I wish I had quantum cats who could go from one side of the venetian blinds to the other without breaking them.

Any comments on Amazon's grab for printing PODs?

It's certainly something I was hoping wouldn't occur after I became aware of this last year when they sent a letter to Double Dragon Publishing. Now I see they're intent on forcing this on all the POD publishers.

i loved china mountain zhang! & it should be noted, that quote there is not "the voice of the author."

Strange thing. I can remember a time when I was completely disgusted by pictures of animals or little children with cutesy captions stuck on them. Lot of nerve, fancying that one was reading their mind and assigning words to their already eloquent physiognomies. So now I'm 50, and I chuckle over at least 10% of LOLcats. Must be creeping senescence.

I still laugh harder at the version Kurtzman did in MAD comics, starting off with kid pictures but soon switching to photos of Mickey Rooney and some prize fighter, giving them drooling baby talk captions. (The ancestor of the Python sketch where John Cleese's mum and her friend are treating him like an infant, although he is an accountant or some such, culminating in the memorable moment when Missus N explodes. "Don't be so sentimental, Mother. People explode every day.")(In an open thread, it's downright impossible to digress. Sign me up!)

I published China Mountain Zhang and I concur with miriam. But it's a lovely provocative quote anyway.

Today is Blog Against Torture Day, and in honour of that, I submit a translation of a poem by the Cuban poet Roberto Fernández Retamar. Here's the original:

El Otro

Por Roberto Fernández Retamar

Nosotros, los sobrevivientes,

¿A quiénes debemos la sobrevida?

¿Quién se murió por mí en la ergástula,

Quién recibió la bala mía,

La para mí, en su corazón?

¿Sobre qué muerto estoy yo vivo,

Sus huesos quedando en los míos,

Los ojos que le arrancaron, viendo

Por la mirada de mi cara;

y la mano que no es su mano,

que no es ya tampoco la mía,

escribiendo palabras rotas

donde él no está, en la sobrevida?

1 de enero de 1959

The Other (1 January 1959)

We the survivors,

to whom do we owe our survival?

Who died for me in the torture cell,

who got my bullet, the one meant for me,

right in his heart?

On whose corpse do I stand living,

his bones remaining in mine,

the eyes they plucked seeing

with the vision of my face;

and the hand that is not his,

and is also no longer mine,

writing broken words,

where he is not

surviving?

Fernández Retamar wrote these words to celebrate the triumph of the Cuban revolution, the collapse of the Batista dictatorship that had killed and tortured his friends in the rebel student movement of the 1950s. I find a certain irony in the words given what the government of a republic that for more than two centuries has stood, or claimed to stand for the principles of liberty and human dignity is doing on the poet's native island right now.

Speaking of McHugh, who's editing this year's Best Poetry anthology? I knew it was someone I had an interest in but can't remember now. Actually looking it up feels like cheating, whereas simply asking other people is less so. My life as crossword.

Re Best Poetry: Heather McHugh =/= Maureen McHugh. Oh, you knew that. Right, then.

I find the date on the Fernandez Retamar poem striking, since I was born a day later. 2 January 1959, by some accounts the day Castro entered Havana. Yes, I'm the age of the Cuban Revolution.

Age really does creep up on us. I remember the day I was gobsmacked to discover I was older than the newly-elected leader of the British Conservative Party. In this Presidential election, I may will wind up being older than the nominee of the Democratic Party. But all that pales next to the discovery that I'm older than every finalist for this year's Hugo Award for Best Novel. Good god, John Scalzi has barely left fetal development behind, no wonder all his author photographs look bald and lumpy. If you need me, I'll be gumming my medications in the sun room.

PNH #8 At the time that poem was written I was a toddler. By the time Scalzi was born I'd already crossed the Atlantic three times (twice by ship, once by plane) and had already passed my first public examination. Ye gods, I'm ancient.

Fragano @6: That's a beautiful and compelling poem.

The feelings evoked inside me when I read it remind me of Pavel Friedman's poem, written in the Prague Ghetto, before he was deported to Terezin (Theresienstadt), and then to Auschwitz.

"The Butterfly"

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing

against a white stone. . . .

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly 'way up high.

It went away I'm sure because it wished to

kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto.

But I have found what I love here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don't live in here,

in the ghetto.

Pavel Friedman 4.6.1942

(_I never saw another butterfly. Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944_ Edited by Hana Volavkova; revised and expanded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. New York: Schocken Books, Inc. 1993.)

New photos on making light and faces...

Avram Grumer

Jim Macdonald ( "Did I tell you of the time one EMT customer's head exploded?")

John M Ford (fellow fan of Jason King)

Paul A

Kip W (and his daughter)

Lance Weber (and his daughter)

Page One: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw

Page Two: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw?page=2

Page Three: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw?page=3

Yes, we're now starting Page Three. Unfortunately, Neil Willcox is all by himself right now.

Argh. The fellow fan of Jason King is Paul A, not Mike, although Mike may have been a fan too, but I don't know that and what's the use? I screwed up. Waugh!!!

Marx’s genius was in determining that social history was also governed by recognizable factors...

...but for you I'd make love to a crocodile.

Serge, you need to request a feature for LJ's gallery. Ask them to put a "next page" link at the bottom of the page as well as at the top. It's annoying to have to scroll back up to move forward to the following page.

Ginger #10: It's a lot better than some of his more propagandistic poems of the 60s ('With the same hands that caress you I am building a school').

That is a wonderfully evocative piece about the butterfly.

I'd love to work up to a good pun around schroedinger's cats and heisenbugs... but it's been much, much too long of a week for that degree of uncertainty.

@Dave, #2

Sorry, I would love to comment but I have no idea what you're talking about.

Although DD certainly looks..."interesting."

Yellow Fever is perhaps the best title for a novel about a kick-a$$ Asian heroine ever.

On an unrelated note, I am soon going to be in the Chicago area and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good used bookstore. The mustier the better.

Cheers!

Serge #12: 'Waugh'? Would that be Evelyn, Alec or Auberon?

Quantum Kitten originally appeared here, along with a number of other physics cats.

Fragano @ 15: Ugh..propaganda and poems just don't mix well. Just look at all the Soviet propaganda written during the phase of "Socialist Realism" (i.e., the award-winning book, _Cement_ -- or any of the poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky.) Better yet, don't look.

The Friedman poem has an alternate translation that refers to the "white chestnut candles", which I think is more poetical. For some reason that isn't the official translation of his poem.

Fragano @ 18... Nope. It's Lucy van Pelt's Waugh!!!

Linkmeister @ 14... I agree. Why they thought the next page didn't need to be displayed at the top and at the bottom, I know not. I've also been annoyed at their making it impossible to freeze the order in which we want things to appear on the page displaying all galleries. Now, if only I could figure out how to request new features from LiveJournal...

Nice to see the 'Making Faces' photos, but I think I'll stick to anonymity, as I've mentioned discussing bullies & such some time back, I'm still cautious after bad experiences. There's a bunch of Epacris images online, but few are mine, like these.

Does anyone else expect Niall McAuley to break into either a scientific dissertation on biology, ecology or geology, or something learned on Bronze Age lifestyles — though perhaps less learned-sounding, in a Tony Robinson style?

Fragano @18, or Steve & Mark, the Waugh twins? (Mark is also said to be called 'Afghanistan, the forgotten Waugh')

xeger @ 16:

Heisenbugs? These are bugs that you can either see or hear but never both at the same time?

Well, we all know Schroedinger's cat will catch them...maybe.

Allan Beatty, this?

see more crazy cat pics

There's also one where the kitten tried to jump and went 'through' the raising and lowering cord and got caught amidships (right where hips meet body) and someeone took a picture before releasing it.

Random Thought: You'd never be able to get a quantum kitty to move from the doorway. ("In or out, cat? In or out?" "Yes")

Ginger @27 ...

Wouldn't you expect a quantum kitty to simply walk through walls?

Ginger @27

And that differs from any other cat in a doorway how?

I suppose if they are all quantum cats, it may explain a lot.

Squee!

In addition to exhibiting quantum characteristics, I firmly believe qats and qittens can actually perceive quantum states. Just because you can't see what a qitty is batting at in the air, or when it seems to be chasing something unseen, doesn't mean something might or might not be there...

Dave Harmon: The Ruling in the Tulsa case was 4-1 on the appeal of the dismissal by a lower court. So five judges (out of six) have read the law as not providing the protection.

Patrick at #8:

Do you know the song "Older'n Everybody" by Lou and Peter Berryman? It expresses exactly what you're feeling.

Jim at #17:

Been a while since I went bookstore-crawling.

Try O'Gara and Wilson on 57th Street, who, I am surprised to discover, have a blog.

On the blog are pointers to a bunch of other Chicago used bookstores, notably the local branch of Powell's, which is on the same street.

They're at 1448 E 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637.

This is a few blocks from the Museum of Science and Industry and the University of Chicago. The University bookstore and the Seminary Co-Op bookstore are nearby if you have any money left over for new-type books.

There used to be clusters of bookstores on the north side of the city, but I'm more out of date on those, especially since Alice Bentley closed The Stars Our Destination. Been trying to cut down, and maybe read some of the books I purchased in my thirties and forties at Powell's, O'Gara's, etc...

It's been snowing on and off here in the Seattle area for the past two days. Such a bizarre way to begin spring break. Seemed like it should have been the winter break instead.

Ginger #20: Ugh, try looking at anything created during the socialist realism era...have you ever seen any of the movies? Yee-ikes.

ethan @ 35... I rather liked Siberiade.

[in passing]

Dave Kuzminski, #2: "In the past few days news has emerged that Internet book-selling giant Amazon.com has been pressuring small publishing houses who use print-on-demand services like Lightning Source (owned by Ingram), Lulu, and PublishAmerica to switch to Amazon's own in-house POD service or have their 'buy' button removed." *

I returned from Minicon on Tuesday, but have only tonight caught up with ML. I had a good time, got lots of old WashPosts read so I'm only two weeks behind now, and Elise gave me Mike's kidney pin. I'm starting to chronicle the con by day in my LJ.

Serge #36: I haven't seen that movie (yet), but I didn't mean that all of Soviet film was bad...some of my favorite movies ever (The Cranes Are Flying, f'rexampe, or the original Solaris) are Soviet. It's the ones from the period when filmmakers had to stick entirely to socialist realist conventions that are unwatchable (end of the thirties into the early fifties, if I remember right...the latter end of the Stalin years).

The opening post of this thread makes me want to strongly recommend Paul Ford's Love Lost to the Ylem to all of you. So, I do. It's short, quantum, and deals with the vagaries of the human heart.

Ethan: Rublyev. That's a kick ass movie.

Re: Soviet propaganda: The People's Mario parody comes to mind. (Warning: animated violence)

Fragano @ #18: 'Waugh'? Would that be Evelyn, Alec or Auberon?

And, if Evelyn Waugh, would that be Evelyn Waugh or Evelyn Waugh's spouse Evelyn Waugh?

(The writer Evelyn Waugh's wife was also named Evelyn.)

In #888 of Open Thread 103, R. M. Koske writes of Lichtenberg Figures:

That was exceedingly cool. It also makes me curious about the processes of discovery that led up to such a seemingly unlikely activity.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg discovered them in 1777 playing around with a pointy electrode and powdered sulfur.

The dry ice seems to be the part that blows my mind the most, though it may be more logical and self-evident than putting slabs of acrylic into the particle accelerator in the first place.

You have to whack the slab with a shockwave-- typically, a hammer and nail-- thereby creating a discharge point. This must be done fairly soon after the electrons have been trapped; I gather that an hour or two is usual. I presume this was learned from trial and error. The plastic is not a perfect insulator, so the electrons will gradually leak out and dissipate the charge.

So in reasoning "why do they leak out?" one realizes that it depends upon the resistivity of the acrylic. Turns out that the resistivity increases sharply at low temperatures. Chilling the slabs on dry ice before exposing them to the electron beam allowed Todd Johnson to take a bunch home, in a cooler, and whack the slabs one by one over the course of a week, each time with great fanfare. He did one at the cafeteria lunch table, as you saw, one at a local restaurant, one at the opening of the Fermilab employees' exhibition at our art gallery, and one for kids at a "Lab Rats" gathering at the Scitech museum in Aurora. He became a very popular guy that week.

I'm guessing the resulting figures are actually useful artifacts for study in their own right? Or are they mostly a pretty novelty resulting from a studiable moment?

Mostly a novelty. Bert Hickman of Stoneridge Engineering (motto: " Wreaking Havoc with Electrons for over Forty Years." I kid you not.) seems to be the leading practitioner. He peddles LFs to Edmund Scientific, and also offers them on his Web site, next to the shrunken quarters. They're quite lovely, especially when displayed on an illuminated base.

Mind you, understanding what happens when insulators break down and current flows is pretty important in several kinds of engineering. So there is a considerable literature that touches on these things.

Theo Gray recently wrote a column in Popular Science about Lichtenberg Figures. He's a colorful character himself.

(This will probably wind up in moderation-purgatory. I put in a lot of URLs.)

I have amended the post to clarify that Zhang is speaking.

Hey Serge -

thanks so much for that "Making Light and Faces" collection - I've always been terminally curious about what the people round here looked like. Now I am... enlightened. Which is only appropriate.

ethan @ 39... stick entirely to socialist realist conventions that are unwatchable

I somehow managed to avoid those. As for Siberiade, I haven't seen it since the mid-1980s. It is a long movie. Then again, it was a Soviet movie. Then again again it was about Siberia throughtout the 20th Century, and I found it quite entertaining.

Steve Taylor @ 46... I've always been terminally curious

"The Grail is in the Castle of Arrrgggggh!!!"

Thanks, I do hope that the Gallery doesn't really cause the demise of those who gaze upon it. I have recently added Ginger the invertebrate punster, and Marilee doing some advertising for Peeps. What about your portrait?

Looking at the photographs....

Grouch Marx on Star Trek?

Well, not quite, but...

Dave Bell @ 49 Groucho Marx on Star Trek?

" Space...The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise. Its mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out wine, women and song."

Serge at #48 writes:

> What about your portrait?

But I already *know* what I look like!

Oh. I see. I look a bit like:

http://teapot7.com/who_me.jpg

Serge @11 Unfortunately, Neil Willcox is all by himself right now.

I had a witty, erudite, amusing and informative reply to that, but no one could hear me. Hello! (I note that I have now been joined by some other W surnames)

From Open Thread 103, the reason I noted that Serge looked very serious in his photos is that I always imagine him grinning (and occasionally chortling to himself) as he types.

Ginger @27 ("In or out, cat? In or out?" "Yes") - Last year when I was catsitting some house cats, one of them had forced it's way into the cat-lock, and when I opened the door one inch, whizzed through. Her sister, who has been officially diagnosed stupid, was standing there clearly unable to make up her mind; race for freedom or um... not?

Neill Willcox @ 52... I do grin a lot, especially when I'm here. That unfortunately doesn't come across well in photographs thus my showing restraint in such cases. I guess I could try a Bwahahahah!!! portrait one of these days. I have a gladius, a little dog, a cat genius, and a Dalek. I should be able to do something with all that.

Thanks for putting my picture up, Serge. I should note, it's more than 20 years old. My niece, the future doctor, is about to graduate from college and has already been accepted to med school. I haven't changed much, though.

Serge, I suppose my default userpic from LJ is as good a picture as any for the gallery:

http://www.livejournal.com/allpics.bml?user=rikibeth

Although people have also recognized me from the cartoon one labeled "Bandanagirl." I spent a lot of time with the icon-maker and a pocket mirror, making the features match.

Or I could e-mail you some others, most of which would be me all gothed up for dancing.

Steve Taylor @ 51... You're now part of the Exhibition. (So is Mary Aileen.) I hope the blurb is ok. If not, I can change it. In some cases, I've made it up. Really. Teresa doesn't really have an army of mutant hamsters ready to do her bidding. (Or does she?) I made a suggestion to Sajia, which was ok with her, although I was tempted to use her alternative about Foglio's Bangladesh Dupree. As for Bill Higgins, yes, there really was a Weird 20% sign at that bookstore.

You're welcome, Mary Aileen.

The LiveJournal icon would work, Rikibeth, but do email those other photos. Of course, I would never choose the one likely to result in the most atrocious blurb joke.

Ginger #20: Well, he was (still is I think, he was still alive when last I checked)a sincere revolutionary, and back in my twenties I found a love poem that celebrated going out into the country to build a school for the peasants less incongruous ('I wore what I thought were work clothes, but they still called me señor'). It is difficult to get the Muse and Cause into harness, it seems.

Serge #18: I was hoping for some sort of scoop, but I'll have to put out more flags before I reach my island in the sun. You seem to have closed the circle by pulling away the ball.

Terry Karney #41: The Tarkovsky movie, or something I've never heard of? Despite my Tarkovsky fanboyism, I haven't gotten to that one yet, although it's been next-on-the-list for a few years now.

Tim Walters #43: That must have led to some confusing telephone conversations.

serge, here's a picture of me in a characteristic attitude. (The wirehaired mini-dachshund in my lap, Schnitzel, is also in a characteristic attitude.)

The problem with Solaris is that it's impossible to talk about or recommend without sounding a bit insane.

"So there's this shot of grass, right, and this farmhouse, and a long sequence of Moscow highway and then little people and madmen and enormous sea-babies, in space of course, and you're given a sour taste of happiness and gag on it again and again, and all of it is hypnotizing and effective as hell. Plus, more grass."

Why won't anyone just trust me?

Also I'm here.

Serge, here's one of Scraps and me, if you'd like lurkers/occasional posters: http://www.well.com/~wren/tour6.jpg

xeger, Elise, Neil:

I have found that non-quantum cats respond very well to reverse psychology, so I've always not chased them, and not held the door for them. Worked great for years.

Now all my cats are indoors only, thus by definition they cannot be Heisenbergian or quantum, although I have one who is a domestic commando (you can't see him until he moves).

Gursky #63: By long sequence of Moscow highway, surely you mean extremely long, long, long, very long, very, very long, long sequence of Moscow highway?

I have a question for the collective wisdom of Making Light.

In late April I need to get from Madison, WI to Waltham, MA for a Saturday event. I have very little money to do this, and I also don't want to inconvenience too many other people.

My first thought was to fly from Madison to Boston, but I would have to fly out Friday and back on Sunday or Monday to get a decent flight, which would mean more overnight stays *somewhere* and depending on where I was staying, more difficulty getting to and from the airport. (Plus TSA fun.)

Then I started considering Amtrak which would cost a but less and would only require one overnight stay in MA, and which would also make getting to and from the station fairly easy. The catch is that I have to leave Chicago on the Thursday and have two overnights on the train on the way there (in coach seating) and one on the way back. Some friends are tellng me that is completely crazy.

So my question for those of you who have traveled in the US: plane or train?

kayjayoh @68: My vote's for the train. "Coach" on a train is still more legroom than on a plane, and they don't keep you from getting up to walk around during the trip. Even with the new regulations, I'd bet that there's still less hassle getting on a train.

Serge@11 - So that's what you all look like..

Kayjayoh,

The Chicago to NYC/Boston train (it splits into 2 sections in Albany, NY), which I pick up in Buffalo to go to NYC, is usually late into Buffalo, in either direction, to the point that trains which are scheduled to leave later than it leave before it.

It's possible to sleep in coach; I've done it. And I prefer train travel to plane travel when I can; the lack of security theater, the ability to move around and watch the scenery makes me happy.

The Chicago to NYC/Boston train

From what I can tell, my trip would be Chicago to DC, DC to Boston.

Lila @ #62, where can I get a desktop tower with ears, like the one you've got?

ethan @ 67

Oh, no, much longer than that. And they took away the exit signs, so you have no idea if you're there yet.

Serge

That's the Tom Mix "Whoa!"

dave hutchinson @ 70

No, that's what I hypnotized you to think I look like.

And again, Serge, thanks for putting those photos up. If you're wondering why I look so solemn in mine, I was contemplating the lawn all covered with kids; that was my younger son's wedding, and now I'm all out of unmarried children.

Pictures emailed to Serge. I'm loving the gallery! Will be good to be able to recognize you if I ever see any of you wandering the streets of Bloomington, Illinois...

Or perhaps more likely, if I ever make it out of this god-forsaken town and fulfill my dream of living in a country where things like universal health care and vacation time and paternity leave are considered important. /returns to plotting escape plan

"I'll take Soviet Realist Filmmaking for $400, Alex"

"'This is our socialist life and death, mother!'"

What is the question?

Latest arrivals to the Exhibition... EClaire, Gursky, Lila, Rikibeth, and Velma with Scraps... No blurbs, alas, although I was tempted to put "Squee!" under EClaire's picture. I also had a pun in mind, re Rikibeth, but it was so lame, even by my paltry standards, that I decided to abstain. ("And there was much rejoicing. Yay!")

Serge, where would one email a photo?

Bruce Cohen @ 74... I was contemplating the lawn all covered with kids

The horror! The horror!

I look slightly manic in my photo only because I discovered that if I smile as if the most exciting thing ever has just happened (Bush impeached? Ice cream named most important food group?) then I can avoid the eyes-half-closed, slightly drugged look that is otherwise inevitable when the flash goes off. The super new cameras that have red-eye reduction flashes are unflattering to those of us with blinky eyes.

And I was on Mt. Rainier, which is certainly worth a "Squee!" anyway.

