And nou for aught ful otherwyse...

Oh dear, the programming language wars have spread to ML...

the programming language wars have spread to ML

Damn right!

Perle, pleasaunte to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere,
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.

Was there not, perhaps, a Pythonist of the hill, or Monte?

Aye, Fragano, he was a mountebank.

And speaking of Apollo... And of flying Pythonists... Why did NASA can its DC-X program?

Serge:
I doubt not because of snakes on planes, except they were of the two-legged species.

Politics, eh, PJ? The DC-X was years ago and yet I remember clearly the test ship going up, stopping there then moving sideways, and finally landing softly. I think there was one test flight that didn't go well, but you'd think they'd have fixed the problem then resumed work. At least, the engineers would have fixed the problem if they'd been allowed. Still, I'm not sure what political interests were opposed to the DC-X. Commercial ones? Who would that be? It's not like any private enterprise had been pouring enough funds into its own heavy-lifter program, in spite of Jerry Pournelle's wet dreams that one would if given the chance.

The DC-X program was halted by copyright concerns from DC and Marvel.

Ross Smith, #2: And of course ML is a programming language, too

oracular responses enigmatic, cryptic, abstruse, unclear, obscure, confusing, mystifying, baffling, puzzling, perplexing, mysterious, arcane; ambiguous, equivocal, Delphic. antonym clear, unambiguous.

James, your explanation makes more sense than a successful technology getting ditched because of a political fight.

I just went to World O' Crap and it looks like the War Over Xmas has already started. Well, the conflict isn't going to stop this here atheist from putting up his Xmas tree tonight. No Nativity Scene though. Thta'd be pushing it. Besides, our new puppy might run away with one of the Three Wise Men.

I hadn't seen any movies in months; I determined to catch up this weekend. I ended up going to two just yesterday:

Flag of Our Fathers was a wonderfully well done and wrenching WWII story. The action alternates between the battle of Iwo Jima and the travails of three servicemen -- the survivors of the group who raised the flag on Mount Surabachi -- touting War Bonds on the home front.

This is not a gung-ho flag-waving John Wayne style WWII movie. It is a bleak and moving meditation on heroism, depicting the horrors of battle (NOT . . . FOR . . . KIDS, NO, NO, NO, DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!) and what it does to the men who do the fighting. It slows down a bit toward the end, when it switches to the present day, and the son of one of the flag-raisers starts narrating. Still, two thumbs up, plus a third for director Clint Eastwood.

Babel is the third film by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Like Amores Perros and 21 Grams it presents the stories of several people from widely varying walks of life. In this case:

* A deaf-mute Tokyo teeny bopper.
* Two Moroccan farm boys.
* An American tourist couple.
* A Mexican nanny living in San Diego, trying to get to her son's wedding.

If you've see either of Iñárritu's earlier films, you know the rest of the formula: Something terrible happens, and people suffer and strive and screw up. Connection are made and the stories converge. You watch, utterly transfixed, cringing and hoping something goes right.

Not as utterly bleak and personal as 21 Grams (which was produced in English), not as cleverly constructed as Amores Perros, but a stunning piece of filmmaking. I probably owe the theater a few bucks for the rents my fingernails left in the armrests.

Stefan, there was a film made about Ira Hayes (an American Indian survivor of the flag-raising) in 1961. Called The Outsider, it starred Tony Curtis as Hayes. It was really dark (in all ways -- b/w film), although I saw it three straight nights, which may have had an impact on my memory.

One of my commenters tried to find it at NetFlix and was unsuccessful, but it might be available somewhere.

An admittedly dumb question here. Courtesy of my wife, who sold an astonishingly large portion of her Magic card collection to do so, I have an iPod. My problem is simple: Apple's earbuds fall out of my ears. I do have a lightweight pair of Koss folding headphones that I can use, but if I'm doing yardwork the foam gets sweaty. Are there any inexpensive earbuds that sound good yet don't fall out of the ears? I've tried the seperate speakers that have a hook for the ear but they hurt like hell. Any suggestions appreciated!

Tony Curtis as Ira Hayes?

He is depicted in "Flag of our Fathers", and to judge from the real-life photos of the three shown in the closing credits they didn't do a bad job of casting.

Abi #5: Yette was hee an clerke of Oxenford.

Serge, #6 & #8 -- IIRC, the DC-X program was not in fact a NASA program. It was funded by the Air Force, I think, and executed by private contractors. After those successful flights, which put egg on the faces of the people at NASA who'd said it couldn't be done, the equipment was transferred to NASA. Jerry Pournelle predicted at the time that the craft, renamed "Delta Clipper", would survive maybe one flight before NASA managed to destroy it. At the time I thought he was being awfully gloomy.

Sure enough, NASA decided to fit a new, exciting, highly experimental LITHIUM-alloy fuel tank. Surprise -- that tank caught fire during the next flight. The whole craft was destroyed. And of course, there was no budget to build another. Everything was reserved for high-budget shuttle follow-ons from the usual suspects, or Space Station Ed. Certainly not for an embarrassing not-invented-here project.

NASA is not always, or even frequently, the good guys. The evidence of that punches me in the gut every time.

Stefan, I knew a lot less about films than I do now, but Curtis played that role very well indeed. I still remember the last scene of Hayes dead in a gutter.

