They were fucking great writers not artsy types sipping 5 dollar coffees waiting for inspiration.
What does this even mean?
Inspiration comes from real life and any two bit drunk with severe mental issues will see more of it then any wannabe at Starbucks.
Our belief that you have to live hard to be a great artist is a product of Romanticism, with the belief that to be great you have to be doomed like Keats or self-destructive and spurned by society like Byron or Shelley. Then we have the example of Hemingway and his style of living that left a strong mark on generations of writers. But Byron, Keats, and Shelley were great workers who started on their art in their teens, and Shelley and especially Keats were great thinkers on the nature and method of their art. And if you read A Moveable Feast you get the impression that Hemingway's greatness came from meticulousness, obsessive work habits and years of journalistic writing, not from hard drinking and whatever.
The thing is, artists have always learned their craft not by going out and living "real life", but by sitting down, getting an education in their art form, and then working. This is the most obvious in the visual arts. Take Titian, who started a painting apprenticeship when he was 10 or 12 and then spent most of his life as the greatest painter in Venice. Rembrandt started his apprenticeship at 13 or 14, Leonardo Da Vinci started his at 14. Raphael's father was an artist so his whole childhood was an apprenticeship. Skipping ahead, Jacques-Louis David started studying art in his teens, Manet started at 13. J.M.W. Turner started studying art at 11 or 12. Monet started art school at 11. Renoir worked as a boy in a porcelain plant and painted on the pots for a living, then went to art school at 20.
More recently, and in America: Marsden Hartley started at the Cleveland Institute of Art when he was 15. Georgia O'Keefe started studying art at age 10, and then went to college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Stuart Davis's mother was a sculptor and his father was the editor of an art magazine, and he spent his whole life among artists. Willem de Kooning spent 8 years at art school in Rotterdam. Robert Motherwell started art school at 17. Frank Stella went to Phillips Academy and then studied art history at Yale. Cy Twombly started studying art at age 12 and then went to the Black Mountain School to study more. Kenneth Noland went to the Black Mountain School on the GI Bill. Jumping ahead, my favorite contemporary photographer, Jeff Wall, taught art history at a couple of universities for 15 years. My favorite contemporary sculptor (the term works loosely for her), Sarah Sze, went to Yale and then got an MFA in New York. I'd guess that the majority, maybe even the vast majority, of contemporary working visual artists under 40 have some sort of academic training in their art.
You could easily make a similar sort of list for writers, only that (until the rise of the MFA program in the 20th century) their apprenticeships were usually informal and harder to spell out in a Slashdot post. But think of the Bronte sisters, who spent their childhoods writing fantasy stories, and whose real life experience consisted of hanging out in their parents' house and then dying young. Or John Ashbery, by acclimation the greatest living American poet, who came from a wealthy family and went to prep school, studied poetry Harvard, did a Master's at Columbia, and then did things like editing a literary magazine and writing art criticism. And he's been publishing in major journals since he was in high school.
Great artists start early and work hard. That and talent differentiate them from the "wannabe" in Starbucks, not life experience. Or not life experience that isn't a direct result of the artist's focus on her art.
Normal people don't write great works of art.
That's almost a tautology. If a normal person made great art, tha
Neither William Shakespeare nor Agatha Christie are known for their drunken escapades and they're more published than anybody else.
We know so little about Shakespeare's life that we can't say that he wasn't a drunk. There's a strong tradition that he used to hang out with Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern, which doesn't suggest extremes of sobriety. Agatha Christie was famously sober, level-headed, and industrious, but Shakespeare's personal life is a mystery.
The man was not just a writer but the Don of English at Oxford, in other words he was THE authority on how the language worked, its history and how words are used. And in LOTR, it showed, not just in English but in the other languages he invented. The Nobel judges were rank amateur hacks in comparision
I think the original statement that Tolkien "didn't display technical mastery" isn't correct. However, just because he had as much knowledge of the functioning and (especially) history of the English language as anyone on the planet doesn't mean that he was going to be a technically proficient writer. My partner is getting a PhD studying English Renaissance literature and I spend almost all of my time hanging out with literature students and professors. These people know an incredible amount about language, far more than I ever will, and some of them couldn't write their way out of a paper bag (and some of them are brilliant stylists). The writing is always "technically masterful" in the minimal sense that it has proper grammar and so on, but demonstrating an ability to write correctly is much different from true technical mastery. True technical mastery is the ability to deploy the elements of language in ways that are incisive and surprising and exactly correct for whatever purpose the writer has in mind. This requires knowledge, but it also requires talent.
So, in this case, you can't merely appeal to Tolkien as literary authority, you have to give examples in his writing. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. He wasn't a constantly great stylist, but he has moments of real greatness. A simple one is the bit of Rhyme of Lore that Gandalf recites to Pippin:
Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing Sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
(The 2nd, 4th, and 6th lines should be indented, but I can't figure out how to do that.)
This is a very simple little poemlet, and yet it does a good job of evoking the Old and Middle English remnants in our language and literature that Tolkien is always interested in bringing up. It has two fine alliterative lines ("Three times three" and "Seven stars and seven stones"), reminding us of Old and some Middle English poetry. We read the indented line breaks almost like a caesura, making this more of a three line poem with a break in the middle of each long line, the second half of each long line modifying the first half, just like Old and some Middle English verse.
The second and sixth lines are very short and staccato. If we again look at the poem as three double lines, we have pretty staccato first and last lines -- in my reading, 7 of the 8 syllables in the first double line are accented, and 7 of the 11 in the last double line are. There are precious few places for the tongue to rest, to easily tumble into the next syllable. In the middle is a wonderfully flowing double line. "What brought they from the foundered land" is straight iambic tetrameter, a verse form that just hurtles off of the English tongue. "Over the flowing Sea?" is an iambic trimeter (with a trochaic inversion at the beginning). Put the two lines together and you have a line of ballad verse, a "fourteener", which was the great English verse line before they took up the iambic pentameter in the 16th century. The contrast of this flowing central part with the first and last double lines is startling and works to emphasize especially the last double line
Also, and most importantly, the little poem just sounds good.
This is how you argue that Tolkien was a technical master. This is just a tiny little poem, six lines only, but it evokes the whole of English poetry before it fell completely under Frenc
Considering the multi-billion dollar loss WebOS has been so far, merely selling a few more next year at a slightly higher price doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me.
There's a bit of a false assumption here. The money that HP has lost on WebOS is a sunk cost. It's gone and it's not coming back, no matter what happens. HP should be thinking entirely of the future at this point. Can WebOS generate a worthwhile profit from today onward? If so, they should hold on to it, even if it never makes back the initial investment.
People often don't think this way. If I lose a ton of money on an asset I'm likely to get rid of it, even if it stands to be mildly profitable in the future. HP shouldn't be thinking that way. (I should point out that I have no idea if they actuall are or not.)
That said, I'd love an open source WebOS, if only to keep Google honest.
The Alphasmart Neo is almost what you want. It's instant on and rugged, has a nice keyboard and a USB out, and you get hundreds and hundreds of hours of use from three AA batteries. It only has five lines of monochrome on the display, and it has its own locked-in OS, and in the netbook era it's a bit difficult to justify $170 on something so limited. But it's a great machine for cranking out text.
Just go to your nearest Whole Foods (or other real food distributor) and get Grade-B maple syrup. It's not as filtered as the standard Grade-A syrup that most are used to. The flavor is incredible compared to the processed crap that everyone is used to.
FWIW, maple syrup grades are more dependent on when the trees were tapped than on filtering and processing. (Actually, they're most dependent on what state, provincial, or national body is defining the grades, but that's a different story.) Early in the season, trees produce sap that tends to be higher in sugar and water, and lighter in flavor and color. This sap becomes grade A syrup. As the season progresses, the sap tends to become thicker, less sugary, darker, and stronger flavored, eventually becoming grade B and beyond. This varies from season to season and even from tree to tree, but is generally true.
