In this post, Tom Kreitzburg explains very well a point that I’ve tried to make on occasion: that all that is, insofar as it is, is good, and that in all of our doings we desire what seems good to us.
Monthly Archives: April 2012
My First Digital Camera
My first digital camera was a Sony Mavica FD5. It had a resolution of 640×480 pixels, and saved images on 3.5″ floppy disks. (Remember those?) I could get twenty to thirty images on one disk, if I recall correctly; I had a little belt case that would hold 10 disks, and I’d swap them out like film cartridges.
Here’s one of the pictures I took with it:
Please note: this is not resized; this is the resolution at which it came from the camera.
It was taken the day my eldest son learned to stand up. He never really pulled himself up on things; he just stood up, like you see in the pictures. (Note to baby-snatchers: don’t come looking for him, he’s in High School now.) A delightful memory, but the image quality is nothing to write home about. Or perhaps it is: “Hey, Mom, you won’t believe how bad these pictures look….”
The camera cost me lots of money, and I loved it and enjoyed it immensely.
Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look and see if anybody had an FD5 for sale at Amazon, and what the asking prices were like. I don’t want to buy one; I still have mine, though I haven’t used it in over ten years. But I thought to myself, you know, it might be a collector’s item. It was Sony’s first floppy disk camera, sold when the industry was young; it has historical interest; maybe it’s worth something.
And, it turns out, it is. If you want to get your very own Sony Mavica FD5, known to work as recently as 2009, you can order one for the rock-bottom price of $24.99. Yes, you heard me right: 24 dollars and 99 cents.
Oh, and $5.99 shipping.
Don’t delay, they are selling like hotcakes.
Sound vs. Sense
I’ve been a subscriber to Pandora for a couple of years now, and I really enjoy it. For those aren’t familiar with it, Pandora is a streaming music service that plays music based on seeds that you give it. The goal is to analyze the music you like, determine the characteristics that music has, and identify other music that matches the pattern and play it for you. I hasten to add, there’s no AI magic going on here; Pandora is based on something called the Music Genome Project, in which humans listen to songs and assess them relative to various qualities. For example, I asked Pandora why it was playing its current song. It answered:
We’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, ska influences, mild rhythmic syncopation, heavy use of vocal harmonies and many other similarities identified in the Music Genome Project.
And apparently I like all those things.
The interesting thing is that Pandora adjusts its notion of what you’ll like as it plays. You can give each song that appears a thumb’s up or a thumb’s down, and Pandora will use those assignments to better understand your preferences. And that’s a problem.
It’s a problem because Pandora can only assess the sound of a song, and not its sense. Once in a while a song will come along that I like the sound of, but dislike because of the lyrics—because the sense of the lyrics is egregiously immoral, or unpleasant, or simply repulsive. I can give it a thumb’s down, and Pandora will never play the song again, but I worry that Pandora will get the wrong idea. I’m objecting to the sense, and Pandora is going to assume that I’m objecting to the sound.
I don’t blame Pandora for this; it’s amazing that it does as good a job with the aesthetics as it does, and I expect that attempts to assess the sense in the same way would be unsatisfactory to everyone involved.
The reason I bring this up, though, is it seems to me that we listeners often judge music in the same way. We listen to the sound, and we ignore the sense. If it sounds good to us, we like it and we listen to it. What’s up with that? Where did the expectation that the sense doesn’t matter come from?
I’m no Tipper Gore; I’m not looking for parental advisory notifications or advocating a ban on music I personally find offensive. But why is it that we assume that popular music should be considered morally and philosophically neutral, when it manifestly is not?
The Economics of Staying at Home
I don’t usually comment on the political news, or on things at Instapundit (because I figure lots of people read that anyway); however, amidst all of the verbiage on Ann Romney’s choice to stay at home and raise the five Romney, I saw this post.
I don’t know anything about Kevin Williamson, and I didn’t read any of his post except the paragraph Glenn Reynolds quoted, but I agree with that paragraph completely:
It is difficult to put a dollar value on parental time, but it is clear that to the Romneys one hour of Mrs. Romney’s time at home with the family was worth far more than one hour in C-level wages; further, a 2,000-hour annual block of time invested in earning C-level wages would have fundamentally changed the character of the Romney household for the worse, while providing negligible economic benefit. Instead, she provided the family with a critical good that Mr. Romney, for all his riches, could not acquire without her cooperation. If we think of the household as a household, Ann Romney’s decision to stay at home makes perfect economic sense: Her decision to be a full-time mother enormously improved the quality of life for Mr. Romney, for the couple’s five sons, and — let’s not overlook this critical factor — for Mrs. Romney herself.
My wife Jane is a stay-at-home mom. She worked outside the home before we had kids; she might possibly work outside the home when our kids have moved out. But right now, right at the moment, having her at home has proven to be the best thing for all six of us, economically and in all other ways.
Human Wave Science Fiction
Sarah Hoyt, whose books I have not read, has recently begun advocating for what she calls “human wave science fiction.” And I’m all for it.
