Otway Adventures, Complexity, Films

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The past weekend I spent down in the Great Otways National Park. It's the fourth time I have had reason to visit, and each has reminded me that I should have done so more often, given its fairly close proximity to Melbourne. The cool rainforest produces a remarkable density of foilage, with emergent and canopy layers of eucalyptus, beech, and blackwood to the dense ferns and fungi of the forest floor. At dusk one witnesses the play of black wallabies, the grumpy howls of koalas, as a cool mist roll in. There is the rugged coastline of the Great Ocean Road, the 1848 Cape Otway lighthouse, and the very accessible Erskine Falls near Lorne. It is certainly a place where my naturalistic pantheism feels at home. Remarkably, and this will leave me somewhat in awe for a while, little of the journey was of my own making, courtesy of the organisation and company of my special friend lei_loo, whose brother had gifted us the weekend cabin.

I recently 'blogged about the installation process and structure for Eazy-Photoz, "a photometric redshift code designed to produce high-quality redshifts for situations where complete spectroscopic calibration samples are not available". It's a good project, but the authors haven't thought out the software in terms of operating environments. I have also written a piece for The Isocracy Network, A Political Economy for Libertarian Socialism, which I take a difficult elaboration on government and state, public and private, factors of production, class analysis, etc. It is in hindsight that I realised that both were examples of complexity, of attention to detail. The latter concluded with the remark, "a complex truth is preferable to a simple lie", despite the enticements of the former.

Courtesy of a visit to Brendan E., on Australia's tragic excuse for a holiday watched a couple of films last week both in a historical high-fantasy genre; Dracula Untold (2014) and The Great Wall (2016), neither of which were terrible although the "high fantasy" component is a little strong for my tastes in a historical setting. I find myself too influenced by a more graduated disenchantment that suggests a more subtle, "low fantasy" approach for the post-mythic age. Apropos, last night finally watched Sunshine (2007), which really is quite close to being brilliant in terms of characterisation, development, and setting, but marred with a few flaws, or rather questions, that need filling in.