Re:Ummm Hello
on
King Rat
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It's not just a Disney thing. Stories for or about children usually start by freeing the child from the presence of the parents. At least if the parents are the sort who do their job - which is to protect their kids from the sorts of dangerous and traumatic events that make for really good stories:-)
The fish out of water is one of the most common storytelling tropes. One of the first things the author has to do is remove the water.
Re:Not to be confused with
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 1
A correction here. Clavell's King Rat has nothing to do with Shogun. The latter is set in, what, 17th or 18th century Japan. The former takes place in a POW camp in Malaysia or Indonesia during the Second World War.
The only similarities are that there are Japanese characters and both are by the same author.
More in this vein
on
King Rat
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been a fan of China Mieville since his now-impossible-to-find story "The Tain". He's part of a non-movement in F&SF which owes a lot to Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and similar. Largely British, mostly urban, and set in worlds where reality's gears are missing a few teeth.
If you like King Rat you'll probably enjoy his other books (Perdido Street Station and The Scar) and books by authors like...
Tim Powers, Jeff Vandermeer, Ian MacLeod, Neil Gaiman, Johnathan Carroll, Alan Moore, M. John Harrison, Forrest Aguirre, Jeffrey Ford, and Jasper Fforde. Mary Gentle, Gene Wolfe, and Borges will almost certainly also appeal.
And of course, if you have $200 just lying around doing nothing you will want to get a copy of the Codex Serafinianus just to squick yourself.
Some of the states don't have SLAPP laws or at least only weak ones.
The food defamation thing is the law.
The Biggie The law is what you can afford. Monsanto can afford an awful lot more law at $100/hour than Ma and Pa Kettle's dairy can. It's worth it to them strategically to defend their product line and business models.
The oil companies outlawing bicycles? Pretty close, actually. There's a haphazard international collection of activists called "Critical Mass" which has the naive idea that everyone would be better off if people ditched their cars and rode bikes. Periodically, they get together and ride bikes in large numbers in the hopes that it will create a "Critical Mass" of bicyclists.
Response from business and law enforcement in the US is swift, harsh and unrelenting. In my own city the usual official descriptions range from "Communist" and "anarchist" (neat trick, that) to "terrorist". Lots of police presence, lots of arrests, lost of MJTF Homeland Security money going to keep them from riding bikes without at least one police officer per bicycle rider.
Food defamation laws are now routine. To say anything that would disparage food products or production is a crime in most states. It's not just "I don't like broccoli". Dairies have been shut down through legal pressure because they stated that their milk was free of BGH. Monsanto contended that simply saying that disparaged and defamed anyone who used BGH. Complain about the horrendously unsanitary conditions on the huge industrial hog farms? You could end up in court if you make noise anyone hears.
Yes, Virginia, that really is the way business is run these days.
The powers that be do not like even the possibility of dissent. Milton Friedman said during the first Bush Administration that one of the great advances was that nobody could even conceive of alternatives.
I do, at least semi-regularly. You have to understand, these guys are Business Fundamentalists. If someone is making a buck off of it it is GOOD. Anything including laws, divine revelation or public opprobrium that interferes with this is BAD.
Consider their audience. The people who read Forbes are business people. They like it when they and people like them are praised and dislike the people who get in their way, just like the rest of us. So Forbes prints articles which damn anything that is "bad for Bidness" (any Bidness).
Every year the folks who put out The Annals of Improbable Research, formerly The Journal of Irreproducible Results, formerly The Worm Runner's Digest hands out ten IgNobel Prizes for scientific achievements "which can not or should not be repeated". It's sort of a Feast of Misrule for science.
If they can give an Ig for the first MRI images showing conclusively how men and women's bits fit together during coitus and a scientific study on the optimal way to dunk a biscuit in coffee, then by G-d this deserves one too!
I had trouble with just this a few years ago. My wife and I were writing an interdisciplinary article for a journal. It included references from education, psychology, criminology, victimology, women's studies, martial arts and a couple other fields.
