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PLASMA BABY

In apparent contradiction to the dour anti-consumerism of my previous post, I have recently acquired a plasma television (Panasonic 42"). To quote The Doc: "It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds". 

My hip pocket, on the other hand, most certainly does have bounds, so I was happy to get something half-decent for under $750. Of course, it isn't quite state-of-the-art: you could easily pay twice as much for an LCD of the same size (or even more for LED) -- not to mention that 3DTV is just around the corner. But speaking personally, I can't really get enthousiastic about current obsession with ever-bigger screens and higher resolution. I mean, like everything else, you get used to it pretty quickly anyway. So if it's big enough to watch comfortably from the sofa (distance is approx 3m -- which is the "recommended" distance for a 42" screen), then I'm a happy camper.

Unfortunately, our current outdoor aerial doesn't allow us to get any channel except SBS (an amusing reversal of the usual problem: "I can now getta ONLY S ah B S ah!"). But for the time being we don't really care: most of our entertainment is either DVD or internet-based -- and most of the worthwhile programs can be viewed on the channels' websites.

WIRED FOR SOUND (+ VISION)

With the new TV in place, it was imperative to find a wiring setup that would allow the computer screen to be shown on the TV. Enter HDMI: the standard cable format for digital tv, which is also compatible with the DVI cables used to connect computer monitors. Some research showed that my iMac is endowed with one of Apple's annoyingly non-standard "mini-DVI" ports, so I needed an adapter of some kind. Now, one of my biggest gripes with Apple is that they sell these adapters for extortionately high prices (and then compound things by changing the format from one model to the next), so I was delighted to find a third-party mini-DVI-to-HDMI adapter for only 10 bucks on eBay (cf 45 bucks for a similar cable from Apple). I also picked up a 10 metre HDMI-HDMI, to transfer the signal from the computer at one end of the room to the TV at the other. Finally, since audio is not transmitted through DVI, I needed a 10 metre stereo RCA cable to take the sound from the computer to the TV. These cables were also available quite cheaply from dealers on eBay (about a quarter of the price in retailers like Bing Lee). So now I'm all cabled up, and I can watch youtube clips (or whatever other video material I might stumble upon on the internet...) in glorious high-resolution 42".

Just for good measure, I also picked up a Sony DVD player. It's amazing to me that you can now buy these for about 70 bucks -- not much more than I paid for all the cables just mentioend. It plays all regions, which is a must since my DVD collection is pretty much evenly split between regions 2 and 4. It also plays discs with formats like .AVI -- which would be handy if I happened to be someone with a large collection of downloaded material.. 

OZ, SEASON 1

To break in the new tv set up, I decided to have a look at this show. One of the earliest HBO drama shows, it ran for six seasons from 1997 to 2003, so as usual I'm a little late to the party. It's a prison drama, set in the fictitious Oswald Penitentiary in an unspecified state of the US. It features the usual mix of prisoner stereotypes and dark themes, and is pretty full-on. But it's also quite entertaining and probably worth watching for fans of The Shield or The Wire. And with only 8 episodes, it goes in quite quickly. One of the highlights in Season One is the "master-bitch" relationship between white-supremist Vern Schillinger and vulnerable newbie Tobias Beecher. 

It's probably a sign that I've watched too many of these shows, but there are quite a few familiar faces: Laguerta from Dexter is there, as are a couple of the gangsters from The Wire. And you may recognize prison manager Tim McManus as hapless Lamar from The Firm (you know, the guy who sat in his backyard with the sprinkler going back and forth across his trousers).

"Growth Fetish", by Clive Hamilton (2003)

Another blow-in from the recent second-hand book sale. I had been curious to read something by this guy since noticing his latest book, "Requiem For A Species", in A&R. Clive Hamilton is an Australian economic/political left-wing think-tank sort of guy who seems to have some interesting opinions at odds with the mainstream.