If you're really hardcore about your maple, you can round up some Vermont Grade C syrup, "commercial grade", that's usually used in large-scale baking operations. It's extremely thick and strong -- my wife calls it maple sludge. If you like maple, that's as close to the taste of the tree as you can get without gnawing on some bark.
Actually... libraries are one of the biggest purchases of books in the country. Most libraries have a new acquisitions budget in the hundreds of thousands (millions for the big regional libraries), and there are thousands of libraries across the country. A book that hits #100 on the bestseller list is probably going to be picked up by those thousands of libraries too, so once a book hits a certain critical mass, the publishers have another wave of guaranteed sales.
Yes, exactly. And it's doubly true for academic and some other specialist presses. A large minority, or often a majority, of the copies of most titles published by university and other academic presses are bought by libraries. Publishers can sometimes profit from this by jacking up the prices on books that they know lots of libraries will purchase, because they know that there wouldn't be any sales to individuals anyway, and libraries *have* to buy certain titles no matter what the cost. An example would be the new editions of the Oxford Francis Bacon. These are excellent, scholarly editions that every library that takes the history of science and/or the history of English thought seriously will have to own. They also cost $250+ per volume, for a set that will eventually be something like 15 volumes. If it weren't for libraries, there would be no way that OUP could get away with that kind of pricing. Moreover, most of the endless specialist monographs that academic presses churn out are pretty only sold to libraries. Without those sales, there would be far fewer scholarly monographs published on exotic or esoteric topics. The decline of library budgets over the last couple of decades (and the massive increase in the cost of journal subscriptions) has led to libraries buying far fewer academic titles, which has then led to fewer titles being published by some of the big presses. (Note that this might be a good thing, if it means that academics start getting tenure not for publishing scholarly monographs but for getting material into open, peer-reviewed online archives instead.)
There's more than just academic monographs. Libraries are the main consumers of reference books. Libraries are major purchasers books in translation and of titles from small and specialist presses. Libraries are major purchasers of poetry and drama. Libraries are major purchasers of art books. Libraries buy a huge amount of hardback fiction outside of just the best sellers. And these are pretty much guaranteed sales -- a publisher can estimate that he'll sell X number of copies of a new book to libraries, which gives him a safe minimum from which to start budgeting. Libraries hurt you if you're a bestseller, but they help almost everyone else.
Lest you think I'm anti-science, it was empirical evidence that finally showed the error of such beliefs. I'm just amazed how much people take for granted even in their own area of expertise.
You don't have to go back nearly so far as Browne and Ross to find examples of this. My father got a PhD in physical geography in the mid 1960s, and spent a lot of time working with people in the geology department while doing so. There were several faculty (at a very respected school) who were absolutely convinced that plate tectonics was a ridiculous theory, and who loudly derided it whenever they had the chance. Now no geologist would say the same thing. When the entire Slashdot archive becomes available for neural uplinking, our post-singularity android descendants will chuckle when they read about we idiots who thought such obviously untrue things were true. Science generates provisional knowledge; today's best explanation might be proven entirely false tomorrow.
And since you brought him up, I'd like to throw in a plug for Sir Thomas Browne. Browne was doctor and a semi-amateur natural historian, but also one of the great prose stylists in the history of the English language. He wrote several great and very strange essays ("Hydrotaphia" and "Religio Medici" being the most famous ones, and the "Garden of Cyrus" the most scientific of the ones actually in print today) and was hugely influential on a small but select group of very great writers -- Coleridge, Melville, Poe, Woolf, and Borges. His syntax is even knottier than average for the 17th century, and he writes some of the longest sentences in our language. But once you get used to his style you'll be with a delightful and delightfully strange mind, who gives great insight into (among other things) the workings of a natural philosopher in the 17th century. The era was not nearly as mechanist as 20th century historians retroactively decided that it was, and Browne is an example of that. He also shows, wonderfully, how blurry the line between the amateur and the professional natural philosopher was in the era, and a little of what we've lost because of the (necessary) specialization of the scientist over the last couple of centuries.
There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone.
This, sadly, is not true. A study at the Hardball Times showed that umpires vary by up to about 5% from the league average in terms of the number of strikes they call, which suggests that human umps aren't so good at calling the defined zone. Umpires have idiosyncratic strike zones, based on personal interpretation of the strike zone, and often on what they can see based on where they set up behind the catcher. Some call strike zones wildly different from the rule book one (most famously, Eric Gregg consistently calling strikes on pitches a foot off of the plate in game 7 of the 1997 NLCS). There have always been batters who tried to shrink the strike zone through an exaggerated crouch before the swing. Rickey Henderson might be the best known recent example of this. Catchers have always attempted to "frame" pitches to convince the ump that a borderline pitch was a strike. It's been the traditional belief that this is one of the most important skills a catcher can have, and an outstanding recent study demonstrated that catchers can indeed succeed in this. The study suggests that the best at framing pitches (Jose Molina) saves about 60 runs a year over the worst at it (Jorge Posada or Ryan Doumit). 60 runs in a season is worth about 6 wins, using the standard sabermetric translation of 10 runs of player value equalling 1 win. 6 wins is a massive swing, the equivalent of replacing a player of little better than AAA quality player with an All Star, maybe the 2011 performance of Evan Longoria or Adrian Beltre. Even if you compare Molina not to a bad catcher but to an average one (and thus, theoretically, the correct or at least average strike zone) , you find that he's still winning 3 or 4 extra games by framing pitches, the equivalent of upgrading an average player to Longoria or Beltre. The thing is, Jose Molina pulls it off entirely by tricking the umpire.
Now, framing pitches and fooling umpires has a long history and is very much a part of the fabric of the game. You can argue that it rewards a player like Jose Molina who has a real and now measurable skill, and penalizes players like Doumit and Posada who are poor at this important aspect of their jobs. Thus there isn't any real moral imperative to get rid of human umpires, other than the worst ones. But you can't argue that human umps can't be tricked, and you can't argue that human umps successfully call the subjective strike zone.
Let's picket the picketers. Show up in a group next to WBC and make a march line with signs and just march around their group holding anti WBC signs or something, like lines from the Bible saying how humans shall not judge, only God can, or something.
Picketing isn't right. They're ridiculous, so you should do something equally ridiculous in response. I've long had a desire to start a marimba band to follow the Phelpses around and put on a show whenever they picket something. The band would be half men and half women, two marimba players and four dancers with maracas. Everyone would wear dark pinstriped suits with fedoras, dark glasses, and mustaches (especially the women -- the Phelpses cry out for mustachioed women). I would demand that the band perform in high seriousness, very straight faces, because this is the marimba and the marimba is too damned important to screw around with. I imagine some very elaborate choreography by the dancers, flash stuff that will wow all of the onlookers, really stick in the memory, so that years from now whenever the name "Fred Phelps" comes up people will instantly think, "MARIMBA PARTY!"
Of course, an even better tactic would be to ignore the idiots and throw a marimba party somewhere else.
If someone from CERN offered you the use of some faster-than-light neutrinos in order to send some advice to the 1982 versions of yourselves, what would that advice be?
And as a followup, would the 1982 yous have listened?
If someone from CERN offered you the use of some faster-than-light neutrinos in order to send some advice to the 1982 versions of yourselves, what would that advice be?
You know that this product would sell, because it's the only reason the neo-luddites are afraid of an eBook reader. "But how will anybody know how terribly clever I am by the title of the book I'm staring at and pretending to read?"
It might surprise you, but some of us even read physical books in our homes, without any witnesses.
