What Charlie Pierce Said

Charlie Pierce often crystallizes, cogently and entertainingly, something that I think. His endorsement of Barack Obama for re-election is a good example of this.

I miss Molly Ivins

The 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."

I feel the same way about Mitt Romney and Massachusetts.

Review: The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Every so often a book comes along that literally changes the way I think about the world. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was probably the <cough> paradigm case for me.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is one of these books.

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.

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 per capita (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 lot smaller.

Review: Among Others, by Jo Walton

I recently read Among Others, by Jo Walton, of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day fame. (She blogs entertainingly at tor.com. She "live-blogged" re-reading the Miles Vorkosigan saga in publication order, which I found quite interesting. And I commend her post on The Suck Fairy.)

Among Others 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.

Among Others 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.

Oh, yeah — there are also fairies and magic. The magic is (usually) subtle and intertwines slowly through the story.

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.

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.

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 karass, in Kurt Vonnegut's language from Cat's Cradle), 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).

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 Among Others.

Also of potential interest: Jo Walton's "Big Idea" post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

Places to purchase Among Others: Amazon BN Powell's Harvard Bookstore

Why I Oppose SOPA and PIPA

I oppose SOPA and PIPA. Here's a good summary why: http://nielsenhayden.com/503_sopa.html.

The argument I included in my notes to my Congressional reps was this:

Imagine that Walmart and Target got up in front of Congress and argued that since people shoplift, they should be able to stop cars and trucks randomly on the streets and highways looking for stolen goods, and to take away drivers licenses at will. They would (I hope!) be laughed out of Washington. But that's effectively what the RIAA and the MPAA are demanding with SOPA and PIPA -- except that it's not just roads, it's the Internet they're demanding police powers over (with no oversight or appeal).

The Internet is the greatest force for free speech since the printing press. It is the medium through which a huge fraction of our news, entertainment, political discussion, and, indeed, of our economy flows.

Intellectual property piracy may be a problem -- although all independent research says that the RIAA and MPAA are exaggerating the problem by several orders of magnitude. Giving the five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers the keys to the Internet is an awful idea.

Read Charlie Pierce

If you're not reading Charlie Pierce's blog, you should start. Warning: includes Bad Language and might be offensive to idiots and Republicans.

Amazing Nerdiness

I was listening to Tom Lehrer's "Silent E" (one of my favorites; I'm always happy when that pops up on my iPod), and decided to figure out how many pairs of words differ only by a trailing 'e'.

So I whipped up this nerdstrosity. I felt I had to share:

perl -e 'my %words = (); my @ewords = (); 
while (<>) {
    chomp();
    $words{$_} = 1; 
    push(@ewords, $_) if (/e$/);
} 
foreach my $eword ( @ewords ) { 
    (my $noe = $eword) =~ s/e$//; 
    if ( defined($words{$noe}) ) { 
        print "$noe -> $eword\n";  
    }  
}' /usr/share/dict/words

Things I've Learned, #1751

If you review your Spam/Junk email folder regularly, sort by sender -- it groups together (and hence allows you to easily skip over) the repeated spam. And there's LOTS of repeated spam (in my spam folder, anyway).

(This does require that you either pick a date range -- or otherwise look only at messages that have arrived since your last review; or move everything you've review somewhere else after the review.)

Paul Krugman Finally Understands

So Paul Krugman finally figured out why the Very Serious People^TM Really Really Hate inflation: because it costs the creditor class money.

You can see the penny drop over the past week in the following blog posts: The Rentier Regime, Wir Haben Auch Rentier, and Who Are the Rentiers.

What I find kind of surprising is that I thought this was obvious. If nothing else, Molly Ivins was making this point back in the 1990s, in her inimitable style:

These guys are economic nincompoops; our Federal Reserve Board, composed of people none of us have ever heard of, knows better. They want to slow the economy down, you see. In the world of the Fed (as we cognoscente call it for short), it's bad when the economy grows fast, and it's worse when everyone can find a job. You see. Because these conditions are believed to cause inflation, which the Fed hates worse than anything. Inflation means that rich people's money is worth less and is especially bad for creditors, those make money by loaning money to those of us who have to borrow money. Got it?

So basically, arguments over inflation targets are an interest group struggle: people who make money by loaning it to others want low inflation, because it benefits them. People who borrow money would like higher inflation, because it makes it easier for them to pay the money back.

NOTE: no one is arguing for Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe hyperinflation. This is an argument about whether we should have 1% inflation or 4% inflation.

I Think I Figured It Out....

I realized why Republicans don't like the Health Care Individual Mandate: because it includes "man date", and that's just too gay.

Unix sort Insanity (Or is it Just Me?)

I just discovered (after way too much time poking about) that Unix sort does not split fields the way I naively assumed. I had thought that it split on whitespace, the way that awk does, but it does not. It splits on the zero-length "character" between a non-space and space character -- and then the space characters become part of the next field.

The nasty consequence of this is that whitespace-tabulated data that have a varying number of spaces (or tabs) between fields -- as opposed to fields separated by a single space, or a single tab, or single comma if you use '-t,' -- will not sort the way you might think.

For example:

$ STRING="fibble ab  de\ngorkle  bc cd\n"
$ printf "$STRING"
fibble ab  de
gorkle  bc cd

$ printf "$STRING" | sort -k 2,2
gorkle  bc cd
fibble ab  de

— i.e. the two spaces in front of 'bc' make ' bc' sort ahead of ' ac'.

And

$ printf "$STRING" | sort -k 3,3
fibble ab  de
gorkle  bc cd

— where the two spaces in front of 'de' make ' de' sort ahead of ' cd'.

 

This explains a great deal of bizarre behavior I've dealt with over the years, stuff I never had the time to drill down and deal with.

My usual fix for this sort of situation is to collapse whitespace into a single space character, sort, and then use my ~/bin/tabulate script on the end:

$ printf "$STRING" | 
  perl -pe 's/[ \t]+/ /g' | 
    sort -k 3,3 | 
      ~/bin/tabulate
gorkle bc cd
fibble ab de

I hope someone might find this useful. In other words, I hope I'm not the only one who took this long to understand this. :-)

 

---

From 'info sort' on Ubuntu:

`-t SEPARATOR'
`--field-separator=SEPARATOR'
     Use character SEPARATOR as the field separator 
     when finding the sort keys in each line.  By 
     default, fields are separated by the empty 
     string between a non-blank character and a 
     blank character.  By default a blank is a space 
     or a tab, but the `LC_CTYPE' locale can change 
     this.

