Aram has been mocking me for years for my optimism that GMOs could be useful. Well, I formally throw in the towel on this one.
Scientific American is reporting that Monsanto has a GMO corn that causes liver and kidney damage, and that they knew about this and marketed it anyway.
In my defense here, I always said it was a bad idea to trust the company that brought you dioxin and aspartame.
I currently have a set of really nifty passwords, so nifty in fact that I really want to show off how clever they are. Which kinda sorta entirely defeats the purpose of having passwords.
Must. Resist. Urge. To. Show. Off. Niftiness. Of. Passwords....
In today's Boston Globe Magazine, the "Miss Conduct" advice column has this sidebar:
What computer people wish everyone knew: Asking an IT professional to take a look at your malfunctioning laptop (for free) is akin to asking a doctor for medical advice at a cocktail party. And not all "computer people" do the same thing. Asking a Web designer to fix your malfunctioning hard drive is like asking a lawyer for medical advice at a cocktail party.
I think we IT geeks are finally <sniff> accepted!
If WETA wasn't geeky enough for you, try out this heartwarming tale of a Kiwi engineer who made his own broadband link out of a $10 wok.
Brilliant.
Last week's New York magazine had a fascinating cover story about the effects of praising children.
The gist is that if you praise kids for being smart, rather than for working hard, they don't do as well, and in fact give up more readily, while kids praised for working hard rise to challenges more resiliently. The effect is pronounced and visible immediately.
This explains an awful lot. It explains a large number of people I saw in college (way more years ago than I care to admit now), and a lot of people at the dot-com where I started working at the leading edge of the bubble. It also explains a lot about my wife's (high-school) students.
Of course, everyone always thinks the next generation is callow and stupid and whiny and all that. But still. This time we have data.
I watched Mike Judge's Idiocracy on DVD yesterday, and while it was no Office Space, it's still an amusing way to spend an hour and a half.
The plot setup of the movie is that Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson, playing a low-echelon army librarian who is dead-average on all measures, including IQ), and Rita (a similarly dead-average prostitute [she's a prostitute for the slimmest of plot threads]) are put into hibernation coffins, ostensibly for a 1-year tes sleept. Due to a bunch of mistakes, they wake up 500 years later instead.
In the intervening 500 years, the story goes, the average intelligence has plummeted because stupid people breed so much faster than smart people -- such that Joe and Rita are the smartest people in the world. The future is garbage dumps the size of cities, gatorade knock-offs replacing water, and Jackass-type shows ("Ow! My Balls!") as the height of pop culture. You know, fiction.
The movie was released in a tiny number of theaters (reports vary on the number), for a week, before being dumped to DVD. This might have something to do with the sheer trashing of major corporations (Fuddruckers morphs into Futtbuckers, and thence to Buttfuckers, Starbucks becomes a brothel chain, and so on).
I'm hardly the only one to remark on the similarity of the movie's plot setup to C.M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" (and "The Little Black Bag"), first published in 1951. That's only in the plot setup, though. Kornbluth's story, which posits a few million "elite" smart people running the world behind the scenes while the billions of "normals" think that it is they who are running it, is actually much darker and nastier than Idiocracy.
By the way, I strongly recommend against googling "idiocracy kornbluth". That seems to pick up every insane right winger who ever read (and seemingly masturbated to) the Kornbluth story. I'm still feeling nauseated after reading some of those.
Via BoingBoing: you can trick out your car with a device that plays audio files over your horn. It only holds eight audio files, but that's probably enough.
I've been wanting this product for years. My choices would be
I'm sure I can come up with a few more over time, but those are the ones I really want now.
What would you want?
A warm Blogospherical welcome to the Zetetical Society Meeting Notes. (Also added to blogroll.)
Why isn't it elench.zetetical.org, though, just to make the Iain M. Banks reference? <grin>
WARNING: Geek content ahead. Get ready to roll a saving throw.
A friend likes to tweak me about our years playing Dungeons and Dragons, especially our fascination with some of the more obscure Fiend Folio creatures. (The new Fiend Folio cover is hideously Harry Potter-ized. Feh.)
