I propose an amendment to your first paragraph: you watch FOX news to get the permissible conservative viewpoint, then switch to CNN for the permissible liberal one. After all, there are standards; whether you identify yourself with the left or the right, there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say on the air, if you want to stay on the air.
For example: by prevailing international standards, Nightline mainstay Henry Kissinger is a war criminal (see Christopher Hitchens' articles in the two most recent issues of Harper's).
Or: based on similar standards, the Sudanese government has as much of a case to extradite and prosecute Bill Clinton (for the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant there) as Spain did for attempting to extradite and prosecute Augusto Pinochet.
Or: the full truth of the deaths of dozens Branch Davidians at the hands of the FBI has been laundered, and is likely to stay that way.
Not that I disagree with him, but if I were a creationist I wouldn't find Dr. Caplan's article very convincing. He provides little real evidence or argument to back up his claim that the human genome "proves" that humans evolved via natural selection. In fact, the closest thing I can find to an argument is his observation that the genes for crucial human traits seem "jerry-rigged" in a fashion which seems incompatible with intelligent (or omnipotent) design. This article reads more like a statement of faith than one of science. Surely someone can do better.
Damn... and me without any moderator points. This has to mean something.
Re:What IT Is And Isn't
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What is 'IT'?
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· Score: 1
OK, so I know I'm dreaming, but I want personal teleportation...
"Jan. 9 - Particle Magazine editor Stathis Borans has just paid $250,000 for a book about IT - but neither the editor nor the agent... knows what IT is.
"ALL THEY DO know: IT, also code-named Buzz, is an invention developed by scientist Seth Brundle, and the subject of a planned book by journalist Veronica Quaife. According to Quaife's proposal, IT will change the world, "ending all concepts of transport, of borders and frontiers, of time and space", and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionary Anton Bartok, president and CEO of Bartok Science Industries.
"Quaife - who has been published in Particle and Omni magazines, among others - has had exclusive access to Brundle's loft-based research-and-development laboratory, not to mention to Brundle himself, for the past year and a half. She tags the proposed book as Soul of the New Machine meets The New New Thing, and also includes an amusing narrative of her first meeting with the motion sickness-prone Brundle..."
Re:The question is not whether there is a problem
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Information Poisoning
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· Score: 2
Try to name a problem government has solved:
Crime? No. Homelessness? Definitely not. Poverty? Drugs? Unemployment? Education? No, no, no, no...
In how many instances has one of those problems ever been solved by private enterprise? For every example, I will give you a counterexample.
Crime: As an institution, the only crime that a private company really cares about is a crime against its property or revenue potential. Otherwise, private enterprise stands to profit from crime every bit as much as from the lack of it (sales of firearms, burglar alarms/security systems, etc...)
Homelessness: What company is going into business to sell homes to people who can't afford them? The homeless, as a rule, do not constitute a market.
Poverty: Poverty is good for business. When the alternative to slave wages is starvation and penury, people tend to settle for slave wages.
Drugs: The drug cartels themselves are massively profitable private enterprises. The fact that they are illegal is a technicality. They are no more or less moral than any corporation, they have simply adapted to their environment (by contributing to government corruption, among other things).
Education: Two hundred years ago, universal public education was unheard of, and the majority of people were ignorant, illiterate, poor and downtrodden. Today, the vast majority of people are products of public education, are literate, make decent wages and live reasonably comfortable lives. Are you telling me this is a coincidence? Do you actually believe the greatest good is served by basing access to education on the private means of individuals and families, thereby denying education to those who need it most?
The "DVD format" is a format designed to control the ideas exchanged between students and professors, and serve as a model for the day when all information exchange can be controlled by a central authority.
Except when it's released region-free, or did you not bother to inform yourself before your knee jerked?
Not that I love the MPAA, but geez, you've got options. I bought a DVD player that plays any/all regions, and I get to have my cake and eat it, too.
Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous.
This is a dumbass thing to say. Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever? My answer, at least, is that political discussion is dangerous to anyone who profits from political quietism. People who can't be bothered with politics, or think that their elected representatives should be prevented from representing their interests or their opinions, put power in the hands of people who don't represent either their interests or their opinions.
We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."