I really wish I could remember the audience reaction; I saw it at a drive-in in Bagdad Az, which isn't far from a few reservations.

I wasn't doubting Curtis's acting chops, just the "white actor playing an indian" phenomena.

I'll have to look around for the film.

And Johnny Cash recorded a haunting song about Ira Hayes which we sang at home. It had Johnny Cah's usual elephantine rhythm and galumphing lyrics, but that's cool sometimes.

Let me ask my own stupid question:

A number of websites I go to (less than 10%) I can't read because the left inch or so of content is off my screen. I'm sure this is a simple matter to take care of but I don't even know what to call the problem to look it up. Can someone help me out here?

Thanks.

IMDB has a listing for The Outsider:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055270/

But there's no DVD or even a current VHS! Bummer.

Bruce: I had the same problem with the iPod earbuds - supposed to fit everyone but don't me. Some of the cheap Sony earbuds from the local drugstore worked fine for me and sounded OK; at around $15 IIRC they're virtually disposable. The slightly triangular and thicker shape made them stay in my ears much better. At some point I'm thinking of trading up to the more expensive in-canal type earbuds.

It had Johnny Cah's usual elephantine rhythm and galumphing lyrics, but that's cool sometimes.

His last album contains a cover of "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails which gives me goosebumps.

The term's "NIH" for "Not Invented Here."

It's done all the time by third raters and incompetents...

Greg, that song does that to me, too. Have you seen the video? Juan found it and showed it to me.

Serge, speaking of the Three Wise Men, I am reminded of the offspring of a friend of mine who said he thought it was the Three Wise Monkeys, wasn't it? Since then, I have contemplated acquiring a creche, just to put the Three Wise Monkeys in it.

Minor nit: "American IV: The Man Comes Around" isn't quite the last Johnny Cash album.

I still haven't heard "American V" yet, but I will, on the strength of IV, which was full of sadness and beauty.

* * *

I'm about to take the dog out for a walk in a rain storm with "hurricaine strength" winds. Queah weathah we're havin', eyup.

ML isn't just a programming language, it's one that has its own mini language war. There's a split between its two main dialects, SML and OCaml.

Bruce & Clifton, do the earbuds fall out because they're too big or too small? I don't have an iPod, but sometimes need to use earbuds with my cell phone and the buds are too big. I ended up getting a headset, since I'm usually home when I'm on the phone that long, anyway, but I wouldn't mind earbuds that fit.

The DC-X program was halted by copyright concerns from DC and Marvel.

Thereby allowing Lockheed Martin and Disney to proceed with the Mickey Mouse X-33 program....

Victor S. -- not quite right. DC-X was a project of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, SDIO. (The SDIO division that funded it was run by then-COL Pete Worden, who is now director of NASA Ames. The actual program manager was an Air Force major, Jess Sponable, and one of the "pilots" was filker Mitchell Burnside-Clapp. I was at the first public flight test, and drove back from the test range to Las Cruces with Pete Worden, pitching a new program to him. My boss was driving, and kept turning around to join the back-seat discussion -- nearly ran us off the road several times.)

DC-X was damaged by an in-flight fire on its last flight. It autolanded successfully despite having a gaping hole blown in its side, but needed substantial repairs. At that point it was under heavy budgetary and political attack -- Clinton was in office, SDIO was being cut back, and DoD was raiding anything space-related for funds to keep their main new-launch-vehicle program (NLS) alive. The net result was that NASA got named the sole national agency for reusable launch vehicle development. DC-X was transferred to NASA, rebuilt as the DC-XA, and made a few more flights, but on its last flight the ground crew forgot to reconnect a hose in the landing gear. It flew, set down, and one landing leg didn't extend, so as soon as the engines shut off it fell over, rupturing tanks and triggering an explosion that destroyed it.

So it was killed by funding problems, national politics, and plain old human error, not NASA technology choices. DoD might have done a better job of running the program, and the one that followed it(NASA did pick the high-tech/high-risk option for X-33, and it failed badly). But it's equally possible DoD would have killed the program completely after the first fire, had NASA not taken it over.

I flick one or both of my earbud earphones in & out again fairly frequently as the environment demands. This means I keep the cords looped up over the top of my ears from the back, so that they'll safely dangle down at the front when removed from the canal. Would this be of any help to your earbud problems?

Stefan: interesting. I saw the trailer for Flags of our Fathers over the weekend and its hand-on-heart screeching about HEROISM and so on actually made me embarrassed to the point of nausea. "The Last King of Scotland", on the other hand, should be a classic...

Something which made me smile this morning. I was looking at pictures of trucks by way of Google Image Search with my two-year-old when I came across this "404 not found" message:

Page does not exist

You have followed a link to a page that appears, unfortunately, to have been misplaced.

In the words of John M. Ford, "We're not lost. We're locationally challenged."

Victor @ #19 and Jordin Kare @ #32... My thanks to both of you about what happened to the DC-X. What a bummer.

elise @ #28... A creche with the Three Wise Monkeys? That sounds like something cross-cultural, maybe Chinese-American with maybe Three Monkey Kings. That also reminds me of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoon that has the Three Stooges meet the Three Wise Men...

