CJC.org

The Christian Science Monitor has a nice article on religion and The Matrix. The article is more for people unfamiliar with the movie and its upcoming sequels, and unfamiliar with their late-night, drunken, rambling grad student philosophical texture (and I mean “late-night drunken ramblings” in the most affectionate of ways), it presents a magazine-length reading the Matrix in terms of Christian Gnosticism:

Gnosticism never developed a well-defined theology, but it depicts Jesus as a hero figure who saves mankind through “gnosis,” or esoteric knowledge. In the Gnostic philosophy, the physical world is not part of God’s creation, but a manifestation of a lower god – a nightmarish reality that imprisons mankind, say religious experts. Gnostics believed they could achieve salvation, not by overcoming evil and sin with God’s grace, but by learning the “higher knowledge” about reality.

There’s also an interesting little glossary on major elements of the first movie, complete with little details like the numerology of apartments and the etymology of the name “Thomas Anderson”.

Update: There’s a much longer, much nicer article up at The New Yorker on the same theme, but without the sample of detail-obsessed numerology and with a heavy dose of movie review that pans the sequel as something leaden that feels like “Matrix XIV”, the movie made after a long-running franchise has run out of ideas.

Poking around ORA’s “hacks” site, I came across this quick note on searching and replacing with command-line perl:

perl -pi.bak -e ‘s/bgcolor=#ffffff/bgcolor=#000000/i’ *.html

The example, of course, is at the back of the pink camel book. In any case, -e says to work like sed, -p means to run the script against all the lines of the files enumerated on the command line, and the -i means to make the changes in place, but put a backup file out there first.

Something like this:

find -name Root | xargs perl -pi -e ‘s/cvs.oldserver.com/cvs.newserver.org/g’

works nicely for switching the CVS server from one machine to another when run across a CVS repository.

I may want to buy the Hacks books, but a lot of the listed hacks are things I already know or don’t care about. On the other hand, the explanations, such as this perl exposition, is nice. Similarly, the Google hacks may be entertaining.

There are also a number of useful hacks on the user-contributed hacks pages.

We saw Cirque Du Soleil’s Varekai on Saturday. Beyond some snippets on Bravo, we hadn’t seen Cirque Du Soleil before. It’s actually pretty amazing seeing it live: our seats were on the third row on the extreme right of the stage, close enough to see muscles quivering in handstands — if they quivered.

For me, there were several distinct stages of amazement and wonder. There’s the simple wonder at the showmanship. Cirque’s production values are high, the results of its corporate sponsorship and ticket prices. All that money was well spent on lighting, costumes, choreography. Yes, they successfully invoked a surreal world, full of wonderful creatures. It looked great, but this was the least of the show’s achievements. I think that any production company with such resources — say, any number of Broadway shows — could have pulled off something similar if it wanted to.

A higher level of amazement was in the physical skills of the performers. Clearly, the acrobats are circus folks in some way, trained from an early age to perform spectacular physical feats. How else do you have spines made of rubber, and muscles strong enough repeatedly support the body’s weight with a bent arm? And these acrobats weren’t even near the limits of their capability: their muscles didn’t quiver from the strain, only from quick adjustments to maintain balance. After all, they repeat the physical acts over and over again through the course of the show, each and every day, with few mistakes. I’m speaking with the jealousy of someone well below the 50th percentile in flexibility in my jujitsu class, and whose legs can come close to giving out after a prolonged bout of multiples. The gulf between professional and amateur is far larger than you can conceive.

The highest level of amazement combined both these other levels: choreography and physical skill combined to produce several acrobatic tricks where you wonder at the devious mind that would have thought, would have conceived that such tricks were not only possible, but were consistently repeatable. The best example would have been the troupe of acrobats who would be propelled into space by another acrobat underneath him. The first acrobat would basically sommersault head over toe, and, depending on the act, land on the feet of the guy who pushed him up. And this would happen over and over again, with varying leg positions and landing points, without any obvious mistake. Yes, most of it is ballistics and conservation of angular momentum, but the body control to pull this off, the timing involved, is simply amazing. (Again, to invoke jujitsu, after more than two years, I still consistently have problems executing a free breakfall without twisting in the air, and I still cannot do an extension roll without flattening out into a thumpy landing).

Definitely, definitely see this if you have a chance. The acrobats and their acrobatics are simply stunning.

Here’s an interesting article by Michael Totten on liberals and conservatives, and their attitudes about the world.

The most provocative observation is that liberal intellectuals are in a way less interested in the world than conservative intellectuals are:

For some reason, perhaps for several reasons, liberals and leftists are bored by the outside world. Compared with conservative magazines, publications like The Nation and The American Prospect rarely feature articles about what happens in other countries. They’ll do it occasionally, but almost always in the context of how it relates back to America. The Nation might report on the effects of Iraqi sanctions, but rarely does it publish anything about Iraq in its own context. If you want to learn about the history of the Ba�ath Party, Saddam�s human rights abuses, the fate of the Marsh Arabs, or Iraqi public opinion, you have to seek out magazines and journals of the center and the right.

The reason, he argues, is that liberals are “builders” and conservatives are “defenders”:

Liberals want to build a good and just society. Conservatives defend what is already built and established. This is what the left and the right are for.