The paper took an extra year to be published because the editors couldn't find any reviewers who were
Qualified to referee the paper
Familiar with enough of the fields referenced
Not authors of papers referenced in the piece
It is to the credit of the potential reviewers and the staff at the journal that they took the time and care on this.
That's exactly how Sokal did his experiment. Anyone who knew anything about science or who even asked a scientist "What the flerp is this guy talking about?" would have seen the article for the steaming pile of unprocessed effluent that it was.
The editors didn't. Instead they went with the warm fuzzies that the reference list and conclusion gave them.
A nice piece of sophistry. However, when the hoax was exposed the editors of Social Text didn't take it so philosophically. They had, and there's no polite way to put this, a s**t hemmorage. They accused Sokal of mopery and dopery and aggravated intention to loiter. They claimed that he was really a right winger and that his volunteer work in Nicaragua was a lie.
Like most stuffed shirts they didn't handle looking foolish very well.
As the author of the piece points out there is a germ of something useful in lit-crit. It's important to know what someone's hidden assumptions are and to figure out what's not being said.
In science hidden assumptions can bite you on the ass. Let's take an example from biology. Strict Darwinian "wedging" or Biblical Creationism. Those are the choices. Given the amount of time that life has existed you simply can't have two species competing in the same niche. The better, fitter one would have already driven the more poorly adapted one to extinction. Therefore we must reject evolution in favor of the Bible's explanation.
Anyone who understands anything about basic evolutionary biology will immediately be able to poke large holes in the argument. The dualism is false. There are many other possibilities. Strict adaptationism, while not actually a crime, is certainly a major character flaw:-) Applying value judgements like "better" clouds the issue, and so on.
The history of science and engineering provides thousands of examples.
What is not said and what is assumed change the character of the discussion.
That's the useful germ. The problem, as the author of the piece points out, is that the critical theorists have spent a long time talking to themselves without having to interact much with outsiders and in fields where there are no reality checks from the outside.
You can find it, but it will cost you about US$200. Amazon, eBay, a number of used and rare booksellers. I think it is still published from time to time.
The author, Luigi Serafini, has written a similarly strange book on puppet theater. No words. Just very surreal pictures that begin to make sense if you look at them long enough.
If a criminal is attacking you right now a cell phone is mostly useful as a second-rate bludgeon. Or maybe, with phones getting so small these days, you could get him to swallow it and use it as a tracking device:-/
But being able to call emergency services can be very important in the phases leading up to an attack. It can also be helpful for witnesses who can't get physically involved to summon the police or ambulance. This changes all that.
I see it as most frightening in cases where the attacker has a lot personally invested in the crime. The abusive ex. The stalker. The dangerously obsessed. In those cases, where the defender needs every available resource, the sudden disappearance of an important tool can be a matter of life and death. We've already seen stalkers use GPS transponders to track their ex girlfriends' cars. So there are at least a few geeks gone bad out there.
I'm afraid I don't have any solutions. These things are already illegal to use. Any thoughts on what a prospective victim or the authorities can do? And yes, I've already factored in "Have a gun." It's not an option for everyone. It is only part of the soluation when it is.
But there already is such a levy. I forget exactly how much. The money collected goes to the music labels precisely to compensate them for content copied to the medium. If we were being consistent there would be a choice - DRM or levy, not both.
Not really. An MRI scanner uses fields of about 2 TESLA. That's tens of thousands of times as strong as the Earth's magnetic field. It doesn't make your blood boil through hysterisis or anything like that.
I would dearly love it if *just for one day*, the entire nation could say "screw it" to capitalism and spend time with their families
Ask, and ye shall receive. AdBusters has been sponsoring "Buy Nothing Day" for years now.
It is considered such a threat to the American Way of Life(tm) that the local (Portland, OR) police turn out by the score to prevent people from celebrating it anywhere near the downtown business district. I'm serious. Riot gear, dozens of arrests, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the whole thing. Just to keep people from saying "Ditch the consumerism for twenty four hours just one day a year."
