The second review is closer to the fact of this book. 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is always held up as an example of Heinlein's work, and I must wonder why. As Byron is remembered for his bad poetry, so Heinlein is remembered for his worst book. I should know: I own almost everything he wrote.
The nitpicker in my demands that I point out that Jubal Harshaw is not Lazarus Long: he is one of the protagonists from 'The Cat That Walks Through Walls' (a mediocre book), and shows up again in the late fiction such as 'To Sail Beyond the Sunset' and 'The Number of the Beast'.
Heinlein's best book is 'The Past Through Tomorrow' - his collected future history stories. These are delightful, and though his technical concepts are heavily simplified.
Let us maintain our perspective: Heinlein was one of the better authors of the golden age of science fiction. He was not on the level of Stanley G. Weinbaum, and certainly was not among the greats (for a philosophical book, try Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End' - if you can find it). When you are tired and want something that you can read easily in a few hours, turn to Heinlein or someone on his level. When seriously reading, read the really fine authors: Homer, Ovid, Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Ford, Stevenson, Poe...the list goes on and on, and will easily fill several lifetimes.
I will reserve all opinion on this topic, as I am not yet of an age to vote, nor consider myself wise enough or well informed enough at the moment to have a useful outlook. Yet, there are two points I would like people to keep in mind:
There is a scrap of verse from earlier in this century: "The center cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Besides that, remember that the government has no money and money is intrinsically worthless. The government has only that money which it can extort from you, no more, and anything that tries to say otherwise is juggling the books - something that is considered very dishonest among accountants. Money has no value except that confidence we have in it. If I issue twenty muduli, self minted, in exchange for a wheel of cheese, you are unlikely to accept the transaction, and yet it is just as real as the dollar or the franc or any other value abstraction. The only difference is the reputation of the issuer, and people's confidence in it. Think about this when you listen to all the plans for moving around small green pieces of paper.
And of course, having used that expression, remember Douglas Adams' words, "Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
This is a bit off topic, but it just hit me: pinball has one of the greatest domain specific interfaces ever developed. The basic setup is three controls: the launcher handle, and two flipper buttons. Some replace the handle with a button, add start buttons, and additional flipper controls, but if you have a vague idea what the game does, the interface is almost transparent.
Tis sad they are dying...pinball didn't leave your eyes aching. Of course, I'm on one to talk, since I spend orders of magnitude more time playing pinball than computer games: almost none, any way you cut it.
One of the more bizarre changes in society has been that of how the majority of the population views money. Currency, by definition, is an attempt to abstract the value of commodities and services. Yet today accumulation of small green pieces of paper has become an end unto itself instead of a means to an end. I am sure I am not the only one that finds this odd.
The above is perfectly reasonble. Now for a hairbrained idea that occurred to me one evening: does the inflation of currency have something to do with the change in perception of money? When a nickel was decent money for a kid, children were still used to thinking in terms of solid objects (paper money doesn't seem nearly as solid as a slug of nickel). Thus a nickel was itself as much an object of interest as, say, the dead rat and piece of string you traded it for...or somewhat less so.
Thinking about it, I don't support that many huge corporations. The only television station I get (the television itself something I could do without) is PBS. Our power is from a semi-local power company. My computer parts are almost entirely Taiwanese generic. My stereo is Sony, but that's the most name brand item in my house. We are stuck with Sprint on the telephone, but I am looking into Internet Telephony now. Besides that, I don't think that there is a huge monopolistic corporation behind reprints of Ford and Camus; books are my major acquisition these days.
Food is still a problem in this light. We have a large garden, but our meat comes from the stores (thankfully there's a very good butcher at the local supermarket), as do our assorted canned goods.
Katz is ranting against corporations. May I point out another target to rant about: the stock market. Particularly the technology stocks. The price to earnings ratios for most of these companies is absurd, which means that shares in them are purely speculation, not investment. The corporation is meant as a way of spreading risk and potential gain in a venture around. Thus having a stock valued more than the proceeds of a company doesn't make much sense. It is merely a gambling house.
I recognize the above comment as flamebait, but it does spark one interesting notion in my mind...
RMS is not denouncing capitalism. He is not advocating socialism. Capitalism the law of supply and demand as the altering factor in the economy. If you want to compare the folks RMS is denouncing with anyone, probably Nazi Germany or Fascist Spain is a better analogy. Both practiced largescale censorship and central planning and control. Just these companies are enforcing it through strongarm legal methods instead of strongarm physics methods. Essentially we are looking at psychological vs. physical terrorism.
I have never read anything involving RMS that would indicate he is so soft in the head as to be a socialist. Instead, he is more akin to the philosophes of the 18th century in mindset. Is this so bad a heritage? The 18th century was one of the high points of civilized thought and ideas.
And now back to listening to Mahler's 4th symphony in mp3...
