(This will hopefully just be the first in a series of posts under the theme “when reason and tradition conflicts”. If I turn out to have enough material, I may end up moving it to a dedicated blog.)

Dressing up

I hate suits. For the longest while, I could not actually explain why. Then I had my attention called to this silly little piece of writing: Jakkesættets 10 bud

Translated, the title says “The 10 commandments of the suit”. And as stupid as it is, it did help me realise why I do not like suits. The 5th sealed it for me: “Don’t run amok”. It basically says that if you want to stand out, you should only do so with one or two things (colour or pattern of the shirt, tie, etc.). Anything more will apparently make you look silly.

Right.

Now, please go and open up Google image search. Try writing “suit” in the search field. Then try writing “dress”.

Take a moment to glance through the results. Notice the difference? Apparently, we have taken “the 5th commandment of the suit” to heart: The suits are basically all the same, while the dresses are under no such constraints (they contain a rainbow of variation on both their shape, colour and pattern.)

The traditional form of the suit has become so constricted that all those same-shaped jackets are mostly either black, dark blue or grey, the shirts are mostly white, while the ties contain the only marginally interesting variations, and then only in pattern and colours.

Now, I am usually pretty apathetic about my choice of clothing. Most of the time, I run around in a variety of t-shirts and blue jeans. The greatest variation I employ here is in my choice of t-shirt. Because few people really balk at strange colours and designs on a t-shirt. Even so, most of my t-shirts are simply associated with a variety of geeky events that I have attended, and are not really bought as much of a conscious choice.

Many guys I know have a similarly apathetic approach to clothing. It has even become somewhat of a meme: Girls and women are the ones who shop for clothes while boys and men simply do not care. And to a great extent, this actually seems to be true.

Do we ever stop to wonder why this is?

Many seem to be under the impression that this is some sort of fundamental, genetic difference of mentality between the genders. But if we are to believe the current body of research on psychology and neurology, this is an outright falsehood: Going by averages, the genetic mental differences between men and women are actually quite miniscule.

Try to think of it this way instead: You want to give your child some toy vehicles. You even go so far as to tell him that he can have as many as he wants. But then you also point out to him that since every other boy only have toy trucks of certain few shapes and colours, those are really the only acceptable toy vehicles you can get him. He would look silly playing with any other kinds of vehicles.

For how long do you now think he is going to stay interested in toy vehicles?

Is it any wonder that I have grown so supremely uninterested in my choice of clothing?

Casual clothing for men is perhaps a bit more varied than the more formal varieties, but it still has nothing on the variety of shapes and colours usually afforded women. It has even become somewhat acceptable for women to wear what in the past may have been considered an exclusively male style of clothing. The opposite, not so much.

And the blandness and sameness of the suits feel to me like the epitome of everything that is wrong with male clothing today. A suit will say nothing about who I am. It will do nothing but suppress the uniqueness of my character: I become basically a minor variant of every other guy who wears a suit.

Even the male folk costumes I have seen, for all their adherence to gendered templates, do far better on variety than most suits today. At least they tend to be a bit more colourful, and even include at times different types of clothing, like the apron I am wearing in the photo to the right. In fact, seeing the variation in folk costumes is part of what has sparked my newly-found interest in this topic.

Breaking the templates

Take a fews steps back and forget what you “know” about how both male and female clothes are supposed to look. What are the primary purposes of clothes? I would argue for something like the following.

• Covering up the bits of your body that you do not want the general public to see
• Keeping you warm (in cold weather)
• Keeping you cool (in warm weather)
• Keeping you comfortable (in general)
• Expressing yourself

None of these have anything to do even with your physical gender (if we ignore underwear). If I were to prioritise this list for comfort in accordance with summer weather, I might very probably end up with some kind of dress-type clothing.

