iMurphy

Where have I been?!?! Well, I had finals: that was miserable. Working full time and taking ten credits will not work; I got a 3.0 average. After that, Jessica wanted me to read Harry Potter and I agreed. I got the first book in Ancient Greek, but it’s proving very hard and will take me a long time, I’m sure. So I plunged ahead and got all seven books in English. I read and read and listened to audio books and read and read but now I’m done! They’re really great books and J.K. Rowling is merciless to the end, killing off major characters left and right. When something approaches this level of greatness, however, I think my wife and I both start switching to the Biblical measure of excellence, and then the work of art nose-dives in our estimation. Harry was great when he was a metaphor or an allegory, but as soon as he was totally real and facing real death, he attitudes were shown to be ungodly and his ultimate hope to be in himself.
There proves to be a through-line that is consistent between Harry Potter, The Matrix, Babylon 5 and even Star Wars (if you dig far enough). Aside from all the mono-myth items, the ultimate struggle and solution in all of these is the same. Our hero (or party of heroes) is faced with two kinds of opponents. There are those who are for chaos, power, i.e. physis. Typically, the protagonist is against this force (not so in The Matrix). Then there are the forces of law and order, nomos. In the end, we are left to conclude that the overwhelming necessity is for a third option, typically self-determination or choice. Of all the aforementioned series, Babylon 5 puts it most succinctly, “We can find our own way between order and chaos . . . Now get the hell out of our galaxy!”
The trouble is, from one sense they’re right in that we must pick a third option, but in a larger sense they’re all wrong, because our choice must be for something categorically different from mere nomos vs physis. To come into theological terms, the possibilities are not limited to antinomianism and legalism. The truth is not some bastard child of these polar opposites, it is the most intellectually rigorous acceptance of both dialectal nodes to the fullest extent. The Law cannot save us, but God did give us the Law and call it good. On a higher plane than the simplistic debate, we say we are not saved by the Law, but once saved we love it and strive to obey it out of love for Him who saved us in order that we might be free.
I had this same debate with my mother, and she came at it from another angle: civics. Do we say that the law is ultimate or people? In simple societies, there is the Rule of the One or Few, monarchy or oligarchy. The greater civilizations have the Rule of Law, but corrupted by political maneuverings. A great society would have great laws that need no exceptions or judges. The inconceivability of such a land pushes us to the superlative Kingdom, where the Perfect Man rules and all laws are but expressions of His Will.

We went on a date last night and saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the IMAX in Seattle. It was awesome! It made me want to go and punch Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi right in the nose! Wake up people, we are in a war bigger than the Cold War and you and Jonathan Edwards are running around saying the War on Terror doesn’t exist and 9/11 is a card Giuliani is over playing! When will you start taking people like Ahmadinejad and Osama bin Laden at their word (like Chamberlain should’ve taken Hitler at his), then I’ll no longer be tempted to call you Corn Fudge.  The final battle scene between Dumbledore and Voldemort was sweet.  One could really believe that these were experienced men of gargantuan, magical conflicts.  It was like the Matrix.   Oh, and I couldn’t help but think that Fred and George Weasley’s firework “W” was intended to express support for our president and his policies that have kept this country from getting attacked again!

Donald Kingsbury had written an interesting spin-off of Isaac Asimov’s celebrated Foundation Trilogy. Kingsbury was a Math professor in Canada and has authored several other sci-fi books. Other reviewers note his excess length, odd sentence structure and old-fashion gender norms. Not wanting to retread already worn ground, I’ll leave it to the reader to read comments on Amazon or Google it. Now, onto new territory!

Science fiction is useful as long as it makes us more aware of the present. Typically, author utilize their expertise in some field or another to teach us something from a new angle. Kingsbury’s contributions to society are:

1. The state of things (from a physics perspective) can be thought of as information. Newtonian billiard balls tell you about the past and the future by the inertia, since we know the rules of motion. But once you get to the quantum level, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle guarantees that information is being lost continuously. The universe, therefore, cannot be deterministic since there isn’t ever enough information to go too far forward or backwards in time accurately.
2. The amount of information present isn’t enough to derive an absolute system for all conditions. Prediction must be constantly refined and reapplied.
3. Prediction is higher form of Man’s survival mechanisms: we contemplate unfavorable senarios until we can avoid them. Only the lazy aren’t constantly thinking of what is to their disadvantage in the world, right up until the moment it clunks them in the head!

