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Must we rethink alcohol?

Sunday, July 16, 2023


From “Masterpiece Endeavour,” Season 2: Morse in a pub

Only a few years ago, the “experts” told us that a certain amount of alcohol actually was good for us — say, two glasses of wine a day. In the last year or so, that has reversed, and now we encounter article after article saying that alcohol has no health benefits and that the ideal amount of alcohol is — none.

The experts can go hang.

In my lifetime, the record of the experts has been abysmal. Meat is good for you. Then it’s not. Eggs are good for you. Then they’re not. Margarine is healthier than butter. Then no amount of margarine is healthy. Vegetable shortening is better than lard. Then no amount of vegetable shortening is healthy. The ideal diet is starvingly low in fat. That’s disproven, and carbs become the culprit. It would seem that the best course is to always be skeptical of what the experts tell us and to use our own good sense.

As I understand it, the experts’ mistake concerning alcohol was a classic error of causation. It seems that people who drink one or two glasses of wine a day are in fact healthier. But the alcohol probably isn’t the cause of that. Maybe it’s because healthy people don’t have to give up alcohol for health reasons, or because people who can afford wine can afford an all-around better diet, or because people who drink wine tend to be better educated, and education correlates with health. So it seems to be — at least in the new thinking — that people who drink wine sparingly are indeed healthier, but the wine is not the cause of that.

For those of us who are healthy and like to drink, then what does it all mean? I think we all have to decide for ourselves. But my own thinking is that, partly because of my age, I need to drink less than I drank two or three decades ago when I was younger, quite healthy, living in San Francisco, and used alcohol as self-medication for work-related stress. Back then, I head a stress headache several times a week. Now I don’t think I’ve had a headache in the 15 years I’ve been retired. Obviously my stress is lower. I’m still healthy, but I’m also older. I also realized that it’s not healthy, or even pleasant, to have alcohol in my system at bedtime. That means drinking earlier in the day (which feels decadent at first) and never drinking (or, for that matter, eating) after 5 p.m.

In the past few weeks, I’ve watched the first eight seasons of “Masterpiece Endeavour.” Starting tonight, I’ll watch the last season, season 9. “Endeavour” is set in the late 1960s up until, I think, 1971. It is shocking — and in a way funny — to watch them drink. They keep Scotch and glasses in their offices at work. They drink at their desks, though clearly it’s considered proper not to start too early. In pubs, they may have a glass of Scotch along with a mug of ale. They serve Scotch in big tumblers, and four or five ounces seems to be the standard single serving. A pint of ale with lunch is perfectly normal. Did people — or at least the English — really drink that much then? Though everyone in “Endeavour” drinks heavily as far as I can tell, Morse gradually becomes an alcoholic. For those who may not have watched this series and who might want to watch it, I won’t say how that fits into the ongoing plot because it would be a spoiler.

A recent article in The Atlantic by Emily Oster has this headline: “Is a Glass of Wine Harmless? Wrong Question. The latest alcohol advice ignores the value of pleasure.” I’m with Emily. People have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years. Wine, Scotch, and ale are amazing products — agricultural products, really. Since too much alcohol is pretty obviously harmful, then the trick is to be sure that one’s relationship with alcohol is not causing any harm.

I will continue to do my share to support Scotland’s Scotch industry and California’s wine industry.

Filed in Health issues | | Comments (3)

Into the woods, and more each year

Tuesday, July 11, 2023


Click here for high resolution version

Fifteen years ago, after I cleared an acre of elderly pine trees for the house, the landscape looked like a huge red gash in the earth. I moved as fast as I could to restore ground cover and to start planting. Growth takes time, but nature moves fast. Though there is a band of grass on all sides of the house, this is woodland, and if I didn’t like woodland then I wouldn’t be here.

I planted a great many arbor vitae trees, as well as ornamentals such as deciduous magnolias, camellia, rose of Sharon, abelia, and rhododendron. But mostly I’ve let nature take its course, as all sorts of native trees volunteered and I left them alone to grow — poplars, persimmon, beech, maple, and oak. There was even a magnolia grandiflora already here. It was a spindly, shapeless thing that never got any light. But, once the pines were gone, the magnolia has grown into a very grand tree, as tall as the house and with a perfect magnolia shape.