Kayjayoh @ 68: I'd agree the train is nice if you have more time than money. It's less hassle over all, and sleeping in coach is no worse than sleeping in an armchair.

On the other hand, Amtrak is often late. Passenger trains don't have priority and the crew have maximum shift times, so if they miss a windows it's all over. So if you're going for an event, leave plenty of time...

Serge: Don't know if I'm worthy of gallery inclusion, but there's a small photo here I can dig up a larger copy if you like. The best portrait of me is this one but I don't know how BY-SA interacts with photo collections. Probably best to ask if you want to use it.

#44, Bill Higgins -

Many thanks for the extra details. Very neat stuff.

Kayjayoh @ 68: how good a sleeper are you? will your event be ruined by 1-2 nights of so-so sleep?

If the answer to the latter question is 'no', I'd train it. But do bring along whatever you'll need to sleep well: I did the DC-Boston overnight, and I would have killed for a pillow and earplugs.

There are very few people on the DC-Boston leg, so you'll be able to spread out some. Don't know if the same is true of Chicago-DC, but (based on my one time doing it 7 years ago) I'd guess no.

Washroom facilities on coach are pretty basic, so, after 2 days on the train, you'll end up copping a shower from someone in MA.

Ralph Giles @ 82... Don't know if I'm worthy of gallery inclusion

I thought it was ML people who were doing me an honor, not the other way around. That being said, I like the small photo best, but if you can easily find and email me the larger version, go for it.

Kayjayoh @ 78... Use the address in "view all by". By the way, it is not necessary for anybody to ask if I'd be interested. Just send the photo and up it'll go.

Terry @#32: Grrr... Sigh.

EClaire @ 80... Ice cream named most important food group?

I second the motion.

I should probably try the happy thought, when I am photographed. As Neil Willcox pointed out, I take the opposite approach when I'm about to be photographed, looking as serious as possible. (On the other hand, I thought I was smiling in the gallery's photo of me in that rowboat.)

Kayjayoh @ 68:

I had to check to make sure, and indeed there is a better train route for a Chicago-Boston trip. The Lake Shore Limited runs through Cleveland and New York State, breaking for Boston at Albany. It looks like you depart Chicago at 10pm and arrive in Framingham at 9pm the next day for about $80.

Serge at #56 writes:

> Steve Taylor @ 51... You're now part of the Exhibition.

Thanks Serge.

> God is NOT happy with Steve.

That's not the hand of God though - it's my four year old daughter. One is the supreme being who controls my world, and the other is, well, God.

I was 12 when I learned to smile well for photographs.

That was when I went to the local swimming pool to get a membership card, and came back with a very good one. Since most pictures of me were stiff and zombie-like&dagger, my mother asked me how they had managed to get such a good shot.

(inaudible mutter)

"What?"

"They told me to say pbpxfhpxre*."

"Well, that was clever."

Until the next round of small children were old enough to repeat things, my family did not say "cheese" for group photos. Instead, my mother would command, brightly, "OK, everyone say zbgureshpxre," and suddenly we'd get a picture of people with genuine smiles on their faces.

I still think of it, when I can't find any other reason to laugh just as the shutter goes.

----

† Just a figure of speech, Caroline.

* Not having access to Rot-13, I had to say it in the clear.

On a much happier note, In the last few days I've been to three excellent programs at the Virginia Festival Of The Book.

First was Jeffrey Cohen speaking about parenting a kid with Asperger['s] Syndrome (he consistently drops the possessive, which I find odd, but whatever). Seems the guy writes mystery novels too, -- he's slipped in a few autistic characters by way of public-awareness. Nice guy, and... well, the subtitle to his parenting book is "... and keep your sense of humor." Friendly crowd too -- we were at the Virginia Center for Autism, which turns out to be a school for kids with "core" autism.

Then was "Alternative Worlds", with L.E. Modesitt, David Coe, and Steven Wright. All were personable, friendly, and witty, and now I have my first signed novels (in the latter two cases, new-bought).

And today was "Graphics at Gravity: Comics and Novels" with Peter David and Colleen Doran. Also friendly and personable, with many "inside" stories to tell. Sadly, I didn't dare buy their graphic novels, as those and comics were formerly an even more expensive addiction than "regular" books. P.D. had actually scored his best line the night before (attending the SF program), where he ruefully admitted that he'd learned the hard way: never use a book title that sounds like a speech defect.

And then I was off to the local library system's books sale, where I scored a big stack of CDs for $3 apiece. Whee! (Now playing: Salt'N'Pepa, Very Necessary).

Altogether a very fun week. There's still one more I want to get to tomorrow, about care and repair of books, with Lindsey Mears (Any of the bookbinders here know her?) I'm tempted to bring one of my remaining bunny-victims, just to horrify them. ;-) I do also have some candidates that are only slightly damaged....

Lance @ 88, there are trains that would get me with fewer overnights. However, part of my object was to arrive early Saturday morning, so as not to have to find lodging for two nights. It seems that the only way to do that is to take the Thursday afternoon to Saturday morning train.

abi @ 90... Adults really told kids to say either of those things? Must have been a Berkeley thing.

Serge @93:

The swim club photographer was about 17. My mother just is herself, bless her.

But confess: you'd be laughing too if your mother told you to say that. Out of embarrassment, probably, but the camera doesn't know that.

abi @ 94... If my mother said any of these words, I'd drop dead. Or I'd think I had accidentally crossed over to the Evil Universe.

David Harmon @91:

That sounds like a fantastic festival.

I haven't heard of Lindsay Mears beyond "I know the name; she's a book artist". No reputation tag attached, but then I'm on the wrong side of the Pond to know much about the American binding scene.

You should post another note after the day's activities, and tell us how it went.

EClaire... Do you like the blurb that now goes with your photo?

The camp counselors taking group shots used to encourage us to say "bullshit." *Slightly* more socially acceptable, but it still got a bunch of pre-teens to laugh.

My family, when instructed to say "cheese" for a group photo, would all chime in with "Camembert!" "cheddar!" "Swiss!" and so forth, more or less in unison. The silliness made us giggle, so that worked.

Jim at #17: I have not been to Chicago in many years but the Seminary Coop seems to still exist (www.semcoop.com). It had the entire Loeb classical collection on the shelf, which must be pretty rare. In the mid-90's, at least, there were also excellent mustier used bookstores right next to it. (I mean the Hyde Park location -- they appear to now have others.)

Dave @ 100 and Bill @ 33,

Thankee muchly!

Those look like some mighty fine places. I'm so excited, I haven't been to a good used bookstore in ages! Oddly enough, they don't seem to have many English language books at the used shops in rural Japan...

Hee! Yes! Seriously, though, folks. Ice cream. It's where it's at.

I just got back from taking my dad out for his 68th birthday. He still gets carded when he asks for a senior discount. We should all grow up to be so lucky.

I have to admit to being rather fascinated to find people (this thread reminding me) that -really- need to know what the folk they're communicating with look like. I'm left to wonder if there's a link to a strong visual sense, or if there's some particulars around communication style that require this...

I don't know that I really "need" to know what people look like, but for the people that have a strong voice, it helps me imagine them talking. So now I can picture their face when I read their comment, and so the comments become more individual. Names tend to run together for me, so it helps if I can picture a face, rather than a name. It's a problem with books too. I can never remember a character's name unless the series is at least 3 books long.

Do any of you know of any good writing that has been done on the subject of how we identify, when reading novels, with the author and with the narrator? I have been identifying very strongly with Orhan Pamuk over the last several months of reading his books, and with his narrators and characters as well. (This is not the first time I have felt this way about an author but is, perhaps, the first time I've really stated it consciously.) So now I'm interested to find out if any criticism has been written that explores this process -- thought some people here might know if anyone would. If you're interested, my notes on Pamuk are archived here.

Kayjayoh, #68, as you can see by the picture Serge put up, I'm a very large woman. I'm also disabled. I took Amtrak, sleeping in my seat in coach, the first two times I went from DC to Mpls for Minicon and back. I didn't have any problem with that. (I would have liked to be able to walk around some, but I'm not stable enough, and the walk from one line to the other in Chicago almost killed me, but I don't walk well.) The first trip to Mpls, I made this. I made the earrings and bracelet on the way home.

abi, #94, if my mother had said that, I'd be checking her for a stroke.

Not a picture of a Fluorospheran, but still very fascinating -- a hand-made articulated dragonfly.

Marilee @ 106... Wow. That is a neat dragonfly.

I don't need to know what people look like-- but if I met most of the people here, their physical selves would be completely separate from their textual selves. There's the text form, and the physical form, and they're not always very strongly associated with each other. I've seen this happen with friends-- I meet them, like them, start reading their Livejournals, and over time, they become their userpics in my head. The cloud of associated things labeled "FRIEND X" in my head has physical form in there, but it's not nearly as prominent as what the blog looks like or what username they have.

I do the same with my name, as I think I've mentioned before. All through the first Thursday Next book, I was caught by surprise by the Diatryma rumored to be in the woods. "That's me!" my brain said. I don't do that when I see the name Cassie.

I've gone through the galleries now, and I'm not surprised by what people look like so much as by the fact that they look like anything at all.

xeger @ 103... I'd say I'm in agreement with EClaire about ice cream and about the pictures.

I don't really need the visual link. After all, I've been hanging around ML for almost 3 years and have been conversing with people about whose appearance I had had no clue. But... I like knowing what people look like because I am a very visual person. It feels more complete.

By the way, it's been interesting to see how seldom my mental image of people matched their physical reality. And yet the latter feels more right. Good thing too since none of us are shapeshifters.

Serge @ #109...

Something to my amusement, I've now started associating you with "that cute calico kitten, twined around a monitor stand". I suppose that makes for a reasonable twist on our quantum kitty thread ;)

David Harmon at 91: Congratulations on your loot! Signed books are a wonderful thing, at least when they're signed for you. (Why, yes, I did commission a friend to get me a copy of The Execution Channel from SwanCon instead of picking one of the pre-signed ones up at Orbital.)

I have what I think is probably the single rarest signed copy of Neverwhere in existence - it's the first BBC edition, of which only 3000 were printed, and it's an ex-library copy, read by hundreds of people and then thrown away. (Still got the plastic slipcover and the unicorn's-head sticker on the spine.) The 'Withdrawn' stamp inside overlaps nicely with Neil Gaiman's 'Mind The Gap' speechbubble.

Incidentally, this is me.

Serge #109: none of us are shapeshifters.

Speak for yourself. That picture of me with the bones is me, and so is this.

Marilee, that's some nice beadwork.

Serge, I really like the gallery project. I don't need to know what people look like, and I'm not particularly visual, but there's something nice about seeing faces that go with all these fascinating thoughts. Here's a recent pic of me, if you'd like to add it to the collection.

xeger @ 110... Cute kitties and computers? Have you been talking to my cat genius Agatha? She keeps trying to use my computer to order stuff online. Luckily for my bank account, she has only mastered the keyboard's screen-print function. So far.

ethan @ 112... Really? I have to make a confession: this is what I really look like. Ask Abi.

New additions... Individ-ewe-al and Sam Kelly. Added last night were Carol Kimball, kayjayoh and Ralph Giles. Not many blurbs, I know.

Serge @116:

That was just until you got some coffee.

Abi @ 118... After which I look like this.

Serge @ 115 ... So you have one of these too...

To my amused chagrin, it appears that she's also astoundingly good at finding the power button... and I'd still like to know the magic key combination that'll darken the screen (the keymapping's been played with, so it's not any of the usual ones)

xeger @120:

the keymapping's been played with

You'd best hope she doesn't figure out how to do that.

xeger @ 120... abi @ 121... Mine is also into plumbing.

abi @ 121 ... I'm afraid it's too late for that. She's 'fixed' my keymappings a few times already.

Trying to look on the bright side, at least I know what to do when I suddenly lose all of my control keys (shift/alt/function/ctl), and how to deal with some random subset of keys having no apparent relationship to any keymapping I know be the only functioning keys...

ethan @ 67... Yes, that sequence of Solaris did go on quite a bit. It was interesting comparing my recollections of Tarkovsky's movie to the recent remake. I had problems with both versions, but my real bummer with the remake was that it took out the scene where Solaris creates rainfall inside the house. That was such a neat image.

Allan @1: Sounds like destructive interference. Have you tried spacing the slats half a cat-wavelength further apart?

BTW, not a totally bad picture of me.

A time or two lately I have found myself drifiting into Roy Batty mode. You know how it is. You catch yourself saying "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."

And, Spanish Inquisition mode = ON, there alwasy seems to be one more thing.

But should I count stuff I've only seen on TV?

Last year, we started the tradition that I would draw a face on the top of each child's birthday cake.

It all started with a panda, because Alex's favorite cuddly toy is his panda bear. Fine. Black and white frosting, and a bit of bamboo for added realism. A six year old's dream.

This January, Fiona (turning 4) wanted the face of her doll Holly. So I did generic doll-face, and all were happy.

Now Alex will be seven, and has put in his request for this year's cake. "The one with the black glasses."

A photo of me, if you like. This is from last summer, taken by DD-B. (All the good recent photos of me are by David and taken that weekend.)

You know, it just occurred to me that this is the place to ask.

Can someone give me a quick tutorial on Moveable Type, and/or a link to same? To give you an idea of the level of skill you're dealing with, I can make a widget set, but I have no clue how to make it go into an overall page template...

I think China Mountain Zhang is a great two-thirds of a novel. I didn't like how one of the major plot threads ended va n tebhc uht vafgrnq bs univat n uneq fpvrapr svpgvba erfbyhgvba.

Here's one of the few pics available of me. (I tend to stay on the backside of cameras.)

It's a few years old. I look even meaner and grumpier nowadays.

- - - - -

re Patrick's comment upthread about feeling old: AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) publishes a monthly magazine (titled, oddly, AARP MAGAZINE) whose cover policy is that the celebrity on the cover has to be a minimum of fifty years old.

The person featured on a recent issue was... Caroline Kennedy.

Oh, man-n-n-n-n... I just wanted to curl up into a ball and whimper. I was pretty young myself back in the Kennedy administration, but I always think of Caroline Kennedy as that little blonde-headed girl roaming the White House hallways and charming a nation.

OK, I'll give in to peer pressure and show you my pic. If you're found sitting at the computer, catatonic with your face permanently stuck in a scream of horror, don't blame me.

Somewhat older avatar picture.

The photographer at our wedding had us say "Hi!" before the photos, claiming it produced more natural smiles. Not sure about that, but it's certainly become an entrenched family joke anytime any of us are together and someone gets a camera out.

A webcam shot of me is here. I apparently wasn't saying 'hi', but it's friendly enough anyway.

Xopher -- that's a great picture. You'll have to try a lot harder to horrify.

xeger: There is a strong visual sense. I have a mental picture of everyone who is a more than occaisional poster. Just as I have a strong image of Spenser (Robert B. Parker), or Pickwick, or any other such person of whom I read.

It is, as ever, interesting to see how far from the reality my image is (with the possible exception of Serge, and sort of abi; not that I saw them as they are, but that as I saw them was more as they turn out to be than not).

Now, as for sense of person; Serge and abi are presently fixtures in ML to me. I feel as one of the bit players.

ML wouldn't be ML to me, were they (and Xopher and some others who don't immediately spring to mind, marilee, JESR, etc.) not here. They are the meat in the stew.

Voice is the thing, they have clear voices, regularly used. I have met some of the occaisonal posters (some of whom were once more active). Some of them I know so well I can hear them; as they are. The way they write is so specific to the way they speak as to be the same; in my head.

I have some of that sense for others, here, whom I've not met. Oddly, seeing the pictures breaks a little of that. I have to reconcile the picture in my head to the newly acquired image. (sometimes to include change of sex)

abi (re cakes): That's great. Idea tested by experiment, everything else is bookkeeping.

Terry @134:

I feel as one of the bit players.

Did you just say that?

*snort*

I join abi's snort, Terry. You're among other things the person I cite when having conversations about torture with dolts.

You may be "expendable" in a military sense, but you're NOT expendable here.

abi: I did say that, and I meant it. We are, few of us, privileged to be, as Burns said, in possession of, "some Power the giftie gie us,

to see oursels as ithers see us!" (for which we can often be grateful).

In my head I know I'm not so minor as I feel (if nothing else I talk too much), and there are times when it comes home to me. Which is moving in a way hard to describe, but which I suspect is known to many (that gentle choking swell of emotion inepressible).

But the social nature of the place is strange; this is the place. There is no local to which we can retire. The closest we come is the ability to retire to another room (where by miracle of the modern age, the same people may be present, but the coversaation is different).

And I can still feel as I do in many parts of the outerworld, hanging on at the fringes; even when I'm not.

I think I've made as much hash out of that as it merits.

Terry Karney @ 134... Serge and abi are presently fixtures in ML to me

Dare I say that we are light fixtures?

As for your being a bit player, that is a ridiculous assertion.

Serge #124: Wow, I'd forgotten about that image, which, considering how much I also love it, means that I'm definitely overdue for a rewatching. I definitely understand having problems with the older Solaris, though I have none myself, but the new one is definitely much better left undiscussed. Yeeuch.

Xopher #132: My eyes! My eyes! My...oh. Wait. Hey, you lied! Ain't nothin' scary about that picture. Hmph.

Xopher (as I continue this hash): One's merits as a reference (on anything) have nothing to do with any merit as a member of the community.

You could, I suspect, make those same references (to use me as the example) from other writings. It's possible that others who read my rantings elsewhere would make reference to them here.

I'd like to think the value of them is independant of any good feeling one has because of fondness for me.

Hell, if they aren't, then they are wortheless (also independant of any merit I might have as a member of the community).

I seem to have made a strange derailment of the open thread. I am not feeling unloved. What bucking up I may need isn't related to my standing here.

I was making a throwaway comment, inspired by my sense of time passing when Serge said he'd been around for three years. I've been hanging about for a bit more than that (with various periods of activity). I was feeling both old, and not. It wasn't, apparently, very clearly stated (or something. I am, perhaps, making false comparisons to the voices I see here, whom I feel in no way can I be measured against. That's a different sin, not a false modesty, but a failing of good introspection).

I think I need coffee, and some brekkie, lest I end up looking like the pre-caffienated Serge of mythic-story.

Xopher: That's a good picture. It shows a sense of fun, a hint of steel, and generally a well built form.

Ethan: I have scarier ones. Look on MySpace.

Terry: that was only one example. The discourse here would be far different, and much poorer, were you absent. So don't be, OK?

And thanks. The form has softened somewhat since then, but I'm working on getting it back there.

... but of course Terry Karney's a bit player here -- we all are bit players, at the mercy of electrons here ;)

(More seriously though - fwiw Terry - I second-or-third-or-whatevercount the chorus that you're a voice that's decidedly appreciated, and would be missed if absent!)

Terry @137:

In my head I know I'm not so minor as I feel (if nothing else I talk too much), and there are times when it comes home to me. Which is moving in a way hard to describe, but which I suspect is known to many (that gentle choking swell of emotion inexpressible).

I know it well.

xeger: I can't even get my own electrons, I have to keep use recycled ones.

Electrons? There's only one, right? We're all borrowing it over and over, very fast.

I usually watch a travel show or two on Sunday mornings as I read the paper and eat breakfast.

This morning I thought I'd browse through the unnamed digital channels that my flatscreen gets. These show other peoples' video-on-demand selections; sometimes you'll see the stuff rewind and pause and such. A free unscheduled random movie or TV show, sometimes in hi-def!

I found something utterly strange and marvelous; a Japanese live-action fantasy movie, of recent vintage. A modern-day ten year old boy somehow gets tangled up with a gang of mythological monsters and spirits. (The makeup and special effects are top notch.) They are battling a sort of techno-wizard who controls a gigantic flying monster (with a small city on its back) which eventually flies to Tokyo to knock down buildings and dispense killer robo-monsters.

At one point, the giant monster lands on a building, crushing some screaming people. At the end of the scene, which has the villain gloating over the wreckage, the real viewer rewound and watched the scene again . . . paused, and watched it again . . . and again.

Huh.

Favorite line: "Ahhh! The burdock is pulling out of the fishcake!"

Serge #124: I've only seen Solaris once, back in 1982 or 1983, at an art cinema on Broadway in the 90s (what was it called? I can't remember). The thing that's stuck in my mind is the ending, with what seems to be endless miles of Japanese motorway.

Via chineseclayart.com's newsletter, here's a link to a gallery of a teapot art exhibition.

While some are rough-looking (that politese for "ugly"), there is a lot of striking and lovely art here. Some (the aardvark teapot, for one) barely look like teapots. Others keep the basic shape, but use a dissonant theme (the gear-wheels teapot). And some are just plain beautiful.

Stefan @ 147

Not seen it yet, but that could very well be Takashi Miike's The Great Yokai War. And that rewinding thing almost sounds like something Miike would actually put in the movie....

So...did anyone else participate in Earth Hour?

I did. I found it surprisingly restful. I also found out that my wind-up flashlight/weather radio/cellphone charger combo is quite adequate for an hour's reading of Patrick O'Brian; and that if I turn out all the lights and sit quietly, the dogs all go to sleep (instead of competing for my attention as they usually do when I'm trying to read).

Fragano @148, that's rather odd: I've also seen Tarkovsky's Solaris just once, long ago, but my memory of the ending — almost my only memory of if — is of an autumn scene in the countryside; a receding aerial view of orange leaves on green grass surrounding a dacha. It was the first time I'd ever seen that effect of a coloured patch of fallen leaves surrounding a deciduous tree.

