Give Me That Old Time Politics (A Modest Proposal)

Unlike half the (semi-)civilized world I haven't yet posted anything in my blog about the political singularity¹ in US politics that occurred a little while ago in the Great Deficit Debate². That's mostly because I'm thoroughly disgusted by the sheer stupidity, cupidity, and general malfeasance our political "representatives" have shown.  But I have a modest proposal that might prevent such disasters in the future, one I first came up with many years ago, in a simpler time, when the crimes of our masters were simpler and perhaps more easily dealt with (and I didn't think my proposal was entirely justified.  Now I do).  After the cut, I'll give you the grisly details.

^1. Where "singularity'is defined as a change in technology or culture so great and so rapid that no one trying to forecast its effects beforehand can possibly do so.  I think I can safely say that no one was crazy enough to predict as recently as a year ago the particularly insane and unnecessary game of "button, button, who's got the nuclear button" on the Republican side of the deficit debate countered by the response of "we win by caving in" that the Democrats and the President replied with.

^2. It's clear to me that the deficit is in their intelligence, not in our budget.

Seniority

So last week I officially became a senior citizen: I turned 65, and am now on Medicare (thank Ghu: it's hundreds of dollars a month cheaper than the previous health insurance¹ I had, with pretty much comparable coverage).  Of course this happened in front of the backdrop of OHNO DEBT DISASTER THROW MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY RECIPIENTS TO THE WOLVES!!!!  I was beginning to wonder if there would be any Medicare by the time my eligibility kicked in, but luckily my coverage started Aug. 1, before Standard & Poors could downgrade US Government credit and turn us into a Third World nation.</sarcasm>

Oh, and another landmark: I am now a grandfather.  My older son Alex and his wife Melissa now have a bouncing baby girl, Ellanor, born about a month ago.  Because they're in Louisiana, we haven't seen her in person yet, but we've seen lots of pictures, and she is, of course, the cutest grandchild ever.

^1. And why, he asks rhetorically, do we need health insurance?  Just give me health care, and we can eliminate the 15 or 20% of the health care expenses in the US the insurance companies eat without providing any useful good or service.

A Geometry for the Many-Angled Ones

You may know (or not) that I've become quite fond of the science fiction of Charlie Stross, a British writer living in Scotland, especially the "Laundry Files" series.  The Laundry is a highly-classified British Intelligence and Counter-Espionage agency whose primary brief is the protection of the United Kingdom against the depredations of evil extra-dimensional beings who wish to invade, possess, destroy, and otherwise prey on humans and their world.

The basic conceit is that H. P. Lovecraft's writings are true: there are beings of great power lurking just around the corner in a higher-dimensional multiverse, beings who can be called forth using forms of geometry and computer software.  In the world of the Laundry, Alan Turing didn't just invent the mathematical underpinnings of the theory of computation; the secret part of his work that the rest of the world didn't get to see shows how mathematics and computer programs can be used to do what amounts to "magic".  Stross' hero, Bob Howard, is a middle-echelon IT sysadmin and secret agent, recruited into the Laundry just before his university computer graphics project could invite in beings that would have leveled the city of Wolverhampton¹.

Now it happens that I've been researching modern geometry in the last year or two.  One of the subjects I've been studying intensively, for use in a software project I hope to blog about in the near future, is a field called "Geometric Algebra"².  And Geometric Algebra just might be the geometry that Lovecraft's "Many-Angled Ones" use in navigating their sinister travels through the universes..  I'll explain more after the cut.  Don't be too bothered by the mathematical terms; I'll try to summarize the meaning of it all so you won't have a mathematician to get it.  And I'll try not to get eaten by the Great Old Ones before I finish.

... and One More Thing ...

Eek, yet another thing to take away time and energy.  A couple of weeks ago I noticed a bump on my back that was rather tender.  Went to the doctor and she diagnosed an infected cyst, so I went to a surgeon (who just happened to be the surgeon who performed Eva's lumpectomy last year, someone we both really liked and respected after that) who set up an outpatient procedure a week later, and pumped me full of antibiotics.