The Gazette, the little local newspaper, shows up once a day, and we all glance at it just to make sure the First Baptist Church of Galax hasn't published our name on their lynching list, but generally we don't read it.
On the other hand, once a week the Economist shows up. They still claim to be a newspaper, even though they use a format that makes really lousy herring-wrapper (but a lot of newspapers aren't much use for that or starting fires anymore). When it arrives, the entire family goes into hunter mode trying to get it first to read. Why?
The Economist is generally readable (their English isn't nearly as abominable as what many American newspapers publish). They don't bore their readers with descriptions of the latest scandal at the Whitehouse in America or in Buckingham Palace in England or the Sultan's Harem in wherever. They talk about economic state, politics, wars, and major legal battles. Their technology section isn't very large but it generally has something interesting.
Why is my family so much more enthusiastic about the Economist than the NYT or the Globe? Because we don't care what little scandal has cropped up in America. There is a lot more to the world, and until large newspapers get themselves focused correctly, and go back to printing sheets that are useful as herring-wrapper and fire-starter, the Economist remains our newspaper of choice. Let's keep the world in scale: America is just one of many countries, English is one of many languages, and there's a lot more to the news than what's going on in this country.
Someone is bound to point out that there is a version of the Economist online that you can access with your Economist subscription. That's fine and dandy, and it means I can send a really good article to my friends more easily, but the printed paper is far more pleasant to read. It's hard to put a monitor down next to your bowl of soup at lunch or curl up with it at night.
What should newspapers do to try to improve circulation? Report what's going on in the world instead of what the government feeds to them to publish, stop giving frontpage coverage to scandals with public officials that are no one's business but those involved, and maybe have an interesting technology column once in a while. Inevitably the newspaper will not be the center of technology news. It traditionally has focused on political and economic news. While these topics are becoming ever more closely linked to technology in many areas, there is still a large difference between technology news and political news.
This is indeed an intimidating figure, and it makes me wonder if Microsoft is evening running BSD4.2 lint on its code, but I still may upgrade the Windows clients on this network to Win2k. Frankly, if it is somewhat more stable than 95 (these machines are still running disparate versions of 95), I would be pleased. I am told it has a telnet server, which would make life far more pleasant for me.
Besides, they're all sitting behind an OpenBSD firewall which is set up in 'high paranoia' mode and patched regularly. For any system that is important, there is not a chance I will 'graze my sheep on the lord's land instead of the commons' as it were.
Slashdot Mirror
The second review is closer to the fact of this book. 'Stranger in a Strange Land' is always held up as an example of Heinlein's work, and I must wonder why. As Byron is remembered for his bad poetry, so Heinlein is remembered for his worst book. I should know: I own almost everything he wrote. The nitpicker in my demands that I point out that Jubal Harshaw is not Lazarus Long: he is one of the protagonists from 'The Cat That Walks Through Walls' (a mediocre book), and shows up again in the late fiction such as 'To Sail Beyond the Sunset' and 'The Number of the Beast'. Heinlein's best book is 'The Past Through Tomorrow' - his collected future history stories. These are delightful, and though his technical concepts are heavily simplified. Let us maintain our perspective: Heinlein was one of the better authors of the golden age of science fiction. He was not on the level of Stanley G. Weinbaum, and certainly was not among the greats (for a philosophical book, try Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End' - if you can find it). When you are tired and want something that you can read easily in a few hours, turn to Heinlein or someone on his level. When seriously reading, read the really fine authors: Homer, Ovid, Dante, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Ford, Stevenson, Poe...the list goes on and on, and will easily fill several lifetimes.
I will reserve all opinion on this topic, as I am not yet of an age to vote, nor consider myself wise enough or well informed enough at the moment to have a useful outlook. Yet, there are two points I would like people to keep in mind:
There is a scrap of verse from earlier in this century: "The center cannot hold. The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Besides that, remember that the government has no money and money is intrinsically worthless. The government has only that money which it can extort from you, no more, and anything that tries to say otherwise is juggling the books - something that is considered very dishonest among accountants. Money has no value except that confidence we have in it. If I issue twenty muduli, self minted, in exchange for a wheel of cheese, you are unlikely to accept the transaction, and yet it is just as real as the dollar or the franc or any other value abstraction. The only difference is the reputation of the issuer, and people's confidence in it. Think about this when you listen to all the plans for moving around small green pieces of paper.
And of course, having used that expression, remember Douglas Adams' words, "Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
This is a bit off topic, but it just hit me: pinball has one of the greatest domain specific interfaces ever developed. The basic setup is three controls: the launcher handle, and two flipper buttons. Some replace the handle with a button, add start buttons, and additional flipper controls, but if you have a vague idea what the game does, the interface is almost transparent.
Tis sad they are dying...pinball didn't leave your eyes aching. Of course, I'm on one to talk, since I spend orders of magnitude more time playing pinball than computer games: almost none, any way you cut it.