As the title suggests, the central thesis of this book is that the concept of economic growth as the key measure of progress has outgrown its usefulness in western society and that we need a new, "post-growth" approach to life.

On a daily basis we are bombarded with economic figures such as GDP, and politicians pander unwaveringly to the mantra that economic growth is good. But when you look closely, the emperor of economic growth is scantily-clad: despite relentless increases in incomes and wealth, we are basically no happier now than in previous generations. The dreams of technology-enabled reductions in working hours and corresponding increase in leisure time have not materialized, and instead people are now working more than ever.

And most depressingly, what we're working for seems more pointless than ever. We buy ever bigger tv sets, but watch ever- more adverts and mind-numbing reality television; we buy bigger, fancier cars but crawl through ever-thicker traffic; we eat more processed food and drink more booze, and then drag our overweight bodies to Fitness First to work it off on a treadmill.

What's wrong with this picture??? Just maybe, it's the futility of a culture of consumption where we're constantly exhorted to acquire the next big thing, blind to the fact that the happiness it promises is a sad illusion. We're in a real life version of The Matrix, and CH wants us to take the red pill and wake up already...

And quite apart from the futility of this existence, we must face up to its awful wastefulness. The planet simply cannot sustain us on our current trajectory. There are 2 billion people in China and the Indian subcontinent looking hopefully towards the West and aspiring to our way of life; if they ever get there it's going to end in tears for all concerned.

His arguments ring true based on my own experience, and although a cynic could probably point to a number of weaknesses (for one thing, he does a much more thorough job of critiquing the current system than he does of proposing a realistic alternative), you can't help feeling there is a lot of truth in there that really needs to be heard.

As my own meagre contribution to spreading the good word, I recommend you check out the first three chapters, which are available on the author's website here. I found Chapter 3, "Identity", to be the most convincing in the book, so it's definitely worth a read. And just think: although Clive might not agree with me here, by not buying the book, you're already helping to wean yourself off the culture of consumption!

HENRY ROLLINS @ THE ENMORE

Last night we went to see Hank do his spoken word thing (as part of his "Frequent Flyer" tour) at The Enmore Theatre in Newtown. It was the first time we've seen him in person and it was an impressive experience. 

Firstly, the guy can TALK. He strode onto the stage and once he opened his mouth that was it -- for approximately 2.5 hours. Pausing for water only during the regular enforced lulls due to audience applause, he powered on like a one man conversational juggernaut. His energy and sheer intensity were unwavering, and you got the feeling that he could have just kept going for another couple of hours if he thought the audience could take it.

Topically, his rants were basically a random walk through what's been on his mind and what he's been up to lately. The feel was spontaneous and unrehearsed --- kind of like an extremely the one-sided conversation you might have in a pub with a very articulate, opiniated and -- above all -- extremely voluble friend that you haven't seen in about a year, during which time he has been on the round-the-world trip of a lifetime.

In no particular order, some of the grist for his furiously grinding mill included: the issue of freedom of speech in the US and its hijacking by right-wing nutcases; seeing punk-rock band Bad Brains in his home town of Washington DC on the night of Obama's election (needless to say, Hank voted for Obama); the US politician John Boehner and his fake tan; his recent role in Season Two of "Sons of Anarchy" (he was casted by writer Kurt Sutter of "The Shield" fame); his appearance on reality show "RuPaul's Drag Races" where he judged drag queen contestants.

He claims (and certainly seems) to be becoming less cynical as he "hurtles towards 50" (he's currently 49). He's clearly a very interested and concerned global citizen, and a significant part of his motivation in giving these talks seems to be a desire to impart some of this to his audience.

All in all it was a pretty inspirational effort. And if he swings by in a year's time I'd probably be happy to hear more.

"Monkey Business: Swinging Through The Wall Street Jungle", by John Rolfe and Peter Troob (2001)

I picked this up in a second-hand book sale on the weekend. I guess I could sum up what I thought of it by saying I'm glad I only paid 2 bucks for it...