Note that I have excluded “looking good” from the list. This is because it is such an difficult measure. It is a line of thinking that maybe we should step a bit away from, because it depends on the subjective opinions of all the people around you. I feel like if I step just a bit outside the traditional templates, I will be drawing comments to the effect of “you’re not doing it right”. In truth, I think there is very little beyond clashing colours that you would necessarily be able to agree with most on. And you will probably never be able to satisfy everyone anyway.

I will admit though, that this is the part I am having trouble with myself. As much as I advocate that people think for themselves and go against the flow of culture (especially when they feel it is pushing against them, and the norms do not hold up to scrutiny), I am myself a bit of a pushover. So I am not likely to just go out and blatantly fight cultural norms on this.

What I may choose to do though, is experiment a little with designing, or putting together a set of clothes that would fall squarely outside the usual norms for male clothing, but still not seem too offensively irregular to most people. Maybe the solution is to break both the templates for male and female clothing in the process?

I wonder if this is even possible. At best, it seems a tricky thing to do. But I think I will at least make the attempt. To invigorate my interest in clothing, I will have to somehow rectify the dearth of culturally acceptable choices usually afforded me.

It should be no secret that I watch a fair amount of animé series, that is, japanese cartoon series. The production quality is usually higher than socalled “western” cartoon series, and the themes and stories are often more mature. Still, as with any other medium, there is still an amazing amount of crap going around, and it’s not always easy to sort out the good from the bad.

But I have noticed a common trait of six of the best series I have seen so far: They are all adaptations of novels.

What usually happens around here when a popular novel, or novel series is adapted for the screen, is that the movie industry takes it up and attempts to adapt it into one or more movies. This tends to happen with somewhat mixed results: It is impossible to fit everything of significance into two hours, so either you spend the effort making very long or multiple movies, or you cut out a lot of material.

What seems to happen with screen adaptations of novels in Japan is that they get adapted to an animé series instead, typically of 24-26 27-minute episodes. That’s about 11-12 hours of material. About the same as the Extended Editions of the three Lord of the Rings movies (a treatment that is really pretty rare in movie format).

Novels have space to be more unconstrained and nuanced in the subject matters they treat. And even though a season or two of episodes may still not be enough to adapt everything, it leaves considerably more running time for a proper adaptation of such depth than you could fit into a movie.

Anyway, enough with the explanations. I said six series, but I will do this in two parts. The three series I will briefly treat here are: Legend of Galactic Heroes, Spice & Wolf and Bodacious Space Pirates. All six of the series are very interesting in their own way. One common trait however, is in how the characters, the social and romantic relationships, and the settings are all presented in unusually realistic and down-to-earth ways for a cartoon setting (even in the LoGH and Space Pirates series, where the Earth plays a peripheral role at best).

Legend of Galactic Heroes

Background: The imperialistic Galactic Empire and the democratic Free Planets Alliance are at war, and two brilliant, though very, very different commanders rise through the ranks on either side. A very ambitious Reinhard von Lohengramm (tempered by his friend, Siegfried Kircheis) on the side of the empire, and a somewhat reluctant Yang Wen-li on the side of the alliance (Yang is actually a historian who entered the military as a way of earning his tuition fees).

Saying much more about the story than this is difficult, because there is so much. The series spans over a hundred episodes, and is far more epic than Star Wars ever had any hope of being (hey, the LoGH universe contains not just one, but _two_ Death Star-like fortresses: Iserlohn and Geiersburg. And those are only small playing pieces in the larger scheme: There are intricate games of politics going on within both the empire and the alliance. Every planet and governing entity involved have their own motives, and every person involved on either side of the conflict have their own goals, passions and attachments.

Additionally, while the empire appears to be the main aggressor, there is not always a clear-cut distinction between who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. There are plenty of both evil and sympathetic people on both sides of the conflict, some of who at least try their best to minimise the damage and casualties (which are often counted in the millions), and some of who exacerbate the whole thing. The weapons are powerful and there is no effective shield technology in this series (apart from the liquid metal surfaces of Iserlohn and Geiersburg). When one ship hits another, that other ship will usually die, taking most of its crew with it.

