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December 5th, 2011
09:45 pm
Here's a question: what is the most characteristic work of your favourite author? (Or artist, musician, etc.) For example, some say that Pinocchio exemplifies both the strengths and weaknesses of Disney at their height. It's schmaltzy, saccharine and heavy-handed, but there are some deeply scary moments too (the boys turning into donkeys), and the animation is absolutely terrific and ground-breaking.
I'm re-reading Wyst: Alastor 1716 right now, and I think it might just be the most characteristic Jack Vance novel:
- Stolid right-wing attitude with a strong work ethic. This book is maybe more direct than usual; it's basically an extended satire on Communism.
- Lovingly detailed haggling sequences. There are two separate currencies in this story, plus bartering, so he really gets into his stride on this one.
- Vance likes boats. The hero's home planet consists of a million tiny islands, and his sister is a professional mooring-mast carver.
- It's charmingly quaint and low-tech with a very thin sci-fi veneer. The hero has a camera that records pictures of a pad of "matrix", i.e. film.
- It's both very funny and very disturbing.
- Captivating girl who entices our hero only to throw him over, later to regret her actions as she comes to a sticky end.
- Great use of language and invention of new words ("snergery", "bonter").
- The hero has to make money diving for crabs. (Cugel has to dive for scales in Cugel's Saga, too. And man, there's also the bit where they dig for the Perciplex in Rhialto the Marvellous. I assume Vance got a job as pearl-diver or grave-digger or something and it made an impression on him.) My friend Dan says "Vance is the only author who documents level-grinding."
- Fantasy elements in an SF setting, not as a plot device but as background colour.
- Decent surprise ending, cunningly foreshadowed. (He doesn't always pull this off.)
- It's called Wyst: Alastor 1716, for heaven's sake.
I think I recommend it. Vance is an acquired taste, and this is a very concentrated dose.
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02:39 am - Sketch #15
Decided to do a quick recording before going to sleep, and it turned out very quick indeed. A bit of noodling to find a nice riff, found a nice simple progression for an A section, built a B section around one of my favourite chords, and just played A-B-A-B-A in one take. Improv goes off the rails a bit in the second B section, but the riff is sustained reasonably well and I like the slow build.
LJ seems to be eating my Flash player so you'll have to grab the MP3 directly. ( Read more... )
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December 1st, 2011
12:27 am - Sketch #14
Remember those old Peanuts TV specials? One reason they were great was the music, which was all written and performed by Vince Guaraldi and his band. I absolutely love his style—laid-back and relaxed, little flashes of virtuosity used very sparingly. (I'd have described the genre as "Peanuts music", but apparently it's west coast jazz.) I've been listening to his stuff on iTunes a lot lately, and that's inspired me to dig out the Peanuts songbook which I bought ages ago. I'm a few weeks late for Halloween, but here's my take on the The Great Pumpkin Waltz:
Or grab the MP3. And here's Vince playing the real thing on YouTube.
I usually try to analyse chord progressions in these sketch posts, but I stumbled on a great post on Amusicology that goes into much more detail than I could muster:
One of the things that I love most about this piece is the way it feels beneath the hands when playing it at the piano. The harmonic progression of the main theme (Cm7, Bm7#5, Bbm13, Eb7, F(add9)/A, Abdim7, Eb/G, F#dim7, Fm7, Eb6/9, Dm7, G7b13) requires only minimal movement in the fingers to get from one chord to the next. Once I get into into the groove of the descending loop, it becomes hard to find a point of exit; improvisation flows.
I only wish my improvisational chops were up to it! I cocked up all attempts to do something interesting in my recording, so decided just to play it straight once through. Maybe it'd be easier with a backing track.
That Eb7 is a really interesting chord. Not only does it step outside the semitone progression, but it contrasts beautifully with the F-E in the melody. E natural is normally a note you'd avoid in Eb; I guess it's anticipating the next chord. With the other notes in Eb7—G, Bb, Db—the E could make Gdim7, in which case I'd expect to be able to throw in an A, but it doesn't really fit. Anticipating the A just spoils the movement onto F/A. So it's definitely an Eb7 there. The combination of chords and melody at that point, plus the little trill that follows, is the main hook of the song for me.
Anyway, that blog looks absolutely terrific, definitely one for my subscription list. The same post also links to a Guaraldi cover of Eleanor Rigby, which is just beautiful. One of those covers that enhances the original by showing it in an entirely new light.
