First footing. Whare's mah whusky?

Fragano: At the bar. (A bar? Whar? I thought Davy kilt it!)

There's no returning from the sacred ship
that bears each victim from from the eastern shore
far out to westward where the oceans pour
past the world's edge and over freedom's lip
into the void. We move at such a clip
that in a moment we're at the new door
and none is ready to assess the score
add up the bill and work out the full tip.
Enough of images! it's time to scold
those who wait patiently with their critique
but cannot see the beauty in the pain
of torment in harsh sun and twisting cold
that tears the strongest heart and turns it weak,
nor can it find true healing in the rain.

Mary Aileen #3: Dan'l cil'd the bar, as everyone nose.

Fragano:

Bravo!

If a Baron is barred from a bar, does he then barge in and throw barbs at the band's bassoon?

#6: Boldly, and badly. The Baron barely blisters the bassoonist. Brouhaha ensues.

Albatross #5: Thank you.

I liked this comic w.r.t. life strategy.

#3 Fragano Ledgister

Thank you for these lines:

"There's no returning from the sacred ship
that bears each victim from from the eastern shore
far out to westward where the oceans pour
past the world's edge and over freedom's lip
into the void. We move at such a clip
that in a moment we're at the new door
and none is ready to assess the score
add up the bill and work out the full tip."

I would have felt moved reading them at any time, but reading them this morning, after experienced my first and so far only sail on an actual sailing ship on Friday, they resonate and vibrate despite the smooth movement, under my feet and up through the top of my head.

Love, C.

Now who do you think wrote this?

Good sorrow cease, false hope be gone, misfortune once farewell;
Come, solemn muse, the sad discourse of our adventures tell.
A friend I had whose special part made mine affection his;
We ruled tides and streams ourselves, no want was in our bliss.
Six years we sailed, sea-room enough, by many happy lands,
Till at the length, a stream us took and cast us on the sands.
There lodged we were in a gulf of woe, despairing what to do,
Till at the length, from shore unknown, a Pilot to us drew,
Whose help did sound our grounded ship from out Caribda's mouth,
But unadvised, on Scylla drives; the wind which from the South
Did blustering blow the fatal blast of our unhappy fall,
Where driving, leaves my friend and I to fortune ever thrall;
Where we be worse beset with sands and rocks on every side,
Where we be quite bereft of aid, of men, of winds, of tide.
Where vain it is to hail for help so far from any shore,
So far from Pilot's course; despair shall we, therefore?
No! God from out his heap of helps on us will some bestow,
And send such mighty surge of seas, or else such blasts to blow
As shall remove our grounded ship far from this dangerous place,
And we shall joy each others' chance through God's almighty grace,
And keep ourselves on land secure, our sail on safer seas.
Sweet friend, till then content thy self, and pray for our release.

Fragano (4): I could have sworn that was Davy Crockett. Huh. I guess I have my iconic frontiersmen mixed up.

Some Downrigging photos here, if you'd like to get a taste.

Plus others.

We've devoured brunch. Now off to hear contemporary tall ship captains speak.

Love, C.

6 and 7: he hums a few bars and they fake it.

What the "Writing Tips from Jennifer Crusie" said about TV reminds me:

I remember one person I met saying that a long time ago, Hollywood writers were people who got their original experience writing for the stage, and more recently, newer Hollywood writers were people who got their experience writing for television, and you can tell the difference.

For the last few weeks, I've been getting spam from an outfit called "GoodDonor."

I haven't gone to the related website, but apparently it's a pick-stuff-up-for-charity service.

Something about it rings all sorts of alarms.

Anyone know anything about them?

D. Boone kilt a bar on this tree.
Davey, Davey Crockett kilt him a b'ar when he was only three. [Variant spellings can be found on the internet.]

Know the difference! It's all in the apostrophe, otherwise, either one could rightly bear a coat of arms with an ursine, deceased, in fess.

Joel Polowin @ 916/148: "Over the last month-and-a-bit, I've usually been asked "On a scale from zero to ten where zero is no pain and ten is the worst pain you can imagine..." which is, to me, not a very easy question to answer."

What I have heard (though perhaps I am mistaken) is that while seemingly arbitrary pain scales are actually fairly reliable: people with injury X all tend to assign the same number to that pain, and people with injury Y all tend to assign the same number to that.

As far as pain scales go, the Schmidt Sting Pain Index is by far my favorite. It makes being stung by a yellowjacket sound like an aesthetic experience on par with drinking an expensive wine: "Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue." I can't help but imagining a culture, though probably not the Culture, where insect stings are a rarefied delicacy, consumed by connoisseurs in special clubs. "Yes, I'd like a Betelguesian bullet ant--shaken, not stirred."

keming bujold

When my sciatic nerve agony was at its worst, I pointed at the frowny face marked "8."

"What I have heard (though perhaps I am mistaken) is that while seemingly arbitrary pain scales are actually fairly reliable"

It would be interesting to test if there were any response patterns which were similar within a cultural subgroup but differed in another cultural subgroup. It might be useful in pain management.

Kip W @18, keming is such a great word!

Protagonismos:
Some filker wrote a song called "Why must I be a prince in a fairy tale?" to the tune of "Why must I be a teenager in love?"

Erik Nelson, #14: That reminds me of Charles Stross's recent blog post about the Great Internet Steampunk Overdose, which pointed out that the genre is (among other things) beginning to suffer from "second artist effect."

I also remember reading something by Jo Walton about "first order" and "second order" fantasy novels, although I don't recall where, or whether those were the exact terms she used.

Constance #10: Thanks.

I've never been on a ship powered by wind. I've been on rowboats. I've been on a panga up the Rio Escondido in Nicaragua. I've crossed the Atlantic by ship. Twice.

me @148/807: Just to be silly, I sent the link to Tor's zombie readiness page to Agoge martial arts, who are the folks who conducted the class at CU.

Hilarious! Good job! But be careful, starting zombies on fire is a dangerous biz anyway ... all you do is create a walking zombie flambé. I definitely advise the swift and repeated use of the big heavy award!

They responded with an invite to a charity Zombie preparedness party (publicity for the premier of the AMC series Walking Dead).

Wesley @ 24: Wow, I had missed that rant. It leaves me wondering how much steampunk Stross has actually read. His main criticism is that the early Victorian age was awful, politically and socially and pretty much every other way, and that authors gloss this over in order to indulge in ancien regime fancies. That hardly describes any steampunk I've ever read--mostly the novels are explicitly about that awful history, and are consciously juxtaposing it with the age's feeling of unlimited possibility for technological and sociological change. That, I feel, is one of the central steampunk problematics. Obviously there's plenty of bad steampunk that doesn't have anything interesting to say on the issue *cough cough* The Court of Air *cough*, but hasn't Stross ever heard of Sturgeon's Law?

keming, like many things literary, reminds you that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Erik, watch your language!

Don't tell Mr. Google that joke with the I'm Feeling Lucky button, at least not on a work computer.

Jacque 26:
"a walking zombie flambe"

should that be called a flombie?

speaking of zombie apocali, I will riposte this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8HW-HVW9Q8&feature=player_embedded#!

The thing about Broder and the war economy is that even apart from being immoral, it's wrong.

While that is the case for WWII, every other war in history was followed by a depression, inflation, and other economic miseries. I have a theory about why WWII was different, which is that the technological driving engine of civilization was compressed during the First Great Depression, and innovations in many areas didn't get funded, so that when money got thrown at things in the war ecomony the technological innovations were there and it was this rise in technology that kickstarted the US economy. (I also think a lot of why the things weren't being funded was because of fear, and that FDR was literally right about that.)

But anyway, the greater lesson of history is that wars are terribly bad for economies.

That was one thing that bothered me a bit about the Star Wars extended history, that, given the frequency of conflict, technology was still relatively stagnant for millennia.

I'm actually planning ahead. I'll be in San Francisco, around the Moscone Center, from Wednesday to Saturday. I would love to Gather with fellow Fluorospherians (first spelled Flouro...), if schedules permits.

From 148:

P J Evans, #929, most of the people who don't have insurance now and have to buy it then will end up in a state/federal pool or Medicaid.

Fred Moulton @ #21, what those scales are useful for is comparing the same patient's pain at different times or under different circumstances (say, before and after 8 sessions of PT; or "my back pain is a 3 when I'm sitting, a 5 when I'm walking and it gets up to a 7 if I stand still for more than a few minutes.").

I was taught that they are not to be used for comparing pain between patients.

Lin D @ 35... Drat. I just came back from a trip to the Bay Area.

"Do you remember the fun we had when you poisoned me?"

Yes, TCM is showing Vincent Price movies today.
How did you guess?

heresiarch @ 24... Steampunk as a literary movement really started some time after 2006's worldcon, I think. Steampunk had been around in movies for decades, mind you, and even the literary aspect owes a lot of its aethestics to James Mason as Captain Nemo. That being said, I mention 2006's worldcon because that's the one for which I had had someone make me a 19th Century outfit, but it took me a long time to figure out how I'd justify wearing that at an SF con. I finally decided to refer to myself as a Victorian Time Traveller. I even had the clock buttons to go with it. Had steampunk been above the horizon in the literary landscape, I wouldn't have felt it necessary to justify it.

heresiarch #18: Hmm. ISTR Dr. Charles commenting that doctors did have to take into account people's pain tolerances. As noted repeatedly above, prior experience is another issue.

Having gotten out of the hospital twice this week, trust me: hyperboleandahalf's pain chart, with the clear label of "I see Jesus and I'm scared" beats the hell out of the conventional version. I recommended it to all the nurses.

Today's big surprise:
Driving around a corner, seeing a large bird perched on the streetlight on the farther corner that I was going toward, and thinking 'Oh, hawk!'
Then realizing it wasn't a hawk at all.
It was an immature turkey vulture (gray head).

I was expecting a thread-starter along the lines of 1(squared)2(squared)3(squared).

My brother's looking for the Gandalara Cycle, but everywhere he looks seems to direct him to Amazon or it's out of print. Anyone know a non-Amazon seller that'd have it, and be willing to ship to Australia? (Price is also a factor =/ )

Heresiarch's comment #27 pretty much mirrors my response to Charlie Stross's startlingly grumpy screed about steampunk. Jeff VanderMeer also had a nicely measured response to Charlie which I recommend. Condensed version: All that nuanced, historically-aware, smart stuff Charlie says nobody's writing? Lots of people are writing it. Dunno what Charlie's been reading.

Of course, Charlie gets points for extra-gratuitous tendentiousness for his opening sentence, "I am becoming annoyed by the current glut of Steampunk that is being foisted on the SF-reading public via the likes of Tor.com and io9." "Foisted on the SF-reading public"! And here I thought that the steampunk fans on Tor.com were just people sharing an enthusiasm. Little did I know that wicked foisting was taking place.