I don't take this analogy very seriously. If someone were standing in front of you at arm's length, swinging his fist at your nose, how long would it take you to get uncomfortable? My guess is one swing or less (depending on whether you knew it was coming). It wouldn't matter even if the guy was the best stuntman in Hollywood and could pull his punch every time, you still wouldn't like it. Likewise, in the real world we need more than the other guy's assurance that his actions won't harm us: we need a buffer zone (the law), and we need a neutral authority to enforce it (the government). The trick is to keep the authority accountable.
I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
Sure. Let's just sit back and let it all happen. Then, when your grandchildren are slaves to the hive mind and Bill Gates' third clone gets a royalty every time anyone has sex, you can explain to them how it was for the best just to let the market decide everything.
My private theory has always been that colours are analogous to musical tones. Under this theory, while there may be an infinite number of frequencies and hence an infinite number of distinct "colours", they actually sort themselves out into a limited number of hues analogous to the tones of the musical scale. The reason we are unaware of this phenomenon is that the human visual range extends approximately from 700nm to 400nm. Since the top (violet) end of our visual range is less than twice the frequency (more than half the wavelength) of the bottom (red) end, we perceive less than one full visual "octave".
Of course, the only way to test this theory, as far as I can tell, would be to engineer some lucky (or unlucky) child with the genes for extended-range pigments, let them grow up, and then ask them if 400nm light looks somehow the same or different than 800nm light.
How about a head transplant? Apparently, this is being seriously considered as a drastic, but possibly justifiable, last-ditch measure to preserve the lives of otherwise hopeless quadriplegics, whose bodies steadily degrade as a result of their condition. They'd still be quadriplegic, of course: no one's talking about reattaching the spinal cord or anything else, it's strictly about keeping blood flowing to the brain. Everybody's favourite quad, Christopher Reeve, has already been mentioned as a possible candidate. If you were reduced to the state of basically a talking head, would you consider it?
IMHO, novels are defined by the author who wrote them.
In that case, what do you think of Brian Herbert's plan to finish his father's last _Dune_ novel, based on his recently-discovered notes? Will that book be "defined" by the father or the son?
I've read _Dune: House Harkonnen_, and I thought it was a pretty enjoyable, disposable read. The characters are paper-thin, though, with little of the depth or subtlety that Frank Herbert displayed in _Dune_. The authors apparently understand this, and they make up for it with plot, plot, plot.
What I miss most from Frank Herbert's novels is the decadent political sophistication that his characters demonstrated. For example: as written by Frank Herbert, the Bene Gesserit are consummate political operatives who get their way through subtlety, finesse and infinite patience, planning generations and millennia in advance. But as written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, the witches might as well be sledgehammer-wielding maniacs. A case in point (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) is the method by which Baron Harkonnen is "persuaded" to sire a child for the Sisterhood's breeding program. Is that the best they could do?
Another contrast: The dinner party about a third of the way through _Dune_. Told from Jessica's point of view, this scene is a masterpiece of political intrigue: with a large cast of characters all pursuing their own agendas, Frank Herbert conveys motivation for each one while establishing Jessica's credentials as a master of observation, all the while setting the stage for the coming betrayal. What compares to this in _Dune: House Harkonnen_? There is (another MINOR SPOILER) also a dinner party scene early in this book, in which one character inexplicably attacks and kills another, in order to furnish a political background for the rest of the book which is never explored, but simply stated.
Especially in his later _Dune_ novels, Frank Herbert could be too subtle for his own good, but it wouldn't hurt his son and his son's co-writer to try harder to emulate at least one of the things that made the father's writing so special.
Video games as operant conditioning
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Trigger Happy
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· Score: 2
An interesting article and an interesting viewpoint from Steven Poole. I'd like to point out an opposing viewpoint (though not necessarily one that I agree with): in his book On Killing, Dave Grossman argues that the prolonged playing of video games acts as a form of operant conditioning, training the player to act on every violent impulse instantly and without thought. (Even if you don't buy this argument, the book is interesting for its insights into the psychology of training ordinary people to kill in war.) Grossman expands on his argument in a pamphlet called Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, which I haven't read.
You wouldn't ever be "outside the influence of any solar wind", would you? Not unless you left the galaxy altogether, anyway, because the solar wind persists all the way to the heliopause, where it meets countervailing winds from other stars. This raises the interesting question of turbulence at the interface. Would a magnetically-propelled interstellar vehicle have to deal with storms whenever it transited from one system to another?