"Three wise men, eh? More like Three Wise Guys."

Jordin -- thanks for setting the story straight. And for offering it as a course correction, rather than triggering my auto-destruct...

Any chance you'll be at Boskone next February?

Oh no...

Here's an excerpt from today's column by Jon Carroll who was in New York City last week:

But there was something not quite right about the scene. The fire damage was just wrong somehow, and the cars were curiously intact except for their fenders. There was an official-looking person standing nearby, so I asked him the question one so often asks in Manhattan: traffic accident or art piece?

"Oh no, it's a Will Smith movie. They were shooting it all last night. Explosions and fireballs and everything. See, there's this killer virus on the loose that turns everybody into zombies, except Will Smith doesn't get it, so he has to fight the zombies all by himself. I think the movie is called 'I Am Legend.' "

I know where I'm NOT going to be when that movie opens.

Re: the particle on management consulting. A great book with the same thesis is the wonderfully-named Consulting Demons, by Lewis Pinault.

Serge, #37: Venerable Ancestors and the Golden Buddha protect us, three Sun Wukongs? Given what a single one was capable of... well.

Will Smith in "I Am Legend"? Good grief. He's on some kind of one-man mission to smear monkey faeces all over the entire corpus of classic sf, isn't he?

(Next: Will Smith IS Hari Seldon in "FOUNDATION"! With The Rock as Salvor Hardin!)

"It is only to the wise that Apollo speaks with a double tongue."

Mary Renault.

"Oh no, it's a Will Smith movie. They were shooting it all last night. Explosions and fireballs and everything. See, there's this killer virus on the loose that turns everybody into zombies, except Will Smith doesn't get it, so he has to fight the zombies all by himself. I think the movie is called 'I Am Legend.' "

Sounds more like a remake of The Omega Man.

At least, The Omega Man had Anthony Zerbe as the leader of the evil mutants. And some footage from Woodstock...

ajay... The Rock as Hari Seldon.

May I be the first of many to point out that Omega Man is I Am Legend with a title change and the usual Hollywoodization.

About Johnny Cash's latest albums... His recording of "Hurt" got some serious airplay, in Chicago at least, and not on some county station. The alternative rock station Q101 played the song in regular rotation. I guess at first people were amused by the novelty of hearing an old man like Johnny Cash singing a Nine Inch Nails song, but after the novelty wore off, people actually found they liked the performance for itself. In fact, since his latest album came out, Q101 has been regularly playing a new song from it that Johnny Cash wrote himself, "God's Gonna Cut You Down."

I guess there was something about him that never got old. He's still a hit with the kids.

cd... You're right, three Monkey Kings would be a bit much.

Jon... I think that James's point is that the Will Smith version will have to do more with the Seventies movie than with the Matheson book. Meanwhile, there was an Italian adaptation done in the early Sixties with Vincent Price. If I remember correctly, that was a fairly faithful version, in tone and in plot.

Serge- no, I think he's better suited to delivering one-liners like "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from kicking ass" and "Violence is the only resort of the competent".

#23 Jeffrey--

I really like the Koss "Plug" headphones. They use earplug foam to surround the speaker tube, and both fit well, block outside sound, and stay in well. I also find them very comfortable.

Maybe, ajay, but I liked the way the Rock used his lower jaw to crush fire ants in The Scorpion King.

Joe, that "God's gonna cut you down" song is titled "Run On For a Long Time," and it's a traditional spiritual. There is a really, really rocking version of it made a few years ago by The Blind Boys of Alabama (on the "Spirit of the Century" album). And today we have Johnny's posthumously-released version, and I heard on the radio a version by Moby. Great song.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the Torchwood people in Cardiff are afflicted with some sort of PTSD. It's established in the first episode that it's set after the end of the most recent Doctor Who season, and episode 4 reiterates that.

The Torchwood organisation must be desperate for staff.

rm,

You are right that the song is a traditional. I was wrong there. But, on the album the song is titled, "God's Gonna Cut You Down."

Great song whatever it's called.

Jim: Reginald Scot, at a guess?

Delta Clipper: A sad loss. That video footage of the test flight was so beautiful, and the project so promising.

#55: Dave Bell:I'm coming to the conclusion that the Torchwood people in Cardiff are afflicted with some sort of PTSD.

*smites forehead* Of course. That makes so much sense. I do have to wonder if the rest of the world would really be in such deep and pervasive denial about what happened though.

On Salon today:

Lieberman, who has said he will caucus with the Democratic Party despite having lost Connecticut's Democratic senatorial primary to Ned Lamont, not to mention the Democratic vote in the midterm election, wouldn't commit unequivocally to his party: "I'm not ruling it out," he said, "but I hope I don't get to that point."

What a bum he is. I think Susan needs to pay him a visit.

A heads-up for Jim: there's some Pyramid-Scheme advertising hitting websites, with a very prominent use of the Tesco branding, a major UK supermarket. A whois on shopping#spree#on#us.co.uk (delete the hashes, I'm trying to avoid creating a target for Google) returns an address which he should recognise from Jamuary this year. and a literary agency from New York in Nevada.

There's a lot of stuff uses the mailing address, and some of it might even be honest. Anyway, I doubt this outfit's use of Tesco trademarks is authorised, and I've already sent off an email to Tesco.