     That is, given the input line ` foo bar', `sort'
     breaks it into fields ` foo' and ` bar'.  The 
     field separator is not considered to be part of 
     either the field preceding or the field following,
     so with `sort -t " "' the same input line has 
     three fields: an empty field, `foo', and `bar'.  
     However, fields that extend to the end of the 
     line, as `-k 2', or fields consisting of a range, 
     as `-k 2,3', retain the field separators present 
     between the endpoints of the range.

     To specify ASCII NUL as the field separator, use 
     the two-character string `\0', e.g., `sort -t '\0''.

My Favorite Sign from Wisconsin

I know I'm late on this, but here's my favorite sign from the Wisconsin protests:

Imperial Cities

I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that Washington DC is an Imperial City.

I not making the argument here that the US is an empire (although the argument can certainly be made). I'm talking about what it means to HAVE an Imperial City.

I would suggest the following as archetypal Imperial Cities: Versailles, Beijing, and Edo (now Tokyo). (Given China's long history, Beijing is merely the most recent of its Imperial Cities.) I would contrast them with other Imperial Capitals like London and Rome. (Interestingly, Delhi/New Delhi forms an instructive hybrid.)

Imperial Cities are those that were built from the ground up to be capitals; they aren't centers of commerce or art or scholarship, except secondarily. They were often built to avoid commerce and art and scholarship, in fact. Usually they were explicitly created by a strong central ruler (Chinese Emperors, Louis XIV of France, the Tokugawa Shoguns) as a place to hold hostages — nobles would be required to send some members of their families to be in residence at all times in the Imperial City, or be themselves in residence.

Another major feature of these Imperial Cities is that the Court became its own society to the exclusion of almost everything else. Court Society dictated what people did, what they wore, who was in, who was out, usually in obsessive detail. This was directly or indirectly to the benefit of the central ruler, as anything that distracted the courtiers kept them from doing anything to take away from the center of power.

This is not to say that Court life in London, or its equivalent in Rome or other large capitals was not intellectually inbred or navel-gazing. But as an instructive contrast, if you were a courtier in the British government in the 17th century, you could physically leave the court and be watching a play, or in a coffee house discussing the events of the day with Samuel Pepys, or dining with the founders of modern science at the Royal Society, within a matter of minutes. There was nothing comparable at Versailles.

Washington DC was built from the ground up to be the capital city of the United States. There was little or nothing there before the current city was laid out. Whatever art and commerce that is there is a follow-on to the government.

If the capital of the United States had stayed in New York, or Philadelphia, instead of moving to a constructed city that had no other existence before the government arrived, what might have happened? Would various government functionaries feel closer to the people whose lives they affect, closer to some of the modes of life that exist outside of government?

Most importantly, would the press be so much like Versailles courtiers, dependent for their existence on the people they are, in theory, supposed to be challenging and whose statements they are supposed to be verifying instead of merely repeating?

Cynically, I wonder if having our capital in our primary commercial city would actually make that much of a difference. The New York Times certainly has failed in its duty often enough (they pursued the Whitewater "scandal" long after it was clear that there was nothing to find; they were slack-jawed credulous in the runup to the Iraq War, and so on, and they certainly participate in Broderism at a high level, although not quite at the pitch of the Washington Post). But I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be worse than what we've got now.

I think the biggest sign that we have an Imperial City on our hands is the signal failure of the press "corps" to actually look at the substance of policy proposals, and their propensity to go with the conventional wisdom (especially when it is dependent purely on superficialities), and to go with horse-race or Inside Baseball-type coverage. ("Democrats say Earth is round; Republicans disagree.") And it's quite sad that this hasn't changed much, or has possibly gotten worse, in the five years since Stephen Colbert nailed them at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Take this GUI and Shove It

Here's a great explanation of why GUI's suck and should only be built on top of command-line interfaces.

More Facts That Will Not Make Anyone Change Their Mind

Ezra Klein on Why Elections Matter.

Convincing friends to choose their political party based on actual statistics.

Dan Savage May Be On To Something Here

Dan Savage has this to say about September 11th (while walking around Manhattan):

On some level I think social conservatives are angry that the terrorists attacked New York City and not Branson, Missouri. Al-Qaeda wanted to attack real America—and real Americans—and they knew that here is where you find both. So in addition to murdering 3,000 innocent people in New York City on September 11, 2001, the terrorists insulted the vanity of America's social conservatives and demonstrated that they shared their prejudices. They're still reeling from the blow.

Not Scared Yet of Atmospheric CO2? You Should Be

It's my impression that most people, even those fully convinced by the science of global climate change, picture the changes that are coming as being pretty gradual, and being such that we (even if only the "we" in high-tech Western countries that don't share borders with low-lying poor countries) will be able to adapt to them to some degree, whatever (nasty) pain they inflict. I've pretty much been thinking that way.

That is: we'll see hotter summers, changing rainfall patterns, more and more powerful storms (Minnesota beat Texas this year in number of tornadoes), beach erosion, and so on. Not to mention the social and political and military implications of climate refugees (the Pentagon is taking this very seriously). But, we think, life will go on, and the human race will survive -- even if life is a lot harder and there's a lot of suffering.

I am no longer so sanguine.

This Scientific American article, How Acidification Threatens Oceans from the Inside Out, is one of the scariest things I've ever read. (The full article is not available online; it's in the August 2010 issue.)

The oceans are getting more acidic due to dissolved carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid. (Dissolved carbon dioxide one of the main reasons that Coca-Cola has a pH around 3 in the can.) Not coincidentally, the oceans have been absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air -- keeping the atmospheric CO₂ levels from increasing even faster than they already are.

Ocean acidification is seriously problematic because most plants and animals in the ocean have evolved to live in a given range of acidity -- and changing that acidity can seriously mess up body chemistry. We're already seeing corals damaged by it, and experiments have shown that small shifts in acidity levels can have big effects on ocean life — reducing reproduction rates, impairing immune system function, and so on: even before acidity gets to the point of simply destroying life, cells and systems in oceanic life forms have to work harder to maintain their internal acidity levels, which takes more resources and impairs their ability to reproduce and thrive.

We're nearing the acidity range where we'll see serious impairment for a large range of sea life — and it might happen quickly, rather than gradually.

The REALLY scary thing about this is that if the acidity messes with phytoplankton (the source of half our atmospheric oxygen), then it's quite simply game over. We're not just talking about a lot of pain and suffering. We're not talking about merely the end of human civilization, or even the end of the human species: we're talking about the end of the biosphere as we know it. Game over, we took off and nuked it from orbit — but we forgot to take off first.

