Atomic Razor

Giving Things

Me And My Big Mouth: Old Fat Furry Catpuss

Scott Pack is giving away the CD-ROM from Oliver Postgate's autobiography Seeing Things. And this time there are "quite a few" of them rather just the ten books that the Book Depository was giving away, so if you want one drop Scott a line. As I said yesterday, free is always good. The Friday Project is going to be publishing an anthology of stories and pictures from the Smallfilms archive, provisionally entitled The Treasury Of Lost Delights, for Christmas 2008, so that's one for next year's present list.

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That's Just Dandy

The Book Depository - Editor's Corner

The Book Depository is giving away free books!  Well, ten free books to the first ten people to email in and claim one. And as I always say, free is good, but you had better get in there quickly as I have already bagged the copy of Sebastian Horsley's Dandy of the Underworld, which I believe has a blurb from Mitzi Szereto, so it will be interesting to do a Compare & Contrast on the book with her.

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Will the Singularity Be an Anti-Climax?

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Surviving Immortality | PBS

It is probably significant that a mainstream commenter like Cringely is talking about the Singularity in a constructive way. The most interesting point he raises is this one:

"But what I find most fascinating is wondering what will happen between now and the Singularity as we anticipate and prepare for what I am expecting to actually be an anticlimactic event."

Why should it be anticlimatic? It may be the case that we tend not to notice an exponential trend until it is too late, but it's not necessarily anti-climatic when we do notice finally notice it.  And we have to think of the magnitude of the event that the Singularity will be. Was the Second World War an anti-climax? If you were Evelyn Waugh (or Guy Crouchback) perhaps (see Sword of Honour), but for tens - hundreds - of millions of people, it certainly wasn't. Were the dotcom boom or 911 anti-climaxes? For many of us perhaps. Our lives go on much as they did in 1992.  What about a full-scale thermonuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and  the United States. Would that have been anti-climax? It might not have turned out like a Gamma World scenario, but it woukd have left a great many dead. I think it would be pretty much the opposite of an anti-climax.

The Singularity is an event of the magnitude greater than that of a world war. It is very likely that there will many anti-climaxes in the run up to the Singularity, especially for those of us with a cynical and jaded disposition. But the event itself? I don't think that will anti-climax any more than World War Three would have been (and might well be).

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Man on the Border

Man on the Border by Dave Austin published by Robert Hale

It is remarkable that Robert Hale still exist and that they still publish novels of this kind, presumably for the library market. I get warm glow knowing that  this sort of thing still exists. They don't seem to publish sf any more. They were (in)famous for publishing vast quantities of the 1970s. I understand they were very prompt payers.

The building (Clerkenwell House) on the page's watermark is their "own" in Clerkenwell. I recall from the colophon of Hale books of my youth. They are obviously proud of their building. Perhaps it is architectural significant in some way; perhaps it is a major source of revenue (and financial independence) to them through letting out space in the building (a quick Google suggests that there are a number of other (publishing) firms located at Clerkenwell House).

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It Doesn't Do Anything

Consider the use of the Curta calculator in Bill Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Curtas are cool, no doubt about that, and maybe there were genuinely useful in the 1960s, but what do you do with them in the C21st? In the novel they are pure chrome and maybe that is enough. There is lots of cool retrotech out there that you wouldn't use to do anything practical with because the technology was obsoleted decades ago and perhaps we should admire a piece of  retrotech for what it is a wonderful work of art. We don't demand to know what use The fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up is, it just is and that is enough. Somehow that doesn't feel right for the Curtas (because they originally did have a use), but I might just be being a Utilitarian Gradgrind.

They Simply Don't Know What Their Assets are Worth

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

It looks like the global financial system is finally melting down driven partly by the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market and partly by the inability of the market to price to the baroque financial instruments that have emerged over the last few years. The problem is that it is impossible to price even non-baroque financial instruments. Take the most instrument of all - the share of common stock. In order to determine the price of a share to first approximation you divide the Net Present Value of the company by the number of shares. In order to calculate the NPV you need to know the earnings of the company and an appropriate discount rate. The problems are

• for typical discount rates, something like half or more of the NPV of the company comes from earnings beyond the ten year horizon
• do you really have any idea what the earnings of a company are going to be 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now?
• discount rates
• do you know what inflation is going to be 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now?
• do you know what the risk-free rate is going to be 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now?
• what is an appropriate risk premium relative to the risk-free rate to use for the company under consideration?

