Newest thoughts →

December 2023

Next on the to-read list is Barrett and Barrett on STAR TREK.

Michèle Barrett taught me as an undergraduate at Queen Mary. A great course on Michel Foucault that greatly influenced my future direction.

P 17 - I did not know that Picard's "make it so" was taken from Herman Melville's /WHITE-JACKET/!

P 34 - claims we must appraise Star Trek's colonialist tendencies in "bearing of the scale of the crime" - compared to Conrad

P 38 - Voyager and TNG much more attuned to the materiality of space than DS9

P 40 notes Voyager's uncanny ability to reset the timeline when things go wrong - the big red reset button

P 59 - different audiences in different decades

P 61 - are Species 8472 just "the enemy"?

P 65 - reference to Star Trek's "human exceptionalism" - Lincoln Geraghty's phrase

P 69 - Deep Space Nine shows captains taking the path of expediency, against TNG and VOY's idealism

P 72 - in STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, a Klingon says the concept of *human* rights is "racist".

P 87 - Enterprise has parallels to 24 as Bush-era allegory

P 89 - "Author, Author" in Voyager is a companion piece to TNG's "The Measure of a Man". I'll be exploring its different premise, through copyright (!), in my book.

P 91 - Enterprise refuses asylum to a sex slave

P 99 - Klingon honour is based on family honour

P 104 - Spock: "those who receive the rewards are totally seperated from those who shoulder the burden"

P 105 - Star Trek is deeply humanist

P 109 - cultural values vs biological traits in Star Trek species

P 111 - shapeshifters in Star Trek

P 114 - bisexual subjectivity of symbionts in DS9

P 117 - not clear that all Trek aliens are 'used' as metaphors for non-white people

P 127 - "Faces" has a parallel with "The Enemy Within" in TOS

P 152 - in TOS, Spock says he does not wish to serve under a computer. When, in TNG, Cmdr Hobson says he doesn't wish to serve under Data (also a computer), it comes across as bigoted

P 167 - there's money on DS9

P 183 - DS9 countenances religion and insanity, which other Trek does not

P 200 - DS9 and Voyager share a new, more tolerant perspective on religion

P 202 on shapeshifters and Odo

P 202 - heroic style of formulaic adjectives from the Odyssey

Pp 229-230 - Janeway as postmodern protagonist - rewriting stories on the holodeck on the fly

P 233 - on the sexuality of the Jadzia-Kahn kiss

Pp 254-255 - Voyager is, of course, episodic... But it's also linear, with the journey home progressing

P 260 - Enterprise lacks the postmodern playfulness of the 1990s Voyager

One of the things I find most challenging about kidney failure is the fluid restriction. I *crave* water/juice/anything, but have to severely limit myself as you can't clear it until the next dialysis session and it causes heart failure.

Just in case I die before I get there, the unwritten book that I really want to get to will be called REGISTERS OF KNOWLEDGE and is about how disciplinary thought is reflected in the aesthetics of writing.

Was dead chuffed to be cited in Perry Anderson's latest book. A massive surprise. PA is one of those figures you think would never know of your work. In a different league.

Xmas read #1 is Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works. I'm going in.

OK. Bad start. It's repeated the debunked QWERTY myth of keyboard jamming on just page 7.

I disagree with Chachra's assertion that money is not a technology because it's immaterial but knitting is because it's material. P74. I'd say both are concepts that have material technological instantiations.

P 80 - good citation of Daft Punk.

The really good thing about this book is how it undoes the libertarian fantasy of total self sufficiency. Things like plastics require vast infrastructures of _cooperation_ between peoples with vastly different areas of expertise, such as oil mining, polymer forming, dyeing etc.

P 102 has powerful stuff on non-fungibility - also applicable to much of scholarly communications

Oh yes! P 111 deals with negative externalities, which I've just been writing about in my STAR TREK book.

P 134 has more on centralization if benefits and displacement of harms onto other groups, with infrastructural politics

P 150 on the dangers of Internet-connected infrastructure. I often think this about dialysis machines. The more modern ones have Internet connections but, oh boy!, I do *not* want a device that controls my blood flow connected to the Internet!

