I'm pretty sure that's been tried.

I would think it would foam up like a microwaved marshmallow.

First post in a new open thread. I feel special.

Second post, not so special.

Nothing to add, really, except that I couldn't get the Baroque Armor link in the sidelights to work.

Beg pardon, in Teresa'a Particles, I should have said.

I would worry more about the vacuum. They aren't intended to pick up items as large as bars of Ivory Soap.

Normally something that size would already have been cleared off of the floor before vacuuming even began.

I'd hate to see how messy your house is.

What WOULD happen if a human got shoved into the vacuum for a brief period? No, I don't expect something like Outland's in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-explode. I suppose ther'd be severe frostbite and capillaries rupturing, but beyond that?

Serge --

Your lungs work in reverse, so all the oxygen comes back out of your blood; you lose consciousness in about 15 seconds and you die quite promptly thereafter, long before you have time to get cold.

This happened to a fellow in a pressure chamber; someone hit the panic button in time, so he lived, but you lose consciousness fast.

rwellor, you beat me to it. I read the opener and said, it depends on how big the hose is for the vacuum.

Huh, rwellor... Groan... Your post reminds me of the Far Side cartoon showing the typical Gary Larson woman with the freaky beehive hairdo, walking down a deep dark forest and clutching the handle of her vaccum cleaner. The caption says:

Zelda belatedly realizes that Nature abhors a vacuum.

Thanks, Graydon. Fifteen seconds? That's awfully fast. I guess Kubrick's 2001 was stretching it a bit. Still, not as silly as Outland. (Ah, if THAT were the only silliness in that movie...)

it would get really, really big and melt even faster.

In 1990, there were about 15,000 vacuum cleaner related accidents in the U.S.

Approximately 30 billion cakes of Ivory Soap had been manufactured by 1990.

One wonders if these two facts are related.

Research question!

I'm writing a text adventure set in a computer camp, circa 1980.

The protagonist is maybe 12 - 14 years old.

What kind of bands might he have listened to?

A whole bar of soap in a vacumn? Amazing. Mine starts sparking and making noises if something as large as a penny gets picked up.

Did you know you can use woolen worksocks as replacement vacumn bags in a pinch?

That's what really happens to those missing socks.

*Sigh*

It is an utterly miserable rainy day in Portland. The lawns are turning to mush, the bark landscape mulch has floated away leaving mud everywhere where there isn't grass, and the sidewalks are rivers.

Now, I can take rain. (It rains more in Pittsburgh, where I lived for a year. It's just more spread out.)

But man, where's the LIGHTNING AND THUNDER? Flashes and bangs made rainstorms interesting.

Is Portland especially well grounded or something? I think I heard one thunder-rumble all last year.

No, kenzie... All those missing socks wind up on a shelf in Wong's Lost & Found Emporium.

What you want is one of those big industrial vacuums, like the Paris street cleaners use to suck up all the dog-doo.

Didn't the MythBusters once build a hovercraft surfer board using a superduper vacuum?

My daughter's crazy daffodils come out early: the first one opened on New Years Day. Since then a few Snowdrops have come up, and a Cyclamen is flowering too, and the daffadowndillies are up to a crowd of 20.

So, tonight we're expecting a hard frost, 5 or 7 degress below zero. Say 20-25 F. Stupid flowers: it's NOT SPRING YET!

One of my favorite episodes of the tv show Charmed had the sisters cast a spell for the return of lost objects. I forget what they were looking for, but at one point, one sister walks into the kitchen to find the table and counters covered in, among other things, sox. Lots and lots of sox.

"I'm writing a text adventure set in a computer camp, circa 1980."

WERE there computer camps in 1980? The protagonist is about the age I was then, and I never touched a home computer until college.

Of course I wasn't very technology-minded, either.

Stefan, regarding your research question:

I was 15 in 1980, and a major computer geek; my favorite bands were:
Talking Heads
Kraftwerk
Devo
The Cars
Pink Floyd
Sex Pistols

Hope that helps.

Does it have to be Ivory? what about Dove? I bet that would expand into a bird.

Stefan, I don't know what sort of music your camper listens to, but if it is pop, http://80music.about.com/library/pop/bl_1980.htm can give you an idea of what was popular back then. Google for top 40 music 1980 and lots of stuff will appear, most of it irrelevant.

It would get all covered with that gray dirt that vacuums collect, doncha know.

Thanks Jack & Shane.

I'm pretty sure there were computer camps in 1980, but it is worth looking into. The exact date isn't important. In fact, a year or two later might be better, because I want there to be time for the camp's original lab full of Commodore computers to become obsolete, setting the stage for the discovery of a PET cemetary off in the woods.

(google google) Aha, the first computer camp opened in 1977:

http://www.nccamp.com/history.html

And the PET came out in 1977 too. So 1980 would work.

(Backstory: The place was once Camp Lose-a-Lot. The character went there as a chubby pre-teen. I'm not sure if this has any plot implications.)

Melissa: Yes, there were computer camps in the 1980s. My very first paying job was as a counselor at a computer day camp. (Summer of 1982. Somewhere I still have my t-shirt.)

We mostly listened to the AOR stuff (Floyd, Journey, Boston, Chicago, Styx, AC/DC, ZZTop, The Cars, etc). No disco, not a lot of the Top-40 pop stuff. FWIW, that's what the band geeks at music camp listened to, as well.

The computer geek I live with, who was 12 in 1980 listened to Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull at the time. But he was weird even then.

Shane's probably got a more reasonable list, to which I would add Blondie since they were all over the charts at the time.

I thought socks were the larval form of wire coat hangers?

I wish I could help with the music question but I don't think I'm of any help at all pre-1986.

kathryn from Sunnyvale

In the thread on flu packs you said that you have a set list of food that you buy/donate to food banks on a rotating schedule.

Would you mind sharing your shopping list? It sounds like a good idea, and I'd like to see what sorts of things you buy to help plan my own.

You can e-mail it to me if you think it's too unwieldy to put in the comments.

Ivory soap, because it has more air bubbles incorporated into it than other kinds (that's why it floats).

I think the bubbles would expand; compared with the brittleness from the extreme cold, I think you'd end up with something like a stomped-on package of freeze dried ice cream (you know, that Astronaut Ice Cream they sell at Space Camp).

Well, nothing to do with soap, or vacuums. My father, Otto Sheller, died today. He lasted a little over a year after the death of my mother Ruth. Since he'd been failing fairly rapidly recently. it's not a great surprise.

Some of the regular posters here may remember them - they went to quite a few cons from the mid-80's to the mid-90's, including several Minicons and Marcons. Daddy's body is going to the University of Iowa med school, where Mama's went just before Christmas 2004.

1980 was in the disco music era. Saturday Night Fever made it to Thule while I was there in 1978, and the soundtrack of it was from the BeeGees or some such.

Disco, ugh.

Wikipedia's entry on the year in music, 1980 may give you a nice overview of what was going on. I see a lot of singles mentioned on that page that I didn't discover until my cousin opened up my ears in 1982 or 83. (Oh, KQAK, how dearly you are missed.)

I'd say your kid's list needs some Gary Numan on it. The Pleasure Principle was released in 1979. Ooh, and maybe some Kate Bush...

Graydon wrote: Your lungs work in reverse, so all the oxygen comes back out of your blood; you lose consciousness in about 15 seconds and you die quite promptly thereafter, long before you have time to get cold.

That may be a bit pessemistic, and depends in part on how much oxygen you have in your system and how abrupt the pressure loss is. Wikipedia quotes USAF numbers of 9-12 seconds Time of Useful Consciousness, meaning how long you can still function more or less intelligently, but notes that that complete unconsciousness takes longer. However, Clarke's estimate of a minute or more in _Earthlight_ and the sequence in _2001_ are decidedly optimistic.

Ivory soap, however, will lose consciousness immediately on exposure to vacuum.

(Now you've got me wanting to dig out a vacuum pump from the garage and experiment....)

Andrew, I don't think any American 12-year-old, no matter how geeky would have heard of Kate Bush in 1980. In 1985, sure, but in 1980 the only way any Americans without a direct connection to the UK had heard of Kate Bush was if they'd happened to catch her one and only appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

On 80s music, there's always Flashback Radio. Of course, if you're looking for 1980 specifically, you'll have to be really picky, picking from their archives.

The Ivory would sublime into the ridiculous.

I hope you all know this will be on the final. Bring two wrapped bars, a #2 pencil, and a pressure suit. "I used one of my bars to check for leaks" is not an acceptable excuse.

Stefan Jones: Meredith raises a point I was working toward: when you ask for "bands he might have listened to" in 1980, are you looking for the pop music of the era that he would have heard on the radio, or for something 'alternative' that will mark your character as someone with precocious taste in music?

As Meredith noted, "Wuthering Heights" had already been a huge hit in the UK, but I would add that it was not unknown here: college radio was certainly playing the hell out of her. So it's extremely unlikely but not impossible for your fictional 12-year -old boy to be listening to Kate Bush.

And now, a tangent: Is the new Kate Bush any good?

Anne, sorry about your loss. May your father rest in peace.

On an unrelated subject, here's something from the less known news:

http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/01/b84f149f-7911-4f94-b7cd-a43808f2fdb3.html

I served in the Russian army myself, still in the Soviet times. Things really are that bad.

When I bought my first house last fall the first thing my mother bought me was a sixpack of Ivory soap. I thought it was a really strange gift as I own my own soap business.

On the 1980 music question: I was 15 that year, not a computer geek but an sf fan, would have been more into gaming if there were more local gamers in Branson High School at the time. Heavily into certain "progressive rock" bands--Styx, Kansas, Queen, and Heart were particular favorites, also (among their predecessors) Yes, The Moody Blues, and of course the Beatles. (I'd probably have been a Rush fan as well if they'd gotten more local airplay.)

I also favored some of the smarter (or maybe just artier) "light rock" outfits--Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, the Steve Miller Band. Didn't get into punk/new wave for a few more years (after moving to "the big city," which in my case was Tulsa, Oklahoma), didn't get into disco or r&b for a few more, and didn't get into country music (very popular in the Ozarks, not to mention Tulsa) for quite a few more.

(It occurs to me that rap was just then beginning to catch on in New York, though "Rapper's Delight"--the first national rap hit--would not appear on record until very late in the year. Might be fun to have a supporting character from the South Bronx trying to explain what this rap business is all about, with his fellow campers laughing and saying it'll never amount to anything.)

A fair number of sf/gamer/hacker types I knew at the time (after I moved to Tulsa, anyway) collected sf/fantasy soundtrack music, especially John Williams's scores for the "Star Wars" and "Superman" movies (and "Indiana Jones" later on). I may have known someone with the soundtrack from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" TV series as well, but the show started running September 28, a little too late to figure in a summer-of-1980 setting. (Summer of '81 might be just right, though.)

Sorry for going on at such length; your question brought back memories!

I haven't been paying much attention to music lately.

I know this is kinda spammy, but if you feel like taking a minute to answer, I'd apreciate it.

Currently I have Sprint as my provider and an old samsung n400 as my phone. My contract is up and I am considering switching. I thought I would ask for some advice. I don't get Verizon here unfortunately. What cell provider do you use and why? What phone do you use and why? How much should I expect to pay?

I only need regular phone service, but I am thinking about trying something more exotic, like a high bandwith modem capable cell, or some other fun techno-toy. Thanks

Oops the link to my blog is on my name. So you don't clutter Making Light.

I wonder how Clarke's _Earthlight_ and _2001_ scenes fitted with the real knowledge at the time they were written? I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that the oxygen loss through the lungs was a later realisation.

I'm now going to have to time the movie scene.

Music in 1980? I was that hardcore, graceless, 14-y-o spod and I probably mumbled 6502 opcodes in my sleep. I listened to Kraftwerk ('Computerworld' had just come out. I had to buy it on general principles.) and a lot of two-tone (Madness, Specials, The Beat) because that's what was popular.

The singular delights of The Peel Programme were about a year into the future.

To Anne Sheller... My condolances about your dad. Mine went suddenly and I never got to say goodbye to him.

What about Pat Benatar? ABBA?

Rob T's comment about listening to sf/fantasy movie soundtracks... I used to listen to them a lot too, probably because in those days, VCRs were not common at all and there weren't many ways to relive a specific movie's experience when I wanted to, on my own terms. One other thing I did circa 1970 was take my hardcover-sized cassette-tape recorder and put it in front of the TV if it happened to be airing a movie I really liked. That way I taped the whole soundtrack, music, sound effects, dialogs, the works. I'd then play the movie back to myself again and again and again. That's something I had thought of on my own. But so did my wife who's also an sf/tantasy fan. How many of this site's pre-VCR posters also came up with that idea?

Anne, I'm sorry to hear that. Surprise or not, it's still not nice. Hope you and your family are okay.

Regarding music, I was too young at the time to be of much use, I just wanted to say it's the first time I've ever heard someone say Queen is prog rock... I suppose Bohemian Rhapsody, maybe.

Paul (currently listening to La Villa Strangiato, from Rush in Rio, and liking it a lot; much better than the album version)

Hmm. Question for Jordin and Graydon: do you suppose you could reduce or stop the O2 loss through your lungs, if you knew you were going to be spaced, by drowning yourself first? I'd expect a couple of lungs full of water would take quite a while to empty in vacuum, and while there's water in the way the diffusion rate is going to be a lot lower -- same pressure gradient, but the exposed surface area goes from something like a couple of tennis courts down to a couple of square centimetres.

Of course, recovery afterwards (when they hook you out of the airlock) is going to be a bitch ...

Wuthering Heights! I loved that song but I had never heard of Kate Bush at the time. Pat Benatar had a cover version of it on "Crimes of Passion" which I adored. That would have been around 1980, if memory serves correctly.

It was probably 10 years later that I finally heard the original Kate Bush version; my immediate impression was that someone had put the record player on the wrong speed.

I think it was Greg Bear's moving Mars that had a scene where someone's spacesuit loses a glove. The person doesn't die because the rest of the suit immediately seals the forearm from the rest of the body. But when they bring him (her?) in, the arm's skin is very red because all the capillaries ruptured.

Eighties music... The Police? Queen?

Had Annie Lennox started doing her thing by 1980?

Drowning yourself sounds like an . . .interesting way to stop the vacuum problem. I don't know how easy it is to breathe in and hold water, given the amount of fuss your body makes about even a little water in the airway normally.

What other gasses will come out of your blood under "zero" pressure? If you held your breath after your lungs were emptied, would they refill before your blood ran out of gasses? [And would that give you pressure problems again?]

Do your lungs, when exposed to vacuum, collapse and stick to themselves? Or is there enough gas from the "boiling blood" remaining to keep them open?

In a less gruesome light:

I was 10 in 1980.

1) Computers went obsolete slower then, I think.

2) I listened to my older sibs' music in the 1978-83 years (Scarsdale, NY for reference purposes.) Sister: The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, and similar [well, similar to me. She had six linear inches of Dead records.] Brother: Meatloaf [Bat out of hell was '78], Tom Petty, the Outlaws, Blondie, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin. My sister bought "London Calling "and I think she listened to it once. I still listen to it, so that's the direction MY tastes went in.

I somehow avoided the Grease soundtrack that "all" the kids from my year were into.

There were definite, clear categories and identities. Metal was around [Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest] and even though the metalheads and the very few New Wave types both hated middle-of-the-road overproduced cheezy rock, they also hated each other.

I hope this helps.

Charlie: do you suppose you could reduce or stop the O2 loss through your lungs, if you knew you were going to be spaced, by drowning yourself first?

Sounds like "The Abyss" meets "2001". The water would boil off, of course, as soon as it was exposed to vacuum, but that would still take some time to happen, as the only exposed surface is the water/air boundary at some point along your airway (as you say, a couple of square centimetres).

I don't have the expertise to work out how fast the water would boil away. Water's liquid at body temperature down to about 0.01 bar, so a little vapour pressure in the airway (from initial evaporation or residual air) would be enough to keep the water in the lungs liquid. You could keep your mouth and nose shut against a 0.01 bar differential (not so a 1 bar differential) so simply letting most of the water vapour escape through your lips might be enough.

Better still, use oxygenated perfluorocarbon with a higher boiling point (or rather a triple point further down and to the left on the chart), so it would stay liquid at lower pressures and also keep you conscious. That works a lot better.

Anyone with more expertise care to comment?

serge, My memory of the re-entry scene in 2001 was that 15 seconds would have been enough. I think the time in vacuum was quite short. OTOH, it was in slow motion, so it's hard to calculate. I won't have time to find my DVD copy & check until tomorrow night at least.

A friend has just journeyed the 1,000 km (by bus) from Sydney to Melbourne to see the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image which finished yesterday. We didn't find out about it until last week, despite it being on since November 2005, so they're obviously falling down on publicity, because with more notice I'd have been there too, and possibly a few more friends who can't just drop everything and go.

Apart from the exhibition, it included showings of his early shorts and other hard-to-see films of his. I remember being quite miffed that when boxed sets of Kubrick films were brought out, they only included big, well-known ones. You'd think they could put in one or two rare films one one disc in a whole set. Or perhaps there's a plan to only have them available in an expensive collectors' complete set, or high-priced 'education resource'.
(This sort of links into the "Life Expectancy of Books" thread.)

I remember hearing Dire Straits for the first time in the fall of 78. Stopped me in my tracks but as i was living in Brussels, it took a while to find out who the group was. The Police were big. As were Talking Heads. But I was still going to Dead and Bruuuuuce concerts, after I returned to the states in 79.

BTW, and utterly off onto another topic, I was hoping that our hosts would have some comments on the James Frey brou ha ha particularly wrt the actions of his agent and editor... I found the following elsewhere, but think that more could be said.

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/

Sigh. Meredith et al. are right--a 10-year-old American Kate Bush fan in 1980 would be a long shot at best. I suppose I was trying to give the kid the head start on cool that I wish I could have received myself. (Bob O., Aerial is almost entirely great, and intermittently fabulous. It's worth your money, but it's not Hounds of Love [1985].)

In that vein: Eurythmics didn't hit the States until 1983; in 1980, Dave and Annie had just finished being the Tourists, and your kid definitely wouldn'a heard of them.

Interesting, but form your own opinion: http://www.canstruction.org/indexi.html

Stefan,
In 1980 my geeky friends and I would play DND and listen to Bauhaus.

Anne Sheller, sympathies on your father's death. Better for it not to be a complete surprise, I think, but an unhappy time either way.

I must have been at several Minicon's with him, at least, but I have no recollection of having met him, and I guess it's too late now.

Anne, my condolences. Your folks went to a bunch of Minicons that I was at, too. Donating one's body to a med school is a pretty cool gift to the future.

Meredith, I was a remarkably under-informed person in 1980, even compared to the other Wisconsin/Minnesota farm town kids, yet I had heard of Kate Bush -- by 1977, even. I believe there was an article about her in some US magazine that I would have read. This limits it to mainstream magazines, at that point, and I cannot recall which. I do remember that whatever it was, it mentioned her vocal qualities in a way that interested me.

i was 10 in 1980. and IIRC, I really liked AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Blondie, Tom Petty, Tommy TuTone, Greg Kihn, etc..

Read on Salon.com that Dianne Feinstein intends to support a filibuster on Alito's nomination. I guess all those phonecalls made a difference. I haven't heard how much effect my call had on my own Senator.

If thrown from a normal pressure environment into vacuum, wouldn't you also get the bends?

My understanding is that the common way of getting the bends is ascending too quickly from a SCUBA dive. In order to inhale at depth, the gas you're inhaling needs to be at high pressure. When you begin your ascent, the nitrogen that you inhaled under high pressure begins to expand as the water pressure around you decreases. The expansion of the gas is potentially a problem as your body isn't built to contain high-pressure gases.

If you ascend slowly enough, the now-expanded nitrogen can be exhaled. If you don't ascend slowly, the expanding nitrogen still has to go somewhere. What happens is it boils inside your veins, a painful and potentially fatal phenomenon known as the bends.

I would assume that something similar happens to the nitrogen in your blood when you go from sea-level pressure to zero pressure. (?)

Oh, hey, in 1980 Billy Joel was not yet "Easy listening." I remember being eight or nine, in the way back of the station wagon, with "Movin' out" playing on the radio. Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel had not yet gotten rich and become implied jokes to 13-year-olds.

In short, while it is attractive to make YOUR 13-year-old from 1980 listen to Devo and the Clash, it doesn't ring true.

Another question: I've been assuming this camp is in the US. Is it?

ScottH: you're talking about a 1 bar pressure gradient (Earth ambient to vacuum). IIRC, you get roughly an extra atmosphere of pressure for every ten metres you go underwater. You'd really have to ask a diver, but my understanding is that for short dives to that kind of depth, decompression stops aren't required. NASA do slow decompression of shuttle astronauts before EVA (5 hours to go from 15psi oxy/nitro mix to 5psi pure oxygen), but remember they're taking the partial pressure of nitrogen right down to zero and they want the astronauts to be able to work for several hours in low pressure. (The low pressure makes it easier to build flexible spacesuits.)

I'd tend to assume that worrying about nitrogen microemboli forming when you go into vacuum, as opposed to the slight lack of oxygen, is a bit like worrying about your ingrowing toenail when your leg is about to rot away due to gas gangrene.

Bob O., Aerial is quite wonderful, particularly the second disc. The first disc has some wonderful moments, but also two immensely silly tracks. It's well worth getting. (I was just gratified to hear that The Red Shoes was indeed an aberration.)

The nature abhors a vacuum joke was by Farley. There was such an outcry over the strip that he had to bring back the character, to show that she wasn't killed. Ms. Velma Melmac became a regular character in the strip. You can see her on the cover of the most excellent Fur and Loafing in Yosemite. And yes, right next to Yosemite National Park there really is a Hoover Wilderness.

I would tend toward the "Astronaut Ice Cream" hypothesis...except I wonder if there's a glazed layer on the outside that might prevent this.

Which brings me up to an old question on my part: Can you make a lighter-than air material by creating the equivalent of an aerogel in a vacuum, sealing the outside with a much less permeable material (not very significant for big enough spheres)? Has anyone tried?

I call dibs on the names "VacuGel(tm)" and "Cavorite(tm)" for it, and for that matter on the name "Nullkido(r)" for aikido adapted to a micro- or null-gravity environment.

Bring two wrapped bars, a #2 pencil, and a pressure suit.

Surely a grease pencil would be better than an #2?

(My first thought reading this thread was that the soap would quietly vanish away. My second was that it's too bad I don't have my father's home-made vacuum chamber to try it out.)

True, TomB, the Nature/vacuum joke was in the Farley comic-strip, but it also showed up in the Far Side. I dread to say the following because somebody will probably looking it up, but I wonder how many cartoonists have used that joke since the first vacuum cleaner came to be.

What, Michael, no upsidaisium?

I would guess that the computer camp kids in 1980 would include three major types: (a) the kid with older sibs who listens to stuff above his/her head, all hip and whatnot, DEVO, Elvis Costello, Boomtown Rats, the Cramps, the Ramones, etc, etc, (2) the kid who listens to whatever the radio plays, which you would get from the sites linked to, and who would neither particularly care what was being played or particularly care if there was a radio on at all, and (iii) the kid with no sibs and no life who listens to his parent's records, so is hip to cool jazz and bad classical pops.

In any case, wouldn't the musical tastes of the counselors would almost immediately and totally overwhelm that of the kids? My own experience, as an elevenish nerd in 1980, at summer camp that had a computer room tho' not a computer camp, was that the counselors picked the music, and we all tried to be hip and pretend that we knew that stuff. I wouldn't extrapolate from that to a general rule, but there it is.

The one thing I remember we all agreed on, on the boys side of the camp anyway, was Dr. Demento.

Thanks,
-V.

Changing topics -- I just saw on CNN that playwright Wendy Wasserstein has died at 55 from cancer. The PBS version of her play Uncommon Women and Others was my first introduction to Mount Holyoke College, just before I went to school next to it at Amherst and later married an alumna of it. She was a great thinker and a great speaker -- I was fortunate enough to hear her in the summer of 2004. Probably some of the NYC readers here knew her...