If you want to really get back to basics (the Sun comes up, blood on the snow, everyone thankful the longest night has passed) I can't recommend Terry Pratchett's Hogfather highly enough. My wife reads it every year and has to be physically restrained from tearing down the October Christmas displays in the local stores. What he does to Santa in the Mall is a true joy to the spirit and will make you lose bladder control laughing.
The choclate brain was cute. But the people at SciAm, as Maxwell Smart would have said, "Missed it by that much." There was a perfectly good choclate heart right there on the same site. Which gift would have more wow-factor? Especially left on your sweetie's doorstep in a little puddle of chocolate sauce?
The "IIS on Linux" claim could be one of three things:
A mistake on netcraft's part
A White House sysadmin using Codeweavers
A clever admin who is making his OS or his web server or both masquerade as something else. It's a pretty common technique to make the crackers' and script kiddies' jobs just a little harder
I would have to add a couple comments here. "Good Book" is a good start, but "Why this is a good book" is useful, too.
Consider a possibly significant piece of information. I am fortunate enough to live in Portland, Oregon, the home of Powell's bookstore. The technical bookstore alone is a cavern covering most of a city block. The main store is three stories tall and does cover a whole block. There are always lots of new copies of Tufte's stuff on the shelves. I have almost never seen a used copy. People buy his work and hang on to it. Anyhow....
TVDoQI, Visual Explanations, and Enivisioning Information are a lot more than how to draw useful graphs. They explain, in some detail, how to communicate potentially complex information succinctly, elegantly and understandably. They also provide excellent heuristics for detecting bad graphical representations and ways of determining when someone is trying to lie to you with pictures. The only books which come close are Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy for argument and How to Lie With Statistics for statistical skullduggery.
Tufte uses many different styles and examples and arranges them in ways which expand the reader's view of what can be shown as well as how to do it.
I just got a copy of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint and am very impressed. He lays out very clearly its inherent and possibly insoluble problems vis a vis information density, the abomination that is the content wizard and the colorful graphing tools which hide more than they show. He's on slightly less solid ground with the cognitive style and "straitjacket" comments; they are generally true but not necessarily so.
He's got a website where you can buy his books, monographs, posters, graph paper, and even a quarter million dollar sculpture.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just a Disney thing. Stories for or about children usually start by freeing the child from the presence of the parents. At least if the parents are the sort who do their job - which is to protect their kids from the sorts of dangerous and traumatic events that make for really good stories :-)
The fish out of water is one of the most common storytelling tropes. One of the first things the author has to do is remove the water.
A correction here. Clavell's King Rat has nothing to do with Shogun. The latter is set in, what, 17th or 18th century Japan. The former takes place in a POW camp in Malaysia or Indonesia during the Second World War.
The only similarities are that there are Japanese characters and both are by the same author.
I've been a fan of China Mieville since his now-impossible-to-find story "The Tain". He's part of a non-movement in F&SF which owes a lot to Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and similar. Largely British, mostly urban, and set in worlds where reality's gears are missing a few teeth.
If you like King Rat you'll probably enjoy his other books (Perdido Street Station and The Scar) and books by authors like...
Tim Powers, Jeff Vandermeer, Ian MacLeod, Neil Gaiman, Johnathan Carroll, Alan Moore, M. John Harrison, Forrest Aguirre, Jeffrey Ford, and Jasper Fforde. Mary Gentle, Gene Wolfe, and Borges will almost certainly also appeal.
And of course, if you have $200 just lying around doing nothing you will want to get a copy of the Codex Serafinianus just to squick yourself.
The oil companies outlawing bicycles? Pretty close, actually. There's a haphazard international collection of activists called "Critical Mass" which has the naive idea that everyone would be better off if people ditched their cars and rode bikes. Periodically, they get together and ride bikes in large numbers in the hopes that it will create a "Critical Mass" of bicyclists.
Response from business and law enforcement in the US is swift, harsh and unrelenting. In my own city the usual official descriptions range from "Communist" and "anarchist" (neat trick, that) to "terrorist". Lots of police presence, lots of arrests, lost of MJTF Homeland Security money going to keep them from riding bikes without at least one police officer per bicycle rider.