One of the more bizarre changes in society has been that of how the majority of the population views money. Currency, by definition, is an attempt to abstract the value of commodities and services. Yet today accumulation of small green pieces of paper has become an end unto itself instead of a means to an end. I am sure I am not the only one that finds this odd.
The above is perfectly reasonble. Now for a hairbrained idea that occurred to me one evening: does the inflation of currency have something to do with the change in perception of money? When a nickel was decent money for a kid, children were still used to thinking in terms of solid objects (paper money doesn't seem nearly as solid as a slug of nickel). Thus a nickel was itself as much an object of interest as, say, the dead rat and piece of string you traded it for...or somewhat less so.
Thinking about it, I don't support that many huge corporations. The only television station I get (the television itself something I could do without) is PBS. Our power is from a semi-local power company. My computer parts are almost entirely Taiwanese generic. My stereo is Sony, but that's the most name brand item in my house. We are stuck with Sprint on the telephone, but I am looking into Internet Telephony now. Besides that, I don't think that there is a huge monopolistic corporation behind reprints of Ford and Camus; books are my major acquisition these days.
Food is still a problem in this light. We have a large garden, but our meat comes from the stores (thankfully there's a very good butcher at the local supermarket), as do our assorted canned goods.
Katz is ranting against corporations. May I point out another target to rant about: the stock market. Particularly the technology stocks. The price to earnings ratios for most of these companies is absurd, which means that shares in them are purely speculation, not investment. The corporation is meant as a way of spreading risk and potential gain in a venture around. Thus having a stock valued more than the proceeds of a company doesn't make much sense. It is merely a gambling house.
I recognize the above comment as flamebait, but it does spark one interesting notion in my mind...
RMS is not denouncing capitalism. He is not advocating socialism. Capitalism the law of supply and demand as the altering factor in the economy. If you want to compare the folks RMS is denouncing with anyone, probably Nazi Germany or Fascist Spain is a better analogy. Both practiced largescale censorship and central planning and control. Just these companies are enforcing it through strongarm legal methods instead of strongarm physics methods. Essentially we are looking at psychological vs. physical terrorism.
I have never read anything involving RMS that would indicate he is so soft in the head as to be a socialist. Instead, he is more akin to the philosophes of the 18th century in mindset. Is this so bad a heritage? The 18th century was one of the high points of civilized thought and ideas.
And now back to listening to Mahler's 4th symphony in mp3...
The Gazette, the little local newspaper, shows up once a day, and we all glance at it just to make sure the First Baptist Church of Galax hasn't published our name on their lynching list, but generally we don't read it.
On the other hand, once a week the Economist shows up. They still claim to be a newspaper, even though they use a format that makes really lousy herring-wrapper (but a lot of newspapers aren't much use for that or starting fires anymore). When it arrives, the entire family goes into hunter mode trying to get it first to read. Why?
The Economist is generally readable (their English isn't nearly as abominable as what many American newspapers publish). They don't bore their readers with descriptions of the latest scandal at the Whitehouse in America or in Buckingham Palace in England or the Sultan's Harem in wherever. They talk about economic state, politics, wars, and major legal battles. Their technology section isn't very large but it generally has something interesting.
Why is my family so much more enthusiastic about the Economist than the NYT or the Globe? Because we don't care what little scandal has cropped up in America. There is a lot more to the world, and until large newspapers get themselves focused correctly, and go back to printing sheets that are useful as herring-wrapper and fire-starter, the Economist remains our newspaper of choice. Let's keep the world in scale: America is just one of many countries, English is one of many languages, and there's a lot more to the news than what's going on in this country.
Someone is bound to point out that there is a version of the Economist online that you can access with your Economist subscription. That's fine and dandy, and it means I can send a really good article to my friends more easily, but the printed paper is far more pleasant to read. It's hard to put a monitor down next to your bowl of soup at lunch or curl up with it at night.
What should newspapers do to try to improve circulation? Report what's going on in the world instead of what the government feeds to them to publish, stop giving frontpage coverage to scandals with public officials that are no one's business but those involved, and maybe have an interesting technology column once in a while. Inevitably the newspaper will not be the center of technology news. It traditionally has focused on political and economic news. While these topics are becoming ever more closely linked to technology in many areas, there is still a large difference between technology news and political news.
This is indeed an intimidating figure, and it makes me wonder if Microsoft is evening running BSD4.2 lint on its code, but I still may upgrade the Windows clients on this network to Win2k. Frankly, if it is somewhat more stable than 95 (these machines are still running disparate versions of 95), I would be pleased. I am told it has a telnet server, which would make life far more pleasant for me.
Besides, they're all sitting behind an OpenBSD firewall which is set up in 'high paranoia' mode and patched regularly. For any system that is important, there is not a chance I will 'graze my sheep on the lord's land instead of the commons' as it were.
And now back to reading...