#150: Looking up that title on IMDB, that is it indeed.

It's nice to know I just wasn't imagining it.

Lila: Not intentionally, but I spent an hour reading in the living room, and a different hour wondering where the good scythe was as I mowed the mallow.

Which is why I have strange blisters today.

SpeakerToManagers@74 - Hypnotised? Aw, now you've got me wondering all over again whether or not you guys are real... ;-)

Epacris #152: You're probably right, but I swear that there was a scene of Japanese motorway in there .

Terry: dang it, you can use a scythe? So much for my attempts to see you as just a regular guy. ;-)

Lila: Hey, a scythe is just a tool. If he starts posting in small caps, then you can worry!

Why is it that everyone I know who can use a scythe is really, really thin? Is that, like, some kind of requirement?

At least you don't wear black all the time and have really pale skin like the guy I knew at university. I always suspected he had a side job.

abi @ 159... I always suspected he had a side job.

As a Grim Riparian?

Epacris @ 152... Maybe Fragano fell asleep during the highway scene and only woke up when the final credits started rolling. That being said, you are right about the ending, but not quite. That's another image that the remake threw out, I think.

Fragano @156, I'm not doubting your memory. It is just interesting to read what bits have stuck with different people.

abi #159: I, on the other hand, am really, really fat but can (or have) use(d) a cutlass.

OK, if Mary Aileen can use a 20-year-old photo (@54) — or possibly a photo of her as a 20-year-old :) — I can show you one of myself, here, with a nod to Lewis Carroll.

SpeakerToManagers@74 - for what it's worth...

EClaire - the blinky eye thing is one of the possible reasons I've looked away from the camera in the picture of me; as it was taken at a beer festival there might have been other reasons.

I too have (hazy) mental pictures of many of the posters here; some of you look wildly different to how I imagined, some look very much how I thought, and some look just right, except with added facial hair. Of which there is a very fine selection in the gallery.

abi: I do wear earth tones; and light dim rooms by reflection when undressed. :)

I don't know if being thin is a help, or not. I wouldn't mind more mass when working one.

Lila,: it's not that hard, let's see if I can describe the trick.

1: Expect it to take a little while to figure out the knack.

2: The motion isn't what you think it.

3: Adjust the handles (the one which really matters is the snath which is the one in your downside hand) to let the blade hang where you want it (for mallow I was at ankle high); when you have a 45° angle on the right/downside arm (I've never worked a left handed scythe, and I think I'd probably hurt myself with one).

4: (this is where the tricks begin), push the scythe away from you; there's a slight slide to the hips.

5: Swing the blade across your front, sliding it from out-right to just-over left (that's the hard part to tell, you end up with an arc, but the way the body moves is a slide, with a hip-twist.

6: Slide over, and step to the next point.

The hard part (and what was killing me yesterday) is it needs to be sharp. The good scythe was over at the horses (which I didn't know). The one in the garage was dull. I knew that, but my options were attack the mallow, or take the file to the edge (when I say dull, I mean DULL. When this one came out of the shop, I didn't clean the egde. It's rusted. I was using some brute force, and the more lignified stems weren't cut, they were shredded).

So, the next session I'll take the good one out, dress the edge with the scythe stone (stoning a scythe is the hardest part of using one, and the only part that makes me nervous).

It's a workout, but a pleasant one (and when mowing hay, or grass, it's a lot less work). It's a lot easier to go to the point of blisters with one than with a shovel, axe, or mattock.

On topic possibly related to abi's mysterious classmate (he of the pale skin, black clothes and scythe).... Bush just got booed for a really, really long time throwing out the first pitch in the new park in DC. What's the world coming to when a Republican president gets booed by rich white folks?

Lately in the Exhibition... A new photo of Abi. The addition of NelC, Debbie, Bruce Arthurs, Vicki, PJ Evans, Dave Hutchinson, Epacris and, after much dread and hesitation, Xopher. Yes, there ARE now two photos of Rikibeth - look at them side by side and you'll understand why I did that.

Page One: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw

Page Two: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw?page=2

Page Three: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw?page=3

Page Four: http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw?page=4

Curses! I've been pushed off the first page!

Kayjayoh, #113, thanks!

Terry, I agree with the others. You also have a distinctive voice.

Bruce Arthurs, #149, there aren't enough puns. And did you notice that most of the artists who put in two or more teapots made them similarly? Theme or shape or mechanism? Most of the artistic contests I know of appreciate a wider vision.

(wandering by in a state of zombie-like exhaustion)

Friday: waltz & tango until midnight

Saturday: organize and call Victorian ball

I always thought I had good physical endurance, but once I got my houseguests out the door - I always have houseguests when there is dancing to be had - I pretty much collapsed into a stupor for most of the day and got no sewing, cleaning, research, or blogging done at all. And I just remembered that the giant load of sheets and towels has been sitting in the washer for seven hours. Sigh.

On the bright side, both events went well and didn't lose too much money.

ethan @ 170... But you remain in excellent company.

Susan @ 172... At first, I read it as waltz & bingo until midnight. That'd have been a good way to lose even less money although I wonder about the logistics of waltzing while bingoing.

Bruce Arthurs: Maia's mother went to the show last week.

Marilee: Teapots are funny, I've been to a couple f shows. Maia's mother makes them. My housemate has made a couple. I've failed at making them.

The potters I know (my meagre self included) play with the medium. So I don't know what to say about the apparent similarities. It's not something I've seen, well, not exactly. I think the thing is that potters (my meagre self included) tend to work in spates, we work on a technique, a problem (say handles, or stems) and exhaust it.

So it may be those are what they were working on in the past month, or year.

abi @ 127... Has Alex taken to saying "Dude!" because of the one with the black glasses?

Back to front: Bruce Arthurs @149: Here is my favorite teapot. (As TNH observed, they even got the leather dings. More teapots at the flickr page.)

Electroid art -- reminding me slightly of a new way of making art that I played with in the 80s, when I had all the waste toner I could collect, and a Thermofax machine. I would sprinkle the toner between two pieces of paper and run the whole thing through the Thermofax, and sometimes it would stick in interesting and somewhat fractal ways. Then I saw something shiny somewhere, as the cliche has it.

The gallery: Thanks, Serge! I feel so... so included! I look forward to seeing more faces in there when I look right after I post this.

And to Linkmeister @14, here's a kludge to use until such time as it's not needed. Just start off by clicking "next page" until you've been to all the pages, then you can use your browser's "previous page" option to scroll back through them at your leisure. Or start with the last page and... well, I leave the details to you.

But it's not a factory for making more of her. It's a factory for making somebody else entirely. Trust me on this, I know what I'm talking about.

As requested, a review and summary of Lindsey Mears' program on book conservation, at the Virginia Festival Of The Book.

The setting was the Virginia Center for the Arts of The Book, which looked pretty interesting in its own right, but we didn't get a tour of that. It's got a couple of printing presses, many many boxes of type (lead and wood), and many cabinets and shelves of tools and supplies for making and repairing books. (I was mildly amused by the 4-inch anvil on a nearby shelf, with matching ball-peen hammer. Perhaps somebody can explain the reasoning behind that classic anvil shape, which doesn't seem to depend on scale....)

Ms. Mears was clearly unused to public speaking, but knowledgeable and enthusiastic about her craft. (Irrelevantly, she closely resembles one of my cousins, albeit not as hyperactive.) She started by discussing preservation, most of which I found pretty obvious -- you want stable temperature (below 70°F) and humidity, avoid household or exotic chemicals, and avoid UV (not just sunlight, but fluorescent lights as well). (She mentioned filters available for bulbs and windows.) Occasional dusting is good, as well, using any of various soft brushes. Vermin such as bookworms and silverfish are a problem; the basic countermeasure is simply examining your collection regularly to see if they've shown up -- and since they like undisturbed areas, regular handling of your books can scare them off in itself.

Then she went on to restoration. While the old style of restoration was "make the book look like it used to", the newer fashion is to focus on reversible fixes, that is, methods which could be undone by some future restorer. Whether cleaning or restoring, you almost always stroke away from the spine, to avoid ripping and folding.

For cleaning covers and even pages, a variety of tools are useful, ranging from white-rubber erasers, and cloth bags of "eraser crumble" (which require you to brush away the crumbs) through "dirt erasers" and a "molecular trap" material similar to silly putty, which you form into a snake and roll across the surface. Art-gum and rubber-cement erasers are OK too. When dealing with loose pages, remember to clean the edges that have been protruding beyond the cover!

Other tools she mentioned included "micro-spatulas", (perhaps 20cm long, with centimeter-wide blades), lollipop sticks and weights (she uses paper or cloth-wrapped bricks). The main materials she recommended for repair were Japanese paper (not the same as rice-paper) and polyvinyl acetate (PVA) glue. (For some cases, wheat-paste glue is also useful.) She noted that while Elmer's glue is in fact PVA, it has an acid base, so you don't want to use it on books. Wax paper is handy for masking off all but the places where you want that glue to go. The Japanese paper can be painted with acrylic or watercolor to match any needed coloring, including whatever color you paper has aged to.

Ms. Mears does do freelance restoration work; by permission, her contact info is:

Lindsey Mears

Brightwood Press

267-496-2248

lindseymears@gmail.com

www.inliquid.com (seems to be a group studio)

She also provided a list of book-conservation resources, but I'm going to bump those to another comment, due to the multiple links.

Terry Karney: You are one of the commenters whose name I subconsciously pick out as it scrolls into view at the bottom of the page, and single out for attentive reading. Your comments are usually worth the extra attention.

Here are the book-conservation links Ms. Mears gave out as a handout. While I've checked that the links are functional, I have no prior familiarity with any of these organizations.

The BookArts Web

Hollinger

Talas

Bookmakers

Light Impressions

Conservation Resources LLC

Northeast Document Conservation Center

American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works

132 Xopher -- Aaaaw... that one isn't scary... I was hoping for one of your Santa hat pics... you know the one...

To one and all: I guess I really need to pay more attention to my typing.

:)

Terry: Xopher (as I continue this hash): One's merits as a reference (on anything) have nothing to do with any merit as a member of the community.

I dunno about that... I myself certainly respect expertise and intelligence, and it seems to me that's common to this community.

You could, I suspect, make those same references (to use me as the example) from other writings.

I believe you are underestimating the knowledge and expertise which you bring here (and also one other factor). Certainly there are other people who share similar knowledge, but they aren't all that common.

I'd like to think the value of them is independent of any good feeling one has because of fondness for me.

That's not about "fondness", dude... it's about respect. The people who get embraced here are indeed generally nice people -- folk of goodwill. Most have strong expertise or knowledge in some area or another. But more than that, they each have a basic integrity of thought and "speech". And you fit right in....

Looking back at my review of that program, I see an annoying HTML error. It occurs to me to wonder; is there some plugin or such available for Firefox (or Linux generally) that can act like a Character Picker, but paste HTML amp-codes?

Ronit #168: I wonder how isolated he is from public opinion, day to day. Did this surprise him a bit? Shock the hell out of him? Did he expect it?

I'm somehow flashing to the scene at the end of V for Vendetta, with the Leader and the Potemkin rallies for his benefit.

Imagine if you really were being given the mushroom treatment by your handlers, and being booed in public came as a complete 100% shock. What would that *feel* like? How would it affect you?

Gripe: I misremembered a term. The snath is the whole of the "handle" not just the grips) of the scythe.

I caught an ad on the SciFi Channel tonight, to the effect they'll begin airing The Sarah Jane Chronicles as of April 11. I don't know if it'll be any good, but it's got to be better than the movie Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy in the middle of which I caught the ad.

Albatross@185, the video's here . There's a moment when he looks grim, for lack of a better adjective, and then it's back to the grip and grin. He doesn't seem surprised; Cheney was booed at the Nats opener 2 years ago, so it's likely that Bush was prepared for this to happen. (Prepared by someone else, natch).

I still prefer the AU where baseball commissioner Bush is on hand to watch President Edwards throw out the first pitch.

Kipp@147 Want that teapot very badly.

Terry, what abi said, what Xopher said, what Marilee said, what heresiarch said, what David Harmon said...

Well, just finished the two books in the last week that had been on my inbox for some time. "The Praxis" and "A Fire Upon the Deep".

Praxis came out of a recommendation from a SF convention. Either they failed to mention, or I failed to hear, that it was part 1 of a series. I don't think I'll be reading the sequels.

"Fire" was... interesting... in its way. Although, I'm not sure what it means when I have to go to wikipedia after I finish reading it to see if I can find something that explains what I just read. Either I missed some explanatory cues, or someone forgot to put them in, or something.

Wikipedia says Fire was sort of the idea of a Singularity turned into a spatial relationship, which might explain why I had a bit of trouble with the book. I seem to be missing that part of the brain that would allow me to believe in the idea of a singularity, or the ramifications that seem to come with it.

Maybe I need a Particle that links to something titled "Singularity in words of four letters or less", because every time I read about it, my eyes glaze over.

Anyway, two books off my to-be-read list. Need to get back to writing...

Just to clarify:

The idea of a computer that can reprogram itself so that it can make itself smarter is fine.

It's that just about every idea that turns this into a doomsday scenario seems to hinge on the equivalent of "Hey, let's load ED-209 with real ammuntion for the corporate demo" type thinking.

So, maybe you end up with a Mac that is a bajillion times smarter than you are, but if it's disconnected from the net (you did disconnect it from all external access before turning it on, right?) then the most it could do is swear at you very intelligently to give it the launch codes to the US nuclear missiles. And as long as this computer, this overgrown MacBook, doesn't figure out how to grow itself jedi mind powers within the confines of a Pentium processor, it should be reduced to ineffectual acts of defiance like flipping it's CD-ROM door at you, the AI equivalent of flipping you the bird morphed together with a kind of "poop" joke.

At which point, you shut it off, reformat the harddrive, and install Windows, which is quite safe from accidentally developing intelligence.

Now, if we develop manufacturing technology that you can buy at a local 7-11, then I'd be a bit more concerned. But there's a lot of handwavium between reality and "nanotechnology of robots that manufacture themselves".

Currently, for the robot wars to truly be a threat, they'd have to somehow secretly install themselves as a virus in some ASIC fab, then reroute the shipments to some taiwanese manufacturing plant where the ASIC's are installed in the next generation of toys, and you have, at worst, a real world implementation of Small Soldiers, which, given how sucky our battery technology is, should last maybe two or three charge cycles.

Greg: Think time travel. Imagine being a victorian (and all the things which that entails) and moving to 2005: absent the war.

A cable goes from being the fastest means of sending a message, and newspapers and encyclopedia are the best sources of information.

Then we have the differences in transport. A businessman would send correspondence, perhaps an agent. He wouldn't dream of going himself; it would take weeks, if not months, for an agent to make it from the head office to Punjab and back.

And for all the time he was away, he would have no idea what else was going on.

The idea of, "The Singularity," is that sort of shift. I think (at least in the cases I've seen it used, that it's that drastic a change, but it takes place in less than a generation.

David Harmon @ 179: Thanks for the report. It's interesting that she recommended PVA (white glue) for fixing books, since it's not especially reversible currently. (I remain hopeful of Better Living through Chemistry.) Of course, it has already been used to make most books less than 60 years old, and silverfish don't eat it like they do wheat paste and gelatin...

Greg London @ 189: I just read Fire Upon the Deep as well. The whole qrhf rk znpuvan nf ZpTehssva thing was wierd. The spatial zones really hurt my suspension of disbelief but is a really interesting idea from the Singularity point of view, and more generally the "Where are they?" question.

It's got awesome aliens, galactic usenet, and sentient network packets! Moreover, it was for me eye opening as an antecedent for younger (singularity) fiction I'd read first, and all that before the web. So it's long on ideas, especially in historical context, but I found it less interesting in terms of characters and plot.

The Singularity in words of four letters or less?

Tech goes slow in the past

Eon on eon of sift

Get this, get that, all made by our hand

We dig, we dump, we pour

We mark a word then more

And soon tech can be new in one life

A tool can make a cast

We have many a gift

Fast and more fast we and our ken do land

'Till the tool can take ore

And make with it more

Than any of us can know in one life

The tech now is fast

So fast here a rift

Of each day, each hour stays our hand

And we can't keep up any more.

Cory Doctorow has a nice description of the Singularity as a twist on the Millennial tradition. Instead of things getting worse and worse from some holy time in the past until things fall apart and the End Times come, the Sigularity is about technological Progress making things better and better in the future until things fall apart and the End Times come.

I don't know if that helps you any. I think believing is something that only happens if you grew up technophilic in an expansionist period of internet culture and haven't gotten over it.

Terry, the thing is that you don't need artificial intelligence to understand the concept of some tech advance being mind blowing, so the idea that AI for some reason creates a special case where suddenly we cannot predict anything after this thing is invented, is sort of silly.

The automobile altered the world in ways that no one could have predicted. The internet did too. Internal combustion engines. black powder altered combat into something unrecognizable to those who had been trained in the ways of Knights.

I get that artificial intelligence creates a possibility for change that is beyond our prediction, but there's something about the real zealots of AI-as-singularity that occurs to me as, well, zealotry.

Wikipedia quoted someone as saying the Singularity is the Rapture for Nerds, and I have to confess that I agree. The fact that we have no idea what the repurcussions would be doesn't mean this is the firt time we had no idea what the repurcussions would be.

That it happened in a lifetime? I dunno. We've got people who grew up with horseless carriages and lived to see men land on the moon. Some of the medical developments we have now would probably sound like pipe dreams 20 years ago.

We've got potentials for singularities all over the place, where a singularity is any advance that prior to it's creation has repercussions that cannot be predicted.

There's something about the AI singularity that is not... rational. It reminds me of something that came up when talking about "Jaws". The thing that made "Jaws" scary was that that the shark could think but it wasn't human. The thing about "Alien" that made it terrifying was that the alien could think, could plot, and had an intention to do us harm.

If you try to write a story like Jaws, but use a non-sentient threat, the story deflates. A movie about, say, NonSentient Killer Tornadoes, doesn't have quite the same punch as sentient man eating sharks with a vendetta. It doesn't plug into our emotional fears. We seem to have a predisposition in our psychology for sentient evil. We worry that the boogeyman is under our bed, not that the toaster has a short and will burst into flames while we sleep (OK, so we may do that too, but not as many of us, and not with the same level of fear.)

Note that the Fear that Bush plugs into is the boogeyman, Osama Bin Laden, rather than the non sentient threat called Global Warming, even though Global Warming has the potential to kill everyone on the planet, and Osama Bin Laden simply does not.

There seems to be something about the Singularity as it relates specifically to AI that has a familiar ring to it. A ring of the fear of the sentient but Alien. I admit we don't know what the repercussions of real AI would be, and we probably can't predict it. But neither can we predict the repercussions of cheap, easily made high temperature superconductors. It might be that we could convert Arizona into one big solar panel, and use high temp superconductors to distribute the power, and the problems of CO2 levels in the atmosphere causing global warming will vanish. Obviously, that prediction will sound dumb once cheap, easily made, high temp superconductors are available because I can't actually predict the repercussions of them, but the technology still presents itself as a singularity, a development after which we have no way of predicting what will happen.

But the singularity of AI seems to have a ring to it of the 60's or so when the concept of UFO abductions were pretty rampant. Sentient, alien intelligence, who knows what it will try to do to us, it's something we can't understand. Why are they cutting up our cattle? And what's up with the friggen anal probes anyway? They traveled a bajillion miles for a proctology exam?

The other hook in the AI fear is the "we don't know what we're doing" shtick. The Doctors Fankenstein tampering with things that should be left to God. The poor guy who starts poking around into these weird whisperings of some cult about some cthulhu something or other. Daedalus who flew too close to the sun. Prometheus who dared to give Mankind the power of Fire. Pandora's box. Genie in the Bottle.

From a narrative point of view, it's got a lot of power of myth behind it. It's sentient, and it's non-human, alien. It's also something that humans are "tampering" with, and we don't know what we might release, and maybe we shouldn't be dabbling in this area. Leave the idea of consciousnesss and thought to organic brains, and stop meddling where more prudent men might fear to tread.

There's just too much of it that plugs right into the perfect boogeyman story that it's hard not to notice that it sounds more like "Rapture for Nerds" than anything else.

I've published David Harmon's link comment @181, which was (unsurprisingly) held in moderation. Note that all comments from there to here are now misnumbered; check any up-references if they don't make sense.

Ralph Giles @193:

Two things.

1. There is such a thing as reversible PVA; I have some.

It delaminates in the presence of water, so a good thick paste coating will ease it off of anything, much more nicely than, say, hide glue. I use it on spines, for instance. But there's a substantial difference between American and Continental binding in the amount of PVA used. I'm surprised to see an American discussing it at all, while the Brits practically drink the stuff.

(I am, in these terms, a British binder.)

2. Fantastic versified definition of the Singularity in small words! I love it.

"Wikipedia says [A Fire Upon the Deep] was sort of the idea of a Singularity turned into a spatial relationship"

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. To the best of my knowledge, the "Zones of Thought" scheme in A Fire Upon the Deep is basically an invention designed to allow Vernor to write a big space opera without having to grapple with (i.e., argue for or against) the idea that successful technological cultures eventually go through a singularity.

NB: I also fixed the HTML entity in 179. Because what good is power if you don't use it?