P 161 all it takes to bring down infrastructure is "failing to provide the expertise, care, and investment that keeps them running"

P 161 - "Any sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice". See also: the UK NHS.

P 174 - explicitly anti-Ayn Rand sentiment

P 192 - the limits of individual action in response to climate change

Around p 225 - the vision that Chachra paints of a renewable energy future shows just how short of imagination fossil fuel politicians are. They can only imagine a world of scarcity without oil, whereas a world of abundance is still possible.

P 259 - finally said it: for-profit infrastructures are problematic

The word that this text revolves around, but never says, is "socialism". We get "sociality" & the importance of social being for infrastructure is highlighted again & again, but really, at the core of this is that infrastructure is social. "Bunker living" is an impoverished life.

Today I've been writing about the oddness of racism as allegorised by alien species in STAR TREK and how the two paradigms never fully align. Also, lots of behavioural traits in Trek are applied indiscriminately as "racial" characteristics.

An interesting phenomenon: we synchronised start times of Muppet Christmas Carol with some friends last night, within a second or two. They were watching the DVD, we were watching Amazon streaming. They finished several minutes before us. Difference in editions or playback speed?

The narrator of the original A Christmas Carol is really odd. Despite the strong morality of the story s/he gets particularly invested in the narrative when beautiful women are described.

I really love the terrible joke at the end of A Christmas Carol where Dickens writes that Scrooge stuck to the Total Abstinence Principle. That is, he "avoids SPIRITS".

I spent the last day of work before my holiday writing some code in Rust. It was painful but now I'm on a break I feel this odd pull to do some more with it... WHY IS MY BRAIN SO PERVERSE?

Rereading Dickens's _A Christmas Carol_ (clearly plagiarised from The Muppets) and the number of lists in it seems to come from his previous experience writing serials with word counts.

Nightmare evening. We lost Robyn. All the neighbours and the local dog warden mounted a search. Two hours later, we found her and she's back safely inside.

On a dialysis session here and there's a very predictable pattern to it. First 30 mins I'm quite productive... Then this sudden incredible fatigue hits me and I fall asleep for 2.5 hrs. I guess because 1/8th of my blood is in the extra-corporeal circuit, it's akin to blood loss.

I'm working today on a slightly off-the-wall experiment: can we pack the Crossref database into a usable SQLite file? Working on verifying the schema I've designed against the live data. 75 million records checked, 75 million more to go.

Crashed/found a schema bug at 80m records

Frustrating set of hospital results today as my immunoglobulin levels are very low again, meaning highly reduced immune protection. I have to go in for an IV top-up infusion.

Everyone's keen to point out Doctor Who's equality credentials, but I wasn't impressed by the "I've seen you walking" jibe aimed at the wheelchair-using character. Although it was proved false, the assumption remained that if using a wheelchair you shouldn't be able to walk.

This is the kind of Little Britain comedy that leads to real discrimination and persecution.

So much of the recent USS pension dispute problem is captured in this pension company's advert. "Defined benefit" schemes are, in this industry's eyes, a "legacy" product. Their view is that everyone's future should be pegged to the stock market.

Some good news at the hospital yesterday. The fistula (mega vein) in my arm is ready to use and I'll be trained to do so in the new year, meaning I can jettison the tubes in my chest. We're also working towards overnight dialysis now, which has similar outcomes to a transplant.

I'm surprised humanities academic hiring panels haven't yet realised that print on demand has substantially lowered the threshold for a book to appear in print. Expecting future panels to demand a specific print run.

£38k salary threshold for migrants is bonkers. Starting salaries for university lecturers are less.
Nurses. Not saying they should be so low, but this xenophobic move is such self sabotage for the UK.

The best thing about home dialysis is that I haven't had to go into hospital for weeks - it feels like luxury! But the one appointment I do have clashes with our online Xmas party. Doh!

Almost had dialysis disaster this morning. I get up at around 5am every other day to do it before work. This morning, I forgot to connect the arterial pressure sensor for some unknown reason. I also forgot to open the saline clamp, so priming was totally off. Had to start again.

With apologies if you have emailed me this morning and had a bounceback, I am having some technical problems with my domain. This should be resolved later today.