Now that I realize that Tor.com has the power to foist, none of you in the "SF-reading public" are safe. You have been warned.

Patrick @ 46... I've downloaded some of that foisted stuff on my Nook. As tomorrow is a day off, I'll probably read them then, as soon as I'm done with Kim Newman's "Moon Moon Moon" - I especially liked the scene where psychic investigator Richard Jepperson is attacked by maleficent mallards.

I want to know what Charlie read that got up his nose. Something must have, because he's usually more temperate than that.

Steampunk is still finding its way, and there's more demand for it than there are good examples of it. That's a recipe for dodgy publishing decisions. Only a few feet away from me is a copy of a recent and very flashy steampunk trade paperback. It was abandoned here by a visitor. I've tried to read it and can't -- the dialogue is just too awful.

You know what's really frustrating about this? Someone looking to write good steampunk could do worse than to read Charlie's Laundry novels three or four times apiece. The aesthetic isn't steampunk, but the technical problems are closely related, and some of the ways they're handled are brilliant.

Patrick, 46: I must admit to rolling my eyes at the remix of "Night of the Cooters." It was cute, but the original was in no way steampunk as I understand the term.

Hyperlocal News: Local cat, 12, not expected by vet to survive the weekend. Cat delighted to prove the human wrong. Local woman relieved but still worried.

(Medical details within: Zl png'f fnepbzn unf bhgtebja vgf oybbq fhccyl. Fubeg bs erzbivat ure yrt, gurer'f abguvat gb or qbar ohg fcbvy ure. Fb sbe gung vf jung V nz qbvat.)

Patrick @46 - Oh, you foist, all right! If you hadn't lured me in to Tor.com with your offers of free e-books, I wouldn't have been bedazzled by the contributors (Kate Nepveu's LotR re-read - I'm looking at you!), and wouldn't have had The Garden of Iden foisted on me. Now I've been forced to get the rest of the series. I'm almost afraid to check back and see what other things you've foisted on me. (Seriously, kids and dogs require attention and action. I can't read all day! What were you thinking?)

Unclear why #49 is addressed to me, or what it has to do with anything I said.

Patrick, you took issue with the idea that tor.com is foisting steampunk on people. I remarked that they foisted something on me that was not as advertised.

Oh, never mind. I've obviously lost my feel for the conversations around here, and should lurk until I can fit in again.

TexAnne, I'm sure your feel for conversation is fine. I'm bemused by this whole rhetorical notion of "foisting," in which the act of giving away free ice cream (or, even more extremely, inviting others to dispense ice cream from our stand) is turned into something sinister and coercive.

The fact that you didn't like a particular piece, or disagreed with some aspect of it, seems to me entirely perpendicular to the point I'm making. I don't expect everyone to like everything on Tor.com; I don't like everything on Tor.com. But I don't think it's fair for us to be depicted as engaged in some kind of act of morally questionable pushiness just because somebody didn't care for a particular story or post.

I'm not even much of a steampunk fan. What interested me about Charlie's post was his obvious rhetorical deck-stacking--first, the assertion that "the likes of" Tor.com and io9 are up to some kind of "foisting", then the highly selective reading of the range of "steampunk" texts and artifacts in order to establish a parallel to China Mieville's argument that heroic fantasy is at root nothing more than an exercise in morally corrupt, historically ignorant nostalgia for an era of monarchism and serfdom.

Of course, heroic fantasy is in fact more than that, and steampunk is more than the shallow fad Charlie tries to make it out to be. As a general rule, when oddball artistic subgenres suddenly explode with activity like this, more things are going on than are accounted for in the obvious get-off-my-lawn dismissals. Lecturing steampunk fanciers with the fact that the Victorian era encompassed tragic and painful contradictions is about as with-it as someone would have been who breathlessly informed the 1980s cyberpunks that Computers Don't Solve Everything, Young Man.

I wonder if some of the grumpiness around Steampunk is an Indie Rock Pete-like displeasure at a huge crowd acting as if a quarter-century old sub-genre (arguably even older!) was something new.

Heck, a major RPG company (to the extent that any RPG company other than TSR/WotC/Hasbro can be called "major") shipped a steampunk RPG twenty-two years ago. It's not often that the RPG industry is ahead of the curve at all, much less by decades.

Patrick @54

And China says as much in his essay. It's actually too bad Charlie didn't follow China more closely, here.

That said, I think it's disingenuous to say that steampunk is generally concerned with the suffering caused by Victorian Europeans. I encounter an awful lot of fanciers who have this Gone With The Wind quality about them, rather "yes, slavery and colonialism were terrible, yes, Dickensian London was bad, but look at this waistcoat! Look at this zeppelin!" In particular, I find that the actual social conditions of the Victorian world rarely translate into secondary-world stuff* (not a lot of poor folks in Space 1889) and also that it is very unusual to see steampunk costuming that is not upper-class in origin.

There is a sizable minority who are grappling with those issues, but I fear they're outnumbered by folks who just like the "gentility" and class of Victoriana. Maybe I'm just sensitized by a few egregious fans of that sort that I've known, though.

*On the whole, it does rather remind me of some criticisms of Tolkien, notably the ones that start with "where does the food come from, to feed these armies?" There are all these gentleman inventors and airship pirates and what-have-you, but not a lot of clear indications of who makes all that lab equipment, or where that cargo came from.

I would never foist steampunk on anyone! I'm not a foister.

Patrick @46
Dunno what Charlie's been reading.
He did spend a lot of the Steampunk panel he was on at WorldCon saying 'I disagree'. It probably didn't help him holding in the rant.

Patrick, if your "Taking the Measure of Rot" sidelight is anything to go by, you might enjoy--well, enjoy might not be the word--the book Limits to Capital, by David Harvey.

Isn't a foister just a highly competitive resident of Brooklyn?

Or maybe just a New York resident; I can't differentiate between separate boroughs' accents.

Steampunk is one of my foist choices, for convincing altered-history storylines. I like the groundedness of the underlying explanation of why things are different -- it feels a lot less foiced than some of the other altered-history explanations and timelines that get presented.

Patrick #46: Clearly, to your many titles, you must now add "Foister-in-Chief" ("to the Court of St James" is, of course, understood).

Devin, #56: "That said, I think it's disingenuous to say that steampunk is generally concerned with the suffering caused by Victorian Europeans"

I think it's "disingenuous"--lacking in candor or sincerity--to pretend that anybody asserted any such thing.

You know how it goes. First, they offer you a little bit of socially-irresponsible steampunk at a party, for free. And everyone's doing it. Then, they offer to sell you a little bit more. And soon, you find yourself brutally colonizing Africa and India, oppressing the lower classes who work in your factories, and forcing women into subservient roles. Yeah, it all *seems* harmless....

#56 "very unusual to see steampunk costuming that is not upper-class"

I'd love to see a well-realized group costume of the "Black Gang" of an airship. Not entirely sure how we'd recognize them as zepplin staff though... maybe weight-reduced wrenches with drilled out handles, non-sparking bronze of course.

Steampunk in general - it's getting awfully mainstream, here in Ottawa there's a radio station using a poster of the Black Eyed Peas in definite steampunk outfits (fancy non-functional goggles, brown leather hats...) and there was also steampunk in the weekend newspaper.

Jo #33:

Yeah, I keep thinking economies and societies are fundamentally too complicated to be understood or explained in terms as simple and universal as "war is good for the economy." (This is one of the reasons I'm not quite a libertarian anymore, despite my sympathies for that worldview.)

At an intuitive level, by the end of world war two, the US was probably somewhere close to our maximum capacity of producing stuff, and some large fraction of that stuff was being sent off to blow up or burn or sink. Now, as a way of getting that capacity to produce stuff up and running, the war economy may have worked out pretty well. (By way of a parallel, I gather that Stalin managed to bring electricity to a lot of the USSR, and to industrialize heavily, using techniques that didn't remotely lead to prosperity long-term.) But to the extent that the country wound up ramped up to produce stuff that served no good day-to-day purpose, it wasn't such a great deal.

I suspect a big part of the benefit of any economic stimulus is building and/or maintaining the companies and industries and organizational stuff (contracts, experience, working markets) to do stuff that we'll later want to do more of. That is, when the economy has melted down and nobody's buying cars, if we let all the car factories shut down for a few years, it will be expensive to bring them back up--the suppliers will go bankrupt, and then their suppliers will, experienced employees will leave and take their experience with them, the whole economy will sort of heal around the loss of that industry in ways that amount to forgetting how to deal with it. And when the industry tries to come back in ten years, it will face a huge ramp-up cost, rebuilding those networks of contracts and suppliers and expert workers and other arrangements.

Looking at the world in that way (with all its oversimplification), it seems like the big question is whether we're going to want the arrangements we're causing to be built. Spending vast sums on stuff from defense contractors causes defense contractors to grow, and their networks of suppliers and financiers and such to grow to support them. If in ten years, we're going to want lots more defense contractors, and less capacity to produce things in other ways, then this is a win. But note that they're a lot better at making bombs and fighter jets and tanks and ammunition than at making cheap consumer electronics, or medical equipment, or houses.

I have no particular interest in, or inherent antipathy towards, steampunk, but lately I sometimes feel like I'm on the business end of a Steampunk Foist. Probably this is because I have no particular interest in steampunk. All the internet's SF-related neighborhoods are excited about it, and I'm not. It's getting to the point where I see rivets and feel like I've eaten too much frosting. A lot of the time the internet comes off to me like a boring guy at a party who won't stop talking about his pet obsession. This is one of those times. (Don't even get me started on the #$%@ing zombies.)

I guess what I'm saying here is that if Charles Stross feels anything like I do, I can understand why he might be feeling ranty.

Avram @ 55... It's not often that the RPG industry is ahead of the curve

One thing I found amusing about Locus's recent Steampunk issue (besides Moorcock's grumpy-old-man comments) was that only one person pointed out that the literature didn't spring up full blown, and that it all started elsewhere. There were a few novels published over the years, but they never really had an effect. It looked like The Difference Engine was going to do just that, but that petered out quite quickly. Before that, there had been the likes of Christopher Priest's The Space Machine, which I suspect was itself inspired by The 7-percent Solution. What I think finally caused a critical mass is Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but mostly Girl Genius. That's just my theory.

I'd just like to say that I haven't been foisted in years, and I look forward to when I get a chance to foist again.

In fact, since I have a (non-Steampunk) story on submission to Tor.com, I hope soon to be foist with my own petard!

Which came foist? The chicken or the egg?

It's weird to me that we're talking about Charlie as if he were a stranger, when actually he comments here with some regularity.

Hi, Charlie. How are you doing?

The weirdest thing about Charlie's rant is that he clearly hadn't been reading the posts on Tor.com which have had far more about the things he says steampunk ignores than the things he says he doesn't like about it.

I don't much care for steampunk either, but that just baffled me.

Charlie has been at a con this weekend. And there's a lot of discussion on his blog.