Maybe aggressive trademark lawyers have some uses.

Jim: Reginald Scot, at a guess?

Indeed, from The Discoverie of Witchcraft.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post has a link to an article that might be of some interest:

...Bush's head suffered about $25,000 in damages...

Before you rejoice, here's the rest of the sentence:

...when a Madame Tussaud's visitor attacked it the day before last week's elections...

Joe J @ 48:

My stepmother teaches high school art, and says that Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra are the only artists all of her students can agree on.

Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra?

I can see a connection. Partly, I think it's the concept of a song's words being important; being more than just musical sounds.

Of course, that's partly the music Sinatra started out with, and he kept going with those songs. And both of them were around long enough that they weren't just a question of fashion. They became part of the landscape against which other singers were strutting their stuff.

And maybe another part of it was that they sang stuff that we could get away with singing. They could sing them right, but the songs didn't come out of our mouths sounding like a 12-bar train-wreck.

Heck, that goes wider than them. I'm trying to rememmber the last time I heard a pop record that sounded like it could be played by four ordinary guys with guitars and a drumkit.

No, music isn't easy, but so much of the modern stuff is logistically difficult.

Jim: It was cousenage and bewraied that suggested it to me. Of course, there's also the tone and the subject matter. Reginald Scot wouldn't recognize liturgical drama if it bit him.

Jo #43: I remember that line as "It was only to greatly honored ones that Two-Tongued Apollo spoke with so clear a voice."

The context was Philip of Macedon getting the prophecy "Wreathed is the bull for the altar; and the slayer, too, is ready." In Fire from Heaven he takes this as a good omen for his planned invasion of Persia, but as it happens he's assassinated that same day.

Now, maybe she used the line as you quote it in another book...if so, I'd guess it was The Mask of Apollo.

Dave #55: What does it mean to be set "after" a season of time-travel stories? I'm sure there may be key events, but...'after' must have a somewhat modified meaning, surely?

I really loathe Christmas decorations that go up before Thanksgiving (or, for that matter, before Halloween).

Different holidays, different decorations. Please.

What's the word about the new James Bond movie? I was kind of curious about it until I came across an interview with the actor where he used a very rude word about women, a word that rhymes with 'runt'.

Xopher; the finale for last season's Doctor Who was set in present-time London, and it involed some serious changes and trauma in the world, so actually, it does make sense to say it happened "after" that.

Even so, the current Doctor Who hasn't been mucking with chronology for the stories happening in modern-day London and/or Cardiff. If Rose went back home to visit mom, it was always some days or months after the last time - this is even a plot point in Early Eccleston, where it turns out she's been missing for a year (Or was it half a year? Irrelevant) between visits -- and it never occurs to her or the Doctor to go "Whoops, let's just pop back in a few weeks ago, how's that?" (ARGH!)

jc: I think it would show more guts on the part of the writers and the tv series to have everyone know and accept more of what's going on, and have people on the street willing to deal with it; and I suspect more of them have an inkling than we've been shown. But... it would make for a harder job for the writers, since suddenly you're talking imaginary world backdrop, not real world. Not that this should stop them, but I feel sympathetic to their decision, as with so many other shows, to have "superpowers/magic/aliens in the modern day" be a *secret*. (Even Buffy only ahd her classmates fully "in on it" right before she graduated high school and got a new crop of strangers and distant acquaintances as backdrop.)

Annoyed, but sympathetic.

At work, I handle environmental cleanups. Teresa's "Arsenic and old cemeteries" particle made me recall a bureaucratic tidbit that I have always found amusing. Embalming chemicals, be they arsenic or formaldehyde, are applied in quantities large enough that the embalmed corpses, if analyzed, would probably qualify as hazardous waste. Years ago, I ran across an actual EPA regulatory interpretation on this specific issue. EPA declared that in this circumstance the chemicals have not been disposed of; they have been "used in the manner intended". They therefore cannot be classified as wastes. And if they're not wastes to begin with, then they can't be hazardous wastes, regardless of how much arsenic Great-Grandpa has in him.

Dunno if anyone else has seen this yet or not (or if anyone thought it worth commenting upon) - the whackjob who sent Keith Olbermann that fake anthrax last month is, in addition to being a Free Republic mouthbreather, also a sci-fi contrarian...

I just followed the link, protected static.

"...steroid mutated superbabes that can punch the lights out of men, but never get punched back in return?.."

I'd agree that the guy definitely has issues.

Jeffrey Smith @ 23: A number of websites I go to (less than 10%) I can't read because the left inch or so of content is off my screen.

Probably what is happening is that your screen set to be X pixels wide, while the web designer has directed the web page to be X+Y pixels wide. If you tell us what resolution your screen is and what web pages this is happening on, we can confirm.

I believe most web browsers will show a scroll bar at the bottom of the page for you to see the rest. Opera, my browser of choice, will rearrange the contents of the page so you don't have to scroll with a click of a button or the press of Ctrl+F11.

Serge: yeah, that line was particularly weird... And this chunk:
...the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O' Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism.

What informed their 'puerile baggage'? Let's see... the first two were decorated WW2 vets who pushed back against McCarthyism and other anti-democratic strains in American culture. Oh, yeah - in Freeperspeak, that's anti-Americanism. Silly me.