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October 23rd, 2011
09:48 pm - Sketch #13
Occurs to me that I haven't posted a sketch for absolutely ages (huh, almost exactly a year, in fact) so here goes:
Or grab the MP3 directly. This one's a jumble—I just sat down and played for five minutes. Apparently I auto-plagiarise when I improvise because the main motif is almost identical to sketch 9, and there are fragments of several other sketches too. The rhythm is my standard cross-handed syncopated thing; decent when I stay in the groove, not so good when my time slips, which is too often.
But I think there are a few nice bits among all the flab. I've been playing around with semitone movements of the 7+9 "Hendrix" chord—for example, E / Bb / Eb sits nicely on top of both C major (making +9) and F# major (making 13); or you can shift it by a semitone for F13 or G13. I ought to sit down and plan something out with that progression. My improv doesn't have enough ideas, so I need to dig some new ruts.
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June 22nd, 2011
09:27 pm - Sketch club
Real sketching this time, not music. I've joined an informal art club that a Google colleague has started. For the first session, we just did a quick portrait of a slightly sheepish sales guy, then a still life of some random stuff from the kitchen. Maybe some actual paid models in future, depending on the level of interest.
It's fascinating how many different styles of drawing there are, even in a small group (five of us on this occasion). Some of the others went for a very classical look, with lots of fine detail and smudged-pencil shading. I went for a more cartoony style, found myself uncomfortable with the pencil, and switched to pen for a more lively and immediate feel. After a few false starts, I was pretty happy with this portrait:
What I'm aiming for, I guess, is comic book art. That's not surprising, as I read a lot of comics, but it hadn't even occurred to me to narrow it down like that before I saw how a bunch of other people approach the same task. Others want to get down an accurate representation, or to capture the look of the light; I want to boil things down to their iconic essence.
I'd love to just sweep out a few quick lines and have it be right, without all that fussy scribbling and cross-hatching. But you've got to run before you can walk. And comics artists usually start with pencil and then ink more carefully on top (some or all parts now done digitally), so there's still fussy stuff, it's just hidden. Anyway, ligne claire is my holy grail (though just as in music my natural style doesn't really run that way).
More scans on my Picasa album. I'll keep that album updated when we have further art club sessions.
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May 21st, 2011
12:43 pm - The anti-Rapture
I've been reading Tim Flannery's book Here on Earth: A New Beginning. Mainly, I must admit, because the cheerful cover kept smiling at me in bookshops. It has blurbs from some of my heroes—David Attenborough, Jared Diamond—but they're clearly about Flannery himself rather than this specific book. In the end I cracked and bought the thing. I judged a book by its cover.
Luckily it's really good. The first half is a high-level, big-picture view of the history of life on earth—a non-fiction Last and First Men, almost. Plenty of nice crunchy facts I didn't know before. For example, how did mammoths survive and flourish in a hostile environment like ice age Siberia? Flannery paints a picture of large herbivores as "ecological bankers", adding liquidity to the economy and allowing the land to work at a higher level of efficiency. And then there's the interesting connection between hobbits and dragons. Most large animals outside Africa died off shortly after early humans arrived in their habitat. Komodo dragons are a rare survivor; Flannery suggests this may be due to coevolution with Homo floresiensis over the last couple of million years. The last of the "hobbits" died around twelve thousand years ago, but the dragons, trained to be wary of aggressive bipeds, are still hanging on—Tolkien got it backwards.
Then he discusses at length the various ways we're screwing up the environment today, and that's what made me feel like writing a post. How about this for a disaster movie scenario?Climate science is now so advanced that we can anticipate the kind of event that may, if we do not reduce the stream of greenhouse-gas pollution, initiate the end of the great 'us' that is our global civilisation. With no warning, a gargantuan ice sheet will begin to collapse. It will mark the beginning of an irreversible process and, even if the initial rise in sea level it causes is just a few centimetres, it will herald an abandonment of our coasts, for the ice must continue to melt and collapse, albeit erratically, until there is no more. It will be impossible to put a time scale on the flooding, but Shanghai, London, New York and most other coastal cities must suffer partial or total abandonment, over weeks or decades or centuries. With economies in ruins and infrastructure drowned, we will then all be on The Road. What I find absolutely chilling is the idea of a single moment where it suddenly becomes clear that our chance to survive is gone. In one sense, nothing changes immediately—day to day life can continue as normal for a while—but another sense, everything changes: the future is gone. (Exactly the opposite of the standard Hollywood scenario, in something like The Day After Tomorrow: massive short-term changes, but after the human spirit triumphs things can get back to normal.)