It may be a while before he notices this set of comments.

Wesley @68:

I felt the same way about the Singularity when it was Flavor of the Month, and the whole 'net was infested with asymptotic curves.

At least no one is treating steampunk like a religion, or a prediction.

Soon Lee @44: Yeah! 1:4:9 matches the proportions of the monolith in 2001, for the reason you mention.

Henry Troup @66: I'd love to see a well-realized group costume of the "Black Gang" of an airship. Not entirely sure how we'd recognize them as zepplin staff though...
For one thing, there'd have to be one or two strategically placed mooring clips integrated into their clothing (say at the beltline and maybe near the nape) so the worker could be roped to the side of the zep for outside work.

Xopher @70: I'm watching you, bub. Yeah, you. Watch it.

I happened to like The Court of the Air. Totally weird and over-the-top, but nevertheless fun.

I think our liking for steampunk may be connected to Bujold's observation that democrats have no problem with aristocracies, as long as they get to be the aristocrats.

Jo Walton @ 33 and albatross @ 67:

One of the vague things I'm remembering is that war can be a short-term boost in a poor economy, because it kick-starts an awful lot of production and creates new jobs. However, it's a long-term drain, as all that money and effort gets put into things that don't really produce anything. Also, while World War Two may have been a boost to the US economy, it didn't really do much good for, say, the UK and Europe. The US entered the war late (although there was unofficial support of various stripes), after both sides had been wearing each other down.

I'd be willing to bet that the US has been in a state of war-related production for so long that any new fight we choose to pick won't boost the economy in any way, never mind being morally reprehensible. I also don't see that our misadventures in Iraq have improved the economy here, either.

Hyperlocal News: Woman attends Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. World unchanged as a result.

I did see two signs that appear to have been made just for the Fluorosphere; one read "You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own spelling", and the other (carried by a young woman wearing a lot of purple) read "Red, White and Blue--I give a %#$* about the Oxford comma".

I also saw Jesus riding on a dinosaur, which isn't a thing you encounter every day.

abi #75:

So what we really need is a steampunk zombie singularity apocalypse story.

"Now that we've got them all connected, the Engines can solve our logistics problems and help us finish the anti-zombie-virus vaccine program," said Elizabeth with excitement. "And then...what's wrong?"

Artemis looked with horror at the Engine, which had stopped typing outputs, and instead was simply humming contentedly to itself, tapping away on the new electromechanical telegraph line that connected it to all the other Engines in the country. An old telegraph operator, he'd "read" the tapping immediately, even as fast as it was. "We have to get out, now!"

Even as Elizabeth heard these words, the door began to shake, being battered from outside. "What is it? What did the Engine say?"

As Artemis smashed the panel of vaccuum tubes with the fire axe, a vicious grin on his face, he snarled "It told the other machine that zombies could be trained to maintain Engines!"

albatross @ 80:

I never quite got the whole zombie thing, or the Singularity for that matter, and I can feel that I'm teetering on the edge of being a little worn out on steampunk at the moment, but I'd read that.

Tony, she actually said egalitarians. And put it in the mouth of an egalitarian-turned-aristocrat, at that!

Fragano@63, "Foist Among Equals"?

The Greetings from Idiot America particle is one of the best things I've read in a long time.

I see Tor.com riding the steampunk wave moderately hard. The lettering at the top of the page, next to the zeppelin drawing, for example, give me that impression. A number of steampunk stories have been published there lately. Also, since it IS hot, many of the bloggers who post at Tor.com are writing about it, which contributes to the overall impression.

I see nothing wrong with that, though I'm not a big fan of steampunk myself. I completely believe that, as Teresa said, the demand for steampunk exceeds the supply. High demand is something publishers, as rational capitalist actors, should actively try to fill.

But if one were grumpy on the whole topic of steampunk (and I agree with many posters that the symptoms of Charlie being in that state are pretty clear), the transition from "riding the steampunk wave" to "foisting steampunk on the readers" is one I might make myself. It's not absolutely accurate, but it's well within the range of rhetoric I allow myself (and perforce "allow" others, in the sense that I can't reasonably complain about things I do myself, and besides I'd be called on it if I tried).

I'm sure Patrick and Liz are publishing the best steampunk that their budget and what's submitted to choose from will allow (in their own opinions). Because that's what editors do. Nobody is deliberately foisting off sub-standard product on the readers (though there is some risk of dodgy publishing decisions inherent in demand exceeding supply, as Teresa pointed out).

Bill Stewart @ 83... Foist come, foist served.

World Wide Words, this week, quoted Patrick's entry on Merle Haggard.

'On his blog, Making Light, on 24 October, Patrick Nielsen Hayden
reported an example of a classic error that's reminiscent of the
famous (and apocryphal) book dedication, "To my parents, Ayn Rand
and God". It was a caption to a picture of Merle Haggard in the Los
Angeles Times of 21 July and referred to a documentary about him:
"Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson
and Robert Duvall".

It was in Sic!.

I'm trying to cash in on the Next Big Thing after Steampunk. So far, I've got:

ElectroPunk - fiction set in the days of constructing the TVA. Lots of electric chairs.

RenFairePunk - fiction set exclusively in historically inaccurate over-priced Renaissance Festivals. Lots of beer and turkey legs and laser jousts.

MtvPunk - Fiction set in 80's music videos. Billy Idol meets Dexy's Midnight Runners. Lot's of hairspray.

albatross @80:

Superb! And with NaNoWriMo just begun, you're just in time to write the rest!

#69:
It looked like The Difference Engine was going to do just that[start a steampunk movement-ed.], but that petered out quite quickly. Before that, there had been the likes of Christopher Priest's The Space Machine, which I suspect was itself inspired by The 7-percent Solution. What I think finally caused a critical mass is Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but mostly Girl Genius. That's just my theory.

My alleged theory is that writing Steampunk SF is haaaaaaard, while writing Steampunk Fantasy is easy.

Stolen from another person on another discussion board:
"I've been suffering hipstercrank over that a lot recently:

Me: Hey, I didn't know you were into steampunk! What do you think of Gibson and Sterling's suggestion that a techno-focused culture in the 1840s UK would lead to...
Them: MY CORSET HAS GEARS ON IT!"

(This is why my wife and I occasionally say to one another, in a cheery-but-vapid way, "My corset has gears on it!" )

I guess for me the difference is that in Steampunk SF, you say "let's pretend that in 1870 they could build giant walking automata that could obey simple instructions. How does that work, what does that imply, how do they use them, what does this mean for the world?" [1870 being 1870, it's probably grim, malthusian and miserable.]
In Steampunk Fantasy, you say "Let's pretend that in 1870 they could build giant walking automata. Isn't that cool?"

Girl Genius is Steampunk Fantasy, but it's really really really good at it and it doesn't pretend to be anything else.

Her corset has gears on it!

Sandy B. @ 90: "Girl Genius is Steampunk Fantasy, but it's really really really good at it and it doesn't pretend to be anything else. "

I think that's selling Girl Genius a bit short. It's a what-if story about "What if mad science actually worked?" and the answer Foglio came up with was "they would succeed in taking over the world and immediately begin squabbling like super-powered infants." The heart of the story is essentially about how do you take a world run by super-powered sociopaths and get anything good or just out of it? You've got Wulfenbach, whose theory is "make a giant empire to keep them in line with," the Heterodyne Boys' "do it with adventurous do-goodery!" theory, both set against the Other's "imagine a slaver wasp stinging a human brain, forever" and various other smaller factions.

It is also really great fun, but there're deeper themes as well.

Sandy B @ 90... Steampunk SF and Steampunk fantasy... I pretty much said the same thing on a panel I did at Westercon last year. Most of what's published would qualify as Steampunk fantasy, I think.

A corset with gears?
How about a gear shift?
I've got to check the latest catalog from Queen Victoria's Secrets...

My bad. I built little boxes and labeled them "This is good" and "This is bad" and then the thing I liked fit perfectly into the "this is bad" box and I didn't think it through sufficiently before hitting "post."

Anyone want to take my Steampunk SF/Steampunk Fantasy idea and make it work? I think there's a useful core there somewhere. (hands over a bronze nonsparking monkey wrench)

CassR @45: Alibris has a bunch of listings for the Gandalara Cycle and they are not owned or operated by Amazon (apparently they're owned by a private equity group). I also know nothing about the shipping-to-Australia part of the problem. (Warning: check out the ratings of the individual booksellers. I bought some textbooks through Alibris and had a TERRIBLE time with delivery from one seller, and when I checked out their ratings and comments, it was an obvious and totally avoidable problem.)

Wesley, #68: Boy howdy, do I sympathize with you about zombies! And to some extent about steampunk; I like the aesthetics* of it, but I'm very picky about actual stories written in it.

Reading this thread (and a couple of other discussions of Charlie's rant elseNet) has been useful in allowing me to examine my own attitudes about steampunk. What seems to have happened, for me, is that I'm looking at it in a very SCA-influenced way -- "the Victorian Era as it should have been, without slavery and all that crap". Which doesn't prevent me from appreciating good steampunk fiction that does address the ugly underpinnings of the era, but it appears to be my default attitude when I'm looking at it as a mode of fashion.

Serge, #69: Another point is that until there was a name for the genre, it was difficult to recognize all those older, disparate things as being related.

ddb, #85: Also, publishers can only put out so many books a year, and if you don't like a particular genre (Vampire Romance, in my case) which is all the rage, it can very easily start to feel as though every new title in that genre is one more slot taken away from something you might actually enjoy reading.

Tracie, #91: So does hers -- although it's not a corset exactly.

* That's odd; my spell-checker insists on the British form here.

Stefan Jones @148/877: I've seen others do this, so I am not mad.

Thank you, that was the first good laugh I've had today, and I needed it. I'm not sure, however, that your predicate is supportable.

urm, I think the popularity of Steampunk is because it has visuals. And by that I mean, costumes and set designs that can not only be imagined, but also built, photographed, and taken to conventions. Previous SF movements didn't lend themselves to this very well, I don't recall. In fact, the only ones that I can think of are descended from very specific media properties*, all of which had the problem of dressing up as either a main character (Kirk! Spock! Kirk/Spock!) or as a non-continuity invented character. Very limiting creatively, and not necessarily flattering. However, movies really give people patterns** to work with, and the advent of the browncoats from Serenity/Firefly was something to latch on to.

Plus, hey, space pirates (Arr! Jack Sparrow in Space!) and westerns without all the baggage about killing the First Peoples or enslaving brown people. Basically, we dumped all the old boxes marked "Pre-1920" from Hollywood's props department into our genre,*** and boy, it tastes yummy!

If this seems familiar, it's because we're overlapping John Carter of Mars here, serialized back in 1912!

