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You are viewing the most recent 20 entries November 16th, 200910:09 pm: Japanese supercomputing budget cuts
Via HPCwire, I've noticed the not unexpected news that the Japanese government are slashing the budget for the Next Generation Supercomputer Project at Riken on the grounds that it's a waste of money. It doesn't sound like there are many reasons to be cheerful about the future of Japanese supercomputing... Tags: hpc
November 15th, 200908:54 pm: The Waters of Mars
While I rather liked The Waters of Mars, I've got to admit to rather mixed feelings. I liked the way the doctor got to wrestle with his conscience in a way that he hasn't had to do for a while, and I thought moments between the doctor and Adelaide Brooke, particularly when the doctor was stuck in the airlock, were really very good. But I wasn't so impressed with all the running around — as the doctor all but said, Bowie Base should have commissioned a special space Brompton — which seemed to do little more than fill the time between the attacks of the killer water people. Still, it was intriguing enough to make me look forward to the xmas episode... Tags: dr who
November 14th, 200905:22 pm: The ethics of being cold
La Mangan waxes lyrical about the problem of deciding when (or if) to turn on the heating:
4a) Every time I move hesitantly towards the boiler, Toryboy flings aside whatever tome he is reading – Babies I Have Known And Eaten, by Michael Howard, What Have The Arts Done For You Lately by AN Tory-Tosspot – and starts wailing in what I believe to be an approximation of a generic voice of liberal concern, "The dolphins! Nooooo! What about the do-o-olphins?" This is insanely annoying but, y'know what? It does make me think of the dolphins and so I stay my hand once more.
Also, I have signed up to this bloody 10:10 pledge to reduce my emissions by 10%. As I already don't have a car, don't fly, never go anywhere, never buy anything except secondhand books and the occasional extra secondhand sweater, am constitutionally incapable of wasting food (as long as by "wasting" we mean "throwing away" rather than "still eating, regardless of the fact that its age and quality have long since rendered the exercise devoid of any pleasure or satisfaction, and turned it into a simple act of refuelling"), the only way I can cut my household carbon footprint is to eat my cats or keep my hand off the thermo-switch.
Not having switched my own heating on yet this year — it hasn't been cold enough and, besides, scrupling to notice such minor thing is a sure sign of moral turpitude — I think I definitely qualify for membership of Otherwise Sane People Who Have Nevertheless Conceived Of The Use Of Central Heating As A Moral And Ethical Barometer. I wonder if you get a free giant womble jumper when you join...
Tags: guardian, lucy mangan
10:18 am: A truly foul day
Dear God, but the weather is absolutely foul this morning — gale force winds, frequent torrential downpours and general badness. I don't think there is anything for it but to stay in, catch up on some reading and listen to Radio 3 until things clear up.
ETA: For the record, I didn't spent the day listening to R3. Instead, I went for operas from my iTunes library, to whit: Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Verdi's Falstaff. I forgot to catch Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre in Opera on 3, but I guess I'll just have to catch it up on iPlayer later in the week. Current Music: John Ireland - Piano Concerto November 13th, 200906:28 pm: Screen and ssh agent
I've generally found GNU screen to be invaluable when working over slow or unreliable network connections. Multiplex mode makes it easy to run multiple sessions from a single login shell; while the ability to reattach to existing sessions means that, should the network connection drop out for any reason, you can pick up from where you left off simply by logging back in and restarting screen. But there are a few minor problems with detaching and reattaching screen sessions when using ssh-agent. In order to perform public/private key authentication via an agent, ssh requires access to unix domain socket file on the local machine. The location of the socket is set in the SSH_AUTH_SOCK environment variable. The location also changes from one login session to another. This means a screen session started from a particular login shell will inherit its value of SSH_AUTH_SOCK and will only be able to authenticate via ssh agent as long as the login persists. Detach the session and reconnect from another shell and, if the original login has exited, automatic authentication will no longer work. Fed up with this, I've added some code to my bash profile to set up a symbolic link from a fixed location to the login specific authentication socket and added some code to my screen setup routines to change the value of SSH_AUTH_SOCK to point to the symlink. This makes it possible for screen to continue to use ssh agent authentication despite detaches but it also introduces another minor wrinkle — subsequent logins on the same system result in the link being updated and means that exiting the most recent login will cause authentication to break. I wonder if, on balance, it might be better to try and fix the problem by wrapping the screen command in a bash function that updates the link prior to the start of every new screen session. Hmm... Tags: hacking