Also, the article says that the propulsion force is constant because the magnetic field expands at the same rate at which the solar wind dissipates. This raises the question (which someone else posed as well): How far out does this relationship hold true? On your way to Proxima Centauri, would you accelerate at a constant rate all the way to the heliopause, then decelerate at a similar rate all the way in?
I did not read Richard Rhodes' article in the New York Times which Katz cites, but I did read his book Why They Kill, and it seems to me that Katz has misrepresented Rhodes' position. In the book, Rhodes explains and elaborates on the theory of the "maverick criminologist" Lonnie Athens, regarding the origins and perpetuation of violence in society. It's well worth reading.
In Why They Kill, Athens and Rhodes do indeed discuss the considerable decrease in private violence (revenge, blood feuds, etc.) in Western societies over the last several centuries, and its replacement by "official" forms of violence: civilian police forces, an organized system of criminal justice, etc. But when Katz writes "Rhodes and others have pointed out that as media use has increased in the western world, violence has generally declined", ISTM he is putting words in Rhodes' mouth. Athens' argument, as reported by Rhodes, has little or nothing to do with media and everything to do with the very personal process which Athens has dubbed violentization. This process incorporates brutalization, exposure to violent behaviour (especially perpetrated upon a loved one), and successful violent performances, tending to lead to a violent self-image and an acceptance of violence as an integral part of one's identity. This, according to Athens, is the process by which violence passes down through the generations; and he holds that understanding this process is the key to reducing violence in society. There is no particular reference to the role of technology, if any. (If Rhodes did indeed specifically address technology in the Times, of course, I would accept that.)
Of course, there is as always some substance to what Katz writes. There is a significant measure of hysteria, verging on moral panic, in the debate over violence in media. If he wanted to shed some light on this, Katz might have cited some studies by George Gerbner, who among other things has noted a positive relationship between media consumption and fear of violence (i.e., those who watch more TV believe the world is a more violent place than those who do not -- no surprise, given the "if it bleeds, it leads" ethos of most local TV news programs in the U.S.!).
Katz might also refer to the book On Killing by Dave Grossman, a history of violence in warfare which offers a very interesting perspective on the effects of violent media, especially video games. Grossman establishes with some authority that it is very difficult to train people to kill; most soldiers don't do very much killing at all. When this fact was discovered by the U.S. military after the Second World War (and it came as a nasty shock, as you can imagine), it led to new training methods based on operant conditioning, which led further to the familiar Vietnam syndrome -- significant increases in kills perpetrated by increasingly traumatized soldiers. And this kind of operant conditioning, Grossman believes, is also at work in first-person shooters and similar violent video games. I can't do justice to his argument (which I don't quite buy, BTW), but it's worth a read.
Actually, I believe Arthur Clarke did incorporate this idea in one of his books: in Songs of Distant Earth, if I remember correctly, the constitution of the planet Thalassa (basically a small island or archipelago in the middle of a planetwide ocean) specifies that the head of state be picked by lottery from among the population, with psychological testing to ensure (a) mental competency, (b) conscientiousness and (c) lack of power-hunger. The character of the president in this book is basically an ordinary guy who can't wait to finish his term and get back to his real life. Wouldn't that be nice?
See also Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams. (Or anything else he's written, for that matter. He's real, real good.)
Katz is a smart guy, but he suffers from an unfortunate mental handicap which sharply limits the value of much of what he has to say: namely, his idée fixe technological determinism. This appears to be a legacy of his days among the Wired crowd, that gang of happy-go-lucky ex-hippies turned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and their sycophants, who breezed through the 1990s on a wing and a stock option and became techno-millionaires overnight, all the while serenely confident that they bore the torch of the techno-libertarian future. What Katz seems not to understand clearly is that it was the money, not the technology, that made this crowd a political force.
Katz correctly notes that fewer than half of the American public bothers to make its preference known in federal elections (and the percentage is ever-decreasing), yet somehow fails to realize that this represents, not the failure of the existing power structure, but its ongoing victory over real democracy. Far from being out of touch, the political-economic power structure in the U.S. exists in a day-to-day frenzy of adaptation to its audience: no country in the world is more closely scrutinized, polled or focus-grouped. All that attention serves to keep the audience happy, applauding and in its comfortable seats, rather than up on stage with the players.