I think we should go for it. The only other visual culture we have to work with is Anime-based (which I adore!), but pre-modern-era Western-world fantasy

--long digression begins--
How did we get here? I blame us.
Somehow, when the pulps faded away, the visual culture of fandom got fragmented. Comics peeled away, changing from illustrated pulps, to sanitized superhero yarns, to bleak, dystopian superhero fanservice tragedies. Hollywood could never get good enough budgets to film what fandom came up with, and for some reason the animated side that could do it didn't have enough resources (or institutional interest?) to pull it off. Maybe the endless reinvention of ideas that went with the first half of modern fandom didn't lend itself to formulas that were easy to film. I mean, there should have been not one, but a good half-dozen "wagon train to the stars" shows by the mid sixties. The very construction of that sentence shows the problem: there was no conventional shorthand for "that kind of story."

That left us with book covers, which really aren't designed for the purpose. (Thus weak or story-contradicting images), and illustrations in RPGs. (Thank Ghu for Phil Foglio & co.) I'm specifically overlooking fanzines and pro-fanzines like Analog, Azimov's, etc. Even the paying magazine markets weren't that mainstream in their heyday.

My thesis is that the lack of a mass visual culture that had a spot for SF narratives that fandom likes is what left us with a Steampunk shaped opening.

And - and it solved certain problems for people with visually-based imaginations. For instance, what to do with the Western. After the Sixties, it was pretty apparent that you couldn't do a straight up western without pointing out that the world of the plot involved a lot of off-screen murder of innocents. So what to do with visuals of wide-open spaces, brass-studded leather bandoliers, dusty stetsons, revolvers, running horses and beautiful steam engines? Realism killed off the Western, and deservedly so - as an an unexamined framework, it gave excuse for all kinds of horrors.

Also, another off topic comment: if vampires, zombies and steampunk are really popular, can I have giant radioactive city-stomping lizards now? Or moths? Or turtles?

--long digression ends--

Sorry about that, I couldn't figure out how to make that a complete thought that fit with the discussion.

*the great triumvirate of the Eighties: Trek, Star Wars, and Who.
**design patterns, a la Christopher Alexander in architecture/modern programming in general. And yes, dress patterns too.
***O HAI IM IN YR CULTURE SEWNG GEARZ ON YR CORSETS

Via Langford, Sir Terry Pratchett's achievement of arms is up on line.
http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk/Newsletter/026.htm

Sable an ankh between four Roundels in saltire each issuing Argent.

The Crest is Upon a Helm with a Wreath Argent and Sable On Water Barry wavy Sable Argent and Sable an Owl affronty wings displayed and inverted Or supporting thereby two closed Books erect Gules.

The motto is "noli timere messorem" - "Don't Fear the Reaper".
Which is rather good.

I wonder if the College of Heralds are familiar with Sir Terry's affectionate depiction of their Ankh-Morpork counterparts?

Sandy, 90: Kate Beaton agrees.

(Hyperlocal News: Woman had a good night's sleep; her cat ate a reasonable amount of breakfast. She apologizes for her tantrum last night.)

doggone it, I broke off in the middle of a sentence, and now I don't remember what it was going to be either.
Sorry.

Lee @95: What seems to have happened, for me, is that I'm looking at it in a very SCA-influenced way -- "the Victorian Era as it should have been, without slavery and all that crap".

How does that work, exactly?

I mean, I've heard that SCA thing before --- "the Middle Ages as they should have been" --- but that doesn't work, historically. You couldn't have had all those wars and knights and jousting and castles and stuff without huge numbers of serfs slaving away to create surplus resources that could be appropriated by the aristocrats.

It's kinda like a bunch of people dressing up as planation owners and saying they're recreating "the Antebellum American South as it should have been, without the slavery". (Which, I suppose, some neo-Confederate apologists come pretty close to doing.)

Wesley @148/885: It definitely doesn't tell us anything about the cartoonist's psychology. ... I'm not comfortable with diagnosing or psychoanalyzing artists through their work.

Actually, my Wanton Speculations^TM about neurology are not based on her artwork so much as on her storylines and a few other cues. But the major point is that I failed to adequately mark them out as coming larely out of thin air. I'll shut up about that now, as I'm clearly on the brink of being an asshole, if I haven't already tipped over the edge.

My other error was mixing two lines of speculation, without demarcating them explicitly.

As to the iconographic <=> realistic spectrum, I think my speculation is still reasonable although, again, not based on anything much except my own experience, observations, and yes, Scott McCloud. (I forget that people around here want actual clarity and rigor.)

The bottom line: she still consistently blows me away with the sheer power of her iconography, however abstract or realistic.

Oh, and thanks for the link. Very interesting!

You couldn't have had all those wars and knights and jousting and castles and stuff without huge numbers of serfs slaving away to create surplus resources that could be appropriated by the aristocrats.

You couldn't then, but you can now--in large part because our serfs these days are machines, and thus we have more surplus. It doesn't take a month to weave enough brocade for a houppelande anymore, because of powered looms, and I can afford to buy it for a couple days' wages, rather than a year's.

Mark @148/891: If a picture's worth a thousand words, you can do NaNoWriMo by drawing 50 pictures in a month, no?

Great minds, wot? I've actually been pondering that very question. And I have a graphic novel notion I've been playing with, even, so I may very well go that route. (And given that I usually do at least 30 drawings in a month, 50 wouldn't be that much of a stretch.) (And it's become Absolutely Clear that I'm not going to be able to both the writing and my drawing at the same time. Leastwise, not while still making a living, anyway.)

Bill Stewart #83: The very foist.

Lee @ 95... until there was a name for the genre, it was difficult to recognize all those older, disparate things as being related

And, if I'm not mistaken, once the genre was Named, the Name - specifically the 'punk' suffix - began influencing the contents. Compare Stephen Baxter's Anti-Ice and The Time Ships, which were published in the late 1990s, to what is now published. No, I'm not putting any story dow.

Avram@101: Well, no doubt actual members of the SCA take a variety of views (I know enough of them to be pretty confident of that, in fact).

One possible view is that the SCA is not attempting to be a description of a workable standalone society; it's a hobby activity embedded within this society.

CassR @45

I've been meaning for the last several years to get started on a project of deaccessioning much of my fiction collection, and my run of the Gandalara Cycle falls in that category. I'd be happy to pass it on if the shipping logistics can be worked out.

I've been told by Albuquerque's local con Bubonicon that they want me to do my "Steampunk and Hollywood" presentation next year. I should be able to keep it within the alloted 90-minute slot. At least, since the con is all indoors, if I run overtime, it won't cause people waiting to come in for the next panel to suffer for sun overexposure as happened at last year's Westercon.

re 78: There's something to be said for economics as a series of unrepeatable experiments. That said, I'll venture a number of probably unsupportable opinions:

First, there's the way that war stimulates the economy. The most obvious is that it knocks down the political and psychological barriers to economic activity-- what I call the "all hands on deck" economic stimulus. The caveats, however, are that it doesn't always do that. This is the first place where I think Broder is wrong, and where he should have learned from recent history. To elicit the AHOD response, it has to be an AHOD sort of conflict, and we haven't had one of those since, um, 1945 (though one could consider the cold war up to say 1960 to be something of an exception).

Second, a large part of the issue now is that we were overextended on credit before we even started thinking about deficit-based stimulus. The Keynesian solution borrows from the future to push up the present, and that is what war also does. But if you are already overborrowing (thanks to twenty-some years of Republicans who can't balance the budget) it's hard for the markets to absorb war bonds and the like (especially when it's not "all hands on deck").

Third, the bigger advantage the USA had in WW II, I think, was that we weren't being bombed or otherwise having our infrastructure torn up.

Fourth, I think it's untrue to say that "all that money and effort gets put into things that don't really produce anything". You do get the benefit of building the support infrastructure and whatever technological development is pushed by the war. This is the other respect in which WW II (and to a degree WW I) was different: it pushed a lot of development compared to later wars. After 1945 wars tended to be fought with whatever had been come up with when they were started, even in Vietnam.

praisegod barebones: Say, do I correctly understand that you are headquartered in Turkey? I have a coworker who wants to go on holiday there. Would you be willing for me to put her in touch with you, if you are. If so, email me at jacquem in the at of panix in the dot of com.

Damn you, Angry Birds, for sucking my time into a slingshot-firing, pig-exploding black hole!

Steve C. #88:

Dieselpunk?

There is a lot of steampunk around at the moment that fits the steampunk fantasy label and given Charlie's opinion of (extruded) fantasy (product), it's an understandable position. It's Sturgeon's Law again.

Two years ago it was vampire romance, last year was zombie year, this year it's steampunk. I'm sure next year, we'll find something else to shake our canes at.

Hyperlocal News: Barfy girl is barfy. Area mother works from home while said girl sleeps (and barfs). This turns out to be a good idea when the mother begins to feel unwell as well.

Opinion is divided* about whether this correlates with the absence of gear-encrusted corsets in the house.

-----
* 50% of respondents indicated that this hypothesis was bunk, while 50% were baffled by it.

Apropos of very little (except perhaps the mention of SCA) here are some pictures of me wearing medieval garb in Gdansk. The rest of my trip to Poland is in the "Poland 2010" set, which has a plate of pierogis and bowl of zurek as the cover photo.

In reviewing the photos, as well as the next two years' vacation plans, I am reminded that I am deeply nerdy. Yay!

Jo @33
Albatross @67

War isn't good for the economy. However, it does take out mind off it for a while.

Something else that happened during WWII that hasn't happened in the wars since... Rationing. More specifically, rationing at home to support the war effort. Even then, rationing was tacked on to the end of Great Depression where people got by with much less than we have now because they had no choice. "Use it up or wear it out; make it do or do without," was not a handy bit of doggerel.

Both sets of Grandparents lived through the Depression and WWII. It left marks -- especially deep ones since both couples were farmers and stayed put in the Dust Bowl when things got bad. Also, a co-worker doing family history asked me to proofread and comment on transcribed letters exchanged by her (non-farming) grandparents as they courted through WWII.

In my grandparents' cases, extreme frugality allowed them to survive when everyone else either failed or left for a better chance elsewhere. Then WWII came and even though they were producing enough to make money, they still couldn't buy much because every spare bit went to supporting the troops. My co-worker's grandmother wrote about having to save a month's worth of sugar rations so she'd have enough to make a birthday cake. Nor did she present that as unusual.

After a decade and a half of deprivation, anyone who had managed to save any money spent it on stuff they'd either been denied or had to deny themselves -- unless they used the opportunity to put a bit by for the next round of bad times. Most survivors of the Great Depression and WWII fall into two basic categories "Spend it while you still have it" or "Tuck it away and hold on to everything you can for when the next Big Bad comes along."

My Grandparents fell in the "Tuck it Away" category. I'm not joking in the least when I talk about inheriting my Grandmother's inner pack rat.

