tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-215956922024-03-13T07:41:38.070-04:00Ranting NerdA Nerd Ranting about Science, Technology, Politics, Science Fiction, and whatever other tomfoolery comes to mind.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.comBlogger335125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-43396976200530843222017-10-27T11:53:00.001-04:002017-10-27T11:53:35.871-04:00TwitterI don't post here much any more, but I have started posting at <a href="https://twitter.com/nerdranting">https://twitter.com/nerdranting</a>.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-9264523489180050652016-10-12T15:56:00.001-04:002016-10-12T15:56:28.282-04:00John Yoo (!) says Trump Reminds Him of MussoliniWhen John Yoo (JOHN YOO!) says that <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/john-yoo-trump-reminds-me-a-lot-of-early-mussolini">you remind him of Mussolini</a>, you're seriously authoritarian.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-29443595626759527702016-06-05T17:56:00.000-04:002016-06-05T17:56:37.609-04:00The Definition of ChutzpahLeo Rosten famously defined chutzpah as the quality that allows man to kill both his parents and then beg the court for mercy because he’s an orphan.<br />
<br />
Donald Trump is arguing that judges need to recuse themselves if they are Latino or Muslim, because they would <i>prima facie</i> be biased against him. <br />
<br />
I think we need a new type specimen for chutzpah. <br />
<br />
rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-89903184521189490292016-05-09T09:35:00.000-04:002016-05-09T09:35:58.373-04:00Trump nickname: a proposal<a href="http://gawker.com/dont-blow-this-1775111772">People are worried</a> <a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/05/09/ditch_dangerous_donald_the_democrats_trump_strategy_underestimates_his_abilities/">about the current attempt</a> to pin the nickname "Dangerous Donald" on Donald Trump. This is understandable; that makes him sound like he could be effective at something. <br />
<br />
The obvious nickname is straight from Game of Thrones: Littlefinger.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-26753252753991975542016-05-07T14:05:00.000-04:002016-05-07T14:05:00.406-04:00New PAC: "Can you Not"Via <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/06/meet_can_you_not_the_pac_dedicated_to_dissuading_straight_white_men_from.html">Slate</a> comes a story about <a href="http://canyounot.org/">a new PAC</a> dedicated to convincing straight white guys to not run for office. It's really clever and well done.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-57018896404020993052016-04-10T16:58:00.001-04:002016-04-10T16:58:14.630-04:00Panama Papers Thought of the DayToday's (retrospectively obvious) thought regarding <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/series/panama-papers">The Panama Papers</a>:<br />
<br />
Rich people are overwhelmingly against a world government<a href="#footnote_1">[1]</a> because an effective world government would wipe out tax havens. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name="footnote_1"></a><br />
[1] As opposed to the weird hybrid thing we have now with the WTO, WIPO, and so on.<br />
rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-47862223681091576342016-01-24T17:33:00.000-05:002016-01-24T17:35:00.287-05:00Ranting Nerd Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens<p>Warning: this review will spoil huge chunks of <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i>.</p><br />
<p>I really liked <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i>. I thought Rey kicked ass, Finn was awesome, and Kylo Ren was whiny. It was great to see the old characters. I even saw it in the theater twice. (I don't remember the last movie I did that for.)</p><br />
<p>That being said....</p><br />
<p>I could rant about lots of things about <i>Star Wars: The Force Awakens</i> (like how the Millennium Falcon was just sitting there on Jakku, door open, not locked, and apparently fully fueled), but the almost all of my quibbles, snark, and annoyance comes down to one thing: JJ Abrams does not understand how big space is.</p><br />
<blockquote>Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.<br />
<br />
Douglas Adams, <i>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i><br />
</blockquote><br />
<p>(This is actually the same problem I had with Abrams' <i>Star Trek</i> reboot. The Federation ships could get from Earth to Vulcan in a few minutes, but when they left again after stranding Kirk on Vulcan's ice moon, they took a long time — long enough to leave the system that Scotty could transport them onto the Enterprise. [Let's ignore for now the total insanity of changing the rules of the fictional universe enough that they could transport across the system, or between star systems like in <i><strike>The Wrath of Khan Strikes Back</strike>Into Darkness</i>.])</p><br />
<p>Let's do the rundown, shall we?</p><br />
<ul><li>The Millennium Falcon just happens to end up on Jakku, where Rey is living. (I am favoring the theory that she was a Jedi youngling, sent there — under the watch of Max von Sydow — by Luke and/or Leia to protect her from Kylo Ren.) Maybe this is actually a plot point, but I doubt it.</li>