In 1985, sure, but in 1980 the only way any Americans without a direct connection to the UK had heard of Kate Bush was if they'd happened to catch her one and only appearance as musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

I saw that! She sang "Roll in the Ball," right? I thought she was wonderful. But I wasn't 12.

In zero gravity, would a bar of Ivory soap float?

{whining}

I wish the color the links turn when they've been clicked was actually a different color than they are before they've been clicked. It is almost impossible to find the last post I read. (I read threads by clicking the most recent post and backtracking to the last one I clicked, a method recommended by another poster here. It worked, previously.) When threads get to be more than about 100 comments, it isn't worth it to try to figure out where I was, so I'm sure I miss some good stuff. I also can't tell if I've clicked links in a thread or not.

None of this is going to ruin my life, but it is annoying. Is there a reason this is set to a slightly different shade of the same color?

{/whining}

I think that in 1965, the hit parade included the Rolling Stones's can't get no satisfaction and Petula Clark's downtown. It's hard to imagine two such different styles making it today on the same hit parade. Especially if you remember who Petula Clark was.

To get absurdly physical, my guess is that not much would happen to the bar of soap. The tensile strength of the soap is probably enough to resist the internal pressure of the air trapped in small bubbles. After all, Pop Rocks kept the CO2 in quite nicely, despite the even larger pressure gradient.

Ann Sheffer: My condolences; the loss of a parent is hard to take. I was fortunate that I was able to say goodbye to my father a few months before he died.

In 1980 I was listening to Peter Tosh, Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Jacob Miller, Judy Mowatt and The Mighty Sparrow....

Continuing on decompression: as pointed out, if you were on an oxygen atmosphere you wouldn't get the bends. It is true that going from 2 bar (at 10m depth) to 1 bar at surface does not generally require decompression stops, but it's not a question of the absolute pressure; it's the proportional change. You do the last bit of the ascent much more slowly, because if you go from, say, 30m to 20m, you are reducing external pressure by 25%, while from 10m to surface it goes down by 50%, and so you have to take much more care not to blow out an eardrum - or get bent - because any trapped air bubbles will double in size in your middle ear in the last 10m.

But: what pressure would your blood be under if your skin were exposed to vacuum? The tension of the skin and blood vessels would still have it under some pressure (guess: less than 1 bar, but not much less). If 0.3 bar is enough to survive in a pure-02 atmosphere, I'm not sure dropping to 0 bar would do that much more damage in terms of bleeding, etc. (obviously bends not a factor)

You might lose both eardrums in vacuum. Watch out for that. Suggest you scream loudly as you are chucked out the airlock, to equalise the pressure.

Dave Kuzminski:

Re can art. When I was at Macalester College in the early 70's a couple of 'proto geeks' built a pipe organ out of coke cans. They called it a Cokenfloete, and it worked! IIRC, they got at least one tv appearance out of it.

Mike Ford writes:

The Ivory would sublime into the ridiculous.

"...because it is as pure as the sky itself!"

I hope you all know this will be on the final. Bring two wrapped bars, a #2 pencil, and a pressure suit.

Will travel.

Re: James Frey -- Someone called the library where I work and said that they didn't want the James Frey book we were holding for them, and that we could pass it on to the next person on the list. When I got home that night I heard about Oprah's denouncing Frey that day, and I figured out that the patron* had called pretty much at the exact minute Oprah's show ended.

* Yeah, we call them patrons. Well, they're not customers, and some of them do patronize...

Anne, I'm sorry for your loss.

The rapidity with which the topic turned from Ivory Soap in a vacuum to unprotected human bodies in a vacuum reminds me of my recent experience on a river cleanup.

We found a car in the river. Parallel with the bank, roof of the car about 6 inches under the surface.

The first thing to pop into EVERYONE's mind was, "I wonder if there's a body in that car?"

(Not being equipped for either swimming out to look or hoisting the car, we contented ourselves with photographing and reporting it. Never heard back any more info on how it got there or the presence/absence of cadavers.)

Thanks for all the responses RE 1980 music.

I'm not going to get too specific RE what the viewpoint character listens too. He is necessarily somewhat a cypher, since the player to some extent fills his shoes.

I'm more interested in what music might be heard drifting out of the camp counselors' cabin, what band names might appear on stickers or graffiti . . . that sort of thing. What I've read above should help.

Right now I'm working on the dream-sequence prologue, to practice NPC automation. It begins with the character walking into his Junior High homeroom in his pajamas and ends with him being chased down a corridor by a faceless, chainsaw-wielding clown.

...chased down a corridor by a faceless, chainsaw-wielding clown...

We all have days like that. But sometimes a clown is just a clown, and not a symbol standing in for one's boss.

Lila, we had a case like that out here 10 days or so ago. Unfortunately, there was a body in the car.

TNH if this is too much of an ad, please accept my apologies and delete at will (not that you need my permission . . .).

I wanted to point to Amazon's 4-for-3 sale; thousands of paperback fiction books, SF/Fantasy/Mystery/Teen/Romance/Kids in a huge list, searchable and divided into genre--buy four, pay for three.

Lots of really great books are on the SF/Fantasy list. It's an easy way to try out someoene new you've been meaning to read for a while. Do check out the Teen list--some often overlooked but worthwhile books are there. Also a lot of what looks to me like manga. Lots of classic mystery authors, as well as newer stuff. And they've got little checkmarks by the titles to make it easier for you to go crazy.

Speaking of the 80's, I got a hold of the State of the Union Address a bit early and I thought I'd share it. Enjoy.

"My fellow Americans: Once again I come before you to speak of the state of our blessed union. I am happy to say that there are bright times ahead.

In the past few years, our great nation has been under siege by men of cowardice and evil. We are not a people to take things lying down. In the face of terror we stood up and took the fight to the enemies of freedom and liberty all over the world. Today, we are safer as a nation. When we started the global war on terror, I told the American people that “we will fight them there, so we won't have to fight them here.” Our actions overseas have been a resounding success. Some would have us pull troops out; have us cut and run. As long as I am President, the United States of America will not run. We will increase and expand our efforts in the name of democracy and freedom. WAR IS PEACE.

Our economy is getting stronger. The stock market has recently regained the strength it lost after the cowardly acts on September 11th. This is in no small part thanks to tax cuts I have given to large companies. This freed capital allows businesses to create more jobs, and compete in a free market with global labor. Some companies have also taken the initiative by reducing or removing health and retirement benefits. I plan to follow suit in order to repair a broken and failing social security and medicare systems. America is a land of employment and opportunity. Evidence of this is plentiful. Every day, people are scrambling to cross our borders in search of work. Giving corporations the power to thrive is key to growing our economy and keeping it the strongest in the world. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

Defeatist voices in our midst would tell us that our military actions cannot be sustained. They would say that our presence breeds terrorism. They would ask for all our dealings to be transparent and public. They would divide us against ourselves. In essence, they would give aid to our enemies. Unwarranted and unnecessary criticism hurts our troops and emboldens our enemies. Defeatists would have us ask terrorists permission to investigate them. Reckless media speak of civilian casualties, torture, and kidnapping caused by the American military. In order to safeguard the citizens of this great country, and in order to win the global war on terror, we must stand as one. We must not squabble over partisan politics. We must support the brave men and women overseas. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Finally, using powers given to me by congress during wartime, I have made us safer by ordering the NSA to conduct warrantless wiretapping inside our borders. Had we acted sooner, perhaps we could have stopped the tragic events of September 11th. Now, we can survey and gather intelligence on terrorists faster, with less red tape. Those evil doers with secrets have no where to hide. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.

Thank you, and God Bless America."

(Sorry, I just needed to vent. Yes, I have too much free time.)

Stefan: Portland definitely suffers from a shortage of thunder and lightning to go with the rain, but we did get (a small amount of) rumbling from an earthquake the other night. A third of a mile from my apartment, even. I was certain the upstairs neighbor had dropped something until I heard a report on the radio (which mistakenly gave the epicenter as being in the West Hills. Not sure how they got the wrong half of the city at first.)

Clipped, without modification, from a Starwood Hotels e-mail:

Experience True RedemptionSM

Halle-verbal infix-lujah.

Rob T.: "Rapper's Delight" actually came out in the fall of 1979, not in 1980. I remember well sitting in the car parked in a DC alley with some friends, smoking a you-know-what. We were about to turn off the car radio and go indoors when "RD" came on. "Oh, wait, I love this song," I said. But instead of playing the short radio edit, which was all I'd ever heard, they played a full-length (8:00 or so) version, the existence of which was thitherto unknown to me. Thus ensued a classic sort of Cheech & Chong reaction among us all: "Wow, man, I don't remember this song being this long..." descending into giggling as it went on and on and on...

Anne, I'm sorry to hear about your father. How are you faring?

Ivory soap: I keep thinking about the interacting processes. All the bubbles would have to pop, right? The bubble walls wouldn't be strong enough to maintain atmosphere. At the same time, the water content would be sublimating. And would the soap freeze before it dried out, or vice-versa? Would a crust of freeze-dried soap form before the bar expanded to maximum volume? Would you get outgassing, or jets of extruded material breaking through the crust? Would the soap's final form be a large soap-popcorn, or a cloud of soap dust?

Furthermore, wouldn't exploded hyperexpanded freeze-dried marshmallows constitute a Damned Weird confection? Why hasn't NASA tried this?

Yog, what's your take on Charlie's "drown yourself to survive hard vacuum" scenario?

Music, 1980, geek: Shane's list sounds right to me. Other possibilities: Steeleye Span, Brian Eno, and the Grateful Dead would be my top picks; also Warren Zevon, Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Peter Gabriel, Television, The Tubes, The Knack ("My Sharona"), Shark Sandwich, The Clash (London Calling), and Richard and Linda Thompson if they're into folk. More mainstream: Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Dire Straits, The Police, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, and a lot of AOR. The Eagles and the Bee Gees were riding high, but they weren't really geek fare.

Stefan, I don't know why the Pacific Northwest doesn't get violent thunderstorms, but I surely missed them when I lived there.

Niall, my rosemary has only lost the tips of its tallest branches, which is Not Right for this climate.

Lin, I once had a dream about the apocalypse in which lost things were found again, but what turned up were all the lost cats.

Leonid, that's appalling. Why does that go on? What's the point of it? If it keeps happening, someone must be benefiting from it; but damned if I can see how.

Just a note: I'm tuned to Firedoglake for real-time news reports about the battle at Dagorlad plains.

Quick thing about music, slightly alternative bent. 1980 was when I first heard Martha and the Muffins "Echo Beach" and started my 12 year quest for the album (yes, vinyl) "Metro Music"(picture repeatedly going into record stores, and being told "There isn't any such band as Martha and the Muffins, someone's pulling your leg" by the end, I had at least 9 of their albums) Also heard Police "Walking on the Moon." Blondie was big. Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio" was almost an anthem for the band geeks (I was one) and also Dire Straits "Sultans of Swing" Billy Joel was very popular with the same crowd, I think "Allentown" was around 1982

Marshmallow aerogel. Mix with comet dust for a Kuiperfluffernutter.

My suspicion about the "drowning to live through outgassing" is that it wouldn't buy you enough time to make it worth doing (and it sure wouldn't improve your chances of making it to cover on your own). Back when HAL and Dave were having their little set-to, the estimate being knocked around was that you could survive about four minutes (which is longer than breath-holding time).

This doesn't mean you couldn't make use of it in a hardish skiffoid yarn, to buy the Essential Eighteen Seconds (and "Take a Deep Breath" appeared eleven years before "2001"), and of course it is on the Short List of Generally Applicable Rules that if you're confronted with an absolutely, positively Fatal Situation, (vacuum, immersion in molten steel, chosen to beam down with the Captain) then anything is worth trying. The Mythbusters have pretty clearly established that sticking your finger in the 12-gauge bore is useless, but it might be considered a bravura gesture.

One for the movie nerds... I just found from my cubicle neighbor that his maternal grandfather used to work as a character actor, mostly in silent movies. His nom de theatre was Bull Montana and usually played the bad guy's goon although he sometimes ventured into SF (of a sort), playing an ape man in the Wallace Beery version of The Lost World, and a monkey man in 1936's Flash Gordon.

Meanwhile I've been wondering if I could find a link between myself and 1973's Flesh Gordon. Took me less than 5 minutes, thanks to my having met various people involved in the original Star Trek. I once met George Takei, who worked with Leonard Nimoy, who worked with Sally Kellerman on the pilot episode. From there we take Kellerman to The Outer Limits's episode The Bellero Shield, where John Hoyt played the alien who's made of light. Hoyt played Flesh Gordon's father.

Fannish links to Flesh Gordon aren't terribly hard, since Tom Reamy worked props (and wrote a very entertaining essay about the making of the flick for Trumpet of fragrant memory) and Bjo Trimble did makeup.

Stefan Jones: what band names might appear on stickers or graffiti . . . that sort of thing

End of the '70s stickers? In 1977, Epic really got behind Elvis Costello's debut album "My Aim Is True", and sent out yellow stickers with the name and title.

When we opened the mail and discovered them, there was a race to put them up in my radio station's mens' room.

I'm sure they they were still there in 1980.

Andrew Willett, Meredith: thanks for the verdicts on the new Kate Bush. There had been a flurry of publicity that it was coming, and then a few mentions that hey, it, errm, has a song about doing laundry... but no real word about whether that was a good thing or not.

Beard5: I'm glad someone else outside Toronto has heard of Martha & the Muffins. If you're a completist, you should know that Martha's put out some children's records.

I knew that Trimble had worked on Flesh, John, but I tried a less obvious approach. Tom Reamy was there too?

Was Donna Summer still popular by 1980? I've caught her Last Dance on my local gym's TV monitors, twice, all within one week. That brought up weird memories.

About the MythBusters, John, did you see the recent episode where they showed that one can start a fire using ice?

At this point, I'm wondering if anyone around here has access to something that could make a near-vacuum and a bar of Ivory. (I'd supply the soap if needed.)

The next step would be to talk NASA (or maybe the Russians) to send up a bar to see what might happen in actual space. All in the name of Science with a capital S, of course.

Would somebody kindly tell me what Larry Brennan looks like, so I can hide if he comes looking for me? I wouldn't like to find out the hard way how far his dedication to Science with a capital 'S' goes ...

I was 12 in 1980...not the best years of my life, to say the least. One thing nobody has specifically mentioned is "Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown" which could be heard on many many pop stations every Saturday morning (I'm pretty sure it was Saturday, not Sunday). They actually did play most of the songs, so it ran for several hours. I have to confess that one song I loved that year was "The Pina Colada Song", though fortunately a friend soon introduced me to more new wave and alternative music....

As long as we're talking about outer-space related issues, I'll mention that a professor at my university is experimenting with boiling water in microgravity (click on "ug Boiling" button).

I have no doubts that people here have access to soap and vacuum-making-things. I'm not sure whether the gradual evacuation of a vacuum pump is exactly what we're aiming for, though. I could blow my chances of ever graduating by testing it-- but I'd rather drop it out the airlock and see what happens immediately.

Does it have to be Ivory? what about Dove? I bet that would expand into a bird.

Which leads one to speculate about an alternate creation myth involving Elder-of-the-Universe types flitting about just after the Big Bang, seeding the universe with (proto)protoplanets by visiting appropriate spots in the accretion disks of various stars and chucking bars of Lava out the airlock.

Well, here's one Larry Brennan picture (via), and another group photo (via).

These may be of some aid to both fans & avoiders.

Serge: And George Barr did the movie poster for Flesh Gordon.

This made me laugh. From soap in a vacuum all the way to Flesh Gordon.

Jeff

Lux Fiat: and a bar of Irish Spring every so often to jumpstart the process? (No, I don't use it: too much perfume for my tender airways.)

Mike, surely leaktesting the p-suit requires liquid Ivory?

>computer camp, circa 1980.
>The protagonist is maybe 12 - 14 years old.

Holy geek alert, batman, do I get a royalty
if you're writing my life story?

>What kind of bands might he have listened to?

In order of supergeek to less geeky:
Pop Muzik - M
Cars - Gary Numan
Funkytown - Lipps Inc.
My Sharona - The Knack
I'm Alright - Kenny Loggins
(Caddyshack was released July 1980)

and of course, there would be the geek anthem:

Whip It - Devo (1978)

Also, in a completely geektoid related
bit of trivia, Empire Strikes Back was
released 21 May, 1980

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080684/releaseinfo

So, one of them might have the soundtrack
to the first movie in their cassette library.
At which point, "Luke, I am your father"
becomes the standard geek greeting, and the
true geekphreak would probably start playing
the cantina song from Episode 4, on their
tinny sounding portable. Soon thereafter,
a simulated lightsaber fight would erupt,
and would not end until someone lost a hand.

or... at least... that's what I would imagine
it would look like...

Greg

While I'm at it:

> What would happen to an unwrapped bar
> of Ivory Soap in a vacuum?

Upon re-entry, just before it vaporized,
it was heard to mutter
"Oh no. Not again."

> What would happen to an unwrapped bar
> of Ivory Soap in a vacuum?

It would evaporate and precipitate again as Ivory Snow

Michael Turyn: Can you make a lighter-than air material by creating the equivalent of an aerogel in a vacuum, sealing the outside with a much less permeable material (not very significant for big enough spheres)? Has anyone tried?

Yes, and yes. Lawrence Livermore Labs developed a lot of aerogel technology, much of it during the years I was there, despite JPL getting more press. Among other things, they came up with an organic variant called SEAgel, made from seaweed (agar), which could indeed be made with a mean density less than air at STP and still support 15 psi.

I forget which tech show it was where I helped staff LLNL's booth, but we had an inverted empty fishtank with some pieces of seagel in it, floating at the top. You could (gently) tap them down and they'd float back up.

It's not a very useful technology for balloons, though; the density is only just a little less than sea level air, so even at sea level it has only a fraction of the lifting power of a helium or hydrogen balloon, and the lifting power goes to zero at a few thousand feet.

Epacris - Happily, not me, although I may resemble the one on the left.

Indeed, none of the images on Google Images is of me.

Charlie - You need not worry about my dedication to capital S Science. At least not until you give up on the writing thing...

Jordin -- I immediately thought of three variant ways to use the blimp aerogel for Evil (by which I mean genuinely bad things, not, you know, Fun Evil), but then, that's what I get paid for.

Of course, as you note, if Tommy Lee Jones simply stared hard at the stuff it would disintegrate, so we're probably safe.

And besides, Evil, like many science fiction writers, is a lazy bastard. It's far easier to throw a brick through a window than to first figure out how to make an aerogel carry a brick through a window* and then make the stuff, just so you'll get a bit of grudging admiration on BoingBoing.

*No, I don't have a way to do this, though I'll bet there'd be a nice DARPA grant in it if I did. High risk and payoff, as they say.

To get absurdly physical, my guess is that not much would happen to the bar of soap. The tensile strength of the soap is probably enough to resist the internal pressure of the air trapped in small bubbles. After all, Pop Rocks kept the CO2 in quite nicely, despite the even larger pressure gradient.

Soap has tensile strength? Viscosity, maybe, but I have trouble seeing it take any sort of load. Ivory is particularly soft, but I wouldn't expect any soap to have the resistance of Pop Rocks.

Niall, my rosemary has only lost the tips of its tallest branches, which is Not Right for this climate.

The Boston Globe said that so far this month has been 6 degrees above average, which I find believable. (That may even have been before the mild weather this past weekend.) OTOH, I've never seen anything like my first winter off campus: several January days over 60.

That should be μg, not ug.

Oh, well...

Randolph the Picky

An earlier text adventure I wrote can be downloaded from here:

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.z5

It is a haunted house adventure, rated PG-13 at most.

Running it requires an interpreter:

http://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/windows.html

About the MythBusters, John, did you see the recent episode where they showed that one can start a fire using ice?
"Fire and Ice" is a Pat Benatar song from the very early 80s. I knew we'd be able to connect the two halves of this thread eventually!

I had to wait until Xmas to listen to the new Kate Bush album - I was advised with dire threats not to go buy it for myself. My opinion is that it is Very Good Kate Bush, but not quite up to Supreme Kate Bush, which would be Hounds of Love or The Dreaming.

I happened to be discussing it with my ex-officemate yesterday, while I was in the NOC dealing with a server crisis (now as a paid conslutant, thank Bob.) We both agreed that this is one of her better albums, despite one slightly embarassing kind of song. I thought it was as good as The Sensual World, he thought it was much better than that, but it turned out the reason for that difference is that I like The Sensual World much more than he does. It's much better than The Red Shoes, in my opinion.

Finally, I should note that Kate Bush singing the digits of Pi in her breathiest and most sensual voice is like pure hardcore porn for an old math geek.

Finally, I should note that Kate Bush singing the digits of Pi in her breathiest and most sensual voice is like pure hardcore porn for an old math geek.

Sold.

Ivory soap has tensile strength --- pick up a bar and pull on its ends. Unless you pull pretty hard, it stays in one piece. Tensile strength.

Putting Ivory soap in a microwave produces a very nifty flaky-fractal-flower expanded soap object. It also produces a very strong smell of the fragrance they put in the soap. Other than the smell, it's a fine party trick.

I assume that if you put the soap in a vacuum and heated it enough to soften it, you'd get a similar flaky-fractal appearance. Maybe even if you didn't heat it.

Oh he love, he love, he love
He does love his numbers
And they run, they run, they run him
In a great big circle
In a circle of infinity

3.1415926535 897932
3846 264 338 3279

Sadly, it appears that Kate loses it after only 53 digits.

Right, Bruce, I had forgotten that George Barr had made the poster for Flesh Gordon.

As for going from soap in a vacuum all the way to that movie, Jeff, it wasn't that difficult of a transition. Don't you remember the scene where our heroes gets trapped by Wang the Impotentate in his Royal Flush?

Flesh Gordon, hey ... My most-clear memory of that is Gordon's spacecraft encountering the dangers of the moronosphere. That must have really struck a personal chord.

Many times I think its boundaries must have greatly expanded & diffused since then.

Anyone seen This article, about a Norweigian filmmaker proposing that "J.K. Rowling" is a pseudonym for a writing conglomorate of some kind? Why is it that people think it's easier for a committee to write a good book than for an individual? Haven't they been in meetings with committees before?

The moronosphere, Mez? Must be like the Far Side's cartoon that showed the Earth surrounded by a shell made of clowns, a layer called the bozone layer, whose function is to shield the Universe from Earth.

Huh oh... It's that time of the year. It's time for Will Durst's George W Bush 2006 State of the Union drinking game... Me, I don't have the stomach - or the liver - for it. I think I'll go and watch my tape of last week's episode of Battlestar Galactica since House and anything else worth watching will have been pre-empted.

Teresa, doing OK. Drove to Iowa yesterday, the funeral is tomorrow.

This is the man who used to claim he wanted to get a donkey and name it Maxwelton, as I mentioned on the thread where we were talking about names.

now as a paid conslutant, thank Bob.

Conslutant. I love it.

Another thought regarding pop music in 1980: when kids get into high school (and maybe even before high school, depending on community) they become somewhat tribal in their musical allegiances. Along with these allegiances come modes of dress, slang, and so on -- all of which can differ by region, and all of which can make the film-maker's task of attaining verisimilitude a little more difficult (and interesting)....

Coretta Scott King is dead. She was a great lady in her own right. She was 78.

IIRC, one of my kid brothers once dated one of the Muffins.

Lots of people not from Toronto know who Martha and the Muffins are. (Warning: one can very easily get lost in this site ... and yes, full disclosure, I am sort of involved with its creation.)

As for Kate Bush losing track of Pi after only 53 digits, we hardcore types posit that she had to make some adjustments to fit the meter. :}

Other kinds of soap wouldn't work. The lovely bizarre effect Wim describes only happens when you microwave a bar of Ivory soap. It's stickier than the average soap when it melts, but its really pertinent property is that it's whipped full of tiny air bubbles -- which is why it floats.

Serge, if you're into playing Hollywood connect-the-dots, you can always try routing through Patrick's brother.

Oh yes, Teresa, I definitely am into Hollywood connect-the-dots. I usually drive my wife nuts with that. If ever I meet you or Patrick, then I'll be able to add Patrick's brother to my reservoir to links. Oh, and by the way, how many degrees of separation are there between you and Kevin Bacon?

