The novel seems to have eclipsed other fiction forms in recent times, but there is a still a roll for the short story. I certainly enjoy many short stories, they can distil a story to its central elements more effectively than longer forms. A certain form of short story is the ‘weird’ story, such as those of Franz Kafka or J G Ballard. One I found recently is the ‘imaginary tribe story; try it on:

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2008/08/imaginary-tribe.html

Author’s note: Given my reasonably diverse music tastes I thought it might be interesting to spread the word about interesting music I stumble across. My original thought was to try and embed short clips in the blog page, but in practice clips can often be found on YouTube.

I have used YouTube clips before, for this post on The Gotan Project. Unfortunately one of the links has died but the two video’s there are quite good and representative of the Gotan sound. They have subsequently released a new album; a clip of a song from that album (‘Diferente’) can be found here. (The lesson here is to make sure you give the name of the song in the text in the blog, that way if you do suffer from link rot you can a least go and look for the song again – I will never remember what that last Gotan song was).

Anyway on with this review, which is of Sufjan Stevens.

Sufjan Stevens is modern indie pop musician with a strong folk music influence. You can see it with the focus on acoustic guitar and the extensive use of banjos and other folk instruments.

My first experience of Sufjan Stevens was the album ‘A sun Comes Up’ which can is in iTunes (itunes link to ‘A Sun Comes Up’).

His most famous album is the Illinoise (he has proposed an album for every State of America. So far he has made two). Here is a song off that album. While you listen to the song try to figure out what the subject is about.

It turns out that John Wayne Gacy Jr is quite famous.

The following songs are some of my favourite that I have come across so far, I tend to enjoy his quite songs.

This Dress Looks Nice on You

To Be Alone With You

Concerning the UFO sighting Near Highland

Seven Swans

With the global financial crisis the left blogosphere has been chattering about how this event is a defeat for neoliberalism, and a opportunity for the rise of left policies.

The problem I see is the framing of these new policies of the left.

In a discussion on bloggingheads.tv, the US reporter Christopher Hayes was discussing what he thought were the policies that were opening up for the left, and Eli Lake pointed out that what he was describing was traditional Keynesian and social democratic policies.

It just seems to me to be that an appeal to old 1930′s style policies is not the best way to progress the left agenda. Obviously there are no new policies under the sun, but if the left is to sell its policies isn’t it going to have to repackage and resell them in a modern and relevant form?

It has been pointed out to me that is some way this is what Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ was, and I think that this gives us a good pointer to how the left needs to package and market a market policies.

Robert Farley a while back wrote an interesting article titled “Abolish the Air Force“, making the case that the Air Force as a distinct military structure should be abolished. This is an intriguing idea.

But it raises in my mind a more basic question – why is their an airforce in the first place?

If you think of the history of warfare, there have been two major warfighting services – the Navy and the Army. These have been enduring institutions for centuries.

When new mechanisms for fighting wars were introduced they were integrated into these structures. So for example, when fighting soldiers became an important part of naval strategy, a new force – the marines – was integrated into the navy, and when aircraft carriers became a potent weapon – the fleet air arm – was created, again as part of the navy.

Similarly new land warfighting technology created new forces in the army, Artillery and Armour being prime examples.

When air fighting came of age during World War 1 the air arm were part of the other services, such as the Army Royal Flying Corp, but after the war the UK created a new service the Royal Air Force:

The decision to merge the two units and create an independent air force was a response to the events of World War I, the first war in which air power proved to be decisive. (ref: wikipedia)

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One of the things that has always struck me about religion is the apparent conflict between the enormous powers of the creator and the feeble manifestations of those powers in the real world of people.

This particularly struck me while listening to the Religion Report on ABC, the episode was about Pope Pius XII, the pope during Hitler’s reign. The discussion centred around the relationship of the church and the Pope with the Nazi regime. The conclusion of Dr Paul O’Shea seemed to be that the pope was all too human and that while he generally had good intent, the way that this played out in his public statements and actions lead many to condemn him unjustly for his acquiescence on nazism.

But at the same time the Pope is God’s envoy on earth, a role set down in the bible. He is the Vicar of Christ and his pronouncements on faith and morals are infallible. As wikipedia reports the second Vatican said:

And this is the infallibility which the Roman Pontiff, the head of the college of bishops, enjoys in virtue of his office, when, as the supreme shepherd and teacher of all the faithful, who confirms his brethren in their faith, by a definitive act he proclaims a doctrine of faith or morals. And therefore his definitions, of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church, are justly styled irreformable, since they are pronounced with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, promised to him in blessed Peter, and therefore they need no approval of others, nor do they allow an appeal to any other judgment. For then the Roman Pontiff is not pronouncing judgment as a private person, but as the supreme teacher of the universal Church, in whom the charism of infallibility of the Church itself is individually present, he is expounding or defending a doctrine of Catholic faith.

