My laptop's musical tastes

The machine seems to be developing a mind of its own.

Yesterday I was working on the 4th Applied Topology book right up until half an hour before a friend was due to arrive, and I was playing a Youtube video of Kalman's Countess Marica for background music. Come quitting time, I closed the laptop and went out into the living room to be social.

All was quiet for about fifteen minutes; then suddenly I heard raised voices. I was rather alarmed, because the speakers didn't seem to be at all happy - though I couldn't make out what they were saying - and the sounds seemed to come from the east side of the house. Was somebody berating our elderly neighbor? Did I need to rush to the rescue? I took a look outside, couldn't see anybody.

Then the speakers quit arguing and started to sing, "Szep Varos Kolosvar," which is one of my favorite numbers from, you guessed it, Countess Marica. Mystery (sort of) solved! It was my laptop - which happened to be located halfway between our living room and Claire's house - making the noises.

At the end of "Szep Varos Kolosvar," the music stopped.

You know, usually whatever I'm watching or listening to on the laptop stops when I close the lid. If the operetta had continued without stopping at all, I would have shrugged and put it down to my ignorance and the possibility I'd inadvertently changed some setting.

But what could cause the thing to shut off the music, wait fifteen minutes, resume playing the operetta... and then stop again?

I am now imagining the laptop thinking something like, "Oh, darn it, she stopped right before my favorite number... Hmm, I don't think she's coming back any time soon... To hell with the settings, I'm going to resume the operetta just long enough to listen to "Szep Varos Kolosvar."

And here I am typing this blog post on the very same machine! I wonder what that will do to our relationship?

Real Life

That disorderly thing called Real Life has been happening with a vengeance around here, mostly around No. 1 Daughter's problems with her pregnancy. Nothing life-threatening, but she's been upset and I've been wearing my Mommy hat instead of my Writer hat. Apologies, and I'll try to think of something interesting tomorrow.

Axioms and Truth

Don’t worry: there will be no math.

Recently I’ve seen a number of posts and articles in which the writers try to talk about axioms and get it wrong. Therefore, this rant.

The writers will keep mis-defining axioms. To boil the definitions down to the simplest possible statement: “An axiom is a statement which is self-evidently true.”

Uh, no.

Axioms are more like rules of the game. For example, let’s look at some poker rules, because nobody confuses the rules for any type of poker to be self-evident truths, right? And poker is an easy example for me, because I learned it sitting under the kitchen table and sneaking beers while the nominal adults in the family bet and bluffed.
(Caveat: this is not intended as a complete set of instructions for any given type of poker; I’m trying to keep it down to the minimum necessary to prove my point.)

Five-Card Draw

Probably the simplest form of poker. Some of the rules are:

-Each player gets five cards
-Players may look at their cards
-There is a round of betting
-After the first betting round, each player may discard one to three cards face down and gets an equal number of cards, also face down, from the dealer.
-After all players have had a chance to draw, there is a second round of betting.

These are (some of) the axioms of Five-Card Draw. Note that none of them are self-evidently true; they’re just the rules of the game, and they can be changed to make variations on the game.

Deuces Wild

For instance, suppose you add a new axiom to those above:

-The four deuces (twos) are wild cards, which can be used as any card the holder needs to complete a hand (with one exception, which we don’t need to go into here).

This axiom isn’t “true” either, right? It’s just a new rule which makes for a slightly different game.

Everything’s Wild

You can always add to the number of wild cards by changing that first axiom of Deuces Wild. My relatives, after a sufficient number of beers have been consumed, have been known to play Deuces,Fives, and Jacks Wild, which makes, as you might say, a wild game.

But suppose you change that first rule to “All cards are wild cards.”

Presto, the game collapses. Now you are free to declare that all your cards are aces and show a hand of Five of a Kind, Aces, which would be a winning hand - except that everybody ese has the exact same hand.

Not surprisingly, this is an axiom which is never used.

Keeping it interesting

Mathematicians (okay, I lied just a tiny bit), just like poker players, like to work with sets of axioms that define an interesting set of possibilities. Sometimes these axioms appear to be obvious truths, like the rules of Euclidean geometry, which seem to be true statements about the world you can see. But pull back a bit, look at the whole world. It’s a sphere. And suddenly Euclid’s axioms don’t quite work. Your obvious truths… aren’t true any more.

And that’s why axioms are rules of the game, not self-evident truths.

Connie Willis and the art of dialogue

I've got a new post up at madgeniusclub.com about Connie Willis and dialogues with multiple speakers.

Dogsitting

Silly me, I thought when the kids were grown they'd want to drop off their children and take advantage of the free babysitting. Instead, the Organizer considers us incompetent. She has a point; I'm actually too arthritic to keep up with a four-year-old. As for the Fashionista, last night she organized a play date... for their dog and our dog! She had a dinner engagement, their half-grown puppy was antsy after being locked in a crate all day, and our terrier is hysterically happy whenever somebody more interesting than us shows up. Which would be, to him, anything with a pulse. BTW, that's somebody else's PBGV in the picture. Fluffy isn't nearly as well groomed as that. I should take a picture of him when the timing is right... after he has a spa day and before he gets out in the back yard to roll around and renew his dead leaf collection.