 

The thing about ocean acidification is that there's no wiggle room at all for global warming denialists. We've got the data on ocean acidity. We've got the experiments on various sea life and the effects of acidity change. There's no remediation possible — no giant space mirror or sulfur in the stratosphere is going to help this. (Sorry, Space Cadets.)

We simply have to lower (or eliminate) our carbon dioxide output. End of story — or end of us.

PhD, In Pictures

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.. This seems pretty accurate to me.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over

In what world is it a reasonable Sysadmin action to stop cron entirely, just to avoid an (otherwise-harmless) email alert from one cron job out of 30+ jobs on a host?

I am not sure why this particular insanity is boggling my mind so much today. (Perhaps some of it is due to the Sysadmin in question first trying to use 'svcadm diable cron' -- FOUR TIMES -- before realizing their typo.)

Space Science Win

This video of a solar eruption may be the coolest thing I've seen in months.

What would the Earth Look like if it didn't Rotate?

Via BoingBoing, scientists calculate what the oceans and land masses would look like if the Earth stopped spinning. It's a lot weirder than I thought.

I love this kind of stuff!

Funny and Bizarre

I saw this bizarre and hilarious blog post about TV shows and, well, bizarrity linked last week from Facebook. It's well worth a read. (The author was a writer/producer for The Sarah Connor Chronicles amongst other things.)

The History Channel is SOOO unrealistic!

Via boingboing, a hilarious rant on why the History Channel's World War 2 season is so unrealistic -- even more so than Doctor Who!

Emo, How'd You Get out of the Attic?

(Emo Philips, that is.)

Emo Philips has posted a bunch of videos on his site, which were otherwise unavailable. This makes me very happy.

My favorite, I think, has to be the Golden Gate Bridge bit. (This is the "Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist, Great Lakes Region, Council of 1912" bit.) Absolutely brilliant.

How Many People Moved Where?

Forbes has an interactive map that shows how many people moved from between US counties based on 2008 data from the IRS. This is very cool.

Caffeine Helps You Get Over Caffeine Withdrawal

This explains so much:

Bristol University researchers found that drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine, meaning that it only brings them back to baseline levels of alertness, not above them.

"Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal," wrote the scientists, led by Peter Rogers of Bristol's department of experimental psychology.

New Favorite Blog

New Favorite Blog: You Are Not So Smart, "a blog devoted to self delusion and irrational thinking."

Especially The Just World Fallacy, which explains a lot about certain political types, and The Duchenne Smile, just 'cause it's neat.

LOST explained in a 3-second Animated GIF

This is hilarious, but if you haven't seen the end of LOST, don't click through.

Animated GIF explains LOST in 3 seconds.

 

(Via BoingBoing.)

Flabbergasted

Arizona School Demands Black & Latino Students’ Faces On Mural Be Changed To White.

What the fuck is going on in Arizona?

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, a State Senator describes an Indian-American candidate for governor[1] (and President Obama) as a "raghead".

What the fuck is going on in South Carolina?

 

(I do realize that idiotic and appalling racism is not limited to Sunbelt states full of cranky white retirees and the state which was the epicenter of the Confederacy. I will not be surprised -- saddened, but not surprised -- if I have to ask what the fuck is going on in Massachusetts in the near future. My point is: what the fuck?)

 

[1]This is the same Family Values candidate who appears to have had an affair with a political blogger. Yes, she's a Republican.

Clerk Fail

So I'm at our local Science Fiction/Fantasy Bookstore, and I'm asking the clerk about when a book is coming out, and in the course of the conversation he utters these words:

I don't really like SF that much. I don't really read.

I suppose it's possible that the owner is scraping the bottom of the barrel on clerks here, but still.

Amazon WTF of the Day

I was going to Amazon.com to check something and on the front page, saw some really weird recommendations (given that my Amazon ordering and lookup history is pretty much square and vanilla). Then I realized that they were due to me putting something into my Cart for pre-order:

Really?  People who like Max Headroom want to order "Sleazy Stags from Dad's Secret Stash"???

Is this a small-sample-size effect or are people who like groundbreaking SF TV from the 1980s simply into bad porn?  (Don't answer that.)  Or is some search term I actually don't want to know getting hits on "Headroom"?

Slippery Slope, Thy Name is The Recording Industry

Music industry spokesperson explains why they love child porn (because it gives them the wedge they want to filter the rest of the net).

PowerPoint and the Military

PowerPoint is destroying military readiness.

I'm waiting for Fox News to call Bill Gates an enemy of America.

Max...M-M-M-M-Max....

Max Headroom finally arrives on DVD. Unfortunately, we still have to wait till August 10th, but it's coming.

Unclear on the Concept

Found in a perl script:

my $end_time         = `perl -e '{print time(), "\n"}'`;

<voice source="South Park" imitate="Butters">Oww...that hurt my brains. Owwww.</voice>

White House Seder

Whatever issues I have with Obama, this makes me very happy.

Can you imagine George W. Bush attending a seder, much less hosting one?

BEEP! Thanks for the Warning, Ubuntu

So I updated one of my servers to Ubuntu 9.10 recently (I like to stay back from the bleeding edge), and it took me a while to realize that somewhere in there — possibly in the recent kernel update — my system beep went away. A little searching showed that a lot of people hate the system beep and were looking ways to turn it off. Fair enough, but apparently Ubuntu thought that it was a good idea to turn off the system beep by default. Bad Ubuntu!

To fix this, I did

modprobe pcspkr

and to make this stick at reboot, I had to un-blacklist the 'pcspkr' module, which I did by removing the

blacklist pcspkr

line in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.

Muh-muh-muh-muh-MAX...

Max Headroom may finally be released on DVD!

No Pity for the Hummer

GM is closing its Hummer brand.

Good riddance.

Sonic Boom + Ice Crystals = Pretty

Via BoingBoing, a video of a rocket breaking the sound barrier amidst a layer of ice crystal clouds. Pretty, and Scientific!

Solaris Zones + pkgserv Hose Zone Boots (Nerdity Level: High)

So SunOracle Solaris has Zones, which are a light-weight virtual server platform that we use a lot at work.

We're finally rebuilding our "chassis" servers -- the ones that host all of our virtual Solaris servers (mostly web and mail apps). Our normal zone creation script kept crapping out )at the point of first booting the new zone) with

zoneadm: zone 'ZONE': These file-systems are mounted on subdirectories of /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root:
zoneadm: zone 'ZONE':   /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door
zoneadm: zone 'ZONE': call to zoneadmd failed

(I've redacted the hostname to protect my company. :-))

The first boot of the zone happens — or rather, fails to happen — after zoneadm -z ZONE install and some file copies into the new zone directory tree.