November 11th, 200909:48 pm: Britten's War Requiem
In keeping with today, here's the opening requiem aeternam from Britten's War Requiem: I vividly remember the last time I saw this live, back in 1997. I managed to catch a performance given by Rattle and the CBSO with, I think, Robert Tear, Simon Keenlyside and Andrea Gruber as soloists. It created quite an impression. Tags: music, videos
November 10th, 200909:57 pm: A Holstian discovery
Despite not operating at full capacity, I've somehow managed to find the time to pick up a rather nice set of Bach transcriptions from Slatkin and the BBC Phil. All the pieces are good, but the standout for me has to be Holst's arrangement of the Gigue Fugue, which is, by turns, delicately and dramatic — a real discovery. Tags: music
November 7th, 200911:38 pm: A fun evening out
An evening out for the first time in quite a while. So much so, that the others ruthlessly mocked me for my stay-at-home tendencies. A fun time was had by all, initially at the Rusty Bike and later at The Angel, before I decided to call it a night. Tags: bricolage
November 6th, 200910:04 pm: The Rest is Noise
 It's taken me a month or so, but I've finally finished The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross' excellent history of 20th century classical music, starting with the shock of Strauss' Salome and ending with John Adams' dazzling Nixon in China.
I really enjoyed the book — hardly surprising, given all the quotes I've blogged along the way — and I've learnt a alot, particular about the friendships and rivalries that developed between particular composers and particular schools of composition. And if there is a slight tendency to neglect British composers in favour of their American contemporaries — although Britten and, particularly, Peter Grimes, are covered in some detail — this is probably only a sign of provincialism on my part.
Just in case any further proof is needed as to the greatness of the book, I'll conclude with a short quote from the epilogue about the relationships between classical and popular music:
[S]ome of the liveliest reactions to twentieth-century and contemporary classical music have come from the pop arena, roughly defined. The microtonal tunings of Sonic Youth, the opulent harmonic designs of Radiohead, the fractured, fast-shifting time signatures of math rock and intelligent dance music, the elegaic orchestral arrangements that underpin songs by Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom: all these carry on the long-running conversation between classical and popular traditions.
Amen.
Tags: books, reviews, the rest is noise
November 5th, 200906:35 pm: Astrology versus astrophysics
A truly excellent correction from the Guardian:
In Pass notes No 2,677: The universe, we contributed a further surprising element to the discovery that the universe is beige-coloured by revealing that two astrologists had conducted the research. Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry are astrophysicists (4 November, page 3, G2).
I'm impressed — the word "astrologist" is completely new to me...
Current Music: Judith Weir - Natural History , schadenfreude
November 4th, 200909:05 pm: Messiaen's sweet tooth
It seems as though Olivier Messiaen's life really was simple and blameless as might be guessed from his music:
For the last three decades of his life, Messiaen lived with his second wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, in an old building in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, in the area of Montmartre. As Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone report in their biography of the composer, the accommodations were fairly spartan, with one communal bathroom on each floor of the building. The main living quarters were decorated in devout Catholic style, plastic crucifixes all around. When the composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen called on Messiaen, he looked to see what books and records were on the shelves, but could find only a copy of the Bible and various recordings of Messiaen's own works.
No one reported anything like a seamy underside to the composer's personality. The conductor Kent Nagano, who collaborated closely with Messiaen in his last years, was once pressed to tell some unflattering or otherwise revealing anecdote about his mentor, and all he had to offer was a story about how Messiaen and Loriod had once devoured an entire pear tart at one sitting.