Is technology the ultimate determining force in politics? Will the Internet make you free? Maybe, if you've spent the last decade or so making sure you own a piece of it. For the Rest Of Us, though, that promise is rapidly diminishing as the process of laying tile, hanging neon, and spraying plastic ferns rapidly transforms the Net into the Biggest Shopping Mall in the World.
Increasing government power doesn't do much to enhance individual freedom.
By itself, no, but whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If people got involved in government, instead of letting themselves be propagandized into thinking that nothing they can do will change anything, then a strong government would be a good thing.
BTW, if I were a U.S. citizen, I _would_ be casting a vote for Ralph Nader. I'm rooting for you guys, I really am. One day, no doubt, a U.S. presidential campaign will have more intellectual content than the average beauty contest, but (unless Nader gets into the debates) it hasn't happened in my adult life.
This whole mess (corporate control of government) got started because we used politics to interfere with them. We need to get back to using markets to control corporations. Why? Because corporations are set against each other in markets, whereas in politics they unify against the common enemy: government.
How exactly have "we" (or anyone) "used politics to interfere" with corporations? How else would you "interfere" with corporations? Beg them to be responsible? That approach has worked so well in the past...
The current fashion to bash government as the natural enemy of free enterprise is amusing, but not very informative. To the extent that they represent different constituencies (all citizens, versus the tiny minority who own most corporate stock), business and government are indeed natural enemies. On the other hand, to the extent that they represent the same constituency (i.e. to the extent that representatives owe their re-election chances to corporate money, and to the extent that elections are fashion shows decided at the fundraishing level, rather than the ballot box), they are natural allies.
It is fashionable in corporate circles to say that all regulation is bad because currently, regulations are hindering some companies' pursuit of profit. About a century ago, when Bell was first becoming the leader in the nascent telephone industry, the exact reverse was true: Bell couldn't get regulated fast enough, because a regulated monopoly basically means a guaranteed market. Bell's reasoning, which convinced government at the time, was that there were too many companies with too many competing standards, and that telephones were a "natural monopoly" which would work best if one standard was enforced by one company. Bell held on to its guaranteed market for most of a century (and fought tooth and nail to keep it).
The lesson is simple: Regulation is good until it becomes bad, and the deciding factor is always the same: profits. What else?
The question is why any of this is necessary. The football team at UVa is a HUGE money-MAKER. Why do they need corporate sponsorship?
Because American universities do not receive sufficient public funding, they are forced to turn to other means of raising funds, such as transforming themselves into highly profitable training grounds for semi-professional sports teams (and de facto farm teams for the NFL, NBA, etc.). This begins the process of transforming the university, in the minds of administrators, legislators, and the general public, from a center of learning to a center of profit. After all, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing for money, right?
Unfortunately this leads to a perverse but pervasive corollary: It must be that anything being done for a reason other than money is being done wrong. This explains why universities increasingly think nothing of selling out what financial and intellectual independence they have to corporations; why the commitment to public education is waning; and why control of everything from schools to prisons is being handed over to the private sector. In a world where even government is dominated by a business metaphor, legislators see themselves as businessmen who represent clients (i.e. the public -- witness the so-called Contract With America), rather than public servants serving a constituency. There is no perception of a universal public interest; there are only isolated, private interests, for profit. That's corporatism in a nutshell.
Slashdot Mirror
Shit any good diamonds lately?
July 24, 1969
Honolulu, Hawaii
Customs Agent: Citizenship?
Astronaut: American.
C: How long away?
A: About a week.
C: Anything to declare?
A: Nope.
C: Would you mind opening your bag, sir?
A: Uh, okay.
C: Would you mind explaining this, sir?
A: It's a rock.
C: No, sir. Would you mind explaining this white powder?
A: Huh?
C: What are you, playing dumb? What's this white powder?
A: It's just a dust sample. It goes with the rock.
C: It goes with the rock. What's that supposed to mean?
A: I don't understand.
C: Do you have a problem with your hearing, sir? I asked you to explain this white powder.
A: I picked that up while I was away.
C: Did you, now? And where might you be coming from?
A: The moon.
C: The moon.
A: That's right, the moon.
C: So this rock is from the moon, right?
A: That's right.
C: And this white powder --
A: It's moondust.
