Folks either have really short memories, or else it goes to show the young age of most Slashdot readers, but these same exact complaints about poor ol' unemployable white collar workers were being made in '93,'94 as the U.S. was coming out of another (mild) recession following (another) war with Iraq. The figure of the IBM executive whose COBOL programming skills are no longer valued and has to go to a C++ training class (now it would be Java, I guess) with pimply-faced teenagers has alredy appeared before in Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs" (published in '96, but written around '94/'95). Sure hope Mr. COBOL-programming IBM executive didn't hang himself as the economic misery increased in the late '90's:P . Now where's my day-trading account...
2) They have a... homogeneous work force
In that they have a 99% literacy rate, while the U.S. has 97% (what a joke!
You're still skirting the issue, though, which is that Sweden is almost 100% lily-white. Try letting in 1 million immigrants/year from mostly third world countries (and that's just the legal ones) and your cherry-picked stats will not fare so well.
Sweden is basically comparable in most social indicators to a big suburb of Minneapolis and just as boring. I'd rather take the diversity and vitality of the rest of America (along with the higher crime rates and greater disclocation it produces) than be stuck with the safe but mediocre and bland culture of Sweden. The world's most famous athlete is always an African-American (Muhammed Ali, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods). Well, Sweden's got Annika Sorenstam. America has produced jazz, blues, rock, and rap. Sweden has got... well, ABBA and Ace of Bace to its credit.
This is definitely NOT a childrens book. It is absolutely crammed with in-jokes that are firmly directed at linguists and philologists and other academics.
I agree, and one of the delights of the book is how learned it is. For example, the proper names of both Farmer Giles and the King are given in Latin, with the latter having something like 8 honorific components. Only someone as erudite as Tolkien would know that during the time depicted in the story- between Rome's withdrawl from Britain in the 400's AD and the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon conquest- Latin would have been used by the island's Romanized inhabitants. Too bad most other fantasy/medieval fiction does not get into this sort of detail and so has about as much depth as something commissioned by TSR.
Yeah, I've heard of this book but have yet to read it. And speaking of Jared Diamond, isn't it pretty weird how he resembles the bassist for the Folksmen:
I second that, and also want to say that some of the game mechanics influenced my thoughts about history and technological development. For example, starting off geographically isolated (i.e. on a small island) with no other civs to trade technologies with is a sure fire recipe for falling behind.
If you look at actual history, though, you can use this game mechanic to explain why certain real-world civilizations were also technologically primitive without resorting to un-PC speculation about inherent cultural/intellectual inferiority. For example, both New World Indians (no wheel, no metallurgy) and sub-Saharan Africans (no writing) were technologically backwards b/c they were isolated from the technology swapping that was going on between the various Eurasian civilizations.
I went to a Michael Chabon booksigning last year and must say that, in addition to being a terrrific writer, he's a very sweet guy. Working as a novelist is an inherently isolating experience, and so I was heartened to learn that this youngish man (I guess he's in his mid-30's now) has 4 children already. Not that there's anything noble about having a large family in and of itself, but I take it as a good sign that someone with lots of kids can't be too selfish and wrapped up in themselves (which is unfortunately the case with most writers).
Towards the end of the event he told us an anecdote about losing a child to miscarriage, and how in the aftermath of that misfortune he was lying in bed with his youngest son, stroking his hair and painfully aware of how precious he was. His son, completely unaware of his father's tenderness just then, looked up at him and said:
I smell STINKY. Stinky's up your nose!!
Hey, I heard the Japan Prize for Best Album went to Duran Duran's Rio.
Actually, the nobels are delayed significantly, too. The reason is so important scientific discoveries can be repeated and verified with a high degree of certainty. The extended time period also allows the awards committees to more appropriately gague the significance and impact of a piece of research.
So mixing analogies from the original post, the delay is so that the Nobel commitee does not give an award to the physics equivalent of Toto or Milli Vanilli.
Recently I picked up the term "retro-tech sci-fi", which refers to science fiction written 20-30 years ago which, while able to imagine super-science technology in some areas like faster than light drives, contra-gravity devices, etc., was completely blind to possible advances in other areas, and so either has technology that's actually more primitive than our own (the room-sized computer in 2001 the movie) or technology that's completey missing, like nano-tech, genetic egineering, etc.
That's why I would say Alastair Reynolds sounds like he's writing retro-tech, since why do we need
cryogenic suspension if we can simply send shapeships with robots that bio-engineer colonists using genemap databases and some basic chemical compounds once the ship arrives near a habitable world? More to the point, lots of the difficulties in space travel come from accomdating the needs of a human biology that evolved under Earth's particular conditions. Would it not make more sense to bio-engineer human astronauts so they don't need things like simulated gravity?
Slashdot Mirror
Folks either have really short memories, or else it goes to show the young age of most Slashdot readers, but these same exact complaints about poor ol' unemployable white collar workers were being made in '93,'94 as the U.S. was coming out of another (mild) recession following (another) war with Iraq. The figure of the IBM executive whose COBOL programming skills are no longer valued and has to go to a C++ training class (now it would be Java, I guess) with pimply-faced teenagers has alredy appeared before in Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs" (published in '96, but written around '94/'95). Sure hope Mr. COBOL-programming IBM executive didn't hang himself as the economic misery increased in the late '90's :P . Now where's my day-trading account...
You're still skirting the issue, though, which is that Sweden is almost 100% lily-white. Try letting in 1 million immigrants/year from mostly third world countries (and that's just the legal ones) and your cherry-picked stats will not fare so well.
Sweden is basically comparable in most social indicators to a big suburb of Minneapolis and just as boring. I'd rather take the diversity and vitality of the rest of America (along with the higher crime rates and greater disclocation it produces) than be stuck with the safe but mediocre and bland culture of Sweden. The world's most famous athlete is always an African-American (Muhammed Ali, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods). Well, Sweden's got Annika Sorenstam. America has produced jazz, blues, rock, and rap. Sweden has got... well, ABBA and Ace of Bace to its credit.
If you look at actual history, though, you can use this game mechanic to explain why certain real-world civilizations were also technologically primitive without resorting to un-PC speculation about inherent cultural/intellectual inferiority. For example, both New World Indians (no wheel, no metallurgy) and sub-Saharan Africans (no writing) were technologically backwards b/c they were isolated from the technology swapping that was going on between the various Eurasian civilizations.
Towards the end of the event he told us an anecdote about losing a child to miscarriage, and how in the aftermath of that misfortune he was lying in bed with his youngest son, stroking his hair and painfully aware of how precious he was. His son, completely unaware of his father's tenderness just then, looked up at him and said: I smell STINKY. Stinky's up your nose!!
That's why I would say Alastair Reynolds sounds like he's writing retro-tech, since why do we need cryogenic suspension if we can simply send shapeships with robots that bio-engineer colonists using genemap databases and some basic chemical compounds once the ship arrives near a habitable world? More to the point, lots of the difficulties in space travel come from accomdating the needs of a human biology that evolved under Earth's particular conditions. Would it not make more sense to bio-engineer human astronauts so they don't need things like simulated gravity?