Book review: Macroscope

SciFi trash by Piers Anthony. I read his OX etc, which I now discover to be 0X etc, many years ago, though I remember little of it except the game-of-life, which helped me fill in several dull hours during my history O-level when I'd run out of history to regurgitate, my memory being poor. Aanyway, I knew the kind of stuff I was getting into and lo and behold, the characters are cardboard as is the geopolitical situation. For unclear reasons he appears to try to rescue astrology, but it a long book and he has lots of things to throw in, some of which I skipped over.

The main "sci" element is the macrons, not to be mistaken for a Gallic leader, no, these are some kind of particles rather like light, in that they travel at the speed of light and allow one to form visual representations; indeed in most repsects they are exactly like light, except they can be "focussed" to arbitrary distance and through solid bodies. Anmd they can also be rx'd (well, obvs) and hence tx'd by aliens as it turns out, thus allowing the cognoscenti access to alien tech, because this is, helpfully, being broadcast.

It turns out - stop me if I've got this wrong, it was all so utterly implausible that I skipped lots of the exposition, plus the expo was done via his characters, who were irritating - that the helpful tech signals are being masked by a "destroyer" signal (which fries your brain), which is itself there to stop people rx'ing the "traveller" signal (which latter somehow allows interstellar flight). After a while they start thinking that the "destroyer" might not be so bad, because the "traveller", by allowing interstellar flight, permits war, and there's some mind-bogglingly crude caricatures of how-to-fight-wars that shows you that war is bad, in case you didn't know. But! Then it turns out that suppressing initiative tends to dullness, so perhaps overall the wars are worth it. So, there's some attempt at "philosophy" in there, and the answer, per Garden of Eden, is that refusing to look at the truth is bad, so at least he gets the right answer, well done.

Book review: Living With Awareness

Living with Awareness is Sangharakshita’s commentary on the Satipatthana Sutta. He outlines the transformative power of mindfulness, linking it to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Sangharakshita offers practical advice for integrating mindfulness into daily life, fostering wisdom, compassion, and peace. The book encourages us to live with presence, deepening understanding of impermanence, and improving relationships, according to Windhorse. At least for contemporary eyes, the commentary is necessary, the original would be incomprehensible; but nonetheless that the commentary is 10-20 times the length of the original leads me to doubt that it is not introducing material of its own.

Before we go on, some preliminary quibbles.

What is the source of truth in Buddhism? For example, in contemporary physics, whilst in practice anyone wishing to study it would read papers, ultimately the source of truth is reality: comparison of theory to experimental results. In mediaeval physics, the source was Authority: generally, whatever fragments of Greek nonsense had come down to them; but we've thrown all that away now. In Christianity, the source is the Word of God, the Bible, as interpreted by the Holy Church, especially if you're Catholic; with God guaranteeing inerrancy. Buddhism has overwhelming respect for Big B, but he isn't a god, and I don't think he is inerrant as a source. Separately, whatever he said (assuming he existed as a historical person) was passed down orally for hundreds of years before being written down; and as the book itself says about 2/3 of the way through, it is likely that what was transmitted was heavily adapted towards being said, and being memorised. So I think that the claim is that, whilst at-origin the product of an enlightened being, it must ultimately stand or fall by rational scrutiny.

An appalling success rate? Nominally, the aim of Buddhism is enlightenment. Nominally, you have been given clear instructions for achieving this (p 229: this is no mere pious exhortation; the Buddha left nothing unclear. The Sutta provides everything we need; we are told exactly what to do, and exactly how to go about doing it). And yet the success rate is waay under 1%. Why? I don't see any sign of soul-searching in the book as to why the instructions are so bad. After all, big B was just some chap, and he had no instructions to follow, yet he made it. I do wonder if there's an analogy with language: I can speak; I could not tell you how to speak. Or easier: I know the rules of English grammar, I could not tell you the rules of English grammar, or how to write down a grammatical sentence. Just because Big B was enlightened, why do we think he was any good at writing down instructions of how-to-be-enlightened?