You would think that the people in these parts would welcome a natural woodland landscape, but they fight it. They prefer huge, square, easy-to-mow lawns, with nothing to stop the eye. I have done everything possible to stop the eye, with a yard that is more like little ponds of grass that meander around the trees. Such a yard is a pain in the neck to mow. But now that I have a zero-turn mower, I can get the mowing done in less than two hours. That’s still a lot of grass, none of which is visible in this photo because so many things stop the eye.

There is another very welcome advantage to welcoming the woods into your yard. The cool air from the woods flows into the yard as the new trees gradually link up with the woodland canopy. Even a slight breeze is surprisingly cooling. The day will come when there will be shade on much of the roof even at midday, but we’re not there yet. And because the trees are deciduous, there’s plenty of sun in winter.

Few people see my house, because I’m near the end of a unpaved private road. But, of the people who have seen it, the abbey landscape is starting to inspire some envy, and a few country folk — country folk, who ought to know! — have asked me how I did it. That’s actually pretty easy. The first thing is make sure that there’s something growing everywhere, that no sun and no water are wasted. Even the ditch along the road in front of the house is a beautiful thing — tall grasses, some wildflowers, blackberries (which get out of hand and must be restrained) and persimmon trees. Not only do ditches channel and preserve runoff, the water makes them lush. They’re a path for wildlife, especially the rabbits, of which there are a great many. Except for the difficulty of mowing a yard in which nothing is flat and in which you can’t walk more than ten yards in any direction without bumping into something, a natural landscape is an easy landscape, suitable for lazy people. A minimum amount of time is spent fighting nature. Another thing I emphasize to the country folk — and the birds agree — is that you can’t have too many arbor vitae trees. Arbor vitae trees are hotels for birds, as are the dense thickets of honeysuckle and jasmine that grow along the top of the orchard fence.

My biggest disappointment is that the deer will eat almost anything. For example, azaleas can’t live through the night. I’d like to have more blooming things, but the deer won’t allow it. Defending my beloved daily lilies has been almost impossible, though I haven’t yet given up. Fortunately there are a great many green things that don’t taste good to the deer.

Every year, the house will be a little more hidden in the woods. I’m like a deer, or a rabbit, or even a cat. There have to be places to hide.

Filed in Sustainable living, The house, The land | | Comments (3)

Much to think about

Sunday, July 9, 2023

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Peter Turchin, Penguin, June 2023. 352 pages.

It seems to me that most publications, and most of our useless and accursèd pundit class, are doing their best to ignore this book. I think I can see why. The political punditry don’t like to bother with scholars and ideas. That wouldn’t get many clicks, and it would interfere too much with the punditry’s pursuit of shallowness — politics as a horse race; who’s up and who’s down; working every day to keep us scared and to keep ratings (and clicks) up; profiting from polarization and wallowing in everything that promotes it.

Even those who have written about this book mostly miss the point. What’s important about this book is not whether the author, Peter Turchin, has a theory that can make predictions, which is all the pundits seem to want to write about. What’s important, and what nobody has written about, as far as I can tell from Googling, are the political factors that Turchin uses to measure the stability of political arrangements, and the course that states take when things become unstable.

By far, the most important factor is the “wealth pump.” It’s the wealth pump that transfers the wealth produced by the working classes to the governing elite — the ruling class — who hold the wealth and power. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. When that happens, as it did in the U.S. when the Reagan administration started the reversal of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal, something will break sooner or later, for two reasons. The first reason is the “immiseration” of working people. The second reason is that too much wealth at the top creates a surplus of rich people competing for power and a bigger share of the spoils. This competition tends to get uglier and uglier as frustrated elites increasingly break the rules (and destroy institutions in the process) to try to get ahead.

Turchin, in brief but very telling examples from history, traces the rise and fall of states that rose, and then fell. His account of the fall of the Soviet Union is particularly helpful, as is his account of what went wrong in Russia during the 1990s as elites fought over, and divided up, everything that belonged to the Russian people. He also sheds a great deal of light on why the political systems of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus went in different directions after Putin came to power in Russia.

