April 2008 Archives

Seen via Yahoo! News:

ATHENS, Greece - A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world's gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos — home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women — have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

[...]

"My sister can't say she is a Lesbian," said Dimitris Lambrou. "Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos," he said.

It puts me in mind of the old story of the Red Cross Inn, except of course this is the other way around:

While I was at University in Lancaster, the International Committee of the Red Cross was having a campaign to stop other organisations using the name 'red cross' and served a 'cease and desist' notice on the Red Cross Inn in Lancaster. The innkeeper turned round and pointed out that the Red Cross Inn (founded, like most other pubs of the same name, by a returning crusader) had been trading under that name for more than seven hundred and fifty years, and politely asked how long they'd been using it. The ICRC retired hurt.

   -- Simon Brooke

And one does have to admit that the islanders do have priority of claim to the word, by, oh, 3000 years or so.  Meanwhile, I think I'll let the National Review have the last word:

Lawyers in Gay, Michigan will be watching the case with interest.

And next in my book-reading, this science fiction work from Greg Bear, set in the same universe downtime from Queen of Angels and Slant, or / (as the cover of my copy would have it).

An enjoyable story, all told; Moving Mars is the first-person autobiography of Casseia Majumdar, the scion of one of Mars's oldest extended families-slash-business syndicates, who gets caught up in Martian politics - both internal and interplanetary - through the frontier society of Mars's first attempts to form a state, up through their final unification and breakaway from an Earth increasingly determined to control both the planet, and the uses of the new theory of physics (rather like some of the ideas explored in his Anvil of Stars, I note) discovered there... and when I say breakaway, I mean breakaway.

Starts slowly, for the first, oh, two-thirds of the book, and I still haven't decided whether that's a bad thing or a good thing.  I'm inclined to think it's mostly the latter, since it accelerates to a jolly good climax at the end, and that itself wouldn't have been nearly as good had we not spent the first two-thirds getting to know the characters well, but it does make it slow to start, which may be offputting.

Good politics, with a nice balance between idealism and realism.  Lots of plausible future world-depth and developments.  Interesting characters.  I don't think it's one of Mr. Bear's best books - compared to Eon or Queen of Angels, for example - but it's certainly worth reading, I think.

It would be ever so much more pleasing if glottal actually were pronounced glot'l.

Kindly make it so.

This is Tony Zirkle:

As you can see, and with a click-through read, Tony Zirkle is an utter shit.  At best, he's a complete goddamned moron, assuming you are willing to credit him with that much.  Frankly, I'm not, so I'm going to stick with utter shit.

Unfortunately, he's also an utter shit who's managed to wangle himself onto the ballot for the Republican primary in the Indiana 2nd District, as one of three candidates.  Not that this is a very high bar to pass, and the sane voters of said District have already rejected him twice, so it's unlikely to mean anything in practice, at least.

But I'm not going to talk about that.

I'm going to try and head something off at the pass, because I can already hear the beginnings of a tremendous avalanche of unseemly gloating.  Let's just remember that every political organization has its extremist shits to bear.  Among others, the Republicans are assigned the Nazis.  You guys over in the Democratic seats get the Marxists, the Maoists, the Leninists, and all those fuckwits who think Che Guevara was cool.  If we start playing the game of whose extremist shits du jour were eviller (answer: no contest) or killed, maimed, tyrannized, oppressed, etc. the most people so we can tar everyone with their brush, no-one's going to win that game, and it's a bloody stupid game anyway, even if played by that gloriously nonexistent political party that is entirely scheissenfrei.

Let's not.

Instead, let's concentrate on the important thing: Tony Zirkle is an utter shit.

Apparently, the EU have now passed a regulation requiring that all bagpipes be limited to 85 dB, no more.

Quoth one Scot I have heard, "Och, shove it up yer arse, ye pack of Froggy bastards."

A most appropriate and well-measured response, I should think.  Well said, sir.

One of the more unusual books I've received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, I must not have been paying too much attention when doing the requesting that month (or at least, I failed to click on the "show rest" button in which this was revealed) - while easily enticed by Classical settings, specifically Christian historical fiction is perhaps not part of my usual taste.

Anyway, having received the book, I figured I'd read it anyway, because I have occasionally had some luck reading outside my usual genres.  (And also, to be honest, I was quite curious as to how one might manage to write Christian historical fiction set in 277 BC.)