Elsewhere, Alex Ross reported that Messiaen's sweet tooth played a role in the commissioning of Des canyons aux étoiles…, which the composer reluctantly agreed to undertake after being plied with an enormous cake covered in crême chantilly and pistachios.
Tags: the rest is noise
November 3rd, 200909:34 pm: Scientific and political ethics
It seems to me that Evan Harris, in a letter in today's Guardian gets the ethics of being an independent scientific advisor just right:
If a distinguished scientist — following appointment as an adviser to the government — has to adapt his or her comments, depending on the government's policy, then they are not independent.
When they become government advisers, the only additional requirements scientists take on — with respect to public comments — is that of confidentiality, and making clear that they do not speak for the government.
Tags: politics
November 2nd, 200910:27 pm: Hippy-dippy tendencies
Another quote from Alex Ross, this time on Karlheinz Stockhausen:
Bright, glib, fair-haired, collegial, Stockhausen exuded what would later be called postive energy, although deep-seated authoritarian tendencies made him a sometimes insufferable colleague. In later years he revealed a mystical streak, bordering on the hippy-dippy; it turned out that he had lived many past lives, and that he claimed to be extraterrestrial in origin. Stockhausen was, in fact, born in a village outside Cologne, in 1928.
Tags: music, the rest is noise
November 1st, 200910:20 pm: A good end to the weekend
Despite having done both in isolate, today was the day of the first biking/running set since before my vacation and I wasn't looking forward to it in the slightest. But I needn't have worried. The bike ride was good and the run was, well, a positive delight. I enjoyed it so much that I seriously considered running the same route a second time just because I could. Definitely one of the best runs of the last few months. Tags: cycling, running
02:39 pm: The problems of rationalism
Via BoingBoing, I happened across this piece in Wired on vaccines and the antivax movement. Skipping the medical stuff, I was rather taken with these two paragraphs which rather neatly sum up some of the problems of rationalism:
The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people "know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling." Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. "A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society," Sagan wrote of certain Americans' embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. "There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community."
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
Current Music: Takashi Yoshimatsu - Ode to Birds and the Rainbow , scepticism, science
October 31st, 200905:00 pm: Agatha Christie on Halloween
Much to my surprise, today's dramatisation of Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party on BBC7 was completely new to me. Although the story was rather slight, I enjoyed the allusive qualities of piece, with it's obvious references to The Tempest and, unless I miss my guess, Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Not being familiar with the book, I can't be sure whether these were present in the original or whether they were added and/or emphasised by Michael Bakewell's excellent adaptation. Tags: radio
04:26 pm: Halloween food scare
I suspect that these photos of Bear's chili dog casserole in the making might just be the scariest thing I'll see this All Hallows' Even... Tags: fear, food
October 30th, 200904:02 pm: Boulez on the XXth Century
More withering sarcasm from Pierre Boulez via Alex Ross, focused this time on Nicolas Nabokov's CIA funded Masterpieces of the XXth Century festival held in Paris in 1952:
Boulez's Structures 1a figured in Masterpieces of the XXth Century as a sample of what the younger generation was doing. The composer and his erstwhile teacher Messiaen played it at 5:30 one afternoon, with Stravinsky and Craft in attendance. Boulez's involvement in Nabokov's festival was grudging; he could not have been pleased to be lumped together with the likes of Britten and Thompson. Two years later he would accuse Nabokov of creating a "folklore of mediocrity" and recommend that a future festival celebrate the twentieth-century condom.
Tags: music, quotes, the rest is noise
October 29th, 200910:43 pm: Boulez on Cage
Today's quote from Alex Ross' superlative book, The Rest is Noise, captures the falling out between Pierre Boulez and John Cage:
...this was too much for Boulez, who was soon speaking as witheringly of Cage as he had of so many others. By the seventies, he was calling his former friend a "performing monkey" whose methods have betrayed "fascist tendencies"— thereby putting Cage next to Strauss, Sibelius and Stravinsky in the crowded room of composers who had been labeled fascist for one reason or another.
Tags: music, quotes, the rest is noise
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