Check out her manifesto, which is really all about good story-telling. I’m especially fond of her rule #2:
2. Your writing shouldn’t leave anyone feeling like they should scrub with pumice or commit suicide by swallowing stoats for the crime of being human, or like humans are a blight upon the Earth, or that the future is dark, dreary, evil and fraught with nastiness, because that’s all humans can do, and woe is us.
Heretics
Continuing my jaunt through G.K. Chesterton’s books, I’ve just finished re-reading Heretics, an odd and not entirely satisfactory little book in which Chesterton examines the beliefs of many of the prominent people of his day. Toward the end of the book, he has a few words about progress, about the notion that we are, mentally, ethically, socially, every day in every way getting better and better:
The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut.
What would we say to a physicist who told us that the goal of physics is to know gradually less and less about the physical world? The goal of physics is to know more and more, with more and more certainty, about the physical world. And the same is true in all fields of knowledge, philosophy and religion not least. But if you’d rather not know, well…Chesterton has a word just for you.
Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.
Noble House
Continuing to work my way through James Clavell’s oeuvre, I spent Holy Week working my way through Noble House. I use the expression “working my way” advisedly, as it was a bit of a slog—my least favorite Clavell to date.
Noble House is an immense book, with an immense cast. It takes place in just over a week; and it’s non-stop action the whole time. The basic premise is simple. The book is set in Hong Kong in the early 1960’s. Ian Dunross, a descendant of Dirk Struan and tai-pan of the Noble House. As the week begins, he’s considering a business deal with two Americans, Linc Bartlett and K.C. Tcholok, that will give the Noble House a presence in the New World. For their part, Bartlett and Tcholok will gladly take over the Noble House if they can, and are also in discussions with the interestingly named Quillan Gornt, the descendant of Dirk Struan’s old nemesis Tyler Brock. Gornt is encouraged to trigger a long-laid plan to destroy the Noble House. The whole drama plays out over the next week, against a background of spies (both Russian and Chinese), pirates, drug smugglers, banking, trade, fires, mudslides, torture, and lots of not particularly graphic sex.
It’s amazing how a book that covers so short a period of time can move so slowly. At about half-way through, I was strongly tempted just to move on to something else. At about that point, though, Clavell began to pay off some of the mysteries raised earlier in the book, and I got interested again.
Noble House is not a bad book; and amazingly, Clavell really does tie up all the loose ends and bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. And there are other inducements to read it, because he ties together all of his other books. It is a direct sequel to Tai-Pan, of course; Peter Marlowe of King Rat is a minor but significant character; and we even meet a descendant of the Anjin-San from Shogun. The theme of “going native” is still present, though somewhat muted, and there’s so much going on, and so many characters, that it’s a hard book to come to grips with. On top of that, the ’60’s is recent enough that (for me, at least) it doesn’t have that historical novel flavor that I enjoyed with the others.
So read Shogun; read King Rat; read Tai-Pan; if you like ’em, you might give Noble House a try. But don’t start with it.
The Lord is Risen!
He is risen indeed!
Womb to Tomb
Today is Holy Saturday, when we remember Jesus in the tomb; and when one prays the Rosary, Saturday is also one of the days when you pray the Joyful Mysteries, which recount (among other things) Jesus’ conception and birth. (I gather that there are different rules for praying the Rosary during Lent; but I haven’t learned them. I simply go on praying the same pattern of mysteries that I pray the rest of the year.) So today I’ve been pondering Jesus’ life from womb to tomb. And it occurred to me that Jesus’ death was necessary, if he was to a human like us in all things but sin, because the quality of a human life can only be seen in retrospect.
St. Paul compares our human lives to a race, a race that ends only with our deaths:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. (1 Cor 9:24)
For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Tim 4-7)
The letter to the Hebrews uses the same metaphor.
…let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us… (Heb 12:1)
Until you’ve finished the race, you don’t know where you stand in the rankings. How you run the race matters—”run that you may obtain it”—but clearly, finishing the race is essential. Jesus ran the whole race. Yesterday, on Good Friday, we remembered the moment He crossed the finish line. Tomorrow, we remember His entry into the Winner’s Circle.
We the living still have the race to finish. Thanks be to God! For in Christ’s victory we have the hope that we can not only finish it—any fool can do that, and will—but by His grace, can run so that we may obtain the prize.
A Heart on Fire
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has a new little book out; it’s what you might call an “e-pamphlet” ($0.99 at Amazon) called A Heart on Fire. It’s about the fault line running through American society these days on the subject of religion and its role in the public square, and about what we can do about it.
Actually, it’s mostly about diagnosing the fault line, because the prescription is really pretty simple. If you want to catch others on fire, you have to be on fire yourself. It’s not enough to complain about others, or about how we Christians are being attacked; in fact, complaints are mostly useless. Rather, we need to live active, dynamic, vibrant Christian lives.
And the key to living an active, dynamic, vibrant Christian life is spending time with Christ himself…which is to say, we have to make time for prayer and the sacraments.
It’s Holy Thursday–a great time to get started.
(Thanks to Richard, who brought the book to my attention.)
The View from the Foothills 