So he sent me some snark about whether I remembered what githzerai were. I could only remember that they were related to (or next to in the Fiend Folio) githyanki, which is one of my favorite names from the entire D&D bestiary. (Not least because I can make stupid jokes to annoy my friends, like "Githyanki." "You're welcome." <rimshot>)
I of course went googling and found the githzerai WikiPedia entry, which mentions that they were invented by Charles Stross. This was a major surprise, because Charles Stross is now a hotshot SF writer whose stuff I've been reading recently, and enjoying immensely. (I strongly recommend The Atrocity Archives, especially if you've ever been a sysadmin.)
I feel like I've come full circle in some deep way. Some incredibly nerdy, sex-and-dating-impairing, deep way.
Thanks, Charles Stross!
Molly Ivins was one of a kind. Her penetrating voice of sanity will be sorely missed.
Obits: New York Times, CNN, The Texas Observer (and its front page coverage.
Go in peace, Molly.
What does it say about me that when I was in the supermarket yesterday and saw this magazine cover:
( specifically the "Get the Body You Want" headline) that I immediately thought: "Grave Robbing"?
Via Nick Mamatas, an astonishingly stupid take on Jim Baen's publishing career:
BAEN BOOKS OFFERED AN ANTIDOTE to leftism generally in science fiction. It helped rescue science-fiction publishing from the leftist, nihilistic "New Wave" science fiction that had arisen in the 1960s and was concerned, in parallel with postmodernism and deconstructionism in other literature and art, with denigrating Western traditions and values. The "New Wave" was never really popular (New Worlds, the major New Wave magazine in Britain, was bailed out by public money after the buyers and readers stayed away in droves), but it might well have had the purely negative achievement of driving traditional science-fiction writers out of publishing. Baen Books gave -- and still gives -- a voice to stories of traditional Western values like honor, patriotism, chivalry, duty and military valor.
This is stupid in so many ways I'm not even sure where to begin. (Mamatas' post is a good start.) I guess it comes down to:
Yes, Jim Baen published a bunch of military SF, and a lot of Campbellian Engineer-saves-the-Human-Race SF (and a lot of which is quite good). But some of that military SF is written by writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and C.J. Cherryh, who hardly fit this guy's notion of a Real Science Fiction Writer, them having two X chromosomes and all. And for crying out loud, Baen published stuff by Marion Zimmer Bradley -- she of Mists of Avalon fame (or in some circles, infamy). (Note that Baen didn't publish The Mists of Avalon; Del Rey did.)
I don't know why I'm bothering to mock someone who writes for the American Spectator, in any case. Other than, well, it's fun.
I'm entirely stunned at how stupid Michael Crichton is.
He's a White-House-visiting Global Warming Denier. We already knew that.
What we didn't know is that if you piss him off, he will insert you into his next book, as a child rapist.
(!)
(Via Talking Points Memo.)
John Wilkins over at ScienceBlogs has a great explanation of The God of the Gaps, and why "Intelligent Design" people really have a very small god.
Money quote:
Those theists who think that God is an explanation only of that which we cannot explain any other way have at best a very small and limited god, one that gets pulled out of the desk drawer only when we are or want to remain ignorant of the nature of something. And that is all ID is - the desire to remain ignorant, so we can call it divine.
So I finished John Scalzi's The Android's Dream last night. Here is my report.
Bottom line: it's a light, enjoyable SF romp that trades knowingly in SF tropes and conventions and flirts with cliché in places without going over the line. It's fun. I enjoyed it.
It's not as meaty or as lean (to aim my metaphors in different directions) as Scalzi's earlier novels, Old Man's War or The Ghost Brigades. It feels less "worn smooth", which has its positives (energy and exuberance) and negatives (a feeling that the book could have been pared down by 10 or so pages, mostly in the beginning).
There are some astonishingly funny bits in the book (though it's not a comedy as such), as well as some pretty serious stuff, but overall it's light and fun.
My issues with it are somewhat nebulous -- it's hard to tell how much of them are me as a reader being my particular and peculiar self, and how much are "in the book", with others seeing the same thing. For instance, the book opens (with an interstellar fart joke, no less) with an entire chapter about Dirk Moeller, who then proceeds to not be in the rest of the book (for reasons which are obvious once you read it). I spent Chapter 1 getting into the mode of "Okay, Dirk Moeller is the protagonist, here's his backstory, and here's his setup, and whooops! there he goes."
Then we have another chapter where we get another set of potential protagonists (whose goals are in opposition to Dirk Moeller's), and then I'm all, like, "ohmygod, who am I going to root for?".
