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WP:Vote

/ Adam / 3 Comments

John B points out (off-blog) a post on The New Republic that with its blend of political and technical metaphors sounds more like a post from early 21st century South Sea Republic: Wiki-constitutionalism.

It describes the tremendous affection South American nations have for rewriting their constitution from scratch, at a rate of once every ten years or so.

Though it’s a catchy name, Wiki-constitutionalism isn’t a great analogy. The defining aspect of C2 or wikipedia was always progressive collaborative refinement of its documents. A rewrite from scratch is more akin to what Jefferson advocated, in Cam’s words:

Jefferson believed constitution’s should be sunsetted every 25 years, so each succeeding generation can rewrite government to be a reflection of themselves. I agree. The reason republicanism has such traction is that our constitution is a 16thC document with an elected upper house thrown in. Many of the errors, skewings and inefficiencies in our system can be traced to their constitutional origins.

To continue the analogy, and reuse one that came up on SSR more than once, it is like throwing out a creaking legacy system written in VB by a million monkeys, and having a new crack team come in and rewrite it in Python (or the tech du jour).

The example of South America is, however, not reassuring. Going back to TNR:

Latin American leaders have discovered that, by packaging ever-longer lists of promises and rights alongside greater executive functions, they can make a new constitution appealing enough to the masses that they will vote for it in a referendum. The result is constitutions that are not only the shortest-lived, but also among the longest in the world. Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s recently approved constitutions have 411 and 444 articles, respectively, and read like laundry lists of guaranteed rights, such as access to mail and telephones; guarantees for culture, identity, and dignity; and shorter work-weeks. By contrast, the U.S. Constitution, the longest-serving in the world, has only seven articles and 27 amendments.

Making most of these efforts, to complete the last lap around this allegorical track, about as successful as your typical Big Redesign In The Sky.

Subtropical Lawn Care For Green Incompetents

/ Adam / 2 Comments

In late 2009 we moved back to Brisbane, and in keeping with the low density suburban vibe that predominates in this city, acquired responsibility for a lawn. It takes up the remainder of a 400 m^2 block after a small worker’s cottage, a largish shed, and a few small gardens and trees are taken out.

I am not a huge lawn fan. We might convert some of it to garden, in the medium term, but even after that some sort of lawn seems inevitable. B floated the idea of letting it return to meadow, and sowing wildflowers. It’s a wonderfully romantic notion, but there are a few drawbacks. In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly describes a person who restores meadow environments in the US, and it is actually pretty hard work. In the same book, he quotes Freeman Dyson’s critique of Biosphere 2: that the great successes of a closed system like that will be weeds. (It was not exactly the original experiment parameters, but that’s just what happened). Rather more prosaically, typical scrub grass in South East Queensland grows to about a metre high. That’s taller than my son.

So rather than invest in tracking technology and snake wrestling lessons for the youngster, I resigned myself to participation in the ritual cleansing of the yard using a lawnmower.

I don’t really like lawnmowers either. Never have, they are coughing, loud, awkward things awash with fumes that always need filling up with petrol. Plus we have, with varying degrees of seriousness, been trying to go through what Alex Steffen describes somewhat derisorily as The Swap:

Many of these ideas are still being presented as support for the idea that we can conveniently retrofit North American 20th Century suburban life for the 21st Century. We still see hundreds of stories a day promoting the Swap — the idea that we can change the components of suburban, high-consumption, auto-dependent lives without have to change the nature of those lives — but that idea itself is non-reality-based.

To me the Swap is not sufficient but it’s a good start. And anyway, where does The Swap end and The Solution begin? So instead of another petrol lawnmower I bought a push mower off Ebay with $25 and an armful of enthusiasm. That’s push mower as in with your arms, not electric. It’s an old Flymo 5/40. Electric mowers have their place but require more financial commitment. And a really really long extension cord, or you take another big leap in expense.

We had a push mower when I was a kid so I was not entirely ignorant of its pros and cons. But here are some lessons learnt.