<li>Rey and Finn get off of Jakku in the Millennium Falcon, but do not go to hyperdrive. So they are in the same star system as Jakku. And Han Solo and Chewbacca are right there to pick it up. And then Han says something like "Jakku! I knew we should have looked further out on the rim". This is idiotic. And so easy to fix! Just have Han say "I am so glad I rigged the flight beacon so we could find the Falcon when it next went into space.". Again, maybe this is actually a plot point (maybe they were watching over Rey?), but I doubt it.</li>
<li>They travel to wherever Maz Kanata is ("Takodana", apparently), and they do it very quickly. In the original, it took at least hours (if not days) to travel from Tatooine to Alderaan. This is relatively minor.</li>
<li>Starkiller Base:</li>
<ul><li>When they fire the Starkiller Base weapon against the Republic, the beams/whatever are visibly moving across the sky, visible from Takodana, as are the planets that they hit and destroy. This means that Takodana would have to be in the same starsystem as all those planets (because otherwise they wouldn't see the destruction for years). This doesn't really make a lot of sense. And even if those several planets were all within a single star system, the speed of light is still a thing. (Even if Earth had a sister planet in a similar orbit, light would take multiple minutes to get here.) I'm also pretty sure the beams move across the sky faster than the speed of light, too.</li>
<li>Starkiller Base clearly has to be movable from system to system, because it eats a sun every time it fires. Who the heck would want to do that for a full planet(oid), made mostly of rock? That was crazy enough for the Death Star, which at least was mostly empty space.</li>
<li>What sun was Starkiller Base eating for the first firing?</li>
<li>Starkiller Base has a huge trench around its equator, which is at least 10% of its radius deep. The planet(oid) appears to have reasonable gravity, so it's fairly large -- and 10% of its radius would mean (a) a huge amount of digging; and (b) that it would change the weather on the planet by sucking most of the air down into it. (By comparison, the Challenger Deep on Earth is 11km deep, which is 0.17% of the Earth's radius.)</li>
<li>When Starkiller Base is eating the star in the climactic battle, the star looks to be about as far as the Sun is from Earth, if not farther. The Earth is far enough from the Sun that <i>light</i> takes 8 minutes to get here. But when Starkiller Base starts pulling whatever-it-is they're pulling from the sun, it does it in seconds.</li>
</ul><li>I don't know how long it takes the Millennium Falcon to get to wherever Luke is, but it sure seemed quick. That could have been easily addressed (just show some shots of them doing various things on ship, in different clothes). But maybe they travelled all the way around the Galaxy in ten minutes.</li>
</ul><br />
<p>The thing that bugs me most about this is that it seems so easy to have fixed most of this.</p>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-3747843800050023822015-01-03T14:30:00.000-05:002015-01-03T14:30:27.706-05:00Andrew O'Hehir on the NYPD and its Broader ImplicationsAndrew O'Hehir is becoming one of my favorite political commentators (he started out as a movie reviewer). <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/01/03/the_nypds_mini_rebellion_and_the_true_face_of_american_fascism/">This essay about the NYPD mini-"rebellion"</a> is a great example of why. It includes one of the best distillations of American Exceptionalism that I've yet seen:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Rather, these worldviews rest on the idea that America is not defined by its democratic institutions, but by a mystical or spiritual essence that cannot be precisely described — but is understood far better by some of its citizens than by others. If those attuned to this patriotic frequency overwhelmingly tend to be white males, that is not evidence of racism (they might say) but of the clarity and selflessness of their political vision.<br />
</blockquote>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-63067941831283984542014-10-21T14:02:00.000-04:002014-10-22T12:49:20.671-04:00A Politician Who Isn't Bragging? Is That Even Allowed?Via <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Best_Candidate_Anywhere">Charlie Pierce</a>, I found the story of Seth Moulton, running for the Massachusetts 6th District seat in the US House of Representatives. Apparently, instead of exaggerating his record, <a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/10/17/moulton-underplays-military-service/lY9FfmOrviwL2LAFHr61dO/story.html">he declined to mention his Bronze Star and other decorations</a>. (Here's <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2014/10/18/mass-congressional-hopeful-seth-moulton-kept-his-military-awards-secret/5UhagwgFRcCbb9zJCa8YZN/story.html">another story</a>.) <br />
<br />