Probably the biggest reason that publications and the punditry are trying to ignore this book is that there is no way to spin it into a centrist morality tale. Someone is bound to slam the book as confirmation bias for liberals, if someone hasn’t already. Turchin does use the word “moderates” in one chapter, but by that he does not mean centrists. “Moderates” is the term he uses for people who initially participated in the violence and mayhem of rebellions but who become sick of violence and start working instead for a restoration of peace. People usually die — both peasants and elites — when the wealth pump pushes things all the way to disintegration and revolution.

I will not try to describe here what Turchin has to say about how far along the United States is on the path to disintegration, and what the possible outcomes are. But I will say this, and I don’t think that, as a liberal, I’m falling into the trap of confirmation bias. If we Americans are to save ourselves, the only solution is a new New Deal in which our ruling elites come to their senses and realize that, unless they use their political power to turn off the wealth pump, the 90 percent of the population at the bottom will use some means or other, including possibly violence, to turn it off for them. This, according to Turchin, in what happened during the New Deal. It wasn’t just Franklin Roosevelt. The ruling class of that time had looked over their shoulders and seen what was happening in Russia and Eastern Europe. And so the ruling class consented to new arrangements in which the 90 percent, the government, and the ruling class all worked together for an equitable sharing of wealth. (There was a serious flaw in that settlement, though, and we’re still paying for it. White people got a fair deal. Black people got Jim Crow.)

Can we turn the United States into Denmark? And how fast could we do it? That’s pretty much what it comes down to. You can imagine how hard that will be, given that the Republican Party’s system of disinformation and propaganda has convinced working people that turning the United States into Denmark is the worst thing that could ever happen to them. The truth is, turning the U.S. into Denmark would be the best thing that could ever happen to the deplorables. Strangely enough — and this book has given me a whole new level of respect for President Biden — that’s what Biden is trying to do, as quietly as possible and in as bipartisan a way as possible. Even we Democrats know far too little about Bidenomics. The media don’t write about it, because the media feed on conflict and failure rather than progress and success. For example, when inflation is rising, the media go on and on about it. When inflation is coming down, they change the subject back to conflict and failure. In the Republican propaganda bubble, no one even hears that inflation is coming down. Clearly Biden has a plan to force the media to write about economic success, by making Bidenomics a thing during the 2024 elections.

If you’re a liberal, this book will renew your confidence that we liberals are on the right track. It also occurred to me while reading this book that political and moral philosophy will get you to the very same place that Turchin treats as a science and which he calls “cliodynamics.” We liberals want to apply John Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” simply because it’s the right thing to do. The difference, from Turchin’s perspective, is that if you fail to pursue justice as fairness simply because it’s the right thing to do, then you’re on the road, inevitably, to violence and collapse.

In Roosevelt’s time, Americans did the right thing. For almost three decades after World War II, America was like Denmark. Can we do it again?

Filed in Political issues | | Comments (0)

The upside of summer

Thursday, July 6, 2023


Dandelion pesto, made with Gorgonzola cheese

Summer pesto:

One of the best ideas I know for making the best of summer is: Eat more pesto. Already this season I’ve had pestos made of basil, kale, dandelions, and mixtures including parsley, dill, cilantro, and thyme. I was afraid that the dandelion pesto would be bitter, but it wasn’t. I did my best to counteract the strong taste of dandelions with other strong tastes — a little malt vinegar, and Gorgonzola cheese. I’ve realized that parmesan doesn’t have to be the default cheese for pesto.

Summer reading:

I always like to have some good fiction and some good nonfiction going at the same time. I had high hopes this summer for Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair, which was published in 1988. I stuck with it for 125 excruciating pages and finally flung it. Why did this book get so many fans and so many good reviews? It’s embarrassingly overwritten, lame in its attempts to be ever-so-clever in every last sentence. Nothing ever happens. There is scene after scene in which new characters are introduced, and dozens of other characters are named but never seen. There is scene after scene in new settings in an old castle, and dozens of other places are named but never seen. A database would be required to track it all. But there’s no motive to track it because it’s so boring. Who could possibly compare something this bad with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien? I’m not even going to waste shelf space on this book. On my next trip to the used book store, I’ll sell it. Until I can scare up some new fiction, I’ll stick with Peter Turchin’s new book, which I mentioned in a recent post.