Physical books don't break as easily as my Sony Reader did. You can flip through a physical book very easily, which you can't do with an ebook (which tend to work better for a straight-ahead, plowing-through reading style). You can annotate a physical book far more fluidly than you can annotate an ebook. I don't have to worry about my physical books becoming unreadable because some device no longer supports whatever format they came in. I can purchase physical books second-hand, and sell them, and loan them to people. I don't have to think about DRM when I buy a physical book. E-Ink is very good, but its contrast and sunlight readability still aren't equal to those of halfway decent paper. The formatting of poetry and plays is usually far better on paper than it is on a 7" e-reader. Then there's the fact that there are vastly more physical books available than there are ebooks. The last time I checked, Amazon had something like 800,000 titles in its Kindle store; the three physical libraries I have cards for (the Chicago Public Library, a large academic library, and an independent archive) have a total of 17.5 million volumes on their shelves. That's not 17.5 million separate titles, but whatever the number of titles is, it's a hell of a lot more than 800,000. (We'll ignore the redundancy in Amazon's store while we're doing this comparison.)
Of course, ebooks and e-readers have their advantages, and will become the dominant form of reading in the near future. But the codex is an awesome technology. Tech doesn't last for 2000 years if it's not really, really good at what it's supposed to do. It will be around for quite a while, maybe not as the go-to format for reading, but as a real alternative. To imagine that ebooks have entirely supplanted physical books and that people only read physical books because they're "hipsters" is at best willful ignorance and at worst a projection of your own insecurities.
Google Books has focused on digitizing academic libraries. I would argue that books found in academic libraries are not necessarily representative of cultural trends across society.
This is just public posturing handwringing over being multicultural "enough". You wanna publicly wring your hands to get "diversity street cred", OK go wring your hands, but you don't need to actually engage the rest of us, you just need to strike the pose.
Speaking as someone who's been working in academic libraries for 18 years -- the original quote isn't handwringing over multiculturalism, it's an accurate description. Academic libraries purchase books that will be of use to academics. There are huge areas that they generally don't collect in. A contemporary academic library will purchase relatively few cookbooks, popular genre novels (romance, mystery, sci fi, etc.), YA books, self-help books, and so on, simply because they don't fit the library's mission. OTOH, an academic library is far more likely than a public library or a brick and mortar bookstore to have books written in foreign languages, books written by or about marginalized groups, and books written by minor or otherwise marginalized authors. An academic library's collection is likely to be more multicultural than that of any other book repository. But it won't have any Harlequins, any recent celebrity biographies, or Personal Finance for Dummies, so it's really hard to say that it represents the broad swath of society's reading practices.
Anyone who remembers the Star Trek: TNG episode "Reunion" (season 4, episode 7) knows that surgically implanted bombs are an actual threat. The old "bomb in the bodyguard's forearm" technique would have worked perfectly for Duras, except that he made two mistakes: he used Romulan technology that was traceable back to him, and he then beat Worf's girlfriend to death. Think of the chilling implications. Worf' s girlfriend is already dead, so the terrorists can't screw up on that count, and they don't even have access to Romulan tech, do they?
National libraries of record already keep copies of everything published. So, for instance, the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bodleian Library keep copies of everything published in English. So we already have a triplicated, geographically diverse, and properly environmentally controlled system, which is going to preserve the books a lot longer than a shipping container on an industrial estate.
FWIW, the Library of Congress doesn't collect everything published in the English, and the British Library and the Bodleian don't either. Those three, plus Harvard, are the biggest four libraries in the world, but there's a lot that they don't ever get, and some that they get but don't keep. Huge amounts of ephemera -- newspapers, pamphlets, zines and small run magazines, things like that -- never make it into *any* library, let alone the LOC, and much that does only does because there is some local library or special subject library that makes it its mission to collect and save as much as it can find in its region/subject area. Huge amounts of self-published work won't ever make it into a library either. I'd guess that half of the original work on Lulu won't ever be collected by anyone, and will simply cease to exist if and when Lulu's servers stop working. The requirement to send a copy of a publication to the LOC (two copies, actually) only exists if one sends something to the U.S. Copyright Office first. If you're doing a small run you'll often not worry about copyright (especially if you're publication is in the public domain, or copylefted, or published on a Creative Commons license, and so on), so you don't have to send anything to the LOC either. In which case, the LOC probably doesn't end up with a copy, and possibly no one else does either.
Then there are a lot of fairly mainstream books from the past that just never made it to a major library for some reason. I work at a large archive that among other things collects American textbooks printed before 1970, focusing heavily on the period 1830-1950. I've cataloged several thousand of them, and generally can't find a record of any library owning maybe 4% of them. I assume that half of these are in a library somewhere, but that library hasn't let WorldCat know about it (which is almost the same as not owning it, but I digress). So the remaining 2% don't seem to be in *any* library *anywhere* -- not the LOC, not Harvard, nowhere. For all I know, when I'm working on one of these things, say some book of rhetoric published in Cleveland in 1880, I'm holding the *only* copy still in existence. My organization is unusual, and this textbook project was begun merely on a whim of one of our staff members. I imagine there are a huge number of similar sorts of works that aren't being collected by anyone, because no project or institution has taken up their cause. Those items are simply winking out of existence as the last copy moulders away in some attic somewhere.
People tend to assume that the LOC and the British Library and other libraries are preserving everything, but they simply aren't. "Everything" has a huge scope, huger than almost anyone realizes. And libraries focus on use and dissemination. Preservation is part of their purpose, but it's definitely below use. Something that's not useful might never get preserved, and something that's useful might get used to death. This is controversial inside and outside of the library world, but it's important for people to understand. Everything isn't stored in triplicate, things are being lost.
Buying Sony digital electronics seems to me like loaning your car to a car thief. Why would you risk losing your library?
The funny thing is that this risk is a reason you *should* buy a Sony Reader instead of a Kindle or a Nook. Sony have been the good guys in the e-reader market. The Reader has been friendly to open formats for a while -- they've supported epub and pdf since 2008 (and txt from the beginning). Sure, you can buy all of your books through the Sony store, in their lrf format, and I guess theoretically they could delete them through some sort of update. But as there's no wireless you'd have to download and install the update yourself, which would stop it going around once word got out that it does something unpleasant. More importantly, there's no need to use the Sony software at all if you're not reading things you buy from the Sony site. I installed their software on my computer just to initialize my Reader, and then uninstalled it. In the 2.5 years since, I've read something like 150 books and magazines on my Reader, not one of which I bought from Sony. They're all either freely available things (that I manage and often format with the excellent open source Calibre software) or things I've bought as epubs from non-Sony sites.
Son'y a massive corporation. I work on the assumption that all massive corporations are evil somewhere at their core. But they also tend to be inchoate masses. The evil settles deeply in some parts, and seems to hang more lightly on others. The division of Sony that manufactures the Reader seems to be the latter.
I am guessing that, if we do create conscious minds in a test tube, those minds will suffer a lot of angst. Maybe even the majority of our thinking processes are moderated by our physical limitations and by our hormones. Could we live in a test tube without going insane?
If we could precisely replicate a human brain and grow it in a jar and didn't somehow give it an artificial world to inhabit -- a robotic body, the Matrix, anything -- it would be profoundly non-functional. Angst wouldn't come into it, insanity wouldn't come into it. It wouldn't become nearly clever enough to go insane. Consider what happens with a so-called "feral" child, usually a kid raised in profound isolation, like being locked in a closet or something. That child at least has sensory inputs, has some control of a body, has experienced eating and breathing, and on and on. And yet even when given good care later in life they very rarely learn to walk correctly, become toilet trained, understand basic human expressions, and so on. They barely function as humans. Now imagine a brain with no sensory inputs at all, maybe at most nervous sensations of whatever growth fluid it is suspended in, along with the occasional jolts of electricity sent by the researchers. Would it even be able to think in a way we'd remotely call human? It would have no purchase on anything with which to build a concept of the world, of anything, even of how to go about the process of thinking. It would be a hunk of meat with a few interesting capabilities.