That's a different brother from the one mentioned earlier, I hasten to clarify.

About Kate Bush... When I visited my buddies & buddettes up in Quebec after a 9-year absence, we found ourselves listening to some of her singing and getting all dreamy about it. I wonder what our host & hostess's 16-year-old daughter thought of us late-40-something folks...

"Why is it that people think it's easier for a committee to write a good book than for an individual?"

so they're claiming it's a good book?

Are we celebrating Patrick's Brother Day?

I just want to say that the Mentos Fountain demo is in my opinion Right Up There with the exploding whale and the liquid oxygen barbecue.

...the exploding whale and the liquid oxygen barbecue...

He sounds like the Unknown MythBuster. Or the Heterodyne Boys's Brother that nobody ever talks about.

Teresa wrote I just want to say that the Mentos Fountain demo is in my opinion Right Up There with the exploding whale and the liquid oxygen barbecue.

And the children can do it without too much supervision, unlke the LOX barbecue, or blowing up large dead things.

I am going to be such an evil great-aunt.

Hmmm... we're replacing our microwave next weekend. Maybe I should add Ivory soap to the shopping list, along with marshmallow peeps (for jousting!) for the old microwave's farewell performance. I'd love to see what Ivory does in the vacuum of space, but then, I'd love to see what many things do when chucked into space. I'm not sure, but I think this is similar to my desire to see items - especially fruit - dropped from high places.

Like many people here, I am related to Flesh Gordon through Bjo Trimble. Unlike many people, I am related to Ms. Trimble through her daughter, who is my hairdresser.

Here, Serge. I don't guarantee that all the links still work, but if not, it'll give you enough clues to find working versions elsewhere.

.-- .... .- - / .... .- - .... / --. --- -.. / .-- .-. --- ..- --. .... -

http://www.westernunion.com/info/osTelegram.asp

"I wish the color the links turn when they've been clicked was actually a different color than they are before they've been clicked."

With lots of HTML viewers you can override that. There will be a menu somewhere labeled something like "Preferences" and you choose the colors you want for unread links and read links. Then when a site doesn't specify, you get it your way.

And if the site does say how they want it, you can override that -- except you might be overriding a lot of other things at the same time. It varies with the software you happen to have.

There's a fair chance you won't like your default colors as well as you like the Making Light colors, but you can probably get the links visible and then you can spend as long as you like adjusting everything else.

Thanks, Teresa.

Is the phrase Everything is physics familiar to any of you? Sunday's episode of Cold Case, set in 1968, was about a young woman who's way more interested in science than in the debutante thing and at some point she says that phrase. My wife and I thought it sounded like something Feynman would have said, but a google search yielded nothing. Any idea?

If you're getting rid of a still-working microwave, I would definitely try the plasma spheres (=home-made ball lightning) experiment. I've always wanted to do that one. Google around for it.

Laura: conslutant is old geek/BOFH slang, not original to me. (To the further uninitiated, BOFH=Bastard Operator From Hell, protagonist of an old set of Usenet stories by Simon Travaglia.)

I have a complaint and a proposed solution, and I'd like to get hints toward software that does some of what I want. (And critiques of the proposal, if you like.)

My complaint is with political blogs, a complaint I had with political newsgroups and with political BBSes before that. An original poster puts up an interesting question. People start arguing about it. Pretty quick they get bogged down in ad hominem arguments. They take cheap shots. They criticise each other's spelling. After a few days the thread gets old and they quit reading and responding to it. Similar threads run in parallel in various other places (other BBSes, other newsgroups, other blogs), and they repeat the same arguments in general but with different people doing the ad hominems, different cheap shots, and different spelling errors. Weeks or months later a very similar thread gets started and the same general arguments, ad hominems, cheap shots etc get recycled. Usually nobody actually makes any useful points, and if they do their points are ignored. I'd like to see something with more focus and a longer attention span.

So I want a technology that encourages such things. The BBS/newsgroup/blog format does not. You have either a list or a tree of responses. When it gets too big it tends to choke off because nobody wants to look at that much. It mostly quits anyway when the topic scrolls off the front page.

I want something like a wiki. The stuff stays, and you can use a keyword search to find the topic if you don't find a link on the home page. But if it's political argument we can't assume that wiki cooperation will work, so I'd like a lock so people can only edit their own pages and nobody else's. (I've seen a wiki where you can put a password on your text when you write it, and then only people with the password can change it. That's probably enough.) When you edit your old post the original stays in a history file, but most people won't be interested in that.

So you look at the topic and you make your best shot at a good answer. It's usually better to make a great second post yourself than to attack somebody else's post -- if your attack is so good that they rewrite their argument to be more effective, what have you accomplished?

But if lots of people are making second posts, what's to keep it from overloading the readers? My thought is to let members join "factions". For each thread you pick a faction you generally agree with. And when somebody from your faction writes something, you get to rank it among its competitors in that particular niche. (Incidentally, there should be nothing wrong with plagiarism in this context. If you want to make changes in somebody else's post and then re-post it, that's *fine*. See how many members of your faction think it's an improvement.)

You might get similar polls by members of other factions and by independents. So a casual visitor might choose to look at the posts that got the most votes, or the posts that got the highest ratio of favorable to unfavorable rankings. He could look each faction's posts that they like best, or the ones that people who're officially independents like best, or the newest ones, or whatever. So people don't get drowned in detail unless that's what they want. And they can post their own ideas and hope either that those ideas will get a lot of votes, or that they'll get adapted by somebody popular.

So what I'm looking for is something a lot like a wiki, but people only get to edit their own stuff. And there should be some way to vote their approval of posts that compete. Ideally people should have some way to join "factions" (and some way to throw out people who say they're in a faction but don't act like it). Extra nice if the factions can vote separately.

Has anybody heard of something kind of like this? I've seen several blogs where people are supposed to vote on posts and maybe comments, but typically a post would get only a few votes before it scrolled off. Most people didn't bother to vote. So then they'd give incentives for voting, and a few people would be incentivised to vote a whole lot. And of course partisans would vote high for anything by their side and low for their enemies.

I just noticed the Gibson guitar particle, and I have to point these guitars out to Patrick. A blogging friend now works there keeping the books, and they're gorgeous instruments. If I played more frequently, I might consider trading in my 30-year-old Rickenbacker for one of them.

That would be the "Admirable priorities" particle, I should add.

Jordin: about the aerogel spheres - how resilient were they? One of my PhD mates over in the physics department here occasionally uses aerogel, and I got the impression it was very fragile.

Clifton said:

Laura: conslutant is old geek/BOFH slang, not original to me.

I have read all the BOFH I could find, but didn't notice that spelling before.

(To the further uninitiated, BOFH=Bastard Operator From Hell, protagonist of an old set of Usenet stories by Simon Travaglia.)

New BOFH stories appear regularly on The Register.

Clifton Royston: If you're getting rid of a still-working microwave...

Yeah, it's fun to do the plasma ball thing, but I've taken to directing still-working items that I no longer need to http://www.freecycle.org/. It's a slight PITA to use, but at least I know that I've kept something out of a landfill for at least a while.

I know the question wasn't directed at me, but I can't resist: I just recently discovered that I am two degrees separated from Kevin Bacon. (One of my good friends used to be The Bacon Brothers' manager. :)

The Bacon Brothers, Meredith?

As for myself... I once met George Takei. Who worked with Leonard Nimoy. Who was in 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Philip Kaufman. Who directed The Right Stuff, where Gus Grissom was played by Fred Ward. Who appeared in Tremors with guess-who.

Not as good as your rating, I know.

"Fire and Ice" is a Pat Benatar song from the very early 80s. I knew we'd be able to connect the two halves of this thread eventually!

"Some say the thread will end in fire
Some say in ice..."

Tomorrow on MythBusters... In "Helium Football", Adam and Jamie test out a myth that footballs filled with helium will fly further and hang longer than ones filled with regulation air. This one has an aroma of flubber. As for the episode's other myth, it sounds on the same level of silliness as what happens if you shove your finger in a gun's barrel, but worse... In "Catching a Bullet in your teeth", the build team undertake tests in the firing line. You go first.

I'm not sure, but I think this is similar to my desire to see items - especially fruit - dropped from high places.

M&Ms, when dropped from a suitable height onto pavement, leave lovely bits of colored shrapnel all over the sidewalk.

according to The Oracle of Bacon,

George Takei has a Bacon number of 2.

George Takei was in Oblivion 2: Backlash (1996) with Jimmie F. Skaggs
Jimmie F. Skaggs was in Hollow Man (2000) with Kevin Bacon

I'm sorry, I have to add this because it makes my personal life a far better place:

Francis X. Bushman has a Bacon number of 3.

Francis X. Bushman was in Story of Mankind, The (1957) with Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper was in Top of the World (1997/I) with David Alan Grier
David Alan Grier was in Woodsman, The (2004) with Kevin Bacon

Go Francis (X).

Candle: I've long thought that the poem is a pun on the poet's own name.

"I wish the color the links turn when they've been clicked was actually a different color than they are before they've been clicked."

With lots of HTML viewers you can override that. There will be a menu somewhere labeled something like "Preferences" and you choose the colors you want for unread links and read links. Then when a site doesn't specify, you get it your way.

And if the site does say how they want it, you can override that -- except you might be overriding a lot of other things at the same time. It varies with the software you happen to have.

There's a fair chance you won't like your default colors as well as you like the Making Light colors, but you can probably get the links visible and then you can spend as long as you like adjusting everything else.

Thank you. This was helpful. I'm using Safari, and after poking around a bit, it looks like I'll have to figure out how to put together a style guide. However, that seems doable.

Thanks again for the help.

And following Linkmeister's lead, here's a link to the Exotic Guitars website.

I can't say how well they might play, but they're definitely cool to look at!

Does anybody know whence came the 4-line version of "Fire and Ice" where the last 2 lines are:

From what I read on the AP wire
I think the world will end in fire

So, that's who Bushman was, julia. Hmm... What did you dislike about his role in Sabrina?
And thanks for the shortened Takei-Bacon connection. It makes my own rating even better.

Say, is there something like the Six Degrees of Separation from Frank Thring?

A few weeks ago, there was a sub-thread about Pride and Prejudice that made me realize that there are a few people posting here who know quite a bit about costumes and about sewing. Maybe one of you could tell me of a good web site where one can buy fabric, for example lightweight grey wool.

Oh, I loved him as Humphrey Bogart's dreadful father. The character was just a dreadful old snob.

I'm hoping my microwave holds out until early April because that's when the city recycles electronic stuff (also in October).

Anybody need a chocolate deity?

Yesterday's WashPost reported on a study showing that the more you hate black people, the more likely you are to be Republican.

Grateful Dead lyricist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow also has a Bacon number of 2.

John Perry Barlow (I) was in Endangered Species (1982) with Paul Dooley
Paul Dooley was in Telling Lies in America (1997) with Kevin Bacon

Re: Wendy Wasserstein-- I met her a few years back at Lynne Thigpen's combination birthday/Hannakwanzaamas shindig. (Lynne won the Tony appearing in Wendy's An American Daughter.) Everybody was supposed to bring an ornament for the tree-- I brought a talking Darth Vader ornament, since Lynne had done numerous shows with James Earl Jones.

Wendy didn't bring an ornament. At a momentary loss, she reached into her handbag and pulled out an empty prescription bottle for Valium. She poked a hole in the lid, put a hook through it and hung it from the tree.

Great party. Neat ladies. I'll miss them both.

western union just stopped sending telegrams? Who the heck were their customers last year? Vacuum tube salesmen? Punch card maintenence people? Just makes me wonder what the heck took them so long.

Meredith - thanks for the M+M link. Looks like I missed Modern Lullaby.

One side effect - I can't actually say that it's an adverse effect - of hanging out here is that I keep getting book and music recommendations to add to my shopping lists.

(BTW, your Bacon Number = Three.)

Oh, that's what you meant about Bushman, julia. Yes, he was quite good as an old snob in Sabrina.

Serge: Finding lightweight wool in grey this time of year may be tricky. A lot of it depends what you want it for.

My usual sources for fabric of all sorts are Fashion Fabrics Club, Fabrics.com, and Denver Fabrics. I've also gotten some nice stuff from Trim Fabric, but their site is annoying, and they tend to be slow in shipping. (Once it gets shipped, it's fine, but they take a few extra days to get the stuff out of the warehouse.)

Realise that these are fashion fabrics, and if you're looking for fabric suitable for men's dress pants, you may want to look elsewhere, and I'm sure someone will be able to come up with a better suggestion.

If you're looking for re-enactment style fabric, that's another kettle of fish entirely.

"Western Union just stopped sending telegrams? Who the heck were their customers last year? Vacuum tube salesmen? Punch card maintenence people? Just makes me wonder what the heck took them so long."

The last niche for telegrams: Birthday greetings and urgent messages to congressfolks.

In 1980 I was listening to both Martha and the Muffins and The Muffins. But I was 17, not 12.

There was a pretty strong progressive rock contingent among computer geeks at the time, though; it wouldn't be that surprising to have the counselors listening to ELP or Tangerine Dream.

from a physics perspective I think one of two things might happen; 1.) assuming there are little bubbles of air or other gasses within the soap and they are of sufficient volume, then as they expand outward to try and equalize pressure they would explode the bar of soap. 2) or if the gas pockets are of insufficient volume then even when the gas expands there won't be enough of it to overcome the tensile strength of the soap and nothing would happen.
of course it's been awhile since I had classical mechanics and it is almost 5 in the morning here so I may be out on a limb here.

Thanks, JennR... I was asking about fabric stores because I've been thinking of having a hall costume made for the next con I attend, something a 'gentleman' of 1880 could have worn at an evening event. I've got the pattern already. I've got the seamstress. Just don't have that kind of fabric here in Albuquerque.

Would there be a difference in how butter reacts to the vacuum of space, compared to margerine's behavior?

So, was the State of the Union speech more of the same? Sounds like it, from what they said on Salon.com. For those interested, Tom Tomorrow has the Pirate Talk version available here. Too bad they couldn't get Robert Newton to deliver the speech. Yarrr!

Serge, wouldn't 1880s evening wear have been black? A light grey would have been morning, country or sports wear, and less formal- at least that's my intuition about it.
The costume will doubtless look great, anyway, and "less formal" in Victorian terms looks extremely dressy in ours!

Probably, Jen, but if I went for an all-black outfit, I'd feel like Mandrake the Magician. So I thought of going for grey. If I had my druthers (meaning if my wife let me), I'd go for a bright-red jacket with a yellow trim, kind of like Dr.Strange's outfit in the Straczynski re-invention of that comic-book. (What is it with me and those various Masters of the Mystic Arts?)

Serge: have you tried checking with historical-reenactment types for prefabs? Depending on whether you're aiming for more of the Victorian Empire look or the Frontier West, you may have to fine-tune your searches a bit, but as a more or less random example, it's possible to buy (more or less) ready-to-wear stuff like this.

Thanks, Julie. It may turn out to be cheaper for me to buy the fabric and have that seamstress make the costume. No matter what, that site has some stuff that I'd need, like suspenders. (I can't find my dad's.)

Speaking of fashion and costumes... Have you and JennR ever seen a 1991 British show set in 1920 called The House of Elliot? My wife Susan bought the DVD set for a book she's working on and it's pretty neat. I got a laugh out of realizing that the photographer's dippy receptionist was Minnie Driver.

Haven't seen House of Elliot , but then I'm more of a distant voyeur of frockage than a participant. (Got spooked when trying to learn how to use a sewing machine which kept snapping needles at me, apparently a regular occurrence when sewing over pins.) I have been thinking of getting an existing garment copied, though-- how does all of this seamstress stuff work, anyway? If you're providing the fabric, is the charge strictly on a hourly basis for labor (including measurements/fittings), a flat rate per garment based on estimated difficulty, or some combination of both?

Not sure what criteria that seamstress follows, Julie. I'd have to ask my wife. It probably has to do with the complexity of the project.

As for my own sewing skills... I can mend socks. And sew a button back in place. With lots of thread. No falling off ever again once I've gone thru it. I like sturdy. Must have some German Engineer among my ancestors.

Hah. Your button-replacement skills may slightly outrank mine if you use actual thread instead of (unwaxed) dental floss, which is terrifically sturdy but is sometimes unhappy about staying in knots. IIRC I did learn how to sew hems, buttonholes, French seams etc. by hand, but it's a hideously slow process and my eyesight is bad enough as it is.

Sewing with unwaxed dental floss? There's GOT to be a really bad joke somewhere in there.

Serge: If you can find the right color at Fashion Fabrics, it'll probably work fine for that purpose. Some of their fabrics are acceptable for CW re-enactment, and some of them aren't. Since you're not looking for really, truly, 'authentic', you've got more flexibility. You could call them and ask. I know that the owner hangs out on a couple of costuming lists, and is willing to help. (She's a little swamped right now, by her own admission, but that should settle out once they get moved.)

And I did see and enjoy The House of Elliot. It helps that I really like many of the styles that came out of that era.

So, JennR, the fashions on that show are fairly accurate? I was surprised by the women wearing pants on more than one occasion.

So, was the State of the Union speech more of the same? Sounds like it, from what they said on Salon.com.

You mean, besides the fact that one of his speech writers has been reading Cordwainer Smith?

A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos.

There were patterns for 'outdoor wear' trousers/pants for women in Godey's Ladies' Book in the 1880s. They were intended to be worn while bicycling, as they were far safer than the skirts of the day. (They were very full, but they were trousers.) I wasn't too surprised to see the 1920s fashionistas wearing trousers. By 1930, as I understand it, they were reasonably common among the fashion-forward, although reserved for more informal occasions.

Sure, pants were safer, JennR, but that often hasn't been of primary concern where fashion is concerned.

Cordwainer Smith, Barry? Too bad they couldn't get Cordwainer Bird instead.

Human-animal hybrids... They're really getting desperate if that's the best non-issue they can come up to distract The People.

Barry, did Chimpy mention that we have to arm ourselves to the teeth because of the Spider Overlords hiding on the other side of the Moon?

Of course, he was very specific - only cloning and human-animal hybrids will be outlawed. Altered animals - AOK.

"You see, Prendick, those campaign contributions were not wasted. The President understands what we have achieved here on my island."

Recently-confirmed Supreme Court appointee Samuel Alito commented: "Not to interfere in the President's executive power - that is the Law. Are we not Men?"

"We are Devo."

serge, i missed that part of the speech, actually.

Howard Dean was in town for the SOTU viewing party that the local Dems had organized, and i was busy helping out with that, so i didn't pick up on the Underpeople reference till i got home and found it being discussed on message boards and blogs.

a review of the transcript yields no mention of the Spider Overlords, alas, but the entire speech reflects an alternate reality that i really don't want to spend any more time in.

Serge beat me. Devo, absolutely. (Which ties discussion of the State of the Union address back in with the 1980-music thread...)

Bush's reference to "human-animal hybrids" made me think of the Devo movie, where the boys are daydreaming about someday having their very own recombo-DNA lab, so that they can build their own "bubble-eyed dog-boys."

Ok, still an open thread, and at least one other Devo-tee here.

This is clearly another sign of the Apocalypse: Disney has re-invented Devo. (Caution: link is NSFSanity.)

Damn you, Bob. I'd managed to put that out of my mind. Devo 2.0 indeed.

* * *

I spent the SOTU speech tromping around in the rain, radio-less, waiting for the dog to take a dump.

No matter what he meant, Bush's being down on human-animal hybrids is sure to lose him the furry-fan vote.

Weirdly enough, the Island of Dr. Moreau came up at lunch just now. In the musical context.

So aside from Devo and Oingo Boingo's "No Spill Blood". . . are there a LOT of Dr. Moreau songs out there?

I have my doubts as to whether Bush was really talking about this research in particular, but PZ Myers has some info about human-to-animal research which may help us to understand Down's Syndrome.

That textile artist does have issues. But I enjoyed the 'tattooing a Powerbook' page.

Of all movie versions of the Moreau story, the Charles Laughton is considered the best, right? I remember the Seventies version as so-so, but it did have Barbara Carrera in it. As for the Nineties version, well, David Without-Thews has ever been much of a draw to me and so I can't tell if it sucks as much as I've heard...

The Human-animal hybrid mention isn't as strange as you might think. I'm sure I've read about modified mice that are given some human genes, so that they can be used to test drugs etc. that aren't read for real human testing.

Ah, here it is.

My unstoppable writing career takes a mighty leap forward:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/newfood/

Second item down.

I just realized that I have a Bacon number of only 5, as my mother's boyfriend's father starred in a movie with John Wheeler, who starred in Apollo 13. My father used to claim that he went to school with Michael Nesmith, which if true would also give me a 5, but which I don't consider nearly as credible.

I would have expected a much larger number until I got to thinking about it.

SF question for the assembled brains:

A friend asked me a couple days ago whether there had been any SF written based on the idea that the asteroids were the remnanta of a destroyed planet. I said I remembered it being a common idea in early SF, perhaps in the '30s, but when he asked me for any books or stories that had used that idea I blanked. Can anybody remember any specific SF novels or stories which involve a destroyed 5th planet somehow, either as plot point or background?

Well I was in a punk band once called the Grateful Dicks, for which I wrote a song called The Cheverolet of Dr. Moreau.

For the particles link labelled "a textile artis with serious issues", the actual artist's home page is http://patriciawaller.com/

Clifton... I think that Don Wollheim once wrote a young-adult novel about that. Can't remember the title.

Clifton: Space Cadet has a chapter about the boys surveying the asteroid belt and finding evidence that the dead planet's inhabitants had blown themselves up.

Heinlein's Space Cadet has a visit to an asteroid involving finds of fifth-planet artifacts as the middle third, IIRC.

And on preview, I see TexAnne's beaten me to the punch. Woe!

CNN's Wolf Blitzer just announced the public swearing-in ceremony of Alito. My brain heard "public swearing ceremony." hmmm, can I contribute?

Two questions for all assembled:

I have a book (Around the World in a Flying Machine by the redoubtable Mr Verne) which is so brittle pages are breaking.

1) How do I reverse the "brittlization"? I'm thinking that I'd want to add moisture to the pages without encouraging mildew and the like. Perhaps some kind of steaming process would work?

2) How can I put broken pieces back on a page? I know regular (Scotch) tape will turn brown and will eventually fall off.

Any ideas would be appreciated. If desired, you can mail me: j dot lipton at verizon dot net

Jeff Lipton: library-supply places sell transparent rice paper and starch paste for sticking pages together. I don't know how you fix brittle, but there is stuff to fix acid in the pages (Wei-To spray).

P J Evans - that sounds like the Wei-To go.

Gaylords' has "Bookkeeper Deacidification Sprays" under Books & Pamphlets>Repair & Maintenance Tools. It's fairly pricy, but if you need to deacidify something .... (Active ingredient: magnesium oxide.) Wei-T'ou seems to mostly have disappeared as a product.

There was a story I read once where a rival intergalactic empire sends a space ship back in time to destroy Earth before humanity comes into being, but they blow up the wrong planet, and so Earth goes on its merry way.

It was in a paperback anthology, which I don't know the title of because the front cover was missing on the copy I found. It was a collection of first published stories by writers who made it big.

It was called E__ or something like that, I think.

Sorry I can't be more substantial.

Must clarify: my previous comment was in response to the query by Clifton Royston about stories about the asteroid belt being a blown-up planet.

The story I mentioned might have been by Damon Knight. Or maybe he was the editor of the anthology.

PJ Evans: Gaylords' has "Bookkeeper Deacidification Sprays"

I read that as "Bookkeeper Deadification Sprays" which might or might not be useful now that (US) tax season is upon us.

Stefan - Today, McSweeney's, tomorrow, the world!

There's DVDs of The House of Elliot? I loved that show. :::making a new tab for Netflix::: They've got both series!

Thanks for the quick answers; I know I have read Space Cadet and that's probably what I was thinking of. (I wound up recommending 'Blowups Happen' due to the lunar history part of it, and am using that as the foot in the door to get him to try out several short story collections - Heinlein, Bester, Silverberg, LeGuin - and find which authors he likes enough to read more of.)