This is reminiscent of the evangelical christian idea of the Rapture, in which the faithful are snatched up into heaven at the start of the apocalypse, where they can relax on deck chairs and sip rum punches while God serves judgement on the wicked atheists, muslims, buddhists etc who were left behind. For me, the most compelling thing about this notion—in fact the only worthwhile aspect—is the idea that we don't know when it will happen. God's a sneaky bastard and could call in his debts at any moment, so if you want to be part of the Rapture you have to mend your ways right now and stay virtuous all the time, just in case. If the time of judgement is known, you can always procrastinate—if I slack off today, I can always be twice as virtuous tomorrow, and it'll all be okay.
Of course, many of the people who actually believe in the Rapture miss the point completely, and obsessively search for numerological minutiae in the Bible that might tell us the exact date and time of kick-off. Given the number of failed past predictions, it's really hard to imagine what they can possibly be thinking. But maybe mainstream thinking on climate change is not so dissimilar. We want our climate scientists to figure out exactly what's going to happen, and exactly how much CO2 we can support without drastically changing our lifestyles. 350 parts per million by 2050? That seems tough, so perhaps we can peak at 450 and then bring it down again afterwards. Or if we miss our intermediate targets for that, we might have to go as high as 600, and then we'll really have to roll our sleeves up and get serious! The more details we get, the more we'll know exactly how long we can keep procrastinating.
But the last section of the book is surprisingly upbeat. Flannery lists dozens of different ways we could start repairing our ecosystem, and seems to have real faith that we can actually make it happen. His optimism is especially astonishing given that he chaired the Copenhagen climate summit; its collapse must have been an absolutely crushing blow to his spirit. In the book he admits that it was doomed from the outset, and he doesn't see much of a role for the UN in solving the climate crisis. Instead, he puts his trust in technology—satellite monitoring, agricultural advances, efficient power grids—and social change: democracy becoming more widespread and more inclusive, opinions changing on the morality of conspicuous consumption. And those are undeniably powerful forces. Just look at the wave of uprisings through the middle east, which has now reached as far as Spain. They're chaotic, unfocused, not particularly concerned with the environment—but after reading Flannery's book, they give me a great feeling of hope nonetheless.
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May 7th, 2011
11:46 am - AV, we hardly knew ye
Well, this feels like that general election result all over again. But more so. Back then the Liberals seemed to be on a real uptick in the opinion polls, but their new supporters vanished like smoke on the actual day. This time they took an even worse beating—but they must have been deserted not only by temporary tactical voters, but by their regular voters.
People seemed to be angry about tuition fees more than anything else. Why didn't that hurt the Tories? Clearly Tory voters are fine with that policy. So the "Liberal human shield" effect just shows that the Tories outmanoeuvered their coalition partners—hardly a surprise. That Liberal policy concession hurt them badly; the only Tory policy concession of note has been the AV referendum, and that strengthens them because they won so resoundingly. (And we have House of Lords reform coming up. That should have been straightforward, but now the nay-sayers will be able to say that the country has no stomach for reform right now. In hindsight, why not deal with the Lords first, then deal with AV from a position of strength? Sigh.)
So I'm not surprised, but saddened and disappointed by the AV result. I've seen a few people complain that those arguing for Yes were arrogant and insulting: "you're either an idiot or a die-hard Tory if you don't vote Yes" was a common theme. I did see a little of that, but, but... I don't like the tone, but dammit, the reasoning is correct. The arguments for No were either ludicrously short-term, or just plain ludicrous. We were deciding whether to make a fairly sensible reform now, or whether to shelve it for another decade or two, and it seems like many people just voted along party lines. The Tories resent their attachment to the Liberals, and took the opportunity to give them a good kicking. Labour, uselessly divided, largely see the Liberals as enemies, so they pointed and laughed from the sidelines.