I cannot possibly do all of it justice in just a few paragraphs. But if you like the space opera genre, it is absolutely worth taking a look at LoGH. The age of the series shows in the animation, but with a story like this, that does not really matter.

Spice & Wolf

Background: Kraft Lawrence is a travelling merchant with a horse and cart, travelling from town to town, trying to make a profit trading goods. Holo is a wolf-spirit who, after having looked over a village for a long while as their local harvest-deity, decides to travel a bit and maybe find Yoitsu, her homeland. To the villagers, she has gradually become a myth and a legend mostly played out in their local traditions. They have also introduced new farming methods, basically making her obsolete as a deity improving their harvest. So she exploits a loophole in the deal she made with the village long ago, and in secret hitches a ride on Lawrence’s cart.
After some wrangling, she convinces him that she is not actually a demon, and Lawrence accepts her as a passenger on his travels, if in return she can help him make better trades. These novels are being adapted to graphic novel format as well, one page of which I show here.

One of the most interesting aspects of this series is its setting. If we ignore the occasional supernatural spirit like Holo, this is perhaps one of the most realistic representations of the middle ages that I have seen on screen. It is not historical in the sense that it happens in a real historical context, but it does very heavily emulate what the High Middle Ages may have been like in some of the more pagan regions of Europe at the time, complete with a crusading, witch-hunting church that commands knights and is quite unfriendly to the pagans: From the point of view of the church, to the extent that pagan spirits exist, they can only be demons.
The specific theology of the church is never actually fleshed out, and instead of a cross, the dominating symbol is a line with a half-circle on the middle. It is monotheistic though, and very clearly modelled on the christian church of our own history.
The regions Lawrence usually travels are a mix of church-dominated cities and more remote pagan villages. Thus, Lawrence’s own tack on religion is that he believes that spirits exist, but his thinking has also been influenced somewhat by the church, which is part of what makes him somewhat confused and dubious when he first finds Holo and learns of her nature.

As they travel, they grow more attached to each other, and are caught up in not only purely economic trades, but also schemes of both political and religious nature. The attention to detail is impressive when they discuss specific trades, the finer practicalities of trading in a specific region, or the risks and benefits of dealing with the church and certain trading companies.

Part of my love for this series also comes from the near constant banter between the two main characters whenever they are not caught up in anything important, and their open acknowledgment of the quasi-romance that is going on between them. They meet many interesting characters on their travels. My favorites are those who come into direct conflict with the culture around them: A female shepherd in the employ of the church, in danger of being suspected a witch because she is too good at her job. A female trader who has to pretend to be a guy to be taken seriously as a trader. A female priest (deaconess) of a small church in a pagan village who not only has to wrangle with a neighbouring branch of the organisation to be allowed to take over management of the church from the recently deceased priest, but who also has to deal with a crisis of faith in the face of what appears to be a mountain of evidence that the pagans are actually right. There is certainly a feminist bent to some of these story arcs, though they manage to come across in a more subtle way than you might expect from my descriptions.

Bodacious Space Pirates

And this brings us in a way thematically to Bodacious Space Pirates. As much as I enjoy Legend of Galactic Heroes for its epic story, it is in many ways archaic, and presents a largely patriarchal culture where women are usually presented as the wives or sisters of the more significant male characters. Spice & Wolf is more interesting in this regard, as the author takes its historical setting and uses many of the story arcs to consciously, though subtly, play around with issues of the cultural oppression of women.

Bodacious Space Pirates takes it a step further. Maybe even a little too far. It takes place primarily in the context of a space yacht club and a pirate ship (the Bentenmaru). The yacht club is affiliated with an all-girls school, which is what I meant by taking it a little too far: This kind of segregation is not really conducive to an egalitarian society, and tends to be a part of the problem. I give it a pass on this though, as it feels mostly like a thinly veiled excuse to deliberately flip the usual skewed gender distribution of such series. The result is a series that would actually have trouble passing the reverse Bechdel test, which is a refreshing thing in a media space so inundated with male casts and lead characters. The girls are not there for the gratification of the male viewers either (as will otherwise too often be the case). They are people. They feel like people. Passionate, fun-loving, smart and quirky people with their own personalities and their own desires (I know, what a novelty, right?).