Doing Internet searches for these strings doesn't really help much.

After many hours of digging, I discovered that I could run zoneadm -z ZONE boot and get the zone to boot — but only if I waited quite a while after doing the zoneadm -z ZONE install — at least ten minutes.

I was able to see that a pkgserv process was running:

root 23107 1   0 14:55:27 ?  0:02 pkgserv -d /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install -N pkgadd

— and that took between 3 and 4 minutes to quit out.

Now, pkgserv seems to be part of an effort to speed up building and patching zones, which can take a long time. The particular setup we're seeing appears to have shown up with the 2010-01-08 Recommended Patch Cluster (though it might have shown up earlier -- we stepped from the 2009-05-08 cluster to the 2010-01-08 cluster, so if it showed up earlier we wouldn't have seen it).

Once pkgserv finally quit, if I immediately tried zoneadm -z ZONE boot or zoneadm -z ZONE ready, it would give me the same "call to zoneadmd failed". truss showed me that a call to zone_create() was failing with EBUSY, and that was propagating up the stack. The thing that's bizarre is that it never seemed to clear. (If I left it alone, it would eventually clear [as I saw empirically] but I never actually managed to pin down how long the error would take to clear — the loop time was way too long.) I think that running zoneadm -z ZONE ready actually prolongs the error.

I finally gave up and tried

umount -f /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door

(plain umount didn't work), and that magically cleared the problem. Both umount and umount -f threw errors, too:

umount: warning: /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door not in mnttab
umount: /fs/zones-1/ZONE/root/var/sadm/install/.door not mounted

(The door file was never showing in /etc/mnttab or in mount output. I could never find a clean way to find the mount.

I think it's clear that the pkgserv setup is a bit buggy and needs to be fixed.

How Gay is the Super Bowl?

Mark Dery asks How Gay is the Superbowl?

What the Oracle-Sun Merger says about U.S. Politics

Interesting article from a Sun employee laid off in Germany, and how the Sun-Oracle merger and resulting layoffsreductions in force illuminate the political landscape in the US.

Context Sensitivity

If you were going to install a new version of, say, apache, and saw

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root   13 Jan  9  2009 apache -> 
                                           apache-1.3.29/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root  512 May 10  2001 apache-1.3.26/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root  512 Jan 27  2004 apache-1.3.29/

in /usr/local, how would you install your new version of apache? I would hope that you wouldn't just install it into an "apache" directory like this:

drwxr-sr-x  10 root root 512 Feb  9 09:38 apache/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root 512 May 10  2001 apache-1.3.26/
drwxr-sr-x   9 root root 512 Jan 27  2004 apache-1.3.29/

I swear, this needs to be an interview question with a hard FAIL mode (as in "Sorry, we're done. Goodbye."). If you can't figure out to preserve the existing pattern, you shouldn't be a sysadmin.

Frustration

Dear Firefox,

Please don't suddenly and randomly flip the value of the "Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages" option. Having the down-arrow key change from "scroll the window down a few pixels" to "jump to the next link" is brain-shearingly annoying.

 

 

Dear Web Application Programmers,

If your web page presents a very complex form to fill out, which can take up to 20 minutes to do correctly, PLEASE program it so that if the user hits Backspace when not actually clicked into a form entry field, it doesn't just happily do the equivalent of hitting the Back button. I.e. ask me if I really want to navigate away from the form I just spent 20 minutes filling in and let me click "no" so I don't scream "NO!" and want to poke out my own eye.

Sincerely,
A Nearly One-Eyed Ranting Nerd

 

P.S. Feh.

Howard Zinn, RIP

Howard Zinn has died.

Immorality of Power

Jonah Lehrer has an interesting post up about how having (or even just remembering having) power over others make people far less empathetic than normal.

The conclusion is not surprising, but is well put:

Of course, we live in an age when our most powerful people - they tend to also have lots of money - are also the most isolated. They live in gated communities with private drivers. They eat at different restaurants and stay at different resorts. They wear different clothes and skip the security lines at airports, before sitting at the front of the plane. We shouldn't be surprised that they're also assholes.

Avatar

The Spouse and I saw Avatar yesterday. We enjoyed it. It's spectacular (in the sense of being a spectacle). Pity about the script, though.

ETA: The Spouse and I both think that the movie would have been much more interesting if Sigourney Weaver had played Colonel Quaritch.

TorchWTF?

Fox is developing a US version of Torchwood.

Favorite quote from the story:

A more straight-faced spin-off of "Doctor Who," "Torchwood" is about a covert group that investigates and fights alien activity.

("straight-faced"? Have they watched this show?)

(Thanks to Wilmar for the heads-up.)

SF Reading Protocols

Jo Walton explains how reading SF takes different kinds of reading skills from other genres.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Attention Grumpy Old People

(And I count myself as one....)

Complaining about the Youth Of Today is far from new:

An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

(Via Making Light.)

Up! In the Air! It's a Bird...it's a Plane! No, it's a Double Movie Review

So The Spouse and I finally watched Up last week, and then saw Up in the Air (in an actual theater) over the weekend.

Up, while technically brilliant and often gorgeous to look at, is one of the bleakest movies we've ever seen. The first 10 minutes of the movie are fascinating to watch, but veer into serious tear-jerk territory fairly quickly. The rest is just bleak and weird, with a few minutes of heartwarming content at the end. The dogs are cute, though.

Up in the Air is also bleak -- but it's supposed to be. It's a very sardonic, and an actual adult comedy (R-rated, even), and has some real bite. It also has George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick (who is (a) young and (b) very good). It may not make cinematic history, but it's a solid couple of hours of film, and I strongly wish there were more movies like it.

Happy New Decade

Good riddance to the Aughties, the 200X's, the Big Zero, or whatever else we want to call the last decade.

Geek Mashup Heaven

Via BoingBoing, there is apparently a cottage industry in mashups of Star Wars or Star Trek as if they were action TV shows from the 1980s:

The A-Team in the Star Wars Universe

Airwolf with the Star Wars people (rebel edition)

Airwolf with the Star Wars people (Imperial edition)

(The user page for the person who created most of those)

Star Trek + Monty Python's Knights of the Round Table

Star Trek characters as the A-Team

The Fall of Barad-Dur Was an Inside Job!

The Fall of Barad-Dur was an inside job!

I'm actually surprised that it took this long for someone to do this.

Mumps Outbreaks in the US

Mumps is breaking out just north of NYC.

<wonders if this will modify anyone's behavior with respect to childhood immunizations>

Testosterone, the Cooperation Hormone?

Well, not quite. But new research shows that the expectation of becoming more aggressive with a testosterone boost is as strong, if not stronger, than the actual effects of testosterone.