I admit to feeling some schadenfreude at how badly Labour have hurt themselves. They'd love to get rid of the Liberals and get back to a straight two-horse race, but that only works if they're strong and unified. They blew their (admittedly slim and unappealing) chance at being in a ruling coalition, they were useless on AV, and they lost Scotland. Their core vote has always been left and north, and a huge chunk of it is in the process of voting themselves off the island. They'll have to swing sharply left to get Scotland back, or sharply right to win in England. Or they could have accepted the need to work with the Liberals and SNP, but they've just demonstrated that they don't play well with others. They don't even play well with themselves.
I hadn't really been following the Scottish elections, but hearing interviews with voters on the day was like a breath of fresh air. One woman, asked to explain her vote, said "the SNP did a pretty good job last time—delivered everything they promised. So I'm happy to vote for them again." Happy and satisfied with the incumbents? Unheard of! And they were ruling as a minority. God knows what they'll do as a majority. Those guys are good.
Likely fallout: the Tories are strengthened, will probably continue to play the Liberals like dummies and win the next election outright. The Liberals will shrink and rethink and won't be influential for a while. The SNP will probably lose the referendum on Scottish independence, but should be able to win extra powers and remain strong as a result. Labour will shore up in England and Wales, but how are they going to get back into a winning position? Blair took them to the right, and even he needed Scotland.
I've been trying to figure out how I'll respond. It's painfully clear that it doesn't actually matter very much; I'm out of step with mainstream opinion. (Although I guess I'm living in the right place: Islington voted Yes.) I could start voting tactically, and support Labour as the only alternative to the Tories; or I could just not bother voting at all. But I don't think I can stomach either of those. I'll just look at the policies again and vote on that basis. I liked the Liberals last time because they were the only mainstream party offering progressive tax changes (mostly abandoned) and electoral reform (failed). I'd be willing to give them another chance if they can satisfy me that their poor performance was due to stupidity rather than malice, and that they've learned their lessons. Or if not, maybe it's time to seriously start supporting the Greens. Or even Labour, if they can pull themselves together and produce some policies I like.
As I said, I don't think Scottish independence will happen any time soon, but if it did, I would seriously consider moving back there. It's exciting to think about. I'm really looking forward to seeing what happens there.
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May 4th, 2011
04:11 pm
Poll #1737945
AV of course
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10
What would you like the result to be? (For fun, including Proportional Representation)
View Answers
| AV is best, FPTP is second best |
   2 (22.2%) |
| AV is best, PR is second best |
| 1 (11.1%) |
| FPTP is best, AV is second best |
| 0 (0.0%) |
| FPTP is best, PR is second best |
| 0 (0.0%) |
| PR is best, AV is second best |
| 5 (55.6%) |
| PR is best, FPTP is second best |
| 1 (11.1%) |
What result do you expect?
View Answers
| No to AV, end of debate |
| 3 (37.5%) |
| No to AV, continued debate on PR |
| 5 (62.5%) |
| Yes to AV, but repealed soonish |
| 0 (0.0%) |
| Yes to AV, end of debate |
| 0 (0.0%) |
| Yes to AV, continued debate on PR |
| 0 (0.0%) |
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April 27th, 2011
11:38 pm - The historical inevitability of proportional representation
Another interesting paper on PR! Who'd have thought there were so many of these things? (Your mileage may experience relativistic effects.) It’s parties that choose electoral
systems (or, Duverger’s laws are upside down), says Josep Colomer. A nice crisp idea, very carefully explored.
Duverger's law says that "a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system." He also asserted the converse, "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to multipartism." These are pretty compelling statements because they fit what we see in different countries around the world—the US has two massive parties, the UK has two and a half at best, whereas Germany and Italy and Israel and so on have big coalitions. (There are exceptions; apparently Malta is weird, with a rigidly polarised two-party system even though they use a mostly proportional voting system.)
You can quantify Duverger's law by calculating the effective number of parties. There are various ways of doing this but they all weight the parties based on their size, with very small parties being discounted. If you have four roughly equal parties the ENP will be close to 4; if you have two big parties and ten tiny ones the ENP might be 2.1 or 2.2 or so. For the 2010 UK election, based on the number of seats (Conservative 307, Labour 258, Lib Dem 57, DUP 8, SNP 6, Sinn Féin 5, Plaid Cymru 3, SDLP 3, others 3) the ENP was 2.57 by the most common measure. But if you count votes rather than seats, the ENP was 3.67 or so (there are lots of terms; I gave up somewhere around Blaenau Gwent People's Voice). That gives you a pretty good feel for the difference between first-past-the-post and proportional representation: voters' opinions are spread between about three and a half parties, but only two and a half are represented in parliament.