The book is the true story of the authors' brief careers as investment banking associates in a Wall St investment bank, fresh out of business school. They shamelessly and irreverently "lift the lid" on the frenzied and mind-numbing culture that they experienced during their two and a half years in the "jungle". All the usual cliches are trotted out: marathon working hours spent pandering to the whims of arrogant and ruthless managing directors and vice presidents; sordid company parties and outings to strip bars; and the ultimate realisation that there's more to life than money. 

As such, it's not terribly interesting or original, and you can't avoid the impression that the authors have read "Liar's Poker" (by Michael Lewis -- an excellent read that I _would_ recommend to people outside of finance) and tried to jump on the same gravy train.

Based on my own limited experience in the IB world, much of what they describe rings true. However, I suspect they have embellished quite liberally in the name of trying to tell a good story. There's not a lot of real substance or insight beneath the fluff, and the locker-room-style humour gets tedious fairly quickly. 

In the plus column, some of the anecdotes _are_ amusing -- even if of dubious credibility. One highlight was the account of an interview which took place in a hotel room and during which the author had to excuse himself to take a dump in the bathroom; the foul smell that hung in the air for the remainder of the interview guaranteed his failure, but left him with the consolation of knowing that the candidate after him would assume that it had come from one of the interviewers. 

And the book does give some insight into what investment bankers (as opposed to traders) actually do, which may be of interest to anyone thinking of getting into the business: it certainly strips away the aura and reveals investment banking as the parasitic industry that it surely is. The reality is that the huge bonuses and lavish corporate perks are scant compensation for the complete subservience and misery that the job entails. 

On poker hand probabilities

Ever since I learned how to do it back in Year 12 Applicable Maths, I seem to keep coming back every once in a while to re-calculate the probabilities of the different poker hands. A big part of this is that I keep forgetting which is the better hand between a straight and a flush. I've never played enough poker to have this cemented in my mind by sheer experience, so I'm always hoping that by going through the calculation one more time, I'll develop some kind of solid intuition.

That hasn't really worked so far, but at least this time round I can record it in this here blog for posterity...

So, we begin with a standard deck of cards, 52 cards arranged into 4 suits and 13 ranks. The first thing to decide is how many distinct poker hands are there? Adopting standard mathemathical notation, the answer is 52_C_5, pronounced "52 choose 5". This "choose" function pops up all over the place when calculating poker hand probabilities; it is calculated by doing (52 x 51 x 50 x 49 x 48) / (5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1). Intuitively, the numerator represents the number of choices for each of the five cards: i.e. there are 52 choices for the first card, 51 for the second (since we've already removed one from the deck), and so on. But since the order doesn't matter, we need to divide by all the ways of re-arranging the 5 cards, which is what the denominator represents. The final answer is 2,598,960.

For the various poker hands, we will work out how many there are of each; the fewer there are, the more valuable the hand. The probability of being dealt a given type of hand will then be given by this number divided by the total number of hands just computed.

Now, the most valuable hand is the royal flush: 10JQKA, all of the same suit. It's pretty easy to see that there are only 4 such hands, one for each suit.

Next comes the straight flush. There are 4 suits, and for each suit there are 9 possible straights ranging from A2345 to 910JQK (we don't include 10JQKA since this is a royal flush). So there are 4 x 9 = 36 distinct straight flushes.

Now, four-of-a-kind. There are 13 different choices for the 4 cards. The extra card in the hand (which has no bearing on the hand's value) can be any of the remaing 48 cards. There are thus 13 x 48 = 624 ways to get a four-of-a-kind.

After that, we move into the realm of hands that you can expect to get more than once in a lifetime, beginning with the full house (three of one rank, two of another). There are 13 choices for the three-of-a-kind rank, and for each one, there are 4_C_3 = 4 ways to choose the suits of the three cards (more intuitively, you could say there are 4 choices for the suit not present). There are then 12 choices for the rank of the pair, and for each one 4_C_2 = 6 ways to choose their suits. So, there are 13 x 4 x 12 x 6 = 3744 ways to get a full house.

