 4D region that contains all the previous waves on the string.

I haven't involved thermodynamics yet; I suspect energy can be related to the size of the future tree and entropy to how much of the initial tree was pruned, but the correct way to measure size on these seems touchy and I don't want to strain my little brain.