Category Archives: Messaged from the Outhouse

‘The way we die now’: grim but well observed

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Seamus O’Mahony is one of the funniest speakers I have ever had the pleasure to observe. A retired gastroenterologist, he has had decades to observe the human condition and then obviously decided that the way we die today needed a rigorous review.

In this lovely book, he covers the various philosophical approaches to death and dying and has a good go at the excesses of modern oncology, doctors as mere service providers and the various individuals trying to instil some sort of deeper meaning into the process of joining the choir invisible. The book is peppered with anecdotes around deaths where things went horribly wrong due to human idiocy and has a particularly satisfying chapter on doctors dying.

The book is a cracking read: more a litany on what went wrong with death over the last century, but never dull or boring. O’Mahony is a little bit too sorry for the decline of the influence that the (catholic) church held over death, but his ultimate tenet that modern medicine is trying a bit too hard to offer solutions for all aspects of life (and death) sounds healthy.

For myself, it has just hardened my resolve that once the day of a terminal diagnosis pops around, I’ll visit the local tattoo parlour and have ‘Do not resuscitate or you’ll hear from my effing lawyers’ in 48 Lato Bold on my chest.

Fortunately it’s broad enough.

Genovese Sauce

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I recently came across a recipe for a pasta sauce I have never heard of: genovese sauce is made with loads of onions , a cut of beef suitable for slow cooking, carrots, celeriac, white wine and bay leaves. After sauteeing I popped it all into the slow cooker over night, and man, the results were stunning.

I would suggest you try it as well. Bon appetite.

How much laptop can you get for 160 Euros?

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You know the dilemma: you are going on holiday, want to take a laptop to potentially do a little bit of light work or even some browsing, but really worry about what happens when your expensive piece of aluminium from Cupertino is stolen (or, in my case, left on a train), potentially full of sensitive information (though to be fair to Apple, cracking a locked down MacBook is pretty tricky). The alternative is taking something with you that might be less disastrous to loose, so maybe an old machine or, in my case, the cheapest new laptop with a 14 inch screen one can find. Step in a large South East Asian provider of electronic goods and an unnamed seller of reasonably priced laptops. In this case a 14 inch laptop with an alleged Intel N3700, 16MB of RAM and 128MB of SSD for 160 Euro. At this price one has to expect a bit of subterfuge, and indeed the processor was a slightly slower (though newer) X5-E8000 and the RAM turned out to be 8MB, but hey, it arrived on time, had Windows 11 on it and worked. Windows 11 laboured a bit with a 9 year old processor, so Debian 12 came (as ever) to the rescue. LXQt runs smoothly, video/audio playback and streaming works well and all internal hardware instances are supported out of the box (so to speak). Work works (?), as its quick enough to let Firefox run the office applications in the browser (if Libre-Office is not your thing).

So yes, thanks to Linux it’s perfectly doable to use a light, cheap but underpowered laptop for the price of an Apple ac-adapter for work and (a little bit of) play. If it’s sensitive information you’re carrying around, the encrypted home folder will sort that.

Just don’t have ‘user’ / ‘password’ as your login credentials.

a silver laptop with a linux desktop

Classic Disco From Utrecht

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So, I have a soft spot for classic Disco. I know that admission (in the seventies’ US of A) might have me ending on a funeral pyle during a break at a National Football League game, but in 2025, I think it’s safe to admit this. I particularly like the Philadelphia, MFSB inspired sound of percussion, funk and a lush and generous orchestration, with its epitomy Dan Hartmann’s ‘Relight my Fire’. I remain steadfast in my opinion that this is the best example of how to use orchestration to enhance and add some drama to an already existing excellent song (though the Manic Street Preachers came close with ‘Design for Life’ and ‘Everything must go’ in a completely different genre). It’s also one of the best songs of all time, full stop. The Take That version pales in comparison and did the song no favour. I always fancied arranging this song for a live orchestra/band/choir, but unfortunately lacked both the talent and the cash to hire 100 musicians, singers and a recording studio big enough to put them all in.

Well, step up the orchestra and choir of the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and arranger/conductor Chris de Bruin, who delivered this as project towards his graduation. While the arrangement doesn’t have the fluidity and perfection of Hartmann and MFSB (particularly the 11 minute version), the video of de Bruin’s project is just so joyful and catchy, that I haven’t been able to stop watching it. A true gem of the Interwebs.

And while we’re at it: their version of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana (arranged by the amazing Emma Wieriks) is just as good. You can feel the fun the musicians had while making this oozing through your screen and speakers.

Makes me want to throw in my day job and go back to university, studying composition at the HKU. Ironically, we recently visited Utrecht for the first time. What a beautiful place with a great quality of life.

Here’s a playlist from some of this team’s other works. Well worth checking out.

The Interstellar Age

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Since my first encounter with Star Trek in the early seventies, Astronomy, Planetary Science and Astrophysics were all academic careers that I secretly coveted. Wouldn’t it be amazing to slowly but methodically entangle the secrets of the universe with a bunch of like minded people or continuously improve the technology needed to assess the necessary data. In other words, become a boffin.

It unfortunately turned out that I was far too lazy to put the work in to become adequate at either physics or math, so by the time I was ready for university I knew that this was not a realistic career to pursue. Today I know that it that it takes ages to get through grad school, that it is pretty tricky to become a PhD student in the necessary field and that you get paid peanuts as a post-doc (if you can get a job at all). So, probably the right decision to rather watch sci-fi and read about space exploration than actually be involved with it. I rather pay my yearly dues to the Planetary Society, listen to the right podcasts and marvel at the work the boffins crank out.

With the remaining members of Voyager 1&2’s science and engineering team celebrating 40 years since the two probes blasted off, the New York Times featured this event quite prominently in its science section, with a particularly lovely article about the remaining engineers by Kim Tingley. I have been following the fate of the two probes for decades as well (the advent of the internet has helped) and thought recently it would be nice to get a nice roundup of their history, so I bought Jim Bell’s book ‘The Interstellar Age’ . Bell is an accomplished academic and heads his own department at Arizona State University (and is the president of The Planetary Society), so you’d think he’d make a top notch author for a book on the Voyagers.

Well, unfortunately, he isn’t. I have no idea why, but rather than focusing on the scientific wonders and engineering issues that such a project discovers, he uses the book to frame his own personal academic career within the timeline of the two probes. Hell, it takes him 41 pages to begin the actual story. Interspersed with the history and some of the findings of the probes there are semi-funny anecdotes of him being a helpful grad-student, but then he omits the story around Voyager1’s faulty radio receiver before the Jupiter flyby. He also spends far too long on the design of the golden records.

I got increasingly frustrated by this book. While without question a nice chap, I really wasn’t particularly interested in Bell’s career, even if it touched Voyager from time to time. I’ll now have to hunt for somebody else’s account of those two technological marvels.

Recommendations welcome.