Traveling persimmons:

For years, Ken and I have grieved over the abbey’s orchard. The peach crop always fails, early on. The squirrels steal all the apples exactly one day before they’re ripe. We do get some figs. But the trees that never let us down are the persimmon trees. They’re natives, so they’re not finicky and never sickly. For some reason, none of the wildlife raid the trees while the persimmons are still on the tree. They wait for it to drop. There are more persimmons in the yard each year than a single household can use. I do believe that Ken does his best to time his American college tours to persimmon season, which is late October. Last year, when he returned to Scotland, he took some persimmon seeds, which we had saved while making persimmon pudding. He planted the seeds in his Scottish greenhouse. He got lots of promising seedlings, some of which he took to Germany as a gift to his wife’s sister. In a few years, we’ll know how the trees are coming along. Our guess is that the German trees will like their climate better than the Scottish trees.

Summer watchables:

Because I don’t really watch broadcast (or cable) television, I had missed the long-running PBS series “Masterpiece Endeavour.” Just last month, the series had its ninth, and last, season on PBS. Having missed the earlier seasons, I decided to keep watching all of it, in order. I’m now on season 6. It is some of the best television I’ve ever seen. It’s intelligent, and made for adults. It’s not here-and-now. It’s set in Oxford in the late 1960s. The characters really grow on you. Each episode is complete in itself, but there are longer-running plot elements. I made a brief visit to Oxford in 2019. At the time, I didn’t know that the pub that I wanted to visit is the Lamb & Flag, which according to Wikipedia has been operating since 1566. Now I know. I’ll need another visit to Oxford to correct my mistake.


⬆︎ My coneflowers have perennialized. Lucky me!


⬆︎ Dill, bolted


⬆︎ Rose of Sharon


⬆︎ Baby persimmons, which won’t be ready until fall

Filed in Food, The land | | Comments (3)

Augustus

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Augustus: First Emperor of Rome. Adrian Goldsworthy, Yale University Press, 2014. 598 pages.

I’m almost ashamed of my interest in Rome. The more I read about Rome, the more distasteful the Roman story becomes. But Augustus, at least, was in pre-Christian Rome (born 63 BC, died 14 AD), and therefore wasn’t responsible for any of the horrors that the Roman religion brought into the world. Also, by many accounts, he wasn’t that terrible, as Roman emperors go.

It was, strangely enough, the HBO series “Rome” (2005-2007), that made me want to read a biography of Augustus. I had watched this series years ago when it was new, and recently I rewatched some of the episodes. The series is quite good, with an excellent cast. The HBO series is set during the time of Julius Caesar. Young Augustus appears as a teenager. The HBO series presents the teenage Augustus as nerdy, very serious, a touch prudish, and very respectful of Roman traditions. That’s probably accurate.

Our fascination with Roman history seems to be eternal. It’s not hard to see why, since it was in Rome (and Greece) that we find the roots of our culture and our politics. Recent events in Russia are a reminder of that. That is, you’d better have some legions under your command if you want to play Game of Thrones. Without his legions, it seems unlikely that that we’d ever have heard of Yevgeny Prigozhin, and equally unlikely that Prigozhin would be alive today, without his private army.

The era of Augustus’ reign is often called the Pax Romana, because it was an unusually peaceful era in Roman history. But, peaceful or not, I felt vaguely nauseated while reading this book. It would have been a terrible time to live, even if you were a Roman aristocrat who didn’t have to worry about starving to death. If you were a nobody, then disease, starvation, or war might put an end to you. If you were a somebody, then you were vulnerable to all sorts of treachery including murder and assassination. Not to mention that there were many situations in which suicide seemed like the right course.

An episode a day of “Masterpiece Endeavour” helped me keep my sanity while reading about Augustus.

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Smoke alarms with better manners?