C: Oh, I see. It's MOONdust. Would you come with me, sir?
A: What, now?
C: Yes. Now.
A: But I have to report for debrief --
C: DOWN ON THE FLOOR! NOW!!
I propose an amendment to your first paragraph: you watch FOX news to get the permissible conservative viewpoint, then switch to CNN for the permissible liberal one. After all, there are standards; whether you identify yourself with the left or the right, there are certain things it just wouldn't do to say on the air, if you want to stay on the air.
For example: by prevailing international standards, Nightline mainstay Henry Kissinger is a war criminal (see Christopher Hitchens' articles in the two most recent issues of Harper's).
Or: based on similar standards, the Sudanese government has as much of a case to extradite and prosecute Bill Clinton (for the bombing of a pharmaceutical plant there) as Spain did for attempting to extradite and prosecute Augusto Pinochet.
Or: the full truth of the deaths of dozens Branch Davidians at the hands of the FBI has been laundered, and is likely to stay that way.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
No, but I am curious as to what Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise's involvement might be. Do you think Jackie Chan will have a cameo?
Not that I disagree with him, but if I were a creationist I wouldn't find Dr. Caplan's article very convincing. He provides little real evidence or argument to back up his claim that the human genome "proves" that humans evolved via natural selection. In fact, the closest thing I can find to an argument is his observation that the genes for crucial human traits seem "jerry-rigged" in a fashion which seems incompatible with intelligent (or omnipotent) design. This article reads more like a statement of faith than one of science. Surely someone can do better.
> whois aoltimewarneryahoo.com
Damn... and me without any moderator points. This has to mean something.
OK, so I know I'm dreaming, but I want personal teleportation...
... knows what IT is.
"Jan. 9 - Particle Magazine editor Stathis Borans has just paid $250,000 for a book about IT - but neither the editor nor the agent
"ALL THEY DO know: IT, also code-named Buzz, is an invention developed by scientist Seth Brundle, and the subject of a planned book by journalist Veronica Quaife. According to Quaife's proposal, IT will change the world, "ending all concepts of transport, of borders and frontiers, of time and space", and is so extraordinary that it has drawn the attention of technology visionary Anton Bartok, president and CEO of Bartok Science Industries.
"Quaife - who has been published in Particle and Omni magazines, among others - has had exclusive access to Brundle's loft-based research-and-development laboratory, not to mention to Brundle himself, for the past year and a half. She tags the proposed book as Soul of the New Machine meets The New New Thing, and also includes an amusing narrative of her first meeting with the motion sickness-prone Brundle..."
Try to name a problem government has solved:
Crime? No. Homelessness? Definitely not. Poverty? Drugs? Unemployment? Education? No, no, no, no...
In how many instances has one of those problems ever been solved by private enterprise? For every example, I will give you a counterexample.
Crime: As an institution, the only crime that a private company really cares about is a crime against its property or revenue potential. Otherwise, private enterprise stands to profit from crime every bit as much as from the lack of it (sales of firearms, burglar alarms/security systems, etc...)
Homelessness: What company is going into business to sell homes to people who can't afford them? The homeless, as a rule, do not constitute a market.
Poverty: Poverty is good for business. When the alternative to slave wages is starvation and penury, people tend to settle for slave wages.
Drugs: The drug cartels themselves are massively profitable private enterprises. The fact that they are illegal is a technicality. They are no more or less moral than any corporation, they have simply adapted to their environment (by contributing to government corruption, among other things).
Education: Two hundred years ago, universal public education was unheard of, and the majority of people were ignorant, illiterate, poor and downtrodden. Today, the vast majority of people are products of public education, are literate, make decent wages and live reasonably comfortable lives. Are you telling me this is a coincidence? Do you actually believe the greatest good is served by basing access to education on the private means of individuals and families, thereby denying education to those who need it most?
The "DVD format" is a format designed to control the ideas exchanged between students and professors, and serve as a model for the day when all information exchange can be controlled by a central authority.
Except when it's released region-free, or did you not bother to inform yourself before your knee jerked?
Not that I love the MPAA, but geez, you've got options. I bought a DVD player that plays any/all regions, and I get to have my cake and eat it, too.
Are you guys aware that the _Cosmos_ DVDs are *not* region encoded? One set, one world. Get informed before you start bitching.
http://www.onecosmos.net/
Hmm... Is there a Linux distribution that comes with Solitaire?