Background: Marika lives on Sea of the Morningstar, the third planet in the Tau Ceti system. She inherits the position of captain of the Bentenmaru from her recently deceased father. Bentenmaru is a pirate ship with a letter of marque, a bureaucratic leftover from a war of independence 100 years ago, where letters of marque were granted to pirates as a way of complementing the undersized independence fleet.

As it turns out, pirates in this day and age spend most of their time putting on shows for cruise ships: They get paid for performing mock plunders of cruise ships for the excitement of the passengers. Their ships are, however, equipped to the teeth with real, live weaponry, and barring any trouble with their insurance company, they will occasionally take on real mercenary jobs.

The yacht club resides over a solar sail ship, the Odette II. Though most of the members are unaware of this, the Odette II is itself a retired pirate ship, retaining a few system optimisations from those days. The yacht club spends most of its time maintaining the ship, and taking it on in-system cruises. There are frequent interactions between the crew of the Bentenmaru and the yacht club. At one point, the yacht club even gets to crew the Bentenmaru for a while (which initially turns out to be a bit of a challenge, with the age of and the number of poorly documented modifications performed on that ship).

While it may be easy to point out at least minor flaws in the space travel and electronic warfare aspects of the series, it actually does a remarkably good job of presenting a believable universe and maintaining an air of hard sci-fi. And while the Bentenmaru can fly pretty freely under its letter of marque, and break the rules to a certain extent, the Odette II is subject to all the civilian flight regulations, and has to file flight plans with the authorities and such.

The electronic warfare aspect of the series is also fascinatingly detailed, and includes talk of transponders, passive and active scanning, and the hacking of enemy ship systems. The hacking aspect is perhaps the more implausible part of this. I have some fundamental gripes with it. But it is again kept sufficiently detailed and internally consistent enough that I can give it a pass, even as a computer science geek: And they do sometimes play around with some interesting and very real concepts, such as the honeytrap, an isolated and monitored faux system, used to deceive and divert potential attackers. At one point, the Odette II keeps up the charade for a while of having been electronically taken over, by catching them in an electronic honeytrap. (Just don’t think too much about the obviously fundamental flaws in system design that allows ships to make takeover bids on each other’s computers like this in the first place!)

I wont talk much about the story-arcs of the show, except to say that this is a show that likes its anti-climaxes. It also bends a few tropes in the process.

Going back to the feminist aspects of the show, this is one of unfortunately still very few series where we actually get to see a non-sexualised and remarkably ordinary representation of a lesbian couple. You wont find out who they are until relatively late in the series, where their relationship suddenly matters briefly for the plot. Knowing this, you may be able to figure it out beforehand. In any case, their identities will certainly come as no surprise when you’ve seen them interacting early on.

And that’s it for the first part of this little trek through animé adaptations of novels. I will write and upload a second part with three more at… some point in the future.

Who might want to read this book?

Though I think most people could probably benefit in some way from reading this book, the exact reason may vary from group to group. And for some, it is going to be a hard sell. Not because it might not be useful or educational, but because it can be quite a provocative read depending on who you are.