Is that even allowed?<br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE:</b> It does occur to me that the last major politician I know of who did this sort of thing was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern">George McGovern</a>, who flew 35 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe and won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Make of that what you will.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-34945844589057503322014-10-20T21:10:00.000-04:002014-10-20T21:10:06.763-04:00"Douchebag": The White Racial Slur We've All Been Waiting For<a href="http://gawker.com/douchebag-the-white-racial-slur-we-ve-all-been-waiti-1647954231">Go read it.</a>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-73058876564442548142014-10-03T10:03:00.000-04:002014-10-03T15:34:57.380-04:00The Worst MuseThe <a href="https://twitter.com/WorstMuse">Twitter feed of the Worst Muse</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE:</b> if you liked that, you may also like <a href="https://twitter.com/GuyInYourMFA">Guy In Your MFA</a>.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-73168381729327169862014-08-14T19:01:00.001-04:002014-08-14T19:01:26.069-04:00Peter Watts on the "Scorched Earth Society"Via <a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/05/27/peter-wattss-the-scorched-ea.html">Boingboing</a>, we have Peter Watts' talk to the Symposium of the International Association of Privacy Professionals: <a href="http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/TheScorchedEarthSociety-transcript.pdf"> The Scorched Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber's Guide to Online Privacy</a> (PDF). The title is deliberately over-the-top. It's a great essay, covering many topics, among them why "privacy" matters far less than "surveillance". rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-70077795350433649752014-07-05T11:50:00.000-04:002014-07-05T11:50:51.916-04:00Programming SucksI'm finally getting around to reading and closing out a bunch of browser tabs. This <a href="http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks">"Programming Sucks" essay</a> is a couple of months old, but it sure is funny and accurate.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.<br />
</blockquote>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-75098580031993065142014-06-30T16:08:00.002-04:002014-06-30T16:08:08.294-04:00Thought of the DayIf corporations are people, shouldn't the 13th Amendment bar buying and selling them?rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-24944123826072704272014-06-05T12:21:00.000-04:002014-06-05T12:21:59.964-04:00Charlie Stross Explains Why This is a Bad IdeaSo apparently the US Secret Service wants software to detect sarcasm.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/06/we-need-a-pony-and-the-moon-on.html">Charlie Stross explains why this is a Bad Idea</a>. Highlights:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>...then the Internet happened, and it just so happened to coincide with a flowering of highly politicized and canalized news media channels such that at any given time, whoever is POTUS, around 10% of the US population are convinced that they're a baby-eating lizard-alien in a fleshsuit who is plotting to bring about the downfall of civilization, rather than a middle-aged male politician in a business suit.<br />
</blockquote><br />
and<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Indeed, a successful sarcasm detector implies not only an eerily functional human consciousness emulation and a metric fuckton of encoded knowledge about human cultural relationships, but the ability to engage in primate social interaction with sufficient agility to tell when a primate means something, and when a primate is signalling an implicit negation of meaning. Which in turn means the sarcasm detector requires a theory of mind. Hello, singularity! And while I'm at it, can I have a pony? And the moon on a stick, too. KTHX.<br />
</blockquote>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-44700183605233752262014-05-19T14:39:00.001-04:002014-05-19T14:39:23.704-04:00What Chris Hadfield's version of "Space Oddity" can tell us about Copyright<a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/05/18/bowies-takedown-of-hadfield.html">Cory Doctorow at Boingboing</a> points us at <a href="http://www.ottawacitizen.com/touch/story.html?id=9842445">a very good essay about Chris Hadfield's "Space Oddity"</a> and what it means for copyright in general.<br />
<br />
Doctorow's comment bears repeating:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Ironically, if Hadfield had recorded the song and sold it on CD or as an MP3, there would have been no need for him to get a license from Bowie, and no way for Bowie to remove it, because there's a compulsory license for cover songs that sets out how much the performer has to pay the songwriter for each copy sold, but does not give the songwriter the power to veto individual covers.<br />
</blockquote>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-34062020158043551612014-05-17T20:24:00.001-04:002014-05-17T20:24:47.970-04:00Daryl Gregory on Investigating the NuminousOver at <a href="http://www.tor.com/">tor.com</a>, Daryl Gregory <a href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/05/investigating-the-numinous-sf-hard-science-and-mystical-experience">explores the concept of the numinous</a> from a hard-SF viewpoint. He jumps off from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/opinion/sunday/a-rationalists-mystical-moment.html">Barbara Ehrenreich's essay in the New York Times</a>. <br />
<br />
