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.
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.
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.
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.
As I mentioned in my review of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, I was surprised that he didn't look at the effects of lead (especially leaded gasoline).
Now, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones is following up on this.
(Hat tip to BoingBoing.)
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.
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
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.
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
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.)
So Paul Krugman finally figured out why the Very Serious PeopleTM 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 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''.
I know I'm late on this, but here's my favorite sign from the Wisconsin protests:
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.
Here's a great explanation of why GUI's suck and should only be built on top of command-line interfaces.