I love simple experiments like the one detailed in that article.

Serious Color Nerdity

Dumpster color fixed (at BoingBoing).

Cutest. Cat. Video. Ever.

Surpised Kitten Is Surprised.

(Via BoingBoing.)

This Explains So Much

Almost every building I hate in Cambridge (and some across the Charles River) turns out to have been designed by Sert.

This includes the Holyoke Center and Science Center at Harvard, BU Law School, and Peabody Terrace.

It's appalling how much of the horrible architecture around here can be laid at the feet of one architect.

Birds that Sing With their Wings

Birds that sing with their wings. (!!!)

(Via Carl Zimmer.)

As J.B.S. Haldane said, the world is not only stranger than we imagine — it's stranger than we can imagine.

Things that go WTF? in the night

About 02:30 this morning, while dead asleep, I was awakened by some noise. The cats all leaped up at the same time that I sat bolt upright. (The cats were all curled up around me, so it wasn't one of them — which it usually is — which made me worried that perhaps someone was breaking a window or something.)

I got up and proceeded to turn on lights all through the house trying to figure out what noise had awoken me.

After five minutes of this, I finally "mentally replayed" the sound I'd heard and thought, "Gosh, that sounded like something falling in a bathtub or shower." I checked the bathtub — nothing. But in the shower, there was a conditioner bottle lying on the floor.

How does a conditioner bottle that sat, stable on the shelf, for 19 hours, suddenly fall off in the middle of the night?

WTF?

 

(This is why I'm a little groggy today. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Bea Arthur, Class Act

Bea Arthur, in her will, left $300K to a homeless shelter for LBGT youth.

Visualizations of Music

So very cool. Someone has made videos which show which instruments are playing which notes as the music plays. Some examples:

Beethoven's 5th, 1st movement

Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement

Bach Double Concerto

Pachelbel's Canon (which illustrates why this comedian hates it so much).

These appear to have been done by the same YouTube user, but their page doesn't seem to link to all of the extant videos. (Warning: that page starts playing The Stars and Stripes Forever after a few seconds!) There does seem to be a playlists page, though, which gives a thematic/historical categorization and includes more of the recordings.

 

(I discovered these videos via Kristin Cashore's blog.)

The War On Halloween

The Onion takes on the War on Halloween.

Why I Enjoy Foxtrot

Last Sunday's strip.

The Benefits of Checking One's Credit Card Bills...

extend to finding out that McAfee keeps billing for anti-virus software that has been uninstalled from a non-working computer, even a year later.

It's amazing how willing companies are to take advantage of standard human cognitive deficits.

Sun breaks gethostbyname(), nscd.

Thanks, Sun!

gethostbyname(3) is supposed to return the canonical hostname in the h_name field of the struct hostent that it returns a pointer to. It is supposed to return any aliases (e.g. CNAMEs in DNS) in the h_aliases field.

Sun recently released a version of /lib/nss_dns.so.1, which is used by nscd (which, if it is running, all calls to gethostbyname(3) go through). This is part of patch 140391-02 (for SPARC) or 140392-02 (for x86). The -03 version of these patches also has the problem. This patch is part of the most recent Recommended Patch cluster, and it is included in the Solaris 10 u7 release.

This patch messes up the return from gethostbyname(3), so that when you look up a CNAME, the CNAME goes into the h_name field and the actual canonical name goes into the h_aliases field.

This breaks anything that uses gethostbyname(3) and actually expects the h_name field to contain the canonicalized hostname. (At work, we found the bug because certain software wouldn't start right -- because the start script compares the local hostname to the result of a lookup of a CNAME, and that no longer worked right.)

Note that this bug persists even if you have hosts caching turned off in nscd.conf.

The simple workaround is to turn off nscd (by using svcadm disable name-service-cache). This can cause some serious slowdowns if you have a lot of name lookups (e.g. directories that contain lots of different users and groups). I measured a slowdown of a factor of 7.7 doing 'ls -l' on a directory containing 150 files each owned by a different user and group. (It was a local directory, and I redirected the output to /dev/null, so I believe I limited confounding factors.) If you don't want to turn off nscd, your only other choice (until a real patch is released) is to ask Sun for their IDR ("Interim Diagnostics and Relief") pseudo-patch for this, which is IDR142516-01 for SPARC, IDR142517-01 for x86. This will require a Sun service contract.

Feh.

Best Shop Sign Ever

Seen in a shop window in Niagara Falls, NY:

Zzzt! Oww! Zzzt! Oww! Zzzt! Oww!

I was leaning my arm on a Juniper firewall (which I use for work), and touching my iPod in its Bose dock, and got what felt like a heat burn (the Juniper is not cool to the touch), but turned out to be an electric shock!

Who's more likely to blame? Apple, Bose, or Juniper?

Time to dig out my multimeter.

 

UPDATE: I got my multimeter out and there is about 80 Vac between ground and the housing of the iPod when it's sitting in the dock. The other iPod in the house shows the same thing. I then plugged one of the iPods into the DC adapter (DC adapter into wall socket, USB-to-base cord connecting it to the iPod) and *that* gives 37 Vac between wall ground and the iPod housing.

WTF? Is this why iPods occasionally explode?

Or have I just managed to totally forget how to use a multimeter??

Lois McMaster Bujold vs. E.R. Eddison

Lois McMaster Bujold crystallizes why I couldn't get through The Worm Ouroboros:

I am also slogging through The Worm Ouroboros, (~1922), by E.R. Eddison. Early 20th C. British adult fantasy, post William Morris, also a little after the charming Lord Dunsany, I think (both of whom are much better writers, so far.) The book reads like Medieval/Reniassance Romance (the other sort of Romance) fanfiction, actually. Some wince-worthy naming choices that one must sort of muscle past lead to a tale about a cast of characters in the old high heroic mold, i.e., with the emotional maturity and egocentric focus of an overdressed drunken high school football squad, except they are running countries. Redshirt follower death-rate very high, female characters few and decorative rather than functional. Historically interesting as a reaction to the relentlessly mundane turn contemporary mainstream fiction was taking about then, I suppose. I'm having trouble deciding who I dislike more, the heroes or the villains. Eddison does get off some pretty elegant prose passages now and then, granted. Shall perservere, hoping for a payoff.

Animal Rescue after the Rapture

Eternal Earth-Bound Pets will care for your pets after you're Raptured up into Heaven. (They're all atheists.)

Bobby McFerrin Plays the Audience (Literally)

Like there weren't already enough reasons to love Bobby McFerrin, here's another. This is almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face, as well as your brain.