Food defamation laws are now routine. To say anything that would disparage food products or production is a crime in most states. It's not just "I don't like broccoli". Dairies have been shut down through legal pressure because they stated that their milk was free of BGH. Monsanto contended that simply saying that disparaged and defamed anyone who used BGH. Complain about the horrendously unsanitary conditions on the huge industrial hog farms? You could end up in court if you make noise anyone hears.
Yes, Virginia, that really is the way business is run these days.
The powers that be do not like even the possibility of dissent. Milton Friedman said during the first Bush Administration that one of the great advances was that nobody could even conceive of alternatives.
Say "BSD", please. If you say "UNIX" SCO will sue Apple and Darl McBride will institute "introductory" OSX license pricing of $1000 a seat.
I do, at least semi-regularly. You have to understand, these guys are Business Fundamentalists. If someone is making a buck off of it it is GOOD. Anything including laws, divine revelation or public opprobrium that interferes with this is BAD.
Consider their audience. The people who read Forbes are business people. They like it when they and people like them are praised and dislike the people who get in their way, just like the rest of us. So Forbes prints articles which damn anything that is "bad for Bidness" (any Bidness).
Every year the folks who put out The Annals of Improbable Research , formerly The Journal of Irreproducible Results, formerly The Worm Runner's Digest hands out ten IgNobel Prizes for scientific achievements "which can not or should not be repeated". It's sort of a Feast of Misrule for science.
If they can give an Ig for the first MRI images showing conclusively how men and women's bits fit together during coitus and a scientific study on the optimal way to dunk a biscuit in coffee, then by G-d this deserves one too!
The paper took an extra year to be published because the editors couldn't find any reviewers who were
It is to the credit of the potential reviewers and the staff at the journal that they took the time and care on this.
That's exactly how Sokal did his experiment. Anyone who knew anything about science or who even asked a scientist "What the flerp is this guy talking about?" would have seen the article for the steaming pile of unprocessed effluent that it was.
The editors didn't. Instead they went with the warm fuzzies that the reference list and conclusion gave them.
A nice piece of sophistry. However, when the hoax was exposed the editors of Social Text didn't take it so philosophically. They had, and there's no polite way to put this, a s**t hemmorage. They accused Sokal of mopery and dopery and aggravated intention to loiter. They claimed that he was really a right winger and that his volunteer work in Nicaragua was a lie.
Like most stuffed shirts they didn't handle looking foolish very well.
As the author of the piece points out there is a germ of something useful in lit-crit. It's important to know what someone's hidden assumptions are and to figure out what's not being said.
:-) Applying value judgements like "better" clouds the issue, and so on.
In science hidden assumptions can bite you on the ass. Let's take an example from biology. Strict Darwinian "wedging" or Biblical Creationism. Those are the choices. Given the amount of time that life has existed you simply can't have two species competing in the same niche. The better, fitter one would have already driven the more poorly adapted one to extinction. Therefore we must reject evolution in favor of the Bible's explanation.
Anyone who understands anything about basic evolutionary biology will immediately be able to poke large holes in the argument. The dualism is false. There are many other possibilities. Strict adaptationism, while not actually a crime, is certainly a major character flaw
The history of science and engineering provides thousands of examples.
What is not said and what is assumed change the character of the discussion.
That's the useful germ. The problem, as the author of the piece points out, is that the critical theorists have spent a long time talking to themselves without having to interact much with outsiders and in fields where there are no reality checks from the outside.
You can find it, but it will cost you about US$200. Amazon, eBay, a number of used and rare booksellers. I think it is still published from time to time.
The author, Luigi Serafini, has written a similarly strange book on puppet theater. No words. Just very surreal pictures that begin to make sense if you look at them long enough.
If a criminal is attacking you right now a cell phone is mostly useful as a second-rate bludgeon. Or maybe, with phones getting so small these days, you could get him to swallow it and use it as a tracking device :-/
But being able to call emergency services can be very important in the phases leading up to an attack. It can also be helpful for witnesses who can't get physically involved to summon the police or ambulance. This changes all that.
