Monthly Archives: July 2009

Finished ripping CDs

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di090703

Two bags with my favorite CDs, which I once assumed I would leave behind when I died, hopefully far into the future. Now in the trash they go.

Finished at last! Every CD I could find is ripped to the hard disk, and a backup is made to an external disk.  The CDs from USA and Europe are stuffed in bags to throw in the trash, those that are not there already.  I keep the Japanese ones, for now. I originally planned to keep the CDs from my favorite artists:  Enya, Leonard Cohen, Chris de Burgh.  They are all awesome, compared to pretty much anyone else, in that the consistently make good songs and perform them themselves with great enthusiasm.  And they fill up all or much of the CD with good songs instead of spacing it out with one good song and 9 boring on each CD. So I was really planning to keep them, until the Jammie Thomas judgment. Now I am not planning to have an American or European CD in the house ever again.  Nor do I intend to buy any from online shops like iTunes etc.  They had their chance, and they blew it.  This means war.

I have decided on Sound Converter, a Linux program, to make all the tracks into MP3 files for easy streaming.  The Opera Unite music streaming program only handles that format.  Unfortunately it also panics at the sight of non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps it thinks they are malicious code?  I am still not sure what to do with my Japanese music in that regard, I have found English translations for one (DearS) but may have to either translate or transliterate the others manually, a Herculean task, although not Sisyphean.  As it is, just converting the hundreds of non-Japanese CDs will likely take weeks, as my Linux CD at home is so old, it is slow even with Xubuntu.

Once the tracks are converted, I intend to use Opera Unite to stream them so my friends around the world can listen to them.  That’s illegal, of course: According to the recent Norwegian law about intellectual property, it is illegal to play music for your family. You can only perform copyrighted works at home if you do so “without the help of strangers”. Since your stereo is almost certainly made by strangers, using it to play for your spouse and kids could get you arrested.

That is not very likely though, because the police is locked up in a long struggle with the government.  They are refusing to work overtime – crimes should please be committed during office hours until further notice.   Things have been going sour over a very long time:  The Norwegian police was reorganized, as are pretty much every tentacle of government, including the one in which I worked.  And like that one, the police also found themselves doing more work for the same pay, and less meaningful work as well. As far as I know this has been the outcome of every “reorganization” in public sector in Norway, as it probably is everywhere else.  Anyway, after years of this they have had enough.  So they are doing only what they absolutely have to do.  And this means as long as we have crazy people running around doing actual crimes, there won’t be police left over to make sure I don’t let my best friends listen to my favorite music.

Trade Day again

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di090702

Unfortunately, the rest of you is gradually going to get bigger and bigger too, until you’re just a quivering mound of fat.  Luckily it takes decades to run its course.

I had forgotten that the first Thursday of July is Trade Day (or Day of Commerce) in Kristiansand, year after year.  It seems to usually take me by surprise.  Not so the people of the surrounding countryside.  I did notice on the commute bus that it was fuller than usual.  In fact, there was hardly a free seat by the time we came to the city.  Still it was not until I saw the crates on the pavement that I remembered.

Extremely regular readers may remember that I have reported from Trade Day almost yearly. In particular the sight of an unusual number of chubby housewives, or something like that, invading the city for the occasion.  My primary theory is that they come from the surrounding countryside, but I have no explanation why women outside the city would be visibly fatter than those in it.  So I have also speculated that maybe these come from the same area as their slightly slimmer sisters, but that they stay out of sight except in dire emergencies, such as half price on frying pans.

In any case, they are back, and they are fatter than ever.  In fact, I think this is getting too far. Perhaps I should say, even I think so.  I find chubby women decorative, but this goes beyond merely chubby.

I’ll briefly repeat my observation of body mass and femininity.  Skinny women, with some few exceptions, tend toward the boyish, or “unisex” perhaps more correctly.  When they fatten up, they normally become more womanly:  Their cheeks grow rounder, their breasts grow larger and heavier, their hips and buttocks grow larger and rounder, and their thighs softer.  But at some point – which varies from family to family, it seems – this process stops.  Perhaps all the feminine fat cells are filled to the max. Whatever the reason, further weight gain seems to just settle wherever there is free space on the body, gradually transforming their feminine curves to a quivering mound of fat.  And once again, they become near indistinguishable from their equally fat brethren. Unisex again.

There is also the detail that it looks unhealthy.  At some point you know that these people will have a problem walking up stairs or a hillside, in extreme cases perhaps even on flat ground, though there are still few of those around here.  But we are starting to see more and more American conditions.  And we know that Americans spend a lot of money on their health and get rather less health for it.  Some claim that this is because socialized medicine is inherently superior in some way.  I think it can all be explained by the fact that most Americans are fat and lazy.  And now we’re getting there too, even the women.  It reminds me of a comment I once saw to the effect that America is a shining lighthouse, and the purpose of a lighthouse is so other people can steer clear of it, not straight at it!