Everyone on slashdot under 30 is having a crisis right now, having never seen such a thing. Many under 20 have probably never even heard of a record player.. OMFG how does it make sound without electricity?!?!?! Ahhhhhh.
The interesting thing is that this isn't necessarily true. In 2010 sales of vinyl records reached their highest level since 1991, and grew by 14% last year, while overall industry sales were down 13%. You can buy turntables and LPs in youth-focused places like Urban Outfitters, and club and party DJs are far more likely than 6 or 7 years ago to have actual vinyl on their decks rather than just a couple of CD players and a laptop. An American 20-year-old today is, strangely, more likely to own a turntable than is a 35-year-old, who came of age in the 1990s, when LPs were supposed to be a dead form.
And it makes sense, in a way. We're in a post-physical era, in which most people don't see a lot of point to owning your music in a physical format. So owning physical music is a luxury, a quirk, even an affectation. In that case, why not vinyl? It has bigger cover art, more space for liner notes -- if you're going to do something unnecessary like purchase physical music, why not get the package that most highlights the advantages of consuming music in a meatspace package?
In the 1990s there were endless arguments about the "fidelity" of CDs vs. the "warmth" of vinyl. At this point people are so conditioned to listening 192 Kbps mp3s on their crappy iPod earbuds that the sound quality arguments sound quaint, and the advantages of CDs seem a lot less relevant. Vinyl certainly sounds better than an mp3 on an iPod. So why not?
I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.
Change one letter and you get an even worse threat: cats. From the New York Times, quoting the relevant section because of the paywall:
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines.... By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.
So, if you're opposed to solar and wind power because of your concern over birds, you'd better not be someone who lets your cat go outside.
I think that we have to remember the theory behind the OED. The OED is an avowedly *descriptive* dictionary. It's goal is to define words as they are or have been used. It is also massive, and attempts to capture as many words as possible, to be definitive about the language, or at least the British version of it. Browse through the OED and you'll find words that are antiquated slang that haven't been used since the 18th century, things like that. "Leet" or "1337" or whatever would seem to fit in there somewhere. Slang is a part of the language -- it gets used, that's really all that the OED cares about.
If you are looking for a *prescriptive* dictionary that will tell you how language *should* be used... well, you're out of luck. All modern English dictionaries claim to be descriptive. American Heritage has its usage panel, that makes recommendations about certain disputed usages, but the recent slang and the common but incorrect (or "incorrect") usages are still in there.
It's ridiculous to include this as one of the least realistic sci-fi movies. Why, nothing could possibly be more realistic than Keanu Reeves, undergraduate physics genius! Just look at a picture of the guy. He practically drips, you know, quantum stuff!
Remember back to 1996. You'd just seen Sandra Bullock, in another example of incredibly apt casting, play a brilliant computer hacker in The Net. You thought nothing could be more realistic than Sandra saving the world through the timely insertion of a floppy disk. But then you heard Keanu's cry: "CHEAP, EFFICIENT FUEL" -- and you knew you were wrong!
Most of the ideas and knowledge that Europeans got from Muslim lands had originally been developed by non-muslims.
Most knowlege *everywhere* derives strongly from knowledge developed elsewhere. The Medieval Muslims depended on the Ancient Greeks; the Ancient Greeks depended on the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, and Egyptians. There's probably a Homo erectus who was entirely original, and we've been ripping him off ever since.
There's a lot that needs to be cleared up in this subthread:
The "torch of civilization" was indeed carried in large part by Islam for much of the Middle Ages. The intellectual aspect of 12th Century Renaissance was sparked in large part by the discovery of texts in Muslim libraries in Spain and Sicily, libraries that were captured by the Normans in Sicily and the Christian states of the Reconquista in Spain. There were Greek texts, the contributions of Islamic scholars on those texts, and Arabic mathematical and scientific texts. The Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and his followers, which was the dominant mode of thought in the later Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, was Aristotelianism as dervied from and mediated by Ab 'l-Wald Muammad bin Amad bin Rushd, aka Averroes. I must stress that it would be entirely wrong to view Averroes as merely a figure who passed on Aristotle. I mean, in a sense *all* philosophy in the West is, as is often said, a gloss on Plato and Aristotle, who loom over everything else. But Averroes was a major, major figure. More generally, there was a huge amount of translation from Arabic into Latin in the 11th and 12th centuries, lots of other names we could go into. People often don't understand the importance of this, but it was transformative.
The "oppression of Muslim rule" doesn't make sense in terms of the Middle Ages. Everywhere in the world was oppressive by our current standards; some parts of the Muslim world were much less oppressive than anywhere in Europe. I can enumerate the dates of the various expulsions of the Jews from various European countries in the Middle Ages and Renaissance if you'd like, for example. Yes, the Greek scholars who came to Italy in the 15th century were often fleeing the Turks, but it's important to realize that they were fleeing the Ottoman Turks, a specific group who were (and largely still are) the traditional enemy of the Greeks, and not the "oppression of Muslim rule" as a whole.
The collapse of the Byzantine Empire had a significant role in the second phase of the Italian Renaissance, beginning with the various Greek scholars who came to Italy in the 1430s as part of the negotiations over the proposed reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Cardinal Bessarion was the most famous of these scholars, but there are many many more, and they helped bring about things like the reemergence of Platonism, the great advances in philology of people like Lorenzo Valla (which later culminated in the various great Biblical translations of the 16th century), and so forth. Italian art was also heavily influenced by Byzantine models for centuries, and really didn't break away from Greek models until the early 14th century. It's worth noting that these Byzantine models for art were from churches and so forth from parts of Italy that were Byzantine for great chunks of the Medieval period, most notably Ravenna and south Italy.
From elsewhere in the subthread:
The Byzantine Empire in the period after the sack by the Crusaders was never as politically, militarily, etc. strong as it was beforehand, but it did undergo a cultural and intellectual Renaissance of its own in the last century and a half of its existence. This was (ironically) triggered in part by contributions from the Latin West, such as the first translations of people like Thomas Aquinas into Greek. At its collapse the Byzantine Empire was culturally as strong
Thus, in a sly maneuver to make big publishing look like evil bastards (not a difficult task), the authors conveniently and quietly take control of book distribution and remove the freedom of the consumer to control the end product themselves. This is bad. Very bad.
This effect (which is very real) is an effect of ebooks generally and has nothing to do with the question of whether the author or big publishers (or small publishers or whoever) controls the distribution of ebooks. A DRM-laden ebook can't be re-sold no matter what, and that's true if I buy it from Random House or if John Grisham personally emails it to me.
As far as Im concerned, these professors should forward their books to the lit department, have some undergrads edit, and pretty it up. then post it on the schools server.
My partner teaches English literature at a university that is consistently rated as one of the top 10 in the US. From time to time I read bits of the student papers that she brings home to grade, and all I can say is: God help the student trying to learn something from a textbook edited by these undergrads. And they're supposed to be the smart ones! The thought of what the dumb ones would do to a textbook would keep me up at night worrying about the future of my country if this plan were to go into effect.
And then there's the problem of the massive duplication of effort that the proposal would cause. You can't just bang out a textbook over summer break. It takes a lot of thought and work. Having a professor at every college repeat the same effort that some other professor up the road is making seems like a huge waste of time. Maybe create a consortium of universities or something like that -- there are ways to break the publisher model, and someone will start to hit on them soon -- but one textbook per university is a very poor allocation of personnel resources.
Slashdot Mirror
They were fucking great writers not artsy types sipping 5 dollar coffees waiting for inspiration.