Clifton: I don't remember that section of Space Cadet at all (for some reason I remember the training and the landing on Venus), but the MacGuffin in Nourse's Scavengers in Space turns out to be a map showing the 5th planet exploding and the inhabitants leaving by starship.

Wollheim also mentions the exploded-planet theory in passing, but I don't recall any dependence on it; what I do remember is the nonsensical basic physics (hitching a ride on an asteroid?!?) in The Secret of Saturn's Rings.

Eric — Loved your take on the state of the Union. I was surprised and relieved when 1984 arrived and it was nothing like. But here we are halfway down the slope.

Of course I did not listen to the state of the union last night — I can't stand non-stop lies, like I knew would be happening. (Do you suppose his buddies the pharmaceutical companies are happy about their blood pressure medicine sales?) But I heard this passage on the news tonight, and looked up the text. While I was listening to it, it occurred to me that it was equally true, or rather much more true, with just a few words changed....

STATE OF THE UNION 2006 george w. bush
"No one can deny the success of freedom, but some men rage and fight against it. And one of the main sources of reaction and opposition is radical Islam – the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death. Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder – and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously. They seek to impose a heartless system of totalitarian control throughout the Middle East, and arm themselves with weapons of mass murder. Their aim is to seize power in Iraq, and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world. Lacking the military strength to challenge us directly, the terrorists have chosen the weapon of fear. When they murder children at a school in Beslan … or blow up commuters in London … or behead a bound captive … the terrorists hope these horrors will break our will, allowing the violent to inherit the Earth. But they have miscalculated: We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it.

In a time of testing, we cannot find security by abandoning our commitments and retreating within our borders. If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores. There is no peace in retreat. And there is no honor in retreat. By allowing radical Islam to work its will – by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself – we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals, or even in our own courage. But our enemies and our friends can be certain: The United States will not retreat from the world, and we will never surrender to evil."

STATE OF THE UNION 2006 george w. bush altered words from the point of view of the rest of the world

"No one can deny the success of freedom, but some men rage and fight against it. And one of the main sources of reaction and opposition is radical fundamentalist Christianity – the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death. Terrorists like Bush, Cheney, & Rumsfield are serious about mass murder – and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously. They seek to impose a heartless system of totalitarian control throughout the Middle East, America, and the world, and arm themselves with weapons of mass murder. Their aim is to seize power and oil in Iraq, and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against Iran, Syria, and the rest of the Middle East, and the world. ... The terrorists have chosen the weapon of fear. When they murder patients at a hospital in Fallujah… or blow up commuters in Baghdad … or torture and kill a bound captive … the terrorist Bush administration hope these horrors will break our will, allowing the violent to inherit the Earth. But they have miscalculated: We love our freedom, and we will fight to keep it.

... If we were to leave these vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would simply move the battlefield to our own shores. There is no peace in retreat. And there is no honor in retreat. By allowing radical fundamentalist Christianity to work its will – by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself – we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals, or even in our own courage. But our enemies and our friends can be certain ... we will never surrender to evil."

Heinlein also used the idea of a destroyed fifth planet in Stranger in a Strange Land -- his Martians had done it, hundreds of thousands (I think) of years ago.

Yes, Marilee, The House of Eliott is available on DVD. We've already got the first boxed set, and ordered the 2nd set that's available. As far as I know, there's nothing more after that.

CHip... Wollheim's The Secret of Saturn's Rings is the one I was thinking of when I brought it up as an example of the exploded-planet story. You're right, it wasn't really that important to the story, but, for some reason, that's one of the few things I remember from a long-ago reading. In fact, the only other thing I didn't forget was the hopping around, which I think was thru the rings of Saturn. Didn't seem silly back then, but I was young and foolish.

My cubicle neighbor did have the stomach to watch the speech, but the thing that really drew his attention wasn't so much the slap in the face of the manimal voters but a comment about making alcohol from woodchip. I guess that's what one should expect from a 25-year-old. Still, what was that about?

For months now I've been mooning over the Australian-Region House of Eliott Series 1 DVD set. History of Costume was one of my favourite subjects at school.
I do have difficulty justifying the $AU120 (~$US90) with the recent batch of medical & other bills, especially since there are other, cheaper, things I'm also after.

House of Eliott's first set costs that much in Australia? This is rather steep. It can't be just because an edition of the set had to be released just for the Australia region, can it?

There was a story I read once where a rival intergalactic empire sends a space ship back in time to destroy Earth before humanity comes into being, but they blow up the wrong planet, and so Earth goes on its merry way.

That might be "T" by Brian Aldiss. I remember it from the collection Space, Time and Nathaniel, but a bit of poking around in the ISFDB suggests that you might have read it in First Flight, edited by Damon Knight.

PJ Evans: Gaylords' has "Bookkeeper Deacidification Sprays"

Larry Brennan: I read that as "Bookkeeper Deadification Sprays"

And I have twice mis-read it as "Bookkeeper Deification Sprays". There should definitely be a spray for that.

Speaking of Heinlein, have any of you sampled the posthumous extended editions of Stranger in a Strange Land, Puppet Masters, etc.?

I'm toying with the idea of picking them up, but I've had mixed reactions to expanded editions by other authors. I'd hate to spoil my memories of the Heinlein as, sadly, they're not making any more of it.

Last but not least, what about "For Us, the Living?"

Back to an earlier question about the pronunciation of "protesters"--I guess it was in the last open thread--my authority for this is Marilyn vos Savant, if memory serves, but I as remember it English usage is to put the accent on the first syllable when the word is a noun, and on the second when used as a verb.

CON-test, con-TEST. PRO-test, pro-TEST.

Which I read to say persons taking part in a PRO-test would be referred to as pro-TEST-ers.

Also on the pronunciation of "protesters": In Geoffrey Nunberg's Going Nucular, a collection of witty and astute weekly columns about linguistic matters, he discusses how the pronunciation of that group of words changed in the US in the middle of last century as the meaning of the word changed. I no longer have access to the book, but it's worth a look, and not just for that.

Clifton: A friend asked me a couple days ago whether there had been any SF written based on the idea that the asteroids were the remnanta of a destroyed planet.

I believe Fredric Brown also used this idea as background in his story, "Letter to a Phoenix". What a great short story writer that man was!

cmk - it's not that simple. There are two different nouns 'defense', for example, as well as 'offense'. Stressed on the second syllable, they have common, everyday meanings. Stressed on the first syllable, they are sports jargon for parts of a (US) football team.

BTW, I wrote a story theorizing that the Belt was the remnant of a destroyed planet when I was in fifth grade. Nor was that my first science fiction story; that honor goes to "Sparky in Space," which I wrote in (I think) 3rd grade. Or maybe earlier. It was about a cute little puppy who finds a flying saucer in the woods, and accidentally launches it into orbit. Then he accidentally lands it in exactly the same place, the aliens (who never appear) are none the wiser, and Sparky lives happily ever after.

Well, whaddaya want from a third grader?

But I digress.

My current theory about the Belt is that it's the Sun's ring. Now that it appears to be a rule that all gas giants have rings, why should the Sun be different just because it was massive enough to "light up"?

Some of the all-about-the-solar-system books I read in elementary school suggested that the asteroids were the remnants of a fifth planet that was ripped apart by Jupiter.

I found this very impressive at the time.

Later, I read other books noting that this fifth planet would have been very, very small, since all of the asteroids together don't have anywhere near the mass of, say, Mercury.

suggested that the asteroids were the remnants of a fifth planet that was ripped apart by Jupiter

I understand they now think that some of those asteroids are really comets captured by Jupiter - Patroclus is the one name I remember. At 70+km diameter, you still wouldn't want it to hit your planet, even if it is ice.

English usage is to put the accent on the first syllable when the word is a noun, and on the second when used as a verb

As incidentally pointed out in the Wipers song "Dimension-7" (I think - it was covered by Nirvana as "D-7"), which contains the two lines:

de-FECT, DE-fect
re-JECT, RE-ject

My feeling is that "protestors" probably wouldn't conform to any rule about the two-syllable words but would fit in with rules for three-syllable words. Only I don't know what they are. FWIW, stress-on-second-syllable sounds right to me, but I *am* English.

What would you call a group of people who were protesting in favour of testing? Pro-testers?

For once, French is simpler than English. No emphasis on one syllable in la langue de Moliere. On the other hand, it does have accents written over some vowels. (Put the wrong accent over 'peche' and you'll wind up with the French for peach, or fishing, or sin. At the wrong time.)

Serge: that reminds me. How do you say "tongue-twister" in French? My Collins-Robert says only "une phrase très difficile à prononcer," but surely the people who invented the archduchess' socks have a more interesting word.

I can't think of one, which doesn't mean there isn't one. I'd have to ask my French-born buddette Elisabeth Vonarburg. If there is such a word, she'd be more likely to know. But I bet you it'd have as many syllables as the sentence you mentionned. You should see how much thicker an American science-fiction book is in French. Mark Twain once said of German words that they're so long they have a perspective. French can be a bit voluminous at times.

My feeling is that "protestors" probably wouldn't conform to any rule about the two-syllable words but would fit in with rules for three-syllable words.

There very easily could be a principle that I'm forgetting that applies to three-syllable words as such; my reasoning was that we're talking about [verb]ers, not [noun]ers, so the pronunciation would carry over from that.

Yes, fair enough. I suppose I'm thinking of the awkward case of "controversy", where I stress it differently when it is extended to "controversial" (not true in US English, if Prince is anything to go by). But really I mainly encounter this problem when it comes to syllable lengths in Latin. I think I know how they work, but I can never explain them to my students.

Well, whaddaya want from a third grader?

My slippers, my pipe, and that book I was reading. Now go away kid, ya bother me...

Well, whaddya know? They just released The Time Tunnel's first 13 episodes on DVD.

The U.S. government has a US$ 7 billion project to build a device to allow traveling in time. A senator is sent by the congress to the installation in order to inspect the situation at that moment and to decide if the government should spend more money in it. As the senator seems to be disappointed, prof. Tony Newman takes his chances and uses the "Time Tunnel" in a trip to the past to demonstrate the device efficiency. He arrives aboard the "TITANIC" in 1912 a few hours before it sunk. Prof. Douglas Philips go to rescue him, but the things go wrong and both become lost in time.

Seven billion dollars to build a time machine? And you notice that's in US dollars, not that funny Canadian money. Wow. Isn't that near what's spent in Iraq in just a few months? Damn that inflation...

I have the barest, vaguest memories of The Time Tunnel. The only episode I remember -- a scene, really -- concerned a bunch of pirates swarming into time travel HQ via the tunnel and menacing the technicians.

Scared the pee out of me.

I don't remember that episode, Stefan. I remember the one set during the Civil War, and our heroes find out that Macchiavelli (yes, that Machiavelli) is working for the South. And there was one where Robert Duvall plays a tech who's planted a bomb in the Machine then gets whisked with Tony & Doug into a far future where Humanity is organized like a hive, then all three get thrown back into the far past, right next to a hive of giant prehistoric bees (heck, why not?), but Tony & Doug get snatched away by the Tunnel, leaving Duvall to be stung to death.

Scott H, after I read the extended editions of RAH, I was very thankful for editors.

And Serge, The Time Tunnel DVDs are also now on my Netflix list. Have any other good ideas?

Serge -- hopping from one ring stone to another wasn't silly, and may even have fit with guesses about the rings' nature at that time. What was ridiculous was saving fuel by landing on an eccentric asteroid and riding it outward -- because if you actually match velocities closely enough to land on an asteroid you're already in its eccentric orbit (so landing doesn't help), and you've probably wasted fuel trying to catch it instead of taking the most efficient direct route.

I've scanned a few "book repair" sites (with emphasis on brittle books), and it seems my little gem is beyond [very expensive] repair. I might invest in book repair tape (only $9.00 for more than I could possibly use), and hope for the best.

It's cheesy (doesn't that go, somewhat, with Verne?) but fun!

The few Heinleins I've read unedited seemed not that much different.

But I was extremely disappointed to reread Puppet Masters after all these years.

There was the scene where an agent was looking all shook up and the narrator tries to cheer him up. The guy had just shot half a dozen mostly-unarmed secretaries who were attacking with staplers and letter-openers and such because they were being mind-controlled by space aliens. So he tries to tell the guy that he did the right thing, there was nothing else he could do etc. The agent replies that he could easily kill his own mother if the mission required it. But he shot these people and they kept coming. What freaked him out was that when he shot them they didn't fall down, and then when they did fall down they kept crawling after him.

So then compare that to the narrator's own behavior. He was a nice guy through and through. Every time he had a choice between completing the mission or being polite to a little girl he chose the little girl and the mission failed. He didn't belong in that organization at all.

And then it turned out he was the director's son. Sheer nepotism. And his father excused him because after each fuckup where he put other agents in danger, he personally made it out alive. Somehow I missed that theme when I was 12.

And yet, it was necessary to have somebody like that as the narrator. If Heinlein had used a real agent as narrator his audience would have been utterly repelled.

candle — A biology professor I had used to say "We USually accent the antepenULtimate SYLlable." (US)

the thing that really drew his attention wasn't so much the slap in the face of the manimal voters but a comment about making alcohol from woodchip.

And now we finally discover why Bush clears all that brush on his vacations -- he's probably been hoarding woodchips for years. (For gasoline, of course -- not what you're thinking.)

This thread's getting pretty long, but I'll ask anyway. I'm getting serious about teaching my older offspring to program (she's 11, I think it's time) and had the epiphany that back in the Stone Age, when I learned to program, the entire context was a heckuva lot simpler. I did my first "real" programming on a Hewlett-Packard whateveritwas. It was basically lap equipment, with a 25x40 screen but an actual graphics mode. I liked that graphics stuff. And Zork. I liked Zork. And I liked all that 10 PRINT "HI!" : GOTO 10 stuff.

But now, I have Perl and Python under Windows. The context is way harder to do anything fun. Until tonight, I'd been at a loss as to how to start showing her how cool programming can be.

Anybody else here a programmer, wanting to teach a child how to *really* code? How have you started? Or have you started?

Here's how I started. I tried to think of simple things and simple contexts, and came up with this:

print "? ";
while (>) {
   chomp;
   if ($_ eq "bye") { last; }
   if (/blah/) {
      print "This is boring.   You're just blahing.\n";
   } else {
      print "$_\n";
   }
}
print "It was fun!\n";

And we went from there. She quickly realized you can program the computer to find any kind of words, and I showed her a taste of what regexps can do. And man -- she immediately started to say, "hey, let's try this! and that!" and started blocking out her first interactions.

Anyway: any ideas from people? I think we've got a start, but I don't know what else might be out there. (Yes, I do know about LOGO and such -- I've never gotten much traction out of it with my kids, dunno why.)

I agree with what Michael just said. Computers now contain so many distractions it's hard to focus and there's so much stuff that it's harder to figure out which stuff is important and concentrate on one thing at a time.

So the barrier to learning is figuring out which of a jillion things is the thing to try to learn.

It doesn't help that standard Windows doesn't come with any programming languages.

Not even BASIC.

My daughter's high-school taught programming in Flash. That seemed to work OK, while letting them get some flashy (pardon) results with a modicum of effort.

(I didn't try to teach her programming, because I had a feeling that would go South rapidly. I did teach her how to build computers, though, and she made some spending money in high school building PCs.)

Stefan Jones: It doesn't help that standard Windows doesn't come with any programming languages.

Well, as a good corporate citizen (although I'm speaking soley on my own, making no claims on my employer's behalf, etc, etc) I feel compelled to point out that you can go and download the Express edtions of Visual Studio which are free through 11/7/06. They provide an excellent learning environment and there are on-line learning resources available.

So, while languages don't ship with the OS, they're readily available, along with a development environment. There's even a free Express edition of SQL Server 2005 so you work with a robust database, too.

OK - commercial break over. (Even if it's all free stuff.)

Michael - You might want to check out http://www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com/.

I haven't used it myself, but it looks like it might be useful for your educational purposes.

Squeak might also be worth a look. It seems to be suitable for both kids and grownups (at least grownups who like Smalltalk).

Other DVD recommendations? Well, Marilee, it depends on where your tastes run.

I understand that The Rat Patrol has also been released, but I have only vague memories of it. They're good memories though, as in the case of The Naked City, which has been out on DVD for some time, I understand.

Oh, and there is Gerry Anderson's puppet show Fireball XL-5. Set in 2063, it tells the adventures of ace starship pilot Steve Zodiac, whose crew also includes Dr. Venus and scientist Matt Matic. Oh, and a robot co-pilot entirely made of transparent plastic. I especially like the first episode, where some villainous aliens have been launching superduperatomic missiles at Earth. Our Hero of course puts a stop to that with some daring piloting. By the end, Venus exclaims that's it's no wonder he's known as such a great pilot. His response?

"You're pretty cute too."

The end. I try not to think of the moment the cameras go off, and the two puppets start having sex with each other, especially with all those strings getting in the way.

Michael, if you're teaching her Perl, you can try Impatient Perl. It's free. I wrote it as a plain, straightforward introduction to useful perl.

BTW, I learned programming on a Radio Shack Color Computer with built in Basic. So, I can identify with the frustration with all the complexity of today's computer environments.

Michael

The question of how to teach your child about computers is interesting, but my answer would have a lot to do with exactly what you're trying to accomplish.

Are you just trying to just get her more-than-usually comfortable with the technology, or is your end goal a more formal knowledge of computer science?

In either case, I'd suggest that you start by setting up a Linux machine. Linux distributions have a couple of advantages as teaching tools:

1. They come with every imaginable variety of programming language for free.
2. The source code for just about everything is easily available.
3. Unlike windows, you can get pretty good performance from a Linux distro on an aged piece of hardware.

As a first course of study, I'd suggest having her build her own web site. (You can have the Apache web server installed for you automagically when you build the Linux system.) My experience (I taught Comp. Sci. for 4y) is that kids are a lot more enthusiastic about web sites than they are about character I/O.

Get her familiar with navigating the OS, opening files, and the command line by building a smallish static HTML site.

Depending on what you're trying to accomplish, from there you could look into a lot of stuff.

Personally, I'd start her off with short survey of TCP/IP networking--maybe set up a small LAN in your house? That will give her background knowledge that would be useful for just about everything else she does.

As far as programming, Java isn't a terrible language to learn on, and there are a whole lot of good tutorial sites out there. If not Java, I'd suggest something object-oriented.

Once she's got the basics of programming, hit her with some of the math--Big-Oh notation, analysis of algorithms, sorting and searching.

When you get a chance, databases are an interesting field of study as well. MySQL and Postgres both come free with Linux, and they're easy to learn & use. Pay attention to normalization and other design principles when she's getting started, as it's easy to fall into bad-but-functional design habits that are difficult to unlearn.

That ought to keep her busy for a year or two, anyway...

The history of musical influences, shown on the London Underground map.

Well, James Wolcott's blog is cheerful today. Not.

God, the 21st Century sucks even worse than I thought it would, back in the early Seventies. At least then I only thought the world would be like Soylent Green.

Sorry, posted this in the wrong thread. posting it here where it belongs.
---------------------------

I think you can install a complete programming environment for Perl on your Windows PC by installing a single tarball from ActiveState, for free.

download

Alternately, if you have Linux, I believe you get perl with the standard installation.

Java . . yeah. It's free, it's famous, and it's mighty useful and. . .mighty.

My dad set up a very simplified wargame in C- the kicker was, you couldn't play, just program your tank.

He had a subroutine for his tank's behaviour, I had a subroutine for my tank's behaviour, and there was a main routine that handled the turns and the results.

It evolved. He put in something that fired at his last location if he hit; I put in code that moved me if I was hit. He put in nonrandom firing; I put in code that moved me into his last shellhole. I put in a berserker routine so, if his tank was nearly dead and mine was OK, I fired nonstop. Obviously, there was no data hiding. . . there were questions about "Should you know my tank's health?" and the like.

This sort of thing may not work for your child, but it worked for me.

On the subject of Perl ...

Over a period of a couple of years I wrote a lengthy Perl tutorial for PC PLUS magazine. Contractual reasons (cough, cough -- the publisher the Perl book contract is with was taken over, gobbled up, the entire editorial department moved to another continent, and don't publish that stuff any more anyway, but it's still a contract) prevented me from turning it into a book and publishing it, but I retained all ebook rights to any book I might write about Perl, and I kept non-exclusive rights to the stuff I did for Future Publishing, so the results are here.

They're in plain ASCII and I haven't added the example files yet -- one of these days I've got to find the time to turn it into a free (Creative Commons) ebook. But Perl is what I'd been doing for a living for a few years at the time I wrote these articles, so hopefully it'll be of use to somebody.

The level they're pitched at is of someone who has some programming experience, or who's got to grips with the Llama book ("Learning Perl", Randal Schwartz) and wants to go a bit further. Each article digs into a different aspect of the language and hopefully explains how to get stuff done using it.

If you like, think of it as my non-fiction trunk book.

Rebol is very good for teaching kids of about the early teens a programming language http://www.rebol.com/ the major reason is that it makes it easy to do some things that kids that age might want to do - http://www.rebol.com/nutshell.html paraphrasing examples:

to send an email
send blah@nospam.com "don't spam me, I won't spam you!"

send a webpage via the email
send blah@nospam.com read http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight

and so forth, it's something of a lisp lite, has a good number of quick examples and the community is about evenly divided between people who have CS chops and people who are just making things work.

More Civil War in clip art, with SIGINT thrown in for good measure.

Throwing in a couple of notes --

I use Perl in my job. A lot. I wouldn't teach it to my kid, if I had one, as a first programming language. Perl is a collection of Effective Ancient Unix Evil, and while I love it, that's not the place to start a kid if you want them to understand what they're doing. (If you come to it understanding what you're doing, it's great stuff. But all in all it's like learning detachment by taking up Shao-lin long fist; if you keep at it for a couple of decades and get seriously good, yes, you'll learn detachment, but that's not what it's generally held to be for.)

(Active State does have single-download free instances of perl, python, and tcl for Windows, and they do Just Work.)

Also in my job, I sometimes make hiring decisions about programmers. If they can't write code on a white board -- which is something you apparently have expunged from your brain by using Visual Studio, to the point of motorboat noises -- they don't get hired.

If I were going to teach a kid to program, I'd start with either Python or Ruby; modern, powerful, easy to get immediate results from, and designed, rather than grew, so you learn about how to imagine structures of organization as well as how to do things.

"We USually accent the antepenULtimate SYLlable." (US)

I fear that contraDICTS my conVICTions when it comes to underSTANDing syllABic pronUNCiATion. But I am only a beGINNer at linGUISTics. (I know contradiction doesn't prove anything, but my suspicion is that the rules are particularly poorly understood in this area. I'm not convinced that it's much of a tendency, is what I'm saying.)

In the discussion about introducing programming languages to beginners, are we risking throwing PERL before swine?

In the discussion about introducing programming languages to beginners, are we risking throwing PERL before swine?

No, it's just SmallTalk.

(FWIW, I started with Fortran IV and then learned assembler, Basic, and Pascal. C was a bit too late for me, although I can usually follow it.)

I learned RPG II by doing. I once took a Novell Netware course with a woman who was working in C++; she tried to explain it to me, and I was lost in minutes. It kinda put paid to my (admittedly naive) idea of "transferable programming skills."

Young whippersnappers!!! When I became a programmer, the language was COBOL. And we used punch-card machines. Steam-powered too.

I remember that, Serge. Oh, those poor CompSci students with their COBOL printouts all over the hallway outside of the terminal room, crawling over all those lines of code, praying no one came along and kicked their stack of punch cards....

Serge: I could never get COBOL programs to work. Where did you meet steam-powered punchcard machines? That's really impressive! (One thing learned with the mark-sense cards used in 1984 was, don't print the boxes with black ink. The other thing was that, always, someone will not read the instructions. And one set came back with proofreading marks on it for correcting the marked votes!)

Actually, PJ, the card-punchers were really modified pedal-powered sewing machines. And we had to walk to the data center, two miles in the snow, uphill both ways. It was rough in those days, kids.

Just got permission to share this:

Rhi on the Road

A former co-worker, an environmental engineer, left recently to work for FEMA in New Orleans.

