I picked this up way back because I was told its conclusion might be relevant to my master's thesis. Only as an example at the tail end of a point, but that is what I do: I procrastinate by reading books that are only vaguely possibly a bit relevant if I am really lucky. I need to stop that.

At any rate. I had read Stanisław Lem before, but only Cyberiad (somehow I managed to completely bypass his more famous Solaris. My expectations were therefore that I would find something quirky, mad, entirely different and genuinely interesting. And so I wasn't surprised; but I wasn't disappointed, either.

His Master's Voice is not like any science fiction I have ever read. Including Cyberiad -- in fact the two are nothing alike. It is a much more coherent story, it is more complicated, it requires more attention. But at the same time it is wonderfully intriguing, perhaps especially to someone with some grasp of the theory of language and communication.

Lem takes a taken-for-granted premise of so much science fiction, that communication with an alien race is possible, and questions it in a theory-heavy context of most major sciences. It is not an action novel. It is not plot-driven, not fast-paced. I may be mistaken in thinking it will appeal mostly to those of an academic turn, but I doubt it. Lem leaves most classics of the genre (even books like Contact, which were written after this one) looking ...

Actually, Ardor: A novel of enchantment according to Prior’s website.

I might as well start off with the thing I’ve written over and over again in my notes: “The prose! Such lovely prose!” Prior’s language is ornate and light at once, her humour gently raucous. It carries an otherwise not-bad, interesting story and makes it an elegant ode to unrequited passion.

It starts, as stories sometimes do, when Francesca Ponderosa leaves her home, to find her sister’s and maybe reconcile with her. In Norcia, Arcadio Carnabuci is deep, unattractive and lonely. From a randomly helpful gypsy (someone had not read his fairy tales!), Arcadio (note that name!) buys magic seeds for love, and plants them. They grow, and in due course become proper plants and bring forth flowers and then fruit. All of them smell of love and lust, and everyone breathes in this air of love – but Francesca Ponderosa barely notices Arcadio, caught up in her own loves, and her own agenda. Instead, Arcadio has the heart of Gezebel, the gentle, observant, caring, helpful mule.

Yeah. She’s the narrator. Ardor is 200-odd pages of unrequited love narrated by a donkey. She’s very eloquent.

Ardor is a novel about unrequited love, about passion and lust. Love hangs in the air in the summer-heated months. And incidentally, just incidentally, magic is here, there and everywhere.

As the town falls more and more under the spell of Arcadio’s fruit, the people there move inevtiably forward ...

En stund nå har jeg fundert litt på et problem. Som tidligere nevnt skal studentene mine gjøre en lab, der de måler lydfarten på forskjellige måter. Den kanskje mest direkte av disse metodene er at man setter opp to lydsensorer ca 2 meter fra hverandre, og så lager man en skarp lyd, og kikker på grafen. Da ser man tydelig at lyden treffer den ene sensoren litt senere enn den andre, og så regner man ut lydfarten fra tidsforskjellen.

Problemet med dette forsøket er at man må ha forholdsvis høy loggefrekvens, altså mange målinge pr. sekund, for å få gode resultater. Hvis man for eksempel målet bare 1000 ganger i sekundet rekker lyden å bevege seg 30 cm mellom to målinger, så man får en unøyaktiget på rundt 10%. 10000 målinger i sekundet ville derfor vært bedre, men det viser seg at det ikke er så enkelt som å bare skru opp loggefrekvensen. Sensorene vi bruker er nemlig koblet til en nokså gammel (det vil si ca 10 år) boks som konverterer de analoge signalene fra sensorene til digitale signaler som sendes til pcen, og denne boksen kobles til pcen via com-port. Og når man skal måle 10000 ganger i sekundet med to sensorer er det en del data som må flyttes. Riktig nok ikke så veldig mye etter dagens standard, men litt i meste laget for com-porten. Det som skjer er i alle fall at systemet henger nokså ofte, og klager på at det ikke får data fra sensorene ...