Buddhism: an individual creed? Again, it can be helpful to compare to Christianity: under which the "aim", so to speak, is to get to heaven; but you do this by... well, opinions vary, let us take a middle ground and say "by being good, by pleasing god", and you do this by (a) believing in him, and (b) loving your neighbour as yourself (hey, whaddayaknow, I got that right: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these). I don't think Buddhism cares about part (a), but I don't think it really has part (b) either; the emphasis is on perfecting yourself. The book in uneasily aware of this; for example from p 220: But the further back you go in the history of the Buddhist tradition, the more significant this attitude seems to be. Buddhism, in other words, was never as individualistic as people sometimes think. It may well have been that the other-regarding aspect of the practice was second nature to the early Buddhists and hence did not receive so full an emphasis in the oral tradition. The Sutta contains only the most perfunctory references to anything beyond one's experience of oneself, the fourfold establishment of mindfulness apparently having come to be regarded as an all-sufficient method. I'm not really buying the "oh yeah everyone knew that so no-one wrote it down" stuff. But also I'm not claiming this is a problem, from certain viewpoints.

Buddhism is suffering-oriented? I have complained before that Buddhist books are prone to start with something like "life is suffering". Our author has heard that too, and does his best to counter it: It is worth giving careful thought to this. Hearing these truths, people often conclude that Buddhism is suffering-oriented, inward-looking, and self-centred, as though the idea was to become immersed in one's own suffering and how to alleviate it. But this is not what the Buddha is saying. Oh good; what is he saying? What is usually translated as 'suffering' is the Pali term dukkha, which points to the fact that conditioned existence, taken as a whole, is unsatisfactory and frustrating. But this does not mean that Buddhists view life as unremittingly painful and unpleasant, which it obviously is not. On the other hand, we can be sure that the Buddha did not choose this example of the workings of conditionality at random. It is salutary to reflect on the inherent unsatisfactoriness of things; like reflecting on the loathsomeness of the body, it is an example of 'bending the bamboo the other way'. We are not being asked to stop finding life agreeable, if that is our experience, but to acknowledge that however agreeable it may be, it is never wholly so. Dukkha is pain and sickness, but it is also lack of complete fulfilment; it is anxiety and loss, bitterness and cynicism... So I think he only gets a half credit: life is not unrelieved suffering, but he cannot help emphasising the loss and bitterness. I think this is an attitude for mediaeval peasants, which on the whole Tibetans were. It doesn't fit the modern world; certainly not my experience of it.

Conditioned existence. I think this term is flung around without being defined; as far as I can tell it means "existence", i.e. life in the real world, as opposed to, errm, the unreal world. The idea is that life must inevitably be unsatisfactory, because we cling to permanence in an ever-changing world. Again as far as I can tell, this is adopted as axiomatic, and never questioned, but I think it should be. I don't think I am clinging to permanence. Nor am I convinced that "ever changing" is really that good a description: the world changes, of course, but quite slowly. Life is wonderful; why would you think otherwise?¹ From the perspective of heightened consciousness, the apparent beauty of the mundane world appears grotesque, says p 69, so why would I want your height?

Modern life is rubbish? From p 220: The Buddha's early followers would not have experienced the alienation from nature that characterizes the lives of so many people today. For them the natural world was ever-present, and the forest glades and parks in which the monks and nuns meditated were highly conducive to the cultivation of enthusiasm and mettä. These days we have to shut ourselves off from the clutter and disharmony of modern urban life, in which the cultivation of positive emotion is continually undermined, and in these circumstances we are likely to find it difficult to contact our feelings in meditation. I'm always doubtful of the happy-peasants-dancing-in-the-fields idealisation of the past.