And then, only in chapter 3 do we meet the person who turns out to be our real protagonist (Harry Creek).
I feel like Chapter 1 should have been labelled "Prologue", and (part of) Chapter 3 should have been Chapter 1, and Chapter 2 could stay where it is, and the rest of Chapter 3 could be Chapter 3.
Now, this whole "who is our protagonist" theme could be considered auctorially interesting, and anyone who knows me knows that while I like nice linear storytelling, I also like weird time-slicing and multiple viewpoint stories as well. But what I really like is knowing who to root for, even if it's more than one person and they're against each other. (This is one of the reasons I hate so much of the "adultery in the suburbs" genre -- everyone is loathesome, so why bother?)
The other thing that really struck me -- forcefully, which is somewhat remarkable since I'm usually a fairly inattentive reader on these sorts of things -- is that until we meet Robin Baker (the other main protagonist), on page 116, there are basically no female characters. I think someone's mother is mentioned (possibly by name), and there's a short bit with a farmer whose wife (who we don't actually see) really doesn't like to be woken up -- but that's it. We see chunks of the US State Department, and of the US Defense Department, but there's not a woman in sight until Robin shows up -- and barely any other than her, after.
This is especially bizarre given the number of strong female characters in Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. Now granted, a lot of the secondary characters in The Android's Dream are criminals or military, or nerds, which as subsets of humanity, tend to the testosterone-heavy. And Scalzi is on record as explicitly mentioning Elmore Leonard as an inspiration. But still. It's somewhat weird. Or maybe I'm weird.
And there are a couple of sequences which violate my cardinal rule of technological extrapolation: don't do details, because they'll almost certainly be wrong. (If you can extrapolate technology and get it right, then you might want to think about designing new gadgets and user interfaces and building the tech, not writing SF!) The positive version of this rule states that tech details should be left as vague as possible, so things don't date too badly. (Nothing dates as badly as last year's consumer user interface.[1])
The last bit of ranting I'll do is about a major (and nearly literal) deus ex machina that is threaded throughout the book. There's a long rant about how arrogant AI people are (which is true), which concludes with the "obvious" way to make an AI (copying an existing brain), which no one (in the book) has thought of. Well, it's a great deus ex machina as it's written, but it's also silly to posit a SFnal world where no one has thought of this, since in our world, lots of people have thought about how to upload their brains into computer simulations. Clearly The Android's Dream exists in a parallel universe where Ray Kurzweil, Greg Egan, and a bunch of other people (including Frederick Pohl, who "vastened" Gateway's Rob Broadhead in Heechee Rendezvous all the way back in 1984) never existed. What I really wish Scalzi had done was explain that lots of people had tried this, but no one had succeeded, and then explain how clever this particular uploaded AI's uploader was.
What can I say? I'm a science and computer geek. Things like this bug me.
Wow, I just spent ten paragraphs criticizing a book I really enjoyed reading. What's up with that? Well, if John Scalzi is interested in a nitpicking science and computer geek to help keep him out of trouble, he can consider this my audition. (Yeah, like he's going to be reading this.)
Or maybe I'm simply still annoyed at him for linking to this, which (as I mentioned a few posts ago), has eaten up way too much of my time. Damn you, Scalzi!
[1] Some notable non-consumer interfaces, like good command line interfaces, age very well indeed.
One, for this online game (which I found via Scalzi's "By the Way" blog). Possibly the best use of Flash ever.
WARNING: this is highly addictive. I wasted spent way too much time today on level 11.
Two, for making me (yes, making me, with the mighty power of his blogging!) pre-order The Android's Dream twice. I hadn't realized I'd already pre-ordered it the second time I went to pre-order it, so I ended up with two copies. If I enjoy it as much as the other ones he's written, I'll probably be sending one of them to someone I like as a Christmas gift. (If I don't enjoy it, I'll send it to someone I dislike.)
Our big cat Meph (Mephistopheles) died today. He was diagnosed with advanced metastatic squamous cell carcinoma last week, and was beginning to really show signs of pain and distress, so we took him to the vet today and made his passing as painless as possible.
In his honor, then.
As a little little kitten -- but look at those paws! (He maxed out at 18.5 pounds, but was down to a svelte 14.5 this summer, and was far far too skinny at the end.)
As an adult, taking up a human-sized chair:
And two pictures of Meph at his goofiest:
We're going to miss you, Meph.