First, if you are religious and consider such activities as sex and marriage holy and sacred in some way, then your best reason for reading Sex & God may simply be the challenge and provocation it contains. To you, it may give you one of many different answers to the reversal of Pascal’s Wager: “What if there is no god? What then, is the harm of believing?”. This book relates with eloquence and detail what may be one of the greater harms: The distortion and exploitation of human sexuality. For the same reason, this may be a good read for any non-religious person labouring under the misapprehension that religion is mostly harmless.
But as said, I recognise that this can be a hard sell.
Second, if you are an apostate, someone who like me has reasoned yourself out of religion, then your best reason for reading Sex & God may simply be the information it contains. A very religious upbringing may have left you with a somewhat limited amount of real sex education. This book will give you a better grasp of the nature of human sexuality and show you ways of how to deal more sensibly with some of the implications of this knowledge.
Third, if you have never been religious and maybe consider religious people somewhat stupid, this should at least give you a more nuanced view of what is really going on. Darrel Ray’s approach to religion from the viewpoint of psychology is to consider it a kind of “mind virus”, with adverse effects and propagation mechanisms, the hosts for the most part being victims themselves. In truth, intelligence has little to do with someone’s religiosity. Additionally, being non-religious is no guarantee that you are actually aware of many of the more sex-educational aspects of the book.

General commentary

Sex & God itself can be described as a popular science book with a focus on psychology. According to Ray, while the topic has been dealt with before, for example in feminist literature, it has never been given much of an actual scientific treatment. Sex & God is ostensibly an attempt to rectify this. Having not read any other books on this specific topic, I cannot comment much on that claim. But I will say that Ray does quite well in relating the relevant scientific views on the question and providing interesting references. He speculates at times, and I can point my finger at a couple of speculative inferences that seem unfounded to me, or at least grossly simplified. But to my mind they occur in quite specific and minor peripheral comments, and have little to no impact on the main points of the text.

While the topic is treated with the seriousness it deserves, the book is laced with bits of humour in appropriate places, sometimes apparent in subchapter titles such as “Super Duck’s Inflatable Penis” and “Ms. Wonder Duck Fights Back”. Mostly though, the humour happens at the expense of the religious contradictions and absurdities presented.

Content discussion

I will now discuss some of the main points of the book from my own outlook. Insofar as it is possible to spoil parts of a non-fiction book, that is what I will be doing here. So if you want to read Sex & God without any advance knowledge of the contents, this is where you should stop reading this review. I inevitably end up relating it to parts of my own life, so if you would rather not hear about that either, you may also consider stopping here. I do not personally or intellectually hold those parts of my life as actual secrets, they just never really come up in any discussions. But my outlook is a little unusual I suspect, and therefore perhaps interesting.

The Universe runs in parallel. As hydrogen fuses into helium in the heart of the Sun, the same process happens in about 300 billion other stars in the Milky Way, multiplied by 125 billion galaxies in the universe, each star generating light visible from other star systems. As the Earth hurtles around the Sun it acts in parallel with 7 other planets, all affecting each other through the force of gravity. On Earth, weather patterns move about in parallel, bumping into each other, creating new weather patterns, lightning storms, tornadoes, hurricanes and heat waves. On the ground, 7 billion humans walk around, in parallel, communicating and thus affecting each other. And human communication is no longer restricted entirely by geography and location. Conversations move by electrons in copper cables, by light in optical cables, by radio waves through the air. We have even developed computers that can automate and organise much of this communication for us. Weather stations all over the world read weather patterns which are used as variables in predictive simulations performed by parallel computations on distributed super-computers. The results of those simulations are then made available as weather reports to millions of people around the world, through the use of messaging protocols on a massively parallel communication network. And as you read this text, the data of which has likely passed through that network as a bundle of messages more than once, images from your retinae are interpreted by parts of your brain in parallel with sound, smell, touch and taste.

But this is where it stops. Because while your brain collects and interprets that data in parallel, it compiles it into a hierarchy of patterns which at the top becomes a single pattern of the world, and these patterns are then understood in time-dependent sequences. As many neurologists will tell you, the ability to multitask as a human is an illusion at best. The brain is geared for prediction, and it does this by remembering the world through sequences and recalling stored sequences through pattern recognition. So in this way we are pretty good at understanding causality: Events tend to happen as causes of other events, and we use this to constantly predict what happens next around us. But because we tend to conflate parallel events into sequences we often derive causality where there is none. If we see two events happen after each other we sometimes assume a causality that does not exist: We perform a dance, and it starts to rain. Suddenly we call that dance a “rain dance” and expect rain to come, or at least be more probable when we perform the dance.