So, enough background.  Alas, I was somewhat disappointed by the book, but not in the way that I expected.  While the Christian theological message was there - through the mouths of the Jewish characters, actually, and shaped thereby - it was put gently enough to not offend this atheist (which I wasn't actually expecting, not being a particularly "anti" atheist), and for that matter to distorting the entire plot only somewhat out of shape, rather than ludicrously out of shape (which I have seen frustratingly often).  The main problems I had were much more conventional ones, principally concerning the characters being regrettably flat in places not required by the plot, and the plot itself being rather predictable.  Essentially, I'd recommend this more as a book for a rather younger reading level than "mainstream".

Additionally, I don't think the author takes sufficient advantage of the setting; given a series of books based around the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and especially one as gorgeous as Rhodes in the days of the Colossus, with the complexities of Classical Greek culture (and, too, my inner Classicist did twitch at times), paganism, and the relationships between Greeks and Jews in the eastern Mediterranean, there's just so much that the author could have used and didn't.  A sad waste of book-potential, if one asks me.

But then, as I said, I'm not exactly the target audience here.

(Context here.)

Enough with the "bodily autonomy" argument, already, as applied to any group larger than the individual assertion thereof.

Plenty of people believe in bodily autonomy, or the even stronger corporal self-ownership.  I adhere to the latter myself.  However, as an argument on the anti- side of this debate, it fails.  Simply because autonomy is exactly that - you can do whatever the hell you want with your body, by virtue of that status.  You want to assert the right of bodily autonomy to not participate, that's just fine, but the people on the other side of the argument can turn around and assert it for themselves, because who the bloody hell are you to tell them what they may or may not do with their own bodies, which are theirs to use as they will, etc., and they'll be right, because you'll be infringing on their right of bodily autonomy.

There are plenty of decent counterarguments to be made, whether it be from courtesy, from necessary regulation of social ill or encouragement of social ill, from etc, ad naus., but this one is not one of those, on account of being trivially and near-tautologically falsifiable.

First and foremost, the use of language herewithin is composed of pure, undiluted, awesome.

I would give a kidney and a lung to be able to write like this.  Quite possibly some other, less redundant and hence more valuable, organs too, could I be assured of survival for long enough to complete my magnum opus, or even a modest opus.

While I have not yet read Dumas doing Dumas, I shall be sure to read our copy of The Three Musketeers in fairly short order for comparison, I think.  (Alas, this does not aid me in reducing the capacity of my to-read shelf - shelves.  Well, it would not have done so anyway, since I would merely be replacing it there with the sequel, Five Hundred Years After, but now I must replace it there with two books.)

The plot, also, which I gather is patterned on that of the classic work, is a very satisfying swashbuckling tale, but really, the gorgeous language and the narrator's foibles are the things that really made this book stand out to me.  Very highly recommended, and I fear I shall have considerable difficulty in not picking up Five Hundred Years After almost immediately.  But we shall see.

So, I have been engaged this morning in, among other things, keeping an eye on this whole Open-Source Boob Project fracas that has blown up around LiveJournal in this time period.

And while I actually agree with the rejection of same by most of the people who don't like it - although through reasoning shorn of the regrettably common Gramscian shash - mostly, I am feeling great schadenfreude.  With a schadenfreude coulis, covered in schadenfreude sprinkles, with a side-salad of warm schadenfreude, served with a Schadenfreude Sling.

Being an advocate of up-tightness and prudery and repression and social codes so rigorous that people stagger out of social situations saying, "By 'eck, that's a rigorous social code", and all, that is, on account of being mindful of the Laws of One Step Beyond, Four-Color Mirroring, and Emboldenment.  And observing that most of the people who are suddenly coming out against this particular use of social libertinism really aren't.

Welcome to the socially conservative side.  Have a hat.

"Florida teens believe that drinking a cap of bleach prevents HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew prevents pregnancy."

My dears, I'm afraid that neither of those is true.  But as a public service, I'd like to make you aware that chugging a jigger of prussic acid prevents damn near everything.

On a related note to the below, we've been rewatching season 2 of Battlestar Galactica in preparation for season 3 coming out (no spoilers, please!), and it occurs to me that while the Colonials of present-time have, I suppose, some justification for coming off like a bunch of carbon chauvinists given that they've just had their civilisation wiped out by the Cylons, from what little we know of the pre-first Cylon War (things like the proxy wars fought using the proto-Cylons, etc. - one suspects, you know, because they're just machines, that don't have the same value as people, and can't suffer like people), it would seem that they were a bunch of carbochauv types even before that.