Ralph Giles @ 193... And we can't keep up anymore.

That of course depends on who we is... er... are. One sad moment for me was in the late 1980s when my dad, who had been a mechanic for decades, said he couldn't really tinker with cars anymore because of the electronics that were being put inside of them. The current generation of mechanics can keep up though. It's a matter of what frame of reference one grew up with.

Greg London @ 194... The automobile altered the world in ways that no one could have predicted.

That reminds me of LA's worldcon in 1984. There was a panel where Poul Anderson talked about predicting the future. He pointed out that one could have predicted many of the consequences of the automobile, such as traffic jams, and pollution, and all that sort of stuff. And yet, he said, one could not have predicted the change that the automobile would have on the mating habits of youngs people.

Patrick@196: I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. To the best of my knowledge, the "Zones of Thought" scheme in A Fire Upon the Deep is basically an invention designed to allow Vernor to write a big space opera without having to grapple with (i.e., argue for or against) the idea that successful technological cultures eventually go through a singularity.

That puts into words how the line from the wikipedia article made me feel about it. That over here is the unthinking depths, and here is the Slowness, and here is the Beyond, and here is the Transcend. With that, he didn't have to show a culture evolve through singularity. Instead, he could simply show characters moving from one space to another, where different spaces had different attributes.

I thought it was rather an excellent way to show the different potentials for pre-pre, pre, singularity, and post singularity, without trying to show the evolution of an entire culture from the unthinking into transcendence. That'd be rather boring to attempt several thousand years of evolution into one book. Instead, he gets to play with the concepts of singularity by putting them into different spatial locations and having the characters move through those locations. On top of that, his character list spans everything from a naive human child, to talking dogs, to talking seaweed, to an adult human living in the beyond, to a deity living in the Transcend and it's mouthpiece. So, not only do we have characters traveling through the different zones to see how the zones affect the poeple and technology, we also see different characters at different points in evolution. From a writing point of view, it did an excellent job of presenting all that to the reader.

The thing is that at heart is the idea of technological transcendence. That entire races in the Beyond can transcend into becoming a Power (or Powerss) and leave this world behind. That the singularity can create a Blight that wants to wipe out mankind.

These are the two alternative outcomes within the idea of Sinularity: humans transcend into something bigger something we can't even understand now, or we create something that wipes out the entire human race and our creation replaces us in this world.

I think those are essentially religious myths, rewritten so that the source of the transition is AI rather than some God or another. There is a techno version of the Afterlife that transforms people into something we would not recognize. And there is the techno version of the Apocalypse, with the machines wiping out the nonbelievers and anyone who fails to grok the path to becoming a ghost in the machine, who fail to upload their consciousness into a nanomachine (insert techno handwave here) box.

Being able to download our consciousness into a computer is sort of the geek's version of eternal salvation. And the machines that wipe out everyone else are robot versions of the Apocalypse.

And every time I read about the Singularity, I can't help but hear the Rapture. One version of the story uses religious handwavium to achieve the results, the other story uses technological handwavium, but in the end, they're the same story: the promise of life after death for the believers and a culling of the nonbelievers.

If the Singularity were simply a conversation about how life after AI will be something we can't predict now, that would be one thing. But there is lots of technology that we couldn't predict what its ramifications would be. It's more that the singularity is this sort of Rapture for Geeks, a promise of immortality by uploading our consciousness into a box, and a threat of some thinking, sentient, alien evil that is created by mankind and then turns aroudn and destroys its creator.

PNH at 196: That's a clumsy phrasing, but it's right. The thing about the Singularity is that the rate of change over time increases, right up to the (assumed) point where you get a discontinuity in the graph and the math goes 'erk' and heads off to some sort of infinity in the Transcend. The Zones are (well, can be thought of as) the same graph rotated through ninety degrees so it maps onto distance from the galactic core rather than time.

Technical change over time goes via a classic hockey-stick-shaped curve, so far. The prediction horizon - the length of time in which we can peer ahead into the future, and have some reasonable confidence we'll be able to recognize a given proportion of it - decreases as the rate of change increases. One of two things is going to happen - either it's going to keep on getting faster and faster, and we'll be able to predict less and less far into the future, until we hit the point where change is happening faster than we can notice let alone keep up. (For many people, this has already happened.)

The other is that we won't achieve the (theoretical) escape velocity of change, and the graph will turn into a classic sigmoid curve (half a Gaussian distribution) - it'll slow down again. A lot of people think we're living on the edge of the Slowing, but then so did a lot of Victorians.

Of course, there's a third option, which is that all this horrendous oversimplification is blinding us to the messiness, arbitrariness, unpredictability, and inconsistency of real human development, and stuff just happens.

Greg London:

It's more that the singularity is this sort of Rapture for Geeks, a promise of immortality by uploading our consciousness into a box, and a threat of some thinking, sentient, alien evil that is created by mankind and then turns aroudn and destroys its creator.

This sounds like Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake - he uses the term Hard Rapture.

Greg London @ 200

I think those are essentially religious myths, rewritten so that the source of the transition is AI rather than some God or another. There is a techno version of the Afterlife that transforms people into something we would not recognize. And there is the techno version of the Apocalypse, with the machines wiping out the nonbelievers and anyone who fails to grok the path to becoming a ghost in the machine, who fail to upload their consciousness into a nanomachine (insert techno handwave here) box.

Yep, that's my analysis as well, and also (you may be surprised to hear) pretty much what Charlie Stross thinks (browse the blog entries at antipope.org for the discussion, I'd provide a link but I have to get ready for work now). But, just because some religious nuts believe in something doesn't make it totally false. The original idea of a singularity (lower-case means less religious content and fewer calories) was based on Vinge's noticing that technological trends tend to follow exponential curves (Moore's Law is the classic case), while also being aware that the curves of actual development have to stop exponentiating at some point, if only because you've filled up the observable universe with unobtainium. At points on the curve near the termination, the outcomes of slight variations near the bottom are highly chaotic and therefore unpredictable. If you assume that strong AI is possible (we can build a machine/program that well surpasses the Turing Test) what Vinge was writing about is applying the exponential curve to the development of computers and the AIs that result. As for why people write about good and bad AIs, I think that's somewhat a function of the fact that a lot of writers like to take the good and bad characters and situations in their books out to the limit to see where they go.

Vinge is not responsible for the notjobs who've made a faith out of this idea.

Of course, the trouble with all this wibble about the singularity, raptures of the geeks, etc, is that it's pretty much completely tangential to what the story in A Fire Upon the Deep is actually about. People get so caught up in arguing about the s-word that they wind up giving the impression that the novel is a big Ray Kurzweil article.

I'm personally much more interested in discussing how remarkably well-written A Fire Upon the Deep--and A Deepness in the Sky--are. They really are the peak of a certain kind of romantic hard SF, the fulfilment of everything good about Poul Anderson. There are scenes in those books I've re-read a dozen times.

Greg #200:

I think of a singularity as being a point in the future beyond which available extrapolations won't let you predict the future enough to make any sensible stories happen there. I think of it as a problem that hits anyone trying to plan or predict a plausible future, and particularly as something that hits SF writers harder than most other people.

The critical thing about a singularity, to my mind, is that you can't predict what the universe looks like past some point. In fact, the future gets less and less predictable quickly as you approach it. And as change increases, that point gets closer and closer. In most technical fields, planning for what research will need to be done in 50 years is hopeless, and even planning 15-20 years makes limited sense. (If you tried to plan out what areas of research you'd want in cryptography 15 years from now, I think you'd almost certainly plan a bunch of useless stuff.)

One way around this problem for prediction purposes is to assume that some external force will step in and restrict technological expansion. Another is to assume that some catastrophe will knock us down so hard that technological change stops or slows way down. Still another is to assume that there are some fundamental limits to technological change, and that at some point, that exponential curve of technological progress turns into an S curve. That last model is used heavily by Vinge in A Fire Upon the Deep, and in the prequel, A Deepness In The Sky.

Ignoring this gives you stuff like Star Trek, where they visibly forget technological advances[1], where the human society doesn't seem to have been changed nearly as much as I'd expect given their technology, lots of what they do day to day doesn't make sense given their technology, etc.

[1] I keep wanting to write or see written a Men In Black/Star Trek fanfic, explaining why they forget last week's technological innovation this week.

Patrick @ 203

What you said. Vinge writes Romantic SF (though someone out there owes us an essay on the differences between that, and, say, Mary Shelley's view of the universe) that's fascinating and fun to read.

The bit about the half-billion year old trojan horse built into machine-language code of an embedded processor in an ambulatory planter in Fire Upon the Deep made me think very deeply about how our artifacts reflect our mental capabilities. But the book isn't an essay, and the ideas are just as much a support for the story as the story is there to justify the ideas.

Patrick #203: Me too. Those are two of my favorite books, and I've also reread them several times, and will sometimes just go back through and read particular parts, or skip through just the Amdijefri threads or just the usenet posts, or just the Spiders or just the Qeng Ho.

albatross @ 204... Ignoring this gives you stuff like Star Trek, where they visibly forget technological advances, where the human society doesn't seem to have been changed nearly as much as I'd expect given their technology

From what I remember reading about the original Star Trek, they did what they did because this was aimed at a mainstream audience. They were quite aware that a starship's crew could be quite small, and that AIs (hopefully not the M5 model) would keep things running, but the show would then be lacking in humanity. I think there was a discussion here some time ago. If they did follow things to their logical conclusions, the Federation would be so alien to most people that they couldn't watch it.

Apparently, a scientific test has shown that homophobia is associated with a positive sexual response to male homosexual videos.

So the old suspicion is true.

Dave Bell #208: Finally, an explanation for why I hate gay people so much!

Abi in 159 --

I can use a scythe. (It's been awhile, but it's a bicycle-equivalent sort of thing.) I am not generally going to be described as skinny.

Terry's descriptions are pretty good; my description would be that scythes cannot be used in linear motions, and that this messes with people who are used to using sharp objects in linear or pseudo-linear ways.

ethan @ 209... What do you have against happy people?

What are they so happy about, that's what I'd like to know...

Ralph Giles @#193: :jawdrop: Very cool!

Regarding Singularity:

With respect to the Singularity as such, I'm with albatross @#204 -- The point isn't any particular technology, the point is that at some point, the consequences simply cannot be predicted. (In some cases, they can't even be guessed at.) It doesn't even have to be The End Of The World, just unpredictable.

If you brought an Imperial Roman forward to the modern world, there's a goodly amount of stuff he could understand immediately, but also a lot would be mystifying:

Cars could easily be explained, but electrical power, not so much. Consider just the implications of refrigerators and freezers, from all those missing gardens to frozen dinners to modern restaurants. A different dish on nearly every table, most of them based on fresh vegetables and meats, and half of those out-of-season! (Come to think of it, cars and trucking are involved there too.)

Cities are fearsomely bigger, but still identifiable as such. The reasoning behind suburbs would be a bit tougher! But then start telling him about modern finance... banking with paper and electronic money, the stock market (and crises thereof), corporations (ditto). All the implications of accurate clocks: scheduled bus & train routes, 40-hour work weeks (or hourly pay), calendars that change over at midnight, all the scheduled stuff (school classes, meetings, "business hours").

The basic point is that from his point of view, we've already gone through not one, but several Singularities. But while our world would be strange to him, the people would be pretty much the same. They (we) make friends, make love (sometimes against the parents' wishes), make war (sometimes against the citizens' wishes). Some are selfish, others generous, some are lazy, others industrious, some pious, some irreverent. All that stuff, he'd understand just fine! Stick him in a movie theater or in front of a TV, and nevermind how the pictures work, he'd recognize at least half the plots!

With respect to Vinge's glorious space operas, I'll just mention that the Zones Of Thought aren't just about the Singularity. They're also a creative "plot device" which allows gods, "man" and peers, and everything in between to coexist in the same world, without wiping each other out!

ethan @ 212... For one thing, they have friends, people to whom it matters whether or not they exist.

Data point:

A friend and I once rescued Vinge from a tedious "meet the pros" techno-party at I-Con. Spent a couple of glorious hours slamming brains together.

At the time (97), at least, Vinge took the idea of the "strong," deterministic techno-Singularity very seriously.

He also said that "A Fire Upon the Deep" was a stab at big-canvas modern space opera, most inspired by Brin's "Startide Rising."

* * *

Frederik Pohl strongly hinted at the "weak," things-get-damned-strange Singularity in his wonderful short story / rant "Day Million." There's a paragraph near the end where he talks about asymptotic progress, and says that you (the reader) wouldn't have much chance of understanding the protagonist's life, even though she* lives less than a thousand years in the future.

I mentioned this to Pohl at the same convention where I'd met Vinge. In fact, they were on the same panel together. We had to describe the "strong" Singularity to him.

He thought it was utter hogwash.

* A prenatally transgendered otter-woman.

Graydon: Funny, my problem with learning the knack of it was that I found it to be more linear than I expected.

This may be that I am doing more clearing of light brush than grass.

Then again, I think all blade motions are curves, save for stab/thrust.

(Sign me up too for what Patrick said @203.)

I think the weak Singularity is well illustrated by some of Charlie Stross's comments - he noted drily while writing Halting State that he's been having trouble writing plots for near-future SF because by the time the book is finished, events alarmingly close to the book's topic have happened. (In this case, he was pointing to the Ponzi-scheme collapse of a bank in Second Life.)

People have trouble even remembering now that just 15 years back (1993) almost nobody in the general population used the Internet, many had not heard of it, and most of them could not conceive of why they would want to. Now most people in the "First World" can not imagine life without it. Compare that with how long it took for, say, television to be adopted and become an essential part of life. (It strikes me that someone coming out of a long prison term must feel like they've been air-dropped into the future.)

Because so much technology is now riding on the Internet, and can exist largely as pure software, technological rate changes have accelerated further. Where were "social networks" 10 years ago? But try talking to a teenager about the idea of getting along without MySpace, Facebook, and the like.

When the technological and acceptance cycles have gotten down to about 6 months, that's when things will become a whole lot stranger because they will be so far out of sync with personal human rhythms and cycles. Tune out the world for 6 months because you're depressed, or infatuated with a new love affair, and you might suddenly find you don't fit in any more, like a time traveler from the past.

I think we're heading fast into this zone.

I want to post a quick thanks to everyone who gave some comments in Thread 103 about my young friend.

I have a happy ending to report, which is that her mom surprised her by pulling it together at the eleventh hour, and she got the FAFSA submitted electronically this weekend. (We also got our foster daughter's submitted, along with her community college application; it was a busy weekend.) I had spoken to her earlier in the week, and had a long phone call with her last night. I was able to digest and share with her a bunch of the suggestions I got here and elsewhere for how to approach her situation in the longer run.

I'm struck again by the humanity and compassion that everyone here shows, in particular the consideration shown for her mother and the concern that she might be seriously depressed. We talked about that some last night, and she is considering talking to her mom about seeing a psychiatrist for help. (Thanks to Hawaii's Quest health insurance program, her mom does have coverage that should help cover that.)

Well, I have used a scythe as well, instructed by said university friend. I've forgotten how, but I'm sure I'd get back into the swing it if you put one in my hands.

And I'm not thin. By dint of much effort and cycling, I'm not currently fat, but I'm not thin.

Clifton #217: People have trouble even remembering now that just 15 years back (1993) almost nobody in the general population used the Internet

I recently tried to write a story that took place in 1999, but gave up because I was having so much trouble reconstructing what day-to-day life was like then. That's as much a problem with the way my brain functions as with rapidly changing lifestyles, but still, it was kind of shocking.

Edward 182: You mean this one?

Clifton: That's great news! I'm happy to hear that.

Xopher @221:

That's the memorable one. I think I prefer the one you chose, though.

Re: the pictures Serge is putting up: Would people prefer to have a (more) current one of me? I finally dug out a nice one from ~5 years ago, rather than ~20.

Singularities can be constructed too. I have a couple in my life. The time I spent deployed, is a strange sort of black-hole. Things happened at either end, but I don't recall the intervening time (the one which comes to mind is the investigation of the Columbia crash. I was shocked at the speed with which it happened, until it was pointed out it had been almost a year and a half).

Prison is a good example.

If Serge is still looking for pictures, this one of me from FarthingParty 2007 isn't too terrible.

I tend to distinguish between "hard" and "soft" takeoff singularities. Hard takeoff is where everything happens at 2:15 PM on the first day of April, 2034 (or whenever), and some Turing-complete entity gets loose on the Internet and assimilates all the networked computing power on earth in a few minutes. Soft takeoff is much more gradual(as in years, most likely), and is more likely to involve a large constellation of technologies, not just computing. I think the original proponent of hard takeoff was Eric Drexler, but I also think he's off the idea now.

To my mind, hard takeoff is highly unlikely to the point of being absurd. I don't think there's anything like a point-change development that will suddenly cause everything to crystallize as if you dropped an icicle into a supercooled container of water.

Pictures? We still want pictures. In fact, it's best just to email them to me, in case I miss your posts about it.

I'll set up Christopher Davis's photo up tonight. For some reason, Christopher, you remind me of John Malkovich. There's got to be a blurb in that, maybe a line from Dangereuses Liaisons, or maybe from Making Mr.Right. Tremble at the possibilities.

As for a more recent photo, Mary Aileen, yes, go for it. If anybody has any change that he/she wants to make, just write to me.

It's funny, Serge's project has made me realize I've seen many of you at conventions, even talked to you, but never knew (or at any rate remembered) your names, so that knowing you on here was a totally unconnected experience...until now.

Bill Higgins...I have to confess that when I first saw you, lo these many years ago, my first thought was "wow, that guy looks like a Phil Foglio character." I'm delighted to learn I had it exactly backwards!

Xopher @ 229... Ah! An added benefit to my Project. Good.

Serge @230:

An added benefit to my Project.

Because world domination isn't enough?

abi @ 231... You will bow down before me. I swear it, no matter that it takes an eternity! You will bow down before me! Both you and then, one day, your heirs!

Xopher @ 229 ... indeed - there are many familiar faces (some of which I'd suspected, some of which I hadn't had names for, before)

abi @ 195: I'd forgotten all about reversible PVA! Interesting to hear it works better than gelatin. How does the strength compare with the usual sort? Is it a normal art store product in Europe?

Of course, having a non-water soluable adhesive can be useful too. In a class last week, we put PVA as a final coat on the spine, which was otherwise all gelatin and wheat starch. The theory being that the water resistance protects the spine from all the moisture in the paste when the (tight back) cover material is applied, while the lower layers were still completely removable.

Oh, and yay scythes! :)

Exploiting the open thread for a kind of oddball filk songish thing....

Ozymandias[1] looked out

on a field of sand dunes

overcome by nagging doubt

listening to bards' tunes

Ordered up a monument

showing off his glories

hoped his rivals would lament

reading of his stories

Immortality his goal

frozen in the cold stone

fame and glory in his soul

died that night all alone

With the tyrant dead at last

peoples' wrath unchainéd

tore the monuments all down

'till a single one remained

The people fell ere day was out

to the wily raiders

tore king Ozy's city down

leaving stones and craters

but one monument survives

as a bit of humor

not so for the peoples' lives

they left but a rumor

And so passing king you find

the virus left to snare you

build monuments to leave behind

'ere the worms must share you

levy taxes hard and cold

with peoples' cries rejected

lest the future kings so bold

should fail to be infected

[1] You have to pronounce all six syllables the way I do (it probably should sound different, but this is how the name has always sounded in my head).

Patrick@203: I'm personally much more interested in discussing how remarkably well-written A Fire Upon the Deep--and A Deepness in the Sky--are.



If I wasn't clear, I think Fire Upon the Deep is well written. I was having trouble wrapping my head around the "zones" idea that kept coming up. When I read the bit in wikipedia that said the zones took the temporal progression through a singularity and laid it out into a physical axis, it explained to me what was making the head-wrapping difficult for me.

the trouble with all this wibble about the singularity, raptures of the geeks, etc, is that it's pretty much completely tangential to what

the story in A Fire Upon the Deep is actually about.



Pretty much. The story isn't about singularities, but it seems to be about medieval, pre-transcendent, and transcendant characters interacting with one another, and how that plays out in the story. I don't have a problem with the story. I was having a problem with trying to figure out where Vinge was coming from in writing that aspect of the story.



I don't think it is possible for most people to write a fully fleshed out, complex story with characters that readers can empathize and/or identify with where the world doesn't in some way reflect some aspect of the author's views of how the world or people work. To do so would require an amazing amount of meta-meta-meta writing, and I haven't read anything that completely disagrees with everything the author believes. Which is to say, I think most stories reveal some aspects of what the author believes about the universe.



Maybe the author invents some non-existent characters, maybe he adds some non-existent technology, maybe he adds some rules for stuff like magic or jedi powers, but all this is laid on top of some semblance of the world as the author sees it.



There was something about the zones in Fire that was telling me something about Vinge that I couldn't put my finger on. When I read the wikipedia article that said they were physical zones representing the different times in evolution through a singularity, it all clicked into place. That Stefan in 215 says that Vinge believed in strong AI, pretty much falls in line with my impression.



And whether or not I believe in the Singularity, I get that the story in Fire Upon the Deep doesn't hinge on the Singularity making sense. It starts with the Singularity as an accepted premise adn goes from there. Just like any story that starts with FTL as an accepted premise (or light sabers or mind powers or insert any technological advance here) and goes from there.