I neste uke skal det være en slags nyskapnings-messe på Gløshaugen. Normalt er slike messer noe jeg prøver å styre unna, og at det handler om nyskapning gjør ikke saken bedre. Ikke at jeg har noe imot nyskapning som sådan, men jeg har et inntrykk av at ofte når det snakkes om nyskapning tenker folk mer på tjene penger enn på å skape en bedre fremtid. Så, som jeg sa, jeg prøver normalt å styre unna denslags. Men ikke denne gangen. Institutt for fysikk har nemlig blitt bedt om å ha en stand for å vise frem noe morsom fysikk, og av en eller annen grunn har valget falgt på meg. Så Støvneng, som spurte om jeg kunne tenke meg å gjøre dette, og jeg har diskutert hva man kunne finne på, og vi endte opp med å bestemme oss for noe morsomt med magneter.

En naturlig kandidat til «noe morsomt med magneter» er naturligvis å levitere en magnet over en superleder. En klassiker, kan man kanskje si, og et triks jeg føler at jeg begynner å mestre, etter å ha demonstrert det sikkert 10 ganger siden jeg kjøpte en superleder i fjor. (Jeg var forøvrig helt sikker på at jeg hadde skrevet en artikkel om at jeg kjøpte en superleder, men nå kan jeg ikke finne den igjen, så antagelig gjorde jeg det ikke. For å oppsummere: Jeg bestilte den fra Tyskland, den ser ut som en litt stygg stein, og den kostet 100 euro.) Siden jeg begynner å ...

I’m not sure I would have loved Elizabeth Bear’s Undertow quite as much as I did if it were not for André Deschénez, who rules the opening paragraphs, along with the planet – Greene’s World – he inhabits. (Someone help me, I am sure I am using that verb incorrectly.) Andre is a preemptive, overwhelming response to Laura Miller’s first piece of advice: He wants, very badly, to be a “conjurer”. Currently, he is an assassin. (There is a part of me that still wishes that we got a heart-wrenching tale of the bad man who kills people who turns a new leaf and proceeds to entertain small children by pulling rabbits and doves out of hats. Alas, Andre wants more esoteric stuff.) While there are other characters in Undertow, some as or maybe even more compelling, some with agendas or their own, André’s want is the most convincing thing this story has given me. (It’s been months since I read this novel, and the scenes that stay with me are Andre’s and another’s, whom I’ll get to in a bit. This review is taking forever to get to the point, isn’t it?)

While he’s not running around killing people and trying to learn to be a Conjurer, André is Cricket’s lover. Cricket is an archinformist, which basically is exactly what it sounds like. Cricket, in her own turn, is at the initial stages of what might turn out to ...

Last week, it was decided that we should begin a rewrite of the code behind Calcuttagutta in django. This to achive better maintainability, easier development of new and fancy features, and to allow me to participate in development without learning php and whatnot.

Status after one week is that we have set up a repository I have been hacking away a bit in my evenings, and by now I have written a primitive, but mostly functional blog application, which allows you to register as a user, add articles and comment on articles. I also thought that we should have the ability to make a more personalised profile page, with an easier address, like www.calcuttagutta.com/username, and I have begun setting that up.

This evening, I started fiddling with some new functionality, like tags and categories. Just to flesh out this rather short article, I include the very first screenshot of Calcuttagutta 2.0 (or is it 3.0?):



Lastly, I have decided to use English as the development language, for the benefit of humanity in general, and also that the interface of the web page should be available in several languages.

Anyway, the main point of this article is that things are now happening. Not necessarily very fast, and not always continously, but definitely happening. So if you have a new feature you wuold like to see, but haven't told anyone about, now is the time.

More later. Now: sleep.

-Tor Nordam

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Kathy H. (truly, I hate that Kafka-reminiscent thing where a surname gets compressed down to initials in a Western setting. It’s a South Indian norm, and not quite as dehumanising or alienating or marginalising or off-balancing as it probably is to a Western reader, so I always forget that it means something when I read it) is a “carer”, coming to the end of her days in that near-professional capacity. (Precisely what the “carer” does is not made clear, though it obviously is something akin to what nurses do, albeit in a very specific area.) Kathy is thirty-one years old, and as she wraps up her last year as a carer she looks back on her life, at the people she’s known, the people she grew up with, in a tidy-minded attempt to make her facts clear to us, and to herself. 