C. Wingate @ 110:

I'd say that the Cold War is an exception because it put the US and the Soviet Union in competition for many things beyond who could destroy each other first. The Soviets putting Sputnik up in orbit gave science education and research in the US a big kick in the rear (since wound back down, unfortunately), which had a variety of positive effects.

I will wholeheartedly grant the advantage that the US didn't have its infrastructure bombed to bits, although I do wonder whether we wouldn't have seen some attempts at that had the US entered the war earlier.

Would you take exception to me saying instead "most of that money and effort gets put into things that don't really produce anything"? You may get some infrastructure out of it, and you will probably get some technological advances (but see below), but ammunition, bombs, tanks, warships, and so on don't generate any real return, and paying for personnel is a money sink as well. I don't mean to downplay the need of any of this when it's appropriate, mind. There are some things you have to spend money on, and I don't think I'm nearly clever enough to figure out what the appropriate balance is, although my own personal opinion is that we're spending way too much on it at present.

As you noted, and I agree, there will likely be some technological advances, but I think they're mostly divided into things that could have developed independently of the military, and things that are not useful outside the military. Radar has significant civilian use, and someone was bound to stand in front of one with a chocolate bar sooner or later. Autonomous aircraft are not something that would need to be funded by defense contract, and have the added disadvantage that anything interesting would likely be kept secret instead of released to the world at large. The internet is another example of something that wouldn't necessarily need to have started off by defense contract.

I like your term: "'all hands on deck' economic stimulus".

nerdycellist @ 115... I think this is my cue to subtly remind some people that there is no photo of them in "Making Light and Faces".

C. Wingate; The real problem with Broder's theory is that it's patent nonsense. The only real example to point to is the effect of WW2 on the US economy.

Even for our wars, looking at the effect on the economy post war is to see it depressed. It is, perhaps, possible to argue that short term deficit spending on weapons, etc. is an injection of capital to the people who need it (if we can assume the money will go, largely, to the broad part of the pyramid, where money is presently tight, and whence broad-based spending would be a "lift all boats" sort of deal), but there are other ways to do that spending (and it's not clear; in fact widely disputed, that the War is what ended the depression. By and large the depression was over by the middle of '40. It's possible to argue it was Lend-Lease which did the final lifting, but even that wasn't waging war, but supplying it).

Those other ways (e.g. infrastructure rebuilding, support for the unemployed) would have better effect in the long run. There are any number of bridges, roads, water systems (both transport and purification) which need work. Lots of work. Work which will be cheaper now, pay off the investment (in spades) further down the line, improve the quality of life in the present, while making it easier to maintain in the future.

We could also pump it into schools. Making higher education available to more people would be good (there are arguments that the widened base of educated workers which came of the GI Bill is a significant part of how the US was able to exploit the demand in the rest of the world for goods in the post-war era. It took more than just someone to turn a wrench, it took engineers to perform process improvement, and create new products, logisticians to get those products made, and to market, etc.

So no, I don't see Broder's thesis (even disregarding the sheer moral unhingedness of it all [i.e. it looks like he's saying, "we have an economic problem at home, let's fix it by going out and killing people),as being realistic.

On the practical merits, it's stupid. On the moral merits it's unconscionable.

In short, he's daft.

The story starts with a zeppelin falling in flames over Potters Bar.

2100 words so far.

Just wondering if any of the regulars here are likely to be attending the event publicised here (err... other than the obvious, of course...)?

fidelio (OT148 @ 804)re morse code knitting. Marna did some of that for me.

Xopher (OT 148 @804) re meeting Planning details (it's set for Weds). As for Kikuichi- the Teaneck and Wood Ridge are, "that number is no longer in service" when called. Englewood Cliffs appears to be the regional offices. We may be able to swing by on Friday to take a look,: but on Sunday, when we swung by, no dice.

re pain scales. I recall having lived with them for a long time, so that I had a fine-tuned calibration of them (and could localise regions). It worked for me, and, from what I gathered, for the doctors. It allowed them to calibrate how much I hurt. Pain being subjective, there is no way to make the map extrinsic to the patient (save that kidney stones seem to be massively painful to one and all; so much so that I was diagnosed about the time I got into he admitting area of the ER).

Patrick @ 64

Apologies for argumentativeness. I was reacting to your statement that:

"All that nuanced, historically-aware, smart stuff Charlie says nobody's writing? Lots of people are writing it. Dunno what Charlie's been reading."

On re-reading, I agree. Taking Sturgeon into account, there's an appropriate amount of smart writing going on.

I was looking to the community as a whole (and Avram's said what I meant perhaps better than I could, at 101). I misread you as addressing the same scope, while in fact there was nothing disingenuous at all about your comments on writers specifically.

Re. wars & economic stimuli, there's a competing theory that any correlation between major wars and economic depressions/recoveries can be explained if the tendency to go to war (rather than rely on diplomatic solutions to problems) and for depressions to begin are both caused by a society-wide optimism/pessimism cycle.

That is to say, society gets generally pessimistic about the future, so people don't spend as much and depression sets in, while at the same time diplomatic actions start to seem helpless and therefore wars broke out. Then the cycle reverses, people get optimistic and start spending, the economy recovers, and diplomatic solutions are seen that enable the wars to be ended.

Such a cycle would be primarily triggered by external events, but would be kept relatively closely synchronized across the society by the tone of news reports, political speeches, and so on. We pick up on each other's emotional states, and move towards them.

While I don't see much evidence for this, it seems about as plausible to me as the hypothesis that wars cause economic recovery: i.e., it's based on ideas that make a certain amount of logical sense, and if true it results in something that has been observed, so it seems worth considering.

Terry @119

In 1926, Britain started building the National Grid. This was partly a reaction to the General Strike, and the way Britain seemed to be falling behind France and Germany. It gave the country a unified electricity supply system, boosted industrial use, and must have been pretty important for winning the war.

Avram, #101: Perhaps a more accurate description would be "the Middle Ages as they would have been with enough technology that nobody HAD to be a peon". I think Edgar gets a piece of it too @97: "we dumped all the old boxes marked "Pre-1920" from Hollywood's props department into our genre" -- and into our culture as well, with all the assumptions that we make as a result of living in the 21st century in a first-world country. And I see a couple of other people have made similar points along the way.

It's a fantasy. You can't have Pern without magical dragons, but that doesn't stop people from wishing they could live there. You can't have steampunk without the historical conditions of the period, but that doesn't stop people from wishing you could, or from pretending that they can. And at the end of the day, they can take off the costumes and go home.

BTW, S.M. Stirling's Changed World series does a very good job of addressing the whole "you can't have the SCA culture without the peons" issue. It's not steampunk, but that aspect of it is relevant to the current conversation.

Victoria, #116: My parents definitely fell into the "tuck it away" camp -- and while there's certainly something to be said for that viewpoint, IMO there's also something to be said for allowing yourself to enjoy the life you're actually living. We fought a lot because I actually did things with some of my income, rather than living on the bare minimum possible and putting all the rest into savings. Which is not to say that I didn't have savings -- I'm not stupid enough not to put some money aside when I can -- but that was never enough to stop them from accusing me of "squandering every penny I made".

Devin @ 123... there's an appropriate amount of smart writing going on

Some of it by GD Falksen.

*waves at Lee*
Hi! Thank you!

I enjoyed Charlie Stross' righteous rant, but like many other highly enjoyable and well-written pop-culture critiques, am left reviewing my media consumption and wondering if anything I like (Ren Faires! Middle-brow classical music! escapist literature!) falls on the right side of Sturgeon's Law.

Probably not, but I really grok the essay, even if I did like the first two Parasol Protectorate books.

Serge 40:
Do costumes need to be justified?
As the beer commercial says, why ask why?

98 ajay: While I'm sure that it's standard for heraldry, it pleases me that the motto is IN ALL CAPITALS (sorry, can't seem to get smallcaps to work here)

Serge @ #118 -

Do I need to send you a pic for inclusion in the gallery? I don't post too often so I wasn't sure I qualified.

Hyperlocal news: Local woman's apartment building has been without heat all fall, even as overnight temperatures dip into the 30s(F). Now there's no hot water, either. "I wish someone had warned me *before* I tried to take a shower!" woman complains.

Just a note: the Howard Rheingold particle is present in duplicate.

Jacque, #102: I hope I didn't sound too harsh... I was actually worried I was coming off too strong there. If it helps, my reaction was influenced in part by the fact that I'm in the habit of reminding myself, when reviewing books and things on my blog, not to conflate authors and narrators too much. And probably also by my reading of the book Born Under Saturn a few years ago--it's a history of Western cultural stereotypes of artists, which spends a couple of chapters arguing with art critics who, in the authors' view, were reading too much into the symbolism of the paintings they studied.

Erik Nelson @ 130... I know. It's just a hangup of mine that has gotten me in trouble in the corporate environment. Besides, it gave me a chance to make up a 'story' about it.

nerdycellist @ 32... If you don't mind, yes I'd like to post one up. Frequency isn't a criteria. Besides, you're not that infrequent a commentator. Just click on my name here and it'll take you to my blog, where you can leave a message. (I'm Serge Broom on FaceBook.)

"Greetings from Idiot America" has nothing new, but having it all there in one place is remarkably depressing.

Serge...is "Broom" pronounced "Bruttenholm"?

Avram at 101 et al:
I am Arthur, King of the Britons!

Wesley 135: "Born Under Saturn"
not to be confused with "Saturn's Children"

Antonia T. Tiger at 120:
Harry Potter became a pubkeeper when he grew up?

Hyperlocal news: Local tuxedo cat suffers cruel and unusual bathing, protests loudly.

"The first Frontline dose didn't get all the fleas, and you're due for the second tomorrow, so now's the best time to wash you," cat's human attendant explains.

Cat accepts chicken-flavored soft treat, but is not reconciled.

The "Idiot America" article has since been expanded into a book.

ajay @ 98: My long-neglected SCA heraldry didn't quite fail me, though I did stumble a moment at just how the roundels were "issuing." If it had been my job to blazon it, I'd have tried to find a term for a cross that flares like that, but then I'd be committing the sin of unnecesarily using a charged charge.

Mildly iconoclastic, both for the rare charge (the ankh) and the secondary charges not fully on the escutcheon, but strikingly simple and elegant in the net effect. I applaud whoever designed it heartily.

Thanks for the workout!

zombie saturation: the other day there were a bunch of zombies entertaining the people coming out of the subway in the morning. I found them a little annoying.

Okay, Mark, I used to be able to keep up with you when you were checking heraldry submissions, but I'm at least as out of practice as you are, and PLEASE explain the "issuing" part?

TexAnne @ 139... is "Broom" pronounced "Bruttenholm"?

It is indeed, but is not to be confused with the character who appeared in the movie advertised on a marquee here, whose name was "Bruttenholm", but was pronounced "Broom".