Gregory's core quote:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>But that profundity, that quality of realness, is also just a feeling. If one of the symptoms of the numinous was that it felt “fake,” as some visual hallucinations do, neither Ehrenreich nor anyone else would be lobbying for pursuit of external intelligences.<br />
<br />
The brain, after all, is lying to us all the time, about things great and small. It edits our sense of time so that neuronal events that reach the brain at separate times seem to occur simultaneously. It makes us see patterns in random noise. And, in its finest deception, it makes us think that there’s a self behind our eyes that’s steering a body around, an illusion so pervasive and natural-feeling that it makes the numinous look like a cheap card trick.<br />
</blockquote><br />
He also links to <a href="http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/how-to-study-the-numinous/">Ross Douthat's response to Ehrenreich</a>, which leads me to say something I never thought I'd say: Ross Douthat makes more sense than Barbara Ehrenreich (at least on this narrow topic). rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-75919822552595416732014-05-15T14:27:00.000-04:002014-05-15T14:27:50.160-04:00Vi Hart on Net NeutralityAs if I didn't already have enough reasons to adore <a href="http://vihart.com/">Vi Hart</a>, she has a <a href="http://vihart.com/net-neutrality-in-the-us-now-what/">fantastic explanation of Net Neutrality</a> and why it matters so much.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-26460069338586077722014-05-02T21:31:00.001-04:002014-05-02T21:31:21.045-04:00Why I read Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow <a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/05/02/standardized-testing-and-schoo.html">comments on Common Core</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The rise of standardized testing, standardized curriculum, and "accountability" are part of the wider phenomenon of framing every question in business terms. In the modern world, the state is a kind of souped up business. That's why we're all "taxpayers" instead of "citizens." "Taxpayer" reframes policy outcomes as a kind of customer-loyalty perk. If your taxes are the locus of your relationship with the state, then people who don't pay taxes -- people too young, old, disabled, or unlucky to be working -- are not entitled to policy outcomes that reflect their needs.<br />
</blockquote>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-45926812057632152842013-08-08T14:04:00.001-04:002013-08-08T14:04:50.395-04:00In case we needed any other reason to oppose Larry Summers for Fed Chair...In case you needed any convincing that Larry Summers should not be Fed Chair, <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/07/larry-summers-helped-sink-elizabeth-warrens-nomination-to-head-new-consumer-bureau/">it turns out he opposed Elizabeth Warren to head the CFPB</a>.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-559241744196465052013-01-04T10:33:00.001-05:002013-01-04T10:33:14.070-05:00Leaded gasoline and the 20th-century crime wave<p>As I mentioned in <a href="http://rantingnerd.blogspot.com/2012/04/review-better-angels-of-our-nature-by.html">my review of Steven Pinker's <i>Better Angels of Our Nature</i></a>, I was surprised that he didn't look at the effects of lead (especially leaded gasoline).</p><br />
<p>Now, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline">Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is following up on this</a>.</p><br />
<p>(Hat tip to <a href="http://boingboing.net/2013/01/03/leaded-gasoline-and-the-20th-c.html">BoingBoing</a>.)</p>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-83618802904233940182012-11-02T12:18:00.000-04:002012-11-02T12:18:35.937-04:00What Charlie Pierce SaidCharlie Pierce often crystallizes, cogently and entertainingly, something that I think. <a href="http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/obama-endorsement-2012-14278423">His endorsement of Barack Obama for re-election</a> is a good example of this.rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-89108866611006310732012-10-28T09:53:00.000-04:002012-10-28T09:53:30.766-04:00I miss Molly IvinsThe late great Molly Ivins said of George W. Bush (and Rick Perry): "The next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please, pay attention." <br />
<br />
I feel the same way about Mitt Romney and Massachusetts. rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-85643992713989994972012-04-18T22:57:00.003-04:002012-04-18T22:59:39.847-04:00Review: The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker<p>Every so often a book comes along that literally changes the way I
think about the world. Thomas Kuhn's <i>Structure of Scientific
Revolutions</i> was probably the <cough> paradigm case for
me.</p>
<p>Steven Pinker's <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence
Has Declined</i> is one of these books.</p>
<p>His core thesis, supported by a huge array of data and
documentation, is that violence has declined dramatically over time
— not always smoothly, not always consistently, past performance
does not guarantee future results — but there's a clear downward
trend.</p>
<p>The kernel of insight is one of those really-obvious-in-retrospect
ideas that changes perspective on a huge amount of history: if you
look at conflicts and categorize them not by how many people they
killed, but by how many people they killed <i>per capita</i> (i.e.