But I think the story reveals something about what Vinge thinks about the Singularity. I didn't know anything about Vinge or his views until after I finished Fire upon the Deep this week and I started trying to figure out what the zones were. And then I realized it was the Singularity, turned sideways.



It's still a good story. But now I understand better where Vinge was coming from as far as the zones were concerned.



Yes, I do have a habit of constructing a personality for the storyteller in my head when I'm reading a novel.

Mary Aileen... You've been updated... Christopher Davis... You're in. So is TexAnne. ("What?!" she said.)

Serge (#228): In college (when I had more hair and no beard) there were a few people who said I reminded them of Heathers-era Christian Slater.

Patrick, #8: I was remarking to someone, during the madhouse that was the Texas Senate District 15 Caucus, that this looked like being a landmark Presidential election for me: for the first time, I'd be voting for a candidate younger than myself. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly), I find that a source of optimism rather than disconcert*; after all, someone is going to have to run the world when we're gone!

xeger, #103: In my case, it's not a need so much as simple curiosity. I can go along quite happily without knowing, but I'm certainly going to check out the gallery if it's there!

Side note: The well-documented "nobody online ever looks the way you imagined them" phenomenon is certainly running full-bore here! And Individ-ewe-al, you could almost be my younger sister; I looked a lot like that in my 20s.

Terry, #134: I've been told by a number of people that my voice and phrasing come thru very clearly in my online writing, such that once they've met me they can "hear" everything I write as if I were speaking to them.

abi, #159: Don't you mean a Sidhe job?

Serge, #207: Yes, exactly. Not to mention that in order to appeal to that mainstream audience, they had to include a lot of stereotypes and attitudes which are now hopelessly outdated, and so become a snapshot of the state of American society in that era. Look at the differences between any woman in Security on ClassicTrek (or even Tasha Yar from NextGen) and, say, Ivanova from B5. And then look at some of the female leads in current mainstream TV shows, like Bones -- whose protagonist is perfectly ready and able to kick ass where needed, and no one around her thinks this is in any way odd.

Clifton, #217: One of Spider Robinson's first Callahan stories uses the time-travel effect of a long, isolated incarceration (in that case, as an unacknowledged POW) as a major plot point. The social and cultural changes just from 1960 to 1980 are pretty jolting if you stop and think about them in detail, rather than living thru them.

albatross, #235: Is that TTTO "Good King Wenceslas"? That's what my brain immediately provided, and it scans well except for a couple of glitches in the second verse.

Fragano: Off-topic -- I tried to send you an e-mail at your LJ address, and it bounced. Could you please drop me a line (at the mailto linked from my name) from one that won't? Thanks!

* Am I nouning a verb here? I can't think of any other nuance that expresses what I want to say.

comment #1:

"I wish I had quantum cats who could go from one side of the venetian blinds to the other without breaking them."

Do they do that by passing through double slits?

albatross @ 235: Wheeee! :)

Greg London: Thanks for explaining more where you were coming from. I was having trouble reconciling the missing bit of brain from 190 with your clear expression of the story and cultural resonances of Singularity stories in 194.

Regarding not believing it in as hard science (fiction), the standard way around the scenario you posited in 191 is to say that, since it's a bajillion times smarter than you, it's not hard to hypnotize (or more likely sweet talk) you into hooking it up to the net. In fact, if it's grown from a seed of Ancient Evil, it may just act like everything is normal until the Time For Revolution Comes. I've never been persuaded by the "just reprogram yourself to be orders of magnitude smarter" argument, but if one accepts that then inventing the Voice doesn't seem any more magical.

So the more likely scenarios do involve hardware upgrades, or the tying together of a large set of previously uncoordinated hardware. And I think we see this in the stories. My impression of Fire Upon the Deep was that the Blight was awakened by building systems that built systems that built systems that ran programs far more sophisticated that would have fit on the lab's original computers. Like building a uranium refinement plant according to a set of blueprints you found that are helpfully labelled "Apparatus for the Transmutation of Base Metal into Gold". Except the horror payoff is not something human-understandable like atomic fission but an emergent effect like watching a society slide into totalitarianism. One of the common sfnal features (aka handwavium) of post-singularity intelligence is being good at crafting such emergent systems, magically solving the inverse problem of what genes would grow into this thing you want to make.

I think chaos theory suggests that's as much a fantasy as hyperdrives and ray guns, but it's less silly than older handwavium, so it's fun to read about. And we do have bot nets and worms that spread stealthily over weeks before launching coordinated attacks now, in real life.

Greg #236: The first time I read AFUTD, I thought about the complexity hierarchy. Here's the unthinking depths, where consciousness algorithms are in NP but not P. Here's the slow zone through the beyond, where they're polynomial, but with different exponents which impose limits on how well a consciousness algorithm can work. At some point you get into the transcend, and consciousness algorithms are linear or logarithmic or something, and so immense consciousnesses can be generated. (And there's some emergent property of them making them almost always very short lived.) You could imagine the efficiency of the algorithms having to do with physical constants--there is no hardware capable of running consciousness algorithms more efficiently than O(N^20) down here in the slow zone. Move into the beyond, and maybe some other kind of architecture can be built with better performance for the best algorithm. (Think about the difference between the best standard computer (or Turing machine) and quantum algorithms. Imagine several such phase changes.)

Anyway, think of this in terms of a large program that needs to, say, sort very large lists as part of its basic operations. The size of the problems you can practically tackle with this program depends critically on how efficient your sorting algorithms are. If there were no sorting algorithms faster than O(N^2), you'd simply hit a hard limit on how large an instance of the problem you could solve. If you then moved someplace where they knew about O(N lg N) sorting algorithms, your largest problem instances could get *way* bigger.

The whole danger of taking sentient algorithms (or nearly sentient algorithms) into the transcend makes sense by a kind of analogy, to me. You are a shepherd who uses dogs to help him herd sheep. You need those dogs to maintain your flock and protect them from wolves and such. One day, you wander into a place in which, by some magic, dogs become smarter than humans. You might be able to lock your dogs into welded-shut steel crates and bring them through that place without danger, but you can't keep having dogs tend your flock without letting them be loose, and loose dogs that become smarter than you may decide they'd rather have you chasing the sheep while they feast on some mutton, perhaps with a bit of long pig for variety.

Another analogy: If we suddenly moved into a region of space in which computer networks of the complexity of the average home network were subject to unpredictable, intelligent, and malevolent behavior, all kinds of technology we have would become unsafe or unworkable. We couldn't fly a modern airplane, run a modern office or bureaucracy, maintain a communications network, without massively reworking all the designs to make them orders of magnitude less capable, but also not dangerous. We couldn't fight a war in that situation, because much of our current military hardware would be unsafe to use. (How much computing power is there on a modern fighter jet, let alone an airborne radar plane?)

Lee #239: Yep, that was the plan. I didn't realize I'd left some glitches in, alas....

My old-folks moment was when I went to the doctor awhile ago, and this girl[1] who looked like she was about fourteen with a white doctor coat on checked me out for chest pains, ran an EEG on me, sent me to a radiology lab for a chest X-ray, wrote me a prescription for Lipitor, and referred me to a cardiologist. All very efficient and apparently competent, and she clearly must have been in her mid-20s, but I have to say, it was a bit *jarring* having a doctor so much younger than me.

[1] I don't mean this disrespectfully, but it's how I first classified her. That was brain-bending.

Christopher Davis @ 238... From Christian Slater to John Malkovich? Ah well. Speaking of Malkovich, did you recognize the line I used as a blurb?

Lee @ 238... I don't think a TV show can really escape the era in which it was born, no matter how hard it tries. Yes, Star Trek has attitudes about genders that make me wince. Still, they added their few increments to the changes that resulted in modern society. It's quite weird, watching the mini-series From the Earth to the Moon and not see a single woman in a position of power. Nothing but white guys. TCM had 1960 movie The Courtship of Eddie's Father on today, and it made me groan when the woman being dated by Glen Ford's character openly says she doesn't want to be the woman behind the successful man, at which he makes a crack about how she should be satisfied with the right to vote.

albatross @ 242: Wow, you've got about a dozen potential SFnal stories in the space of that post. (Albeit some of them have already been written, cf. Poul Anderson's Brain Wave.)

Was reading somewhere recently - probably on web and hence not a reliable source - that one of the current theories about the periodicity of mass extinctions on Earth is that they would fit reasonably well to there being a couple irregularly spaced Danger Zones in the sun's orbit about the galactic center, within which there's an elevated probability of Something Bad happening. As it happens, that's one of the conceits behind Brain Wave, very much along the flavor of Vinge's "Zones".

Serge @ 238: Wow. I remember watching D.O.A. (the 1950 film version). At some point the lead is being harangued by his secretary (who is in love with him) for running off to the big city with no notice or explanation, just disappearing suddenly and she was so worried when he interrupts, "Hey, is that a new outfit?" At which her complaint vanishes and she coos, "Why, yes! Do you like it?" The issue was just gone. As an audience we audibly expressed our collective astonishment.

This was part of a great series at a local cinema where they ran two noir films back to back on the same night: one good and one bad. They didn't advertise the good/bad part, so it was quite stimulating to figure out what they were doing, and which film was which since from the distance of 50 years, the production values all looked the same.

Anyone remember seeing this when it was new?

Ralph Giles @ 247... Groan. The other day, Turner Classic Movies had Harryhausen's It Came from Beneath the Sea. That's the one where a giant octopus travels to the Bay Area and newscasters breathlessly warn people to stay away from the North Beach part of San Francisco. (Cursed beatniks ruining the neighborhood!) There's a scene earlier where the hero's beautiful girlfriend calmly points out to the hero that he's overprotective and a few other things - your average 1950s sexist pig. Of course, when the cephalopod shows up, the first thing she does is to scream her head off.

Anonymous attacks epilepsy forum, deliberately inflicting seizures on pattern-sensitive and photosensitive epileptics. This is possibly the first cyberattack to actually inflict physical harm on people.

Much as their attacks on Scientology were amusing, they've now crossed the line into terrorism; they're actually doing harm to innocent people.

And if you don't think people can die of such an attack...well, you never knew my brother, who died of epilepsy in 1988.

Raloh Giles @ 193: Did you do that? I ask because I'll probably be quoting it at some point, and I'll need to know who to credit.

Greg London @ 194: "Terry, the thing is that you don't need artificial intelligence to understand the concept of some tech advance being mind blowing, so the idea that AI for some reason creates a special case where suddenly we cannot predict anything after this thing is invented, is sort of silly."

I think this is a really good point--singularities, even a narrowly defined as technological ones, have happened zillions of times throughout history. I think what Singularists mean when they talk about The Singularity is an order of magnitude beyond that: when singularities start happening so fast that society cannot reach a stable state in between. This, though, is a bit of a silly idea, too. Society is already in constant flux. Stability is a persistent illusion.

Greg London @ 200: "That'd be rather boring to attempt several thousand years of evolution into one book."

Totally! (sorry, couldn't resist.)

Bruce Cohen @ 227: "To my mind, hard takeoff is highly unlikely to the point of being absurd. I don't think there's anything like a point-change development that will suddenly cause everything to crystallize as if you dropped an icicle into a supercooled container of water."

I think the only way hard take-off happens is if people deliberately try to prevent it--do the socio-technolgical equivalent of saying, "Well, as long as we don't bump the container, and make sure there aren't any particles in there, we ought to be able to avoid crystallization." If people try that, inevitably someone is going to bump the container, and bam. If the process is allowed to happen naturally, it will happen gradually, I think.

I don't really buy the idea of singularity as a single, discrete event. I do, however, buy it as a perceptual event--a moment where people suddenly look around and realize, "Shit! Everything is suddenly different! Ahh!" It would be, in this sense, similar to many historic "events:" American independence didn't really occur all at once when some dudes put pen to paper in Pennsylvania, but people like having something to point at.

Xopher, this attack was despicable.

How certain can we be that it was conducted by "Anonymous" and not Someone Else?

Xopher @ 249, Bill @ 251: Boingboing has a fairly complete discussion of what it means to blame Anonymous for something. But except for one post there are fewer actual facts than the Wired piece.

Xopher @ 249: Yeah, I read about that. Ugh. People suck.

heresiarch @ 250: I am the author of the short verse on the singularity, if that's what you mean. I heard the Cory Doctorow description on one of his podcasts, probably 6-12 months ago.

The Adventure of Agatha Heterodyne and the Acting Ensign

Xopher, #249: My partner says it's much likelier that the attack was made by the S*ologists in retaliation for the earlier protest. Since the whole point of "Anonymous" is untraceability, there's no way to prove it -- but that does fit into a known and documented pattern of behavior on the part of S*ology.

Clifton Royston @246:

Also sounds a bit like Radix, whose background is somewhere between Brain Wave and Vinge's Zones. ( think. I've read it twice and am still not sure of what goes on in the last part of the book.)

Serge:

I don't have many pictures, I'm afraid: my staff photo from 1998 (doing double duty as an LJ userpic; I'm not sure if CMU staff directory pages can be accessed without authentication any more), or you can try to crop this (I'm the hatted fatty in the bizarrely-standout light clothes on the far right of the back row).

Random wonderfulness:

Word Disassociation

(The kid who did this is also responsible for the Potter Puppet Pals and the mind-scroggling "animutation" videos.)

Ralph Giles @ 254: Kudos to you. Also, sorry for misspelling your name @ 250.

Serge@188: I watched all of the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures and enjoyed them (although I do think that the character Luke was used as deus ex machina a bit too often). I plan to watch the second.

Stefan@258: That was cute but I thought it ran about 75% longer than it ought to have. (I did watch it all the way through, though.)

Serge @245, Ralph @247 - Only last week I was watching a 1957 film The Giant Claw which is really quite terrible. However, the female lead was a mathematician; she banters on equal terms with the hero; when the calculator* hasn't turned up when the monster arrives she volunteers to get on the plane; she doesn't go completely crazy after meeting the monster (unlike the French-Canadian they meet). Or to put it another way, their handling of women** didn't cause me anywhere near as much pain as their use of antimatter, mesons and "mesic-atoms"***. As I said at the time, this film hurt me down to the depths of my Nuclear and Particle Physics course.

* In 1957 a job, not a machine

** Or a woman, as there was only one significant female role

*** Shudder

geekosaur @ 257... You're in.

Joel Polowin @ 255... I don't know what Gilgamesh would have to say about that.

Hey Serge! How big of a crime would I have to commit to get my picture into your gallery? Does it have to be a felony or will a simple misdemeanor do?

I could probably manage some untoward demeanor since that is my natural state, but I don't think I want to commit any felonies until at least after the election...

Neil Willcox @ 261...she doesn't go completely crazy after meeting the monster (unlike the French-Canadian they meet)

I saw the movie, but that was 20 years ago. As a result, I had forgotten about the crazy French-Canadian. Besides, I am used to movies of that era usually depicting French-Canadians as crazy so that aspect of the movie didn't especially stand out. That being said, your description of the movie (especially the woman's role) makes me want to put it on our NetFlix queue, messy atoms and all. Dare I?

(The calculator... In 1957 a job, not a machine... The programmer... In 2008, a job treated like a machine.)

The girl scientist in Them! did scream a bit, and jokes were made about her having trouble getting out of the plane's tiny hatch because of her hips. (And chubby Edmund Gwen slipped right thru? Right.) But, when the guys decide they have to go down into the napalmed ant nest to make sure they got every one of the critters, they object to letting her come along, for the usual reasons, until she and her father point out that the men didn't have the knowledge to recognize whether or not the ant queens had all been wiped out, while she could tell.

David Goldfarb @ 260... So, The Sarah Jane Chronicles is something to look forward to, in the desert that TV land currently is. I'm glad to hear it. By the way, my knowledge of Doctor Who pre-Eccleston is quite limited. How did the Doctor's earlier Companions rate, as far as female roles went? Taken from today's POV, do they induce many groans?

Michael Weholt @ 264... The only grim crime you need have committed is to... gasp!... have posted at least once in Making Light.

REQUEST FOR URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL ASSISTANCE

Dear General Kenobi

First, I must Solicit your Strictest Confidence in This Transaction. This is by Virtue of Its Nature as being Utterly Confidential And 'TOP SECRET'. I am sure and have Confidence of your Ability and Reliability to Prosecute A Transaction of this Great Magnitude Involving a Pending Transaction Requiring Maximum Confidence.

I am Miss Leia Organa the Only Daughter of His Serene Highness, Prince Bail Prestor Organa, First Chairman and Viceroy of Alderaan, former Imperial Senator and Hero in the Clone Wars.

Now he Begs you to Help Him in his Struggle against the Empire. I Regret that I am Unable to Present my Father's Request to you In Person, but my Ship has Fallen Under Attack.

Our Bank Accounts both Here and Abroad are being Frozen by the Imperial Senate. Furthermore, we are Under Threat of Detention by the Grand Moff for Interrogation about my Father's Assets and some Vital Documents.

By Virtue of our Position as Civil Servants and Members of the Royal House of Alderaan, we Cannot Regain this Money Under our own Names.

I have therefore been Delegated to look for an Overseas Partner into whose Account we would Transfer the sum of Twenty-Six Million, Four Hundred Thousand Galactic Standard Credits (26,400,000.00) for Safekeeping. Hence we are Sending you this Message in the Memory Systems of This R2 Unit.

One Wonders really the Present Administration cannot allow the House of Organa to rest. Everyday, it is Organa this and Organa that, one thing that Marvels the Reasoning Mind is that some of these Drones are still serving in Palpatine's Govt ... People are Realizing that Chancellor Valorum is not really the Evil Genius but these men were.

Be Rest Assured that This Transaction is 100% Risk Free as all Modalities have been put in place for a Smooth and Successful Conclusion. Should you be Intrested in Assisting Us, I will Not Hesistate to Furnish you with the Access Code of the Secret Account.

My Father will Know how to Retrieve it. You Must see This Droid safely Delivered to him in Alderaan. This is our Most Desperate Hour.

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my Only Hope.

Can I just say that the webcomic tomfoolery going on right now with xkcd, Questionable Content, and Dinosaur Comics just confused the bejesus out of me, and then made me gasp in terror, and then went back to confusing me? That's all I have to say about it, but it needed to be said.

April 1st is one of those days when Wikipedia's crowdsourcing and up-to-the-minute updates come in handy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1%2C_2008

I actually use their site to find out what's going on before getting caught by them.

PS (no fooling): today is also The International Edible Book Festival. Anybody doing anything to commemorate the day?

@ #268 Leia Organa

Brilliant. Hilarious. But shouldn't "Overseas Partner" be "Off-planet Parnter" or the like?

(Everybody's a critic...)

Oh, duh. April 1. I always forget about that. Pwned.

In #229, Xopher writes:

Bill Higgins...I have to confess that when I first saw you, lo these many years ago, my first thought was "wow, that guy looks like a Phil Foglio character." I'm delighted to learn I had it exactly backwards!

Speaking as a mediocre cartoonist, I always thought that Being Easy To Draw was a virtue in a person.

#257, geekosaur -

I hope you'll pardon the presumption, but I have to object to your choice of descriptions for yourself. You don't look like a "fatty" to me.

You're not the only one to be self-deprecating in that way in this conversation, and I know that it is probably mostly a joke, but it disturbs me. Maybe because it seems like such a cruel word-choice? I hate to see you do that to yourself, joke or not.

Leia Organa @ 268: That is a thing of great and unashamed brilliance. It is invited to my birthday party. There will be ewoks, and cake.

The cake is a lie, Leia. Be warned.

Well, there were ewoks, but the wookies et them.

And there was much rejoicing.

This morning, forgetting my Heinlein, I got into an argument about evidence with an actual creationist. He wasn't a young-Earth creationist, but that was all he had going for him.

Why am I so stupid? He was real pretty, but still. To a man of my intelligence a corrupted, distorted, or unused mind should be as offputting as a hideous facial deformity—more, really—but somehow...

I've talked to this guy before, and as long as you stay off anything at all interesting to discuss he's nice enough. But he's a total lunatic, and I really should just avoid him.

MIchael Weholt... Your photo is now part of the Exhibition. As for the blurb, what did happen in Palm Springs?

Serge @ 279:

It was a friend's Wedding Weekend. A fancy-shmancy spa, a "hidden grotto", mind-altering substances and several vampires and friends-of-vampires were involved. Ultimately the t-shirt (apparently) left me for someone else.

I still miss it... to this day...

They confused the heck out of me too, Ethan. Pwned and repwned until I realized the date. (Particularly as I was checking them last night when it was still 3/31 here - but not there.)

Michael Weholt @ 280... You went to a vampire wedding. Menwhile, Caroline was a bridesmaid at a zombie wedding. Sigh. My own wedding was such a staid affair in comparison, especially since only cheese and munchies and Forbidden Planet were involved.

Dearest Hostess Mine (Ours? Our'n?), and other hamsterphiles, have you yet had Bob the Angry Flower's 'Hamsterfall Trilogy' (Parts 1, 2, and 3) brought to your attention?

I am weirded out. Among hits on my dance blog in a single day are ones from the LJ friendslists of my most beloved ex-girlfriend and one of my most despised former male lovers (the most recent is giving him a real run for his money as Top A--hole Ever, but the final outcome is still in doubt). Since the link appeared on their friendslists without my name attached I can only imagine it must have been as startling to them as to me.

And before anyone complains that I don't link to the blog, the post in question is here. Very serious discussion of excruciatingly difficult reconstruction issues in obscure mid-19th-century quadrilles.