What does this even mean?
Inspiration comes from real life and any two bit drunk with severe mental issues will see more of it then any wannabe at Starbucks.
Our belief that you have to live hard to be a great artist is a product of Romanticism, with the belief that to be great you have to be doomed like Keats or self-destructive and spurned by society like Byron or Shelley. Then we have the example of Hemingway and his style of living that left a strong mark on generations of writers. But Byron, Keats, and Shelley were great workers who started on their art in their teens, and Shelley and especially Keats were great thinkers on the nature and method of their art. And if you read A Moveable Feast you get the impression that Hemingway's greatness came from meticulousness, obsessive work habits and years of journalistic writing, not from hard drinking and whatever.
The thing is, artists have always learned their craft not by going out and living "real life", but by sitting down, getting an education in their art form, and then working. This is the most obvious in the visual arts. Take Titian, who started a painting apprenticeship when he was 10 or 12 and then spent most of his life as the greatest painter in Venice. Rembrandt started his apprenticeship at 13 or 14, Leonardo Da Vinci started his at 14. Raphael's father was an artist so his whole childhood was an apprenticeship. Skipping ahead, Jacques-Louis David started studying art in his teens, Manet started at 13. J.M.W. Turner started studying art at 11 or 12. Monet started art school at 11. Renoir worked as a boy in a porcelain plant and painted on the pots for a living, then went to art school at 20.
More recently, and in America: Marsden Hartley started at the Cleveland Institute of Art when he was 15. Georgia O'Keefe started studying art at age 10, and then went to college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Stuart Davis's mother was a sculptor and his father was the editor of an art magazine, and he spent his whole life among artists. Willem de Kooning spent 8 years at art school in Rotterdam. Robert Motherwell started art school at 17. Frank Stella went to Phillips Academy and then studied art history at Yale. Cy Twombly started studying art at age 12 and then went to the Black Mountain School to study more. Kenneth Noland went to the Black Mountain School on the GI Bill. Jumping ahead, my favorite contemporary photographer, Jeff Wall, taught art history at a couple of universities for 15 years. My favorite contemporary sculptor (the term works loosely for her), Sarah Sze, went to Yale and then got an MFA in New York. I'd guess that the majority, maybe even the vast majority, of contemporary working visual artists under 40 have some sort of academic training in their art.
You could easily make a similar sort of list for writers, only that (until the rise of the MFA program in the 20th century) their apprenticeships were usually informal and harder to spell out in a Slashdot post. But think of the Bronte sisters, who spent their childhoods writing fantasy stories, and whose real life experience consisted of hanging out in their parents' house and then dying young. Or John Ashbery, by acclimation the greatest living American poet, who came from a wealthy family and went to prep school, studied poetry Harvard, did a Master's at Columbia, and then did things like editing a literary magazine and writing art criticism. And he's been publishing in major journals since he was in high school. Great artists start early and work hard. That and talent differentiate them from the "wannabe" in Starbucks, not life experience. Or not life experience that isn't a direct result of the artist's focus on her art.
Normal people don't write great works of art.
That's almost a tautology. If a normal person made great art, tha
Neither William Shakespeare nor Agatha Christie are known for their drunken escapades and they're more published than anybody else.
We know so little about Shakespeare's life that we can't say that he wasn't a drunk. There's a strong tradition that he used to hang out with Ben Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern, which doesn't suggest extremes of sobriety. Agatha Christie was famously sober, level-headed, and industrious, but Shakespeare's personal life is a mystery.
DIDNT DISPLAY TECHNICAL MASTERY?????
The man was not just a writer but the Don of English at Oxford, in other words he was THE authority on how the language worked, its history and how words are used. And in LOTR, it showed, not just in English but in the other languages he invented. The Nobel judges were rank amateur hacks in comparision
I think the original statement that Tolkien "didn't display technical mastery" isn't correct. However, just because he had as much knowledge of the functioning and (especially) history of the English language as anyone on the planet doesn't mean that he was going to be a technically proficient writer. My partner is getting a PhD studying English Renaissance literature and I spend almost all of my time hanging out with literature students and professors. These people know an incredible amount about language, far more than I ever will, and some of them couldn't write their way out of a paper bag (and some of them are brilliant stylists). The writing is always "technically masterful" in the minimal sense that it has proper grammar and so on, but demonstrating an ability to write correctly is much different from true technical mastery. True technical mastery is the ability to deploy the elements of language in ways that are incisive and surprising and exactly correct for whatever purpose the writer has in mind. This requires knowledge, but it also requires talent.
So, in this case, you can't merely appeal to Tolkien as literary authority, you have to give examples in his writing. Fortunately, this is trivial to do. He wasn't a constantly great stylist, but he has moments of real greatness. A simple one is the bit of Rhyme of Lore that Gandalf recites to Pippin:
Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing Sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
(The 2nd, 4th, and 6th lines should be indented, but I can't figure out how to do that.)
This is a very simple little poemlet, and yet it does a good job of evoking the Old and Middle English remnants in our language and literature that Tolkien is always interested in bringing up. It has two fine alliterative lines ("Three times three" and "Seven stars and seven stones"), reminding us of Old and some Middle English poetry. We read the indented line breaks almost like a caesura, making this more of a three line poem with a break in the middle of each long line, the second half of each long line modifying the first half, just like Old and some Middle English verse.
The second and sixth lines are very short and staccato. If we again look at the poem as three double lines, we have pretty staccato first and last lines -- in my reading, 7 of the 8 syllables in the first double line are accented, and 7 of the 11 in the last double line are. There are precious few places for the tongue to rest, to easily tumble into the next syllable. In the middle is a wonderfully flowing double line. "What brought they from the foundered land" is straight iambic tetrameter, a verse form that just hurtles off of the English tongue. "Over the flowing Sea?" is an iambic trimeter (with a trochaic inversion at the beginning). Put the two lines together and you have a line of ballad verse, a "fourteener", which was the great English verse line before they took up the iambic pentameter in the 16th century. The contrast of this flowing central part with the first and last double lines is startling and works to emphasize especially the last double line
Also, and most importantly, the little poem just sounds good.
This is how you argue that Tolkien was a technical master. This is just a tiny little poem, six lines only, but it evokes the whole of English poetry before it fell completely under Frenc
Considering the multi-billion dollar loss WebOS has been so far, merely selling a few more next year at a slightly higher price doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me.
There's a bit of a false assumption here. The money that HP has lost on WebOS is a sunk cost. It's gone and it's not coming back, no matter what happens. HP should be thinking entirely of the future at this point. Can WebOS generate a worthwhile profit from today onward? If so, they should hold on to it, even if it never makes back the initial investment.
People often don't think this way. If I lose a ton of money on an asset I'm likely to get rid of it, even if it stands to be mildly profitable in the future. HP shouldn't be thinking that way. (I should point out that I have no idea if they actuall are or not.)
That said, I'd love an open source WebOS, if only to keep Google honest.
The Alphasmart Neo is almost what you want. It's instant on and rugged, has a nice keyboard and a USB out, and you get hundreds and hundreds of hours of use from three AA batteries. It only has five lines of monochrome on the display, and it has its own locked-in OS, and in the netbook era it's a bit difficult to justify $170 on something so limited. But it's a great machine for cranking out text.
Just go to your nearest Whole Foods (or other real food distributor) and get Grade-B maple syrup. It's not as filtered as the standard Grade-A syrup that most are used to. The flavor is incredible compared to the processed crap that everyone is used to.
FWIW, maple syrup grades are more dependent on when the trees were tapped than on filtering and processing. (Actually, they're most dependent on what state, provincial, or national body is defining the grades, but that's a different story.) Early in the season, trees produce sap that tends to be higher in sugar and water, and lighter in flavor and color. This sap becomes grade A syrup. As the season progresses, the sap tends to become thicker, less sugary, darker, and stronger flavored, eventually becoming grade B and beyond. This varies from season to season and even from tree to tree, but is generally true.
