Some family history

My funny last name comes from Malta. It is pronounced ‘cow-key’.

Malta is a small group of islands in the middle of the Mediterranean. The best description I’ve heard is the population of Wellington in the area of Stewart Island. Malta has the oldest freestanding buildings in the world and seems to have been an important prehistoric cult centre.

It was first settled in 5200BC and has been colonised many times over the last two and a half thousand years: by the Ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Knights of St John, the French (briefly), and the English. The Turks tried a couple of times, most notably during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. It gained its independence in 1964.

My grandfather Joseph Cauchi was born in Cospicua in 1897, when Cospicua had not yet been swallowed up by a spreading Valletta. He was the oldest of nine children. His father had been the CEO of the Bank of Malta. Most of my great-aunts and great-uncles who didn't emigrate lived in and around Sliema, which is a seaside suburb to the west of Valletta. One great-uncle, Johnny, went to live in Mdina and left his art collection to the nation: it's now open to the public. My dad remembers seeing some of his paintings when he was still alive. The walls of every room of his flat were full of pictures all the way up to the ceiling.

After the war in the late 1940s my grandfather served for a time as CGMO (Chief Government Medical Officer) in Malta. His name is engraved with those of other CGMOs on a marble plaque in the foyer of the Ministry of Health. My great-uncle Johnny qualified as a lawyer but for many years worked as curator of an art gallery – Dad thinks it might have been Malta's national gallery.

If you meet another Cauchi in New Zealand, they will be directly related to me.

Annoying

So there were a few things I couldn't find after moving: raincoat, pins, red oil paint, watercolour paper, and the original first draft of my comic. The missing comic is a little annoying, but at least I stashed scans of it on this blog. The red oil paint was in a box with the other oil paints, and that box was in another box. When I opened them up, everything else was there except the red (very strange). I went and bought some more pins to replace the missing pins, and now the replacements have gone missing as well. If I were paranoid, I'd think someone was deliberately messing with my head.

Oh yeah, I am paranoid, and someone is deliberately messing with my head.

End in sight

The last few weeks have been completely nuts. At the moment, my books and materials are packed in boxes and stacked with the rest of my worldly belongings in the garage. However, the end is in sight. We move in on Friday the 13th.

On alien life

This article explains why the author thinks finding evidence of life on Mars would be a bad thing.

These kind of arguments annoy me because they seem to contain a basic error. Science, like any belief system, is based on faith. In the case of science, it’s faith in the assumptions that underpin the scientific method. One of these assumptions is that the observable universe is solely the product of the operation of natural laws, i.e. that it is pristine and natural.

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it uses this assumption as evidence. However, we have no reason for believing that the assumption is true. We just have to accept it on faith.

Let’s assume that an intelligent technological species evolved somewhere in our galaxy several billion years ago. They built von Neumann machines and sent them off to colonise the galaxy.

If I were designing those machines, I’d give them another purpose on top of replicating themselves. I would programme them to seed life in suitable places – for example, rocky planets at the right distance from their sun to have liquid water on their surface, like our planet. The easiest way of doing this would be to reconfigure the stuff that was already there (basic amino acids etc) and let it develop naturally. If one of those machines rolled up here about 3.8 billion years ago and did this, the end result would be what we have now.

More political compass stuff

Dad writes in the comments to the last post: 'I came out six squares north-east of your position. That's still in the bottom-left square, but nearer the centre. Mind you, the answers I gave weren't always entirely serious.'

Those of us who are in this quadrant are not exactly well served by New Zealand's political parties. This is from the 2005 election:

I suspect that, if there's been any movement by the major parties for this year's election, it will be in a north-easterly direction.

Dead phone

I don't have a phone, TV, or Internet connection at home. Now I don't have any means of contacting the outside world at all. Yesterday, I managed to kill my cellphone by inadvertantly detaching the top half from the bottom half. Given the state of my finances, I'm not likely to get another one soon. It's quite liberating.

Update: Oh well, it didn't last. I have a new phone, but with the same number.

The dog

On the way out to the Pinnacles, I reached back and lowered the electric window in the back seat so the dog could stick her head out it and take in all the exciting new smells. I did this three or four times during the trip.

On the way back, we wound all the windows up and had the air conditioning going (to stop the kamikaze bees). I turned around at one point and was surprised to see the back window open. I didn't open it. I asked Rose. She hadn't opened it. We concluded it had to be a fluke. Surely the dog had trodden on the button by accident.

To test this hypothesis, we wound the window back up. A little later, I turned around again. Sure enough, the window was down. I find it very difficult to credit, but it looks awfully like it was deliberate. It was done twice, and it was the same window that I'd demonstrated how to open both times.