"Programming in COBOL is like trying to drive a large dead whale along the beach at Daytona." -- a friend of mine, who got paid to drive whales.

Mais ou sont les chards d'antan?

Oh, and wrt the "Things I Learned from My Patients" Sidelight, and the most interesting of the "patient tried to eat the drug evidence" stories, I usedta live in University City (Philadelphia), and in another college town for ten years before that. One must understand that college is more than books you haven't read and TAs who speak a dialect of Old Martian. It's about acquiring life experience, and breaking down the barriers that separate the resident's forceps from your viscera.

COBOl isn't as bad as that, Mike. It's just that, unlike the unix servers owned by each team, the company has one mainframe,a big expensive machine where everybody has stuff going and so you're not allowed to make changes on the fly.

On the other hand, that weakness is a strength. I set up my team's mainframe system 10 years ago and that darn thing never breaks down, unless of course it's provided with data that the other teams said we'd NEVER get in a million years, like a negative amount. Meanwhile, our unix-based system...

Graydon wrote Also in my job, I sometimes make hiring decisions about programmers. If they can't write code on a white board -- which is something you apparently have expunged from your brain by using Visual Studio, to the point of motorboat noises -- they don't get hired.

Well, I hope it doesn't do horrible things to Sasha, but he asked for Visual C++ and that's what he's getting (or gotten, it may have arrived by now).

Of course, he's not job-hunting just yet.

Vicki --

Games companies, who more or less universally are looking for disposable code monkeys who will accept horrid hours for the thrill of working on games, are quite happy to hire Visual Studio programmers. And since Sasha's interested in games, it's probably better to get it out of his system before it's a job.

Visual Studio, IDEs as a class, are not a general bar to employment so much as a general bar to understanding what you're doing.

Kinda like lego is cool but doesn't teach you structural engineering or how to drive nails.

If you want to teach a kid programming, it's good to get some idea what he wants. Then find some way to encourage him to branch out from there.

Everything's black boxes, and you might get him to open some of them.

If he wants to learn about how computer software works, he could do a lot worse than pick up Forth. Forth is easy if you haven't learned something else yet. There's a great online manual.

http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf.html

You get a simple virtual machine. A simple compiler and a simple interpreter. A simple programming language. Usually it includes a simple assembler. Often a simple file system. You can get a simple OO system. Since almost all of the system is written in Forth and can be modified, you can learn about compiler design and use, database design and use, OS interface stuff, practically any low-level issues you get interested in, all in a simple model system that's easy to understand. But it's all text. You can do graphics with it, but people don't. You can do TCP/IP and generating web pages is very very easy, but building a more-or-less-standard GUI interface is less easy.

Besides giving people a sense of what's inside a lot of black boxes, the thing Forth is best at is developing programming intuition. When you get that sense that you're climbing a mountain of glue or a mountain of glass, it means you have hold of the wrong end of the problem. Go back and get a clearer sense of the goal and a clearer sense of the useful system calls, and think more clearly about how to organise it all. Also, testing will get you through times of inadequate compiler safety a lot better than compiler safety will get you through times of inadequate testing.

TCL has some of the same virtues on a different level. A reasonably simple virtual machine at a much more abstract level. Great symbol aanipulation, and you can do fine GUI stuff. A rich feature set that doesn't always work intuitively. Much much easier to pick up than Perl, with enough hard stuff to reinforce that sense of when things aren't working and need a simpler approach.

I've heard good things about Flash for getting flashy results quick. I haven't tried it, but if that's the outcome you need it's worth a look.

If at some point you want to open one more black box, you might try Verilog. You can design little integrated circuits, test them on your PC, burn them into an FPGA and test them there for real. There are people putting little microprocessors on small cheap FPGAs. It's no harder than programming and if you need something special that's slow on a PC you can design a circuit to do it fast.

candle—hmm. Well, he was a biology professor. Maybe he was talking about Latin and Greek species names? Or not.

Anyway, even if there were a standard system of emphasis, it would be overridden by the much more interesting subject of emphasis altering meaning, as was mentioned above. My sister and I used to play a game with simple sentences—seeing how many different and contradictory meanings we could get out of one sentence by altering the emphasis:"He gave that to me." But I don't remember that we ever considered 2 syllable words where the different meaning is accompanied by different emphasis.

This is a good place to check an assumption. We were in England in 1960. The other kids could not hear the difference between "uh HUH"and "UH uh". I had assumed that even if that were generally true then elsewhere in the world, by now, with movies, English speakers would all hear that. But are there non-US places where English is not so much a language of emphasis?

Linkmeister - The great thing about RPG is that the geniuses at IBM actually thought that it would enable businesspeople to do their own coding, thus eliminating the need for programmers. I've still got my RPG reference card around somewhere - how I hated RPG.

My first real assembler program that people actually used was written in Wang VS Assembler - which was pretty much /360 assembler with ASCII coding - thus making string handling curiously different.

Oh, and our card readers were powered by thousands of hamsters running in little wheels, and we had to punch the holes with our incisors which had been filed into precise rectangular shapes.

Mina, you might try the British on the difference between "oh AYE" and "OH aye", which is analogous, the former being an agreement and the latter a statement of disbelief.

Maybe he was talking about Latin and Greek species names? Or not.

I think there actually *are* rules for Latin and Greek - and I ought to know them, seeing as I am supposed to be a classicist, but I never learned the accents properly - but that's largely because they are dead languages. In English you can change the emphasis on monosyllables easily enough, and I suppose there are instances where emphasis changes the stress pattern without changing the grammatical function of the word (ie. verb => noun). But I don't really know. I was just being awkward anyway. Sorry!

The other kids could not hear the difference between "uh HUH"and "UH uh".

If these are pronounced the way I think, then isn't there a difference in aspiration (I mean pronouncing the H)? That feels to me more prominent than the stress difference. But in any case, I wonder if all this is largely a result of English being a language in which stress and pitch are not generally a factor in meaning, so that when a new phrase can mean both "yes" and "no" it takes a while to register that stress is what makes the difference. If that makes any sense.

There must be some proper linguists here who can deal with this. Perhaps this was all resolved when this question came up before.

In Latin in High School, my teacher taught us that everything is sounded out, but we don't know the emphasis.

It's late at night for me and I'm not remembering any complex sentences in Latin that, if they were in French or Spanish would have a different emphasis.

On the other hand, having learned Latin (at the same time as I was learning French) has helped a great deal with understanding/reading Spanish and Italian, though my spoken Spanish is farked up from the French education, even though I know the way Spanish is different from French and know the right words. I just pronouce them wrong (French).

Sigh

On teaching kids to program: coming at it from an old-school games programming point of view, I've started with machine code with my oldest (9 y.o.) and we'll be working our way up to assembly language shortly. The rationale of starting so low is that it lets you really understand what a computer is. To my mind, C/C++ is a horrible mess as a first approach to programming, but makes perfect sense as a kind of better assembler once you’ve tried writing small programs in assembly language and experienced the problems for yourself.

Target platform is the Nintendo Game Boy Advance: the ARM’s a nice docile CPU, there’s plenty of documentation on how to get started, and the hardware is cheap. Anyone interested in going down this route should check out Jeff Frohwein’s excellent site.

On stress in English: it’s the kind of thing native speakers tend to do quite unconsciously, but (in the UK at any rate) people use stress to differentiate between similar-sounding numbers. Frex, the difference between ‘nineteen’ and ‘ninety’ in the spoken language has almost nothing to do with the final ‘N’: when there’s ambiguity, people typically exaggerate the stress difference to try and resolve it. (“Is that nine-TEEN or NINE-ty?”)

More generally, I think stress patterns are more important for comprehension than we tend to realise. My wife’s a non-native English speaker, and when we misunderstand each other (in a linguistic rather than a Mars-and-Venus kind of way) it tends to be for reasons of stressing rather than word choice, grammar etc. I suppose this makes sense from an information theory point of view: a bad phone connection can swallow consonants, but the prosody still gets the message across.

I remember once standing in line at a snack counter in an airport behind a French-speaker trying to order "aPELpe". Having taken some French in school helped me to (eventually) decipher this as "apple pie". I can still remember the "Aha!" moment when I got it. I wound up playing interpreter, asking the Francophone if he wanted his pie heated....but at least I'm not still in that line.

Gawd... The assembler language... I did learn that in college, along with the venerable COBOL, and FORTRAN, but I never could get the hang of it. And promptly forgot it all because nobody used it in the a business environment. The same thing happened with FORTRAN, although I did like it. And so, for me, it was COBOL. (In spite of what my earlier posts suggested, in those days we did not do computing with Jacquard looms.)

Around 1998, I got myself a book about the C language and taught myself the basics, which came in handy when an opportunity came to transfer to a team where C++ was the language. Now I deal with PL/sql and PERL.

Back to COBOL... As far as I know, its acronym stands for "Common Business-Oriented Language". That's the official story anyway. Does anybody know otherwise? I'm asking because of Galactica's planet Kobol and the original show apparently had plenty of Mormon elements snuck in it. Or so I was told.

...am now trying to remember where I first heard the story about the French celebrity who was asked what she wanted out of life, and replied "Only 'appiness." With the emphasis on the second syllable.

Ah. Programming questions. :)

Michael:
I'm getting serious about teaching my older offspring to program (she's 11, I think it's time) and had the epiphany that back in the Stone Age, when I learned to program, the entire context was a heckuva lot simpler.

But now, I have Perl and Python under Windows. The context is way harder to do anything fun. Until tonight, I'd been at a loss as to how to start showing her how cool programming can be.

I don't have any kids (I'd be a disaster with them!) but if I did, I'd probably start with Python rather than Perl because Python has a much cleaner syntax that is easier to read, which is even more important at the learning stage than later -- most of what the kid'll be doing to start with is reading your programs and trying to figure out why they do what they do. I can't think of anything that's much better than Python -- it has many of the same advantages as Smalltalk and other languages that were designed with educational purposes in mind, yet has the benefit of being a language that's in active use for modern applications.

Also, using (e.g.) wxPython, you can set up a very simple framework for graphical programs. Hide it in a module to start with, then later explain what modules are later and show her how to make her own. That could be a rather fun avenue to explore.

Stefan:
It doesn't help that standard Windows doesn't come with any programming languages.

Not even BASIC.

Windows comes with 2 programming languages: JScript and VBScript. Both are functional, full programming languages at least as powerful as the BASIC implementations that came with most home computers in the 80s. If you're on the Windows9x family still, you also have the DOS 'QBASIC' interpreter.

Clifton Royston:
My daughter's high-school taught programming in Flash. That seemed to work OK, while letting them get some flashy (pardon) results with a modicum of effort.

That's a good idea, although the software to do it is a little pricy. The language you program Flash in is a variant of JavaScript, so is pretty functional, but you get the added nicety of very simply playing with visual objects. Does anyone know of a free Flash editor, or are we stuck with macromedia's?

Tim Walters:
Squeak might also be worth a look. It seems to be suitable for both kids and grownups (at least grownups who like Smalltalk).

Smalltalk's an interesting language, and worth a play with. I haven't looked at how it's evolved with Squeak, but I've only heard good things about it.

Sandy B:
My dad set up a very simplified wargame in C- the kicker was, you couldn't play, just program your tank.

He had a subroutine for his tank's behaviour, I had a subroutine for my tank's behaviour, and there was a main routine that handled the turns and the results.

Sounds like C-ROBOTS or its more recent reimplementation, C++ Robots.

Hmm. Perhaps it's time for Python Robots. :)

Other things you might want to try:

• A declarative language, like Prolog. Putting in some statements and seeing how prolog can make a chain between them to draw conclusions is enlightening as to how computer logic works.


• If the kid's mathematically inclined, try a functional language. Python can be used as if it were functional, and has most of the features you'd need for this, but you may want to try a pure-functional language anyway. (Interesting note: some universities have begun using functional languages as the language they teach in their 'introduction to programming' course for CS students. The theory is that the way of thinking you learn with functional programming is a better way of thinking for other kinds of programming, too)

There's a very good reason why French people speaking English drop their Hs. That's because that letter is never pronounced in French either.

Oh, and the French 'TH' is always pronounced 'T'. The English 'TH' is a real tongue-twister so it's not surprising if it comes out as 'zee'. I think I've got the sound right, or fairly close. And no, I don't sound like Inspecteur Clouseau of Zee French Surete.

Marilee... Back to the DVD of The Time Tunnel... After two 13-hours days in a row at the office, I decided to treat myself so I bought the set yesterday and found that I had made a mistake in my original post. The set contains the first 15 episodes, not 13. And it contains a longer version of the pilot.

In case you're interested, Marilee, there apparently is a DVD of the series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I saw that show years ago, with the episodes out of order, so I can't tell if the first season was relatively straight SF. Not-straight SF would be having Blackbeard's Ghost pop in, or the ghost of a Nazi submarine taking over the Captain (or was it the Admiral?), or lobster-men from outer space, or the Captain getting irradiated and turning into a werewolf. Didn't they also have mummies? And Victor Buono - although he didn't play King Tut?

Michael, if you do decide to go the Python route, one of my colleagues, Allen Downey, has written a book called How to Think Like A Computer Scientist on Python for beginners. The book is available as a free download in a variety of formats, under a GNU Free Documentation License. You can also buy hardcopies, if you are so inclined, from either Green Tea Press directly or from Amazon, where you can also read the comments.

Serge:

Season 1 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was the relatively-straight SF, black-and-white one. S2 had a somewhat James-Bond flavour, with interludes of corny aliens. The mummies and werewolves were mostly in S3; S4 was even weirder/sillier than that.

The 4th season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was even more silly, Ellarien? Ouch. I remember a few years ago, getting up before 4am and feeling like it too, so I turned the kitchen's TV on and found myself looking at what was either German Cinema, or the epitome of a Voyage episode: someone is hiding in the airducts of the submarine, which is deserted, except for a luger-carrying dwarfish clown who looks very angry.

I love the "Uh'uh" topic, because it's one of the two (US) English utterances I know of which actually use a glottal stop as a consonant. (The other one is the variant "Nah'ah".) The glottal stop is that sound in between the two syllables, which English speakers don't normally consciously perceive as being a consonant or even present.

Since the glottal stop is a standard consonant in pretty much every Polynesian language, if you want to be able to understand or speak Hawaiian (or Tongan, or Samoan, or...) you must be able first to hear it and then to say it. Bringing up "uh'uh" gives people an anchor to get them to really listen to how they say it and hear it, and learn to recognize it.

Southwestern Polynesian languages like Samoan or Tongan also have "ng" without the hard "g" (as in "ring" or "singer") as a consonant, including at the beginning of words, but that's easier to pick up. (If you see written Pago-pago, Samoa, it's pronounced more like "Pongo-pongo", but with a soft "ng".)

P.S. I am not a linguist so I'm probably explaining this poorly.

I remember watching 'Voyage To See What's On The Bottom' (what we called it) as a kid. It got to where we were categorizing the plots as 'monsters' and 'dolls' (including robots), generally alternating.

Programming: if you can find it, for learning Pascal is good; for sheer weirdness in a real language, try TECO (a text-editing language).

Serge:
someone is hiding in the airducts of the submarine, which is deserted, except for a luger-carrying dwarfish clown who looks very angry.

That sounds like the late S3 episode, 'The Wax Men'. S4 brought us the Leprechaun, the Abominable Snowman, the Lobsterman, and the episode simply titled 'Terror' in which the world was menaced by evil red Amaryllis flowers.

Voyage To See What's On The Bottom

Coughgagsplutter.

PJ, in your opinion, which Irwin Allen is it that had the highest weird factor? Voyage was out there, but I think that Lost in Space wins easily. It is rather hard to beat the episode with the Arabian Knight who, chasing after his girlfriend trapped in a bottle, is zipping around the universe in a steam-powered asteroid. Or the episode where Dr.Smith psycho-analyzes the god Thor and convinces him that all his problems stem from his childhood even though he didn't have a childhood.

(The other one is the variant "Nah'ah".)

Er, what does that mean exactly? In UK English I would probably interpret it as someone saying "nutter". It's not far from how I would say it myself. But obviously these phrases don't require a glottal stop like "uh uh".

My native accent, if that's the right phrase, is filled with glottal stops. I take particular pride in pronouncing "glottal" as "glo'al". It also means that it's very tough to distinguish between my saying "can" and "can't".

Also, why do people here (in Oregon, at least) fail to pronounce the "h" at the beginning of "herbs" or "herbal"? This wasn't a difference in UK/US pronunciation that I had ever heard about before.

We mostly didn't watch 'Lost in Space'. (Of course, we thought it would have been greatly improved if Dr Smith had gotten what he deserved.)

Cows with Guns was funny but would be a damn sight funnier if the animators had realized that only female cows have udders.

MKK

Candle:
I just remembered the one which I usually count as second is much more common: "Uh'oh" when something has just gone wrong. Usually I count, "Nah'ah" as a distant third. "Nah'ah" also means "No". I think it's US regional.

Wow, your comment is absolutely right. Now that I think about it, I have heard UK accents where as a consonant shift a t gets replaced by '. What cities or regions does this accent come from?

"Also, why do people here (in Oregon, at least) fail to pronounce the "h" at the beginning of "herbs" or "herbal"?"

I do it too. (I'm from the Albany, NY area.) I always thought that was the difference between "herb" and the name Herb.

"only female cows have udders."
For that matter, only female cows are cows. (as opposed to bulls.)

Also, why do people here (in Oregon, at least) fail to pronounce the "h" at the beginning of "herbs" or "herbal"? This wasn't a difference in UK/US pronunciation that I had ever heard about before.

I'm pretty sure it is, though.

--Mary Aileen

We mostly didn't watch 'Lost in Space'. (Of course, we thought it would have been greatly improved if Dr Smith had gotten what he deserved.)

Left the Robinsons an an airless rock,* formed an alliance with the Klingon Empire, and used the Robot to conquer Earth? (This would include conquering whatever Foreigh Power had put him aboard to begin with, but that would have led to the immortal "Kahless Meets Khrushchev, as Reported by Walter Cronkite" sequence.

Mashup fanfic is the new polka-dot.

And of course "Lost in Space" is famously the series that CBS had already acquired, and therefore turned down Gene Roddenberry's space show.

If there's a competition for "weirdest Irwin Allen Moment," though (and I might actually wanna be on the Worldcon panel), I would suggest it is The Story of Mankind, an all-star adaptation** of a book by Henrik Willem van Loon,*** in which Ronald Colman (as The Human Spirit) and Vincent Price (as the Devil) argue about whether humanity is worth not blowing up (with its new invention the H-Bomb) in front of judge Cedric Hardwicke.

There follow lots of bizarre recreations of historical events, played by an even more bizarre collection of actors. Some are actually inspired choices (Peter Lorre as Nero), some are weird-city (Groucho Marx as Peter Minuit, swindling the Indians out of Manhattan, Hedy Lamarr as Joan of Arc), and, well, Dennis Hopper as Napoleon.

Turner Classic has run this (it was from Warners, and doesn't seem to be out on video, further indicating the abject failure of our educational system).

*There are, of course, no airless rocks in space, which is fortunate, since the mission did not seem to have provided spacesuits.

**For certain asymptotic values of the word.

***This is America. No fault attaches to having missed Henrik Willem van Loon.

****Chico and Harpo are also there. The Marxes have no scenes together. Harpo plays Isaac Newton. The prosecution rests.

"Nah'ah" or "Nuh'uh" is used to indicate, "Very much no," in my experience.

e.g.: "He hit me over the head with a piece of foam, insulted my taste in dress, and called me crazy! Was I going to put up with that? Nuh'uh! So I threw a kipper at him and called his mother."

The Story of Mankind, Mike? I'll have to keep that in mind.

And I think you should propose a weird-Irwin-Allen-moment panel to the worldcon.

I meant, Mike, that you should propose that panel to the worldcon because people know you. They'll take you more seriously than they would a fan - even for an Irwin Allen panel. I'm sure quite a few of us would attend.

Gee, I didn't miss van Loon. We had a fairly extensive collection of books in our house...in 1966 it was 36 1.5-cubic-foot-boxes in volume. (Moving is 'an occasion to prune the collection'.)

We figured losing Dr Smith would allow them to actually get home before they all died of old age (or Smith-induced difficulties).

Clifton Royston wrote: Now that I think about it, I have heard UK accents where as a consonant shift a t gets replaced by '. What cities or regions does this accent come from?

It appears everywhere in Britain, as far as I can tell, although I suppose the stereotypical glo'al-stopper would be a cheery cockney chap.

Here in Manxland I remember that glottal stops were so common at my primary school that one teacher started a bit of a crusade against them. We weren't allowed to go to the toilet unless we pronounced the 't' at the end of the word when we asked permission. And you couldn't get round it by saying "loo" instead. It was "toileT" or nothing.

Jules notes:
"Windows comes with 2 programming languages: JScript and VBScript."

Ah, yes . . . I've heard that. I don't believe it, though. :-)

Well, I don't *literally* disbelieve it. I know these tools are there. I don't doubt that they are as powerful or useful as you say.

But for the purposes of a parent or kid wanting to teach / learn programming, these scripting languages are invisible.

Really. Try looking for them. Nowhere on the "Programs" tree (at least on my Dell, running XP, pretty much as supplied). Searching via Help brings up a few unhelpful references.

I think this "burial" is deliberate MS policy.

Could one contemplate a remake of LOST IN SPACE starring Dr. Psmith?

"Gosh, another new world to land on, explore, and get sent packing by a gigantic something-or-other. It certainly is a crowded old galaxy, isn't it?"

"I sense danger! Danger! Danger, I tell you!"

"Now, you see, that's the whole problem in a perspex-craniumed nutshell."

Could be contemplated, Charlie old bream, but would be most dreadfully housecat-flung in the execution thereof, don't you know.

glottal stops: My Long-Island-raised college roommate used one in the middle of 'little'. I have not otherwise noticed it on Long Island, however.

--Mary Aileen

I think that glottal stops are currently used in the UK to denote one's common touch and lack of snobbishness. It's an inverse snobbery thing.

Is anyone else having trouble accessing Blogspot blogs? I keep getting an error message that says "Alert! The document contains no data". I've tried clicking several of my favorites from the 'Friends Relations Cronies and Colleagues' sidebar links, and get this same error on all the ones with blogspot accounts. :-(

Blogspot has been having intermittent problems for a couple of days now. I think their servers may have died, or something like.

Harriet: I'm having the same problem.

Serge, I put Rat Patrol on my list, but I thought Voyage was silly the first time around.

Let's see if this goes the other way: I just added The Red Shoes to the list for a memorial viewing and as long as I'm looking at ballet, I also added The Turning Point.

Give an open thread a cookie...

I'm not even going to go back and respond to people individually by name because I'm too damned lazy, but I will drop a Hueuuuge thank-you to the lot of you for all the juicy tidbits of leads.

The main reason to "why Perl" instead of Python is simple: I had the laptop at her fencing practice, and while I do my GUI work in wxPython nowadays, for a quick-and-easy fun program in ten lines I could write in a couple of minutes while she was sitting around, Perl was just plain my best bet, due to my own checkered history.

As to text I/O versus Web pages: we've tried Web pages. Didn't click -- and I don't want general computer literacy; she's already OK there (she discovered the Google advanced search on her own -- and frankly, it boggles the mind that for her, the world has *always included Google*!!!) I want to teach programming, and more specifically, I want to teach her the geeky aspects of it that I loved as an adolescent. So far, the experiment seems to be working.

The Kids Programming Language is a new one on me; the offspring says it looks pretty cool (and I concur), so we'll be trying that.

I do want to introduce her to wxPython, yes. She's already proposed writing a simple GUI for the Perl script. I like that for maximum software-engineering cruft (a Python wrapper for a Perl script -- yeah!) -- after all, I wrote a Web comic compiler in Perl on Windows generating SVG from high-level XML descriptions with ImageMagick doing the final translation to a GIF. I like cruft. It's fun. My daughter agrees, so far. :-)

She also liked the idea of writing chatbots to talk to each other, and I'm going to look into C-ROBOTS as well (I saw that one before, long ago...)

Lots of good ideas.

Also: I'm from Indiana and my own dialect has a glottal stop for final 't' and silent 'h' in "herb" and "herbal" but not in the name "Herb." Just so ya know.