Aanyway, careful readers will notice that much of that comes from the last 2/3 of the book, and I found that easier to grasp. The earlier stuff I found rather mushy; it washed past my eyes leaving little behind.

What of mindfullness? It appears twice in the summary and is a Key Concept in modern Buddhism. Well, I dunno. It is a concept; one can indeed forget it, and it is good to be reminded (see-also Meetings With Remarkable Men) but I'm doubtful it can support the burden it is given.

Notes

1. That's rather hostage-to-fortune perhaps. But (a) Buddha was the favoured son of a rich family; and (b) you're not telling me this stuff is for the down-hearted only, are you? No: so why is solace-from-pain relevant; there doesn't seem to be an obvious connection between it and enlightenment.

Tidying the shed

Fixing boxes, tidying the shed: retired life is one adventure after another.

My picture shows "before", should you be in any doubt.

When we moved in the shed was there, invitingly empty, and so we threw various things into it, until it became a mess and full, as you'd expect. After which any change became a matter of shuffling round the mess, and various "traditional" gumpf faded into the background at the back and was never seen again.

It is made fairly well, of metal, but doesn't offer much in the way of opportunities for hooks or shelves or the like. Perhaps I should put up some wooden beams to allow this. But for now, since I was in B+Q after wood glue, I bought some el cheapo (£20) plastic shelving, threw things out into the garden, swept up some cobwebs, and re-assembled the mess onto the shelves, in the process throwing out a small amount of junk.

The after picture shows things looking somewhat better; I still need to finish off over on the left side, and decide whether to get another unit, or to put up the fourth metal shelves that didn't go into the basement, or whatever.

Update: I did indeed put in a beam-type thing. Here's the first, on the RHS; I also did one on the left later.

And then, looking at the back left the next day, turning over a pile of curtains and stuff, a cloud of wasps flew out and they weren't happy. But after a bit of fly spray they died down.

Fixing the Primavera box

Years ago - before children, I think, so decades ago - M bought me this lovely box, and we used it for years, and then it got accidentally knocked out of the window and broke; and for some obscure reason I thought I needed to fix it "properly", and so put it away and didn't. And today I ran across it again and thought I might as well fix it as well as I could, and worry about perfection later. 

So having bought some new wood glue, the old having congealed, I rather roughly glued it together, and then though oh I really ought to be clamping it while it dries, by which time it was a bit late but never mind.

And now I have:

It was, per my title, originally from Primavera. The assistant said something about it being made by "England's premiere boxmaker" but that could just have been sales talk.

Book review: Sad Cypress

Another Christie. This time we rise from the lower-class depths of Mrs McGinty with a sigh of relief to a more refined upper-class plane: the inheritance of the estate of Mrs Welman provides the driver for the plot, with to-be-weds Elinor and Roddy going down to see her having received an anonymous letter. We get to see that while the two are nice enough they are useless and aware of it; indeed so is Ma W; as so often, those with wealth have in these books done nothing for it.

If you want the plot, Wiki will tell you, so I won't.

I was all in favour of it-were-Roddy-wot-dun-it; he fits the young-man stereotype, though not obviously the pushy cocky type. His enthusiasm for Mary could easily be faked; with Elinor out of the way the dosh would be his. Instead, and nicely I think because it is good to have minor characters pulled up, it was the nurse wot dun it.