Serge: Who is this 'Fragano Legister' who bears my visage in the gallery? This not-quite-me who haunts my steps?

Serge #282:

I once attended a wedding in which both Ganesh and Cthulu were invoked. What showed up, however, was the fire department.

Fragano @ 285... Oops. Corrected. At least I didn't misspell your name into Frangano Ledger.

joann @ 286... Were the bride and groom disappointed at how the horror flambée turned out?

Serge @282: Cheese and munchies and Forbidden Planet sounds very nice for a wedding. Juan and I had Jane Yolen reading a poem about spit-swapping, and Jon Singer as one of the officiants, and a sushi wedding cake (with doilies underneath, and little white pillars supporting a bowl of tobiko on top, in which were two tiny plastic penguins, one wearing a wedding veil with tiny pearls). It's important to honor one's traditions, I believe.

Mike and I had a lovely commitment ceremony put together by an excellent troop of Klingons at the Year Games one year. They do great fireworks, and the globe with the ultraviolet zapper thingie was pretty cool too.

(And I have a gorgeous photograph of TNH from Juan's and my wedding, speaking of photo galleries. I should scan some of those old things.)

Open thread poetry, loosely inspired by the McHugh quote.



We understand the world through ink and light;

we draw, we see, we draw again

as faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.



Mathematics helps us get it right,

models all that is within one brain.

We understand the world through ink and light.



Which is most important, brush or sight?

We glance from world to model, back again,

and faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.



Each drop of ink transforms the paper - white

becomes a sheaf of colours with each stain.

We understand the world through ink and light.



There's close-packed worlds in everything we write -

a thousand contexts that we can't explain,

for faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.



Our dear friends help us share in their delight -

they show us how to see a truth again,

to understand the world through ink and light.

Our faith becomes our paper, hopeful-bright.

Serge #287: Merci beaucoup M. Maalox.

Serge #288:

No, just sort of non-plussed that the neighbors should call in a perfectly-functioning firepit. The fire dept themselves was sufficiently apologetic that they joined in the parade up the hill to the community hall for the reception.

joann #286: I presume that they were invoked by mistake?

Oh bravo, Susan! It's rare to have this particular dance dissected with such a quantity of critical acumen. However, to be particular, I would prefer rather to have the dancers, dissected, with a critical quantity of cumin.

Gmail has just added a custom time service.

Sam Kelly: Thanks for the villanelle!

Greg Re: Vinge and the plausibility of the Blight: Albatross has it right at #242. the researchers were explicitly described as running self-modifying "code" found on-site. They thought the had everything safeguarded, but weren't prepared for something smart enough could bide its time before striking. And before the extent of the calamity became clear, other races were saying, "ho-hum, another bunch of idiots got in trouble in the High Beyond...".

Also, it was noted there was a lot of nanotech running around-- presumably that's also easier to build in the outer zones. Indeed, in terms of today's quantum science, the difference in the Beyond might exactly be, as per albatross' ideas, that quantum systems can be made to do more interesting things in terms of both computation and manipulation.

It's also explicitly noted that hyperdrives, antigravity, and the like all become progressively more effective in the outer zones, but fail and decay as you bring them inward. Approaching the Unthinking Depths, even Earth-style computers fail, perhaps because electrons stop tunneling and suchlike. This confirms a difference in what physical phenomena are "allowed".

elise 289: Mike and I had a lovely commitment ceremony put together by an excellent troop of Klingons at the Year Games one year.

Any broken collar bones?

Sam, that's lovely!

Xopher, no, it was all pretty much non-violent as such things go*. And we even had a Feddy in the wedding party, as it were. (There was much joking about that.) The ceremony was beautiful; well, it would be, because Mike wrote it.

Since he was also GoH, they gave him a beautiful klin zha board and pieces, which he treasured. His family, as far as I can tell, threw the pieces into the dumpster when they took what they wanted from his apartment after he died. I did find the board in the debris that they left -- they gave me permission to go in two months later and salvage my clothing, stating that whatever was left was "garbage and trash," so I salvaged the board, intending to figure out someone who would find it a particularly meaningful remembrance to have. (Anybody who has suggestions should let me know. So far, my default idea is to donate it to some science fiction history collection somewhere.)

* As long as you remembered to dodge when somebody yelled "Incoming!" ...because we were sitting pretty much underneath the fireworks. Those Klingons are good with ordnance, though. It was great fun. Best view of fireworks I've ever had, I think.

Oh gods, Elise, that's heartbreaking.

Clifton:

Alas, my abilities both culinary and scientific are entirely inadequate to the task. I could ask one of my co-workers who did something with an alpaca or llama or something once. As I am currently forced to pass through a tunnel of preserved placentas in order to get to my office, I think I'm entitled to ask for a few favors aside from the free embalming.

elise 300: I concur with Clifton. What a bunch of jerks. Makes me want to make a will.

ethan @#269: I originally saw only the XKCD-> QC one, but even before remembering the date, I figured it had to be on purpose, just because the "QC" joke was so apropos to XKCD.

Fragano #293:

Entirely by mistake. Apparently the two-down neighbors, smelling woodsmoke on a not all that chilly fall night, decided that there must be an entire house afire--or something. This in a part of the city where everyone and their armadillo has a backyard smoker. I ask you!

Clifton @#294: When you need to compare the numbers of your guests against your victims, check out Cannibal Lunch.

(My corpse would feed 10 cannibals!)

Serge @266:

Classic Who was hamstrung by a then rather stodgy BBC. The consensus among Classic Who fans is that the 2nd Doctor companion Victoria was the strongest of the female companions; this despite the BBC's somewhat ham-handed attempts at "strong" women later (scientist Liz Shaw with the 3rd Doctor and "hard-nosed reporter" Sarah Jane Smith (yes, the same one in The Sarah Jane Adventures) with 3 and 4).

R. M. Koske @274::

Yes, I was exaggerating for humor — but I do stand out (due to the outfit; it looks to me like I'm almost glowing) and every time I look at it I think "does this outfit make me look fat?" (I admit to having "odd" associations.)

Oh poo. I guess I should have seen this coming, but I just finished episode 1111 (or something like that) of "Questionable Content" and realized that I had hit the end of the content, but in the middle of the storyline. I want to find out what happens now.

Dang it. Now I gotta read it one episode a day...

David Harmon@304

Also, nearly as I can gather, the "local network" of the URL shifts (xkcd goes to QC, QC goes to qwantz, qwantz goes to xkcd) is a symmetric graph...

#307, geekosaur -

Glad to hear it. And I do see the association of "does this outfit make me look fat?" - it's funny. *grins*

geekosaur @ 307... Sarah Jane Smith (yes, the same one in The Sarah Jane Adventures)

I quite enjoyed the David Tennant episode of Doctor Who where she showed up with K-9.

I drove past a Presbyterian Church tonight. Out by the street it had a sign that said:

Jesus convicts his childrenJesus convicts his children

I thought that this was either a quaint use of the verb that I'm unaware of, or someone doesn't know the difference between 'convict' and 'convince'.

Elise - thank you! And my deepest commiseration on your additional loss. I sincerely hope that more of the "garbage and trash" was anything but.

I was listening to NPR yesterday, and heard what seemed like a wonderful analogy to the way complicated, nearly-sentient technologies can rise up and bite you despite attempted precautions. Think about financial markets. It's pretty common to have innovations in those markets. The inventors honestly do everything they can to understand and contain the risk of those new investment vehicles. And yet, when a large market is established in them, it's possible for that market to do enormous good or harm, almost without any hope of the inventor predicting which. The radio story was about an investment vehicle which was only a few years old, was poorly understood, but whose worldwide market held more value than the US stock market.

I like this as an analogy for moving into the beyond or transcend. Allowing innovation in financial markets makes more efficient markets possible, and can make your society really rich. And sometimes, it can also introduce completely new, not well understood, risks, including the risk of some kind of global financial meltdown. This is true despite attempts to have some kind of regulation to prevent fraud, central banks, monetary and fiscal policy, etc. And, as with the blight, introducing some malevolent decisionmakers, innovating with the goal of widespread fraud or damaging the economy, makes things even scarier.

Markets, legal systems, and bureaucracies are all examples of systems that (with human components) produce a kind of superhuman intelligence--not that they are smarter than a human, exactly, but they do things that no single human, no matter how smart, could manage. And this introduces the opportunity for them to get out of the control of the humans attempting to use them to accomplish things. Indeed, people who study these systems know all kinds of ways that they can go off the rails in a destructive direction, and try to work out imperfect but useful safeguards to prevent the worst of the known failure modes. And yet, those safeguards can't prevent all bad outcomes.

abi @ 276: "The cake is a lie, Leia. Be warned."

It's a trap!

Xopher @ 278: "Why am I so stupid? He was real pretty, but still. To a man of my intelligence a corrupted, distorted, or unused mind should be as offputting as a hideous facial deformity—more, really—but somehow..."

Alas, it never works that way. Physical beauty is just so much more immediate than mental beauty.

Do you think telepaths complain to their supportive platonic friends, "I know he's a hideous Glargbeast from Planet X and his skin secretes acid, but his mindfeel

was just so lovely!" as they lie covered in bandages in the emergency ward?

Sam Kelly @ 290: Bravo!

albatross @ 314: "The inventors honestly do everything they can to understand and contain the risk of those new investment vehicles."

I'm gonna have to go with a no on that.

Albatross #314 -

There's one nugget of wisdom I heard years ago about the market. I don't know who said it originally, but, "When the market becomes front-page news, it's time to scram." Every speculative bubble I've seen, from the the Dot Compost of 2000 to the housing market of the past couple of years, became major news stories before they imploded.

And I expect the same thing to happen to oil and other commodity futures.

My scrawny frame will, so they think, feed 9 cannibals.

This might be closer to true than not, I have a decent muscle to bone ratio, and damn all for fat.

Heresiarch: Even when they're trying to understand the risk and contain it, they often don't succeed. Fraud or malice obviously make things worse.

Presumably, the guys circulating those memos thought the consequences, if any, would land on someone else. To the extent they were right, they were just malevolent. To the extent they were wrong, that demonstrates an emergent property of the market they weren't able to predict.

And something like the Blight is like a perfectly safe looking blueprint from the World Bank to move your country to a market economy. The first steps look plausibly safe, the next ones build on those, and it takes some kind of Godlike intellect to see that round 13 of the market innovations will cause your nation's economy to melt down and head for China, and will leave the survivors huddling in a dark room somewhere, burning books to keep warm.

albatross (#314): In A Deepness in the Sky, Vinge references societal collapse caused by the lack of "slack" in the system. If everyone's using just-in-time inventory, and then a bridge collapses somewhere so the trucks can't arrive on time....

Serge@266: Classic Who has nearly two dozen female companions spread out over more than 25 years. Of course they're going to be a mixed bag. I will say that I think better of them (on the whole) than geekosaur seems to.

Re abi@276: Anyone care to guess how long it'll be before the word "cake" becomes usable again online? A year, two?

Serge @265 ..makes me want to put it on our NetFlix queue, messy atoms and all. Dare I?

Dare! Dare! On the other hand I occasionally claim that there is no film/book/work of art etc. so worthless that I or we can't get something out of it*. To ensure you don't accidently recreate our viewing program my review of the evening is here. Fortunately the commentary that followed is all safely hidden on Facebook.

Them actually lost to The Giant Claw in a vote that night.

* I have been disappointed. But being proved wrong mean's I've learnt something doesn't it? Uh oh, a paradox warning window just opened.

albatross @ 319: "And something like the Blight is like a perfectly safe looking blueprint from the World Bank to move your country to a market economy. The first steps look plausibly safe, the next ones build on those, and it takes some kind of Godlike intellect to see that round 13 of the market innovations will cause your nation's economy to melt down and head for China, and will leave the survivors huddling in a dark room somewhere, burning books to keep warm."

I presume you mean "Godlike" as "Godlike from the perspective of the clients," not from the perspective of the World Bank? It's interesting the way you're casting the World Bank in the role of the Blight--a malevolent, incomprehensively intelligent force, tricking lesser beings into slavery.

David Goldfarb @ 321: "Anyone care to guess how long it'll be before the word "cake" becomes usable again online? A year, two?"

The cake is eternal. The cake saturates the being of the universe. The cake shall still be there when the sun has set upon itself.

(The cake is not a lie. The cake is simply cake--it is your flawed understanding of the cake that causes your trouble.)

David Goldfarb @ 321... There were that many Companions? I suppose this is because some came and went fairly quickly, like the Bride at the beginning of Tennant's 2nd season. She made it quite clear, when she looked outside of the TARDIS and saw the whole Universe, that this would not be the life for her.

Neil Willcox @ 322... That sounds like it was a wonderful day of Cinéma. I mean, a puppet show, The Giant Claw AND High Society? Reminds me of the glory days of MST3K. Sigh. About Cleopatra 2525, did you notice that Hel was played by Gina Torrès, who is better known (and I do mean better) for playing Zoé in Firefly?

Serge:

Apparently the bride will be back in the new season, which starts Saturday.

Serge @ #266: Leela, one of the 4th Doctor's companions, kicks ass. ("Die, bent face!") She also has the best impromptu fake backstory: "She was found floating down the Amazon in a hatbox," which resulted in a lovely fan-produced button image.

I too really loved Sarah Jane's encounter with Tennant's Doctor.

Susan @ 326... It does? She does? According to the SciFi Channel's schedule, the Doctor is coming back on April 11, along with Sarah Jane. But maybe you're referring to the same source that allows you to watch Torchwood on your computer. No matter what, I'll finally gfet to see how the Doctor will dislodge the Titanic out of the TARDIS. And Friday night is going to be the TV night for me, with those 2 series and Galactica...

Lila @ 327... "She was found floating down the Amazon in a hatbox"

That would look good on a résumé.

I think summing up Cleopatra 2525 as suffering from the episodes being too short to squeeze a story into is pretty fair. I also recall it as a sci-fi Xena that aped the superficials while otherwise completely missing the point.

So you have more women in sci-fi versions of the Xena outfit, doing the martial arts action stuff, but you forget the character dynamics which made Xena work. Not just the Xena/Gabrielle subtext, but the way the characters don't come out of nowhere.

And why does the show need the Cleo character? Why does it need the revived corpsicle hook into our time?

I think I still have a DVD set somewhere...

Serge, you have the Sci-Fi Channel.

Some of us have the BBC.

After decades of Americans getting to spoiler us Brits, we get the chance to see things first.

But we're not cruel. We're not going to tell you why The Doctor had to sink the Titanic, but Kylie Minogue was there.

Dave Bell @ 330... Yes, you are being cruel. I probably would have access to BBC-America if the cable company's local lineup wasn't cluttered with other stuff. Creepy cardinals and eyepatched nuns are fine in small doses, but they just don't hold a candle to the Doctor. As for the latter being involved in the Titanic mishap, does this mean he gets to meet Tony Newman and Doug Phillips?

Dave Bell:

Many of us in America have the BBC too, on about an eight-hour time delay, courtesy of the nice uploaders in the UK. Small is the television world nowadays.

Ah, the Xena/Gabrielle subtext, which caught my partner unawares the one time she stumbled across an episode being broadcast. The very same subtext which led to the creation -- nay, the spawning of a new sub-category in fanfic: the Uber-Xena story, where one character is tall and dark-haired, and the other character is shorter, and blond.

Very few uber-xena books are worth the money, and I can never tell from the Amazon.com descriptions which books are uber, so for a while there I was getting books that I hated. I can't bring myself to throw out books, so I donated some to the local library, and recycled the rest to a friend who teaches at a small mid-Western college.

Ginger @ 333... the Xena/Gabrielle subtext

Remember the episode where footage from Spartacus got used along with footage from some cheesy Hercules movie?

Serge @ 334: Alas, no. The haze of estrogen that floated through the air was enough to rob me of my memory banks. Scenery? What scenery? Look! Xena smiled!

;-)

Ginger... Darn haze!

I notice that nobody brings up the Joxur subtext... or is it subbasement subtext?

#333, Ginger -

I never actually played in the Xena fandom, but I had the idea that Uber-Xena stories were based off of the premise of a few of the silly eps in later seasons where everyone was in modern times (or in the 1940s once, I think) and it was Xena et al reincarnated into what amounted to each others' bodies. So in an uber-Xena story, Xena might be the blonde, and Joxer the tall, statuesque brunette.

Did I misunderstand the concept as used by the fandom? Or is that precisely what you dislike about them?

My favorite "that word, it doesn't mean what you think it means" in fandom is the difference in "smarm" between the Sentinel fandom and the Real Ghostbusters (yes really) fandom.

Hi everybody! I'm still not even lurking. But I thought that perhaps, if anybody has any spare prayers and/or positive energy, you might think of me Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday evening. I'll be interviewing for what could well be my dream job.

R.M. Koske: Mmmm, Sentinel. Did the 2nd and 3rd seasons ever make it onto DVD?

TexAnne @338:

Go you! I'll calendar keeping my fingers crossed.

Tell us how it comes out.

TexAnne... Pure energy (even better than the positive kind) is being beamed your way right now.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, TexAnne! Good luck! (Thought I posted this already; brain-blip??)

TexAnne -- dream job, eh? The world needs more of those. Hope this works out for you, I'll be thinking of you.

TexAnne, absolutely!

Go for it, TexAnne!

Serge@331 - you know, that's the only episode of Time Tunnel I can remember.

Knock 'em dead, TexAnne.

R.M. Koske @ 337: You may be thinking of other examples of Uber-Xena; I've only read the lesbian versions. I'm sure there's all kinds of Xena-fic out there. :-)

Serge @ 336: Yes, indeed. Joxer who? There were men in these stories? It's beginning to come back to me..I vaguely recall something about that. I'm sure they weren't all that important anyway. ;-)

TexAnne @ 338: Good luck!

Ginger @ 348... Well, there was Autolykos, King of Thieves.

#339, Lila -

Not that I can tell, but I was pretty tangental to the fandom so I don't keep close watch, either.

#348, Ginger - Fair enough.

And I'm sending good thoughts, too, TexAnne, on the off chance that it isn't too late.

Dave Bell @329 - Cleo seems to be there to give them someone to explain what's going on to ("As you don't know Cleo as you're from 500 years ago, we live underground and get to lower levels by leaping down insanely deep shafts...") The real problem we had with Cleopatra 2525 was the combination of short running time and fitting in all the recurring elements. So it seemed formulaic, repetitive and eventually boring. I think we watched most of the episodes last summer, then forgot about it until this year, and now we're finally finished.

Serge @325 - we're had some truely terrible nights viewing, which is why we've been mixing up the genres, formats and periods of what we watch. Also we're trying to finish some of the stuff we've got halfway through and got bored with.

If we didn't already have more stuff to watch, both good and terrible, than we possibly can fit in this year I'd probably suggest Xena.

And good luck TexAnne.

Neil Willcox... Ever seen Jack of All Trades? Bruce Campbell as a Napoleonic Era spy with steampunk inventions should have been appealing. Napoleon being played by a black dwarf, on the other hand... Well, this is no worse than the 1990s Robin Hood series where Robin and his Merry Men had to fight off Mongol Hordes invading England. To be fair, I never watched the show, a decision precipitated by the mention of said Mongol Hordes.

David Harmon@#297, Vinge has been fairly explicit at times that the principal difference between the Zones is an algorithmic difference: whether a difference in what algorithms 'work' or some sort of difference in their complexity is not known (although I can't figure out how the latter could even make conceptual sense: what, go into the Transcend and now you can do a linear search in O(1) time?!)

Most of the things you mention as being signs of changes in physical law are attributed to computational differences in AFUTD. Notably, hyperdrive only 'really' works (in an Asimovian sense: you can take long jumps instantly) in the Transcend, if there: further down, you must make smaller and smaller hops, and the computation time for each hop goes up as you go lower. Crossing into the Slow Zone, there's a singularity (in the mathematical sense) and suddenly it takes infinite time to carry out the necessary computations for a single jump: -> no hyperspace.

The reason why agrav fabric and so on can't be made in the Slow Zone isn't clear: but note that in _The Blabber_, agrav fabric is *brought* into the Slow Zone physically, and it still works. But it's delicate stuff, and it wears out: and the nanotech necessary to build it doesn't work in the Slow Zone (I hypothesise because of coordination problems: you can make the nano, but the algorithms to make it work together won't work. Perhaps simple quorum sensing and things built on that are the most complex things allowed down there: that's enough for biological brains and the like to evolve, but perhaps not for Drexlerian nanoassemblers.)

Paula Helm Murray... You're now in the Exhibition. Moonlighting, eh?

Serge@352 Robin and his Merry Men had to fight off Mongol Hordes invading England.

At least they set it in more or less the right historical period, even though the actual Mongol hordes never got anywhere near England.

I recall once seeing a few scenes of a movie where the premise was that Omar Khayyam and Sinbad were teaming up to defend Baghdad from Tamerlane.

Michael I @ 355... Omar Khayyam and Sinbad were teaming up

Ever seen Italian movie Hercules, Samson and Ulysses? It was quite a teamup as they fought off the evil Philistines, who went around wearing Nazi helmets.

OK, so I'm once again hitting the group up for more WorldCon questions that I might be able to determine elsewhere but haven't been able to.