Now we reach the point where the flush and straight jostle uncertainly in my memory. Let's take a punt and tackle the flush first. A flush is five cards of the same suit, but which do not form a straight. The simplest way to calculate this is to calculate all flushes including straights, then subtract the number of straight flushes and royal flushes that we already calculated above. So, there are 4 suits for the flush and 13_C_5 choices for the ranks of the cards. From this we must subtract 36+4. We end up with 4 x 13_C_5 - 40 =  5108 ways to get a flush.

Arranging cards in order of rank (lowest to highest), there are 10 different straights from A2345 to 10JQKA -- ignoring the suits. Each card can be one of 4 different suits, so there are 10 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 10,240 possibilities. But once we need to subtract the 40 straight and royal flushes, so there are actually 10,240 - 40 = 10,200 ways to get a straight.

It's interesting to see that there are approximately actually twice as many ways to get a straight than a flush, and yet it's not intuitively clear (to me, at least) which should be the more likely.

Now that the order of flush and straight has been resolved, let's run quickly through the remaining, more prosaic, hands. 

Three-of-a-kind: 13 choices for the triplet, and 4_C_3 = 4 choices for their suits. The remaining two cards must have different ranks from the triplet and from each other (otherwise we'd get four-of-a-kind or a full house). There are 12_C_2 = 12 x 11 / 2 = 66 choices for their ranks, and 4 choices for each of their suits. Thus we have 13 x 4 x 66 x 4 x 4 = 54912 ways to get three-of-a-kind.

Two pair: 13_C_2 = 13 x 12 / 2 = 78 choices for the rank of the pairs, and for each one, 4_C_2 = 6 choices for their suits. The fifth card can be any of the remaining 44 cards. So there are 78 x 6 x 6 x 44 = 123,552 ways to get two pair.

Finally, the humble pair. There are 13 x 4_C_2 = 13 x 6 = 78 ways to get two cards of the same rank. The remaining cards must have different ranks from each other and from the pair (otherwise we'd have a more valuable hand). There are 12_C_3 = 220 choices for their ranks, and 4 choices for the suit of each one. There are thus 78 x 220 x 4 x 4 x 4 = 1,098,240 ways to get a pair.

What about the number of ways of getting nothing at all? Well, subtracting all the above from the total number of hands, we get 1,302,540, which is a probability of approximately 50.1%.

Poker hands --- Done!

Latest movies

Narc (2002)

I watched this after reading Rio Rancho's positive review. It's a gritty cop drama in the mould of The Wire starring Ray Liotta and Jason Patric. I quite enjoyed it: while it doesn't really break any new ground in the genre, it is nevertheless a solid and fairly entertaining film. Refreshingly, it doesn't try to be anything it isn't: just a good, honest narcotics-based cop flick.

Julie & Julia (2009)

Based on true events, this film tells the story of frustrated wannabe writer and amateur foodie Julie Powell (Amy Adamson) who finds an outlet for her talents by attempting to cook every one of the 524 recipes from Julia Child's famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days -- and writing a blog about it. Interwoven in parallel is the story of the events that led to Julia Child (Meryl Streep) writing the book some 40 years earlier, while she was living with her husband in Paris.

In case you haven't guessed, this wasn't a Peter-pick, but I was happy to go along for the ride: it was an easy-to-watch, feel-good sort of a film (and I had even heard of the book!). Although it does have a narcissistic side (which was portrayed quite well in the film), I find the concept of setting oneself a random but personally meaningful challenge, and then documenting its progress, quite inspiring.

One pet peeve was Meryl Streep's portrayal of Julia Child, which seemed a little over the top and became tedious after a while (I was reminded of Mrs Doubtfire more than anything else). The film also ended on a slightly unresolved note, with Julie rebuffed by Julia (then 91) who apparently didn't approve of her blogging exploits and, as she has since passed away, presumably never will.