Nit-picks, and so on. I think we could have done with less of Elinor woozing around in a daze half wondering if she really had done it. We know she hasn't, because it would be terribly tedious if she had. Peter Lord's car appears unexplained, unless I skimmed to much at the end; presumably he visited, and presumably he dropped the German matchbox; it was kind of him to provide red herrings for Aunt Agatha. But unless Hercule immeadiately recognised these as red herrings, and I saw no sign of that, he would inevitably have asked the good doctor to account for his time that afternoon, and this he did not do; Ag doesn't make him do this, of course, because she knows it is a red herring; and I suppose I should have taken the hint. Poirot knows that Roddy has been back to England earlier than he said because he burgled his house; but it would be natural to consult the immigration records or whatever to confirm that. The torn-off fragment of (m)orphine label is anomalous. Hercule never considers whether it was accidentally left, or deliberately done as a plant to make the poisonning clear. But it has to be an accident, since it is "the wrong label" (my previous motto of "whenever something is torn off there's always a clue there" is true in this case), in which case it is an unexplained accident. As to the poisoning: we're back at the usual trope of "oh she was killed with poison" ignoring niceties of dose and so on. Had Elinor done it, it would have been natural to ask how she knew what a fatal dose was, but no-one does. As it happens "Hopkins" is medical, so does know. "Hopkins" survives because of the emetic, and this brings in the thornless roses, and so it is all terribly cute, but also rather convoluted; more naturally she would just have put the powder in Mary's cup and poured tea for her, which would have worked just as well.

The biggie, though, is the idea of Mary inheriting, then dying, and passing her property onto her aunt. As someone else pointed out elsewhere, as an illegitimate child this would have been difficult; presumably even harder as aunt-of-child; and anyway the evidence that she was Mrs W's child is slender. Not only that, but "Nurse Hopkins", it emerges at the end, has hopped it from the New World with plod hot on her tail, so how is she proposing to turn up to make the claim? This just doesn't seem well thought through. Incidentally, the letter-to-Mary, which we are told to read as though to the child, is clearly written as though to a third party; I saw that but didn't think it through clearly, I merely though: "oh, our Ag has carelessly written it as though to a third party", but I should have known she isn't careless in that way. Oh, and also, as I read the situation at the end of the book: that plot has come to pass. Mary should have inherited. But no-one mentions this, not even Poirot saying quietly "well we'll just forget that shall we?".

New Laptop

I have a new laptop. Now that I am a gentleman of leisure and unable to sponge off work, I felt the need. The old Lenovo I paid £200 for four years ago when transitioning from Qualcomm to Roku is too small slow and weak. Here we see how gloriously sleek and slender the new one is.

It is a Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16" 3K Touch Screen, 1.66 kg, H12.80 x W355.40 x D252.20mm, Super AMOLED, 2880 x 1800. There are a confusing variety of options; I'm not at all sure I needed the "360" bit, which means it folds back like a tablet, but after looking around I concluded this was about the best I could get without spending ages possibly saving a few hundred pounds. This is from John Lewis: I wandered around there - it was where M got whatevre she has - and it was their only product that at all caught my eye. The screen is lovely and survives well against a bright background. And is also touchscreen, though I don't find myself using that much.

Here's the proof that it has no missing pixels yet. It has a combined power-and-fingerprint-sensor that appears to work. Here's it updating the BIOS to P14RHB.

Book review: Reflections on a Marine Venus

Or, what I did on my holidays, by Laurence Durrell. Sort of. I'm being unkind for effect, which I probably should not be. But quoting Goodreads, In his hugely popular Prospero's Cell, Lawrence Durrell brought Corfu to life, attracting tens of thousands of visitors to the island. With Reflections on a Marine Venus, he turns to Rhodes: ranging over its past and present, touching with wit and insights on the history and myth which the landscape embodies...  which I interpret as the previous book did well, there's clearly a market for this stuff, can you do another island book please?

And so he has dutifully written up his time on Rhodes, post WWII. There's the stuff he actually did, though it seems rather thin for several years worth (perhaps he was busy with his assigned job, and it wasn't quite the holiday I'm claiming), a few stories of excursions, bits of potted history or myth to pad it out, and a culminating peasant festival.

This is from 1953; it may be his second book, and pre-dates the Alexandria Quartet; which, for all my quibbling, I may well now read.

What saves it, of course, is that he is a well-bred cultured chap who writes well. You can take this book anywhere. But, somehow, to me at least, he fails to really convey the joy of the island and instead it is a bit laboured; the effort shows.