President Bush is pushing math and science education.

I'm . . . uh . . . I really don't know what to think of this.

It's like _____ suddenly advocating _____.

(Fill in the blanks!)

Oh. My. God. . . .

The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/science/04climate.html

Pardon my language, but fuck, fuck, fuck, this is not funny any more.

This is an addendum to Stefan's post; you really need to read the link he gave, and this one.

My son the physics major gave me a copy of this book. It is an interesting discussion of how the Republican Party has sought to manipulate, hide, and discredit science.

Mary Aileen - You're on LI? Listen for the glottal stop in "bottle". You'll hear that more often than in "little".

Once upon a time, a friend asked me if I wanted a "kudJOOma". Turned out she meant "Good Humor". (N.B. - for non USians, it's a brand of ice cream novelties.)

BTW, I'm a Brooklyn boy without a discernable local accent and I've never pronounced the initial H in herb or herbal.

My wife is Hungarian. I find it a roughly monthly source of cognitive discord to realize that I may flee the repressive regime in the US someday ... for Hungary. Go figure.

One of the big problems I see with the current administration is that most of them have no background in sciecne, math or engineering, in any form. To them it's probably elitist ... never mind that to reach their publicly stated goals of returning to the Moon, going to Mars, and using less oil, engineers and scientists are going to be the people in the front line. I suspect that at the schools they attended, science and math were not required, or only minimally required, for political-science, PR and journalism students.
(BTW, I found a really good description of the neo-cons the other day: Psalm 10:5-9. Read it and hope we can throw these guys out before RSN.)

all of this stuff makes my desire to move to Ireland or the U.K. not seem so foolish. Then again, I probably will stay in Kansas City until my dear mom is no longer with us (could be later than sooner, I hope to the Goddess... ). She lives in Lawrence, KS, which is about 35 minutes away from home during non-rush times.

I'm still rather confused about the idea of the (male pronoun) cow guru with udderly inappropriate plumbing...

One of the big problems I see with the current administration is that most of them have no background in scie[nc]e, math or engineering, in any form. To them it's probably elitist [...}

I don't think it's elitist, except inasmuch as that word, like "liberal," is a contentless insult, another version of Them. I think it's an attitude that there is no such thing as a fact, that there are merely arguments you have made stick, or been able to convince a jury that your client didn't really do, or that the speaker "didn't mean literally." (It all becomes clear now: the government is a metaphor for an actual government.) "Theory" is, you will note, still being used to mean "guess," and the press is still too damned ignorant to correct this.

It's directly related to my earlier argument about the New Model CEO (which I won't tire people by repeating in full); there's no goal that's beyond the company's means, if your subordinates will only implement your imperial will. (See also Eco's 14 Points.)

I'm not sure we can take the Moon and Mars "programs" as anything but more kited checks, but if there is any serious intent behind them, it comes from men with no comprehension whatsoever of the technical issues. I watched (on NASA TV, uncut) Sean O'Keefe try to discuss the hypothetical Crew Exploration Vehicle with the technical press. These guys weren't being rude, and I'm sure every one of them wanted some good news on a Shuttle replacement, but they were asking serious, informed technical questions about the vehicle's specs, which had obviously been pulled out of some White House drone's backside, and the Administrator simply stonewalled, saying that this was all a proposal and he couldn't discuss specifics. (To be fair, he couldn't have said anything else without lying, but he was also being hishonest by suggesting that anything on the developmental timeline was achievable without the unspeakable A-word*.)

Then, of course, Eco's eleventh point is about mori-ing heroically pro patria, and is there anything else a manned space program run by this crowd could possibly be?

*"Appropriations."

The UK accent with lots of glottal stops is what is now basically Generic Southern (aka Estuary), and probably involves anyone within 50 miles of London. Which is most of the population, I believe. You will note Tony Blair dropping them in occasionally, too, although I suspect that in his case it is the inverse snobbery which abi was pointing out. (I'm going the other way: my accent started out pure Estuary and then got gentrified in college. And still, unless I am watching my language closely, I will put a glottal stop in every place there could possibly be one.)

As far as I know, though, the usual thing in the UK is to pronounce the 'h' in 'herbs', unless they drop the 'h' everywhere else. I suppose it must be a US convention; I was just surprised I hadn't noticed it before. I wonder if the UK version is a later development, since it would be unusual for spoken pronunciation to move *away* from the written ... but again, I'm just guessing here.

I've never heard "Nuh'uh", but I can now see how it would work. It's interesting how it conforms to the romance-language convention of negating with the pre-positional "ne", n'est-ce pas?

World O' Crap digs up some gems by George Deutsch, the (ahem) political officer vetting PR at NASA:

http://blogs.salon.com/0002874/2006/02/04.html#a2120

Among other things, he suggests that it was entirely possible that Laci Peterson was killed by satanists.

The upside of dealing with these arrogant Young Republican weenies is that they leave a paper trail. I'm sure the next few days will see more revelations about this boy wonder.

Right now, I'm finding myself really looking forward to going out in the rain and picking up after the dog.

Here's a 2003 Washington Monthly article which attempts to explain why GWB and Republicans in general don't like/trust science. (One clue: scientists trend Democratic.)

"It's like _____ suddenly advocating _____."

It's like Homer Simpson suddenly advocating OH! Look, a pretty doggy!

candle,

I live in Edinburgh, and my kids go to a nursery staffed by locals. The attendants range in local accent from Gilmerton (south of the city) to Portobello (north of the city). No one in the situation has spent any significant time in England at all.

Yet my children come home speaking in an accent that includes glottal stops. I think that it's either local to more than the Sahf, or has spread throughout the country by shows like Eastenders (a long-running soap opera, O non-UK readers).

I've even started using them (unconsciously) as a marker of informal speech, which sounds rather funny in my Californian accent.

Stefan suggests that, for the Administration, a background in science, math or engineering is elitist. To Mike, they probably are not elitists.

I think they are neither, that they are in fact anti-elitists.

In the days of Bill & Al's 1992 victory, some people said this was the Baby Boomers vs those who came before. When Al was running against Dubya, another Boomer, this was the conflict at school between the brains and the jocks. I have this feeling this was an apt comparison, between those who respect brains, and those who don't have the brains and who hate those who have brains and who needs brains anyway when you have muscle?

First Draft proves how, if the govt is allowed to spy on the the phone calls of Americans, we will find a link between terrorists and, yes, Kevin Bacon.

...and Kevin Bacon was in Stir of Echoes, where Kathryn Erbe played his wife and who went on to be the co-star on Criminal Intent and to everybody who ever appeared on one of the Law & Order shows, and that includes Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson, who had a small part in one of the Die Hard movies, which leads us to Bruce Willis, who met with the troops in Iraq.

I tell you, it's all connected.

As far as I know, though, the usual thing in the UK is to pronounce the 'h' in 'herbs', unless they drop the 'h' everywhere else. I suppose it must be a US convention; I was just surprised I hadn't noticed it before. I wonder if the UK version is a later development, since it would be unusual for spoken pronunciation to move *away* from the written ... but again, I'm just guessing here.

My suspicion is that the US have changed towards a French pronunciation, possibly due to the word's association with French cookery. A quick google suggests I'm right to assume the locale of the change, although I've no idea about the cause:

The majority of Americans early dropped the initial h-sound in such words as when and where, but so far as I can determine they never elided it at the beginning of other words, save in the case of herb and humble. (H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 1921)

I must admit to having found amusing Clairol's series of TV adverts from a few years back for their Herbal Essences range of haircare products. For some reason, they decided to use what I assume were their US adverts in the UK, leaving each one with the tag line "have you got the urge to herbal?", with "urge" and "herbal" being alliterative.

It did leave me wondering what urbling was, and whether or not it was legal.

Whereas Wikipedia agrees with you, although the data is unreferenced:

Spelling pronunciation has also added /h/ to the Commonwealth pronunciation of herb, /hɜːb/, while American English retains the older pronunciation /ɝb/.

As the more recent source, I'm probably more inclined to trust it.

My suspicion is that the US have changed towards a French pronunciation...

Oui, oui, Jules, our plan eez working...

I believe "umble" was the original word, and the aspirate was added later. The umbles of an animal were its (squishy and largely unrecognisable) innards. Hence, umble pie, made from the bits that the aristocratic hunters rejected.

Say, Dave, does 'humble' come from 'humor'?

No, sir, but we umorists are very, very umble. And we're all a little Squeers, except thee and me.

Quaker joke!!

I think of go'al stops as being particularly Scots, from UK acquaintances and from memory of a Scots folksinger telling of being drilled in the proper pronounciation of "Betty bought a pound of butter." It's interesting to hear of them happening in the U.S. -- even if it's on Long Gisland -- or elsewhere in the UK.

Jules: My suspicion is that the US have changed towards a French pronunciation, possibly due to the word's association with French cookery.

Yet Julia Child always pronounced the "H" in herbs, and she was largely responsible for improving (and slightly Frenchifying) late 20th Century American cooking.

Marilee said... I put Rat Patrol on my list, but I thought Voyage was silly the first time around.

To say the least.

I'm ashamed to say I'm not familiar with our recommendations. But if I may make one more SF-related recommendation, all of The Flash came out in one DVD set not long ago.

Glo'al stops are very common in Lancashire.

I always assumed there were placed they were used in the US, largely from the written form "Lil" for "little" as in "Lil Abner" -- if that's not a glottal stop, what is it?

As for Betty and the butter, try singing as fast as you can:

Mrs Betty Botter bought a bit of butter
But the bit of butter made the batter bitter
If you want a bit of butter that'll make the batter better
Then you'd better get the butter with the Anchor sign!

HTH!

Humble is Middle English, from Old French, from Latin humilis, low, lowly, from humus, ground. See the Blessed AHD, all praise to Cal Watkins.

I think Dave is thinking of the numbles, a term of venery borrowed from Old French nombles, the edible viscera, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

. . . in other words, the umbles are derived from numbles, not humble, or even 'umble.

Which leads me to wonder why did numbles lose the n--which it did, by at least the eighteenth century, since Johnson's Dictionary has umbles as a lemma.

the written form "Lil" for "little" as in "Lil Abner" -- if that's not a glottal stop, what is it?

I've always assumed it's literally 'lil', as in 'lily'. But I could be wrong on that.

--Mary Aileen

I concur with Mary Aileen - "Lil" wouldn't have a glottal stop, but would probably have a vowel shift (not a linguist, don't know the correct term, glide?) if said in either an Ozark or Appalachian accent.

If I can put in an anti-recommendation:

When I watched the live-action FLASH series on its broadast run, I kept tuning in because I couldn't believe that the writing on the show could possibly be as bad, or worse, than the previous week's episode.

It was bad. It was BAD. It was so bad that saying the plots and dialogue went *clunk* is a gross understatement.

Since Howard Chaykin was on the writing staff, I figure all the other writers were kept so busy restraining Chaykin from trying to turn Barry Allen into a drunk, or a drug addict, or a rapist, that they had no time left for, y'know, actual writing.

(I do not, to put it lightly, enjoy Chaykin's pee-in-the-punch-bowl approach to "updating" old comics characters. I still remember, with shudders, what he did to poor old Tommy Tomorrow -- whose only crime was being boring -- in the TWILIGHT miniseries.)

"Li'l" is almost-but-not-quite two syllables - it gets drawn out a bit, the way I've always heard it pronounced. (My father was born and raised in OK; his father was from northeastern Kentucky. Can we say back-country somewhere?)

Bruce... It has been a few years since I saw the Flash TV series and thought it was decent even back then, if taken as a comic-book. (You want bad, try the Black Scorpion TV series of a few years ago.) My feelings may have changed and I may wind up feeling the way you felt from the word go.

I will probably have to work a bit hard at ignoring that Chaykin was involved. Let's put it this way... Back in the late Eighties, he revamped the Shadow into a comic that allowed the character to still be alive today since he started in the Thirties. Margot Lane's daughter gets involved with him, but she hates him for what he had done to her mom. Still, they have sex and next morning she calls him Master. I don't know why I was surprised, since this is the man who once said he used to be a Democrat because the girls were easier to get into the sack. I threw the comic-book away and never looked again at anything by that pig.

Just checked Wikipedia - they have a good article on the glottal stop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop

Another article describes some of the dialectal pronunciation we've been discussing as being an alveolar flap rather than a glottal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapping

I thought Li'l Abner was pronounced sort of Lih-d Uhl Abner.

As a computer ignoramus, when I read (skimmed) the program language discussions upthread I kept thinking of Daniel Perl(e) vs. Monty Python, and very surreal images danced in my head.

Pronunciations -- hasn't it been said somewhere that Shakespeare probably sounded more like someone from the Ozarks than a plummy modern Brit?

Larry: Thanks and more thanks for the "Express Editions" tip! I had been wondering how to start picking up some Windows universe C/C++ coding sk1llz without having to shell out hundreds of bucks. I haven't done any real code for Windows since Windows 3.1 or thereabouts, and I've been really feeling it as a handicap in job interviews lately.

Right now I'm sitting in my son's bedroom with Visual C++ on my laptop, watching my son play with his wooden trains, and just got my "hello world" equivalent to run. A very luxurious Sunday morning feeling.

Now I've just got to get Ubuntu or Kubuntu set up on another partition so I can do the same thing in Linux-land...

Certainly "humble" comes from humilis; the loss of the "n" in "numble" I think is part of a common phenomenon where "a numble pie" becomes "an umble pie" - it's more difficult to sound the stop between "a" and initial-n, for some reason. As for erbs, the other reason I suspect that the British pronunciation is later is that the "American" accent derives from the 18th century East Anglian / East Midlands accent, owing to the origins of the Pilgrim Fathers. Is that right? The coast of North Carolina supposedly preserves some of this, and that at least is probably closer to what Shakespeare would have sounded like. (But that is just a cliche in any case, I suspect.)

Latin has the "h" in herbs, but Italian and French don't pronounce it - I presume English borrowed it from there and that the UK added an aspiration later. It doesn't stop me from finding the US pronunciation amusing, though. Sorry about that.

I don't associate glottal stops with Scotland at all - my impression of the Scottish accent (which is probably just educated Edinburgh) is that the t's are firmly pronounced. Gordon Brown wouldn't produce too many glottal stops. But then Tony Blair was educated at Fettes, and it doesn't seem to have done him much good. I'd still be inclined to blame the cultural influence of Sarf. But then, I'm a suvv'ner.

What we need here is David Crystal's The Stories of English.

Pronunciations -- hasn't it been said somewhere that Shakespeare probably sounded more like someone from the Ozarks than a plummy modern Brit?

Thanks, Faren. Now you've got me associating Shaespeare with George Clooney as one of the Soggy-bottom Boys...

candle: Don't forget that the touted Pilgrims were only one of many English immigrant groups. The Jamestown colony was not hugely successful, but it was the leading edge of immigration to Virginia, well before the Pilgrims. I'd look to that as a more plausible source of the hypothetical "Shakespearean" English in backwoods America. (Which I believe has been somewhat debunked - "closer" may be true, or perhaps just divergent in a different way.)

"Li'l," as in Little Abner, is pronounced more like "liyul," only not really. It's just barely a diphthong because all you do is drop the flap in the middle: "liddle: without the d, or "lily" without the y.

Can I draw back in Serge's comments upthread about scientific and mathematical ignorance in the US administration?

When Al was running against Dubya, another Boomer, this was the conflict at school between the brains and the jocks. I have this feeling this was an apt comparison, between those who respect brains, and those who don't have the brains and who hate those who have brains and who needs brains anyway when you have muscle?

In the UK, all of these nuances are conveyed by accent. Gordon Brown, as The Brainy One in the cabinet, pronounces all of his consonants, but Tony Blair tries to be folksy with glottal stops. I find it a lot more comforting, to be honest, to see them getting their down home credibility from accent rather than from trashing science.

And the commonest factor in the Edinburgh local accent (apart from the Fettes College-style pseudo-English assimilationist style of speech *), is the use of a glottal stop for "t" ("Be'er for "better"). It is only used informally, and is often the marker that we have left formal business manners for more friendly ways.

Other Scottish accents vary wildly, between Highland and Lowland and within each region. It appears to be a Lowland urbanism to lose the letter t with glottal stops - I have never heard it from my Aberdonian in-laws, whose vowels and dialect words baffle me more than their consonants.

* Ironically, this is the only accent I can reliably imitate, and forms the basis of my telephone voice. Phones magnify accents, and I had to go at least midatlantic to be understood by all callers.

abi...

Accents and Class... That reminds me of a woman I knew who was from the USSR when there was still a USSR. She really didn't like Gorbashev, partly because he spoke like a peasant.

About the British Isle... What kind of Scottish accent does Sean Connery have? Probably very influenced by spending so much time among the British... And is it my imagination or does he have more of an accent now than he did back in the early Sixties, when he was probably trying to hide his origins. Or something.

When I visited my family back in Quebec after a 9-year absence, it was tough at first, partly because more than once I found myself speaking in English. I did manage the switch, but I was told that my accent isn't singsong like it used to be, that it's way more clipped than is normal in French.

Yesterday's WashPost had an article on how political folks keep re-editing Wikipedia to more accurately reflect their views.

Serge

First, a vocabulary note: Scots, English and Welsh people are all British (the Northern Irish are not. It's complicated, and best explained with Venn diagrams). Don't think about it - just remember it if you ever run across anyone really touchy on the subject.

Sean Connery is proudly, if a little indeterminately, Scottish. I don't know exactly where some of his consonants come from, particularly that s --> sh thing. They aren't from his native Edinburgh. (He was a milkman in Leith for a while, delivering to the road I lived on 30-plus years later. No one on that street talked remotely like him.)

When he was James Bond, he did try to sound a bit more English, or at least a bit more softly Scottish, than he does now that he's rediscovered the Saltire. (For genuine Scots who have made it big in the wider world, you'll hear a more genuine accent and more genuine convictions from someone like Billy Conolly than you will from Sir Sean the Tax Exile.)

I have never crossed the language barrier when I've returned home - we all speak variants of English. Did you stop using French as your home language when you left Quebec, or was it French at home and English at work? I ask partly because we're planning a move to the Netherlands, and I'm trying to get my head around living my public life in Dutch. Experiences of others are appreciated.

Whoa!

Have you heard? Dubbya says Iran has WMD's!

Wait! Haven't we heard this before? Why, in watching the media, does it seem like I'm the only one to whom this sounds familiar? Oh, wait, of course, that must be that "liberal bias" kicking in again, right?

aargh

I stand corrected. The transposed "n" in "a numble pie" to "an umble pie" is the same event as from "a napron" to "an apron", then. And then they inserted an entirely redundant "h" to produce "humble pie", in mistaken identification with "humble", which really does descend from the Latin. Truly, this is a bizarre language we speak.

Here is a fantasy novel plot generator to go along with the title generator:

http://www.warpcoresf.co.uk/fantasyplot.php

Voyage totally lost me in an episode that depended on the calm in the eye of a strong hurricane including a calm sea.

I quite liked The Flash. Yeah, some of the episodes were bad, and it was waaaayyy too influenced by Tim Burton's first Batman movie. I thought it had good bits, though -- the two "Nightshade" episodes and the two with Mark Hamill as the Trickster come to mind. I liked the heavy use of special effects: I could remember the old "Superman" show where Superman was onscreen for maybe five minutes an episode...they didn't do that, at least.

In other news, I find that Teresa's Particles can be hazardous to my health (or at least my pocketbook) as I am compelled to purchase one of Kevin Pease's elemental t-shirts.

Dropping t's at the ends of words is common in many Irish accents, parts of Dublin and lots of the midlands for example.

Wha's tha'? Tha's a ca'. It's too fa' to be a ca'! It's jus a really fa' ca', righ'?

Here in Athlone, I correct my kids all the time, so they probably get beaten up at school. No, they probably will end up with two accents, one they only use in front of me, and one like tha' sample I gave.

I grew up in Edinburgh and never heard anyone talk remotely like Sean Connery. Sean Connery's brother doesn't talk like Sean Connery. Best to just class him as sui generis and move on. (Don't even mention Star Trek.)

Billy Connolly has a more authentic accent, but Glasgow, not Edinburgh - far more glottal stops and omitted consonants, and very difficult to understand, even for other Scots. (I fondly remember a Czech friend stopping a passerby in Glasgow for directions, listening to him blankly and asking me "Was that man really speaking English?") For the real Edinburgh accent, watch 'Trainspotting' or 'Shallow Grave', which are both set there.
A lot of the American accent comes, I believe, from the West Country (think 'pirate accent' and from Ulster.

Did I stop using French as my home language when I left Quebec, abi? Pretty much, yes, aside from irregular calls to my parents to let them know I was still alive, but, even before I left, I was already reading mostly stuff in English, and watching mostly American TV, so the jump wasn't that drastic.

abi says about Sean Connery... He was a milkman in Leith for a while, delivering to the road I lived on 30-plus years later. No one on that street talked remotely like him. And ajay says ... I grew up in Edinburgh and never heard anyone talk remotely like Sean Connery. Sean Connery's brother doesn't talk like Sean Connery.

I think somebody once said something that dissimilar about Cary Grant. I guess that's what one gets from moving away from the home turf, but never completely letting go.

Jon Carroll has an interesting column (then again his column is seldom uninteresting) in today's San Francisco Chronicle about China and Google, especially the part about China letting America think it's still the top dog.

Is this what it felt like for the British Empire in the early 20th Century, this fading away, to be replaced by a country nobody would have seriously thought of as competition?

Serge: yes, exactly.

Back in 1860, the UK was an industrial superpower as well as a military one -- with about 50% of the planetary GDP. By 1900, that had dropped to 30% of GDP, European rivals like Germany were developing rapidly and had better education and infrastructure provisions, and so on -- and the navy was forced to abandon the Two-Power Standard (requiring the Royal Navy to be equal in power to the next two major powers combined). If that latter sounds familiar, it bloody ought to: until a couple of years ago the US military ran on an analogous rule, requiring it to be able to fight two wars simultaneously on different parts of the planet.

When I pause to consider what's happening in international relations and economics these days, and especially when I look at the relative state of the US, I get a strong sense of deja vu.

I think the two-power standard was abandoned as part of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, which limited battleship tonnage and numbers after the Great War. Britain agreed to the treaty because a) not enough money after the War and b) belief that the War had indeed Ended War.
A look at this in fact shows that, Washington notwithstanding, the Navy was still almost at the two-power standard in 1939, at least in battleships, light cruisers, and destroyers. By 1939, the German surface navy wasn't a problem, numerically: Japan and, oddly, Italy were.

The more worrying implication of your post is that the 1910-1960 decline of the British Empire wasn't exactly a peaceful period. Lots of other nations wanted their place in the sun and thought that they could take it. Fortunately the Germans always attack before they are quite ready.

Weighing in a bit late on the anatomically-odd male cow discussion, my hypothesis is that the animator did it that way deliberately in order to finesse the "cow well hung" verse - in which, you will note, the male cow is depicted squirting his opponents with milk rather than what the lyrics describe him doing.

" Sean Connery's brother doesn't talk like Sean Connery."

And my brother doesn't talk like me. I don't know how that happened, but I have an accent[sic] that is not found in any member of my family. So it's not just fakey Hollywood types that do that.

Pronunciations -- hasn't it been said somewhere that Shakespeare probably sounded more like someone from the Ozarks than a plummy modern Brit?

I heard a radio feature a while ago about the RSC doing a season of one of Shakespeare's plays with reconstructed pronunciation; it didn't sound much like Ozark to me, but there was a definite accent - lots of odd vowels. I don't know English regional accents well enough to pick one that it sounded like.

I remember them mentioning that they did polls to see if the audience was having trouble with the pronunciation, and got a noticeable strand of people who found the play *more* accessible: people whose English was not posh found they related better to Shakespeare now that his English wasn't posh either.

ajay: the capital intensive cost of regular (as opposed to guerilla) warfare is much higher than it used to be. Indeed, it vastly exceeds any likely yield from looting the victims -- as witness the current mess in Iraq, where the bill for the invasion and occupation is an order of magnitude higher than any likely oil revenue.