The site is /.ed, of course. My question is, how do you pronounce 3IVX, anyway? Thrivix?
Political discussion about cloning is horrendously dangerous.
This is a dumbass thing to say. Just what exactly is "dangerous" about any kind of political discussion whatsoever? My answer, at least, is that political discussion is dangerous to anyone who profits from political quietism. People who can't be bothered with politics, or think that their elected representatives should be prevented from representing their interests or their opinions, put power in the hands of people who don't represent either their interests or their opinions.
We could do with a few limitations of government, such as don't ever regulate something that isn't being used to hurt someone else. "The right to swing your fist ends at your neighbor's nose."
I don't take this analogy very seriously. If someone were standing in front of you at arm's length, swinging his fist at your nose, how long would it take you to get uncomfortable? My guess is one swing or less (depending on whether you knew it was coming). It wouldn't matter even if the guy was the best stuntman in Hollywood and could pull his punch every time, you still wouldn't like it. Likewise, in the real world we need more than the other guy's assurance that his actions won't harm us: we need a buffer zone (the law), and we need a neutral authority to enforce it (the government). The trick is to keep the authority accountable.
I would prefer if politicians didn't talk about cloning. Let them argue about how much a congressional toilet seat costs instead, it would be much more productive for humanity.
Sure. Let's just sit back and let it all happen. Then, when your grandchildren are slaves to the hive mind and Bill Gates' third clone gets a royalty every time anyone has sex, you can explain to them how it was for the best just to let the market decide everything.
My private theory has always been that colours are analogous to musical tones. Under this theory, while there may be an infinite number of frequencies and hence an infinite number of distinct "colours", they actually sort themselves out into a limited number of hues analogous to the tones of the musical scale. The reason we are unaware of this phenomenon is that the human visual range extends approximately from 700nm to 400nm. Since the top (violet) end of our visual range is less than twice the frequency (more than half the wavelength) of the bottom (red) end, we perceive less than one full visual "octave".
Of course, the only way to test this theory, as far as I can tell, would be to engineer some lucky (or unlucky) child with the genes for extended-range pigments, let them grow up, and then ask them if 400nm light looks somehow the same or different than 800nm light.
How about a head transplant? Apparently, this is being seriously considered as a drastic, but possibly justifiable, last-ditch measure to preserve the lives of otherwise hopeless quadriplegics, whose bodies steadily degrade as a result of their condition. They'd still be quadriplegic, of course: no one's talking about reattaching the spinal cord or anything else, it's strictly about keeping blood flowing to the brain. Everybody's favourite quad, Christopher Reeve, has already been mentioned as a possible candidate. If you were reduced to the state of basically a talking head, would you consider it?
IMHO, novels are defined by the author who wrote them.
In that case, what do you think of Brian Herbert's plan to finish his father's last _Dune_ novel, based on his recently-discovered notes? Will that book be "defined" by the father or the son?
I've read _Dune: House Harkonnen_, and I thought it was a pretty enjoyable, disposable read. The characters are paper-thin, though, with little of the depth or subtlety that Frank Herbert displayed in _Dune_. The authors apparently understand this, and they make up for it with plot, plot, plot.
What I miss most from Frank Herbert's novels is the decadent political sophistication that his characters demonstrated. For example: as written by Frank Herbert, the Bene Gesserit are consummate political operatives who get their way through subtlety, finesse and infinite patience, planning generations and millennia in advance. But as written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, the witches might as well be sledgehammer-wielding maniacs. A case in point (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) is the method by which Baron Harkonnen is "persuaded" to sire a child for the Sisterhood's breeding program. Is that the best they could do?
Another contrast: The dinner party about a third of the way through _Dune_. Told from Jessica's point of view, this scene is a masterpiece of political intrigue: with a large cast of characters all pursuing their own agendas, Frank Herbert conveys motivation for each one while establishing Jessica's credentials as a master of observation, all the while setting the stage for the coming betrayal. What compares to this in _Dune: House Harkonnen_? There is (another MINOR SPOILER) also a dinner party scene early in this book, in which one character inexplicably attacks and kills another, in order to furnish a political background for the rest of the book which is never explored, but simply stated.