Rikibeth @ 147: Issuing/"issuant" was something that used to be regarded as mildly bad form and a likely quality of SCA heraldry rather than English or Continental heraldry. It's when a charge is partially obscured by an ordinary or, in this case, the edge of the escutcheon, so that the charge seems to be captured in the moment of emerging into view. Compare "azure, a sun in splendour Or, issuant from a base argent" = a cartoony winter sunrise that would get sent right back with CYA notes about not enough points of difference from thus and such. In most SCA usages, it trips the bad form tripwire because it's used to imply motion and proper, traditional heraldry is static.

67
We shut down the production for rockets (the bigger ones, at least) and also the production lines for space shuttles, so now we're going to be depending on the Russians for access to the space station.
People in the higher reaches of government seem to think that all it will take is businesses wanting access, and we will miraculously have commercial space flight.

So the roundels are emerging from behind the ankh, making a sort of four-leaf clover effect?

Yeah, I can see how that would make SCA heralds go "Oh, no you don't!"

PJ Evans @ 150... it will take is businesses wanting access, and we will miraculously have commercial space flight

That's the kind of crap we've been hearing from the likes of Jerry Pournelle for decades.

Cass, #45, Abebooks has it. I had them ship to Australia and I don't remember exactly what it was, but it seemed reasonable You can check the mailing cost first.

Erik Nelson, #146, AMC has a new show, The Walking Dead, and put out zombies a lot of places. They tried to enter the Lincoln Memorial but the Park Police stopped them.

Lying sack of shit Repukes....
The one running against Barney Frank has the temerity to claim Barney Frank, who fought in vain for YEARS to apply and have enforced regulations on the financial services industry, is responsible for the economic meltdown. The oppponent make a lying sack of shit look appealing. The same goes for Mitt Romney who's repeating the same horseshit.

Cambridge SoundWorks might have been the last company founded by Henry Kloss (others include Advent and KLH), less well known than Amar G Bose, who founded Bose--but Kloss' loudspeakers were always better than Bose's.

There's an article in North Shore (I think that's the name) Magazine. Cambridge SoundWorks' headquarters is in North Andover, moved there from an once-factory-and-warehouse building in Newton, which it I expect had moved to after originally having been in Cambridge. (I wondered what had happened to the company when the building in Newton had a big For Sale sign on it.)

An Asia company, Creative, bought Cambridge SoundwWorks and moved all the production to China...

Once upon a time, this area was where most of the the best loudspeakers were made. Maybe Bose is doing some manufacturing here, or not.... but mostly consumer electronics are made in Asia.... and most of the world's semiconductor manufacturing is there, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation is the big merchant foundary company. Its success is a combination of past (it seems to be having some problems now I think I've read) excellence in customer service and support (delivery on time and at aggressively attracive pricing) and production quality and advanced technology, versus other suppliers, including varous companies doing production in the USA, whose support, pricing, delivery dates, and/or quality didn't meet TSMC's excellence levels.

The Democrats should have been running videos like this for months:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BJfMPxQuiU&feature=player_embedded

#154: This is news to you? Barney Frank has been the Right's designated Cause Of The Financial Crisis for going on a year. I find this a useful shibboleth when reading comment threads. If someone blames Frank, I know I'm dealing with a memoid who has absolutely nothing of value to say.

* * *

Tangential to that . . . if Frank and Pelosi are out of the picture come January, who will be the new Fox News hate objects? They need someone whose gender, race and/or orientation makes them a useful, hackle-raising target.

Rikibeth! Fleas! I stand with you against them.

Today, mostly because the bed was crazy rumpled-- I usually neaten it when I get up but I overslept and the adrenaline-fueled morning did not allow for tidiness-- I found two fleas, one dead, one live. Nothing else recently. I am doing my best not to declare anything, but I am defining victory conditions.

Diatryma, I found the advice that everyone gave you with YOUR flea problem most helpful in mine, with the only gating factor being money to buy the treatments. (And, currently, an ailing vacuum. Luckily we've got a backup.)

I'm still getting bitten more than I'd like, but this is only the second month of Frontline, and I'm sure I'll need to repeat the carpet treatment as well.

I was somewhat distracted from the fleas by a MOUSE problem. Ultrasonic mouse repellers didn't; I finally had to resort to poison. And a stocking full of mothballs in my engine compartment, because the damned things nibbled through my ignition wires. Now I'm washing mouse droppings out of the stored linens.

I suppose it's good that I'm not allergic to tetracycline, just in case the mouse problem and the flea problem bring on a Black Plague problem?

2010 World Champion San Francisco Giants.

What? It's an OT!

#156 Stefan

They've abusive bullies and deserve some of the more unpleasant "corrective action" measures applied in e.g. Girl Genius with the faint hope that there might be something of redeeming value redeemable in them....

Hmm, Srh Pln as Zola.... Karl Rove as the Prof Beetle's dead assistant. The Schmuck as one of the most obnoxious determined toadies to Zola. Or, no, the Schmuck as the turncoat Jaeger.

Serge, that Bruttenholm/Broom business also showed up in The List of Adrian Messenger.

Erik Nelson @142: Here.

Several things: To start, I expect tomorrow to be interesting here (given that the Giants just won their first Series in 52 years). On a more proximate topic (as I was unaware they had won until I randomly checked the Times' website), I have just spent the last five hours debugging experimental code and writing analysis code. This includes freaking out about a bug... and having it turn out to be interesting, rather than just useless. I still need to rerun two subjects, but that is doable.

Yep, how I know I'm in graduate school.

Since Making Light knows everything- does anyone know what this is? It's apparently a cartoon character, and it seems to be connected to Finland in some way. Are there perhaps any Finnish lurkers or occasional commenters who recognize it?

Raphael @164

It looks to be a Moomin, the creation of Tove Jansson.

Google Images on "Moomin" will reveal hundreds of the critters.

Jules @ 121: Well, I wasn't, but now you've pointed it out.... As it happens, I'm in Dudley for a conference this weeekend and it's a 15 minute train ride from Dudley Port to Birmingham New Street, so I might see if I can skip out of the socialising on Friday evening and come along. You'll be there? Hm, now I'm starting to think whether it would be possible/practical to get to Novacon the following weekend (not been for years).

Stefan Jones @ 138: Yes, I found it depressing as well, and I'm British - but we do seem to be following the good old USA...

Regarding Pterry's Coat of Arms, some may not be aware of the owl reference.
http://www.nzbirds.com/birds/ruru.html

ErrolC @167

I think the College of Arms has just won the Internet.

Would this qualify for a Hugo nomination?

Thats why I have never been attracted to SCA stuff:
"the Middle Ages as they should have been"

No, I want stabbing in the back, quarrelling, fighting, mud, rich people looking very rich and poor people working away in the mud. Of course we don't get as realistic as we could, it being quite hard to replicate the social hierarchy with a bunch of weekending modern folk. But it is entertaining to see people's reactions when I say I'm mixing clay and horse dung for bronze casting moulds.

Then I get to wash up and go home and have a nice hot bath and appreciate the 21st century better.

Raphael @164 (and Dave): That particular Moomin's name is Moomintroll. I believe there are only 3 Moomins in the stories, Moomintroll and his parents.

Many of the images found by a Google search for Moomins are actually Snorks.

Dave Bell @165 and NiallMcAuley @170, thanks! (I'm kind of baffled that there's an entire classical children's book series that I've never heard of, though.)

ddb, #85: "I'm sure Patrick and Liz are publishing the best steampunk that their budget and what's submitted to choose from will allow"

For the record, I've never acquired, edited, or published any steampunk anywhere, to the best of my recollection.

If anyone wants a rundown on who actually does what at Tor.com, I can provide that. But the point I want to make here is that whatever comments I've made in defense of steampunk have had nothing to do with my own editorial work.

On a different subject, I'm trying to figure out if I have anything useful to say about ddb's remark, also in comment #85, that "high demand is something publishers, as rational capitalist actors, should actively try to fill." This strikes me as mistaken on several levels. Supply-and-demand incentives create opportunities; they don't create a moral requirement. The fact that there is always a demand for contract killings doesn't mean that anyone "should" offer their services as a murderer-for-hire. And the fact that there's a high demand for a particular kind of fiction doesn't mean that every publisher is obliged to cater to it. The fact is that people, including people employed by publishing companies, do things for all sorts of reasons--the extent to which they act as "rational capitalist actors" is generally surpassingly small.

Nearly twenty years ago, in Backlash, Susan Faludi documented example after example of how American corporations in the 1980s ignored overwhelming evidence that serious money could be made by marketing to independent-minded women, and turned instead to products and campaigns that were predicated on the notion that feminism was over and that American women wished to return to a pre-feminist state of affairs. (One might almost suspect that what members of the business class do has far more to do with maintaining their privileges and the social structures that support those privileges than it has to do with coolly assessing market needs, but that's a different branching path off of this set of observations.) Similarly, what people in publishing choose to publish is likely to be affected by many considerations, both personal and also related to the particular opportunities and disincentives inside the organizations in which they work. The idea that any business operates primarily as some kind of engine of efficiency, dispassionately identifying areas of "high demand" and moving smoothly to cater to them, is one of the great fairy tales of our time. Yes, when pressed, the more intelligent members of the business class will acknowledge the existence of concepts like "market friction," but the core delusion is that the system basically works and should be left to run itself lest its essential genius be compromised. And the building blocks of that delusion are people endlessly repeating to one another obviously false statements like "high demand is something publishers, as rational capitalist actors, should actively try to fill." Future generations, if we have any, will look back at this kind of talk the way we look at people earnestly telling one another about phlogiston.

Terry @122--Cool! How did she choose to designate the dots and dashes? I ended up using a purl stitch for the dots, and a yarn-in-front slipped stitch for a dash, with a single knit stitch between each letter, and two between each word, but there have to be other ways to do it.

David, you know more than a few authors. Why do they write the books they do? Answer: it's complicated.

Publishers can't publish what authors don't write. Readers trust writers they know far more than they trust what the packaging says about the content. We have a visual style we call steampunk, but I'm not sure we've found the main vein of stories that go with it.

I propose a quick and dirty test for large organizations: look at photos of leaders and top management. If they all look vaguely similar, you're not looking at an open-source meritocracy.

I just came back from the polling station.

I was first in line.
Like I did in 2008.
I cast the first vote.
Like I did in 2008.
Make me proud, America.
Like you did in 2008.

Vote!

@167: Now, that's Bad Ass.

Rikibeth @ 151: No, actually the roundels are issuing from the corners of the escutcheon, so the ankh looks like it's on a black cross with inner corners rounded and ends flared. Here's ajay's link made clickable for your convenience; the emblazon is halfway down.

Hyperlocal News: Area man scrubs stove top, laments sticky orange scum isn't as easy to remove from Congress.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden @ 173: "And the fact that there's a high demand for a particular kind of fiction doesn't mean that every publisher is obliged to cater to it."

That explains the vast quantity of literary porn in bookstores. Heh. ("Rational capitalist actors" need better scripts.)