Back before mechanisation and artillery began raising the cost of warfare, invading the neighbours looked like a good way to make a quick buck; it has been suggested that Nazi Germany would have been bankrupt by mid-1940 if they hadn't gone on the ultimate asset-stripping spree of all time, and even then it was barely a break-even proposition.

Hopefully this means that future great power conflicts will resemble the cold war -- a lot of sabre-rattling and a lot of baroque arsenals, followed by the economic collapse of the weaker party as it fails to keep up with the Jones's.

(Right now, mired in the short-term, it's looking like the main types of conflict on the horizon are guerilla warfare buttressed by ideological incompatabilities. I'm trying to look 20-70 years ahead, at the likely shape of the end of the American century.)

Completely off-topic (but isn't that what open threads are for?), but I noticed the 911truestory advert in the right-hand sidebar, and I frowned. From a quick look at it, it looks like the usual crazy conspiracy theory stuff; seeing it on this site, though, makes me think twice about that. So my question, I guess, is: how much of a QA process is there to the ads you accept on this site? I know the usual idea is that running an ad doesn't necessarily mean endorsing its message, but this thing is really a little weird for makinglight. It's almost like running a Publish America ad...

Besides regular warfare being much more expensive than it used to be, Charlie... I wonder if any empire, even Rome's, could have lasted beyond the invention of powerful explosives. I mean, it's relatively easy to build an empire when your opponent is technologically inferior, but what if the opponent is a schmuck who doesn't mind blowing himself up along with a good chunk of the neighborhood?

I've been thinking about that "end of empire" thing too, lately, but it got me wondering how much of the 20th century was "American". Weren't we isolationist foot-draggers for quite some time? I know, I know, there were lots of little wars with other countries dating back to the 19th century or earlier, but as a Boomer I tend to think of US dominance as starting in the Forties and turning into a widespread cultural dominion for the next 60-odd years (not counting the Beatles, the "British Invasion" and all that). Meanwhile, most of our wars seemed to turn out badly.

I'm not looking for a lesson on military history -- my husband could provide that -- but for other people's thoughts on the nature of dominant nations past and future (if that's not too grand and pompous a topic for an Open Thread).

Faren wrote that most of our wars seemed to turn out badly.

Maybe that's because of the story that defines America's creation, which was a revolt against an empire.

Paul A - "Posh." For some reason I really love that word, although I never use it and don't really know if I like all of its connotations. But, it really sounds wonderful. Posh, even. Thanks for using it - it made me smile as I sit beneath my SAD lamp, trying to drive away the effects of a dreary Seattle winter. (Although it may be nice here for a few days - a cosmic apology for yesterday's game, perhaps.)

That ambigram particle is cool.

I particulary like:

Have~A
Nice
Day

which when turned upside-down reads:

Go
Fuck
Yourself

One more thing, Faren... It may also be that America isn't good at empire-building because nobody could build an empire today, what with explosives being so readily available. In other words, we're coming into the game at a time when it can't be played anymore. I think.

Charlie - I hope you're model's right.

One note about war and it's cost is that right now there's a great asymmetry of cost/value for the US and for the Iraqi insurgents (and Al Qaeda, for that matter.)

On the US side, costs are percieved as high, and the loss of a small number of lives (compared to say WWII) is unacceptable against a benefit (oil?, global stability? democracy for Iraq?) that is perceived as low.

On the Iraqi side, the benefits (self-determination, freedom from invaders, deriving the benefits of their own economic output) are higher than the loss of a few more lives (various insurgents and suicide bombers) in the face of those already dead.

It's not that the Iraqis value their lives less (I hope!), it's that the social utility derived by each incremental life lost is so much higher than for the US.

I think the last time we understood that was WWII, when we really were fighting for our future. The true believers would say that Iraq is the same thing, but the wisdom of mobs says otherwise.

Faren: the parallels still hold. Imperial powers don't always win wars; sometimes they lose badly, even spectacularly badly. (You might want to look up the history of the First Afghan War some time -- the Elphinstone Expedition and its aftermath. Disastrous doesn't even begin to describe it.)

Nevertheless, the pre-eminent power can survive such disasters -- that's the distinguishing characteristic of a pre-eminent power, after all. When the British government noticed what had happened in Afghanistan, they simply sent another army. Similarly, the USA might have lost the Vietnam war, but there are still US military bases in something like 140 of the 190-odd countries on the planet.

The big difference, when you're not the pre-eminent power any more, is that your military SNAFUs have an unpleasant habit of coming home and camping out in the living room (as Hitler learned the hard way). The UK got a clue, somewhere between 1914 and 1956, and avoided the worst of the hangover. Other folks (France, 1815, Germany, 1945) didn't manage quite so well.

Then again, Serge, seems to me Faren hit the proverbial nail exactly on its head with her observation about postwar American cultural dominance. We've created a cultural and economic empire largely without having to use explosives. The economic empire now seems to be in decline, but I suspect the cultural empire will remain strong for decades to come, for the simple reason that we seem to be pretty competent at creating and marketing those things -- or that one thing, a sense of freedom -- that youth around the world desire.

But why do countries and empires decline in power, and others rise up? There're numerous reasons (and books) that attempt to explain this phenomenon. My simplistic pet hypothesis is that, everything else being equal (an important qualifier), the country or culture that can most quickly adapt to changing circumstances is the one that will ascend in relation to its competitors, and speed in adaptation is a result of the abilities to process information and then innovate. Reading btwn the lines of Jon Carroll's column, however, the Chinese seem to be operating under a different hypothesis -- speed of innovation isn't as important as the quantity of innovations and a country's / culture's ability to control them for strategic purposes. An anology would be the lumbering tactics applied by the Soviet Red Army versus those of the Third Reich's quicker-to-react Wehrmacht. The Soviets were slower to innovate on the battlefield, but they had the benefits of mass and of geographical space (aka time). Which means I'm hardly sanguine as to the strength of my hypothesis...

Serge --

Explosives aren't anything new; they're just taking the place historically occupied by setting fires. (All this building in stone and concrete is something of an historical aberration; your historical city, or walled farmhouse, etc., burned very well indeed.)

The fundamental problem with Empire is that it uses military force to introduce market distortions in favour of the ruling class of the Empire. More efficient, and more widespread, markets make the (comprehensively dire) effects of this happen faster.

The Hamurabic "one law, the law is equal for all, service as the highest ideal" empire model has the potential to have a lot of social benefits. This is where the good things about empires come in.

The structure of empire uses military force to maintain relative social (meaning economic; social and economic are fundamentally the same thing) standing in despite of innovation, efforts at import replacement, or good sense in terms of effort or cost minimization; that eventually produces a monumental disaster.

The US is without question headed at the monumental disaster; the question is what kind, and how long it takes.

The novel thing about this disaster will not explosives and suicide bombers, but nuclear weapons and attempts at economic blackmail with same.

Fortunately, nukes require maintenance; unfortunately, in the presence of an existing infrastructure, that maintenance isn't very expensive as such things go.

True, Graydon, explosives are nothing new, but today's non-nuclear stuff can make even more of a mess. And there are small missiles. And automatic weapons. One person can do a lot more damage today than burning a barn. As for Richard's comments, I was really talking of traditional empires built by military action. I agree that we still have an economic empire, but once it's gone, eventually our cultural empire will fade away too. After all, most people try to emulate the culture that is economically successful.

This all reminds me of the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, where Blofeld once again holds the world hostage to his latest thing. He sends an ultimatum to the Soviets and to the Americans, but then he makes a crack to James to the effect that he didn't even bother with Great-Britain.

Serge --

I was more thinking of Willie Macintosh, and Auchindon, than barn-burning. (And when all your food for the winter is in the barn, and there is no way to get more to you even if you could buy it, burning a barn isn't lacking in magnitude as political statements go.)

The US empire certainly was built by military action; it's a straightforward extension of the Anglo Thassalocracy.

There's been a whole lot of forced market access, for an awfully long time, on the part of the US.

But Serge, tiny Great Britain is still something of a world power, even if it's only with regard to pop music. When China reaches the top o' the economic heap, I'd be very surprised if its cultural clout exceeds that of the West, 'cause Chinese music just isn't that easy to dance to. ; )

I remember during the 2004 primaries and how everybody ganged up on Howard Dean for saying that America may not always be on top, or words to that effect. I'm sure he hopes he was wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

Graydon, I don't disagree that the US has used its political, economic and, at times, military clout to maintain access to markets or keep weaker, strategically important countries in line with our interests. But seems to me that we've been far less egregious at literally planting our flag elsewhere than the Great Powers of the 19th and early 20th century. An interesting question: did we become a world power by design, or by default?

Richard --

Military has been the default in the Western Hemisphere at least since 1890. Implicit threat of military force has been enormously important since 1945, since only other nuclear powers have any possibility of an effective right of refusal, and even that has to get around the economic clout.

I see no obvious consequential difference between installing local satraps, in the form of brutal, repressive dictators, and taking explicit possession for the purposes of being directly brutal and repressive.

In the US's case, I can argue that avoiding taking explicit possession is a direct result of the Philippine adventure and wanting to make sure the enserfed local population didn't have any possibility of access to US courts. (That's why making everybody in the Roman Empire a Roman Citizen was a big deal -- suddenly, equal access to the courts.)

The possessions of empire tend to get at least some infrastructure and some rule of law; the optimized resource extraction environments don't, and that is why they're not possessions most of the time.

....Fortunately, nukes require maintenance....

Unfortunately that makes nukes a wasting asset.

Given something like Philip Wylie's smuggled atom bomb - or today's delivery by shipping container - a given bomb is a use it or lose it asset.

I was really talking of traditional empires built by military action

It seems to me empires built by military action don't hold. Not even Conan's. Military empires are I think more like Napoleon's or some of the European Hapsburg/Bourbon/Catholic/Protestant struggles that end up falling into war so often.

For traditional compare with CJ's thumbnail on Rome:
Fiction: Rome set out to rule the world.
Fact:....Rome beat Carthage in three wars and finally got involved in African politics trying to stop this cycle. They wanted rid of it. But every time they tried to dismount the tiger, it turned and bit them.
They were then contacted by several eastern kingdoms whose kings willed the Romans their kingdoms if they'd just save these kingdoms from their neighbors and keep them peaceful.
One of these was Egypt. The Roman Senate tried to reject the gift---the Roman people had had enough of foreign troubles. Julius Caesar stood up and argued for the Egyptian Will...and was voted down.
1. Egypt. See the end of previous statement.
2. the unwarned massacre of thousands [reputedly 50,000] of civilian Roman and Roman-affiliated colonists by an eastern warlord [one of the tyrants the other local countries were afraid of:] outraged the civilized world and prompted Rome to go after the guy---Mithridates.
3. See: the African situation. Once Rome was in there, local politics came into play. Jugurtha of Numidia, invited to Rome on a diplomatic mission to try to settle things, assassinated one of his rivals on Roman city streets---bad news.
An exception to Roman good behavior: the Roman Senate appointed Memmius to handle matters in Greece...and the guy turned out to behave badly. The Romans did not consider him a hero. It was very bad manners to steal the silverware...or Greek art treasures. They considered it justice that his ships sank...and gave us modern divers the Greek bronzes we have: the rest were, ironically, lost to mediaeval plunderers.
3. Alexander had conquered the east and pasted it together. Tyrants claiming his mantle had thus far caused war after war in the area. Once Rome ruled it, there was peace and a reasonable chance of the local peasants living to die of natural causes

A successful empire, IMHO, needs use relatively little military force - send the Marines (from Nicaraugua to the Boxer Rebellion) but not the combined forces - though the combined forces must be threatening enough to forestall action by other powers. The threat is more powerful than the execution (cf. unlit cigars) see e.g. Guatamala -1954? - where four P51's made the difference or Greece after WWII where a squadron of SB2C made a difference. There is a logic of empire quite apart from military adventurism.

> for other people's thoughts on the nature
> of dominant nations past and future

Buy a copy of "Civilization" and play it a while. you'll get someone's view of dominant nations, put into a playable format.

(as a former Civ addict, you should play with a map size set to "Tiny" and land mass set to "Pangea" if you'd like your games to last hours, rather than weeks, long. If you play a game with a tiny map and a pangea land mass, and you know what you're doing, you can play a complete game in 3 or 4 hours.)

Civ has several ways to "win", including cultural dominance, getting into space first, and others, but all of these can be trumped by simple military might. And military might wins one way: whoever produces the most, wins.

I think that when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America finally declared war on Germany, Churchill said it was the "beginning of the end" or some such thing, basically saying that the US manufacturing power would win out over any temporary advantage the Germans might have.

Civ also has some interesting game rules about modern warfare. Once any country has the technology to build nukes, ALL countries have the ability. (whether they have the resources, such as access to raw uranium/plutonium, is a different issue) This seems to tie in with the real world in the fact that Iran has the knowledge to build nukes, they are getting hung up trying to acquire the materials.

Tactical nukes, and nukes like those we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are pretty cheap to build in Civ. They also don't invoke a nuclear winter scenario, so usign them in onesey-twosey is "no big deal". One thing that does disappoint me is that Civ doesn't have a way to trigger nuclear winter, but oh well.

Another thing that Civ doesn't seem to grasp or model well is stateless terrorism. In civ, production is tied to a city, which is tied to a country, so weapons are all property of a nation. Civ doesn't have a way to model something like Al Queda, which operates outside of national boundaries.

Civ also has a simplistic economics model. You cannot suffer a depression, a stock crash, or massive unemployment. You're either making money or losing money, and you repeat that every turn. But it is interesting to see how you can become filthy rich based on your core, capital cities, even though your outer cities are suffering massive corruption and are losing money every turn. Think New York versus New Orleans.

Another thing that Civ does not model well is forms of government. As the player in Civ, you get to decide if you will be a tyrant, monarch, or president. In real life, the people decide and the rulers either go along or try to fight their own people. Civ doesn't have your people spontaneously fight for democracy once they advance to that level.

It isn't a perfect model of reality, but Civ does one thing very well: it models the use of production and military force extremely well, at least up until you get nuclear technology. If you want to play around with how the world worked up until the end of World War 2, Civ is a hands on way to play.

From the Roman empire to teh British empire to the rise of the American superpower, Civ will give you a feel for how it works.

Remember that scene from North by Northwest when Cary Grant is meeting with Leo G. Carroll at the foot of Mount Rushmore? Grant says he doesn't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at him. Carroll responds:

"He's probably telling you to walk softly and carry a big stick."

Somehow the sexually inadequate bozos in the White House forgot the part about walking softly.

The US is without question headed at the monumental disaster; the question is what kind, and how long it takes.

So, any kind of disaster will do, from economic collapse to massive meteor strikes? And on any time scale from days to centuries?

. . . I'd have to agree.

Thoughts on dominant nations, future:

I keep waffling as to whether stateless terrorism is a new issue or not. I keep thinking of the Barbary pirates and sending in the Marines in 1805, and I can't tell if that is similar or different than, say, Al Queda camping out in Afghanistan, making it their training grounds.

The one difference, of course, is the weaponry available to individuals with enough money to buy what they want on the black market. Another difference is the goals. The Barbary pirates were in it for the money. Al Queda is in it for, well, I'm not exactly sure what they're really in it for, but making it unprofitable for Al Queda won't stop them the same way making it unprofitable for the Barbary pirates would.

I think with nukes, we have entered a phase of history where nuclear nations have become "equals" even if they are only one-one-hundredth the size of a superpower. If north korea has nukes, we won't be using force to solve our problems with them, but then they won't necessarily be usign force to solve their problems with South Korea.

Nukes seem to have set the status quo, and frozen national borders.

The only people willing to use such weapons now are those who operate without borders. Stateless terrorism. Organizations such as Al Queda who operate without a national identity, present no target of reprisal for their actions. Afghanistan was their main training grounds, and their attacks on 9-11 caused the US to try and erradicate them from Afghanistan, but getting rid of them in one country does not get rid of them.

State dominance will occur without direct use of force against fellow nuclear-capable countries. The European Union is a step towards dominance for western europe, achieved without war. Military action will be waged against non-nuclear countries.

Dominance of stateless organizations may rise and fall, but I don't think they'll ever stay dominant. Al Quada became dominant on 9-11, but I think they've been severely weakened, and won't become dominant again for some time. I think anytime a stateless organization attempts to dominate a state, you'll always see a violent state response. The shores of Tripoli. The mountains of Afghanistan.

The thought of stateless dominance is more powerful right now than their actual strength. We're terrified of Al Queda getting nukes, getting WMD's, but they're a phantom menace right now, they live as a boogeyman in hiding, waiting to launch some surprise attack. We relate to them like the shark in Jaws. After WW2, our main military strategy was to defend our country from a surprise attack like the Japanese launched on Pearl Harbor, except it was going to be a suprise nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Now, we're wrapped up in defending ourselves from 9-11 style terrorist attacks.

As for future dominance in general, I think that dominance has only been possible because of differences in technology, differences in attitudes, that enable the drive to dominate. What I think is going to happen is that the differences are going to evaporate. At some point, we'll all have the same technology, at some point, we'll all have roughly equal economies, and dominance and empire will not be possible. Before that happens, the nations that are currently domiant will have to go through an adjustment phase to bring them on par with non-dominant nations. Poor countries will have to become richer than they are now. Rich countries will have to become poorer than they are now. And they'll eventually find a Q point where they settle into stability. (assuming some knucklehead doesn't nuke us into the stoneage before that happens).

But that's just me.

In the US's case, I can argue that avoiding taking explicit possession is a direct result of the Philippine adventure and wanting to make sure the enserfed local population didn't have any possibility of access to US courts. (That's why making everybody in the Roman Empire a Roman Citizen was a big deal -- suddenly, equal access to the courts.)

The US debate about possession of foreign conquests is older than that, actually. At the end of the Mexican-American War, there were Americans arguing for taking over all of Mexico, not just the thinly populated northern parts (Alta California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico). This was opposed by (among others) Southern politicians, on two grounds: 1) basic racism (not wanting those brown Mexicans to become US citizens one day); and 2) fear of more free states in the future, since slavery was outlawed in Mexico.

an update on Civ;

There is an open source, free-as-in-beer version of Civ, called, oddly enough, freeCiv that duplicates the gameplay Greg London illustrated.

Nifty features include being able to play as historical or fictional nations. (I have wasted many an afternoon playing the Dunedain vs. Mordor.)

Nuclear winter, in a limited sense, was implemented even in the original version of Civ; let off too many nukes, and the water level rises, temperate areas become desert or tundra (with associated movement pentalties), cities lose certain kinds of food production, etc.

Civ in any form is not reccomended for:
1. writers
2. artists
3. editors
4. anyone who needs to get things done.
It is the ultimate time sink if you have any obsessive or perfectionistic tendancies. Forget ever being able to finish that novel.

Greg London is quite right about the production concept; staying a dictatorship or a monarchy the entire game and building new cities every single turn will quickly win you the game, where quick=4 to 12 hours of your life you will never get back again.

-r.

Fans of (a) hagiography and (b) comic books -- and I know you're out there -- will be interested to learn of the upcoming British publication The Flying Friar.

You'll thrill as he soars through the sixteenth-century skies! You'll marvel at his super strength! You'll venerate his modesty and patience! You'll cheer as he thwarts the fiendish plot of the dastardly Lex Luther! (You know. Lex. Great-nephew of Martin.)

I promise that I am not making this up.

rhandir,

nuclear winter? Really? I never needed to use nukes to win a game, so I never saw it happen. I did play around with some nukes to see what they did, and all I got was some pollution around the target, which I could clean up with some workers.

as for the time sink, yeah, on a normal sized map, it takes weeks to play a game. I then discovered that it is a lot easier to conquer the world, if the world is tiny. I can usually start and finish a tiny map game in 3 hours or so. Still a sink, but way better to get a 3 hour Civ fix, than a 3 week fix.

I think the quickest I conquered the world was something like 500 BC one time. Not too shabby.

One other oddity about Civ is that Railroads seem to be grossly overrated. As soon as I discover the technology to build railroads, I send all my workers out to connect all my cities and then lay tracks to the front lines. Everything then gets free travel. and I dump military units from the furthest cities right into combat. I don't think it works that way in real life, but oh well.

Greg London: Stateless terrorism. Organizations such as Al Queda who operate without a national identity, present no target of reprisal for their actions.

Greg, if AQ were to detonate a nuclear device in a US city. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the Kaaba, or anywhere in Mecca for that matter. Not necessarily a response I'd endorse, but one that has a non-zero probability of happening.

Andrew Willett: Fans of (a) hagiography and (b) comic books -- and I know you're out there -- will be interested to learn of the upcoming British publication The Flying Friar.

Will Mother Superior Bertrille (surely she's risen in the ranks by now) play a Mayor Linseed analog?

Whoops - got my universes mixed up. Strike Mayor Linseed and replace with a suitable Superman-based figure.

Greg --

Remarkably close to it. Certainly close enough when you can just send workers to clean up nuke sites.

Sandy --

Not asteroid strikes, particularly. (Given enough time, yes, something wretched will happen; Yellowstone will eventually erupt again...) But on one edge we've got the diverse dire outcomes of "Rummy really does nuke Iran" and on the other edge we've got the diverse dire outcomes of "the Chinese decide it's time to take back Taiwan" and on the other edge we've got the economic consequences of renewed war on the Korean peninsula and on the other edge we've got the climate shift -- current big question, when will Greenland go? -- and on the other edge we've got a US economy that's at significant risk of outright falling over and taking most of the global economy with it.

I can't see any way out of that box that has any real chance of happening. There's a limit to dumb luck, and any attempt to take effective control of events in time to stave off disaster would itself constitute a disaster.

if AQ were to detonate a nuclear device in a US city. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the Kaaba

Larry, Iraq had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks. But we went after them anyway because they were "linked" to Al Queda, no, because they had WMD's, no, because they were bad people, insert excuse of the minute here.

Just because some knuckleheaded president might attack the Kaaba because Al Queda sets off a nuke in NYC, that doesn't mean that Al Queda is not a stateless organization. Moronic logic from gunslinging presidents who get their strategy from war movies don't change that. Al Queda is a stateless organization.

Civ is crack.

Stay away from it.

Even the CivAnon site is a cruel marketing ploy to get people to play Civ IV.

Two points in Charlie's comparison of the US and UK empires:
- the two-wars doctrine was a Republican noisemaker from Rumsfeld's spiritual ancestors; it was presented as an ideal by the people who now use "We're making you more secure!" as an excuse for any misconduct, but IIRC it was never achieved -- the money just wasn't there.
- Also IIRC, the UK at least didn't sell itself to its successor and its primary candyman. I keep wondering whether it will be the Chinese or the Saudis who first decide to stop wasting their trade surplus buying U.S. debt.

Sean Connery's accent was noticed in old fannish circles; the promo for Outlands included his personal greeting to "Norriscon" (Noreascon 2).

Graydon, America may be effective at installing satraps, but I'd argue that for a country of our putative power we've been remarkably ineffective at maintaining these satraps over time. IMHO, that's perhaps the primary consequential difference between satrapization and taking explicit posession of -- er, conquering through force of arms -- someone else's hunk of geography. Not that the latter seems all that effective either in maintaining influence over the long run....

Greg - I didn't say that the scenario I put forward was sensible, or that it reflected any relationship between AQ and any particular state. Or, for that matter that I endorsed it. I don't, but I'm not sure how I'd feel if there was suddenly a hole in the middle of say, Chicago.

The only reason that I think that the nuke Mecca scenario is possible is because of people like General William "My God Can Beat Up Your God" Boykin.

The reason I think it won't happen is because of the degree to which the Bush family is in bed with the Saudi royal family and Big Oil.

Richard --

No particular satrap has much of a half life. The complete and total inability of anybody to get effective labour laws passed or refuse US definitions of free trade (the mercantile equivalent of unconditional surrender) has been remarkably consistent.

The only guiding ideology to this is profit.

Now, that said, the US is a stunningly incompetent imperial power, considered as an imperial power. But that's not what the US is trying to be. The US is trying to maximize returns for a certain kind of business organization, and that it does very well.

Charlie Stross - - in your note of 9:01 this morning, you’re making a classic error about imperialism: you argue that imperial looting is no longer profitable, and therefore we're likely to see less of it as a national policy.