The guys over at Sadly, No! are having a field day with him, and are keeping a pretty good list of all his various incarnations.

Yep, Lenora, that's about it. Maybe not exactly here-and-now, but near-future. I think the London and Cardiff stories in DW have to be a few years from now, because there's a different Prime Minister, but one story was set at the time of the planned London Olympics, and Torchwood wasn't secret then. I think that sets a limit.

While there's a couple of bits of evidence in Torchwood which are obvious if explained, what is clearly said in the first episode is that it is taking place not long after the last episode of the first David Tennant season. There's a more explicit connection later. That's the local continuity, as seen by people who aren't time travellers.

As for why the Doctor and Rose couldn't have gone back a few months so that Rose wasn't missing, it isn't hard to see, from the Father's Day episode, that bad things can happen if somebody messes with their own history.

Serge, speaking of the Three Wise Men, I am reminded of the offspring of a friend of mine who said he thought it was the Three Wise Monkeys, wasn't it

We might have the Adoration of the Dinosaurs up again this year. No sodomy will be in evidence.

Sandy B... I was just thinking that it's been a long time since those two words had come up in one post.

About the Doctor and Rose... I don't know why it took me so long to notice, but my wife's baby sister looks a lot like Rose. Come to think of it, her hubby does remind me of Christopher Eccleston. Could it be...? Naaah.

Salon.com quotes right-winger Mark Steyn...

"...I get the feeling here without wishing to be any more homophobic than I'm normally accused of, but in my part of [the] country, almost every lesbian you run across tends to be someone who's just been in a couple of really bad marriages and despaired of men, and I notice that in Europe, a sort of similar trend is that women who have been in a couple of bad marriages with western men basically embrace Islam as a way of, you know -- and again, whether it's your sort of boorish English soccer lout or your kind of sweet, you know, new male that, 'I'll do the ironing, darling' type, that it does seem that the women up here in the north country embrace lesbianism just as a kind of general weariness with the available range of males. So I noticed that there's something similar with the women in Islam in France and Belgium..."

Serge @ 79:
'Clueless' comes to mind as a desciption for Steyn.

So, last night I downloaded and listened to an episode of Exploring Tomorrow called "Mimic." (Exploring Tomorrow was a short-lived radio series, similar to Galaxy magazine's X Minus One, except that it took its stories from Astounding, and each episode was hosted by John W. Campbell.)

"Mimic" is the story of an astronaut who returns from a deep-space mission after five years. His sister begins to suspect something is wrong, and it's revealed that her brother has been assimilated by a shape-shifting alien, and the alien is still hungry. Pretty standard, but plenty entertaining. Anyway, John W. Campbell as host interrupts the story from time with some inane, rambling analogy about "what would happen if you let a pair of tigers loose on an island full of sheep," and concludes, "the tigers would eat all the sheep, until there was nothing left to eat but tigers, and therefore, the monster in tonight's story is impossible, and these events are inconceivable in the real world." (Paraphrase.)

I thought, "Waitaminute -- did he just dismiss the very story he's presenting? What's that about?" Then later it occurred to me that "Mimic" uses the same plot device as Campbell's "Who Goes There?"!

Could some of you who know more about Campbell than me (I'm guessing that's approximately all of you) speculate as to what was going on in Campbell's brain?

Clueless and a few other words that'd trigger the disemvoweller, P J...

Serge: The only steroid mutated superbabes I can think of are the Draka, and I'd think the idiot in question would admire them.

Not likely, Fragano. They'd laugh at the guy if he asked them for a date. Which is probably what his whole psyche is built upon. "Chicks don't dig me, but I'll show them, hahahahahahah!!!"

Protected Static, Serge, that story makes me sorry that it's not actually possible to drum someone out of science fiction. I'm just grateful that he hangs out at Free Republic. Let them bear the disgrace.

The results I'm getting from the Googlism particle aren't what I'd expect. They pull their information from Google, right? When I tried my mom's name, it returned nothing ("Sorry, Googlism doesn't know enough about" her). Going to Google proper and searching on her name, I get 507 hits, including multiple reviews of her book. When I tried my dad's name, again, nothing — Google comes up with 733, including the Wikipedia article on him. (Vanity-googling my parents is more interesting than doing myself, I find.)

Re: #37, #41 & #49, and multiple Sun Wu-Kongs:

IIRC, one of the many tricks that the Great Sage Equal to Heaven learned was the art of turning his hairs into copies of himself (who would, I think, merge back with him after doing whatever needed to be done).

I can see him doing it just so as to mess with people.

A three Monkey-Kings sculpture would no doubt have the "See-No-Evil" one peeking, the "Hear-No-Evil" cupping one ear so as to hear *better*, and the "Speak-No-Evil" one would be sticking out his tongue through his fingers.

Owlmirror... That sounds like a hilarious sculpture of the Monkey King. I'd probably buy it if I saw it at a con's artshow, provided it doesn't set our mortgage back a decade.

Yeah, Teresa, but unfortunately you know what it is that people will see as the weirdest part of his personality. Not that he is a Republican geek, but that he is a skiffy type.