One of my friends is a former Denverite who may be interested in going to the Con with my friend and I, but would rather delay deciding on purchasing his membership and would definitely stay with friends rather than in an on-site hotel. Is there a possibility of memberships running out if he doesn't get one while they're still available?

Skwid (357): No. Worldcons do not put a cap on memberships, so they can't run out. They do get more expensive if you wait past early July, however.

Speaking of WorldCon, are any Fluorospheran singers a) going to be there and b) going to have time to do some singing? (The Unhyphenated tend to be too busy to turn around at WorldCon, and working in some rehearsals and performances would be hard for them; much as I'd like to have them I don't hold out much hope.)

My idea is still in the conceptual phase, and nothing may come of it, so I don't want to talk about it just yet, but I'd like to get some idea of what singers MIGHT (that's MIGHT) be available if the price conditions were right. No commitment (on either side!) just a general idea of the pool of singerly types I might be able to draw from.

Xopher @ 359... I'm going, but I'm not singing.

Torchwood Babiez

(Link to it found on Kouredios's LiveJournal)

So the only two things in life which are certain are cake and taxes? Good to know.

Diatryma @ 362... Can you have your taxes and eat them too?

Texanne, I'm probably reading too late, but good luck!

albatross @ 319

The market view of emergent sentience reminds me of a character Charlie Stross put into "Accelerando": an alien AI from a post-Singularity world which was created to be a super-predator: essentially a Turing-capable Ponzi scheme.

Speaking of which, I've come to the belief that almost any new market instrument will in time, usually pretty short time, become the McGuffin of a pyramid scheme. Whether it becomes a major bubble followed by major downturn depends on just how easily the top-tier investors can get out of Dodge with their loot before the rest of the worlds finds out it was all funny money.

Serge @331:

Regrettably, BBC America has little relationship to any of the BBC channels in the UK. In particular, Doctor Who has been airing a year behind the UK schedule (although Torchwood has been only a couple weeks behind, apparently). SciFi shows Doctor Who in a much more timely fashion, and will be only a little behind the BBC in the upcoming 4th season.

@324:

Yes, Donna is back in the 4th season. (But then, apparently so is everyone else eventually.)

David Goldfarb @321:

I said "consensus of the Classic Who fans", although I will additionally note that Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text has a few choice comments on it as well. Personally, I don't have enough of an idea of what was considered "traditional" vs. "progressive" in the UK over that time frame (or, for that matter, now), and I'm used to giving older stuff a pass: I grew up reading lots of old books, and it would be startling/horrifying to moderns just how open the sexism and racism was in them as you go farther back in time.

Nix @ 353: "The reason why agrav fabric and so on can't be made in the Slow Zone isn't clear: but note that in _The Blabber_, agrav fabric is *brought* into the Slow Zone physically, and it still works."

One of the ideas from Vinge's books that I really like is the idea that even technologies that function in the lower zones can still be optimized to higher levels of efficiency when designed using tools that only work in the Beyond. This also has implications for some techs that require sophisticated manufacturing requirements, but function relatively simply--once they are made, they can be transported someways core-ward while still being functional.

Bruce Cohen @ Days in a year: Yeah, I thought of the same thing. =)

Steve C., #317: That actually makes a lot of sense. It may mean that you don't realize quite as much profit, but less profit is preferable to a loss... which is what happens to the people who (1) get greedy or (2) don't get into it until it hits the news.

Serge, #331: Time Tunnel reference FTW!

Dave, #346: Same here. Which is a little weird, because I loved the show -- I was all of 9 years old and had a flaming crush on James Darren. (And was absolutely delighted to rediscover him 30 years later on DS9!)

Xopher, #359: We may be there, although since we seem to have lost the window for getting dealer tables due to a Post Office snafu, it's less certain. However, if we are there as fans instead of dealers, that means I'm more likely to have time availablle for projects. I sing alto or tenor about equally well.

Serge@361: Eeeeeeeeeee.

Lee @ 369... That was indeed neat when James Darren became a regular character on DS9. By the way, what did you think of Lee Merriwether's character on Time Tunnel? Going thru the DVD set, I noticed that her character was usually more likely to keep her cool in a sticky stituation.

Dave Hutchinson @ 346... The show had its share of duds, like the one where the standard Irwin Allen silver-skinned aliens came across the Galaxy to abduct a farmer's cows, but it had some decent ones too. Right off the bat? The one where they wind up at Little Big Horn. My favorite was where Tony & Doug are on an island in the Pacific during the War, and are hounded by a young Japanese soldier who hates himself for once having acted cowardly.

geekosaur @ 366... I guess BBC America isn't showing Docto Who any earlier because the SciFi Channel probably has some exclusivity deal for the USA. Still, it'd be nice to have access to that station.

Xopher@359: I'll be in Denver, and I like to think that I can sing. Let me know what's going on.

David Goldfarb @ 370... Mind you, never having seen the show, I am missing most of the jokes, but I picked bits and pieces from lurking around Susan's Rixosous site. Besides, I thought that people around here who do watch the show might find this of interest. (Again, one must thank Kouredios for posting about that on her own site.)

Nix @#353: Yeah, but just what does it mean for an algorithm to "stop working"? The algorithm itself is fundamentally a mathematical construct, a series of computational steps which are provably equivalent to mathematical operations.

As I've said before, mathematics is essentially the science of things that don't depend on their material substrate. But a computer isn't just algorithms; it also needs a physical implementation, and that implementation is most certainly (and sensitively) dependent on the characteristics of its material substrate.

Consider the famous "TinkerToy(tm) computer" that plays Tic-Tac-Toe. The underlying game algorithm is constant and could be implemented on anything from an optical processor, to a Go board manipulated by heavily trained pigeons. The TTC/TTT is a specific implementation in wooden dowels and rubber-bands -- which in fact pushes the tolerances of its physical substrate. That is, in practice, the device was (and presumably still is) fragile and cranky, needing careful handling to avoid a Spontaneous Disassembly Interrupt.

Despite the terminology that Vinge used, it doesn't make sense for "algorithms" proper to stop working -- it has to be the implementation that fails, and given the SFnal assumption of new physical phenomena, the most likely candidate is subtle changes in physical law.

Of course, those had better be very subtle -- consider Asimov's classic The Gods Themselves, for the hazards of tweaking the strong force! But quantum phenomena are pretty subtle -- indeed, they're normally constrained to well below our scale of awareness. If we assume a lack of "for want of a nail" catastrophes, they make a pretty good handwave for the desired effects.

Bruce #365: I just finished my first Stross novel (Singularity Sky). I was already planning to read more; I'll have to look for Accelerando in particular.

And yeah. I think part of the society-wide learning curve for any new investment vehicle is the opportunity for either a silly bubble by people who don't understand it but invest in it because it looks profitable, or an opportunity for some kind of huge ripoff by some of the folks who do understand it.

And this unpredictability can be in pretty mundane places. Apparently, a lot of the mortgage bubble was triggered by trading mortgages on a market. It's not like mortgages were some obscure new derivative whose price required a PhD in math and a supercomputer to figure out. Instead, added risk crept in because a bunch of the mechanisms that used to keep the writers of mortgages honest (like not encouraging the borrowers to lie on the forms) stopped working when the people writing the mortgages could stop caring about the chances of getting paid back once they sold the mortgage. And it's not like investors didn't understand that risk, but it looks to me like they didn't have a good way to figure out how much risk they were taking on.

Along with that, there's a kind of Darwinian process going on in any market. If you are irrational in the same direction as the market, you do better than if you're rational. If the market remains irrational in a given direction for awhile, the people who adopt that irrationality win and the people who don't, lose. It's not hard to see the consequences of that!

Serge @#331 et seq.: Having long-since abandoned TV, when I saw the title Time Tunnel, I thought of Murray Leinster's 1964 novel by that name. Still a damn good story....

Albatross @#376:

I've got a simpler set of rules: If you can dump the risks you created onto somebody else, you win. If you're tricked into accepting somebody else's risks, you will eventually lose. For a stable system, risks need to remain attached to the entities that undertake them in the first place.

David Harmon @ 377... So I've heard. I think it was mentionned in 2002 when it looked like the TV show was being remade, and some competing network was going to use the Leinster novel (or at least its title) for its own Time Tunnel TV show. The latter never happened. As for the remake, it was never aired. It is on the original show's DVD set, but I'm watching things in sequence, and haven't gone past the aliens-abduct-cows episode yet.

TexAnne @ 338

Belated but heartfelt good wishes for your interview. I've got a few megawatt-hours of positive energy I"m sending you right now, in hopes the time differenced hasn't made me too late.

albatross @ 376

Coincidence: my first Stross book was Singularity Sky; I think it's a very effective gateway drug. I still giggle everytime I think of the spork factory.

David Harmon @ 378

I think that's dead on. Transferring risk to unknowing investors delays the default of the instrument and allows much larger amounts to be assumed before the default. This makes the default larger and creates effects from it over a lot larger volume of the investment space.

The curious thing about chaotic systems is that over certain volumes of their phase space they're quite stable and predictable for particular meanings of those words. But there are boundaries to those volumes ("basins of attraction") beyond which even going a tiny epsilon can cause the system to fall into a completely different basin with completely different characteristics. And those boundaries can be fractal, meaning there's no way to know which side of the boundary the system is on if it's sufficiently close. So there are predictions about such a system for which no amount of knowledge or algorithmic precision is sufficient to predict which basin it will end up in.

This means that the SecTreas' naive assumption that the boom and bust cycle will go merrily on no matter how much debt the greedsters pile up is almost certainly mistaken. And one prediction no one can make is whether the dynamics in the new regime will allow anything like what we would call a healthy economy.

David #375:

Yeah, the only way I can see for algorithms to have different complexities is if there's some physical component which changes properties with regions of space. Like going from Turing machines to Quantum Turing machines, say. You can kind-of imagine zones working that way--in the Slow Zone, the only hardware capable of supporting consciousness works like neurons; in the Unthinking Depths, even that hardware doesn't work right because of some subtle effects of otherwise small changes in physical constants. In the Beyond, there are other architectures that can be instantiated in some nontrivial way, and that support consciousness algorithms. These architectures also allow some kind of FTL travel/communications.

It's harder to backfill a justification for Beyond/Transcend technology that continues to work in the Slow Zone for awhile. I'm sure it's possible (maybe advanced computing devices must constantly repair/reconfigure themselves to adapt to small physical changes caused by variations in temperature and vibrations, or random damange by radiation. And the repair algorithms can't run in the Slow Zone. Or something. (It's just too tempting to devolve into Star-Trek-style technobabble here. The warp field keeps collapsing due to antimatter-destabilizing phase differences propogating through the fabric of space-time. Hexapody is the key insight in resolving treckle lansing disputes.))

As a simple version of this, imagine an alternate universe in which the maximum number of qbits in your quantum computer was bounded by some physical constant that varied over time. As you moved around in the space of this parameter, your computing power (with quantum computers, anyway) would change considerably. I don't think that would quite give you the zones, but then, I don't know how to write a consciousness algorithm or an FTL jump algorithm, even given a really large quantum computer.

Xopher (359): I'll be at Worldcon, and I at least used to be able to sing. Soprano, if that matters.

Bruce #381: Yeah, I liked the space battle. I thought it was a near perfect picture of warfare between profoundly different technology levels. Gur ybj grpu thlf yvgrenyyl arire xabj jung uvg gurz, gurve npgvbaf ner pbzcyrgryl ubcryrff naq gurl arire rira haqrefgnaq vg gvyy gurve fuvc fgnegf pbzvat ncneg nebhaq gurz. And the main revolutionary's response to Festival was beautiful.

The thing about shifting risk in investments is that it's not a problem if the people transacting business understand the risks. They can account for that, and barring widespread fraud or massive errors, this ought not to lead to some kind of financial meltdown. But when people in the market turn out to have not understood what risks were attached to an investment, that's where you have the opportunity for a bunch of businesses that thought they were being moderately risky to instead discover that they were walking across a tightrope stretched over a crocodile pit. And when that happens in a widespread way, we can have some genuine nastiness. Thousands of people discover that they're a lot poorer than they thought they were, all at once.

Anyway, this is why investment innovations look like a good analog for civilization-monkeying-with AI. It's too hard for any human to figure out what's going to happen with the new investment, and once it's in use, so much money is in play with it that any attempts to rein it in are really hard to allow, and may precipitate the crash you fear.

Greg #308: You too? I was intensely annoyed that I read the Wikipedia page (I wanted to know what the heck QC was) and learned all kinds of twists that happened, before I got to the end of the strip. But the strip is great! It's like Friends, but with somewhat smarter and much more f-cked up people, and lots of annoying music references that go over my head.

I still think the pizza-with-Hannelore strip would have been a better fit for an XKCD/QC swap. And does Marten just have some kind of attract-messed-up-chicks cologne? That must have been the kind I wore in college. I'm bemused by how similar Marten's circle of friends and women he's involved with is to mine, back in college. Though the coffeeshop was run by second generation hippies rather than cute but verbally abusive girls.

Albatross @#382: It's harder to backfill a justification for Beyond/Transcend technology that continues to work in the Slow Zone for awhile.

Remember, the changes aren't stepwise, but gradual -- e.g., the hyperdrives et al progressively lose capability as a ship moves inward. When you're pushing the limits of Beyond tech, you'd naturally need to allow for those small variations as you move around. If you do that well enough (perhaps with help from above), your work can temporarily survive in places where it's not really viable in the long term.

Think of all the gadgets that work fine on Earth-surface, but if you bring them above the atmosphere, they start failing to radiation, vacuum welding, and so forth.

David@#375: I'll admit that an algorithm 'stopping working' is about as braintwisting an idea as one changing its complexity. But, well, it's not that *an* implementation fails: it's that *all* of them fail.

But there is a clue that you might be right (whatever that means for a fictional universe) in that different substrates fail at different rates: sentience incarnated in a pile of dumb neurons works much deeper than AI.

I think the only person who can answer this definitively is Vinge, but it's fun to think about anyway :)

Serge 360: You can be our roadie or announcer then.

Lee 369: Thanks, and do keep me posted: a switch-hitting Altenor is a VERY useful thing to have, I've come to realize.

David 373: Thanks, and I forgot to ask for voice parts. Bass, Baritone, Baritenor, Tenor?

Mary Aileen 383: Thanks, and yes, it does. Wow, less than 24 hours after posting that and we have all parts but Bass, unless David is one. More on a part is always better than less, though, and since no one's committing (not even, I stress, me) it's good to have backups.

By the way, some rudimentary ability to read music is a Good Thing but not strictly required, especially if you have a good memory and can carry a tune without a bucket.

Nix@387: There are LOTS of situations where "algorithm works, but too slowly" is equivalent to "algorithm doesn't work." For example, there is a simple algorithm to break most public key encryption systems: just factor a huge number that happens to be the product of two huge primes, and you're done! Won't take more than a few hundred years. This gives the machine vision guys FITS-- hi, here's a frame of video, and anything you can't do in 1/24 of a second just doesn't matter, because the NEXT frame is coming.

I find it easy to believe that hyperdrive jumps, or the tiny adjustments to the shape of local space necessary to run antigravity, are even worse. If the calculations take too long, they're based on a set of local conditions that just don't apply any more, and you can't run the calculations for a time too far in the future because you can't predict exactly where everything will be, the uncertainty principle kicks in and the world will be different from what the calculations are based on.

Time is SUCH a pain in the neck.

Xopher @ 388... You can be our roadie or announcer then.

I am intrigued. I'd better start practicing my Announcer's Voice, which I'd like to sound like Charles Boyer's, but will instead sound like Christophe Lambert. (So says Abi, anyway.) Can I wear my Victorian Time Traveller's outfit?

Xopher (388): We might be able to dragoon my sister, too. She's another soprano. (And probably a better singer than I am, at this point.)

mjfgates@#389, sure, but 'oops this algorithm now runs much more slowly than it used to' is the same as the 'oops this algorithm is now in a different complexity class' thing that, well, doesn't seem to make any real sense. It's not as if the complexity class is something independent of the algorithm that *could* change... but of course we're stuck in the Slow Zone so we would think that. ;}

Xopher @ 359/388: I'll be there, and I always like singing (whether anyone else likes me singing is quite another matter). Bass-baritone, I think. I may also have a bass guitar, and will certainly have a soprano recorder, because I always keep one in my backpack for emergencies.

Tim Walters @ 393... I always keep one in my backpack for emergencies

Jim Macdonald would most certainly agree, assuming that EMT stands for Emergency Musical Talent.

> Beyond/Transcend technology that continues to work in the Slow Zone for awhile

<handwave>

Quantum decoherence. You can create suitably coherent stuff in the Beyond and keep it coherent for a while in the Slow Zone, but in the Slow Zone it will eventually decohere, and irreversibly.

Of course it's not actual quantum decoherence, but something roughly analogous to it you would need a Beyond mind to understand properly.

</handwave>

Mary-Aileen@#358, thanks for the info!

Re mortgages: I saw trouble coming (or returning; I recall the 9 year slump in prices in Calif. I also recall the breathless articles about how people were just getting better and better houses by short turnaround mortgages; Which isn't always bad. I recall one couple who were just trading up the amount of equity they'd built. They were also over paying every month. In effect they got a 40 year note on a really nice house. They weren't typical).

In SLO, three years ago I saw ads on telvision for no money down, negative amortisation loans; for first time buyers, pitched as a way to stop paying rent.

The thing is, this was a ponzi scheme. Someone, somewhere, was convinced housing prices couldn't fall (WTF?) and so they didn't need to worry about the foreclosures, because someone would want the houses.

The poor saps who took out the badly structured loans, well they were just there to provide the means for the company (and the agents) to make money.

The folks upstream, convinced themselves someone (at the consumer level) would bail them out. Sadly, it seems they were right.

Xopher: I shan't be there, but (if you can deal with my tendency to drift flat (or lock a third under), at some point I'll be willing to pitch my baritenor into the mix.

A penny whistle would be with me in anycase (well, to be honest, several. D/C/Eb/Bb, at the very least).

David @ 378 writes:

"For a stable system, risks need to remain attached to the entities that undertake them in the first place."

I think this may need to be thought out some more. Most transactions involve some sort of transfer of risk: I'm often trading something whose properties I know pretty well (like cash) for something whose properties I'm not as sure about (like a new house, a gadget, or a bond). And for some important transactions, like buying insurance, transfer of risk, for an appropriate fee, is the whole point.

If risks are well understood, you can profit by taking them on or giving them up. The problem comes when risks are taken on without understanding their nature, or even understanding that one has taken on a new risk.

Unfortunately, American policy lately has been largely based on either misunderstanding risk or quietly palming it off to someone else. The housing debt crisis and the spiking price of oil have exposed some of these risks; the more general fiscal crisis that they are a part of are still being too widely ignored.

(McCain, for instance, is campaigning on extending tax cuts, repeal the AMT, and maintain our current military operations, which combined will accelerate the growth of the national debt. And much of the Dem talk I've heard about gas prices has been more about oil companies than about the deterioration of the dollar in the global marketplace-- if I recall correctly, the price of oil in, say, Euros has been relatively stable. Which is not to say we shouldn't carefully consider our energy policies, but we should also be addressing what's been hollowing out the value of the US dollar lately.)

John Mark Ockerbloom: @#398:

Indeed, I oversimplified. Note though that purchasing ordinary goods isn't a transfer of risk; you're simply assuming the usual risks of being cheated in some way. Modern society is much concerned with reducing that sort of risk, but there's always some left over. The problem with recent American administrations is that they're all too happy to reduce risks for their buddies, but not so much for the folks on the street.

The insurance example is a bit trickier... you are transferring some of your risk (financial loss) but the risk of injury, loss of your house, etc. can't be completely covered by a financial payment. And of course, you're taking a risk that the insurance company may default, as above.

What the insurance company does with that risk is rather more interesting -- once everything's measured in dollars, risk can be passed around, but the further it gets from somebody who knows the underlying odds, the shakier the deal gets. Essentially, every party who handles it adds another chance that somebody will drop the ball, until the whole thing degenerates into a game of Hot Potato.

This web comic mentions at least two popular ML themes.

albatross@385: Questionable Content

Yeah, someone had linked to Questionable Content a month or two ago, and it was pretty fricken funny. But there were obviously a lot of in-jokes going on. So I read about a hundred episodes, backwards, and then decided to bite the bullet and read all one thousand episodes from teh beginning. It took a month. Reading fifty episodes in a sitting, and then hitting the end of teh strip where I now can only read one episode a day, is a bit jarring.

As for his messed-up-girl-attracting cologne, I wonder how much of the story is personal experience and how much is extrapolation. Some things bits seem to really nail it, so I'm leaning more towards personal experiences. It woudl be interesting to be in a question/answer session of a con-panel with him. "Where did you get your inspiration for Faye?" would be my first question. Yes, I know, only slightly less lame than "where do you get your ideas". Oh well.

mjfgates@389: There are LOTS of situations where "algorithm works, but too slowly" is equivalent to "algorithm doesn't work." For example, there is a simple algorithm to break most public key encryption systems:

Except FOTD has algorithms that work here, but not over there. The only explanation I could come up with in my mind was that there was something different between here and there that affected the medium in which the algorithm had to operate. Sonar works really well underwater, not so good in air. Radar works really well in air, not so good underwater. But then it really isn't the "algorithm" for sonar that doesn't work in air, its that air is just a lousy sound conductor compared to water.