The Further Adventures Of Handyman Gekko

New flyscreen for the bathroom

This was a little project I'd been putting off for quite some time. When we moved in, the flyscreen had a fairly large flap ripped into its bottom corner -- as if someone had aimed a chest-high spinning roundhouse kick at it.

Perhaps that kick had been motivated by frustration from a previous attempt at getting the frame out of the window -- which I soon found to quite a fiddly business. In the end, the previous frame was "compromised" and the project expanded into constructing a new frame from scratch. I had learned the hard way that the screen is designed to be removed from the inside (duh!).

Building a new frame and installing the flyscreen wasn't too big a job in the end. It required a couple of specialized tools: a plastic "mitre" which allows the cutting of the frame at a precise 45 degree angle with a hacksaw; and a "spline roller" which, as the name suggests, rolls the rubber spline into the groove thereby clamping the flywire in place (TIP: while doing this, clothes pegs are a good way to clamp the wire onto the frame at reasonable tension). The frame segments are held together by little plastic corner elements (invisible in the final product). I also added a little plastic handle doo-da at the bottom to facilitate lifting out the flyscreen (without breaking it) if that ever proves necessary.

New stormwater pits

Finally got these done by the plumber: a big metal one at the back and a smaller plastic one at the front. The previous set-up had pipes from the downspouts straight underground to the stormwater drain. This was potentially dangerous if ever this were to become blocked, since there would then be nowhere for the water to escape other than under the house.

Although the end result is functional, I'm not blown away by the workmanship. I think if I had to do this again I'd be happy to have a stab at it myself. The only really tricky bit would be sawing the concrete path to make room for the pit.

Retaining wall drainage

Last weekend I finally completed this long-running project.

For the smaller section of retaining on the right side, I ended up inserting the new ag pipe introvenously into the older one and then laying it along the top along the length of the wall:

Just for good measure, I also surgically inserted the leftover bit of ag pipe so that it runs almost vertically into the old pipe, since this corner had been particularly boggy before:

Then came the fun part: back-filling the cavity behind the wall with a mixture of blue metal stones, old bricks and bits of sandstone that had been there previously, as well as a lot of the clay-ish soil that has been piling up from other excavations around the place (the idea being to have bricks/rocks immediately behind the wall to a thickness of about 30cm, and then soil from there to the rock face). This was tedious, particularly since, in order to protect the new drainage system from getting clogged up with clay particles (which had been the undoing of the previous one), I was wrapping the stones and brick in landscape fabric (a deceptively tough felt-like material that lets water, but not sand or soil, pass through).

So here is the end result:

Next step: planter boxes will be set up in the area behind the retaining walls, and some decorative gravel will fill in the remaining spaces. Further down the line will be a gravel drain in front of the retaining wall, which will be linked up with the metal pit mentioned above.

And then maybe I'll stop thinking about drainage for a while, which will be nice for all concerned. Because you know things have gone too far when you find yourself stopping in the middle of a carpark to mutter, with knowing admiration, "boy, that's a good-sized drain...".

"Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals", by Robert M. Pirsig

Phaedrus rides again!

"Lila" is the follow up work to the cult classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which I read -- and loved -- a few years back. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I approached this one: the reviews I've read are a little mixed, and the general consensus seems to be that it didn't really measure up to ZAMM. But finally I decided that the original was so good that even if this one were only half as good it would still be well worth a read.

I needn't have worried though. While purists and fans may argue that ZAMM is, strictly speaking, the better of the two, there is no doubt that this book is a worthy continuation and deserves to be read by everyone who enjoyed ZAMM.

The narrative approach taken broadly resembles that of ZAMM: the character Phaedrus (a.k.a. The Captain, a thinly disguised representation of Pirsig himself) undertakes a journey, this time by boat rather than motorcycle, accompanied by a troubled female companion (the eponymous Lila) that he has picked up in a dive bar along the way. 