We're all Going To Die!

Krakatoa is active again.

Review: Harry Potter And the Half-Blood Prince

We saw the sixth Harry Potter movie last night. It was highly enjoyable until about 2/3 of the way through at which point the edits for the book-to-film transition started coming unglued, and in fact ended up changing things on an important character level.

I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the books being able to follow it, though. There was a LOT left unsaid.

No adaptation of a 650+ page book into a 2.5 hour movie is going to avoid cutting enormous amounts of material, and in this case, most of the cuts were fair (and some were annoying but will almost certainly be addressed in the extended cut DVD) -- until the end. They cut out some really important stuff, and changed two very important plot points, which bear directly on characters (not just plot stuff). We were annoyed by that.

However, it was an enjoyable movie, and -- especially considering how bleak the end is -- the first 2/3 of the movie was very funny. We were with a good audience for that (20-somethings mostly, at a 9:30pm showing). We laughed a lot. The young woman playing Lavender Brown is a hoot, and we loved Luna Lovegood's lion hat.

Overall? Far from the best movie of the series (I say #3, The Spouse says #4), but entertaining.

This, Mr. Bezos, is why I Will Not Buy a Kindle

They revoked the purchase of several George Orwell books after the publishers changed their mind.

George Orwell!

This Explains a Lot

Cats embed a cry inside their purr to get humans to do what they want. This explains

 

...sorry, I had to go feed my cats.

As I was saying, this explains a lot.

DM of the Rings

I know I'm way late to this story (and had to see it on Boingboing too), but DM of the Rings is freaking hilarious. It's the story of a D&D campaign wherein the DM is trying to do Lord of the Rings (and the players not only don't know Tolkien, but don't care and think that all the tedious backstory is just boring). It's a webcomic made of screenshots from the movies, and it's brilliant.

Warning: this may suck your brain for a day or so.

Why To Love John Hodgman, Part 51241

John Hodgman addresses the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.

 

(Via Pharyngula.)

 

Edited to add: Hodgman interviewed by Psychology Today. (Hodgmanian Synchronicity!)

Bad Web Design, No Donut!

So I was looking at the lyrics for Green Day's 21st Century Breakdown album, and each song links to a separate domain, like http://know-your-enemy.com/ for "Know Your Enemy".

This seems overconsumptive and stupid. American Idiotic, even.

 

Updated to add: This apparently is my day to stumble over horrible web design. I was reading this Inside Higher Ed article mocking (former Bush chair of the Council on Bioethics) Leon Kass and I wanted to look up "apodictally", so I tried to highlight it, and seemed to fail. It turns out someone decided that the Inside Higher Ed style sheets should make highlighting merely change the color of the text from black to blue-so-dark-it's-almost-indistinguishable-from-black. Perhaps highlighting in a useful (read: visible) fashion is for Lower Ed.

Jesse Ventura vs. Dick Cheney

More evidence -- as if we actually needed any -- that torture is not a partisan issue, except in the minds of idiot and/or evil right-wingers: Jesse Ventura vs. Dick Cheney.

What? I've read all the Hugo Nominee Novels? That Can't be Right

I think this is the first year in which I've read all Hugo nominee novels before the convention at which they are awarded.

(Were I voting, I'd go with Anathem. Although that young Charlie Stross surely deserves something after having been nominated <N> times without winning, Saturn's Children is not my favorite of his works.)

A Feature that Windows really Should Add

I have a Windows box for work. I don't log out of it very often. I am really kinesthetically oriented for icons and window placement etc. So when a program crashes (damn you, Firefox 3.0.9 and 3.0.10, for being flakier than 3.0.8 and earlier!), I tend to quit all the programs that have taskbar icons to the right of that program, so I can end up with the "right" taskbar arrangement after restarting everything.

A few days ago, my boss pointed me at Taskbar Shuffle, which (without even needing a reboot!) allows you to rearrange your taskbar. Hallelujah.

<rhetorical>Why doesn't Windows come with this feature?</rhetorical>

Anyone Want a Michael Whelan Book?

Anyone local (near me) want a slightly cat-chewed version of The Art of Michael Whelan? (The cat-chewing is on the top of the spine; the contents are fine.) For some reason I've had two copies of this for years.

Yet Another Reason I like Paul Krugman

His grammar parser gets annoyed by the same things mine does.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb for Treasury Secretary

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (of "Black Swan" fame) lays out some simple and sane principles for fixing our financial systems.

Habitat for Humanity

Does it make me a bad person that I think that Habitat for Humanity should stop building homes and start buying homes at foreclosure auctions?

Review: The True Meaning of Smekday

I read Adam Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday a week or so ago, and enjoyed it very much. (Thanks to jadelennox for the recommendation!)

"The True Meaning of Smekday" is (within the novel The True Meaning of Smekday) an essay written by Gratuity "Tip" Tucci (her mother started calling her "Turtlebear" once she found out that "Gratuity" didn't mean what she thought it meant when she named her daughter). The essay was occasioned by the "National Timecapsule Project" to "provide a record of this time in American history for generations to come". "This time in history" meaning when the extraterrestrial Boov invaded on Christmas Day (which they renamed Smekday in honor of their glorious leader Captain Smek) 2013.

Gratuity, who is eleven-and-a-half for most of the events recounted in the book, is caught up in the central events of the time. Before the invasion, her mother claims to have been abducted by aliens (and forced to fold laundry), has a large and growing (and glowing!) mole on her neck, and then disappears on Christmas DaySmekday. Gratuity survives on her own after the Boov invasion (and destruction of all human resistance), but when the Boov discover that humans are unwilling to let the Boov move into their cities, the Boov decide to put all humans into small areas (Americans get Florida). Gratuity decides to drive to Florida rather than go in the Boov rocket pods. Hijinks and hilarity ensue.

I could summarize some of the plot, but it would probably sound like a ten-year-old describing their favorite movie to someone who has never heard of it. Suffice it to say that it's an enjoyable romp, complete with irony and wit, some of which would go right over the heads of younger readers (and that's okay). And it includes one of the most twisted explanations of how Disneyworld (showing up here as "Happy Mouse Kingdom") manages to stay so incredibly clean.

The cast of characters includes Gratuity's mother's cat (named "Pig"), a Boov who calls himself "J.Lo" and is on the run from the other Boov, more aliens (the Gorg), and a bunch of pre-teen boys hiding out in Happy Mouse Kingdom, who have formed "the Brotherhood Organized Against Oppressive Boov" (BOOB). (Gratuity asks if that shouldn't be "BOAOB", but the boys reply that they wanted to be "BOOB". Needless to say, this doesn't endear them to Gratuity.)