Serge #68: I heard a review of Casino Royale on BBC Radio 4 tonight and the general feeling was, "Hurray! The Bond franchise has finally decided to take itself seriously!"

Sebastian Faulks said that he thought it was the best Bond film so far. Praise was heaped on the new actor chap, the script, the music, the character development, the plot -- basically everything.

Madeline Kelly said (#90):
I heard a review of Casino Royale on BBC Radio 4 tonight and the general feeling was, "Hurray! The Bond franchise has finally decided to take itself seriously!"

In fact, the BBC website now has a review of the new Bond film, and it is indeed quite positive. Another article quotes positive reviews from the Daily Mirror, the Daily Telegraph, and the Times.

Still, madeline, I'm really bugged by the actor's use of a very derogatory term toward women. As far as actors who played Bond are concerned, my favorite after Connery remains Timothy Dalton (but let's skip the movie that had Wayne Newton in it). I'm not sure what rank I'd give David Niven or Woody Allen in the Bond pantheon.

I've seen several local (DC-area) reviews saying that it's the new Bland film.

The news feed to my ISP had this up tonight:
Early Roman Shipwreck Carried Fish Sauce
By DANIEL WOOLLS (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
November 13, 2006 6:39 PM EST

MADRID, Spain - A shipwrecked first-century vessel carrying delicacies to the richest palates of the Roman Empire has proved a dazzling find, with nearly 2,000-year-old fish bones still nestling inside clay jars, archaeolgists said Monday. [snip]

1500 amphoras, formerly holding fish sauce (read garum), but now containing only fish bones, because the seals weren't hermetic. It's a 100-foot-long ship, in 80 feet of water. The archeologists are very happy.

OT, but this is too much fun. Drop over to Unfogged for the "Unsuggester" thread.

Or to find the exact opposite of your favorite book, go here:

http://www.librarything.com/unsuggester

For example, the exact opposite of "Atlas Shrugged" is Flann O'Brien's "The Poor Mouth".

But the exact opposite of "The Poor Mouth" is something by Terry Pratchett; Pratchett is the opposite of almost everything, because apparently his fans read no other books. Flann O'Brien is only #2, because his books are less popular than Pratchett's.

Lexica: Googlism (quite an old site, I remember playing with it years ago) looks only for the exact phrase match "X is ...".

Thus though I show up on a number of web pages, Googlism only sees a few references to me, mostly due to activity on tech mailing lists, where somebody said "Clifton Royston is such-and-such..."

(Even so, it does seem oddly limited in what it finds. Searching for the phrase "Clifton Royston is" manually on Google turns up a number more references.)

Alas, Blogspot appears to be out, went to check how Ms. Snark was doing and got:
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Internal Server Error

Error 500
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Checked other blogspot bookmarks, all same. Hope they're back soon, Ms. Snark is a high point in my day and I got whacked today with work. Insanity, thy name is gift marts....

Serge #84: Well, he seems to share some of their worldview. On the other hand, you're probably right.

the city waits to hear the urgent call
the leader's house is guarded all the night
the enemy's been spotted near the wall
a shepherd's said to have fainted at the sight
the army marched off yesterday to fight
we've had no report heard nothing at all
our god we're told will help defend the right
our soldiers will not die nor the city fall
farmers report the crops are touched by blight
the harvest this year will be very small
the summer birds have already taken flight
away from us even the vermin crawl
but we'll come through our city will survive
we are in spite of all fears still alive

Howard #81: I never met Campbell, but I've heard and read from people who had that he tended to have ... enthusiasms ... that depended on a lack of careful reasoning (Scientology, the Dean Drive, the Hieronymus machine, krebiozen(sp?), ...), and to have a habit of stating opinions as vigorously as possible. Such people aren't always aware of their own contradictions.

It's also possible that he'd had some time to think about the idea behind "Who Goes There?", which would hardly be the first highly-rated SF story to be massively implausible if you try to trace it back.

John Emerson, that Unsuggester toy is wonderful! It told me that the exact opposite of The Selfish Gene is Little house on the prairie. *glee*

Philosophical quibble: I don't think it's possible to be OT in an Open Thread.

Automated sorting quibble: Pratchett (likewise JK Rowling, likewise the Beatles when it comes to music) really messes up every "people who like this also like that" algorithm I've ever seen. Surely there is a computational way to correct for: this item is so vastly popular that everyone likes it, and therefore you can't use it to predict what other things someone might like?

I am having far too much fun with the Unsuggester. Apparently my favorite books aren't liked by people who are big into depressing modernist and classic works, computer programmers, knitters, and pastors. Given how many knitting, programming, and depressing modernist books I have, this is all the more amusing. (I don't have any depressing modernist books about programming knitting patterns, but it's only a matter of time.)

I got my MythTV box up and running yesterday; the first item I recorded was "Prime Suspect," which I'm watching right now. (While, in the background, a Michael PAlin travelogue is being sucked down to disk for later.)

It's curious how effortlessly and casually the cops bring surveillance photos into the equation. They do that on Law & Order now and then, but here the Eye seems quite pervasive.

Sandy B @76:
"We might have the Adoration of the Dinosaurs up again this year. No sodomy will be in evidence."