Kind of makes a chap more sympathetic to the "Screw you, squishie!" position, so it does.

More relevantly, seeing as machine intelligence is probably not a hypothetical issue, it demonstrates one reason to not be carbon chauvinists very clearly indeed.  Not that that means we not should do that anyway, but here's a pragmatic reason.

So, I read this story from back in '07 titled "Killing a Pleo robotic dinosaur", which someone sent me a link to in a context I no longer recall.

I was struck by the following:

The press materials that came with the Pleo suggested I hold it by its tail to see what happens. It screams and thrashes. My 4-year-old started crying. I had to promise my wife never to do that again in front of her.

I'm impressed with the robot's behavior. It snuggles when you hold it. It falls asleep when you cradle it. It gets frisky when you scratch it under the chin. It's much more lifelike than Sony's discontinued Aibo.

So when I watched this video of a couple of guys from Dvice torturing the Pleo and making it whimper pathetically, I felt uncomfortable, even though I knew it was absolutely ridiculous to feel that way.

My wife didn't want to watch the video. She said that even though the Pleo was incapable of feeling anything, watching the video is "bad for your psyche," and that the people who hit the Pleo were damaging their pscyhes, too.

So, the first question that springs to my mind is, okay, exactly why is it "absolutely ridiculous to feel that way"?  Well, I imagine the answer that most people will come up with is that being a machine, driven by software, it can't actually feel pain.  While it has programmed responses, it has no actual qualia, and so while it acts as if it is in pain, in reality it is not.

We used to think that about animals, as well.

And, in fact, we could still make a case for thinking that about animals, seeing as we have no real, practical way of telling, in any but the vaguest sense, if they actually have qualia, or for that matter, even if we do, or a decent definition of what particular mechanisms are required for such quale-consciousness.

Instead, in practical morality, we resort to assuming that the appearance of suffering reflects the reality (the quale) of suffering.

By that standard, therefore, cruelty to these simulated lifeforms (and this should probably include such virtually simulated beings as, say, Sims) should be considered immoral and unlawful in much the same way as, say, animal cruelty¹.

For those who would disagree with me on this point, please - and to give it context, you may wish to imagine while doing so that you're strapped to a table while I stand over you with a scalpel and an expression of unfettered curiosity - consider exactly how you'd convince me that you have qualia, and aren't just running a sophisticated software simulation of NO DON'T HELP HELP OW OW PLEASE NO AAAARGH THE PAIN, etc.

(As long-term readers know, both the human-speciesist and carbon chauvinist answers are things I find deeply unimpressive, so no need to mention anything but novel variants on those, m'kay?)

1. Not that those laws are generally strong enough, hereabouts, but that's another argument.

Another book received through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, Careers in Crime is an entertaining (and informative, for those of us who like picking up little tit-bits of fact along the way) parody of traditional job information guides - such as, per the blurb, the Jobs Rated Almanac.

As such, I probably wouldn't recommend it as the source for all the information you'll need should you actually be considering a career in crime.

What it is, however, is delightfully amusing when considered as a "bathroom book" or "coffee table book" to be picked up and flipped through in moments of boredom, and since this, I believe, is the market it was aimed at, I'm pleased to report that it hits it exactly.

Anyone else ever noticed that the Word grammar checker insists that you capitalize Fifth Amendment, but not first amendment, second amendment, tenth amendment, etc?

Curious, is it not?

Even if the below is a hoax, or the result of astounding reproductive ignorance, which seems likely upon reflection, given the timescale and that most effective herbal abortifacients are also effective herbal poisons...

...well, I can't really say I give a rat's ass.  Opinion not changed.

[Updated: Ah, so claim Yale.  Makes sense.  Not that it makes more'n a lick of difference.]

[Updated Further: Or not, claims the "artist".]

Courtesy of a comment at Rachel Lucas's, this story, which I will let you read for yourselves.

...