Apart from that, the day was hot but despite the blue sky there was a fairly strong breeze that kept the city from overheating completely.  There was much less wind in the valley where I live, however, so I did not get the house cooled down until right now, around midnight.  Even then it is barely bearable.  Sleep quality (and even quantity) suffers from the heat.  Ironically the basement is downright chilly.  I should have rented that instead, I sometimes think.

I can’t imagine how people can stand being fat in this weather.  Fat is a good insulator, to the point where whales and seals use it to survive the cold of the arctic waters. And unlike clothes, you can never take it off. Wouldn’t it be nice if humans put on weight in the autumn and lost it again in spring? In Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy there is such a mechanism, but then again the seasons there last for centuries.  I suppose “bone fever” is not really an alternative here on Earth. Although I do expect to lose a few pounds during the Mexican flu, if I survive it.  And it seems all but a few people do.  But that is a concern for another time, if ever.

Pick your disaster please

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di090701

Or perhaps it already is the year 2100 and we are characters in The Sims XXIV. Because if I narrowly study “The Sims” games and carefully project the future development from currently existing data, today’s reality is around the level of detail I would expect by then. If so, I really hope there is a backup of our world.

This week’s New Scientist has another article on global warming: “Sea level rise: It’s worse than we thought“. It focuses mostly on the melting of glacier. It is the same old death warmed over and elicits the same mocking and denial from the people who don’t believe humans can change the climate.

I was tempted to write a comment myself, but I restrained myself primarily because I no am no longer a subscriber. The reason why not is, ironically, that they have not introduced an option for web-only subscription, but insist on sending me dead trees every week as long as I subscribed. And by air freight, it seems, given how rapidly they arrived. I can see the positive aspect of that, but it ought to be entirely optional, as it is with The Economist and lately even EnlightenNext (formerly What is Enlightenment). But enough about that. What was my reaction?

“2100 – that’s several decades after the Singularity. It won’t be a problem for humans anymore, even should there still be humans around.”

What? Why should climatologists need to worry about something squarely in the field of the computer scientists? As if they don’t have enough to keep track of already! The only thing they need from the tech nerds is a new supply of even faster computers every couple years, to run the newest, improved climate models. Ironically, it is exactly this trend toward faster and faster computers that may render their entire career absolutely worthless, because the things they study literally happen at glacial speed, while the changes brought about by the information revolution happen over the course of a few years.

This is not the only case. It is a general trait of science. It is a long time now since anyone could be an expert on science – these days, we all know more and more about less and less. This renders most science without predictive power, because the real world is almost never limited to one science. Well, we can (for the time being) still predict solar and lunar eclipses with great accuracy. But when we get down to earth, nothing stands still – or moves in the same direction – long enough to make a good prediction.

Peak oil, anyone? Remember a year ago, when the oil price was so disastrously high that students started to enroll in online courses even though they lived only an hour’s drive from the college? And since agriculture was based heavily on gas- and diesel driven tractors and lorries, food prices went up as well, even more than they already did from the brainless decision to invest tax money in growing corn for fuel, outcompeting human food. So, last year, the end of the oil age was near. Oh noes! We are all going to walk or ride. The cities will be left deserted. The military and police will collapse. We are going back to the dark ages if not worse! Well, that situation is bound to repeat itself if the world somehow gets out of the current economic slump. But you know what? This directly influences the CO2 content in the atmosphere, and thus the greenhouse effect. Unless you are reasonably well informed about fossil fuel extraction (and, it later turned out, economics) your climate predictions will be only marginally better than tea leaves. Generally you can say “it will become warmer” since there is already CO2 out there enough to change the climate for a long, long time. But any details beyond that are doomed.

But that is not all. Oh no. Let us talk virus. After the SARS outbreak that mysteriously died out, the world became aware that pandemics were a real threat. And as good luck would have it, a few innocent people died of bird flu before we had time to forget the whole incident. Sucks to be them, but for the rest of us this was like a gift from on high. Or at least could have been. The world’s governments – at least the parts of the world that people are not fleeing from at the risk of their very lives – started to plan, and even cooperate. Roche built factories to churn out the miracle flu medicine, Tamiflu, and governments started stockpiling. Many other plans were laid as well, to stop a pandemic before it could stop us.

Remember what happened? The Mexican flu sneaked up on us, and is currently spreading rapidly, especially in the southern hemisphere where it is winter now. If this had been the bird flu, with 60% mortality, instead of the much less murderous swine flu, civilization as we know it would have been doomed. On a timescale of approximately a year. That is to say, in 2011 there would be no Internet, no nations, no banks, and very few places with both electricity and running water. I am not kidding about this, and neither should you kid yourself. We studied for this test for five years, and we flunked utterly, completely.

I could go on and on, in fact I have several long paragraphs in my brain cache ready to write down. But would that even do any good? What we need to know is that urgency has priority over severity. This understanding is passed down by the survivors from every battlefield, literal or figurative, and most people have a vague idea that it must be so. Which is why you need so long an education to obsess over something you not only don’t know, but CAN’T know.

Now, tell me something about the climate in 2030, when I or at least someone I care about may still be around. If you don’t know what will happen in 20 years but can make very accurate predictions a century ahead, excuse me if I attend to my other interests instead.