Actually, this whole comment is lovely, and I'd like to link to it, if that's OK.

fidelio: I forget. Since I am in New Jersey/New York until next week I can't go grab it to tell you.

When I get home I will try to remember to look at it/take a picture (that, or I might just ping her and ask her to tell the world).

It pretty easy to make out, save that I made a transcription error, which made deciphering it a bit confusing.

I think she had definite ideas about how to make it better. I need to ask Merav how it was she coded the same message in the Tunisian crocheted vest she made (which I think I may press her to finish tonight, that I might wear it to lunch at Hamachi tomorrow.

PNH@173: And in fact my explicit reference to "rational capitalist actors" was intended to include-by-reference the concept that that's a simplistic model of how business decisions get made when viewed from the inside -- even sometimes when it looks like that from the outside. (And of course sometimes, from the outside, it looks like a business aggressively resisting what the market wants; like the American auto industry in the 1970s.)

My "should" was intended as less than moral imperative; more the suggestion that it's good business. But it isn't always; especially in a smaller publisher.

PNH@172: I checked the pages on Tor.com and found you and Liz listed as the fiction editors, so I credited you jointly as such. And now, because you have told us, we know that no Steampunk on Tor.com or anywhere else was your choice; I know more than I did before.

@ 167, et.al.
I hope the College of Arms had fun putting Pratchett's Coat of Arms together. There are certainly enough Disk World references to make it look like they read at least some of the books. The helm makes me think of Vimes' Night Watch.

@ 168
It would be worth it to see the expressions on the Collegiate faces if they get nominated for the Hugo.

There are probably a few expat Brits reading who would find this useful: How to watch BBC iPlayer abroad.

I voted. As usual, the problem was that there were so many people who deserved voting against, and relatively few who deserved voting for.

"Why are you here?"
"I'm here to fight for truth, and justice, and the American way."
"You're gonna end up fighting every elected official in this country!"
"You don't really believe that, Lois."

Didn't make it to the polls as early as Serge - I was in the 450 range. Not bad for an hour and a half.....

Just spent half an hour looking for a quote. Some Republican in Congress, possibly Speaker of the House said something like "We never discussed how we were going to pay for anything" at some point, talking about Iraq or possibly the entire eight years of the Bush Presidency. I may have seen this quote on a Making Light sidebar.

For some reason I'm having issues finding it with a search engine.

Help?

I voted several weeks ago (absentee). Our polling place is popular (or there are a lot of responsible folks in our district), and I got tired of long waits in line. The record being 4 hours...

When I woke this morning the radio host was talking with a man who had reached his polling place at 6:31 am EDT to find that there were fifteen(!) people in line ahead of him. He was much aggrieved over these circumstances.

Am I right in thinking heavy turnout = better odds for the Democrats?

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, 173, wrote:
One might almost suspect that what members of the business class do has far more to do with maintaining their privileges and the social structures that support those privileges than it has to do with coolly assessing market needs, but that's a different branching path off of this set of observations.

Well, yes. That's exactly what the members of the business class do, because they, like every other class* want to maintain their privileges. That's normal human behavior: the preservation of oneself and one's family. (And, as a distant third, the preservation of one's team, as any number of revolutionary movements have found to their sorrow.)

Except, of course for the privileges that are so useful that it makes more sense for everyone to have them, so they can benefit from network effects. The whole progressive movement from the 1780's on could be seen as an ongoing experiment to test serially distributing privileges to others to see how nice a society they could build. In much the same way the elites of the time experimented with how nice a house they could build (Montpelier!) or capital (L'Enfant). So: the progression from only landed free white men being able to vote all the way to eighteen year olds of any color or sex.

I am tempted to ascribe the success of the Progressive project to the large number of relatively comfortable, well off people who had access to education, hot baths, and decent meals, decided that was normal, and then worked to include more people. (If for no other reason initially to prevent starving, smelly, ignorant mobs from burning down their cities every decade or so. Not sure what took the French so long to figure that one out. Maybe my hypothesis is flawed? Maybe there's a difference between elites who gain power via education & hot baths vs. those who are born into it/got it via a coup?)

I've heard members of the business class - Wall Street Journal reading, Mad-Men era guys, talking about the virtues of unions** and the importance of paying taxes. Why? Because it benefits them. Assessing market needs are a means to an end: keeping their job to amass their family's personal wealth. The efficient market myth is just part of the apparatus to fleece unsuspecting investors.*** And should be properly regarded as a bug, not a feature. There is evidence that many in the business class do in fact regard the whole "maximize quarterly profits" phenomena as such a bug. The only debate is when it will crash the system the next time. (And, of course, where to park one's capital to protect it from system crashes.)

*not technically true, but go with it, please.
**works better than OSHA for safety rules and preventing child labor, but they were skeptical that they were still necessary.
***not regarded as a positive feature by said guys, but they can't figure out what to do about it, aside from letting the SEC tweak the rules every so often. There's some of the same pathologies that you and Teresa have noted regarding scams in general: the elite have often been scammed, and are not often willing to disavow the systems that scammed them, because that would have to admit to being scammed...

I was worried that my voter registration did not move with me, but it turns out I am registered. I got my vote-by-mail ballot on Saturday - a little late for actual mail voting, but plenty of time to fill out and drop off before call-time for the Requiem mass. The church is a polling place. Not my polling place, but with vote by mail in CA, you can drop your ballot off at any polling place. Yay for convenience!

(still woefully undecided on a couple of Propositions. Guess that means a "no" vote)

I voted last Weds. I've spent the past week with my, "I voted" sticker on my hat. I got a call yesterday from a friend (who has had the twin crises of becoming a bit more liberal, while the party he favors has gone off the rails to the right) ask me (as has become common in the last few years) for my recommendations on the ballot.

He can't vote for Whitman, and Brown infuriates him, so he voted Green, in the hope the lesser of the two evils he sees (which I think is Brown), gets the nod, and there is some value to an advisory vote. He did the same in Bush/Kerry.

As for Props, I voted, "against my interest" in that I said yes to increasing my vehicle taxes, and kept it from getting harder to pass fees. I hope the budget gets easier (simple majority. I might have been happier if it were 55 percent, but the present 2/3rds is completely untenable, and allows the minority to engage in heinous acts of political blackmail, while costing the state money in borrowed funds to cover day to day operating expenses, sometimes for months).

And... We shall see, as the polls come in.

Victoria @183, the helm of Sir Pterry's Grant of Arms has the look it has because he is a Knight. It's one of the English conventions. A heraldic artist from another country might depict it differently, and English artists would still have choices on most of the detail. Generally, they would follow local conventions for the Arms of a knight. Likewise the "mantling", which was originally intended to keep the sun off--think of the traditional image of the French Foreign Legion in the desert--is almost entirely up to the artist.

Effectively, a blazon describes what has to be, and, subject to some additional rules, the artist decorates it with these extra details. There has to be a helmet to carry the crest. If there are Supporters, they have to have something to stand on. And, after that, it's turtles all the way down.

Lori@189 - I think heavy turnout can be good for either party depending on the region. In most big cities, it's probably good for Democrats. In rural areas and conservative suburbs, it's as likely to mean that the Tea Party folks are riled up.

Devin #123: Apologies back at you for being a tad touchy.

I put my "I Voted" sticker on the side of my computer, right above my Windows XP Pro OEM Software product key certificate of authenticity.

Hyperlocal News:
Woman reports to polling place to exercise her franchise, and after doing so, returns to work to find an open parking space right by her building entrace, indulges self with fantasy of civic virtue being rewarded.

This year in Tennessee, there are 14 independent candidates on the ballot for governor, including David "None of the Above" Gatchell (who supports the addition of a "None of the Above" to all ballots, and whose site boasts a picture of his terribly cute campaign manager), and Basil Marceaux (who is all over the map on issues, pretty much, but is very definite about the importance of the correct way to fly the US flag). This seems like a high number of candidates for a position which will become much harder to manage when the federal stimulus money dries up.

My congressional district has, besides the Democractic incumbent and Republican challenger (and that was an entertaining primary race) a Libertarian candidate, a Green candidate, and six independents.

WHile I was getting ready to hit the big green "Record Vote" button, one of the Local Youths wandered into the polling place, and came up to me, asking "How old to you have to be to do this? Is it, like, 18?" I said yes, and pointed out the clerks' table, saying "Those ladies over there can tell you how to register." The poll worker supervising the machines scurried over and told him "You have to step back; this lady is voting". He did, looking at me with amazement: "Really? No way!" because, you know, what is a person voting supposed to look like? It's an arcane and mysterious thing, this business of exercising the franchise.

Terry @ 181--thanks!

Also, too--Michael Franti and Spearhead re-work for "Say Hey" for the San Francisco Giants.

The part of Charlie's post on steampunk that I think is really to the point is the long paragraph at the end (well, long by internet standards), in which he lays out specific challenges for steampunk writers.

I think those specific challenges are worthy, and I'm sorry that Charlie doesn't feel up to writing them himself (he thinks either he or the writing would be too angry, I'm not sure which).

And actually, combined with James Nicoll's call for science fiction that acknowledges a possibility of a future in which the condition of humanity and the earth has improved, I think there's some heavy inspiration there.

Wow, fidelio--it almost sounds like you're describing my neck of the TN woods. Though as dubiously entertaining as our congressional primary was, I'm finding myself riveted against my will to the spectacle of the final election, since the Republican challenger is equal parts risible and terrifying, with a dash of pathetic, and I'm probably more concerned than I ought to be that she might stand a chance.

Linkmeister @ 161... Something tells me that Mike Mignola was throwing in a homage. I'll definitely need to look up the movie if TCM ever shows it. Or I could add it to our NetFlix queuuuuuuue.

alsafi @ 201--

I'm in Nashville, with Jim Cooper as my representative; IIRC the Republican primary here had 11 candidates on the ballot. I think it may have been the Tennessee district with the most people registered as candidates for all parties in the August primary--more than either of the two districts where the incumbent is retiring.

Interestingly, the 9th District, which is mostly Memphis, only had one Republican in the primary, which says a lot about how unwinnable the state Republicans see that seat.

We had a state constitutional amendment about hunting as well.

Yup, I'm in Memphis, and our primary fun was Herenton's bid for Cohen's seat. Everything I've heard is that Cohen considers it safe, and that's comforting, but his one Republican challenger is a wild-eyed tea party wingnut--I don't know where they found her. She's an odd duck, Charlotte Bergmann, but her yard signs have sprouted up like mushrooms, and I know there are a whole lot of reactionary conservatives in and around Memphis. It has me a little worried, because I like Steve Cohen and think he's been doing a pretty good job, and I really don't want to have him replaced with an incompetent with a tenuous attachment to a reality-based worldview.

I saw the constitutional amendment re: hunting--I thought that was a bit weird, personally. Do you know if there's some story behind that?