divided by the world population at the time), then generally speaking,
the fraction of people who die in armed conflicts has been getting
smaller over time. A <i>lot</i> smaller.</p>
<a name='more'></a>
<p>However horrible the wars of the 20th Century were, they (a) have
not been repeated in the 67 years since the end of World War II; (b)
did not kill as huge a fraction of humanity as earlier wars.</p>
<p>As an eerie bit of synchronicity, I had been looking up World War I
while watching <i>Downton Abbey</i> in January, and when looking at <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I">the Wikipedia page for
WWI</a>, I was surprised to find the line "It was the sixth-<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll">deadliest
conflict</a> in world history". The embedded link is to Wikipedia's
<a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll">List
of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll</a>, which includes
a table, sorted by absolute numbers. WWII is at the top, followed by
the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763), the Mongol Conquests, the Qing
Dynasty Conquest of the Ming Dynasty, the Taiping Rebellion, and
<i>then</i> WWI.</p>
<p>You can choose the column by which to sort the table, and if you
choose "Percentage of the world population", the An Lushan Rebellion
comes out on top with <i>14-15% of the world population</i>. (!!!)
WWII drops to #5 on that table (1.7% - 3.1% depending on
estimates).</p>
<p>That was simply stunning to me. I'd never even heard of the An
Lushan Rebellion. And 8 out of the top 10 in that table (sorted by
percentage of population) involve (or are entirely encompassed by)
China.</p>
<p>Pinker includes a similar table (on p. 195 of the hardcover), which
also includes famines, genocides, and the Mideast and Atlantic
Slave Trades, with similar results. He writes</p>
<blockquote>
First of all: had you even heard of all of them? (I hadn't.) Second,
did you know that there were five wars and four atrocities before
World War I that killed more people than that war? I suspect many
readers will also be surprised to learn that of the twenty-one worst
things that people have ever done to each other (that we know of),
fourteen were in centuries before the 20th. And all of this pertains
to absolute numbers. When you scale by population size, only one of
the 20th century's atrocities even makes the top ten.
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>Even if Pinker had stopped here, this would be a great service to
the discussion of violence: what a lot of people think about the
level of violence in the 20th century is simply false. But he does a
lot more than that.</p>
<p>He marshals plenty of evidence from multiple disciplines showing
that the death rate from violence in hunter-gatherer (and other
non-state) societies was and is dramatically higher than those with a
strong state. Hunter-gatherer societies don't go to all-out war as
often (if at all), but they fight <i>a lot</i>, and when each fight
leaves one or two dead, out of groups of 100-150, the per capita death
toll is huge.</p>
<p>Basically, he argues that Hobbes was right, and Rousseau was wrong,
at least as it pertains to the narrative underpinnings of their
respective political philosophies. On top of everything else, I have
a renewed appreciation for Hobbes' <i>Leviathan</i>.</p>
<p>Along the way, Pinker takes the reader on a tour of historical
attitudes toward and practices of violence: duels, the original
source for "cutting off one's nose to spite one's face" (cutting off
people's noses for what we would consider trivial offenses was quite
common in Europe at one time), tortures of the most gruesome sort, and
conduct in battle and warfare that is almost literally unthinkable
now. A lot of what he catalogues is not for the faint of heart.</p>
<p>He then follows through with sections titled "The Pacification
Process", "The Civilizing Process" (which covers the decline in
homicide in Europe — by a factor of 100), "The Humanitarian
Revolution", "The Long Peace" (about the surprising lack of a Third
World War), "The New Peace", "The Rights Revolutions", "Inner Demons",
"Better Angels", and "On Angel's Wings". He brings in data and ideas
from a wide variety of disciplines and a large array of researchers.