Builders want to start with the local environment — think globally, act locally — and work from there; defenders look for external threats when there are no obvious problems at home.

A corollary about the “Bush is a Nazi” slogan thrown around by the far left is that the left: while the left may understand Bush, they truly, deeply misunderstand the Nazis. This perhaps is from an ahistorical understanding of the world. A similar corollary about the far right branding everyone as a Communist traitor: the right may understand Communism better than the left, but, focusing on threats, sees threats everywhere.

One thing Totten doesn’t bring up is how a lot of left-wing discource on foreign policy is colored by Leninist theories on imperialism. How else do we explain the arguments that all Bush wants is to seize the oil? The problem with all-explaining theories about how the world works is that you stop looking for explanations, even though these theories don’t work, and were disproven decades ago.

I like to think of myself as a liberal with a fairly wide reading of international affairs. I’ve studied military history for years, and have been slowly catching up on an understanding of the Middle East, especially since 9/11 (Years ago, I picked up Bernard Lewis’s Muslim Discovery of Europe out of curiousity). I was appalled by the far left’s complacence in the face of Al Qaeda, and I was disappointed by the sense that the left’s refusal to acknowledge that war was a valid policy choice with regard to Iraq. I want to see more compelling policy arguments become the main voice of the left, because we desperately need it.

I wonder a bit about the neo-con hawks in the various Republican administrations over the past two decades. They don’t quite fit into the Michael Totten’s dichotomy: they’re the intellectual heirs of the anti-Communist liberals of Truman and JFK, and fled the Democratic Party after the McGovernites took charge. They are liberals: their goal is the transformation of states into liberal capitalist democracies, classic “builders” in Totten’s taxonomy. In foreign policy terms at least, they’ve found the conservatives to be more intellectually with it than the left. Is this how it goes?

Regarding my old school SQL, I found this site that covers new school SQL (or, in my case, SQL that isn’t at least ten years out of date):

SQL Zoo

I think the original name for the site was A Gentle Introduction to SQL. Conveniently, it shows SQL variants across DB engines, such as MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and Postgress. This is as much a syntactical reference as the official MySQL documentation. A quick glance through the site, and I don’t see such exotic structures as correlated subqueries, but I do see string manipulation functions, which is perhaps more what I’m after.

My weekend programming project to improve the search capabilities of the weblog software I’m using is basically done, after a spate of typical computer-based monomania. The search function works nicely, and I’ll be ready to package it for public release in a few days: it’s mainly the usual matter of documentation and disclaimers. The one feature that I want that isn’t quite working yet is the wildcard search. But that’ll be taken care of in the next day or so, since I know what I want to do with it. There might be some refactoring involved, but that should be no big deal.

The project wasn’t taken on purely out of altruism. This was done for a few reasons:

This is from the New York Times. Someone has written a paper on co-op/condo prices in Manhattan where the price components are broken down using regression analysis.

So, you get results along the lines of: a doorman adds on average 11.8% to the price, an extra bathroom is 15.5%, an extra bedroom is 18.5%, etc. Square footage was obviously the largest contributor to price, with every 1% difference in square footage adding 0.53% to the price of a co-op.

By this calculation, the combined apartment should be just around double in value compared to the current apartment. Recent major renovations add an average of 8.67%. So, from this point of view, it’s a bit of a wash.

Interestingly, real estate listings indicate that 2-BR/2-BA in this neighborhood should go for more, something like at least 15% or so.

It should be noted that we still don’t have anything like Black-Sholes for real estate units.

Scott sent his digital SLR set over. There were about 300 images total, most of them much better than the Sony point-and-shoot. He burned through all his CF cards before he left just after we went through stick defense. Unfortunately, Scott and Liz couldn’t stick around through the “fun” part with the knife defense, free fighting and multiples; we don’t have photographs of the looks of exhaustion at the end of the test.

As usual for action-orientated photography, most of the shots aren’t that interesting. Here are the best 30 or so:

From these shots: I need a haircut. I also need to bend my knees more when throwing. And not slouch. Many, many thing.

There should be some video in the next few weeks. I guess I’ll post the free fighting and multiples in particular when I get a hold of them.

Quite clearly, a lot of these shots require a caption, or some other explanation. Unfortunately, I’m using some homebrewed gallery software to show these images, and I haven’t gotten around to sticking on some caption thing as of yet.

I’m missing two documents from the co-op application right now:

Hopefully, the management company will accept email copies of these. Everything will be much easier if it doesn’ have to go on paper. They’ll even get it before the weekend in this case.

The management company also wanted the bank’s recognition agreement redone slightly; since I’m purchasing the other apartment with intent to combine, the recognition agreement has to have both 4B and 4C on it. I spoke with the bank, and this was no problem. They’ll send fresh copies of the recognition agreement to me by tomorrow, or Monday at the latest.

I stumbled across the Queens Tribune’s 2002 “Best Of”. The categories are interesting: it’s very Old World, in the sense of being relatively heavy on the Italian, diners and delis. Queens is perhaps the most international county in the world, with ethnic communities clustered vibrant commercial districts from the East River to Nassau. And yet, somehow, the Queens Tribune manages to find only one Indian restaurant, no Greek ones, one Korean, and a handful of Chinese (most of which weren’t in Flushing).