So at a very basic level, our intuitive understanding of the world around us is a heavily optimised sequential approximation of a parallel reality. It assumes some connections where there are none, and misses some connections where they do exist. And while it is an approximation that has served us well for most of human history, the progress of science and technology increasingly presents us with questions and problems that require us to understand much better the intricacies and consequences of parallel interaction.

One of the defining characteristics of humans is that we build and use tools to make up for our shortcomings, both physically and intellectually. We cannot chop down trees with our bare hands, and so we invent the axe. We cannot move very fast, and so we invent the bicycle. We cannot see very well, and so we invent glasses and telescopes.

We cannot intuitively understand the universe, and so we invent mathematics. The distances that the brain really understands can be measured in metres. But the distances we can express and perform calculations with in mathematics are literally boundless. Even if we may never completely grasp just how far “10 billion light-years” is, we can still work with such numbers on paper and in simulations. It seems perhaps trite, but it is the difference between believing in dots of light attached to a firmament, and knowing about other stars existing at literally unfathomable distances.

And finally, getting to the point of this introduction: We cannot intuitively understand parallel interactions, and so we invent process calculi.

- Extending Psi-calculi and their Formal Proofs

Urban dictionary: “Bleamer”

I recently came back from Open Source Days 2012 where I had a lightning talk about a current project of mine.
In short: LaTeX Beamer is a great presentation framework. The only real shortcoming of Beamer is that custom animation is not really something LaTeX was built for as a publication tool. But custom animation is something I often wish I could do when I need to explain something that’s a bit convoluted.

Applications like PowerPoint and Keynote are both out for me, for reasons of platform dependence and closedness. I also have a nagging suspicion that neither really offers the kind of animation freedom I sometimes want.

But as an amateur Blender user, I know that Blender has a very powerful animation system. So I set to work writing scripts that would let Blender take over where Beamer starts tripping over its own feet.

Thus Bleamer.

Oh, and before people start taking out the torches and pitchforks, I should point out that when I want to do animation, I’m talking about custom animations intended to explain stuff or make a point. I concur that Obnoxious off-the-shelf transition animations and pointless sliding text are just evil distractions.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to implement standardised transition animations if I feel a bit bored, or have nothing better to do.

Be afraid.

Having said that, here’s the OSD slide presentation which features a copious amount of evil, pointless animations to make the point of total animation freedom. Runs in Chrome or Firefox (and theoretically any other browser supporting WebM). Press space or page down to advance. On a few slides you may have to wait a second or two for the animation to show itself. Also, advancing in the middle of an animation is slightly buggy, so try to let the animations finish before you advance:

Bleamer: Freedom in Presentation

What follows below is an explanation of what I am actually demonstrating. The first code release of Bleamer will happen when I have fixed outstanding issues in the current code and added a Blender GUI code for interaction with the scripts.

Crap! the Blender logo came off.

Title slide: Projection. One of the interesting features is the ability to project any element of your slide onto an object (usually a plane) in Blender, thus making it possible to capture anything on your Beamer slide and move it around.
The slide also demonstrates that should you really need it, you have a physics engine at your disposal (in fact, Blender offers several physics engines).

Wow... Moving right along.

Slide 2: Simple movement.
Adding and moving stuff around is probably the easiest thing you can do. This particular slide took very little time to create.

No! Wait! I just wanted to change this one thing...

Slide 3: 3D objects.
Blender is a 3D modelling suite, which means you have access to 3D modelling… Should you find a need for it.
But remember that the addition of 3D objects to your slide also means you should start taking into account effects such as lighting and shadows. You must also consider the use of orthographic vs. perspective camera view. I may add features to make this more manageable in the context of a slide presentation, but this is not a very high priority.

Wheeeeee!

Slide 4: Projection again.
Again, projecting stuff onto objects and moving them around is one of the easier things you can do. In this case, the task was complicated somewhat by the fact that I am using the physics engine for moving the bullet points around.