Apart from the minor contretemps associated with any babysitting operation, the evening went well. True, Bida spent the first twenty minutes of the play date sitting by the door where she last saw the Fashonista and whining plaintively, but then Fluffy coaxed her into the intoxicating game of "Let me drag you around the floor by the skin of your neck and then we can trade places." Granted, Bida's youthful energy eventually drove Fluffy to seek rest and refuge on the First Reader's lap. (Representations that a thirty-pound terrier with five pounds of hair is not a lap dog have so far failed to convince him.) But the kids had a good time and Fluffy, at least, was too tired to discuss going outside in the middle of the night.

And when the Fashionista came back for Bida, the First Reader made a slightly sick joke about possible injuries, to which she responded, "I'm never letting you babysit my children!

Gloat, chuckle, gloat. She mentioned children.

Promise I'll stop now!

I know I'm spending too much time reading about the Blitz relative to the amount of space it's going to occupy in A Tapestry of Fire, but all the first-person narratives I've found are fascinating, as are the historical overviews that put them in context. How do I know I've been reading too much about the Blitz? Not only do I now have a very black sense of humor, but the other day I was reading a novel set in London in 1940 and as the date of December 29 approached I started talking to the characters, telling them, "For God's sake, stay away from St. Paul's and the financial district tonight!"

Okay, time to pull back and get to work on the sagging middle of the outline again. But first I do want to gloat a bit about the wonderful book I've acquired. It's big, it's heavy, you need a good light and a magnifying glass to make out anything... and it's well worth the trouble. It's a reprint of pre-war large-scale Ordnance Survey maps that were hand-colored to show bomb damage on a scale from Minor Blast Damage (yellow) to Total Destruction (black), and it shows the damage to individual buildings. If I set up at a table with good lighting and a magnifier, I can read an account of the bombing and fires in the Elephant and Castle area on the night of May 10-11 and, as particular landmarks or streets are mentioned, find them on this map with an estimate of the degree of damage.

I like maps.

Business as usual, Mr. Hitler

But first, an announcement: I've been invited to join the bloggers at Mad Genius Club, a blog for writers and especially for indie writers. I'll be posting every other Thursday afternoon. So in future you'll be spared posts about writing techniques; this blog will be reserved for frivolity (and, of course, book announcements) My most recent post is Context and Misdirection, and it's about the song "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry." If you're wondering what the heck that has to do with writing technique, click over and take a look.

Now, about London and Blitz spirit:

Yes, I'm still reading about the Blitz, even though I've really got all the information I need for A Tapestry of Fire. It's a gripping subject. Also, I like first-hand accounts, and there are tons of memoirs available.

I've also come across more distanced views of that period. There are several "debunking" books that claim Londoners weren't as perky as media and contemporary accounts imply. To read some of these books, you'd think that Londoners were about to experience a nervous breakdown en masse during the Blitz.

Poppycock.

In the first place, nobody ever claimed that every single resident of London greeted the bombing with a stiff upper lip and British cheer. Of course there were people who were terrified, miserable, couldn't function due to sleep deprivation, and if you go looking for examples you will find them.

In the second place, the people who lived through the Blitz were somewhat self-selected for iron nerves; those who couldn't take it, and had the option of going somewhere else, skedaddled.

And finally, the most impressive thing about the Blitz is that London still functioned. People sheltered in subway stations or in backyard Anderson shelters or under the stairs, and in the morning they rubbed their eyes and went to work. Plumbers and electricians and carpenters were there for life's little emergencies as well as repairing Blitz damage. Grocers and butchers and dairymen kept people fed. Journalists and secretaries and business owners and shopgirls went to work. Even politicians went to work, which may or may not be a good thing.

And many shopowners whose premises had suffered bomb damage put up cheeky signs and... went to work.

You have to admire the people who adorned their semi-wrecked shops with signs like these:

PLEASE ENTER THROUGH THE DOOR
HITLER CAME THROUGH THE WINDOWS

BUSINESS AS USUAL, MR. HITLER

TRY OUR HIGH EXPLOSIVE HAIRCUTS
THEY’RE A KNOCKOUT

MORE OPEN THAN USUAL

BLACKED OUT EVENINGS? TAKE HOME SOME BOOKS

NO WINDOWS BUT PLENTY OF SPIRIT

SORRY WE’VE GOT NO FRONT DOOR
DON’T KNOCK JUST COME STRAIGHT IN

BOMBED? YES!
BUT YOU SHOULD SEE WHAT THE RAF HAS DONE TO OUR BRANCH IN BERLIN

OUR WINDOW HAS GONE
BUT WE NEVER DID LIKE WINDOW-DRESSING ANYWAY