out of the blue

Aaron and I just went to see V for Vendetta. I am blown away. More later.

My recently played music

There's an online music service called "last.fm", which is an online database of the music people listen to. You can find people who listen to similar music, and through them find other music you might be interested in. They provide a nice rss feed for your recently listened tracks. They also provide information about what your top tracks/artists are, overall and weekly. This information is updated every once in a while, rather than constantly. It also takes a little while to get a big enough database for the data to actually mean something. I listened to a bit of Nick Drake to see what I thought of his music, and he's now one of the top artists on last.fm, whereas I've hardly listened to him ever and still prefer a lot of other music that isn't even on the list.

Anyway, I wrote/stole a php script to parse that rss feed and display it on my web site. That's where the link goes.

This service seems to be very interesting. I signed up on a whim, not because I though it was going to be extremely useful, but because it was a neat idea. Now I'm there. You might try it out too, if you want.

What happens when you post a journal entry titled "Blog" with nothing in the body but "Blog"?

This.

How quickly do you notice the anachronism in this photoshopped Renoir?

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Well, here are the photos and a painting that I will have submitted to Reflection by tomorrow:

Reflection Submissions

All of them have been edited in some way, to improve color, or a little more (the mountain island was particularly changed, due to the presence of an annoying jet engine). I think that doesn't detract from the art of the pictures: I'm overcoming the limitations of my media, which is a relatively inexpensive digital camera without any manual controls. So there.

I hope you enjoy them. The tifs are gigantic, so don't bother downloading them unless you really want to see a higher quality version.

Honestly, here's one of the main reasons I'd want to be a writer:

"I think I'm going to reprint a few stories that have never been reprinted for the 2007 short story collection for kids I'm planning (Ray Bradbury said that he didn't mind if I called it M is for Magic, which is my tip of the hat to R is for Rocket and S is for Space, bless him) and I know that it'll be back to the tubs again for that."

[From Neil Gaiman's online journal – link]

To begin a sentence (or especially a parenthetical) with "Ray Bradbury said" would be amazing. If I could do that, I would die happy, because Ray Bradbury is quite possibly the most amazing writer in the history of the galaxy. And Neil Gaiman, another of the writers I admire well-nigh Godhood, just got to use it.

I think I want to be Neil Gaiman, so that I can talk to Bradbury and be sort of legitimate about it. And so that I can write like Neil Gaiman. I think I'd rather write like Ray Bradbury, though Neil has a lot of his own unique awesomeness, but that would mean I'd never get to know him. I'd just be him, which would almost be a disappointment.

(Lucky blackguard….)

Okay, so Chris Paff and I were trying to figure out how the units of luck would be expressed. We were thinking something along the lines of the inverse of the probability of an event times the integral of the intensity of pleasure/goodness over the time that it lasts. You also have to consider the question of how to measure the intensity of an event, because pleasure is rather subjective. Paff suggested a sneeze, but who knows how universal that is. If there are any suggestions, give me a shout. Anyway, this line of thought reminded Aaron, Becky and I of the measurement of Beauty that we've discussed in the past: Helens. One Helen is enough beauty to launch a thousand ships, so naturally most discussion is done in terms of milli or picohelens. (Note that we could say that it was only her face that launched a thousand ships, and that she might be rated higher than a Helen when taken as a whole, but I think that its safe to assume that "the face that launched a thousand ships" was meant to be metonymy. After all, who wants a unit called a Helen-face?)

Our conversation turned in interesting directions… What would the average number of Helens be for a person? Along the way, these quotes came up:

"I could launch a duck!"
-Becky

"…the ability to launch a small raft, or a log with a hobo on it…"
-Aaron

Finally, we talked about negative Helens—that is, a person with a rating of some number of negative Helens causes people to launch ships to get away from them.

Quite an enjoyable night.

I don't know how many of you know much about the huge controversy about some cartoons published in a Danish newspaper depicting various comic artists' renditions of the prophet Muhammad, who isn't supposed to be represented physically according to Muslim tradition, but I thought some people might be interested in reading this.

The Washington Post ran an article which printed the Danish Newspaper's editor's response to the overwhelmingly antagonistic backlash against the comics. Here's a few excerpts from the article:

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn't intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

A little later in the article, he wrote contrasting Denmark's religious tolerance to the Middle East's intolerance:

Nowhere do so many religions coexist peacefully as in a democracy where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. In Saudi Arabia, you can get arrested for wearing a cross or having a Bible in your suitcase, while Muslims in secular Denmark can have their own mosques, cemeteries, schools, TV and radio stations.

When you read the whole article, you can see that the riots were not necessarily typical Muslim reaction to the comics. A very small percentage went out and tried to bomb embassies. It specifically discusses how many moderate Danish Muslims were willing to speak out against the violence that occurred in response to the comics.

If you haven't seen the cartoons, they can be found here. They are definitely potentially offensive, but so are a lot of things that get published, and generally those things don't provoke so much violence as this did.

I'm curious about what you guys think about the whole situation. Should the newspaper have not printed the comics because they were potentially offensive? What about the radical Muslim reaction, was it justified? Any other opinions?

I'm in the middle of a painting. So I made a web page devoted to saving versions as I progress. At the end, it'll have a sequence of images that records the entire process. If you like, you can keep track of how it goes. Feedback is particularly encouraged! Tell me what you think, what changes you think you would make, etc. I'd love to hear.

Succession: art page