For Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun

This painting done by Simeon Solomon in 1866 feautures the tired image of the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, born Varius Avitus Bassianus. He was known for his various sexual pecadillos, sun worship and general ecentricity.

Reading the story of his life, I pity him. He was Emperor for 4 years during a particularly bloodthristy time in the Roman Empire. Economic, political and religious instability seemed to be everywhere, lurking on the German borders, in the heards of the Romans and in the bloody hands of the dastardly Praetorian guard. During his short reign he was ultimately unable to control the army, history, the world, or even himself. It seems to me that as time went on he focused on the one thing he could master - his body.

He was stabbed to death by his own Imperial guard on 11 March 208AD.

Hail Caesar...

The new president, while doing nothing, seems to upset everyone. Many on the left, myself included are stymied at his lack of action and seeming dithering. Everyone on the right, which itself has grown very extreme, hates him fanatically and screams in apocalyptic tones about all the evil he is to unleash on the nation.

This, of course, ignoring the many evils already unleashed by the late Bush II, who has only lately left the throne.

The neutered Senate divides itself into two, one half eternally filibustering the other. In their impotence they put forward weak ideas and strong attacks. They are useless. Among them few have any courage to think, but rather follow and attack like packs of wolves.

I fear we are entering an age of Caesars, though we are in the first few chapters of this new volume of American history...

Soon there may come new crisises, and the Senate and President, unable to disengage themselves from the poisonous game of partisan character assassination, will be unable to provide leadership. When the dollar crashes, or another war is lost, or another attack happens where then will the die fall?

Who can say.

What I can say though is that there is a vacuum of real power. Whenever the next thing happens, and it will happen, there will be no unity and no one with enough support to do anything about it. The result will be chaos, a democratic chaos.

The result of that, my friends, will be a strong man who can make a unified policy. When that happens the death of democracy will not be met with tears, but rather with cheers for the new stability it will bring.

Hail Caesar Agustus....

Windows 7

Today one of the headlines from The Economist is the following...

"An imminent Pakistani offensive in Waziristan, Windows 7 Launched, protests in Bankok.."

It is interesting that now the launch of a product is now History in the grandest sense of the word.

Where does the rabbit-hole of comodification lead?

Rubix Cubes and Jewel Quest 2

Lately two things have been consuming my time. One being a rubix cube at work and the other being Jewel Quest two during the late, borring hours of homelife.

Late last night, while playing Jewel Quest, trying to manipulate the matrix to produce 5 and 6 in a row I came to a realisation that, while obvious to everyone good at math, was totally hidden to me since I am very poor at the mentioned... That realisation was that Jewel Quest is more or less a logarythm which is interactive, and changes in and out random varables whenever you cancel a piece and as a result new jewels come into the top to fill out the matrix.

This was an interesting thing to realise becuase it made me think of all the other potential activities that I may be envolved in that are similarly live performances of a logarythm or at least of an equation where changing variables effect other changing variables.

I´m sure that none of my terminology is right in this respect, but I saw the jewel quest as a changing system that added new complications every time I cancelled or solved, I guess, exisiting factors given to me.

Anyway, the Rubix cube also presented me with an interesting idea. Let it be known again I am no good at math, but have always been interested deeply in physics.

Now, on the cube there are cells which one can switch around to put them in different positions. At first I had difficulty manipulating a block from one place, facing one way, to another facing a different way or in a different area at least. After a while I learnt how to do this, but in learning about it I realised something.

I realised that basically the switching from one side to another is tantamount to changing the dimension that that block is in, if we define the dimension of the block as being it´s relation to all the others and it´s "side". Such a change, from the perspective of the block, would be unexplainable, magical and totally imperceptable as one does it.

I am reminded of the book "flatland" where the author suggests that higher dimensions are simply not visible or understandable to those of lower dimensions. If I were to use my finger to poke into a 2 dimensional universe, the 2 dimensional creaters could only percieve the flat tip of my finger.

This is the matter of the rubix cube. The flat block, no more than the flatlander, would be able to explain the dimensional shift of his position vis a vis his past side or anything else.

In effect, when one is playing with a rubix cube, one is playing the role of a higher dimensional being manipulating a surface or the reality of a lower dimension.

The Greatness of Being Small

I've been listening to a lot of Greek lately, in addition to all my regular current events reading, and one thing that has really impressed me was the ability of the Greeks to do great things given a small amount of resources. I mean really crazily great things, like defeat 100 million Persians with 300 Spartans.

In light of my other readings, about current events, and especially the current battery of failed attempts to reform various aspects of US culture and political economy one thing became clear to me: smallness can be a huge advantage in both adaptability and creativity.