This illustrates a number of interesting points:

• The distinction, for a first point, between morality and law.  I am, for example, required by the principles of deontological libertarianism and sophoncy (personhood) rights to acknowledge that Ms. Shvarts was indeed within her rights to carry out this work of "art", despite intense moral distaste for both means and end.
• The need, for a second point, in a society built on such principles - or, it would appear, even in a society not built on such principles - for some group such as The Golden Age's College of Hortators or my own pet universe's Monitors of Cacopraxia to successfully apply some suitable social sanction for this type of behavior.
• And, for a last point, exactly how uncivilized we have become that this kind of vile, atrocious, pernicious, nihilistic barbarism is now sufficiently normalized so as to pass muster with barely even a harshly-phrased comment. 

(And should any of my readers (many of whom I do not know) be sufficiently depraved as to disagree with me on this characterisation, may I cordially invite them to kill themselves¹, right away, and try to be effective at it, for I do not wish their ilk in my acquaintance, my society, or indeed on my damned planet.)

What the bloody hell is wrong with people?

1. Note for morons: if I have to explain the difference between this and a death threat to you, you shouldn't be reading this blog either.

Sigh.  Okay, let's talk about this thing.

Looking at the site, I find that they describe their principal reason as follows:

Shutdown Day is a non-profit organization registered in the province of Quebec, Canada. Shutdown Day was founded with the sole purpose of spreading awareness about the pitfalls and dangers that lie in the excessive use of television, computers, and computing equipment like game boxes, cell phones, music players, online social websites, etc. that impinge on social space and interaction amongst our communities.

and

Michael Taylor, the original partner in the idea of Shutdown Day, says
"I certainly could not and would not want to live without my computer. However, I am often drawn into spending hours chatting on MSN, simply because my friends are online instead of socialising face to face. I am often too busy to cook a proper dinner, because I want to see the latest news on digg.com or the latest YouTube video. I know parents who are so addicted to the computer that they spend little time with their children, and I also know children who do not spend time with their parents because they are always using the computer. We are not preaching to anyone to turn off their computers. We are just suggesting that people might like to take part in this experiment, and see what happens."

Which is fine if you happen to suffer from that sort of problem (although I might question how many people with "computer addiction" to the level implied will be able to self-initiate other activities), and so I shall not, despite invitation, call it a useless gesture in this area.

HOWEVER, they also say:

Shutdown Day also aims to partner with other like-minded organizations in promoting sustainable development, especially in the area of social behavior relating to the effects modern technology.

And the site FAQ says:

For some people the reason for shutting down may be to conserve energy and spend one day helping to save the planet, which would be really great and we certainly welcome that kind of participation in the project.

And I have seen a few people (not you, Silmaril, but elsewhere) who evidently did not read the latter clause of that sentence, and are earnestly linking to it in the same spirit as Earth Hour, etc. - let's turn off that nasty old technology, preserve resources, and save it all for Mother Gaia.

You will save energy, it seems intuitively clear, but let's run some numbers here.

Starting up the average PC from cold takes approximately 100W for approximately 75s, and so roughly 7500 J.  A PC in standby/sleep normally consumes around 1W, so dividing down, we find that a startup consumes roughly the equivalent energy to leaving the machine in sleep/standby for 2.1 hours.  From a purely ergetic point of view, then, one should shut down one's machine if one plans to be away from it for longer than that, and not otherwise.

As if one shuts it down for a shorter period, one's actually using more energy, savvy?

(Marxists and other adherents to the labor theory of value may now depart.  In this day and age, if you still believe in the labor theory of value, you need more help than I can possibly give you.  Go educate yourself.)

HOWEVER again, this falls down in two places:

One of those is usually cited, which is wear and tear on hardware.  This is, I will be the first to admit, a small effect, although based on comparative data from working hardware support for businesses adhering to differing philosophies on this point, I do believe it is measurable.  But that is as maybe, particularly if you are one of those computer users who doesn't keep their hardware very long - although in that case, you might care to question your eco-cred on that point.

Much more significantly, though, it falls down in exactly the same place that most environmentalist - and other well-meaning non-economically-aware - programmes do, such as in recycling and public transportation, etc., in assuming that the value of the user's time is zero.  If the user's time is worth a non-zero amount, one may fairly easily calculate the estimated cost in wasted time due to those 75s restarts, shutdowns, closing and reopening applications, finding one's former place, etc. - hibernate ameliorates this on some machines, mostly laptops, most of the time, but by no means removes it entirely - and if it is significantly non-zero, one will find that the value of lost time exceeds the potential savings from shutdown rather than standby.