There are many other nu gets of insight littered throughout the 500 pages, all the kinds of stuff that occurs to math professors! They make good food for thought, but as said by others, they could’ve been presented more concisely.
What is most annoying about this book is its unquestioned late-modern/post-modern assumptions. Illicit sex and abortions are ubiquitous features of the future world. Religion is just some political force from the past, passing away as humans become advanced. Science is slowly advancing us towards “The Truth” but the lessons of history are only of use to politicians. Love is simply the maternal gene acting up or ways people get what they want out of each other.
Asimov was cavalier and condescending towards religion in his books, but he was constantly either profound in his plot twists or engrossing in his characters thought-lives. Kingsbury does neither for too many pages upon pages. The main character, Eron, loses his brain-supplement-machine, but we barely spend a dozen pages delving into his torment before we are whisked away to flash backs and competing main characters. Kingsbury brilliantly reveals psychohistory to be Modernist intellectual chauvinism but spends a half page on what should have been an engrossing denouement. The thrill of out-smarting Asimov the Genius is taken away by too many pages of poo-pooing human history. Still, an interesting read.

Having a baby is a good time to unplug and get away from the internet. There is no much cool stuff out there, and making more has never been easier. Have you seen Odeo? Oh, man! Tuhin Mehta’s Gizmodo’s Hard Drive Dying Dance Track (as heard on Rocketboom 2/17/06) is awesome.

In my time away, I’ve been mostly playing with my son, working and listening to the cooing (and screaming) of my new daughter. Whenever anyone is out our house, though, we have been forcing them to play Settlers of Catan. This addictive board game is tons of fun and we even got the Expansion Set and the Seafarers add-on for Christmas. However, when I looked online for related stuff for this post, I found that everyone interested enough to write about it online has all four billion extensions and has played to death. My idea seem small in comparison, but here goes.

(If you haven’t even played the game yet, none of the following will make sense to you).

Krakatoa

This is really just a rearranging of the Expansion Set, but it has a unique feature (and a back-story!). Jessica has been on a quest to find all the cool children’s books so she’ll be prepared at used-book stores. I remembered a great book I read call The 21 Balloons about some explorers who go to Krakatoa right before it explodes. There is a diamond mine in the volcano and after the explosion, the island turns into a beautiful ring-shaped atoll (at least in my memory of the book). Now you have the chance to settle this land and even search for diamonds!

Take all the land cards from Settlers and the Expansion set and pull out one wheat field. Add on water tile and shuffle. Make a row of four and then a row of five on top of it. Following the map, make another row of six, but replace the middle two tiles with water hexes. Now make a row of seven, only for the middle three put a water, the grain card upside-down (or a gold hex if you have Seafarers) and another water. Now just complete the mirror image of water you’ve done before. Place the dice-number-tokens in a spiral, starting from the outside. You should place the last, ‘ZC’, on the “diamond mine” in the center.

The extra rules for this game are simple. To get to the diamonds in the middle, you need to build a bridge which costs two brick and two wood. (Just use a road tile to represent this.) You can build only one settlement/city on the diamond island and no roads. Settlements on the island don’t have to be two clicks away from settlements on the otherside or each other. You get an extra victory point for any settlement or city you build on the island. If you have a colony on the island and its ‘6′ is rolled, you can choose whatever resource you want to collect (or any two if you have a city).

We’ve tried this game and it was quite fun. The one water tile amongst the land hexes can make for some tight squeezes (Atolls are almost never perfectly circular.) Let me know if this game works for you!

    Rocketboom skiped their usual geek news read by hot chick routine the other day, and instead hosted a bizarre greyscale (not just black and white) animated video of birds attacking a British man in the bath. I’m seriously considering buying the album on iTunes. The song is “Bathtime in Clarkenville” by (The Real) Tuesday Weld, which samples “Sweeter than Sugah” by The Mills Brothers. It is playing over and over again in my mind; it’s an earworm.

    I have now scene all the epidodes of Firefly, the failed TV show by Joss Whedon. I used ‘failed’ without great hesitency because the show is practically perfect in every way: I can’t imagine why in the ‘verse they cancelled it! The DVD Boxed set of all 11 aired episodes, with un-aired episodes and special features is great. The movie comes out in a few weeks, and my wife and I are hoping to go as soon as possible after opening. My sister successfully converted us and we hope to bring others into the light. You should go rent it!

    Scowering the internet, I found a good wiki and fan site for the movie. I’ve also started saying lots of the gorram Chinese from the show, dong-ma? I hope, however, that if you haven’t seen any of it yet, that you will trust me and go see it before clicking on any of these links. It’s funny, compelling, sublime, base and thought-provoking. Go see ‘Serenity’ and promote good film-making.