Attention to detail impresses me, so I’m continually unimpressed by almost everything. For all the power of free market tiered pricing, it’s almost impossible to buy something that doesn’t have some component built by the lowest bidder. And the lowest bidders are presumably the companies where the idiots work.

For reasons totally beyond my control, I have a silver angle poise lamp here. Several idiots had a say in its construction.

Sturdy Weighted Base! - except the base doesn’t secure to the arm, so if you pick it up by the arm, it comes apart.

60W round lamp (not supplied) - except they actually supplied two, one of them already fitted.

The awkward bayonet fitting (which rotates as you rotate the bulb, so you have to squeeze your fingers down the side to hold it steady) has two positions: bulb screwed in, and bulb almost screwed in. The lamp arrived with a bulb almost screwed in, and so it fell out after about five minutes of standing still. Luckily it didn’t smash. The fitting makes it very easy to think you’ve screwed it in when you haven’t, so I almost don’t blame whoever on the factory floor almost screwed this one in. Bayonet fittings aren’t hard to design or build. It took subtle carelessness and lack of testing to get this one wrong.

Finally, the instructions printed on the side of the box refer to a locking-in-place feature that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t even exist on the picture of the lamp on the front of the box.

It’s not all bad though; the springs make a nice twanging noise and when it comes down to it, the lamp really does produce light. And I don’t think any of its faults were malicious, unlike, say, products from Sony or Microsoft, who make conscious decisions to build annoying products: Memory Stick dependence, upgrade dependence, file format dependence, cable size and shape dependence, charger dependence, and so on… vendor lock-in in general. They can’t lock you into a lamp.

Upon entering a public house in heady early 21st century Britain, you are immediately, and ruthlessly, assaulted by total disinterest. When a waitron finally notices you, usually in the same way they notice what they’ve just trodden in, you’ll get the lead-piercing lava-freezing glance, whereupon they’ll pause, mid-text, zombie-drag over to your table, grab your throat by their outthrust gauntlet-clad fist, push you against the half-timbered wall, and hiss “woddaya wont?” while checking their watch and chewing their gum. This is par for the course in the British service industry, which makes it so surprising that the staff at the Filmworks cinema in Manchester seem genuinely pleased to serve you. Working at a ticket desk must crush the spirit, but they’re always nice and friendly. This is not about courteous ushers though; this is about The Gallery.

For eleven pounds on a weeknight, you can sit high up at the back of the cinema in wide seats designed to hold even the biggest film fans, eating complementary popcorn and nachos (and plates of Quality Streets), drinking complementary fizzies and coffee, and guzzling non-complementary alcohol. There is a cretinously ill-placed cloth net in front of the balcony wall, which stops your drinks and food sliding over the edge, but does nothing to stop you actively hurling your hot coffee and broken bottles down onto the unsuspecting standard-rate-paying prole scum (as they would like you to think of them) below. If you’re in the front row, this net blocks the bottom 10% of the screen, so although these may be the best seats in the house, as claimed, they are not in the best position.

The seats are quite antisocial in their magnitude, but it is possible to squeeze two people into one. They don’t allow under-18s anywhere on the whole floor.

You can sit in the bar area before the film starts; they’ll call you when it does, like in an airport lounge, which is not what you want to be reminded of. Interestingly, they really do call you when the film starts, not when the adverts start. This means the increased price is enough to win them over to your side (at the regular £3.50 a head, the marketeers are the real paymasters).

So anyway, it’s quite good. Pity the films aren’t.

I like reading other peoples’ Christmas presents: if you’re quick, you can finish them before they get taken away. Reading your own books can be done any time. And so I read this:

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

While looking on amazon.co.uk for reviews (to see what my opinion should be, obviously) I found this one:

fantastic book well written and taughtme loads, of stuff. And very funniable.

Now: this is a book about punctuation. The sarcastic comment about how interesting it is can come later. For now, let us bask in the imagined horror of what this reader’s punctuation, grammar, and spelling must’ve been like before reading the book. It’s possible ve’s being funny, but if ve can’t even spell vis own town’s name properly, I doubt it.

As for the book itself, it’s OK. The author, Lynne Truss, writes as if for Radio 4 (or maybe the Daily Mail). Funny in places, but overall coming across as someone who hasn’t spent enough time on the internet. That’s probably a good thing overall, but her characterisation of the net as a force for language destruction is poorly researched.

One thing I wasn’t aware of before is the existence of scriptio continua and how punctuation cures this. The current trend of compound-word coinage is thus a disturbing throwback.

Apart from the pop-culture name dropping (always fun), the rest of the book was quite good. Hmm, well, maybe it was just OK.

Guards! Guards!

For some reason, I also read this. Disjointed. Funny. Sort of nihilistic. Not the hack fantasy I always assumed Terry Pratchett wrote, but in fact clever fantasy parody. Very clever. Douglas-Adamsy (yay!). Web-censors will need to be fully sentient before they recognise the subtle rudeness.

I enjoyed reading it, but it was in no way gripping. Maybe that’s not the point.

Diaspora

My usage of the word ‘ve’ above might make one think I’ve fallen into the transhumanist webgulch, but in fact it was coined by Greg Egan, and used extensively in Diaspora. Useful too, as long as you’re not obnoxious about it. Which I am, muahaha.

Diaspora, if it really is anything more than a thread of short stories, casts the transhuman condition as a struggle between realism and abstractionism. As an immortal near-god, do you explore the universe, or create your own? I vaguely recognise this as something big-A Art tries to deal with, but hard-SF seems to deliver more results than that has so far.