(It may be useful in accessing this to bear in mind that by the above figures, the energy used in keeping a computer on standby for one day is approximately 86400 J, or 0.024 kWh.  My utility charges $0.07/kWh, which makes the cost of keeping the computer on standby for a day... $0.0017.  How much was your time worth again?)

Haven't done one of these for a while, so...

"Under section 31(c) of the Imperial Emergency Management Act (Revised), 4111, when a Class II Emergency has been declared by the Imperial Emergency Management Authority, or when an emergency is in progress and the Emergency Communications System is off-line;"

"And in the absence of duly Mandate-authorised authority, including all officers of the Ministry of Harmonic Observance;"

"In such situations as it shall be necessary to prevent further harm to life or property, or to perform essential works of reconstruction, Citizens shall be authorized to enter unattended commercial (retail or storage) property within the zone of the Emergency in an orderly manner, and appropriate therefrom such goods as are necessary for the prevention of harm or performance of essential works, as stated.  Such appropriations shall be recorded at the site from which they were made, and the owners of said property may claim due recompense at the market price for such appropriations from the Imperial Emergency Management Authority."

"Citizens are reminded that the appropriation of any goods not required to prevent harm to life or property or to perform essential works of reconstruction, or to cause any unnecessary property damage in the cause of such appropriation, is forbidden under section 31(c) of the aforementioned Act, and shall constitute the crime of looting.  In times of Class II Emergency, looters are considered enemies of the public safety, and are to be shot on sight; Citizens are further reminded that the law enforcement duty is the responsibility of every Citizen, especially in emergency situations."

"It should also be noted that the privilege of appropriation conferred by section 31(c) is intended to cover emergencies of unusual duration, and that the responsible Citizen should not consider it a substitute for individual crisis readiness, as delineated on pp. 432-440.  Remember, a prepared Empire is a safe Empire!"

        - Codex of Civic Services and Citizen Responsibilities, 117th edition

Quoth the Angry Economist:

The comedian John Oliver was quoted as saying, about an inflatable floating barbacue grill, which lets you cook while soaking in your pool:

"Is there any greater example of what it is to live in the freest nation on Earth than that?", he marvels with no small dose of irony

Sure, it's funny, just the idea of cooking in a pool. But why would it be ironic that freedom would produce strange outliers? In a free society, most people would be most like most other people. But out on the ends of the bell curve you've got some strange people doing strange things, and selling strange stuff. The face that you can find this strangeness is good evidence that America really is the freest nation on Earth.

Probably one of the most important ones, beyond the basic trifecta, in my view, and one which - as an eccentric of some note - I'm particularly sensitive to attacks on.

Of which there are enough, and more than enough.

Why In-Depth Discussions Of Your Sex Life And Sexuality
Are Like In-Depth Discussions Of What You Had For Lunch,
Or That Great-Aunt Who Won't Stop Treating You To Detailed Descriptions
Of Her Bowel Surgery

or

Will You People Just Shut Up Already,
You're Boring Me Senseless

[Body text elided for redundancy.]

And now, the sequel to The Ghost Brigades, booklogged here, and Old Man's War, booklogged there...

In Which, as an old-fashioned subtitle might say, The Colonial Union Learn That Behaving Like A Complete Pack Of Bastards Does Not Pay.

Of course, I can't really say too much more on that front without book-destroying spoilers, but considering I've been bitching about the creepifyingness of the Colonial Union's behavior and some of the pessimality of the setup of the universe since I first started reading it, it's very nice to see that at least some of the characters in the universe (General Tarsem Gau, please stand up and take a bow if physiologically possible) recognize some of that and wish to do something about it (and thus implicitly the author too, of course).  It is, shall we say, the payoff I've been hoping for.

And, also of course, it's still a good book for the other reasons I've liked the previous Scalzis, so recommendations for this series continue and are enhanced.  Very good books.

Could someone, anyone, admit that it's possible to dislike the status quo, and so desire change, and yet still believe that all the change on offer (which is not all the change that is possible, obviously, despite much denial) would be downright worsificatory, and so deserving of rejection?

I swear I'm going to reach through the screen and strangle the next idiot who claims that rejecting both technocratic socialism and demagogic socialism is equivalent to unqualified support for the status quo, present administration, and every little thing any member of the Republican party does anywhere and anywhen.

Some people want change that is not your change.  Deal.

Yes, yes it does.