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

The typical smoke alarm is a low-tech device designed to be as unbearably irritating as possible. Humidity can trigger them. Few things are more annoying than their low-battery chirp. If a smoke alarm malfunctions, it always will be in the middle of the night. One night last week, around 3 a.m., the smoke alarm on my bedroom ceiling let out one loud chirp, then stopped. The window was open, and there had been rain for three days. No doubt the humidity had caused it. I was not able to go back to sleep that night for fear that it would chirp again. And you can imagine what the cat thought of it.

As I lay awake, plain reasoning convinced me that better smoke alarms ought to be available now. Fifteen years ago, when the original smoke alarms were installed in my house (there are six of them), dumb smoke alarms were the only available type. The next morning, I started Googling for information about smart smoke alarms. It soon became clear that the Google Nest smoke alarms get the best reviews. They cost three or four times as much as ordinary smoke alarms — $119 each at Amazon. The cost of replacing all my smoke alarms would be $714. I was not eager to spend the money, having recently spent a big chunk of money to have the water heater replaced, and another big chunk of money for some roof maintenance.

To spread out the expense, I decided to buy two new Google Nest smoke alarms for now. And then I’ll replace one a month.

Current building code in the U.S. requires smoke alarms in certain rooms (especially bedrooms), and all the smoke alarms in the house must be interlinked so that if one alarm is triggered, all the alarms sound. Each alarm has three wires — the black and white wires for 120-volt power, and a red wire with which the alarms signal each other. The Google Nest alarms come in two types. One type runs on batteries and will work in older houses before hard-wired smoke alarms were required. The other type (which is what I needed) requires 120-volt connections of the type now required by building codes. (These also have three 1.5-volt batteries for backup during power failures.) The Google Nest alarms detect carbon monoxide as well as smoke.

Whether your house is old or new, you can have inter-linked smoke detectors. The Google Nest smoke detectors do not use the red wire. Instead, the smoke detectors communicate with each other by creating their own WIFI network. You use an app (iPhone or Android) to set them up and give them the name of the room they’re in.

So, what about their manners? What I want, of course, is for a smoke alarm to remain silent unless it actually detects smoke. Rather than chirping when the backup batteries are low, the Nest smoke detectors will send you an email. Before an alarm sounds, if a small amount of smoke is detected below the level for a full alarm, a synthesized voice will tell you about it and let you know what room is involved. You can use the app if you have questions about the condition of the smoke alarms. The alarms also have a colored-light scheme that is much more informative than the tiny winking lights on older smoke alarms. A circular light in the center of the smoke alarm will be blue during setup, green when all is well, yellow for an early warning, and red in an emergency. There’s a night-light feature. If you walk underneath the smoke detector in the dark, the light will turn white to light your way to the bathroom.

One of the biggest aggravations of the old smoke alarms is figuring out what’s wrong when something goes wrong. Who chirped? Why? Which room caused a full-scale false alarm? The Google Nest app stores ten days of history, so that not only can you figure what’s wrong right now, you can also see what happened yesterday when you were out of town.

I’m an Apple guy, and these smoke alarms are not compatible with Apple HomeKit. I understand, though, that there is a bridge application that will allow Apple Home devices and Google Nest devices to communicate with each other. I’ll be looking into that.

My job for today is to install one of the smoke alarms in the basement (where most of my false alarms originate) and one in my bedroom. My bedroom ceiling is twelve feet high, so, for safety, I’ve enlisted a neighbor to help me.

As for the old smoke alarms, I have a sledge hammer, and I plan to use it.

Filed in Technology | | Comments (2)

The mendacity of the punditry

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Not long ago, I made the claim here that all conservative discourse is derp and always has been derp. You’ll always find a fallacy in conservative discourse. Sometimes the fallacies are the unintentional errors of defective conservative minds, and sometimes they’re sly attempts to deceive us. This is one of the reasons why conservative propaganda is so effective on so many people. Many people just don’t know enough to reason out the fallacies or detect the falsehoods.

Emma Duncan is a columnist for the Times of London who used to work for The Economist. Her column today has the headline “We should cheer the decline of humanities degrees.” (Unfortunately all Times of London content is behind a paywall.) This is provocative. It’s also semi-obnoxious, intended to irk those who value the humanities. But, worse, a claim she makes to defend what she’s saying is wrong, no doubt knowingly wrong. She just thought that most people wouldn’t notice.