The book is illustrated with near-realistic drawings (representing the Polaroids that Gratuity takes), Gratuity's drawings, and a couple of comic strips drawn by J.Lo to explain various things Boovish. Adam Rex is ridiculously talented to be able to draw all these things and write as well as he does. (Not fair!)

You should also look at www.smekday.com, which includes a short "Human Learning Video #42: The True Meaning of Smekday" (if the Quicktime movie doesn't work for you, follow the link to the YouTube version). This instructional video is of a puppet show explaining the new Boovish holidays, and is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. (I was nonplussed the first time, and every viewing since it just gets funnier.) The problems (for me) with the video are (a) it raised my expectations too far -- no book could include the sheer density of comic genius that the video does; and (b) there's only one!

In summary: go buy this book. It's fabulous (and on sale at Amazon). And watch the video.

Further Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale

Here are a bunch of thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Series Finale. They are not particularly well ordered.

Highlight to see them; this is to avoid spoilers.

If you read this in an RSS reader, stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet!

 

So this really seemed to call come down to "God did it". And angels? Really?

Somewhat ironically, this is quite a bit closer to the original Glen A. Larson Battlestar Galactica than any of the rest of the show. (Both the Mormonism and the plot. Wasn't there an episode of the original series with angels?) Larson may be smiling.

At least the Baltar-in-Caprica-Six's head showed up again.

I do wish they'd explained how Baltar survived the nuclear explosion in the miniseries (which clearly killed the original Caprica Six -- she downloaded from it in "Downloaded", the late-second-season episode where Baltar-in-Caprica-Six's head first -- and last -- showed up). Was he resurrected the way that Kara was?

Tell me again why Hera was so important? Because she seemed more like a walking Plot Device than anything else here.

Why were Laura and Sharon/Athena kept out of the bridge for the climactic "can't we break the cycle" scene? Okay, I guess Sharon/Athena probably would have blown Cavil's head off, but it seemed like they just needed to recreate a hallucination that was originally set up 1.5 seasons ago.

I'm so sick of SF that ends up with "and that planet became our Earth". Resounding cliché alert!.

It was 150,000 years ago? Really? That's just dumb. 50,000 would fit better insofar as the colonists were anatomically modern humans.

If Hera was Mitochondrial Eve, then that means that the indiginous populations died out, or were killed off. Nothing sinister there.

What are we now supposed to make of the shot at the end of Season 3 (after Starbuck re-appears) where they show us Earth -- our Earth, with North America clearly visible? I am fairly certain that Ron Moore stated clearly that the Earth there was really our Earth. I suppose he could wiggle out by saying that the Earth that they found at the end of the first half of Season 4, the 13th-tribe Earth, was not Our Earth, and not what they showed us at the end of the Season 3 finale.

And WTF: Saul Tigh saying to Galen (Tyrol) "If anyone had done that to Ellen, I'd have done the same"? Really? (a) wouldn't this means that Saul should kill himself? (b) Galen looked ready to space Callie retroactively when he found out that Callie's kid wasn't his.

Tori deserved better. I totally understand why she killed Callie. It was evil, but I totally understand it.

Daniel. Why even bring him up? Other than to explain the gap between Six and Eight? To show how evil Cavil was? We knew that. I felt like that was a huge loose plot thread that they planted and didn't pay off.

Kara's Dad wasn't Daniel? Then WTF?

Kara just vanishes into thin air?

"God did it." Totally frackingfucking weak.

What The Frack

Just finished watching the Battlestar Galactica series finale.

I'll probably write more about this later, but for now, I am feeling seriously unimpressed. Possibly even annoyed.

"Syfy"? Really? Oy.

So, the SciFi Channel is changing its name to "Syfy". John Scalzi gives it his trademark snark treatment.

You see, it's not just that "Syfy" is a stupid name, and renaming your brand is usually a sign of desperation. It's also that "syfy" means "venereal disease" (e.g. syphilis) in Polish.

Oh well, after Friday's BSG series finale I won't be watching much SciFiSyfy anyway.

Edited to add: io9 weighs in with 25 other possible names they could rebrand with.

Watchmen

I saw Watchmen today (with Dan) and enjoyed it quite a bit.

The movie is very faithful to the book, but it didn't seem slavish. (They did change a major mechanism for a plot point at the end of the book, and honestly, I think this version is better.) Some subplots were removed, but their absence didn't seem to be problematic to me.

With the exception of Matthew Goode (as Ozymandias/Adrien Veidt), the acting ranged from decent to quite good. Patrick Wilson (as Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II) did a great job, as did Jeffrey Dean Morgan (as The Comedian), but the really standout performance was Jackie Earle Haley as Rorshach. I don't know what was going on with Matthew Goode -- he's a British actor with a solid resume, but he sounded like a demented Dutchman in the movie, which might have been intentional -- but whether on his part or the part of the director is hard to say. It wasn't a big problem, in any case.

The special effects are impressive without taking over the story (and mostly drawn straight from the book), and the pacing seemed fine to me. Some people thought it could have been cut back 20 minutes or so, but I wasn't bored at all -- and I usually am if something is slow.

I'd like to especially note the opening credit sequence, which is simply fabulous and almost worth the price of admission on its own. It was given a shout-out by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light, and rightly so. (Go read the story. The lawyers at Warner's are jerks, and the Warner's upper management are idiots.) You can find the opening credits here.

Delayed Review 2: Graceling by Kristin Cashore

On the advice of several friends, I picked up a copy of Graceling in mid-September of last year.

Graceling is a first novel by Kristin Cashore. It's really good, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. You should borrow or buy it and read it, and loan it (or buy other copies and give it) to people you know.

The setup of the story is replete with the apparatus of stock fantasy: kings and princes and somewhat mystical powers -- i.e. the tropes and elements that in the hands of someone with less imagination and nerve would be dreadful, but works well when wielded with the right balance and wit. (It works very well here indeed.)

The main character, Katsa, is a young woman (just about 18), neice of King Randa of Middluns, who has a Grace. In this world, Graces are semi-sort-of-magical powers, that manifest themselves in two ways: (1) a very specific skill/talent/power; and (2) eyes of different colors (Katsa has one blue eye and one green eye). Some Graces are benign and in high demand (cooking skills or healing skills); some are less benign but also in demand (fighting skills); others are simply not very useful and are thus not prized -- but these Gracelings are usually mistrusted and mistreated if they have been found wanting by the Kings and Princes of the land).

Katsa's Grace revealed itself when she was eight years old and she reacted instinctively to a leering courtier who tried to grope her -- reacted with lethal violence. From then on, she was trained to be the King's special killer.