In the case of shares, lots of people are trying to figure out the value of each share, so might put one's faith in the wisdom of the market (in other words, it's a confidence issue). The fact that share prices of a typical company typically fluctuate about 1% per day suggests to me that the market is not as wise as it thinks (there is a limit to how much the market can/would be allowed to fall by on any given day, so the risk is on the scale of weeks-months-years and over that period the value of shares can vary widely - Ericsson lost 75% of its value in February 2001 and a year later had fallen to 2% of its January 2001 value). For the baroque financial instruments there are fewer people trying to figure out their value and it is not clear even to first approximation how to go about pricing the instruments. Something is only worth what someone will pay for it and we are in the realms of behavioral economics and game theory. This sort of thing didn't really arise in the African savanna. Anyone for poker?

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Three Coincidences (III)

One recent Friday, I went to Tales of the Decongested (as I have done every month since December I was somewhat surprised to realise) at Foyle's. One of the participants had apparently dropped at the last moment so Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone read Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Circular Ruins". The thing is at the moment I am reading the collection Labyrinths (what took me so long?), which contains the story. So I pulled the book out of my bag  and read along with Rebekah (silently I hasten to add). The thing was though that Rebekah read from the version included in the  1998 Collected Fictions. So I took the opportunity to carry out an unexpected compare and contrast exercise on two translations.

The more modern translation probably was more colloquial and fluent. The older one certainly contained a number of words where, I suspect, a literal translation of the Spanish word was used when it would have been better to have substituted a more common word or phrase (lustra, for instance, a useful word, but not one, I am ashamed to say, lacking a classical education, that I was familiar with beforehand). Some sentences were translated identically suggesting that they were literal translations of unambiguous phrases. But in many cases the translations diverged significantly. The divergences were without obvious pattern, sometimes the older translations would be verbose, other times the newer. It is somewhat disturbing to come across a section that in one translations is rendered with a short, plain, simple sentence and in the other by long, detailed, complex phrases. Something something is been lost or added. This is inevitable. As the characters in David Lodge's Small World like to quote Jacques Derrida "Every decoding is another encoding".

Borges was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Unfortunately to appreciate his work fully  is to read it in the original. John Scarne said that Spanish is like canasta, easy to learn, but hard to master and I suspect that Borges didn't write O-level Spanish. So unless we see remarkable advances in intelligence augmentation or I unexpectedly get a job in a Spanish-speaking country, I don't think I will ever read Borges in the original. Which is a pity because I am missing a great deal. The question is whether that matters or not. I might not get as much out of Borges as a native hispanophone, but although it is clear that Borges was a master of the Spanish language, more than most (perhaps more than any other great writer), his significance lies in his ideas and his fictional conceits. James Joyce held that anything could be translated. That might not be exactly true, but it is not just in Borges's case that reading translations is worthwhile. We might only get a shadow of the original, but that shadow is worth studying. Still, my LifePlan50(TM) calls for me to become fluent in another language over the next ten years. I don't know what that language will be, but I know if that I am ever to become the writer of English I want to me, it must be done.

Soon She Will Be Invincible

Last night to the Crockatt and Powell Bookshop in Lower Marsh near Waterloo for the launch party (or possibly pre-launch party or, whichever way, one of the many launch parties) for Marie Phillips's long-awaited Gods Behaving Badly. It was an unusual book launch in that there was no reading, no interview, no speech, but never mind, the wine was far better than normal for this kind of event and I got my book signed, so that's my retirement fund taken care of. The book is very nicely produced illustrated with what to my tutored eye look like woodcut-style illustrations of Greek gods. The book has illustrated end papers. In the very best produced books, the endpapers have different illustrations, but you can't have everything and Marie can always insist on that for her next book - assuming that GBB matches sales expectation and isn't relegated in a couple of months to the 99p table at Bookthrift. I am looking forward to reading the book. No idea when that will be. I have the 800 pound gorilla of Michael  Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union to face first.