She’s certainly right about a few things — that today’s young people have to pay far too much for their educations; that, if they can get a job at all they are paid too little; and that housing costs too much. But — like a true conservative or radical centrist — rather than aiming her fire at unfairness, injustice, and exploitation, she instead celebrates the decline of humanities degrees. That’s the work of a defective mind.

In her fourth paragraph, she writes:

“I suspect that this is a sign of what the historican Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, the tendency of societies to produce more potential members of the elite than the power structure can absorb…. We are overproducing big time. A degree from a decent university is regarded as the entry ticket to the elite in this country, and numbers have rocketed.”

College students are not elites. They are not even “potential members of the elite,” at least, not for a long time, and not unless they were born rich or are extremely lucky. Turchin’s book was released only two days ago. My copy arrived the day it was released, and I have barely started reading it. But Duncan’s attempt at deception was immediately obvious.

Turchin starts this book by defining what elites are. Elites, he writes, on the first page, are power holders. We live in societies in which money equals power. An American, Turchin writes, with a net worth of $1 million to $2 million is in the lowest ranks of the elite. This means only that their lives are not precarious. They can turn down crummy jobs, and they won’t be bankrupted by a medical emergency. One’s net worth would have to be much higher than a measly $2 million to truly be a member of the elite.

Duncan writes that we are overproducing “big time,” and she puts that in the context of young people with college degrees. That is flat out false and is nothing like what Peter Turchin is saying. By overproduction, Turchin means the overproduction of wealth. One of the examples he cites is the American Civil War and the period that followed. Most of the gains from a growing economy went to elites, not to workers (or slaves). The interests of rich industrialists came into conflict with another elite — Southern slaveholders. And yet Duncan lays the blame for elite overproduction not on extreme inequality and unfairness but on poor, in-debt college students who can’t get a start in life!

The term Turchin uses is “popular immiseration.” The problem of college students today is not that they are frustrated elites. Rather, it’s that they are a just one caste in our society that is being immiserated by a system that fleeces the 90 percent at the bottom of society to pump money to the top.

People like Emma Duncan are part of that system.

I will have a review of this book later on.

Update: Sam Mace, on Substack, delivers a seriously good whippin’ to Emma Duncan, calling her article “execrable.”

https://theorymatters.substack.com/p/why-we-need-humanities-a-response

Filed in Economic issues, Political issues | | Comments (0)

The things we’re about to learn

Thursday, June 8, 2023

For those of us who have been saying for years that Trump is going to prison, this is no surprise. The wait has been miserable. But surely it’s safe to assume that the U.S. Department of Justice knows what it’s doing. And no doubt the DOJ has been particularly cautious and meticulous in a case like this one.

Obviously we’ll soon learn a lot from what comes out in court not only in this case but also in the other court cases that Trump is facing. But, just as important, we’re also about to learn a lot about the media and about the punditry.

Any media person who continues to push the notion that Trump will still somehow magically get away with everything, just to keep us anxious and angry, is a media person to whom we should pay no attention ever again. And any pundit who says that these indictments are a dark day for America is a pundit to whom we should never again pay attention. The Trump dark days are past. The dark days in American history were when Trump was in the White House. Today is a grand day in American history. One of the strongest blows ever for equal justice has been struck. We can cheer with our heads held high and with every meaningful principle on our side.

And yes, there also is schadenfreude. There, the principles are not our side. Still, I refuse to feel any guilt about taking pleasure in watching them pay for what Trump and the Republican Party have put us through. Now we can look on and laugh as the Republican Party, which brought this on itself, splits right down the middle. And the people who gloated about liberal tears and repeatedly said to us “fuck your feelings” will whine, vent their rage, and come up with new conspiracy theories. But their demoralization is inevitable now, and, politically, that’s where we want them.

I’ve been saving a bottle of champagne for this moment left over from a canceled celebration after the horrible election of November 8, 2016. It’s too late tonight to pop a cork and properly celebrate. So I think I’ll save the champagne for next Tuesday, after Trump appears in court.