Both attempts are quite silly, but that doesn’t stop them from being in some ways fun. I didn’t really enjoy the speculative particle physics part of Diaspora, but I liked the psychogenesis section and the idea of life as an emergent phenomenon of some kind of chaotic function space. Very Permutation City. Very mathematical. In fact, right now, I’m supposed to be revising stuff that is actually in the book!. The Gauss-Bonnet theorem, Euler characteristics, topology, manifolds, metrics, curvature… all part of the novel, and all on the January 2004 exams. What astonishing luck!

Mixed in with the maths is a feast of cool ideas, which is what SF is about. Character development means funny things in books like this. It’s done quite well, but nevertheless comes across as a loosely glued together collection of episodes. You can almost imagine that the reason why the section prologues are un-numbered is because they were spliced in at the last minute to make sure the book isn’t reviewed as a short story collection. No, that’s too harsh. There is coherence here.

Some might blither at the rather bleak ending. I think it’s quite powerful, maybe even romantic. Imagine if the last episode of The Office hadn’t gone the way it did. I wouldn’t have complained; sometimes a nasty dose of reality is what Art is all about, although in the case of Diaspora, perhaps that should read: a nasty shock of abstraction.

I don’t subscribe to the author’s Dust hypothesis, which he apparently really believes in. I believe continuity is important. That’s why I don’t like his bandying about of clones; too many times a character cloned verself and then effectively committed suicide, reasoning, “it doesn’t matter; my clone will live on for me.” No, no, no! If a twin dies, he doesn’t carry on living in his twin’s body. He dies. Clones are merely twins; entirely separate. I think the author knows this and uses his Dust hypothesis to gloss over it.

There is a glossary of terms at the back of the book which I missed completely, but if you’ve read any other Egan*, or any other kind of post-human speculative fiction or literature, you won’t have any trouble working out what he means. One thing he doesn’t explain is how big polises are. He gives clues though; a quick calculator session mid-read suggested they are about 6 metres across, assuming they are spherical.

Greg Egan’s nicely retro webpage (it even has Java applets!) is a good companion to his books. It has explanations, diagrams, equations and other things. Groovy.

*Ugh. I hate hate hate using the author’s name to refer to vis books. I feel like a port drinker. Too old, and too cryptofascist.

Osmosing through the covers and floating out of the window seems perfectly natural. Not even crossing the night-still city and breaking through the cloud layer arouses your suspicion. Sharp ascension. The horizon curves away as the thinning air sinks and guards the globe against the hard vacuum; breathing is not an issue. You look back and watch the Earth spin. A full rotation, then another; spinning into to a blur, then slowing down. You face the dark side and begin to descend.

Your impossible longitudinal orbit takes you over the golden rice paddies of newly temperate Antarctica and the deserts of South America. Coastlines have changed. The ground is a cratered landscape of subsiding mines, each larger and more desperate than the last. Gas refineries rust, their purpose used up.

Further north, as you pass over the glassy middle east, the muddy coast plays host to the beached carcasses of the giant wave harnessing machines, each dying along with its infrastructure and being washed ashore.

Below, whip-driven slave hordes scrabble into the landfills with bottle-lacerated hands, searching for reforgeable steel. The natural iron ore deposits are gone now, trapped in too-thin veins, or deeper than a lack of technology can dig.

As you fly towards the city, you pass over the sprawling subsuburbs of compact white low-energy housing, once filled with the working poor who couldn’t pay the rising electricity bill of an old house, then filled with the skulls of rioting invaders who couldn’t afford clean water or the guns required to guard it. Sparkling fresh mountain streams run ironically nearby, now recovered from the industrial age, their poisons successfully offloaded into the marrows of the skeleton stacks that line the banks.

The fortified inner city bunkers of the owning class loom ahead, surrounded by the debris of war, but the dozen metres of concrete and lead shielding did not protect their inhabitants from the fallout of going cold turkey from an energy dependence. Mounted clergymen patrol with crossbows; the last bullets were fired long ago, and the managed forests firing the remaining foundries could not support an arms industry beyond the occasional sword and arrowhead.

And then you notice the silence. The churning factories: dead. The beeping cars: melted down into blades and armour. The summer snowdrifts dampen nearby sounds. You look up to the night sky and see the milky way. A defunct satellite deorbits somewhere over Asia and inspires a dozen splinter faiths.

Landing near the charred outline of a library, you see an orphan child in ragged acrylic, hunting insects. He spies movement and pounces, but it’s only a scrap of paper. He discards it and wanders off, darting between shadows to avoid the curfew-enforcing Priests. The cold of the snow bites at your toes, and you feel distant for a moment. The scrap of paper lands at your feet, just as you feel a pillow in your arms. In the moment before drifting back to consciousness, you pick it up, and read:

Support your local fusion research effort!

Pictures of waves!

These are from the dog beach in São Conrado. It’s not really a dog beach. It’s just a beach where dogs are allowed, unlike all the others. Directions: from São Conrado, go up the Estrada do Joá road. Just after the top, there is a gated entrance to the club on that island. The one that looks like a prison. The beach belongs to the club, so the guys on the gate will let you in if you’re a member, or at least look foreign. Such is the reverse-racial-profiling that goes on in the minds of some Brazilians. Keep driving until you reach a car park. Park. Release dog. Enjoy.

Big crashing wave

Little crashing wave

I like this one

Odd one out from Ipanema