Am I the only one who finds these two descriptions of the pope to be in conflict?

I was listening to the In Our Times episode on vitalism, and suddenly the story of Frankenstein’s monster make more sense.

If you remember Dr Frankenstein creates a creature by animated a body through the use of electricity.

As outlined in the radio program, vitalism dealt with the ‘spark of life’ the thing that gave a living human life, the thing absent from the dead. As knowledge and science advanced in the 19th century electricity came to be seen as a candidate for this ‘spark of life’. For example one scientist was able to make a dead frog legs twitch by running electricity through them.

Growing up I always saw all these images of “cigar-shaped” rocket ships which I thought kind of quaint because I was used to the “straight as an arrow” Apollo mission rocket ships.

An example is the ship in the Tintin story: “Destination moon”.

Source Wikipedia

But I saw a video of the original Nazi V2 rocket that made me realise where the image came from:

For some reason I was reading about Bruce Lee, the revered Kung Fu master of my childhood. I never realised how athletic he was until I saw this photo:

For some reason I think that people with those giant back muscles (like swimmers) look like bats.

Matthew Yglesias posted on the lack of ‘fighters’ in Star Trek:

The Imperial Star Destroyer of the Star Wars universe is a hybrid battleship/aircraft carrier, capable (according to Wikipedia) of carrying 72 TIE fighters plus auxiliaries, but also capable of fighting it out ship-to-ship.

All of this makes me wonder why the ships in Star Trek are so clearly cruisers and battleships, rather than aircraft carriers. As far as I can tell, no race in the series employs vessels that act as motherships to large numbers of fighters.

Clearly this is a question that calls for a made-up answer. So what I would say is that most likely in the Star Trek universe it’s not technologically feasible to equip a craft smaller than a Defiant-class starship with deflector shields. You could attribute that to the physics of the deflector fields themselves, or the need for a large power supply, or what have you. Either way, the upshot is that piloting a small craft in battle would be tantamount to suicide.

In sympathy with Matt’s call for imaginary answers, I think this issue requires serious consideration. However, i think the real question is why the Imperial Star Destroyers in Stars Wars had fighters at all.

The use of a large mother-ship with smaller fighters attached is an obvious homage to the aircraft carriers of World War Two, particularly the Pacific Theatre of the war where they were a decisive component of the American forces.

These aircraft carriers were a combination of a mother-ship with associated fighters. But it was the nature of the medium that made this work, that is the fighting was occurring a the interface of water and air. It allows the combination of water-based large, heavy, slow ships with air-based light, fast fighters.

You don’t see this occurring in other aspects of earth-side modern (or world war two) warfare. You don’t see tanks mother-ships with little fighter tanks, or long range bombers with little fighters tucked inside them.

This is also relevant the the space medium of the Imperial Star Destroyers. Both the ISD and the fighters travel through the same medium and would seem to be little reason to create separate types of space craft (that is, it is going to be more effective to make big ships – or small – but once you know that your best strategy is to make as many of those as possible).

So the question for Star wars, and Battlestar Galactica, is why have fighters at all?

I was listening to Car Talk and a caller had a problem with a weird noise emanating from the car. The proposed solution was that a door in the air conditioning system was getting stuck and the specific door could be isolated by removing the glove box and listening.

It was the first time I heard that term “glove box” and thought – why is it called that? Is it really because the early drivers of motor vehicles tended to wear gloves when the got out of the car? Maybe early car drivers were predominately opera buffs and attendees of white tie evenings.

Thanks to the wonders of wikipedia we can learn that the origin of the Glove Compartment is in fact a box used to hold gloves, although the answer is more prosaic. The early cars without a hardtop were windy and gloves were necessary to keep out the cold.

I was listening to the podcast of Thinking Allowed from the BBC, where they were discussing the coming financial crisis and the the fact that it appeared as if no economists had predicted it was coming.

One listener wrote an email into the show which was read aloud: “none of the financial types or economists seemed to predict this crisis but sociologists have very good models of how this type of behaviour comes about”. Maybe we should put the sociologists in charge of banking regulation?