The events of the story provide the backdrop for an ongoing discussion/exploration of his ambitious, all-encompassing philosophy (already fleshed out in ZAMM), which he calls "The Metaphysics of Quality". Its basic premise is that everything in the universe can be classified according to different types (or levels) of Quality. This framework permits a natural and general definition of morality as those processes/actions which best serve the highest level of Quality in a given system. Thus, morality is served whenever "intellectual" Quality prevails over "social" Quality, which in turn should take precedence over "biological" Quality, and so on. 

As I said, it's an ambitious undertaking, and at times it can be quite hard (though rewarding) to follow. It's also the type of work that is inevitably subject to scorn (or outright dismissal) from within traditional academic/intellectual circles, partly because of it's ambitious scope, and partly because Pirsig quite deliberately sets himself apart from more mainstream writers. You get the feeling that works like this are destined to either languish as cult relics or else achieve widespread recognition long after the author's demise.

On that note, a couple of other authors that I'm reminded of are Nassim Taleb ("Fooled by Randomness", "The Black Swan") and Stephen Wolfram ("A New Kind of Science"). What Pirsig shares with both these guys is that (a) he's clearly a very intelligent, original thinker; (b) he has the courage/audacity to publish his ideas as a kind of manifesto that eschews conventions of the mainstream; and (c) as a result of (b), his work has been received with a mixture of derision and cult-worship. (Of the three, Taleb's ideas seem to be the first to achieve vindication --- thanks to the GFC.)

At the end of the day, I don't really have the academic chops to offer a detailed critique of Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality or how much it really contributes to our philosophical outlook on the world. What I can say is that I found many of his arguments to be very compelling, and I'm left with the feeling that there's a lot of wisdom in what he says. And, unlike much of the academic literature, his ideas are presented in a way that's very accessible and enjoyable to read. There are some weak points --- his comments relating to biological evolution and quantum mechanics, in particular, seemed a little dodgy -- but these don't seem deep enough to seriously weaken his argument.

BOTTOM LINE: I seriously recommend "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to those who haven't yet read it. And if you like it, I'd suggest you won't be disappointed by "Lila".

Things We Lost In The Fire (2009)

It's a pity the script to this vapid dog-turd of a film wasn't one of the things lost in said fire...

With a line-up featuring Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro (as well as David "Hank's goin' to hell" Duchovny), you might have hoped for something half-way entertaining here. Instead, what you get is a slow-moving piece of clichéd melodrama that wouldn't be out of place on the Hallmark channel.

The premise is fairly simple: Halle Berry's husband -- an all-round good-guy type played by Duchovny -- is killed in a senseless, random act of violence one night when he pops out to the convenience store to buy ice cream for the kids (cue violins right there). His best friend (del Toro) --- an affable but basically good-for-nothing heroin addict that Duchovny has loyally stuck by through the years --- comes to the funeral and strikes up an acquaintance with Berry and the kids. Before long, Berry has taken pity on him and he moves into the garage (which has just been renovated after the fire to which the film owes its name).

The rest of the movie is about Berry struggling to come to terms with the loss of her husband (and why his fate wasn't visited instead upon the clearly more-deserving del Toro) and about del Toro simply trying to stay clean. The ending (uh-oh, spoiler alert!) is Hallmark happy-dappy, with del Toro heading off to rehab and vowing to remain lifelong friends with the kids (his future relationship with Halle is left open-ended, but we wouldn't be too surprised if they were to hook up further down the line -- clearly the kids have already accepted him as a potential father figure).

So, basically, it's a bit of a waste of time. Redeeming features? Well, HB is rather easy on the eye and, to be fair, puts in a fairly solid performance. And del Toro does bring a certain charisma to his role as the drug-addled Jerry; just not enough to lift the film out of the smouldering scrap heap of mediocrity in which it languishes.