Especially in his later _Dune_ novels, Frank Herbert could be too subtle for his own good, but it wouldn't hurt his son and his son's co-writer to try harder to emulate at least one of the things that made the father's writing so special.
An interesting article and an interesting viewpoint from Steven Poole. I'd like to point out an opposing viewpoint (though not necessarily one that I agree with): in his book On Killing , Dave Grossman argues that the prolonged playing of video games acts as a form of operant conditioning, training the player to act on every violent impulse instantly and without thought. (Even if you don't buy this argument, the book is interesting for its insights into the psychology of training ordinary people to kill in war.) Grossman expands on his argument in a pamphlet called Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill , which I haven't read.
You wouldn't ever be "outside the influence of any solar wind", would you? Not unless you left the galaxy altogether, anyway, because the solar wind persists all the way to the heliopause, where it meets countervailing winds from other stars. This raises the interesting question of turbulence at the interface. Would a magnetically-propelled interstellar vehicle have to deal with storms whenever it transited from one system to another?
Also, the article says that the propulsion force is constant because the magnetic field expands at the same rate at which the solar wind dissipates. This raises the question (which someone else posed as well): How far out does this relationship hold true? On your way to Proxima Centauri, would you accelerate at a constant rate all the way to the heliopause, then decelerate at a similar rate all the way in?
I did not read Richard Rhodes' article in the New York Times which Katz cites, but I did read his book Why They Kill , and it seems to me that Katz has misrepresented Rhodes' position. In the book, Rhodes explains and elaborates on the theory of the "maverick criminologist" Lonnie Athens, regarding the origins and perpetuation of violence in society. It's well worth reading.
In Why They Kill, Athens and Rhodes do indeed discuss the considerable decrease in private violence (revenge, blood feuds, etc.) in Western societies over the last several centuries, and its replacement by "official" forms of violence: civilian police forces, an organized system of criminal justice, etc. But when Katz writes "Rhodes and others have pointed out that as media use has increased in the western world, violence has generally declined", ISTM he is putting words in Rhodes' mouth. Athens' argument, as reported by Rhodes, has little or nothing to do with media and everything to do with the very personal process which Athens has dubbed violentization. This process incorporates brutalization, exposure to violent behaviour (especially perpetrated upon a loved one), and successful violent performances, tending to lead to a violent self-image and an acceptance of violence as an integral part of one's identity. This, according to Athens, is the process by which violence passes down through the generations; and he holds that understanding this process is the key to reducing violence in society. There is no particular reference to the role of technology, if any. (If Rhodes did indeed specifically address technology in the Times, of course, I would accept that.)
Of course, there is as always some substance to what Katz writes. There is a significant measure of hysteria, verging on moral panic, in the debate over violence in media. If he wanted to shed some light on this, Katz might have cited some studies by George Gerbner, who among other things has noted a positive relationship between media consumption and fear of violence (i.e., those who watch more TV believe the world is a more violent place than those who do not -- no surprise, given the "if it bleeds, it leads" ethos of most local TV news programs in the U.S.!).
Katz might also refer to the book On Killing by Dave Grossman, a history of violence in warfare which offers a very interesting perspective on the effects of violent media, especially video games. Grossman establishes with some authority that it is very difficult to train people to kill; most soldiers don't do very much killing at all. When this fact was discovered by the U.S. military after the Second World War (and it came as a nasty shock, as you can imagine), it led to new training methods based on operant conditioning, which led further to the familiar Vietnam syndrome -- significant increases in kills perpetrated by increasingly traumatized soldiers. And this kind of operant conditioning, Grossman believes, is also at work in first-person shooters and similar violent video games. I can't do justice to his argument (which I don't quite buy, BTW), but it's worth a read.
Actually, I believe Arthur Clarke did incorporate this idea in one of his books: in Songs of Distant Earth, if I remember correctly, the constitution of the planet Thalassa (basically a small island or archipelago in the middle of a planetwide ocean) specifies that the head of state be picked by lottery from among the population, with psychological testing to ensure (a) mental competency, (b) conscientiousness and (c) lack of power-hunger. The character of the president in this book is basically an ordinary guy who can't wait to finish his term and get back to his real life. Wouldn't that be nice?
See also Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams. (Or anything else he's written, for that matter. He's real, real good.)