Ever since the Christmas episode of MISTER BEAN, I've felt that no Nativity is complete without a T. Rex and helicopters.

fade,

(I don't have any depressing modernist books about programming knitting patterns, but it's only a matter of time.)

ahahahaha. i wonder who will write the great american depressing modernist novel about programming knitting patterns.

individeweal,

Pratchett (likewise JK Rowling, likewise the Beatles when it comes to music) really messes up every "people who like this also like that" algorithm I've ever seen.

i would think everyone who likes terry pratchett likes douglas adams. i could be wrong, of course. people are funny.

Stefan @103, I think I read somewhere that Britain is the most officially watched population in the world in terms of number of cameras positioned around the country.

I ran into the Unsuggester when I was looking at my LibraryThing earlier today but hadn't checked it out. If you tell it "The Tao of Pooh" you get a zillion books about Christianity.

I don't understand Library Thing. For one thing, I'm way too lazy to catalog all my books. For another thing, what do we do with the catalogs? Find somebody who owns the other Valerie Freireich book -- and then what? Whine at them because they have it and you don't?

Lucy, I don't use it this way, but I've seen a lot of people who tag their books geographically. "Fiction, spare bedroom" or "Poli-sci, downstairs" come to mind.

The most useful thing about it to my mind is the ability (if you've got a cellphone with 'Net capability) to check your library while in a bookstore; it prevents you from buying duplicates.

Re #37 and #28, my take on the Three Kingly Monkeys came out a little different.

O Melchior, you brought me gifts of gold
To make a crown that you refuse to see:
You hide your eyes lest kingship make me bold,
Seduce me on the heights, corrupting me.
And Balthasar, who gave me frankincense,
Is deaf to my pronouncements. Are your fears
That I'd usurp my Father so intense
That cowering, you cover up your ears?
My Caspar, bringing myrrh, forshadows loss
And closes fast his mouth, unreconciled
To thoughts of death, the shadow of the cross:
A monstrous gift to bring a newborn child.
My kings, this all was planned, and you might trust
I'll do not what I choose, but what I must.

I find it surprising that I haven't seen any mention of the fact that Jack Williamson has passed away. He was published in nine decades (in the twenties and forth), and was a giant in the field. May he rest in peace.

Miriam, I, as a human, would make quite a lot of predictions about someone who likes Pratchett. But automated algorithms usually end up telling me that people who like Pratchett also like something ridiculous, like Dan Brown or Catherine Cookson or the Left Behind books. (Not that it's impossible to like books from very different genres, of course, but for less stellar authors the algorithms tend to come up with stuff that common sense agrees is related.)

Whether we humans are right or the dumb machine are right depends on your perspective. There are just so many people who have read at least one Pratchett novel and liked it, that asking "what sort of things does this group of people also like?" ends up being equivalent to asking "what sort of things are popular with the whole population being measured?"

Linkmeister said (#108):
I ran into the Unsuggester when I was looking at my LibraryThing earlier today but hadn't checked it out. If you tell it "The Tao of Pooh" you get a zillion books about Christianity.

You know, I just tried it with Foucault's Pendulum and got pretty much the same thing, including the same books by "John Piper" (although a vampire romance novel and something called Daughters of the Moon: Goddess of the Night showed up in the middle of this, looking a bit out of place).

(The Nativity: in a stable in Bethlehem, a baby lies in a manger. His mother, Mandy, is startled by the noise as three camels arrive outside.)
Mandy: Aaaagh! Who are you?
Wise Man 1: We are three wise men.
Mandy: What?
Wise Man 1: We are three wise men.
Mandy: Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o'clock in the morning? That doesn't sound very wise to me.
Wise Man 2: We are astrologers. We have come from the East.
Mandy: Is this some kind of joke?
Wise Man 3: We wish to praise the infant.
Wise Man 1: We must pay homage to him.
Mandy: Homage? You're drunk, it's disgusting! Out!
Wise Man 2: We were led by a star.
Mandy: Led by a bottle, more like. Get out!
Wise Man 3: We must see him. We have brought gifts.
Mandy: OUT!
Wise Man 1: Gold, frankincense, myrrh!
Mandy: Well, why didn't you say? He's over here..

Individ-ewe-al: I think the most important thing to note about the automatic recommendations for such books is that they are probably extremely useful in at least one sense: they are what they are because the majority of people who buy such books only buy other books that have been wildly popular. For people who are only interested in wildly popular books, these recommendations are therefore spot on.

The Helsinki Complaints Choir. (Via lsanderson's LJ)

Re: earbuds. I'm using a slightly upscale pair of Sonys that cost about 39.99. Their selling points are that they have a sort of floppy collar that softly hugs the inside of your ears, shutting out a lot of outside sound. They are the poor man's noise cancellers. They last a long time. I wouldn't have had to buy a second pair, but I somehow slammed the wire of the first pair in the peppermint tin I was keeping it in. I'm more careful now.

Apparently my favorite books aren't liked by people who are big into depressing modernist and classic works, computer programmers, knitters, and pastors.

THE PLAIN AND THE CROSS
by
Lucia D. Lammermoor

Bob Gunderson, minister of a small knitting village in Minnesota in the 1950s, finds himself facing two challenges: his parishioners are being driven into penury by competition from the new Hollerith Automated Knitting Machines, and he himself is suffering a crisis of faith. As winter comes, with the town's young men fighting in Korea, Gunderson faces a long, dark night...