This meticulous tidying makes Kathy’s first-person narrative a gem of restrained passion – different from but still akin to Stevens‘ or Masuji Ono’s own still-smoking embers – but it also allows her to get away with what runs through her story as a recurring theme: Kathy and her peers are told what they need to know about themselves obliquely, subtly, so that they can dance around the subject of themselves without using the brutally honest terminology that would pain them, and pain us readers, and perhaps encourage them to protest against the lives they live, and the people ...

Not far from where Camilla lives in Edinburgh, there is an interesting area called Quartermile. I say interesting, but I mean that in the same sense as a traffic accident or something like that. Originally, the site was home to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, which according to wikipedia was a hospital for the poor, which consisted of a lot of nice, old buildings of stone. Or, I suppose they weren't old at the time, but they grew old, and fell into disuse. Recently, however, some clever financial person or other decided that one could probably make a heap of money by converting these nice old buildings into flats. And then it was also realised that one could make even more money by putting up a bunch of modern glass-and-steel type apartment blocks in between the nice old stone buildings.

Currently, I think several of the new buildings are more or less done, and a flat there can be yours for the low, low price of £ 250000 for about 42 square meters, while the refurbishment of the old buildings is, as far as I know, not done yet. In addition to creating a lot of flats, someone has decided that it will probably make the area more attractive if one could have everything one need within a short distance. Hence, there are now a couple of cafés (one of which is of course a Starbucks, situated less than 200 meters from the closest preexisting Starbucks) and a Sainsbury's ...

Jeg er for øyeblikket på besøk hos Are, på Sagene i Oslo. Og som vanlig når jeg er på besøk hos Are (eller motsatt) diskuteres det datagreier. Temaet denne gangen har stort sett vært Calcuttagutta. Det viser seg nemlig at Are og Anders har en plan om å skrive Calcuttagutta på nytt, på en seriøs og industristandard måte. Samtidig har jeg lekt litt med tanken på å skrive Calcuttagutta på nytt i Django, noe jeg tipper vil ta mye kortere tid. Grunnen til at vi har begynt å tenke på dette er at det finnes en del ønsker om ny funksjonalitet, som vi tror vil være lettere å implementere fra grunnen av, heller enn å begynne å lage masse stygge hacks i den eksisterende koden, som i følge Are er spaghettiorientert programmering.

I tillegg har Are og Anders et ønske om å utvikle seg faglig ved å bygge opp en side fra grunnen av med seriøse verktøy, mens jeg har et ønske om å kunne være med å utvikle. Nå har jeg ikke tenkt å la mitt ønske om å være med på moroa stå i veien hvis Are og Anders faktisk går i gang med å bygge oss en digital borg av en blogg, men (igjen i følge Are) har de syslet med denne tanken i fire år, opprettet to repositories på google code, begynt å snakke seriøst om temaet flere ganger, og ikke faktisk gjort så mye. Så det er nok en ganske stor sannsynlighet for at det ...

Inspirert av Jørgens nylige retroanmeldelse har jeg lyst til å komme trekkende med et album som neppe har fått den oppmerksomhet det fortjener. For flere år siden sendte Dag Martin meg i retning av filmen The Proposition og dens lydspor, komponert og fremført av Nick Cave og Warren Ellis. (Sistnevnte er multiinstrumentalist i Caves husband The Bad Seeds.)

Et par år senere så jeg enda en film med musikk av disse to (skulle det vise seg): The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (norsk tittel: Mordet på Jesse James av den feige Robert Ford*), som er mer en meditasjon over maskulin selvutslettelse enn en biopic. Annen gang jeg satte på DVD-en, oppdaget jeg at det er jo musikk i filmen.

Foten på klangpedalen, ett innledende pianoklunk og vi går rett i g-mollen. Fire takter med tung bass som monotont slår grunntonen mens Cave trykker litt rundt akkorden^†, før Ellis' fele bryter inn med en melodilinje som kombinert gjør åpningssporet til nettopp en «Rather Lovely Thing». Som mye av verket ellers er det ikke lett plystrbar melodi så mye som en lek rundt akkordene eller vokalisering med instrumenter. Etter åtte nye takter kommer forløsningen i form av et akkordskifte og ...