Much of the rest of the book concerns Katsa's growing desire to no longer be the King's pet killer, and to change the circumstances under which Kings can do such things. Much of the books' plot is set in motion by the arrival at court of Prince Po[1] from the island kingdom of Lienid, who is also Graced with amazing fighting skills. Katsa dislikes him on sight, which leads in the direction you'd probably expect -- but usually along a non-obvious path.

One of the things I like most about the book is that while the elements going into the story are fairly standard, they're put together in ways that are often quite unexpected. And during the slow reveal of the Main Villain (and I like that there are multiple unrelated villains), the main characters aren't stupid. About three pages after I figured out what the Main Villain is doing and how he's doing it, and just before I started thinking, "Augh! The main characters are dumb! How can they not see it?", they figured it out. Hallelujah! Non-stupid characters, not artificially jerked around to not see something that has become obvious to the reader! And then even though they've figured it out, it doesn't help much. Hooray for turning the screw another turn!

(Okay, I'm going to try to avoid saying anything more about the plot. Really.)

There seem to be (broadly) two approaches to background detail. In one, the author fills in lots of details about everything, and that can help ground the reader to feel like the world in the book is complete and fine-grained, but can potentially overwhelm the reader with irrelevancies. In the other approach, things are sketched in quick strokes and details are given only as necessary and/or pertinent to the story, which can streamline a plot-heavy story but can also end up leaving the reader feeling like they're missing the grit of a real world. (My problem -- and I know that this is my problem -- is that my reading brain is too lazy, or in a hurry, to make up details to put in the background, so without a certain level of details, I end up picturing things being very smooth and under-featured -- almost cartoony.) An example of this split (or spectrum) in approaches is how walk-on characters are handled: in some stories we learn names for many or all walk-on characters (even horses and other animals), while in other stories, no one gets named unless they're important to the plot. Cashore's work falls into the second category. (David Foster Wallace would probably be an archetype of the first.) Purely as a matter of taste, I generally like to have more details rather than fewer, but in a 471-page book (aimed at young-adult readers both artistically and as a matter of marketing), it does make sense to me to trim that back. (And of course, just because I would like more details puts no onus on Ms. Cashore to do anything to change her artistic choices.)

In summary: I really enjoyed this book and am looking forward to re-reading it (probably fairly soon -- but perhaps I should wait until either just before -- or maybe just after? -- the prequel, Fire, comes out in October). Is it perfect? Nope. (Nothing is.) But it's a cracking good first novel and I highly recommend it.

---

[1] Every time I read "Katsa and Po" my silly brain does have a tendency to recite bits from The Mikado. Fortunately, this didn't affect my actual reading of the book.

Delayed Review 1: A Fine Frenzy's One Cell In the Sea

I bought A Fine Frenzy's album One Cell in the Sea almost a year ago (my iTunes tells me I added it on May 2nd, 2008, which is in turn nearly a year after it came out).

I quickly got obsessed with this album to a degree that I haven't done in years. (The last album with which I got anywhere near so obsessed was Green Day's American Idiot.) I listened to it at least once a day for several months, sometimes multiple times a day. And instead of abruptly dropping out of the rotation like some albums (it's sort of like my brain is done with them and doesn't crave it any more), I still listen to it three or four times a week.

The problem with this level of obsessional listening is that it's hard to tell if it's actually good or if it's just the obsession speaking. However, I've given the album to some people as gifts, over the past few months, and they like it too. So I feel validated. Go me!

A Fine Frenzy is effectively Alison Sudol plus backup instrumentalists. She sings and plays the piano, both very well, and writes all her own songs (as far as I know). She's got a voice that can go from low and husky to high and clear, and she knows how to write songs that fit her voice. She writes strongly emotional songs and catchy tunes (sometimes at the same time). The songs aren't treacly; many of them are about relationships, but most of those are about failed or failing, or just plain didn't-happen, relationships (like "Almost Lover" and "Ashes and Wine", the latter of which is my current favorite).

There are some songs from the album (notably "Rangers"), which just get stuck in my head, but which I still don't know how to interpret. Is it just a catchy tune with obscure lyrics, or is she making literary references I don't get? I still don't know.

Apparently Alison Sudol has been tagged with the "red-headed piano player = Tori Amos" meme, which is bizarre since I don't feel like there's a lot of overlap, other than the relatively superficial facts that they're both female piano players/songwriters who have red hair. But then again, I like both of them, so maybe I'm just not seeing it.

I am slightly annoyed by the album cover (go look on Amazon), and wonder how much of that was Sudol herself and how much was the record company. I think it's clear that they are trying to market her as a Little Redheaded Girl, which annoys me. (I expressed this to my wife, and she said "What's your problem? You like redheads." I replied "I like redheaded women, thank you very much.")

I strongly recommend this album. But on the off chance that you have the same obsessional reaction I did, don't say I didn't warn you.

Interstitial Advertising FAIL

I have a pile of books and movies and albums (from the last year or so) about which I've wanted to post at least short reviews, and I figured I'd come up with a catchy name for the sequence. I wanted something with rhyme and assonance and the only thing I could come up with was "Delayed Deconstruction", which isn't quite right, and "Retarded Reviews", which has the right denotation and entirely wrong (and unfortunate, if not downright offensive) connotations. So I went to Merriam-Webster.com to look for less-freighted synonyms of "retarded" that would match it's original meaning of "delayed".

I then got

retard

One entry found.

---

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---

Entry Word: retard
Function: verb

Text: to cause to move or proceed at a less rapid pace <an herbicide to retard the growth of weeds>— see slow 1

Not quite an epic FAIL, but worth at least an "augh!"

Possibly the Nerdiest Review of a Science Book Ever

Michael Bérubé reviews Sean Carroll's new book, months before it comes out.

Dear Large Financial Services Company

Dear Large Financial Services Company:

If you are going to send me notification email messages, with

Content-Type: text/plain

then please actually make the message be plain text, not HTML crud.

Or send a MIME version with one in text form and one in HTML.

Really, this is 1998 technology we're talking about here.

And while we're on the topic, please let me have a password that has non-alphanumeric characters in it.

What the...FAIL

FAILblog has a very funny disease FAIL today.

(Warning: humorless Christians should avoid that.)

Have You Apologized to Rush Yet?

Have you apologized to Rush Limbaugh yet?

It's pretty amazing that we have Democrats who are willing to actually call out the Republicans as the whiny little pussies they are.

"Peak Oil" Revisited

Is it just me, or should Peak Lubricants maybe change their name, given Peak Oil?

And their slogan? "It's time for a change." Priceless.