Still Here After All This Time

It's been a really long time since my last post on this blog.  That was caused by a number of things: recovery from surgery was slower than I expected, at least in terms of getting back the energy to do things during the day.  For awhile there it was all I could do to go to the park and sit for an hour while the dogs walked around.  It took almost six months to get up the energy to walk any distance myself, but once I started doing that, my energy started coming back at a faster pace.  Now I can do 3 or 4 hours of (mostly non-physical) work a day after walking the dogs.

But once I had the energy, more things intervened.  Our Lhasa Apso, Jemma,  suddenly (over the course of 2 or 3 weeks) went blind.  We spent some time going to vets and not getting a definitive diagnosis until we saw a veterinary opthalmologist.  He diagnosed SORD (Sudden Onset Retinal Disorder), a disorder whose etiology and mechanism are pretty much unknown, but whose prognosis is 100% blindness in almost all cases, and which has no treatment.  Jemma has been blind now for several months, and has mostly acclimated herself to it.  Dogs aren't as strongly affected by blindness as humans, because smell and hearing are so much more acute for them.  Jemma's only serious problem (aside from a non-related eye infection that lasted several weeks) is that when she gets excited or upset she gets disoriented and gets stuck in loops between obstacles, going back and forth until she accidentally goes off at an angle and misses one of them.  We''re working with her on that, but she is a very stubborn dog (a breed quality) and is having trouble taking direction when she gets that way.  Spencer, our Rat Terrier, has been very solicitous of her, following her and trying to help her (though not very consistently). He has come to get us a couple of times when she got into trouble in the back yard.

The other thing that's been keeping me from the blog is a project I've started.  Now that I'm able to do useful work at least part of the day, I've decided to come partially out of retirement and create software that, with a little luck, I can sell to bring in a little extra money; at least enough, I hope, to pay for the additional hardware and software I've had to buy for the development work (that's not really a lot, but retirement hasn't been quite what it was supposed to be, thanks to the Current Financial Unpleasantness).  I've got a project that I think I can do myself, one that I've been thinking about off and on for a year or so.  It will start out as a Macintosh application, sold through Apple's Mac App Store, and if that's successful, I plan to port it to the iPad. Details in a near future blog post.

I'll continue to post here, but probably not as often as I was doing last fall.  I'll be spending about 20 hours a week on the software project, and that will include some postings on a new blog I'm setting up now along with a website for the company that will sell the software.  I'll post the details for the new site and blog here soon.

Swimming Towards the Surface

As some of you few may know, I had back surgery a little over a week ago, and that's why there've been no posts for awhile.  The recovery is going well, and I"m not as spaced out by the pain relief drugs as I was at first, so I'll be easing my way back into a life on the Web as well as in the Real World starting about now.

I'd like to thank Eva for taking care of me (and the dogs) so well and so carefully; I quite literally could not have done it without her.

More Poetry in Stock Than Ever Before!

I have finally gathered all my poems from the archives of Making Light and put them onto my own web site, The Den of SpeakerToManagers, on the Miscellaneous Sonnets and Other Poems page.  As the title implies, they're mostly sonnets, with a couple of villanelles thrown in for good measure.  The poems are in chronological order of writing, the oldest at the top of the page.  I hope you enjoy reading them.

ETA: I'll be fixing up the typography and the layout of the poems in the near future, but the content will remain the same.

Arise Ye Prisoners of Starvation

The other day I watched "Capitalism: A Love Story" for the first time (we don't go to the movie theater but once or twice a year, so we have to wait for things to be put on cable), and was blown away by the trailing title song: a jazz version of The Internationale (in English). Listen for yourself:

Back for a Bit

This blog has been very quiet the last few weeks.  One of the reasons is that Eva has been going through a course of radiation therapy for the last 6 or 7 weeks; that's kept me busy driving her to the hospital every day, plus doing the chores that she hasn't been able to do because of the fatigue the therapy causes.  In addition, I've had some medical appointments of my own, as I try to figure out what to do about my back.  But now Eva's therapy is done, and I've come close to having some resolution on my own case, so I expect to be writing more, at least for the next few weeks.

More details on both Eva's and my medical adventures below the fold.

The End of the World Cup Game

Really, you had to be there.