F-klubben rules!

Slide 5: 3D without lighting.
3D effects can be useful even without lighting, as is demonstrated here.

Bleamer!

Slide 6: Animated transparency and adding text in Blender.
Sometimes you will want to add text to a slide within Blender, which is also quite easy. It affords more direct control of the text while working with it in Blender. I may make an effort to dig up the most common Beamer fonts and explicitly include them with Bleamer.
Another thing you may notice here is the use of fading effects. This is simply achieved by animating the transparency of the text.

Quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I hope they serve good food.

Slide 7: Objects following paths.
Another potentially useful feature, is the use of modifiers to let objects (text and other stuff) follow and deform along a path.

Must follow the arrows... Must...

Slide 8: More objects (now arrows) following paths.
Which gave me the idea for this slide. There are a number of interesting applications for this kind of animation. So again, I may try to simplify the use of this in the context of Bleamer.

Pythagoras transformed.

Slide 8: Mathtex
Mathtex integration. This is one of the biggies. I have craved the ability to animate mathtex formulae. One of the Bleamer scripts allow the compilation of mathtex formulae directly into Blender, with transparent backgrounds and everything. It’s still not perfect, as every moveable element of a formula still has to be compiled separately. I have an idea of how to fix this, though. And that would truly make the animation of mathtex formulae a breeze.

Run for your life!

Slide 9: Garishly overblown usage of the rigid body physics engine.
Need I say more?

This is what my table currently looks like.

You may notice a prominent accordion… Or, “accordion”.

Yeah, if you look closely, you may notice this is not an “accordion” in the sense that you may be used to. But it is awesome.

Thus, it also comes with interesting output options.

The point of the other stuff on that table is to eventually hook these kinds of chips up to the MIDI output through a synthesiser (blueprints courtesy of the MIDIbox project).

Some of the geeks among you may recognise these as two revisions of the famous (and awesome) sound chip from the Commodore 64 personal computer.

As my theory goes, the eventual action of hooking up the SID chips to the accordion may cause an awesomeness singularity, destroying the universe (which may then be replaced with something even more bizarrely inexplicable).

So it’s lucky that I’m still missing the MIDI cable, isn’t it?

It’s also lucky that I still don’t have a working fume extractor for the soldering iron. And that the tips I ordered for the iron was for the wrong model.

But it will all come together, just you wait. I will succeed eventually. And then the entire universe will be my hostage.

*MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*

First contestant arrives.

Go!

Note how neatly I follow the railroad gates as they go down. But I need to keep the head start I get from the slow acceleration of the train up until the forest.
Update: Forgot to comment on this, but yes, I run a red light in this video. Don’t do this at home, kids! Though in this case, the greatest danger is probably a fine. The railway gates are down, and I highly doubt any car is going to come crashing through.

Where the video ends is approximately where i started having problems with the camera shaking off.

I just scouted the terrain two days ago.

Unfortunately, I can only go as far as Skölsta. There seems to be a path that go further, but it is a very bumpy forest path not really made for bikes. This means I will have to stop at Skölsta. But this still gives me a good 6-7 km stretch. And if I have to keep an average speed of about 30km/h through that terrain, it would probably be good with a break when I reach Skölsta anyway.

Legends of map:
Train: Black
Me: Blue

The most annoying part is marked with red on the map. The red part of the path consists of some kind of clay substance which is very annoying to bike on when it has rained (me and the bike were very dirty after the trip two days ago). And unfortunately it looks like rain on saturday.

So hopefully, I can gain a fair lead on the starting stretch. We shall see.

Otherwise, it looks fair. I have confirmed that I can keep a somewhat consistent speed over 30km/h, at least on plain, straight roads. Which should hopefully put me on par with the steam train. Unfortunately, I will likely be up against Thor. And Thor has airbrakes, which means it may go faster than 30km/h. It would have been nice with Långshyttan (the other locomotive of the same type that I think they use as substitute for Thor), as Långshyttan lack airbrakes, and is therefore restricted to 30km/h.