Anyway, back to Colomer's paper. The interesting step he and others take is to question the causality of Duverger's law: PR and multi-party states go together, but which causes which? They argue that multi-party states tend to switch to PR, and not the other way round. Colomer tries to test this hypothesis systematically, with lots of analysis of historical election results. The data isn't presented as clearly as I'd like, but it seems reasonably convincing. His explanation for why this should be the case is based on modelling the parties as competing agents, each trying to maximise their own power. Strong parties benefit from plurality voting (e.g. FPTP) so they try to move the law in that direction where possible; weak parties benefit from proportional representation, so they try to move the law that way. It turns out that the model is asymmetric: moving from plurality to PR should be common, moving from PR to plurality should be rare. As Colomer puts it:
An implication of this reasoning is that, in the long term, we should expect that
most electoral system changes should move away from majoritarian formulas
and in favor of systems using rules of proportional representation. Reverse
changes, from PR toward more majoritarian rules, may be the bet of some potentially dominant, growing or daring party. But they can imply high risks for a partial
winner to be transformed into a total loser, if its optimistic electoral expectations
are not confirmed. [...] In a historical perspective, and to the extent that the assumptions and
implications of the model are sufficiently realistic, we should find increasing
numbers and proportions of electoral systems using PR formulas rather than
majoritarian rules.
This is dynamite. He's saying that electoral systems tend to become proportional over time, and that this is backed up by historical data. It almost feels like the kind of law Hari Seldon might come up with. Cool! Whether you like or dislike PR, the fact that we can analyse it as a naturally-occurring process is amazing.
Okay, so, what does this mean for the Alternative Vote referendum? (You knew I was going to bring that up.) If you accept all of Colomer's arguments, it's just the outward sign of the multi-party pressure that's been growing since around the 1970s; and movement towards PR will probably happen eventually, it's just a question of when. Rather than "yes" or "no", you're voting for "sooner" or "later".
But Colomer perhaps misses a trick. He treats the parties as rational, selfish agents; but this is a referendum, so ordinary people will be voting directly, and their votes won't necessarily be split along party lines. What should a rational (and hopefully not too selfish) voter do? I think it depends whether you want the option, in future, of supporting a minor party. If so, you should be pushing to accelerate the arguably-inevitable move towards PR. And that does mean more coalition governments, further down the line. AV itself won't result in more coalitions, but I think it's the first step in that direction.
I'm going to vote yes. The current coalition is a mess, but that's just because Westminster politicians have such limited experience of running one. They'll get better at it.
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April 26th, 2011
10:11 pm - Breaking out of LJ
I still like LJ, but it feels a bit ghetto-like these days. I think my previous post on AV might be of interest to some people who don't follow me here, but linking to it is a bit embarrassing because there's so much crap around the sides of the page if you're not logged in. I've upgraded to a paid account to get rid of the ads, but it's still not great.
So I'm considering moving somewhere else, at least for public posts. Would anyone particularly recommend trying out Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress, whatever?
I've been fiddling around with App Engine, which has some very nice aspects—full control over my domain and a nice admin console without having to fret about scalability and Apache configs and so on. To give myself some options for the future, I just set up a little link redirection service, currently consisting only of link.iainmerrick.com/av-is-a-good-compromise. Watching all the hits appear as soon as I posted that link to Twitter was fascinating. (20-odd for the link but only 4 for robots.txt—either my followers are keener than I thought, or most webcrawlers aren't honoring robots.txt.) (I'm not tracking individual users, as far as I know, because you don't have to log in to use the site.)
App Engine is a bit too low-level for an actual blog, though. Or is it? Maybe there's an off-the-shelf app I can install. Or maybe I can write a wrapper for my LJ's RSS feed, which seems to be pretty clean. That way I could keep using LJ but still have nice tidy links to my own posts.
If I go down the App Engine route, I need to back up both the code and the data somewhere. I guess I'd have a source control server on my machine at home for the code, and pull down all the data regularly; then back up both of those on some third-party service. Again, any recommendations? DropBox, maybe?
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