Filed in Political issues | | Comments (2)

The Oxford Murders

Tuesday, June 6, 2023


Elijah Wood and John Hurt, set in Oxford in 1993

While beating through the bush for something to watch, I came across “The Oxford Murders,” on Hulu. The film was made in 2008. It’s set in Oxford in 1993. A mystery with Elijah Wood, John Hurt, and an Oxford setting? Of course I was going to watch that.

But it’s yet another example of the fringiness of my taste and why you should be skeptical of anything I like. I would have given “The Oxford Murders” at least a 95, but Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 17/33!

I read through some of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews. Apparently many people took the film seriously and thought that the film was trying to be smart. I didn’t see it that way at all. Rather, it was a parody, making fun of people who are smart or who think they’re smart. Much of the humor was based on that. I think that John Hurt also saw it as a parody, and that that would explain his over-the-top performance as an Oxford professor — always declaiming, and usually a bit too loud. Maybe those reviewers haven’t read Sherlock Holmes, as John Hurt clearly has? Elijah Wood was amazing.

I have an Oxford fetish, and this film didn’t disappoint. It’s all there — the pubs, the dining halls, the lecture halls, the library, the bicycles, the Oxford accents, the snark.

It’s a shame that it was only an hour and 50 minutes. I’d watch six seasons of this.

Filed in Culture | | Comments (11)

The new and the good as new

Monday, June 5, 2023


Western Electric Model 302 telephone (1937-1955). The receiver, by the way, is a Collins 75A-4 (1955). It uses vacuum tubes — lots of them. Both the telephone and the receiver still work!

It blows my mind how much technological change I’ve seen in my lifetime. I love the old stuff as much as the new.

Today, while I was live-streaming the video from Apple’s annual developer conference at which Apple announced its new “mixed reality” device, I also was cleaning up, and hooking up, a vintage Bell System Western Electric Model 302 telephone that I bought on eBay.

I have lived during a fascinating period in the history of technology. When I was a boy, maybe 10 or 11 years old, we had a Model 302 telephone. I was in my mid-30s when I got my first computer. Ever since then, computers have been an important part of my life. As for Apple’s new mixed-reality device, I’m becoming convinced that it will start a revolution, and, in a few years, devices like this will replace our computers, our laptops, and our televisions. The goal, I’m sure, is to make them small enough to look like glasses, rather than masks that fit over the face. This seems strange until you think about the fact that, ever since television came along, we sit in front of glowing screens. If you think about it, sitting in front of glowing screens is more weird than wearing glasses.

If, like me, you think Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is a goose, it’s amusing that, after spending billions of dollars on his vision of mixed reality, his devices are primitive. Today, Zuckerberg got crushed, unless there’s a market for cheaper and more primitive devices.

With Apple it’s a whole different story. The “Vision Pro,” starting at $3,499, is frightfully expensive. But Apple is just getting started, and it’s clear that there was no cheap way to start if you want to do it right. Now we can see why even our Apple phones have all those processor cores, graphics cores, and neural engines. The engineering base was already in place for the new visionOS operating system that the new devices will use. All the Apple gear, as always, will work together. My guess is that, in a few years, millions of people will use these things. Apple’s intention today, of course, was to kick start development. Things will move very fast from this point on. Let’s hope they get cheaper as they get better.

I don’t recall that Apple’s presentation today mentioned AI at all. But that’s where this is going — realistic avatars in imaginary spaces that we can talk with, much like Star Trek’s Holodeck. It’s spooky. But it’s also very exciting.

As for the Western Electric Model 302 telephone, a great many of them were made. They remain common, and they’re inexpensive on eBay. They’re almost indestructible, and it would be rare to find one that doesn’t still work. Strangely enough, some telephone systems still support pulse dialing, including the device that I wrote about here.

⬆︎ Watch two teenagers try to dial a rotary phone.


⬆︎ Apple’s new Vision Pro


⬆︎ It’s amusing to think about how right-wingers must have hated Tim Cook’s display today of Apple’s wokeness. The Disney CEO also appeared, to say that Disney is already producing stories for the Vision Pro.


⬆︎ Speaking of old and elegant, yesterday I took this photo of Lily. She’s 15 years old now. Her coat isn’t as sleek and black as it used to be. But she’s still going strong.

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