If you're really hardcore about your maple, you can round up some Vermont Grade C syrup, "commercial grade", that's usually used in large-scale baking operations. It's extremely thick and strong -- my wife calls it maple sludge. If you like maple, that's as close to the taste of the tree as you can get without gnawing on some bark.
Actually... libraries are one of the biggest purchases of books in the country. Most libraries have a new acquisitions budget in the hundreds of thousands (millions for the big regional libraries), and there are thousands of libraries across the country. A book that hits #100 on the bestseller list is probably going to be picked up by those thousands of libraries too, so once a book hits a certain critical mass, the publishers have another wave of guaranteed sales.
Yes, exactly. And it's doubly true for academic and some other specialist presses. A large minority, or often a majority, of the copies of most titles published by university and other academic presses are bought by libraries. Publishers can sometimes profit from this by jacking up the prices on books that they know lots of libraries will purchase, because they know that there wouldn't be any sales to individuals anyway, and libraries *have* to buy certain titles no matter what the cost. An example would be the new editions of the Oxford Francis Bacon. These are excellent, scholarly editions that every library that takes the history of science and/or the history of English thought seriously will have to own. They also cost $250+ per volume, for a set that will eventually be something like 15 volumes. If it weren't for libraries, there would be no way that OUP could get away with that kind of pricing. Moreover, most of the endless specialist monographs that academic presses churn out are pretty only sold to libraries. Without those sales, there would be far fewer scholarly monographs published on exotic or esoteric topics. The decline of library budgets over the last couple of decades (and the massive increase in the cost of journal subscriptions) has led to libraries buying far fewer academic titles, which has then led to fewer titles being published by some of the big presses. (Note that this might be a good thing, if it means that academics start getting tenure not for publishing scholarly monographs but for getting material into open, peer-reviewed online archives instead.)
There's more than just academic monographs. Libraries are the main consumers of reference books. Libraries are major purchasers books in translation and of titles from small and specialist presses. Libraries are major purchasers of poetry and drama. Libraries are major purchasers of art books. Libraries buy a huge amount of hardback fiction outside of just the best sellers. And these are pretty much guaranteed sales -- a publisher can estimate that he'll sell X number of copies of a new book to libraries, which gives him a safe minimum from which to start budgeting. Libraries hurt you if you're a bestseller, but they help almost everyone else.
Lest you think I'm anti-science, it was empirical evidence that finally showed the error of such beliefs. I'm just amazed how much people take for granted even in their own area of expertise.
You don't have to go back nearly so far as Browne and Ross to find examples of this. My father got a PhD in physical geography in the mid 1960s, and spent a lot of time working with people in the geology department while doing so. There were several faculty (at a very respected school) who were absolutely convinced that plate tectonics was a ridiculous theory, and who loudly derided it whenever they had the chance. Now no geologist would say the same thing. When the entire Slashdot archive becomes available for neural uplinking, our post-singularity android descendants will chuckle when they read about we idiots who thought such obviously untrue things were true. Science generates provisional knowledge; today's best explanation might be proven entirely false tomorrow.
And since you brought him up, I'd like to throw in a plug for Sir Thomas Browne. Browne was doctor and a semi-amateur natural historian, but also one of the great prose stylists in the history of the English language. He wrote several great and very strange essays ("Hydrotaphia" and "Religio Medici" being the most famous ones, and the "Garden of Cyrus" the most scientific of the ones actually in print today) and was hugely influential on a small but select group of very great writers -- Coleridge, Melville, Poe, Woolf, and Borges. His syntax is even knottier than average for the 17th century, and he writes some of the longest sentences in our language. But once you get used to his style you'll be with a delightful and delightfully strange mind, who gives great insight into (among other things) the workings of a natural philosopher in the 17th century. The era was not nearly as mechanist as 20th century historians retroactively decided that it was, and Browne is an example of that. He also shows, wonderfully, how blurry the line between the amateur and the professional natural philosopher was in the era, and a little of what we've lost because of the (necessary) specialization of the scientist over the last couple of centuries.
There's no way to trick the umpire into giving you a smaller or undefined strike zone.
This, sadly, is not true. A study at the Hardball Times showed that umpires vary by up to about 5% from the league average in terms of the number of strikes they call, which suggests that human umps aren't so good at calling the defined zone. Umpires have idiosyncratic strike zones, based on personal interpretation of the strike zone, and often on what they can see based on where they set up behind the catcher. Some call strike zones wildly different from the rule book one (most famously, Eric Gregg consistently calling strikes on pitches a foot off of the plate in game 7 of the 1997 NLCS). There have always been batters who tried to shrink the strike zone through an exaggerated crouch before the swing. Rickey Henderson might be the best known recent example of this. Catchers have always attempted to "frame" pitches to convince the ump that a borderline pitch was a strike. It's been the traditional belief that this is one of the most important skills a catcher can have, and an outstanding recent study demonstrated that catchers can indeed succeed in this. The study suggests that the best at framing pitches (Jose Molina) saves about 60 runs a year over the worst at it (Jorge Posada or Ryan Doumit). 60 runs in a season is worth about 6 wins, using the standard sabermetric translation of 10 runs of player value equalling 1 win. 6 wins is a massive swing, the equivalent of replacing a player of little better than AAA quality player with an All Star, maybe the 2011 performance of Evan Longoria or Adrian Beltre. Even if you compare Molina not to a bad catcher but to an average one (and thus, theoretically, the correct or at least average strike zone) , you find that he's still winning 3 or 4 extra games by framing pitches, the equivalent of upgrading an average player to Longoria or Beltre. The thing is, Jose Molina pulls it off entirely by tricking the umpire.
Now, framing pitches and fooling umpires has a long history and is very much a part of the fabric of the game. You can argue that it rewards a player like Jose Molina who has a real and now measurable skill, and penalizes players like Doumit and Posada who are poor at this important aspect of their jobs. Thus there isn't any real moral imperative to get rid of human umpires, other than the worst ones. But you can't argue that human umps can't be tricked, and you can't argue that human umps successfully call the subjective strike zone.
Let's picket the picketers. Show up in a group next to WBC and make a march line with signs and just march around their group holding anti WBC signs or something, like lines from the Bible saying how humans shall not judge, only God can, or something.
Picketing isn't right. They're ridiculous, so you should do something equally ridiculous in response. I've long had a desire to start a marimba band to follow the Phelpses around and put on a show whenever they picket something. The band would be half men and half women, two marimba players and four dancers with maracas. Everyone would wear dark pinstriped suits with fedoras, dark glasses, and mustaches (especially the women -- the Phelpses cry out for mustachioed women). I would demand that the band perform in high seriousness, very straight faces, because this is the marimba and the marimba is too damned important to screw around with. I imagine some very elaborate choreography by the dancers, flash stuff that will wow all of the onlookers, really stick in the memory, so that years from now whenever the name "Fred Phelps" comes up people will instantly think, "MARIMBA PARTY!"
Of course, an even better tactic would be to ignore the idiots and throw a marimba party somewhere else.
If someone from CERN offered you the use of some faster-than-light neutrinos in order to send some advice to the 1982 versions of yourselves, what would that advice be?
And as a followup, would the 1982 yous have listened?
If someone from CERN offered you the use of some faster-than-light neutrinos in order to send some advice to the 1982 versions of yourselves, what would that advice be?
You know that this product would sell, because it's the only reason the neo-luddites are afraid of an eBook reader. "But how will anybody know how terribly clever I am by the title of the book I'm staring at and pretending to read?"
It might surprise you, but some of us even read physical books in our homes, without any witnesses.