Some ideas are more speculative and/or less convincing than others
(but Pinker is careful to label which of these ideas he thinks are
conclusive and which merely point to the need for further
research).</p>
<p>His argument in many of these sections is that in many cases,
people became less violent due to a self-reinforcing civilizing
process: violence and murder became seen as vulgar and
declassé; reformers (abolitionists, prison reformers, Charles
Dickens writing about poor houses, and so on) pushed society to
change. It didn't happen overnight, but it happened, and happened
independently of most technological changes that many people have
suggested were the cause of the declines in violence. Basically,
people can change, and people can, collectively, increase
self-control, de-emphasize being quick to respond to slights on their
honor, and change their views of violence. Culture is not written in
stone, and changes over time, and has changed in ways that has reduced
violence by several orders of magnitude.</p>
<p>There were many topics that Pinker raises, about which I felt
compelled to think further, or to do more research about because they
were so interesting. A big example is the legitimacy of state/police
power (and its monopoly on violence). This is especially interesting
with regard to the correlation between levels of violence and a
"culture of honor" — and how that seems to match up with
locations where state power is not legitimized (either because it has
not reached there [e.g. Appalachia in the 19th century] or has been
deliberately neglectful [e.g. poor/minority areas of cities from the
1970s to early 1990s and up to the current time], or is corrupt, or
outright tyrannical). Connections with the successes of Community
Policing seem fairly direct to me.</p>
<p>One other thought: this book made yet even <i>more</i> happy that
I don't live in a medieval fantasy world. (I like to watch <i>Game of
Thrones</i>; I don't want to live there.)</p>
<p>Even when Pinker infurates me, he's always interesting. A few
of his riding-his-hobbyhorse moments seem to have slipped through the
editing process, but overall he's actually fairly restrained. I don't
buy everything he says, but he's not just making stuff up. (And,
honestly, I think the sheer scale of historical cruelty and horror,
[e.g. the circumstances which inspired so many social movements] made
him re-evaluate some of his hobby-horses in the light of historical
perspective.)</p>
<p>Overall, I think this is a hugely important book. Almost
everything I've read since I finished it a couple of months ago has
been interacting with it in my mind; being interpreted in the light of
the ideas it stirred up.</p>
<p>I found it very easy to read (other than the gruesome parts). His
future-looking sections at the end of the book are somewhat less
engrossing than the earlier, more data-driven sections, but still
quite interesting.</p>
<p>Bottom line: highly recommended.</p>
Places to purchase <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0670022950/">Amazon</a>
<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/better-angels-of-our-nature-steven-pinker/1100480675">BN</a>
<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780670022953-8">Powell's</a>
<a href="http://shop.harvard.com/book/9780670022953">Harvard Bookstore</a>
<hr>
<p>Addendum: I'm leaving this one gripe at the bottom since it
doesn't really fit above.</p>
<p>The biggest single problem I have with the book is his discussion
of the surge in violence in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States,
and the tail-off of that surge in the 1990s (looked at on a graph from
1950 to 2010, it's a big spike — but in the larger historical
trends, it is a smallish blip). This discussion is (perhaps by
necessity) more nebulous than a lot of the rest of the book, but there
are several ideas which he simply doesn't mention, which I had
encountered simply by being a reasonably-well-read reader. The one
whose absence surprised me the most — given Pinker's background
— is lead (especially in leaded gasoline).</p>
<p>Lead and lead compounds are potent neurotoxins in and of
themselves, but they are also causes of more subtle developmental
problems, especially in the brain and central nervous system. One
reasonably obvious effect is to delay or inhibit full development of
the prefontal cortex, the part of the brain that performs "executive
function" -- impulse control, long-range planning, and basically
everything that keeps people from being idiots. Given how much of the
rest of the book is about how strengthening impulse control helps
create a less violent society, it seems obvious to talk about how lead
and lead compounds would affect this.</p>
<p>Tetraethyl lead was introduced as a gasoline anti-"knock" additive
in the mid-1920s, and was finally banned in the US in the mid-1990s.
Its use in the US had been on the wane since the early 1980s, though,
as alternative anti-knock formulations came into use, and as catalytic
converters (to meet emission standards) became common. The rise and
decline in violence in the US, from the 1960s through the 1990s
roughly mirrors the use of leaded gasoline and lead paint. Even if it
isn't all of the story, it is one with a clear biological basis, and
is one that people have suggested and documented. It deeply surprises
me that Pinker didn't mention this, even in passing.</p>
<p>Examples:
<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12070635">"Reduced
cognitive abilities in lead-exposed men"</a>;
<a
href="http://articles.cnn.com/2010-05-13/health/lead.poisoning.landrigan_1_smelter-lead-based-paint-poisoning?_s=PM:HEALTH">"Scientist
taught world to get the lead out"</a>;
and two <a
href="http://blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience/2011/08/24/at-the-door-of-the-loony-gas-building/">articles
about tetraethyl lead</a> <a
href="http://blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience/2011/08/25/of-dead-bodies-and-dirty-streets/">by
Deborah Blum</a>, based on her research for <i>The Poisoner's
Handbook</i>.