"A powerful, disturbing work of knit-punk from the author of 'Purl Harbor'" - San Francisco Examiner

Lucy at #107: Part of LibraryThing's appeal is just your standard "Shiny!", but I'm starting to find it useful for checking whether I have a copy of a particular book *in this house* without having to find it first. Since a lot of my books are in storage, knowing I have a book is not the same thing as knowing it's readily accessible. It's also useful for checking bibliographic details without having to find the book when I'm discussing a book online. If I was reading more, I'd probably find the suggestions on other books to try useful.

I need to work out how to download it into my Palm, that I may go into BookBuyers and know whether that desirable out-of-print classic is something I already own. That's where it could be really useful.

But the reason I started it was because it was a very easy way to catalogue my books, which I wanted to do for insurance purposes. As I've found out, shipping companies are more inclined to cough up without arguing for damaged/destroyed books if you have a detailed list of what the books were and what their value was... That it is an off-site catalogue is even better.

It's been a whole week since the Election and the bloom isn't off the rose yet. I like that.

So: I'm definitely going to PhilCon, unless I get struck by a meteor or something. Thanks to Susan, I finally got them to admit that they DO have a room for me; thanks, Susan!

Anybody else going?

She's good, isn't she, Xopher?

Yes she is. Yes yes.

No kidding, Xopher. I still wonder how she managed to get the people in charge of LAcon's newsletter to put an item reminding me to check for messages at the darn board. Or words to that effect. I still have a copy of that newsletter issue.

This has become obsessive for me. Results at my URL. Did you know that the opposite of Dan Savage's "Skipping to Gomorrah" is Thomas Hardy's "Far from the Madding Crowd"?

You can see videos of all four Complaints Choirs, including the original (Birmingham) here.

Xopher,

I came across this article on cnn.com today and I thought of you:

Soldiers' widows sue for pagan symbols on headstones

The Star of David is OK, as are more than a dozen variations of the Christian cross. Even the atomic whirl used by atheists gets the thumbs-up from the federal government.

But a Wiccan symbol representing earth, air, fire, water and spirit isn't recognized by the federal government for veterans' grave markers.

The article goes on to say that there are "approximately 1,800 active-duty service members identify themselves as Wiccans, according to 2005 Defense Department statistics." It's more than reasonable that they deserve to have recognition of their beliefs on their headstones, but try explaining that to the christian right folks who equate anything pagan with evil.

I'm sure there's much more to this issue than I can understand, and I know that there are a few people around here of pagan faiths that might be able to comment on this. So, I thought I would post it here.

(I apologize Xopher if I have wrongly identified you as a Wiccan if you are not.)

Xopher, Serge:

Stop now.

It's all attributable to a glass of POJ every morning and a large collection of black footwear. Also, wearing funny things on my head.

[returning to her sulky my-state-is-full-of-idjits hole]

wearing funny things on my head

Like Princess Aura's tiara?

Susan... Did Joe really win because of the idiot faction of the Democratic Party? It was my understanding that he did because the Republicans voted en masse for him.

Now I want to go catalog all my books at LibraryThing just to confuse it.

I entered Pride and Prejudice -- one of my favorites -- and was told, basically, that I ought not program computers. I found this amusing, because my job last year (which I quite liked) consisted entirely of coding. In FORTRAN 77, no less.

Lucy @ 107:

I've been meaning to use Library Thing to catalogue my son's book collection (in what spare time?) - he was recently gifted his second Each, Peach, Pear, Plum and his third Goodnight, Moon.

I've been using it on my on collection as well, since I have a terrible memory for the names of authors I hated. I've wound up being seduced by the slick packaging and buying second helpings of crap more than once. I intend to be soley responsible for an upswing in the use of the "craptastic" tag.

Plus, as someone else said, shiny! As someone with fairly impressive aphasia that comes with tiredness, I really just love the name.

Incidentally, I suppose neither of those titles actually have the punctuation I've given them. But, dammit, I believe in the serial comma and the post-vocative comma. Please don't be too harsh.

Serge:

Lots of factors.

Whether the only idiots here were Dems is open to question.

Thanks for the link, Susan. I'm hoping we'll see your account of the whole thing one day.

Eric #70:

I was wondering whether old-style embalming might affect the classic Brit murder-mystery exhumation scene. It now occurs to me to wonder about current-day practices. Dibsies on doing a murder mystery where this matters, or, better yet, kills off all the exhumers.

Joe J #125: I am very much Wiccan, and I appreciate your letting me know this. Didn't Rumsfeld try to throw the Wiccans out of the services? I seem to remember something like that; he got swatted down, of course. The Army has (until recently) been one of the most tolerant employers as far as my religion goes; you can have 'Wiccan' on your dog tags, and they had my friend Judy write a section on Wicca for the Chaplain's Manual.

Susan #126: I'm now thinking about which of the silly-things-to-wear-on-one's-head I should bring to Philcon to photograph you in.

Caroline #129: If you enjoyed a job programming in Fortran 77, perhaps you shouldn't program computers...for the same reason an alcoholic shouldn't drink!