Physical books don't break as easily as my Sony Reader did. You can flip through a physical book very easily, which you can't do with an ebook (which tend to work better for a straight-ahead, plowing-through reading style). You can annotate a physical book far more fluidly than you can annotate an ebook. I don't have to worry about my physical books becoming unreadable because some device no longer supports whatever format they came in. I can purchase physical books second-hand, and sell them, and loan them to people. I don't have to think about DRM when I buy a physical book. E-Ink is very good, but its contrast and sunlight readability still aren't equal to those of halfway decent paper. The formatting of poetry and plays is usually far better on paper than it is on a 7" e-reader. Then there's the fact that there are vastly more physical books available than there are ebooks. The last time I checked, Amazon had something like 800,000 titles in its Kindle store; the three physical libraries I have cards for (the Chicago Public Library, a large academic library, and an independent archive) have a total of 17.5 million volumes on their shelves. That's not 17.5 million separate titles, but whatever the number of titles is, it's a hell of a lot more than 800,000. (We'll ignore the redundancy in Amazon's store while we're doing this comparison.)
Of course, ebooks and e-readers have their advantages, and will become the dominant form of reading in the near future. But the codex is an awesome technology. Tech doesn't last for 2000 years if it's not really, really good at what it's supposed to do. It will be around for quite a while, maybe not as the go-to format for reading, but as a real alternative. To imagine that ebooks have entirely supplanted physical books and that people only read physical books because they're "hipsters" is at best willful ignorance and at worst a projection of your own insecurities.
Google Books has focused on digitizing academic libraries. I would argue that books found in academic libraries are not necessarily representative of cultural trends across society.
This is just public posturing handwringing over being multicultural "enough". You wanna publicly wring your hands to get "diversity street cred", OK go wring your hands, but you don't need to actually engage the rest of us, you just need to strike the pose.
Speaking as someone who's been working in academic libraries for 18 years -- the original quote isn't handwringing over multiculturalism, it's an accurate description. Academic libraries purchase books that will be of use to academics. There are huge areas that they generally don't collect in. A contemporary academic library will purchase relatively few cookbooks, popular genre novels (romance, mystery, sci fi, etc.), YA books, self-help books, and so on, simply because they don't fit the library's mission. OTOH, an academic library is far more likely than a public library or a brick and mortar bookstore to have books written in foreign languages, books written by or about marginalized groups, and books written by minor or otherwise marginalized authors. An academic library's collection is likely to be more multicultural than that of any other book repository. But it won't have any Harlequins, any recent celebrity biographies, or Personal Finance for Dummies, so it's really hard to say that it represents the broad swath of society's reading practices.
Anyone who remembers the Star Trek: TNG episode "Reunion" (season 4, episode 7) knows that surgically implanted bombs are an actual threat. The old "bomb in the bodyguard's forearm" technique would have worked perfectly for Duras, except that he made two mistakes: he used Romulan technology that was traceable back to him, and he then beat Worf's girlfriend to death. Think of the chilling implications. Worf' s girlfriend is already dead, so the terrorists can't screw up on that count, and they don't even have access to Romulan tech, do they?
We're doomed.
National libraries of record already keep copies of everything published. So, for instance, the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bodleian Library keep copies of everything published in English. So we already have a triplicated, geographically diverse, and properly environmentally controlled system, which is going to preserve the books a lot longer than a shipping container on an industrial estate.
FWIW, the Library of Congress doesn't collect everything published in the English, and the British Library and the Bodleian don't either. Those three, plus Harvard, are the biggest four libraries in the world, but there's a lot that they don't ever get, and some that they get but don't keep. Huge amounts of ephemera -- newspapers, pamphlets, zines and small run magazines, things like that -- never make it into *any* library, let alone the LOC, and much that does only does because there is some local library or special subject library that makes it its mission to collect and save as much as it can find in its region/subject area. Huge amounts of self-published work won't ever make it into a library either. I'd guess that half of the original work on Lulu won't ever be collected by anyone, and will simply cease to exist if and when Lulu's servers stop working. The requirement to send a copy of a publication to the LOC (two copies, actually) only exists if one sends something to the U.S. Copyright Office first. If you're doing a small run you'll often not worry about copyright (especially if you're publication is in the public domain, or copylefted, or published on a Creative Commons license, and so on), so you don't have to send anything to the LOC either. In which case, the LOC probably doesn't end up with a copy, and possibly no one else does either.
Then there are a lot of fairly mainstream books from the past that just never made it to a major library for some reason. I work at a large archive that among other things collects American textbooks printed before 1970, focusing heavily on the period 1830-1950. I've cataloged several thousand of them, and generally can't find a record of any library owning maybe 4% of them. I assume that half of these are in a library somewhere, but that library hasn't let WorldCat know about it (which is almost the same as not owning it, but I digress). So the remaining 2% don't seem to be in *any* library *anywhere* -- not the LOC, not Harvard, nowhere. For all I know, when I'm working on one of these things, say some book of rhetoric published in Cleveland in 1880, I'm holding the *only* copy still in existence. My organization is unusual, and this textbook project was begun merely on a whim of one of our staff members. I imagine there are a huge number of similar sorts of works that aren't being collected by anyone, because no project or institution has taken up their cause. Those items are simply winking out of existence as the last copy moulders away in some attic somewhere.
People tend to assume that the LOC and the British Library and other libraries are preserving everything, but they simply aren't. "Everything" has a huge scope, huger than almost anyone realizes. And libraries focus on use and dissemination. Preservation is part of their purpose, but it's definitely below use. Something that's not useful might never get preserved, and something that's useful might get used to death. This is controversial inside and outside of the library world, but it's important for people to understand. Everything isn't stored in triplicate, things are being lost.
Buying Sony digital electronics seems to me like loaning your car to a car thief. Why would you risk losing your library?
The funny thing is that this risk is a reason you *should* buy a Sony Reader instead of a Kindle or a Nook. Sony have been the good guys in the e-reader market. The Reader has been friendly to open formats for a while -- they've supported epub and pdf since 2008 (and txt from the beginning). Sure, you can buy all of your books through the Sony store, in their lrf format, and I guess theoretically they could delete them through some sort of update. But as there's no wireless you'd have to download and install the update yourself, which would stop it going around once word got out that it does something unpleasant. More importantly, there's no need to use the Sony software at all if you're not reading things you buy from the Sony site. I installed their software on my computer just to initialize my Reader, and then uninstalled it. In the 2.5 years since, I've read something like 150 books and magazines on my Reader, not one of which I bought from Sony. They're all either freely available things (that I manage and often format with the excellent open source Calibre software) or things I've bought as epubs from non-Sony sites.
Son'y a massive corporation. I work on the assumption that all massive corporations are evil somewhere at their core. But they also tend to be inchoate masses. The evil settles deeply in some parts, and seems to hang more lightly on others. The division of Sony that manufactures the Reader seems to be the latter.
I am guessing that, if we do create conscious minds in a test tube, those minds will suffer a lot of angst. Maybe even the majority of our thinking processes are moderated by our physical limitations and by our hormones. Could we live in a test tube without going insane?
If we could precisely replicate a human brain and grow it in a jar and didn't somehow give it an artificial world to inhabit -- a robotic body, the Matrix, anything -- it would be profoundly non-functional. Angst wouldn't come into it, insanity wouldn't come into it. It wouldn't become nearly clever enough to go insane. Consider what happens with a so-called "feral" child, usually a kid raised in profound isolation, like being locked in a closet or something. That child at least has sensory inputs, has some control of a body, has experienced eating and breathing, and on and on. And yet even when given good care later in life they very rarely learn to walk correctly, become toilet trained, understand basic human expressions, and so on. They barely function as humans. Now imagine a brain with no sensory inputs at all, maybe at most nervous sensations of whatever growth fluid it is suspended in, along with the occasional jolts of electricity sent by the researchers. Would it even be able to think in a way we'd remotely call human? It would have no purchase on anything with which to build a concept of the world, of anything, even of how to go about the process of thinking. It would be a hunk of meat with a few interesting capabilities.