Or its supplied fonts do, anyway.

Which pleases me.

I like food.

No, let me rephrase that.  I really like food.  I love food!  I love eating food, I'm pretty keen on making food and then eating it, and basically, that food stuff is all good.  If they came to me tomorrow and said, "Okay, we can put an orgasmic-ecstasy-on-demand wire in your pleasure center tomorrow, but in exchange you have to agree to only eat gruel for the rest of ever", I'd tell 'em where to stick their wire, and it wouldn't be in my brain.  You see where I'm coming from, yes?

As such, you can also imagine my opinions on the undressed-green-salad (sans interesting vegetables) and tofu, anti-meat, anti-sugar, anti-fat, anti-carbohydrate - hey, has anyone come out against proteins, yet? - anti-trans-fat, anti-egg, anti-this, anti-that, you-may-live-longer-but-you'll-be-bloody-miserable-doing-it food police and their hanger-on weenies.  I hope you can imagine them, anyway, since even our generous defamation laws prevent me from actually blogging them.

There's eating healthily most of the time, and then there's being a jackass about it, y'know?

Anyway.  For those other times - and really, it has to be only for those other times, because if you dined solely on the recipes in this book, you'd have a coronary inside a month.  When the author subtitled it "The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook", he wasn't kidding.

But for those other times when you fancy something supremely and outrageously decadent, like "Breakfast as a Mind-Altering Drug", "Propane Steak", "Champagne Chicken", "Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Hot Fudge Dessert (PMS Remedy)", or my personal soon-to-be-favorite, "Yeast-Raised Doughnuts Fried in Lard", this is the cookbook for you.  I look forward to occasionally eating from it immensely.

Also - and Amy can testify to this, since I read it in bed and probably kept her awake by doing it - it's a very funny book.  Possibly not to everyone's taste, since to quote one Amazon review:

Not only does this book contain "sick twisted humor," as stated by another reviewer, it is foul-mouthed and dishonorable. I don't know how anyone could want to eat anything after looking through this book.

So, essentially, don't buy it if you're a) easily offended, or b) suffer from the kind of metaphorical ass-stick that makes you cringe inside or tut with disapproval when reading, say, Stuff White People Like.  It violates, so far as I can tell, every rule of so-called political correctness that I've ever heard, and then goes looking for a few more.

But it's funny as hell.

(As a final, random and mostly irrelevant note, the pig in the cover art looks like it was deeply annoyed by having that apple stuffed in its mouth and being roasted.)

See Amy's review of this book here.

Well, now, I haven't (yet) read much Zahn, outside his Star Wars books and - quite some time ago - Conqueror's Pride; although having said that, I think his Star Wars books are about the best written in that particular framework, and given that, I'm not sure as to why it took me quite so long to get around to reading this.  As you can tell from the date on Amy's review, we've had it for quite some time.

For it is, indeed, a very good book. The Green and the Gray is the story of two alien - although remarkably humanesque - cultures hiding in New York, having fled their fairly bitter war only to end up in the same place, an arrangement (gone wrong) involving the death of the 12-year-old Melantha Green that is supposed to head off a renewal of their war that might kill thousands of New York bystanders, and the human couple who get caught up in the middle of this whole mess.

It is; or was to me, a delicious blend of good old pulpish SF with much better cultural development and character writing/character-driven elements than you generally found in good old pulpish SF; fast-paced; and gripping enough that I didn't sleep nearly as many hours as I should have while I was reading it.  Several elements may be identified as formulaic, perhaps, but he does very good things with the formula.

Decidedly recommended.

And finally, the last book in the Familias Regnant/Serrano Legacy series, following on from Change of Command, which I booklogged earlier.

Alas, most of the issues which I had with Change of Command are still present in this book.  While an extensive suite of characters, plot threads, and layers are usually something I find satisfying, here there are just too many threads and too much intercutting for a book of this size, I think, and at least one of them (Sirialis) appears to disappear half-way through without resolution.  (On second thoughts, make that two - much the same lack of closure could be said of the free trader plotline.)  There's a clear ending, with one character from all through the series ascending to statesmanship, some promise of coming work on resolving the major conflict, and a poignant farewell to old friends at the end of the book, but there's just so much left unresolved.

Overall: Either this needed to be spread over more books, or a fairly major chunk of plot items needed to be cut out, because while I can see a really rather good space opera struggling to get out, the structural issues strangle it aborning.