But I look forward to Saturday. If I can keep up at least some of the way, that will be great. Following the train from the outside seems much more fun than just sitting in one of the carriages.

(Updated to fix name-confusion)

Here’s the deal:

Close to where I live is the end-station of museijärnvägen (“museum-railway”) of Uppland, going by the name of Lennakatten. It runs from there to Marielund, a bit east of Uppsala.

and it looks like it is possible to follow this railway fairly closely on bike, at least up to Skölsta.

From there on, I am not so certain any longer, but I will try to find a good route this week.

What I have not told you yet is this: In the weekends in summer, a regular passenger service is run on this railway. Some of the trains running the stretch are really great-looking Steam trains. The organisation running the service has six of them in reserve.

And I have just decided that I want try to race one of them next Saturday.

I am not sure how fast they go at max speed. Steam trains are not necessarily all that slow, so it is entirely probable that I simply cannot keep up. The biking route is also slightly longer. After coming out of Uppsala for instance, Lennakatten goes straight through the forest, while I have to take a path around it. And after Skölsta, there are probably cycle paths that I can follow, but I will have to check out how they go.

On the other hand, the locomotive will be burdened by 4-5 wagons full of passengers, and it has to stop at stations on the way.

So it may not be completely ridiculous.

But the point is: I intend to find out.

As a little extra information, the Lennakatten railway is actually getting expanded. We just had a new bridge installed not many days ago.

Going once… Going twice… Sold!

Go on, have a look.

Look at the going price. Then look at the item. Then have an extra look at the going price again just to confirm that the buyer is a complete nutter, and should be locked away for the rest of his life.
I’ll tell you a secret: I bid only slightly less than the going price on that one. And whoever overbid me seemed determined, so I let it go.
I have managed to secure two now, though I’d have to cannibalise a working Commodore C64C to get to one of those. This counts as a kind of sacrilege in my book, but I could do it if I really need to.
The 6581s I have are probably good enough for me, though.

“What on earth are you talking about you nutcase? Have you gone completely bonkers? £30 for a stupid, old chip?”

Yes. Well. Except that we are talking about one of the more famous microchips in computing history. Have a listen to this:

This is the theme music from Turbo Outrun. A game released in 1989 for the Commodore 64. The C64 itself was released in 1982. That is the MOS 6581 (SID) chip from a C64 playing that music. As far as I know, no other computer or even game console from the 8-bit era came even close to the sound you could get out of that chip. It still holds a lot of nostalgia to many, and most of all, it doesn’t just sound good compared to anything from that era. No, it still sounds good today.

So even today, people are creating synthesisers based on these chips, and creating music with it. Unfortunately:

1. While the C64 may be the single best selling computer of all time, it went out of production in 1994. The SID went with it, I assume.
2. Anyone with even a glimmer of geek left in them will find it hard to let go of a working C64, or even to cannibalise one for their own use.
3. If you’re not careful, it’s quite easy to burn out a SID.
4. Some people are creating synthesisers built for 8 chips or more. (Greedy bastards! But hopefully they’re doing some amazing stuff with them.)

Putting this all together, you end up with a bit of a shortage of SID chips. Thus the sometimes insane prices. Especially, it seems, for the 8580, as the bugs that were ironed out in it make it better for synth use.
Ironically, as some will recall, the removal of a certain bug in the 8580 revision also broke speech synthesis for many games (Turbo Outrun, for instance) on the C64. The SID was never designed for speech synthesis, but a bug with volume control in the 6581 made it possible. And that was exploited to great effect. A way was found to do it on the 8580 as I recall having read. But for that revision of the chip, speech was at least broken on all games and applications released until then.

Oh well. I should now at least have sufficient spares to build myself a MIDIbox SID for my accordion. The rest of the necessary parts are all standard, currently made electronics.

It’s enough to make me go all giddy inside…