The question has been asked many times before by historians: After seeing how successful the Greeks were with their hoplites and war tactics, why didn't they copy it? Was the Perisan empire not the largest empire then ever seen? Was it not the richest? The largest? etc.

Of course it was, but it's very hugeness became a factor, in my opinion that impeded it's progress. The Persian monarch was in the habit of collecting from the subject peoples around him to form an army, would it not be very difficult to break this tradition and make his own in the Greek school? Arrogance, that of the large toward the small, no doubt also played a factor. Why should the great Persians copy the puny Greeks? We have the empire, after all, not they. Maybe their victory was a mistake. Persia is still #1. So the logic goes.

For the Greek city-states, much like the Italian city states or the modern European Nation-states, none of those excuses holds water though. Each of those small units, without any excuses to fall back on, does it's best to get the best results. If they fail they pay for their failures, historically sometimes pay with their very existence, and then try to make a better solution. The result of this is progress, technological as well as cultural on every front.

Looking at the modern us Healthcare debate through this lens I can't help but laugh a little and remember the Persians. We are the greatest, the biggest, the strongest, why learn from the little guys around us?

(Beware, the above is a dangerous attitude)

The Night Land

The Night Land is a book written by William Hope Hodgeson which is utterly stunning in it's vision, scope and cruelty while at the same time falling prey to an awful writing style and a stilted, farsicle romance.

Written in 1912 the author somehow manages to clearly imagine a sunless, hopeless, chilly future wherein the "final millions" of the Earth crowd tougether in an 8 mile high Pyramid made of metal. Against this great fortress the powers of darkness aways sit, wait, and watch. From the great pryamid at all times the masses of people can eye the watchers, huge motionless Godzilla-like nightmares that at all times are waiting for the forcefield protecting those final millions to fail or falter. All around the pyramid myriad horrors half-manifest in the darkness, threatening dangerous possbilities to this last base of mankind.

This is where the book is at it's most sucessful and why I recommend it for a very slow read. The feeling of a watching breathing doom, which never sleeps or rests but only stares is the jewl of the text. One must wonder as he wrote this if he wasn't thinking of the final conflicts between Germany, England, France and Italy that would ultimately result in 9 million pointless deaths.

The feeling of being balanced perilously in the middle of the dark nothing is well alive in the text. Add to this a great amount of very origional and iteresting ideas (I wouldn't mention everything in a review, should I?) then we have a far-seeing work, if not of prophecy, of real psychological horror.

Of the negative points I will very breifly speak. They are legion. The book is written in a childish attempt at 17th century prose. That is all of the difficulty and none of the depth. The plot itself is pretty simple (the world is more interesting by far than the plot). The love story featured prominently in the work is NAUSEATING becuase it is so saccharine. However, if you can survive all these tortures (I recommend reading slowly and possibly skipping the first non-sequitur of a chapter) then you can read the book.

You don't even have to buy it. Google has it here: http://books.google.cl/books?id=eITGn5W3q5wC&dq=The+night+land&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=es&ei=h7_PSvinI5HO8QaV5tXuAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Happy readings!

Office Life

Hey nobody,

I have started to fall into the rythm of the new life. Now, after 3 weeks in the new company I no longer feel like I have to be careful with every decision (better to not show my incompetence) nor careful with the content of every sentence (better to not alienate the people I will have to work with).

Now more or less the office stasis has won out finnally and I come in every day and do my job without much comment. My job, in case you are interested, is translating factory production demands and questions into Chinese, then getting the answer and putting it back into Spanish. Occasionally, English gets a use here and there, if only becuase I get tired of looking at all the possible characters that I could mean when I type "ji" (the answer is in the hundreds). Those who type Chinese know my pain, those who don't, well, be happy you don't.

The co-workers are more interesting, a bit. At first they were frosty and standoffish like Chileans like to be, after that they become more normal latinos. The workday is crazily long, from 9am to7pm. In reality this means no one (exept me perhaps) actually arrives anywhere near ontime and generally drift out a little after 7.

How does working work when you have such a long day? Well I am writing this blog at work, so that should tell you. Also our rythms have to do with the factories in China, which are on a whole other schedule. . . usually each day we work in two short bursts, right in the morning when it is still possible to get something done in china, then right before we leave when the Chinese are waking up.

As for the personalities of the officemates, I don't know yet. The big boss seems somwhat combustable, but he seems to save it mostly for recalcitrant factory owners. In general the atmosphere is pretty relaxed ... and it has to be. For anyone to maintain stamina over this period of time it's necessary to have rests and bursts of activity.

If I ever get to know any of these people I'll tell my audience of none all about it. Trust me.