I see it as most frightening in cases where the attacker has a lot personally invested in the crime. The abusive ex. The stalker. The dangerously obsessed. In those cases, where the defender needs every available resource, the sudden disappearance of an important tool can be a matter of life and death. We've already seen stalkers use GPS transponders to track their ex girlfriends' cars. So there are at least a few geeks gone bad out there.
I'm afraid I don't have any solutions. These things are already illegal to use. Any thoughts on what a prospective victim or the authorities can do? And yes, I've already factored in "Have a gun." It's not an option for everyone. It is only part of the soluation when it is.
But there already is such a levy. I forget exactly how much. The money collected goes to the music labels precisely to compensate them for content copied to the medium. If we were being consistent there would be a choice - DRM or levy, not both.
Not really. An MRI scanner uses fields of about 2 TESLA. That's tens of thousands of times as strong as the Earth's magnetic field. It doesn't make your blood boil through hysterisis or anything like that.
According to SCO's own SEC filings software and services are no longer their core business, litigation is. So Novell can't be competing with them.
Hammer.
Nail.
Bang.
Then the junior members of the board will stage a mutiny and send the good ship SCO back to port.
[For those who are scratching their heads we're talking about the classic film The Caine Mutiny.]
I would dearly love it if *just for one day*, the entire nation could say "screw it" to capitalism and spend time with their families
Ask, and ye shall receive. AdBusters has been sponsoring "Buy Nothing Day" for years now.
It is considered such a threat to the American Way of Life(tm) that the local (Portland, OR) police turn out by the score to prevent people from celebrating it anywhere near the downtown business district. I'm serious. Riot gear, dozens of arrests, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the whole thing. Just to keep people from saying "Ditch the consumerism for twenty four hours just one day a year."
An excellent policy.
If you want to really get back to basics (the Sun comes up, blood on the snow, everyone thankful the longest night has passed) I can't recommend Terry Pratchett's Hogfather highly enough. My wife reads it every year and has to be physically restrained from tearing down the October Christmas displays in the local stores. What he does to Santa in the Mall is a true joy to the spirit and will make you lose bladder control laughing.
Wired lost its mojo about the time it was bought by Conde Nast.
The choclate brain was cute. But the people at SciAm, as Maxwell Smart would have said, "Missed it by that much." There was a perfectly good choclate heart right there on the same site. Which gift would have more wow-factor? Especially left on your sweetie's doorstep in a little puddle of chocolate sauce?
Close. They've already called the Linux, Open Source, and Free Software movements "communists".
I would have to add a couple comments here. "Good Book" is a good start, but "Why this is a good book" is useful, too.
Consider a possibly significant piece of information. I am fortunate enough to live in Portland, Oregon, the home of Powell's bookstore. The technical bookstore alone is a cavern covering most of a city block. The main store is three stories tall and does cover a whole block. There are always lots of new copies of Tufte's stuff on the shelves. I have almost never seen a used copy. People buy his work and hang on to it. Anyhow....
TVDoQI, Visual Explanations, and Enivisioning Information are a lot more than how to draw useful graphs. They explain, in some detail, how to communicate potentially complex information succinctly, elegantly and understandably. They also provide excellent heuristics for detecting bad graphical representations and ways of determining when someone is trying to lie to you with pictures. The only books which come close are Schopenhauer's The Art of Controversy for argument and How to Lie With Statistics for statistical skullduggery.
Tufte uses many different styles and examples and arranges them in ways which expand the reader's view of what can be shown as well as how to do it.
I just got a copy of The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint and am very impressed. He lays out very clearly its inherent and possibly insoluble problems vis a vis information density, the abomination that is the content wizard and the colorful graphing tools which hide more than they show. He's on slightly less solid ground with the cognitive style and "straitjacket" comments; they are generally true but not necessarily so.
He's got a website where you can buy his books, monographs, posters, graph paper, and even a quarter million dollar sculpture.