Everyone on slashdot under 30 is having a crisis right now, having never seen such a thing. Many under 20 have probably never even heard of a record player.. OMFG how does it make sound without electricity?!?!?! Ahhhhhh.
The interesting thing is that this isn't necessarily true. In 2010 sales of vinyl records reached their highest level since 1991, and grew by 14% last year, while overall industry sales were down 13%. You can buy turntables and LPs in youth-focused places like Urban Outfitters, and club and party DJs are far more likely than 6 or 7 years ago to have actual vinyl on their decks rather than just a couple of CD players and a laptop. An American 20-year-old today is, strangely, more likely to own a turntable than is a 35-year-old, who came of age in the 1990s, when LPs were supposed to be a dead form.
And it makes sense, in a way. We're in a post-physical era, in which most people don't see a lot of point to owning your music in a physical format. So owning physical music is a luxury, a quirk, even an affectation. In that case, why not vinyl? It has bigger cover art, more space for liner notes -- if you're going to do something unnecessary like purchase physical music, why not get the package that most highlights the advantages of consuming music in a meatspace package?
In the 1990s there were endless arguments about the "fidelity" of CDs vs. the "warmth" of vinyl. At this point people are so conditioned to listening 192 Kbps mp3s on their crappy iPod earbuds that the sound quality arguments sound quaint, and the advantages of CDs seem a lot less relevant. Vinyl certainly sounds better than an mp3 on an iPod. So why not?
I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.
Change one letter and you get an even worse threat: cats. From the New York Times, quoting the relevant section because of the paywall:
... By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines.
So, if you're opposed to solar and wind power because of your concern over birds, you'd better not be someone who lets your cat go outside.
I think that we have to remember the theory behind the OED. The OED is an avowedly *descriptive* dictionary. It's goal is to define words as they are or have been used. It is also massive, and attempts to capture as many words as possible, to be definitive about the language, or at least the British version of it. Browse through the OED and you'll find words that are antiquated slang that haven't been used since the 18th century, things like that. "Leet" or "1337" or whatever would seem to fit in there somewhere. Slang is a part of the language -- it gets used, that's really all that the OED cares about.
If you are looking for a *prescriptive* dictionary that will tell you how language *should* be used... well, you're out of luck. All modern English dictionaries claim to be descriptive. American Heritage has its usage panel, that makes recommendations about certain disputed usages, but the recent slang and the common but incorrect (or "incorrect") usages are still in there.
It's ridiculous to include this as one of the least realistic sci-fi movies. Why, nothing could possibly be more realistic than Keanu Reeves, undergraduate physics genius! Just look at a picture of the guy. He practically drips, you know, quantum stuff!
Remember back to 1996. You'd just seen Sandra Bullock, in another example of incredibly apt casting, play a brilliant computer hacker in The Net. You thought nothing could be more realistic than Sandra saving the world through the timely insertion of a floppy disk. But then you heard Keanu's cry: "CHEAP, EFFICIENT FUEL" -- and you knew you were wrong!
Best movie of all time.
Most of the ideas and knowledge that Europeans got from Muslim lands had originally been developed by non-muslims.
Most knowlege *everywhere* derives strongly from knowledge developed elsewhere. The Medieval Muslims depended on the Ancient Greeks; the Ancient Greeks depended on the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, and Egyptians. There's probably a Homo erectus who was entirely original, and we've been ripping him off ever since.
There's a lot that needs to be cleared up in this subthread:
The "torch of civilization" was indeed carried in large part by Islam for much of the Middle Ages. The intellectual aspect of 12th Century Renaissance was sparked in large part by the discovery of texts in Muslim libraries in Spain and Sicily, libraries that were captured by the Normans in Sicily and the Christian states of the Reconquista in Spain. There were Greek texts, the contributions of Islamic scholars on those texts, and Arabic mathematical and scientific texts. The Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and his followers, which was the dominant mode of thought in the later Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, was Aristotelianism as dervied from and mediated by Ab 'l-Wald Muammad bin Amad bin Rushd, aka Averroes. I must stress that it would be entirely wrong to view Averroes as merely a figure who passed on Aristotle. I mean, in a sense *all* philosophy in the West is, as is often said, a gloss on Plato and Aristotle, who loom over everything else. But Averroes was a major, major figure. More generally, there was a huge amount of translation from Arabic into Latin in the 11th and 12th centuries, lots of other names we could go into. People often don't understand the importance of this, but it was transformative.
The "oppression of Muslim rule" doesn't make sense in terms of the Middle Ages. Everywhere in the world was oppressive by our current standards; some parts of the Muslim world were much less oppressive than anywhere in Europe. I can enumerate the dates of the various expulsions of the Jews from various European countries in the Middle Ages and Renaissance if you'd like, for example. Yes, the Greek scholars who came to Italy in the 15th century were often fleeing the Turks, but it's important to realize that they were fleeing the Ottoman Turks, a specific group who were (and largely still are) the traditional enemy of the Greeks, and not the "oppression of Muslim rule" as a whole.
The collapse of the Byzantine Empire had a significant role in the second phase of the Italian Renaissance, beginning with the various Greek scholars who came to Italy in the 1430s as part of the negotiations over the proposed reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. Cardinal Bessarion was the most famous of these scholars, but there are many many more, and they helped bring about things like the reemergence of Platonism, the great advances in philology of people like Lorenzo Valla (which later culminated in the various great Biblical translations of the 16th century), and so forth. Italian art was also heavily influenced by Byzantine models for centuries, and really didn't break away from Greek models until the early 14th century. It's worth noting that these Byzantine models for art were from churches and so forth from parts of Italy that were Byzantine for great chunks of the Medieval period, most notably Ravenna and south Italy.
From elsewhere in the subthread:
The Byzantine Empire in the period after the sack by the Crusaders was never as politically, militarily, etc. strong as it was beforehand, but it did undergo a cultural and intellectual Renaissance of its own in the last century and a half of its existence. This was (ironically) triggered in part by contributions from the Latin West, such as the first translations of people like Thomas Aquinas into Greek. At its collapse the Byzantine Empire was culturally as strong
Thus, in a sly maneuver to make big publishing look like evil bastards (not a difficult task), the authors conveniently and quietly take control of book distribution and remove the freedom of the consumer to control the end product themselves. This is bad. Very bad.
This effect (which is very real) is an effect of ebooks generally and has nothing to do with the question of whether the author or big publishers (or small publishers or whoever) controls the distribution of ebooks. A DRM-laden ebook can't be re-sold no matter what, and that's true if I buy it from Random House or if John Grisham personally emails it to me.
As far as Im concerned, these professors should forward their books to the lit department, have some undergrads edit, and pretty it up. then post it on the schools server.
My partner teaches English literature at a university that is consistently rated as one of the top 10 in the US. From time to time I read bits of the student papers that she brings home to grade, and all I can say is: God help the student trying to learn something from a textbook edited by these undergrads. And they're supposed to be the smart ones! The thought of what the dumb ones would do to a textbook would keep me up at night worrying about the future of my country if this plan were to go into effect.
And then there's the problem of the massive duplication of effort that the proposal would cause. You can't just bang out a textbook over summer break. It takes a lot of thought and work. Having a professor at every college repeat the same effort that some other professor up the road is making seems like a huge waste of time. Maybe create a consortium of universities or something like that -- there are ways to break the publisher model, and someone will start to hit on them soon -- but one textbook per university is a very poor allocation of personnel resources.