Katz is a smart guy, but he suffers from an unfortunate mental handicap which sharply limits the value of much of what he has to say: namely, his idée fixe technological determinism. This appears to be a legacy of his days among the Wired crowd, that gang of happy-go-lucky ex-hippies turned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and their sycophants, who breezed through the 1990s on a wing and a stock option and became techno-millionaires overnight, all the while serenely confident that they bore the torch of the techno-libertarian future. What Katz seems not to understand clearly is that it was the money, not the technology, that made this crowd a political force.
Katz correctly notes that fewer than half of the American public bothers to make its preference known in federal elections (and the percentage is ever-decreasing), yet somehow fails to realize that this represents, not the failure of the existing power structure, but its ongoing victory over real democracy. Far from being out of touch, the political-economic power structure in the U.S. exists in a day-to-day frenzy of adaptation to its audience: no country in the world is more closely scrutinized, polled or focus-grouped. All that attention serves to keep the audience happy, applauding and in its comfortable seats, rather than up on stage with the players.
Is technology the ultimate determining force in politics? Will the Internet make you free? Maybe, if you've spent the last decade or so making sure you own a piece of it. For the Rest Of Us, though, that promise is rapidly diminishing as the process of laying tile, hanging neon, and spraying plastic ferns rapidly transforms the Net into the Biggest Shopping Mall in the World.
Increasing government power doesn't do much to enhance individual freedom.
By itself, no, but whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If people got involved in government, instead of letting themselves be propagandized into thinking that nothing they can do will change anything, then a strong government would be a good thing.
BTW, if I were a U.S. citizen, I _would_ be casting a vote for Ralph Nader. I'm rooting for you guys, I really am. One day, no doubt, a U.S. presidential campaign will have more intellectual content than the average beauty contest, but (unless Nader gets into the debates) it hasn't happened in my adult life.
This whole mess (corporate control of government) got started because we used politics to interfere with them. We need to get back to using markets to control corporations. Why? Because corporations are set against each other in markets, whereas in politics they unify against the common enemy: government.
How exactly have "we" (or anyone) "used politics to interfere" with corporations? How else would you "interfere" with corporations? Beg them to be responsible? That approach has worked so well in the past...
The current fashion to bash government as the natural enemy of free enterprise is amusing, but not very informative. To the extent that they represent different constituencies (all citizens, versus the tiny minority who own most corporate stock), business and government are indeed natural enemies. On the other hand, to the extent that they represent the same constituency (i.e. to the extent that representatives owe their re-election chances to corporate money, and to the extent that elections are fashion shows decided at the fundraishing level, rather than the ballot box), they are natural allies.
It is fashionable in corporate circles to say that all regulation is bad because currently, regulations are hindering some companies' pursuit of profit. About a century ago, when Bell was first becoming the leader in the nascent telephone industry, the exact reverse was true: Bell couldn't get regulated fast enough, because a regulated monopoly basically means a guaranteed market. Bell's reasoning, which convinced government at the time, was that there were too many companies with too many competing standards, and that telephones were a "natural monopoly" which would work best if one standard was enforced by one company. Bell held on to its guaranteed market for most of a century (and fought tooth and nail to keep it).
The lesson is simple: Regulation is good until it becomes bad, and the deciding factor is always the same: profits. What else?
The question is why any of this is necessary. The football team at UVa is a HUGE money-MAKER. Why do they need corporate sponsorship?
Because American universities do not receive sufficient public funding, they are forced to turn to other means of raising funds, such as transforming themselves into highly profitable training grounds for semi-professional sports teams (and de facto farm teams for the NFL, NBA, etc.). This begins the process of transforming the university, in the minds of administrators, legislators, and the general public, from a center of learning to a center of profit. After all, if something is worth doing, it's worth doing for money, right?
Unfortunately this leads to a perverse but pervasive corollary: It must be that anything being done for a reason other than money is being done wrong. This explains why universities increasingly think nothing of selling out what financial and intellectual independence they have to corporations; why the commitment to public education is waning; and why control of everything from schools to prisons is being handed over to the private sector. In a world where even government is dominated by a business metaphor, legislators see themselves as businessmen who represent clients (i.e. the public -- witness the so-called Contract With America), rather than public servants serving a constituency. There is no perception of a universal public interest; there are only isolated, private interests, for profit. That's corporatism in a nutshell.