But that’s true only if you’re looking at the balance sheet for the imperial power as a whole. That is, that’s true only if the people paying the costs of imperial adventures are the same set of people as those who are reaping the profits.

The people who are collecting hundreds of billions of dollars of public money from America’s attack on Iraq are decidedly NOT the same Americans who are sending their loved ones to fight and die in the desert. Imperialism can be profitable for ruling elites AND a complete disaster for the polity as a whole.

(If the costs and benefits of a great power's foreign policies ARE fairly distributed, you tend to see the principle “Democracies don’t launch wars of aggression.” The United States launched a war of naked aggression. Finishing that syllogism is left as an exercise.)

The people who are collecting hundreds of billions of dollars of public money from America’s attack on Iraq are decidedly NOT the same Americans who are sending their loved ones to fight and die in the desert.

Yes, it's the Verres problem.

Damn you, Andrew Willett. Now I will have to buy The Flying Friar as a teaching aid for my hagiography class.

The people who are collecting hundreds of billions of dollars of public money from America’s attack on Iraq are decidedly NOT the same Americans who are sending their loved ones to fight and die in the desert.

That is another real-world feature that is not simulated in Civ.

If the military were purely a commercial, for-profit endeavor, paid for by those who benefit from it, then we sure as hell wouldn't be in this money-pit of a quagmire called Iraq, assuming, of course, that the "you break it, you buy it" rule applied. Haliburton planes wouldn't have bombed the hell out of the power grid in Iraq if they had to pay for it to be rebuilt with their own money.

On the other hand, they probably advised the military to bomb the hell out of the grid knowing they would be awarded the contract to rebuild said grid. insert national infrastructure here.

Btw, there's a Civ 4???

"Lord of War" comes to mind here. Not a great plot, but when you watch the level of bribes and kickbacks and forgeries and illegal activities going on, it sort makes you think, yeah, that's how it probably works.

Civ IV: Yes. I've been playing it. It was advertised as a remake from the ground up, but I don't think it goes that far. Desert becomes completely valueless, unless it's river valley or oasis; mountains become untraversable; railroads have a (low) movement cost; there are a number of new resources, and resources generally are easier to find, including the vital strategic ones; the Wonders are comprehensively revamped; and religion becomes important, esp in the early game. And the bells and whistles have been upgraded, with a lot more animation, some really nice music - check out the Soweto-sound during the intro. On the minus side, the spaceship-launch (which brought me to tears in Three) has been excised and replaced with a blah piece of bad action, poorly animated.

On the whole, a bit better, with less micro-management, but as a human player, very difficult to win beyond about level four.

Charlie: The UK never experienced a serious threat to its heartland due to imperial overstretch (and if the UK learned its lesson between 1914 and 1956 what do you call Suez, the Malay Emergency, the Mau-Mau conflict, the fight with the NLF in Aden in the 1960s, and the little tiff in the Falklands in 1982?) Germany, Napoleonic France (and for that matter Ancien Regime France) and Russia sought to build empires contiguous to their heartlands. The British empire was mostly overseas (the only contiguous territory being John Bull's other island). That's a crucial difference.

Btw, there's a Civ 4???

Since October.

I think it's an improvement over 3, but the changes are considerable -- probably greater than with 2 or 3, and several of them take getting used to. Some key differences:

-- There are no longer abstract government types. There are five characteristics of a civilization ("civics"): Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion, and five civics in each group. (This originated with Alpha Centauri.) Most civs go through a turn of anarchy when they change civics, though certain nations are immune. Each civic, as you'd expect, relates to how you want to run the empire.

-- There's a religion system. Whoever's the first to develop a particular tech "founds" an associated religion (e.g., Monotheism founds Judaism). There are seven religions; the manual notes that seven was chosen as best for gameplay, and their names were chosen as familiar to everybody. You can send out missionaries to try and convert other civs (and a civ can have multiple religions); coreligionists are more likely to come over to your side if you're culturally superior. The religions all have real-world names, but they don't actually have any tenets -- your play is unaffected by your religion or lack thereof, though there are advantages in founding them. I sort-of understand why they used real religion names instead of (in Steve Jackson's phrase) The Temple of Gooble the Mostly Omnipotent, but it does look a little odd. It might have been nice if you could have changed the religion names (as you can with the civs and leaders).

-- There are now "Great People," who are generated by cultural achievements. Engineers, Merchants, Prophets, and Artists can be used as specialized citizens to boost a city's stats, or they can be expended to create various things -- an Artist, for example, can be swapped for a "great work" that hugely boosts a city's Culture total. The Great People have real names, which leads to more cognitive dissonance, like when Lao-Tzu builds the Church of the Nativity.

The game is, as one would expect, graphically way ahead of any previous version. It's now fully 3d -- little squads of people run around building roads and killing each other, and there's a seamless mousewheel zoom from a few squares to the entire globe. This does come at a cost; I've got an AMD 2800 with a Nvidia 6200 video card, and it's very slow at the top graphic settings. Runs just fine at "medium" settings, which look entirely okay.

Ah. Goobleism. They used to advertise in back of Popular Mechanix.

So far I've resisted any temptation to buy Civ 4, and Dave's note that "mountains become untraversable" has furthered my resolve. If the Donner Party can make it through the Rockies, then Settlers sure as heck can!

Hey, remember when we were talking about aerogel, and, like, evil purposes and stuff?

Buy yours here:

Via Boingboing, naturally. Also, if you decide to buy a box of goodies from United Nuclear, and you get the big neodymium magnets, and some of us with metal bits are in the nabe, ring a bell and shout "High Gauss!" from time to time, okay?

I'm safe for a few more months; Aspyr is aiming to ship the Mac port of Civ IV in June.

Stefan, the fact that mountains are now "impassable terrain" bothered me at first, too (of course, the thing I liked best about Alpha C was the terraformer vans -- there was nothing quite like conducting a land invasion of your neighbor over brand new land, or submerging his coastal cities), but, while occasionally frustrating, it's not all that unrealistic -- remember that a Settler isn't ten people and a wagon, it's everything necessary to start a major city.* (I do think Scouts ought to be able to get through, but note that maps are much smaller, in terms of squares, than in any previous Civ; the largest "mountain range" I've ever seen on a standard-sized world is four adjacent squares, so it's not like in Civ 3, where there were vast expanses of mountain country (inevitably where your sole iron mine was located). Iron, incidentally, is much easier to get hold of now, though it's still a "strategic resource," meaning Worth Fighting People Over.

*You can now build "towns" in the radius of cities, which grow over time and greatly increase the city's economic production. They're also fairly profitable to pillage, if that's your thing.

Fragano: Suez I call one man's madness - Anthony Eden's - but a long way from being a colonial war. What colony were they attempting to obtain or retain there? The Malay Emergency was a model of how to win a war against a guerrilla insurgency. The resulting state is no showpiece for democracy, but it's a damn sight better than Vietnam. The Mau-mau was a lost war, and the outcome would have been better for the people had it not been lost. Consider Zimbabwe, where the British got out voluntarily, coerced the (admittedly redneck) remnants into surrender, and thereby produced a disaster and a basket case, even by African standards. Aden was a holding operation until a reasonably stable regime was established, and maybe a sixty per cent success on those terms. There was never a thought that the British were going to retain it. The Falklands was a just war against a ramshackle tyranny that got its bottom booted past its ears and very right, too. The Falklands is still British, in accordance with the clearly and unequivocably expressed wishes of its people. Gibraltar the same, embarrassing as that may be to the British government itself.

It was a good empire as empires go, and unlike most empires, when they went, they went pretty well.

Quick - before it goes away - a Google Sets hack.

Go to
http://labs.google.com/sets

Enter in the following and see what's predicted in the set:
- mow lawn
- do laundry
- buy groceries
click "Large Set"

The fourth item should be a doozy.

Stop it, John! I'm not going to fall off the wagon again.

Instead, I'm writing stuff like:

Object roadkill "roadkill" highway
with name 'roadkill' 'squashed' 'oppossum' 'animal',
bagged false,
initial "There's a squashed animal by the side of the road.",
description
[;
if (roadkill.bagged) "The dead oppossum is securely contained in a plastic bag.";
else "It is pretty chewed up, but you are pretty sure that it is an oppossum.";
],
before
[;
take:
if (plastic_bag in player || plastic_bag in location)
{
print "You use the plastic bag to pick up, and then contain, the roadkill oppossum's leaky corpse.";
roadkill.bagged=true;
remove plastic_bag;
move roadkill to player;
}
else
{
print "There's no way you're going to touch the disgusting thing with your bare hands.";
return true;
}
],
;

"The only reason that I think that the nuke Mecca scenario is possible is because of people like General William "My God Can Beat Up Your God" Boykin."

see I think it's cause they're evil but stupid, an evil and clever person would nuke medina and threaten to nuke mecca unless they delivered all the oil.

Bob: what's going on in Iraq isn't classic imperialist resource-extraction; the people taking the profits from the war aren't, for the most part, taking their profits from the conquered nation -- they're taking them from the US taxpayer. To that extent, the Iraq occupation is an excuse, rather than the main event: a fig-leaf to conceal the asset stripping of what's left of the American public purse.

NB: the estimates of resulting oil revenue that Rummy was bandying around before the invasion were on the order of a total $100Bn. Total spent on the Iraq war so far? Including colateral damage to the US economy due to the rise in oil prices since the war, $2Tn. The invasion is deeply unprofitable, in terms of the traditional imperial hostile takeover model. It's something else again, if your objective is to line the pockets of your defense contractor buddies.

Here's a fun gedankenexperiment: what would be the likely outcome of a directive from 1600 Penn Avenue to invade and occupy Iran? Even if it comes wrapped together with a "Get out of Iraq free" card?

Dave, you haven't been following the declassified 25-year secret files on the Falklands, have you?

It turns out that Thatcher sent her foreign secretary to the Falklands in 1979/80 to try to convince the islanders that they really wanted to become Argentinian citizens, while conducting secret negotiations with the Junta to sell the islands. Then the islanders said "bugger off, we're British". The removal of the South Atlantic fisheries patrol ship had already been scheduled, and the Argentinian Junta interpreted the sudden about-face in Whitehall as a treacherous U-turn on what they'd believed was a done deal, the purchase of the Falklands by the Argentinian government.

It's a lot fishier than it looked at the time ...

At last... Minelli's Lust for Life, with Kirk Douglas as van Gogh, is now out on DVD.

Fishier how, Charles? That Thatcher and the then British government were prepared to give the Falklands away is hardly surprising. They cost actual money, after all, which went against their religion.

And of course the vile Galtieri regime interpreted actually taking the islanders' wishes into account as nonsense and treachery. Of course the generals could never have believed that a government could actually be motivated by principle - though they were half-right, in this case. The British cabinet was no doubt perfectly prepared to act without any principles at all, but their little exercise in realpolitik was trumped by a backbench that actually enforced that most tired and dated of shibboleths, the will of the people. Thatcher and her cabinet became uneasily aware that if they sold the Falklanders out, they would most likely not survive the next sitting of an outraged House of Commons. The generals in Buenos Aires of course saw this as division and weakness. It was not the first time that tyrants have made that mistake about the British. Fatally, in this case, and a damn good thing, too.

Larry Brennan,

Thank you. That made my co-worker and I simultaneously go, "wow."

Made my day.

civ4, hm, will have to ponder whether to go down that path, for once you start, forever it will hold you. The thing about Civ3 is that I finally got to the point of understanding enough of the game that I could start and finish a game in one evening. New game with new rules means longer games until I figure out the shortcuts, the important things to develop, and whatnot. to quote, the great philosopher, winnie the poo, "Oh, bother."

aerogel: Hm, at a hundred bucks a pop for a chunk that fits in the palm of your hand, its still works out to be just a tad too expensive to reinsulate my house with the stuff. I also noticed that the stuff is fairly transluscent. Wonder if Pella Windows will come out with a version of windows that uses Aerogel instead of glass in a decade or two. It might be neat to get a chunk of it and use it as a soldering iron stand, if I still soldered anything anymore.

I wonder when this company will be selling monomolecular nanotube rope in chunks of a few feet or more. I'm saving up to build my own space elevator you know.

I have so far been immune to the lure of Civ [well, Civ 2 and 3].

I think it's because I played Master of Magic first and, if I can't drop Doom Bolts on people, it loses a lot of the thrill.

Sandy, it is a bit fun to play with the Civ Map Editor, which comes with Civ. You can't throw Doom Bolts, but you can turn mountains into oceans, oceans into mountains, green fields into deserts, and prairies into tundra, among other things. I wish you could do that sort of thing during normal game play. When the bad guys start approaching your army, turn the sea into land so you can evacuate, then when the enemy pursues, turn the land back into sea and drown them all.

I suppose it would be all well and good until the computer player did that to me, at which point, it just wouldn't be cool.

Greg: This could be the basis for a Civ scenario: Civilization -- Exodus.

Master of Magic was overall a mediocre game, but the tactical module was wonderfully spiffy. Very much like a tiny on-screen miniatures game.

Instead of (as in Civ) smacking units one after the other into an enemy stack, all the units in the battle appeared on the tactical map and could be moved around, retreated, and so on. You could have your cavaly and ground troops advance while supported by archers. Add magic and monsters and things get really fun!

John: Aerogel is tempting, but pricey. I've occasionally thought of something to do with it, but nothing practical comes to mind right now. Hmm. I was amused to read that "Aerogel is composed of 99.8% air and is chemically similar to ordinary glass." I'd think it would be chemically similar to air. It's 1/3 air by weight, but that means only half the molecules are SiO2.

Hmm. I wonder how you suffuse it with another gas. (put it in a vacuum and see if it acts like Ivory soap?) I read somewhere that H2+Cl2 can be ignited by light. So if you suffuse an aerogel with these gases, then turn on the light, I wonder if it would explode or just burn on the periphery. Makes me long for my basement chem lab, but maybe I should just be glad I survived.

Supermagnets are also tempting, and I guess I could be careful about checking the friends and family for metal bits, but what if the UPS guy has a pacemaker? Sounds like I might not want to play with them at home.

Stefan: One of the Master of Orion games (2?) had a similar tactical mode. Loads of fun.

I'm not a big fan of Arlen Specter, but at least he's willing to say Gonzales is smoking Dutch Cleanser. I invite the resident poets to filk the phrase "Bon Ami que fumar" [*].

MOO is another game I had to give away, for fear of ruining my productivity.

No, not just fear; certainty.

But like a recovering junky, I still like talking about the stuff.

MOO 2 was wonderful. It had just about everything I would have imagined a space game needing. Except, after a while it got stale, particularly the endgame. There was a certain point where, if you played well, all your planets were lush green Gaia worlds with impregnable defenses. The only thing left to do was eliminate those extra-dimensional cliched baddies. After doing that a half dozen times, you noticed the shabbiness of the whole set-up. The artificiality of the subcreation. Disbelief could no longer be suspended.

Charlie Stross: We're in agreement - but recall that our attack on Iraq was sold (in part) as paying its own way.
(Wolfowitz explicitly made that claim, without really bothering to explain how we would derive the profits from Iraq's oil revenues.)

Note that some large fraction of the "$2trillion" cost estimate really has wound up flowing directly into the pockets of the Bush Junta: for example, note that the oil companies have posted record profits this year. Factors that are "costs" for the populace as a whole are seen as "benefits" by the criminals who have seized control of American state policy.

And the disaster in Iraq doesn't mean that similar imperial ventures won't continue to be used as excuses for future raids on the Treasury.

Has the whole Iraq mess trickled down to the David Weber school of space opera yet?

George Deutchs the Bush flunkey attempting to censor NASA scientists writes like an undergraduate because that's all he is; he never graduated. Or at least that's what one blogger claims--that doesn't say much for NASA's HR department though.

Greg: Civ 4 is shorter to play, even counting developing new strategies, because (as noted) the maps have far fewer squares for a given size of world. I played a standard world, with six opponents, to completion (built the starship) in under four hours, which included eliminating the two civs I was sharing my continent with. (War is still slow and expensive, but having gunpowder, tanks, battleships and bombers -- and, uh, the Maxim gun -- when they have archers helps a lot.)

Interesting new tactic: Seaborne and aerial bombardment of cities don't do any damage to the units inside, but they wear down the defensive bonuses of the city. It's much easier to take a place when its defenders aren't getting an 80% bonus.

A new feature is adjustable game lengths: units move the same, but you can speed up or slow down the rate at which stuff gets built and research is done. I haven't played with this; it seems like it's best for people who want to move armies around a lot. (All games still time out in 2040; it just takes variable numbers of turns to get there.)

He (Deutsch) was a political appointee, Lisa. HR may have had no choice in the mattter, but I agree that the whole system stinks royally.

One of the blogger's commentators suggests that the whole class of incompetent, resume-padding appointees be called "Brownies."

Don't know why I didn't notice this before:
In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.

Would anyone at NASA be greatly disappointed if Mr. Deutsch and a roll of duct tape went missing shortly before the next Delta V launch?

standard world, with six opponents, to completion in under four hours

Wow, that may be worth the upgrade then. I'll check it out.

speed up or slow down the rate at which stuff gets built and research is done

In Civ3, you can double all production rates. I don't think you can double research rates, but man, the production rate thing makes a huge difference. I've never been able to research a new technology in less than 4 turns, no matter how many scientists I have. There are a couple of tech threads that have a whole lot of nothing in between that makes 4-turns-per-stage really boring, but I haven't figured out how to get it to move any faster.

Stefan Jones: One of the blogger's commentators suggests that the whole class of incompetent, resume-padding appointees be called "Brownies."

Strictly speaking, the name for someone who's unqualified for their job, but who got their position simply due to political machinations is not "Brownie", it's "Bushie."

Yes, but we need a name for incompetents appointed by the incompetent.

Bob: there were probably some competent Bushies. Besides, "brownie" is such an obvious line, as in "Brownie, you're doing a great job!"

Dave L: could the parlous state of Zimbabwe have to do with the civil ~war that erupted after the British departure? I wonder who was meddling in that....

"George Deutchs the Bush flunkey attempting to censor NASA scientists writes like an undergraduate because that's all he is;"

well, I never graduated.

The usual suspects, no doubt, Greg, though there certainly wasn't much in the way of direct arms, except for the Chinese, and that amounted to very little. The culprit for the enormity of turning a major food exporter and one of Africa's best-developed and most prosperous territories into a horror story of starvation, despair and ruin is the tyrannical, corrupt and murderous Mugabe regime, a cabal of thugs and gangsters whose aim from first to last was to enrich themselves while impoverishing an entire people.

Damn, that was quick: Deutsch has been shown the door. Granted, he was just a cog in a much larger disinformation machine, but it's a start.

Bryan

Do you censor the research summaries and reports of Nasa scientists?

Do you write like a sophmore in a job that requires textual proficiency?

The issue is not that Deutsch didn't graduate; the issue is that he's incompentent, and lacks both the skills and the credentials that one would expect Deutsch to have. It's quite possible to be a top notch writer without graduating from college, or high school--but in such cases the incumbent makes up for any seeming inadequecies by having ability. Deutsch's writing skills are truly sophmoric, and his reasoning abilities, as demonstrated by his published work, exceedingly limited.

Deutsch is not only an ignoramus, he's an uncredentialed incompentent ignoramus with an agenda.

Thank you, Andrew. You made my day.

So, what's next for the young commissar? My money is on a cushy job for The Discovery Institute*. After all, he has valuable government experience.

* The well-funded creationist^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Intelligent Design think tank whose plans to remake our culture are detailed in "The Wedge Strategy." (google it.)

And there was absolutely no way that anyone with any understanding of normal English usage could ever have taken the way the earlier post was phrased as an implied slight at the limited intellectual capacity of people who never graduated.

Thanks Andrew. That's one less lying Brownie to worry about.

Stefan - I'm continually astounded that the Discovery Institute is here in the fair Emerald City. I could understand if they were in Richland, given all the stray radiation...

bryan - it's not the absence of the degree that counts, it's the willful misrepresentation that counts. FWIW, I was 16 when I graduated from HS, and 32 when I got my Bachelors (mostly because I wanted an MBA, which I got two years later. The degrees mostly only count if you want them)

I don't believe I've seen it mentioned here, but Deutsch is in simple fact an Aggie. From his performance so far, he might be the prototypical Aggie. 'nuf said?

The blog of Nick Anthis, the guy who exposed Deutsch:

http://scientificactivist.blogspot.com/2006/02/breaking-news-george-deutsch-did-not.html

Thank you, Nick.

Aerogel pops up in unexpected places. I present for your edification: "super-insulating shoe insert uses advanced aspen aerogel nano-pore material to combat extreme hot and cold temperatures" ...
This turned up as I was looking for other things entirely at one very well-known online commercial site, you may find it elsewhere. It might be one route to playing with the substance. OTOH, there's also an aerogel hair mousse, so perhaps definitions differ.

That google sets thing is decidedly weird.

Re the Falklands--this goes back to the question of competency, in part. Thatcher's mistake was to start negotiating with the junta before they'd sold the idea to the Falklanders.

Assuming, of course, that they wanted to sell the islands, rather than wanting a war.

Apropos of knitting (crochet, actually, but I couldn't resist -- and they get it wrong in the title), the March issue of Discover mag has an illustrated article on mathematician Daina Taimina's representations of hyperbolic space in yarn. I haven't checked the website, but here in the US the issue itself should be readily available. I could have done without some of the spooky lighting, and the black background for the text, but the thing's still interesting.

One of the blogger's commentators suggests that the whole class of incompetent, resume-padding appointees be called "Brownies."

Why insult a perfectly good branch of the Girl Scouts by using their name that way? Close observation suggests that Michael Brown wouldn't know the Girl Scout Promise if it came up and bit him on the ass.

The significance of Deutsch's appointment/lying/firing isn't that he was a crony. It is that Bush appointees are so poorly scrutinized.

If they don't check to see if basic information is true, then how do we know that Al Queda isn't already on the payroll?

I am quite serious. How do we know that assorted bad guys (and allies) don't already have lots of people working in our government? How would we tell?

You don't suppose that Bin Laden is actually, say, working for the U.S. Forest service somewhere in the Rockies, do you?

nobody: You don't suppose that Bin Laden is actually, say, working for the U.S. Forest service somewhere in the Rockies, do you?

Well, somebody's got to keep an eye on the Unabomber's cabin.

Debra - Well, I'm thinking more the malicious, imp-like brownie, not the adorable, cookie-pushing brownie. (Then again, considering the impact of the latter on my diet...)

Nah... Bin Forgotten is working for the Dept of Miscellaneous Affairs.

Eep! Now I can read the Blogspotters, but Kathryncramer.com has gone 404......

Don't trust any brownie, especially if it looks like Dakota Fanning.

All wars go back to a question of competency, I suppose: competency in assessing the likely reactions and resources of a given group of people. Thatcher misjudged the Falklanders, not only the latter's obduracy and refusal to countenance their own betrayal, but their ability to appeal over her head to her own party and, I believe, to the British people themselves, whom she also misjudged. That was a culpable failure of judgement, never mind the smiling conscienceless perfidy of contemplating the act at all.

Nevertheless it was the generals in Buenos Aires whose misjudgement of the British was even more disastrous - for them. Here was the true incompetency, and the immediate cause of the war. They judged that the British would not or could not fight. They were wrong.

David Goldfarb... Recognized a young Angela Bassett in one episode of The Flash? And the actor who played that really slimy TV anchor in a few episodes?

Well, I have to correct myself this morning. Mr. Deutsch is a failed Aggie - he did not actually manage to graduate from Texas A & M.

going to take advantage of the open thread to vent. Chirac is a knucklehead and a coward. Rather than call for the intolerant to be more tolerant and for the violent to be less violent, he blames free speech. Nice job, moron.

An open thread-y random thought. Being adopted, I have had issues with the term "natural parents". What do you call the folks who raise you then; "artificial parents"? It just occured to me that in Girl Genius, Agatha's folks, Adam and Lilith Clay (heh heh - just caught the name joke too), really were artificial parents. Oh, the Foglios must have had fun with that. I'm a little slow on the uptake sometimes.