Saturday, 18 November 2017

Technical stuff - well off topic

I'm enjoying getting technical again - looking after websites (including eradicating Flash!), building stuff. I always got promoted / pushed up into management roles so I never fully realised my true geek potential at work.

So I idly downloaded Fing to have a look what's on my network. And that got me thinking. Checking out my second router to ensure I wasn't running two separate 5Ghz wireless access points (I wasn't - had disabled the other), I saw this on the 20005 port on my NetGear router:

"20005/btx xcept4 (interacts with german telekom's cept videotext service)"

Rather weird. But I'm only scanning inside my network, so fairly happy it was nothing to sinister. Turns out it's NetGears "ReadyShare" - an implementation of file sharing over USB for your home network.  It is OK, but it would be a vulnerable point if someone got into my network.  As PC World said:

"The way in which vendors have implemented NetUSB in their products is egregious, Holcomb said. “For instance, hardcoded AES keys, the processing of unvalidated and untrusted data, and kernel integration are all red flags that should have been identified during the early stages of SDLC [software development lifecycle]"

It was worth the effort just to find this wonderful paragraph.

Tuesday, 31 October 2017

Mysteries - Knut Hamsen

Knut Hansen - I have some old PAN copies of his books ever since Doris Lessing said that he may well have made some wrong choices (Nazi sympathiser, gave his Nobel medal to Goering apparently, so a bit more than just a vague fellow traveller), but that didn't detract from his abilities as a writer. Fair enough - I mean I still like P.G.Wodehouse without agreeing or being happy about his Fascist sympathies.  But Mysteries gradually becomes less and less readable as it's fucked up and more and more unpleasant hero indulges in drunken tirades, poisons the object of his love's dog (well it did bite him) and generally behaves in a very unsociable manner.  Also in a less and less readable manner - you get tired of his anti social outbursts, his ravings. You don't get any insight into his inner musings, only a third person narration of what he does and says and dreams. He's compared with Dostoyevsky, but he lacks Dostoyevsky's sense of inner truth and realism, his sense of meaning.

I've been searching for a summary of the book so I don't have to read it all - not that I believe anything much will happen. There is no time to read it, given the mountain of unread books that grows week by week.  I just want a sense of closure!

Friday, 10 February 2017

The Married Man: A Life of D.H.Lawrence

There are, sometimes, som very irritating passages in biography that just call out for, well, calling out.  Those interpretive passages that take off with some kind of (usually) psychoanalytic (but can be political) speculative analysis that can't be proven. Then it's backed up with just a little bit of scientific research that is entirely tangential to the conjecture, but never mind that hey it's science in the same paragraph so it makes my assertion nearby more true!
Here it is - I can't be bother to type it out, I found it quoted somewhere else(Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding
By David Ellis) , by someone who has the same dubious view I have of her psychoanalytic judgement, and snipped it as a .jpg.



Of course it fits in with the zeitgeist about Lawrence (if you can have a zeitgeist  about something, ah well). Lawrence isn't popular or read now - people turn their noses up at him not even because they've read much about him I suspect, but just because they've heard about him. Sons and Lovers, Woman in Love, The Rainbow - still some of the best novels in the English language - what evidence can I give? - give Leavis a chance!

Thursday, 12 January 2017

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.- Thomas Nagel

Such a snappy title - or did I make that lame joke the last time I referred to it? It has this wonderful ring to it though, the "almost certainly"  throwing what we might unfairly call the "Logic of  Dawkins" back in his face. Because, make no doubt about it, this book does tug at all the uneasy feelings you have about "how?" How did it all come about? - yeah, yeah evolution is the best we've got , it does make sense but not all the way. The Theists have their day and then God Squadders wade in with their triumphant right wing nastiness all in the name of the Lord.

Well that was a very uncool rant to begin what was to be my gentle exploration of the the fact that there seems to be good evidence that we are missing out on crucial thinking regarding the development of life and the development of consciousness. I'm reading the book very slowly, underlining things in pencil, making notes like this: " 'the prevailing doctrine' that life has appeared solely by random physical laws cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption". I think I'm getting it, in that I'm understanding that he's not posing any particular solutions, not sticking out for, say, Neutral Monism ( dontcha just love it, tossing these terms around - means you can get it on with the Bhuddists when they talk about the numinous), just saying that reductive materialism is, at bottom, so highly improbable that there must be something else.

I'd always veered towards a kind of sloppy emergence, the idea that as systems get really complex so new emergent things, well, emerge, including consciousness but Nagel does argue very forcefully that that is just not good enough. It's enough to turn you into a dualist and start searching for the ghost in the machine all over again. Because, actually, if there was something out there to be discovered as fundamental as relativity or quantum theory, why not posit it as being all ghost wrapped up entirely with our ordinary world, but undetectable and unprovable.