March 15, 2013
Nostalgia
January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives--a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do--so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if only they could return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one--young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it.
While I was in Philadelphia, in some of the many interstices of displacement that bedevil such a trip, I read Kim Stanley Robinson's short story The Lucky Strike and its companion quasi-fictional essay A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions. I like Robinson's work in general, and the Mars trilogy in particular, but this struck a special chord for some reason. Highly recommended.
Posted by matt at 11:01 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2013
Posterior Distribution
There are few things that can make one feel as thoroughly stupid as Bayesian statistics.
Still, at least I haven't fallen prey to such fuckwittery as molecular dynamics. (Remind me to blog about BPS.)
Posted by matt at 1:26 AM | Comments (0)