  • Consistency. These push mowers work best on short grass, so a philosophy of little and often works best. Once the grass grows a bit it will wrap around the internal axle, and also just stop the rotation of the blades. To make progress you then need to do many short sharp pushes on the same segment, rather than a relatively smooth walking pass. The effort increases in a brutally non-linear fashion relative to the length of the grass. When the grass got long, I ended up spending nearly a third of the mowing time on the most lush 5 metres square patch
  • Summer will beat you. We had record rainfall this summer as a long drought ended. Together with a few weeks away on business, bone idleness on my part, the wet ground and summer sun-fuelled grass vaulting ever skywards, I had to resort to borrowing a petrol mower a few times just to reset the playing field. Ok, what actually happened, even more humiliatingly, was my retired father just came and mowed it when I wasn’t home. Now we are on the edge of winter I am keeping up pretty easily. It’s still a net carbon win, but a bit frustrating to have to cheat in this manner. I suspect that without forking out for a lawnmower bike a few passes with the petrol mower will still be needed each Christmas though.
  • Grass types make a difference. For a lazy lawnmower like myself, broad short kikuyu grass is great. Shorter thinner grass like cooch or other even snobbier varieties used down south are dense pains in the neck (and back and shoulders).
  • Whipper snipper. It is harder to fudge edges with a push mower, as you can’t lift one wheel and push with that dangerous but widely used tilted petrol mower technique without losing almost all cutting power. Once I had established to myself that this push business wasn’t just a fad, by mowing for a month or two, I bought an electric whipper snipper. We recently switched to 100% green power at home so the carbon footprint is restricted to the manufacture and transport. Since I never did the edges properly before anyway, the place actually looks better now.
  • Profile. Our lawn is pretty flat and rectangular. Even so, there are a few dips and holes in it from trees removed long ago. They are a pain as well. We are trying to fill in the holes, but so far everything put into them has trickled down out of sight in a few weeks. They must have been big trees, possibly with roots in another plane.

I figure some people pay for the gym to get their exercise. I hate the gym, and this way we can still traverse our yard without a compass.

Two Letters and Twenty-Five Kinds of Awesome

/ Adam / Leave a comment

AE, the Canadian Science Fiction Review, is a larval stage SF magazine being launched through Kickstarter. I have the lucky, internet-mediated acquaintance of two-thirds of the staff. They are by turns witty, elliptically brilliant, and elegant vivisectionists of consensus reality. They also do words. Big words, small words, words jammed together into sentences, all varieties. Don’t believe me, go check their site out. Words all over the place, but none out of place.

The editorial team have embraced the web and Creative Commons, which is both appealling and the only approach that makes a damn bit of twenty first century sense, and they ultimately leave the final copyright choices up the the submitting authors. They are also planning to pay a decent rate – the SFWA rate, specifically. Their inspiration is, to paraphrase them slightly, more the many headed hydra of the Canadian cosmopolity than “Mounties In Space”.

Given the track record of these people’s superbity-ness, the very least I could do would be to point the rusty, lone search engine robot that reads this blog their way via the link above. So I’ve gone a tiny step further than that and pledged some money as well. Given the way Kickstarter works, this will come back to me in the form of delicious, perfect bound science fiction. Or if they don’t find enough backers this time, it will just come back to me, and the world will be a less speculative place. Which would be a shame. Because if there’s one policy this blog can follow, through thick and thin, it is being pro-awesome.

I really want to read a Mounties In Space story now. But stylish. Like Mountiepunk.

Captain Beefheart, John Sundman, and Richard Prince

/ Adam / 2 Comments

John Sundman writes ripping fictional yarns free of the help and hindrance of the established publishing industry. He has an eye for the technoparanoid flavoured with notes from Christian mythos.  Others have raved about his thriller Acts of the Apostles which is indeed a fun book; personally I like the experimental loops and hilarity of Cheap Complex Devices. It also helps that the tech sounds right, and no doubt his background as a tech writer (as well as fireman and peace corps volunteer) enriches the work.

Like most writers who are not also eccentric industrialists or aristocrats, and especially those without a current advance, Sundman is looking at ways to get paid to write, and his latest project got enough backers at kickstarter to get the go-ahead.

Which brings us to Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet. Captain Beefheart created a series of critically acclaimed and cultishly adored art-rock-wtf records in the sixties and seventies. If you need a more recent reference point – I did – he is Matt Groening’s favourite musician. I have a copy of Trout Mask Replica only because of a review written by Groening. It is a corker of a record but it sounds like a blues band being mugged by schizoaffective rabbits on the first listen.

Don, unfortunately but perhaps not surprisingly, could not make a living out of being a brilliant avant-garde rock musician, but he does make a living as an avant-garde painter. How does this work economically? The number of people buying fine art is if anything far smaller than that buying music, even avant-garde rock music. I suspect it is because Beefheart was in a no-mans land of niche popularity in a mass medium. An LP, CD or MP3 is cheap, with high production costs and low marginal costs. Each copy is also effectively identical, so supply is pretty expandable on demand. The result is low unit costs but also the need either move a lot of units, or make money another way (like gigs).

So Captain Beefheart took a similar career trajectory to Richard Prince – he moved from easily reproducible art to painting, which is the complete opposite of the cost scale. In the fine art world each piece is unique or in a strictly limited set (eg prints). The marginal cost of producing another self-portrait by Rembrandt is effectively infinite. The fine art world is therefore dominated by firstly a certain amount of zero-sum status pissing contest, and secondly and most relevantly a culture of collecting and patronage. It was more financially viable to find a few wealthy patrons than tens of thousands of casual followers.

If you look at Creation Science on kickstarter, it’s an attempt to tap both types of market. Contributions can range from a busker tip to full blown patronage, and according to Sundman the patron-style packages were not just wishful thinking. Personally I stumped up for the paperback, and here’s a toast to the success of Captain Johnny and his Magic Price Point.