Sadly disappointing, I'm afraid.

So, we saw this yesterday as part of the Amy's birthday festivities.

The film was packed with bad geography and anachronisms, including metalworking, horse-riding, Atlanteans, the pyramids of Egypt, domesticated mammoths, the stars of Orion being in the same places as they are today, and I-swear-to-God phororhacos walking around.

What it did not have, on the other hand, was Raquel Welch in a fur bikini, or any reasonable substitution for same.  Thus, I was somewhat dissatisfied.

...this sort of thing happens.

While the correct term for a valuable surgical procedure, the word "lumpectomy" is a howling linguistic barbarism of the first water.  It's not even as if Classical Greek was entirely void of words for "lump", because it isn't.

For shame, oh word-coining surgeons of the past!

So, I have been playing with the IE8 beta, and specifically the new "Activities" feature - essentially, web-servicy features that you can call from any page and pass a selection to.  And to try that out, I figured I'd put one together that would be at least slightly useful to me.

So, enter the rot13 activity - taking a trivial ASP.NET page to rot13 whatever's posted to it, and tweaking it slightly to work as an IE8 activity (works as both preview - fast display for short texts - and executes for longer texts that need a whole window to display inside).  Feel free to try it out if you're also dabbling in the IE8 beta.  Source code available on request.

http://www.siliconcerebrate.com/services/rot13.aspx

Funer naq rawbl!

So, a few days ago, Amy was putting together some instructions on the care and feeding of sourdough starter (and the making of simple sourdough bread using same) for one of her cousins, which she has graciously allowed me to share with the world, for the satisfaction of their tasty-bread needs.  Behold them!

I've also fixed a couple of bugs in my Formmail.NET drop-in formmail replacement that a user of it was kind enough to e-mail me, but that's not nearly as tasty as the sourdough is.

A new author, this time, and a book which has been sitting on my to-read shelf for something over a year now, I think, possibly because I have been mostly in the mood for novels, rather than a collection of short stories.

A thing to be regretted, I think, since this proved to be a very enjoyable book, packed with delightful stories - most but not all in the fairy tale style, and both darkness and humor mixed, coupled with fascinating twists on the reader's normal expectations.  Of which, to be enumerative for once, I shall mention my particular favorites:

• The Thirteenth Fey, The Uncorking of Uncle Finn, and Dusty Loves just because this whole family of fey are made of awesome.
• Granny Rumple, a retold Rumplestiltskin as a story of anti-Semitism.
• The Sleep of Trees, in which a dryad meets a god... of sorts.
• Salvage, an SFnal tale in which aliens salvage haiku from a dying poet.
• Under the Hill, in which fey meets gangster for mutual benefit.
• Creationism: An Illustrated Lecture in Two Parts, which is made of even more deliciously satirical awesome.
• Memoirs of a Bottle Djinn, in which a Greek slave in Araby discovers a bottled djinniyeh... and more.

Which is, of course, by no means to sell the other stories in the volume (including the Nebula-winning title story) short, but then, one can't praise everything.  In short and to sum up, then, an excellent book that I would heartily recommend to anyone who likes the genre.

...when you find yourself posting comments of this form:

"This is the argument you actually made:

<insert long dissection>

At which you failed.  Because this is the argument you were evidently trying to make:

<insert long reframing>

Which is a stupid argument anyway, because it doesn't counter the other fellow's argument.  This is the argument which you should have made:

<insert long argument>

Which is still wrong, because:

<insert rebuttal>

But at least then you wouldn't have looked like a complete sponge-brain."

It's not quite as masturbatory as arguing with yourself, but it's damn close.

(The Amazon insert to the right refers to the Wiley paperback, rather than the Barnes & Noble hardcover.)

I enjoyed this book - an engaging and interesting look at some of the great disputes in scientific history and the people involved in them - quite a bit, despite a few irritating scientific stretches of the author's at a couple of points, right up until I got to the epilogue, where I found this:

The feuds included in this book showed a variety of ways in which resolution can take place.  One method not included that I'd like to mention is resolution by a commission, or study group.  This approach can be useful in helping resolve social issues, including such questions as the desirability of nuclear power or whether the greenhouse effect is really upon us.

And that, gentle reader, is when - had my lovely wife not been sleeping at the time - the book would have been thrown across the room with great force.