</p>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21595692.post-71228316289209261742012-03-18T13:14:00.002-04:002012-03-18T13:14:30.715-04:00Review: Among Others, by Jo Walton<p>I recently read <i>Among Others</i>, by <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Walton">Jo Walton</a>, of
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Pixel-Stained_Technopeasant_Day">International
Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day</a> fame. (She blogs entertainingly
at <a href="http://www.tor.com/Jo%20Walton#filter">tor.com</a>. She
"live-blogged" re-reading the Miles Vorkosigan saga in publication
order, which I <a
href="http://www.tor.com/tags/Vorkosigan%20saga">found quite
interesting</a>. And I commend her post on <a
href="http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/09/the-suck-fairy">The Suck
Fairy</a>.)</p>
<p><i>Among Others</i> came out last year and got such effusive praise
from other writers that I wondered whether it was a case of a book
from "a writer's writer", who (similar to "an actor's actor" or "a
comedian's comedian") is someone doing stuff that is interesting but
not compelling to anyone other than people in the same field. I am
happy to have been proven wrong. Or maybe what it is is that Jo
Walton is "an SF reader's SF reader", and since I'm an SF reader, it
really worked for me. I do fear that it would not work as well for
someone who hadn't been an SF-steeped 15-year-old.</p>
<p><i>Among Others</i> is the (first-person) story of fifteen-year-old
Mori (Morwenna), who has fled her half-insane mother in Wales after an
accident that killed her twin sister and shattered her leg. In the
summer of 1979, she ends up with her father (who had abandoned them as
children), because British law prevents her extended family in Wales
from being able to take her in. She is sent to an English boarding
school, where she is basically the designated outcast: Welsh,
semi-crippled, academically talented, and constantly reading SF and
fantasy, which buffer her from the pain of her life.</p>
<p>Oh, yeah — there are also fairies and magic. The magic is
(usually) subtle and intertwines slowly through the story.</p>
<p>Half-autobiography (Walton explains in an afterward that getting
her own childhood right was way harder than historical research),
half-fantasy, this setup could have been a twee or treacle disaster.
But Mori's whip-smart, clever-but-not-worldly, astringent voice is a
treat to read. I laughed out loud multiple times and subjected
everyone within earshot to (sometimes extensive) quoting.</p>
<p>You could argue that "not much happens" in the book — most of
the action is interior, but that hardly matters. I enjoyed reading it
immensely.</p>
<p>As much as anything, the book is a love letter to reading and
interacting with other readers, and to libraries and librarians. A
central part of the plot is Mori discovering an SF reader group in the
town where her school is located; she had performed a small magic to
find herself a group with which to fit in (a <i>karass</i>, in Kurt
Vonnegut's language from <i>Cat's Cradle</i>), and it is an open
question (for Mori herself as well as for us) whether the magic caused
this or if it was just luck, or fate. We get to see Mori read,
discuss, and analyze books that were just coming out (or just arriving
in England), and there are occasional in jokes for those of us who
have read the books she's reading (e.g. Mori wonders about the
implication of some feature of a book that, which that book's
[still-in-the-future for Mori] sequel will address).</p>
<p>If you've ever been fifteen and reading was an escape, or "merely"
a joy, and especially if you were reading SF at that point, I strongly
recommend <i>Among Others</i>.</p>
<p>Also of potential interest: Jo Walton's
<a
href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/01/20/the-big-idea-jo-walton/">"Big
Idea"</a> post on John Scalzi's <a
href="http://whatever.scalzi.com/">Whatever</a> blog.</p>
<p>Places to purchase <i>Among Others</i>:
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Among-Others-Jo-Walton/dp/0765331721/">Amazon</a>
<a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/among-others-jo-walton/1100354003">BN</a>
<a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/18-9780765331724-0">Powell's</a>
<a href="http://shop.harvard.com/book/9780765331724">Harvard
Bookstore</a></p>rantingnerdhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00192899727951019414noreply@blogger.com10