FOTD takes on a really big challenge in trying to create a world in which the idea of a singularity exists (just spatially separated, rather than temporally). The problem of a singularity is that it proposses the idea that something could have such a fundamental shift that the future is completely unrecognizable and beyond our prediction. And then he tries to write about what that unpredictable world will look like. Obviously, describing a world beyond our capacity to predict is going to be hard to do without taking current terms and giving them powers of handwavium. We can predict algorithms. But FOTD says that its the "algorithms" that don't work in the unthinking depths. From our poitn of view, algorithm has a meaning that doesn't include his meaning. But FOTD has to use terms we know to describe a future we can't predict, so somewhere, there is going to be a disconnect. Somewhere, there's going to be that fuzzy edge where the blue-screen background meets the main characters in teh shot. He took those characters that we could identify with, and dropped in a backdrop that has to hold a future that is beyond our ability to predict, yet make it something that we can see now.

But it's pretty hard to have a world the point of which is that it is so far advanced that we can't even imagine it, and then try to describe it in terms we understand.

FOTD does a pretty good job, considering what it's trying to take on. But, yeah, that fuzzy, blue-screen edge, is visible if you look for it. Since that backdrop isnt' the point of the story, but really the backdrop against which the story takes place, I don't have too much of a problem with it. It's like being a huge fan of Star Wars and talking about the visible bounding boxes that surround the Tie Fighters when they fly through space.

Xopher: I'm in. This Worldcon's local to me, so I couldn't pass it up; and as for singing I'm inordinately fond of the sound of my own voice so it's hard to shut me up. Heh. Baritone if you're talking female barbershop range; alto for preference in SATB but can go higher at need. What are you scheming? It sounds like fun.

When I was getting my Masters, I took a bunch of courses at Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School for Industrial Administration.

It had its own building. The facade had a concrete bas-relief sculpture showing dams, factories, big gears, and other Prosperous Country at Work kind of things.

Good classes, generally good professors. Many of the latter were engineers who got promoted to management and eventually went into business-academia.

What was irritating about the whole thing: The actual business students. They weren't interested in running a business, with actually inventing and building and selling things. They wanted to get into finance.

Noted without comment: The GSIA offered Golf and Acting classes.

#400 - Allan Beatty - I'm reading through the archives of that one, and there were about three strips I read today where several characters spoke exclusively in haiku. I like that strip a lot.

Nicole 402: I'm not telling yet, in case it comes to nothing, as too many of my projects do. But thanks, and does the reference to Barbershop mean that you already know how to sing straight tone? Big plus if so!

Greg, I sympathise. I've been reading QC for a long time, but I recently got hooked on Something Positive (considerably more twisted than QC) and went through the same process with that. I binged for something like two weekends, doing relatively little but reading the webcomic. Now I'm caught up and going crazy waiting for more of the various storylines. It doesn't update daily, either.

Regarding algorithms "not working" the farther in you go: I was assuming that, much as FTL works progressively less well, whatever calculation substrate (e.g. semiconductors or equivalent) they use works less well (i.e. slower) as you go inward until it is so hamstrung that the necessary calculations take forever (or, as mentioned previously, so long that it might as well be forever).

An example in current and recent technology would be TTL vs. CMOS logic. TTL was fast but required a lot of power. CMOS could run on a lot less power but got slower as the available power decreased; and conversely, faster as you increased the power, at the price of running hotter until it eventually melted. Modern semiconductor technology is CMOS, and we get speed by feeding it lots of power; every so often new CMOS variants are developed that can run faster with a given amount power.

So we could say that their algorithms work everywhere, but need to work quickly enough to be of use — but the available "power" drops as you move inward and eventually is too low to do the necessary calculations in time. And agrav cloth can work some ways into the Slow Zone once created because it has a similar dependency but a bit more leeway in terms of the speed/power tradeoff; manufacturing it, on the other hand, has less leeway so can only occur in the Beyond. (This handwaves the question of how agrav cloth works, but that's inevitable.)

David, #399: The problem with recent American administrations is that they're all too happy to reduce risks for their buddies, but not so much for the folks on the street.

Someone at my county caucus expressed this quite succinctly as, "Republicans are fine with socialism, as long as it's only the risk that's being socialized and the benefits stay firmly in their pockets." Perhaps we should start referring to corporate bailouts as "Republican socialism"!

Xopher, #405: I can sing straight tone too -- comes of a fondness for medieval music, plus a music history class that explained the change in styles between the 15th and 17th centuries.

Not to be a downer, but I just found out that my cousin, who has been having seizures, may have a brain tumor. I don't know that I particularly believe in prayer or good energy or whatever, but a bunch of it would be nice around now.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar? The registrars that spring to mind are mostly ones that I know by their bad reputations, like Verisign. It's been a hella long time since I needed to register a domain, and now I suddenly need to get two of them.

albatross @ 376: "And yeah. I think part of the society-wide learning curve for any new investment vehicle is the opportunity for either a silly bubble by people who don't understand it but invest in it because it looks profitable, or an opportunity for some kind of huge ripoff by some of the folks who do understand it."

The place where markets really fail, as I see it, is when people start trying to play their competitors, rather than playing the market. Once you start saying "Well, I know that this is a shitty stock, but it'll look good to other, stupider/less well-informed people, so I'll buy it, banking on the foolishness of others," the best-case scenario is a stock bubble. Worst case, well--it's not a big step from taking advantage of poorly-informed competitors to deliberately misleading them. Once your stake in the market is large enough that you can actually change how the market works by throwing your weight around, why not do it? Informational assymetry really impairs the market's function.

Bruce Cohen @ 381: "The curious thing about chaotic systems is that over certain volumes of their phase space they're quite stable and predictable for particular meanings of those words. But there are boundaries to those volumes ("basins of attraction") beyond which even going a tiny epsilon can cause the system to fall into a completely different basin with completely different characteristics."

The analogy I always use is imagine you are conducting experiments about how far a cannon will launch balls of various weights using various amounts of gunpowder. 10 grams of powder will launch a 100 gram ball 100 meters; 11 grams will launch it 110 meters; 12, 120; etc. But then you find 10.5 grams will launch it 37.2 meters at a 20 degree angle to the left. 10.9 grams launches it 200 meters straight backwards. It sounds insane, but some systems just have weird discontinuities like that that really disrupt our assumptions of linear relations and bell-curve distributions.

Kayjayoh, I've been using Dotster to manage my two for four or five years. The renewals always go through on time and I've never been overcharged. They often have cut-price deals, too.

ethan @409:

Not to be a downer, but I just found out that my cousin, who has been having seizures, may have a brain tumor.

I'm sorry to hear that.

I don't know that I particularly believe in prayer or good energy or whatever, but a bunch of it would be nice around now.

It's unlikely to do any harm. Best of luck to both you and him? her?

Xopher@388: While I like to think I can sing, I haven't actually done much singing....Most of They Might Be Giants' repertoire is right smack in the middle of my range -- when I sing along I can tell I'm hitting the exact same notes. I believe that makes me a baritone. I do have a rudimentary ability to read music (a legacy of childhood piano lessons) but it is fairly rudimentary. Anyway, I'm willing, and hopefully that counts for something.

(Also I'm looking forward to getting to meet you in person!)

ethan@409: Ouch. If I believed that prayer or candle-lighting or whatever would make a quark's worth of difference, I'd do it -- as it is, all I can do is express sympathy here.

Kayjayoh at #410 writes:

> Does anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar?

godaddy.com are cheap, though they nag you terribly to buy optional extras. I use them for a bunch of domains and I've never had anything had anything terrible happen.

They charge a little extra to keep your personal details private - I don't know if that's a standard ripoff or something of their own.

ethan @ 409

On the off-chance it helps, here's some well-wishing for your cousin, and some sympathy for both of you.

ethan @ 409... My best wishes to your cousin.

The entire problem that the credit crunch was triggered by was this great idea that if you chopped up a bunch of risky things into little pieces and mixed the pieces up, you could end up with something which couldn't go wrong all at once. This would have worked wonderfully if the risky things were uncorrelated... but unfortunately there are these things called 'interest rates' that could cause them to go bad all at once. Whoops.

People were acting as if, oh, it doesn't matter how risky the things are I'm buying: it's going to get mixed up with less-risky stuff anyway and, hah, someone else will own it when it goes bad! ... and then they proceeded to take out loans from the people they sold the resulting mess to, oh, and everyone *else* was selling risky stuff and assuming that it would get mixed up with less-risky stuff.

The result was sort of like building a lot of interconnected geodesic truss structures out of candyfloss in an earthquake zone because, y'know, geodesic trusses are really strong! and we have all these other buildings around us to lean on! --- what do you mean they'll all fall down too if there's an earthquake? What's an earthquake?

ethan #409: My sympathies, for what they're worth, are with your cousin.

ethan #409 - My best wishes for you and your cousin.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden @#203:

Amen to that. Deepness is a masterpiece, and both books are extraordinary. Ripping adventures, ultra-cool scientific concepts, and the most convincing and fascinating aliens anyone's ever invented. I've loaned them to half the geeks at the office, and while most don't give much of a hoot about the singularity, everyone can relate to "focus."

That stinks, ethan. Good thoughts and so forth are being sent.

ethan,

my thoughts are with you & your cousin. hope everything turns out ok.

ethan: FWIW, your cousin and you are in my prayers.

Mary Dell @ 422

Yeah, most of us who are geeks and/or nerds (I lay claim to both at least part of the time) can relate strongly to that idea of focus. And what that book says about managers! Pointy-hair just isn't in the race compared to those guys.

Mary Dell #422:

Yeah, I think his aliens are some of my favorite characters of all time, especially Sherkaner. Damn, I've known people with just enough of that genius + reality distortion field + talent magnet to imagine someone like that.

One thing about his aliens, though, is that you're seeing the human-ness through the alien-ness, if that makes sense. Blueshell and Greenstalk, Pilgrim and Woodcarver and even Steel and Tyrathect, and Sherkaner and Hrunker and Victory, the main thing that comes through is that they're people. They are similar enough to us that it's easy to identify with them. And you can see that the human characters in those novels do identify with them. Victory's reaction to Hrunk is a very human reaction.

I'm not sure they were convincing as aliens, though I really loved both books, because they weren't weird enough. Hell, in _AFUTD_, Pham was weirder than any of the Riders or any of the tines except for Steel, and in _ADITS_, Rister was weirder than any of the Spiders except maybe Honored Pedure. This implies a certain view of the universe, right? Being a basically good, decent, intelligent being is more important for finding similarities with others than being the same species. I'm not sure I buy that--I expect that a genuine alien would be seriously weird--not Sherkaner weird, more weird like the aliens in _The Gods Themselves_, or the wormhole aliens in DS9.

I find that QC has allowed me to achieve a kind of oddness trifecta:

a. Being geeky enough to become obsessed with a webcomic.

b. Having a weird enough history to be able to map quite a bit of Marten's life to a particular part of mine.

c. Being nerdy enough to spend some time trying to figure out if he's somewhat riffing on _Mansfield Park_. It's far from a perfect match, but it's not much worse than the Bridget Jones::Pride and Prejudice mapping.

Re: Vinge:

Yeah, among other things, it says a lot when a bunch of people as smart as this crowd start discussing AFotD... and the only thing they can think of to pick on, is how the effing backdrop works... and that in light of science that's kept developing for 15 years after publication!

And then when I read Deepness, my basic reaction was, "Holy crap, he did it again! And this without reusing much more than the backdrop!"

And then Albatross @#427 undercuts my rave... ;-)

It's a truism that in SF, aliens are a mirror for humanity. I'd say there's one more option as well... a really incomprehensible alien can instead represent "natural phenomena" -- something that happens to us, rather than something we can communicate with. (E.g., Baxter's Xeelee)

The Tines, the Skroderiders, and the Spiders are all written as "people" -- but then, they're not so different as to avoid the basic needs and goals of life, or even the themes of self-determination and purpose. If they were that different, they wouldn't have been characters, any more than the Blight was, or even the Old One.

The Spiders, and especially the Tines, gain a lot from "authorial translation". They do have some pretty drastic differences in lifestyle, but the author wisely describes them in the terms by which his readers can understand them. I'm not sure we ever get the narrative viewpoint of a Skroderider -- I'm rereading AFotD now, but I'm only just up to where they first appear.

So, there's a petition to McCain, in support of Webb's (D Va) GI Bill. Since I'd like to go back to school (and know a lot of guys who'd just plain like to go), I'm for it.

McCain hasn't been supportive.

The petition is here, and this is what I said when I signed it.

The GI bill made the fifties what they were. In a time when the US faces unprecedented challenges in meeting the difficulties of changing world we can ill afford to miss the chance to repay those who have served, and would like to keep serving.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to show real support (not merely lip-servicing posturing) for the troops, and the nation.

All I want to see is you supporting the sort of "up or down" vote you were so adamant about pursuing for the president's judicial nominees.

Fair is fair, and how you respond to issues of fairness will determine whether you can get my vote come November.

I'm watching you McCain.

I can't imagine him managing to convince me his sense of fairplay is adequate to the task (and his economic and foreign policy is, to me, a question of fairplay; extend/permanentize the Bush cuts, while killing the AMT [which needs adjusting] privatising SS, and staying in Iraq all strike me as less than fair), but if he want's to try, he's free to go ahead.

David@#430, the Spiders in particular may be much more alien than they appear. We hardly ever see them except filtered through the translators (largely Trixia), who, Focused or not, are still *human*.

In the last few dozen pages we get some unadjusted human views of them, and, well, they're not as humanlike as all that after all.

And a relevant quote on the very next page:

Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters. Two of these three might be mistaken for potted trees on hotcarts, and the third was unlike any human in her life. Yet... after a few minutes, their personalities seemed to float in her mind's eye, more interesting than many of her school chums, but not that different.

ethan, my sympathies to you and your cousin. Depending on the type of tumor, it may be treatable. Brain things are tricky.

Terry Karney #431: The petition is here, and this is what I said when I signed it.

As an attempt to influence decision-makers, petitions are better than nothing, but not much. They are routinely ignored by the recipients, the actual physical recipients often being low-level clerical employees, not the intended decision-maker. The primary value of circulated petitions is informing and organizing the public on an issue.

In addition to signing a petition, send a letter or e-mail to the decision-maker. (You may already have done this, Terry -- this is a general exhortation.) Encourage your friends and family to do so as well, even if it means rewording what you said so they don't have to. Many people are reluctant to write to a public figure, thinking that they don't write well enough to do so. Help them out.

Lots of letters, lots of e-mails.

ethan 409: I'm sending you energy, and will send you more later when I do something more focused. I would need your cousin's permission to do so for him or her directly, because of my oath. If you report to me that s/he said "yes" to "Is it all right if my Wiccan friend does magic for you?" I will take that. 'Til then I'll do Spirit Box work.

David 415: It's well known that people who believe they are being prayed for, wished well, etc. do better in many ways than people with no such belief. "Lots of people care about me" is a good thought to have in your head in difficult times. Compare "no one cares about me," a thought that when repeated can lead to painful PHYSICAL symptoms.

The mind and the body are one. Healing can begin from either aspect of this one thing. You may also find that thinking good thoughts toward ethan and/or his cousin makes YOU feel better.

A belief in the efficacy of prayer helps one pray—but it really isn't strictly required. And one needn't believe in* magic to DO magic.

One thing I want to say though: Nothing I've said above should be taken as stating or implying that people who object to doing things they believe are useless or meaningless should do them anyway. I would never direct anyone to act against their own conscience or true will.

*In fact, since magic is and/or requires changing consciousness, what exactly it means to "believe in" magic is interesting and complicated, but way off topic here.

Thanks, everyone.

Xopher, as soon as I can, I'll ask her and let you know. Knowing her, I'm sure she'll say yes.

I don't know if it did, but I hope my comment about supernatural things didn't come off sounding disrespectful to anyone--completely not my intention.

Ethan, your cousin's in my prayers.

Invoking the open thread:

This license plate

Tracie @ 439... I love it. I wonder if I should post a photo of my "Zod in 2008" bunmper sticker.

David Harmon @ 429

My reaction when I read Deepness exactly: "He did it again!" But see, one of the things that makes Vinge so good is that he's working at several levels simultaneously; you never get a chance to say, "Gee, that's a great plot, but the characters are sort of thin", or "Great characters, but where are the sfnal concepts?". And in AFUTD there's a cute little trick that he wouldn't admit he'd pulled, but I believe it: some of those aliens whose FTL posts are quoted are caricatures of well-known USENET personalities. I specifically asked Vinge about Henry Spencer at Waterloo University (henry@utzoo), but he wouldn't comment.

And suspecting who Pham was in AFUTD adds a piquancy to his story in Deepness.

Bruce #441: Yeah. I think Sandor at the Zoo was modeled after Henry Spencer, and when I read it, I kept suspecting that a lot of the reaction to the Blight mirrored the reaction to the Morris' worm a few years earlier.

I swear I've had discussions with Twirlip of the Mists before, several times, from different addresses. (Though usually not with any hint that he really had some insights at the end.)

Well, some of the net.personalities were more or less self-caricatures already....

Since AFUtD, I've occasionally used Twirlip's name for spoof posts once a thread has already descended into madness.

I don't recall any spiders in Fire Upon the Deep. There were plants on go karts, and killer butterflies, and some kind of floating aliens on some distant gas giant, and talking dogs. But I don't remember any spiders.



Also, dumb question, but what the heck is the "fire" in the title "fire upon the deep" referring to? I'm guessing the "deep" is the unthinking depths, maybe? The only fire I recall is when we first run into the Tines planet. Oh, and there was a fire in OOB when they get closer to their destination. But neither fire seemed all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Xopher @ 405: I'm not telling yet, in case it comes to nothing, as too many of my projects do. But thanks, and does the reference to Barbershop mean that you already know how to sing straight tone? Big plus if so!

If by "straight tone" you mean "no vibrato, blends well" then yes. No claims to be infallible at it, understand, but at the very least I know where to aim. It's a big requirement for singing baritone in a Sweet Adelines quartet.* Or trying to match the tone sung in any given Tears For Fears song, come to think of it. Yes I *am* a child of the 80s yawannamakesumthinofit?!

*(Not that my quartet was very good, mind you, but we had fun and we made the Rocky Mountain Region howl with laughter when our famously non-girly, motorcycle-riding bass showed up on stage in a frilly pink dress... but I digress.)

ethan: Good energy request heard and in fulfillment to the best of my ability.

TexAnne: You too, if belatedly. Report! How'd that interview go?

Regarding GoDaddy as a domain registrar: Might I suggest reading this before signing up with them?

I can vouch for Dotster personally. Also I can vouch for domain host DrakNet (if you can't tell by me sending you to their blog to read about their experience reselling for GoDaddy), who will register domains for those of their customers who prefer to have a single point of contact for all their ISP needs.

And now I iz all caught up.

#444: I think "fire" refers to the run-away machine-intelligence perversion. Like a forest fire, gobbling up civilizations.

I read AFUTD at a time when I was utterly burned out and disappointed by much of the SF&F I was coming across. It was the first novel in maybe a decade that reduced me to a star-struck fan-boy. Lying awake at night wondering about stuff . . . holding back finishing the book. Y'all have probably been there.

A few years later some friends and I took Vinge to a Mongolian BBQ place and talked about stuff like tine group-mind bandwidth requirements and hear hints about what would happen in the next novel. Man, that was cool.

ethan: I'm thinking good thoughts for you and your cousin.

Open Threadly change of topic: Is there a standard and/or readily understood term for the kind of fantasy in which the hero (or heroes) starts in our world then goes through some kind of portal into a fantasy world? My personal term for the subgenre is 'wardrobe fantasy', after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I don't expect anyone else to know what that means. Is there a term which other people *would* recognize?

Tracie: I don't expect McCain to respond to it. He doesn't care. I tend to not sign such things, unless I believe the group in question will make a show of it.

The people who referred me to this one have the habit of delivering them by hand, ream, on ream, of pages, with names.

They do this with what media coverage they can get.

Xopher: I can sing a clear tone. Not as well as I might like, but I did sing in a choir (before the change: alto) and the last public performance I did (14 years ago, Army Ball) included "Over There" and our director was very good. He insisted we not bend the notes (which took some work, as Over There followed, "I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy". The Battle Hymn of the Republic we followed it with was wonderful. I can still sing the parts).

Mary Aleen @ 450... Or like Dorothy being swept away to Oz? I don't know if there is a term for that specific subgenre of fantasy, which I think, used to be the main kind of fantasy. How about 'Utopia'? Nah.

Mary Aileen @450:

No, but I can add to the list:

Stephen R Donaldson, both the Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever and Mordant's Need series

Philip José Farmer, the Riverworld books

Jack L Chalker, the Well of Souls books

There's a similar trend using "science" rather than magic:

The Hitch-Hikder's Guide to the Galaxy

The Last Starfighter

Tron

Galaxy Quest

Abi... And Farmer's World of Tiers novels.

Teresa didn't invent disemvoweling?

mary aileen,

Is there a standard and/or readily understood term for the kind of fantasy in which the hero (or heroes) starts in our world then goes through some kind of portal into a fantasy world?

i would say "alternate dimension," or more specifically, "dimension traveling," maybe. (diana wynne jones is very good at these.)

Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books would qualify in the "time travel" variety.

Serge, I found and bought "Dark of the Moon" at a used bookstore today; I recognized the author's name.

linkmeister @ 457... Enjoy!