Hyperlocal News:

Local woman discovers that the Polish word for "Aunt" sounds exactly like a Spanish slang term for lady-parts. Nonetheless, she looks forward to meeting her first niece and/or nephew, even if they call her *unt Nerdycellist.

re 117/119: Would you take exception to me saying instead "most of that money and effort gets put into things that don't really produce anything"? I think I would take exception to the notion that this is different from most of the money and effort that goes into developing and producing goods for consumer retail, or for vacations, or other non-capital use. Or for that matter, to be quite precise, police supplies (including weapons). Perhaps it is different, but I don't think we can quantify that difference.

The crucial point is pretty much where Terry finds it: Broder wants WW II to be the pattern, when has not in practice been repeated since. I think it is also the case that Broder assumes that Obama will go to war over Iran, not that he is advocating it.

Little Brother in Montgomery County, Md.

Hyperlocal news:

The artist formerly known as Barf Girl was still too unwell to go to school today; her mother was similarly afflicted and stayed home from work.

TafkaBG was in better shape than said mother, and wanted to "do something", preferably involving making things from yarn. She has a knitting doll already, and has been making crochet chains.

Said mother is a knitter.

However, said mother could not face the prospect of teaching tafkaBG to knit. "Images of needles sliding out of whole rows of stitches swam before my eyes," she is reported as saying. So there was much YouTubing, and both invalids learned the fundamentals of crocheting granny squares.

In related news, a long-haired figure was seen pounding on the door of the Crochet Embassy and demanding asylum, while a mob of knitters (with flaming balls of eyelash acrylic stuck on long needles) approached in menacing fashion*.

-----
* Hand-knit, with really intimidating cables

Rikibeth at 158, I sympathize. About 12 years ago spring I had to replace 1) some internal washing machine hoses, because mice had chewed through them, and, some months later, 2) my whole damn STOVE, because the insulation was impregnated with droppings.

That's when I called in a pest control person, who administered little blue pellets of poison. No, I don't like having poison around. But yes, it got rid of the mice.

The cats were useless. They watched the mice with great interest, but did not catch them.

alsafi @204--I think there isn't much need to fear the astonishing Charlotte will carry that district; if the state Republican committee thought it was winnable by a candidate of theirs, they'd have made a reasonable effort to get a less terrigying candidate in there, in hopes of appealing to swing voters.

I'm not sure of the entire story behind the hunting amendment--I suspect it's designed to appeal to rural voters, hunters, and gun owners and thus increase turn-out among segments the GOP hopes will vote their way. It reads fairly harmlesly--it does not restrict the right of the state to limit hunting of endangered creatures (and deer and coyotes, as well as possums, rabbits, raccoon and game birds can't be considered remotely endangered here), to regulate commercial activity connected with hunting, to require permits or enforce safety requirements, and does not interfere with the right to limit hunting on public or private property. Since I doubt the state of Tennessee was likely to put an end to hunting any time soon, this wasn't exactly a needed amendment, except perhaps in the minds of some conspiracy-minded souls.

Jules @ #121 - It is entirely possible that Moose may be present.

RE:

Fleas:

My dog had them for the first time, as far as I know. At least, for the first time since I adopted her six years back.

I honestly didn't know what was happening. She had a stiff / sore right leg at the beginning of the month, so when she started licking and chewing on this leg I assumed she was trying to deal with twinges of pain from arthritis or hip pain or some-such.

After hearing he scratch and suck all night Friday, I finally brought her to the vet. The assistant quite quickly found some of the little bastards.

I've never been super-concientious about apply Advantage, but I'd always had it around until a few months back. I'd remember to dose Kira every few months, which I guess was enough. Not having it around, I forgot totally.

By conincidence I had a bath and groomer scheduled for that afternoon. The groomer happily added flea treatment and anti-itch shampoo to the mix.

A remarkable improvement already.

I put her bedding through a hot dryer cycle. Should I be dosing and vacuuming the carpet as well?

I amused my housemate by reading the job titles listed on the ballots. For example, for Treasurer, we have The Incumbent, a Businesswoman, a Retired Technology Manager, a Business Owner/Attorny, a Retired Professor, and someone who didn't list any job title at all. I realize one should do research before the election, but the amusement value of those job titles is worthy of note.

Yes, I got my vote in.

Hyperlocal news: traveler to San Francisco now in San Francisco, for those wishing to meet an occasional commenter face to face.

Stefan: Yes. The life cycle of the flea is interesting. They have a larval phase, independent of the host animal.

They then pupate. When they are mature they wait until a warm body lies on them, and they they emerge, and pile on.

That humans don't have a specific flea is strong evidence that we have only been sedentary for a short while (on an evolutionary scale).

There are area products for dealing with lawns, meant to kill the larva, before pupation.

207 C. Wingate: I like the idea of a cardboard flap rubber-banded over the lens. Cheap, easy to implement, and not quite as aggressive (and less likely to lead to a felony charge). But I'm weird.

C. Wingate, #207: One of the 3 propositions we're voting on here is whether or not the red-light cameras should be retained. Ours have a distressingly high proportion of false positives -- tickets sent out over what turns out to have been a legal right on red after stopping -- so I suspect it's going to be voted down.

Dave Bell @168
I should have mentioned that the Ankh-Morpork Coat of Arms includes a mor(e)pork, so that aspect of Pterry's, while clever, isn't exactly original.
The College of Arms do, indeed, rock.

Sandy B. @ 94: "My bad. I built little boxes and labeled them "This is good" and "This is bad" and then the thing I liked fit perfectly into the "this is bad" box and I didn't think it through sufficiently before hitting "post.""

I don't think there's anything wrong with your boxes, just the "good" and "bad" part. I definitely think you're onto something with the steampunk SF/Fantasy division.* Some steampunk takes the technological underpinnings of that time period very seriously, and some works treat it as a particularly brass-and-leather-intensive form of handwavium--I just think that the latter can still have strengths all its own.

* Rather, the mixing of elements from both those genres under the steampunk umbrella**. That might explain some of steampunk's appeal: it traipses freely between two closely aligned but separate genres.

Then again, it might also explain some of the grumpiness: people coming to steampunk with SF reading protocols might be seriously put off by the realization that the work they are holding is not *gasp* sufficiently rigorous.

** No doubt a self-opening model, with attachments for personal assault deterrents and/or flight devices.

Mark Frauenfelder twitters us this link:

http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/

Nicely well done.

* * *

My co-workers reports on her family's Halloween Candy Control measure.

On the evening after Halloween, the Great Pumpkin visits to take away spare trick-or-treat candy and leave presents.

The more candy left in the plastic pumpkin, the better the present.

And what happens to the candy the Great Pumpkin takes away?

It gets left in a bowl on the edge of her cubicle.

I like this custom.

Lizz L @ 209... The cats were useless. They watched the mice with great interest, but did not catch them.

No mouse would be foolish enough to venture inside our house, not with Agatha the Cat Genius around. For the same reason, no bunny shows its twitchy nose in our backyard anymore.

Cadbury Moose @ 211; Jules @ 121: Well you should be able to recognise me, if I make it there (I'll try to do so), because I'm in Serg's "Making Lights and Faces" Gallery (page 2 - sorry, I won't have the lemur on my shoulder. Oh, and I'm 5ft 2. And I'll probably be lugging a folding bike into the pub with me (I'm sure not leaving it locked up in B'ham city centre on a Friday evening, and I don't want to risk not finding a taxi and having to walk 1.5 miles from Dudley Port station back to the hotel, afterwards.

Hints for recognition?

I have found one live flea in the past week and two dead ones.

I have twenty-four hours remaining before I declare phase one victory. I don't know what I'll do to celebrate, but it might involve vacuuming up the diatomite all over the place.

fidelio & alsafi: I'm in Little Rock, and Arkansas has a hunting amendment on the ballot, too. I hadn't thought of it being intended to draw hunters to the polls. It's being touted as protecting our right to hunt when the evil liberals come to take our guns away, as (they say) is being done in other states already.

abi @ 208 After hearing so many people say they learned to knit when quite young, I'd been thinking about teaching my 7yo daughter to knit, but after showing her how to make some relatively simple friendship bracelets, I decided it might be a while. I am afraid one of us might end up impaled by one or more needles (not by my hand; I can just see her getting frustrated and throwing them, either up in the air...or straight at me). Maybe I'll suggest we both learn to crochet together instead.

Heresiarch @27: I've been reading steampunk since the mid-eighties; what part of Blaylock, Powers, and Jeter did you miss?

It's much of the recent stuff I'm less than impressed by.

Serge @40: Steampunk has, by my metric, been around since about 1985. If you think it dates to 2006, you're rather late to the party -- that's merely when it went exponential. (Same as with paranormal romance: "Interview with the Vampire" came out in 1976, but it was the late eighties, IIRC, when vampire fic began to proliferate, and the mid nineties before it exploded.)

Teresa @48: One too many Gail Carriger novels, I'm afraid. I like Gail, but the ... excursions ... finally got slightly too far up my nose, and I sneezed.

Xopher @72: just back from a long weekend's hard work in Antwerp; trying to deal with various relatives having/about to have major surgery: preparing for another weekend's work in Birmingham. In other words, same old.

As a general aside:

Is it just me, or is most of the current steampunk boom American? I don't recall seeing much recent British steampunk, "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" aside. (Include, at this point, the usual half-formed polemic about how it's a reaction against current cultural perceptions of insecurity/unease about the future and a harking back to some vaguely imagined "golden age".)

Tony @77: exactly.

I reckon late 19th century British empire jingoism looks a lot more attractive from the outside -- if your background is one that was not a participant. Just like the attractiveness of aristocracies, from the viewpoint of folks insulated from it by centuries of living in a republic.

SteveC @88: a few years back I was muttering about Dieselpunk -- intermediate early-modernist techno-fascist stuff about Air-mindedness -- but Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and/or Scott Westerfeld, got there before me. So I'll have to invent this alternate history genre set in the 1980s, with hairy post-hippy types called "hackers" doing too much crystal meth and worming their way into the vast electronic babbage machines of the military-industrial complex ... I think I'll call it something like "cyber" -punk.

Lucy @200: one of my up-coming self-challenges is: to write a near-future SF novel depicting a plausible future which readers would actually like to live in.

There is not enough of it about. (Talk about un-met consumer demand!)

Re: hunting and fishing initiatives

On NPR's Talk of the Nation today an Arkansas resident posited that the proposed amendment in his state was a way to ensure those two activities wouldn't get caught up in animal cruelty legislation. From the show:

DAN: I wanted to comment about the ballot measure in Arkansas about hunting and fishing rights. I think it's also a reaction to attempts to get animal cruelty legislation passed in the state. It's been really difficult to get any kind of anti-animal cruelty legislation passed at the state level. And the argument against it is usually from the hunting and fishing lobby.

CONAN: So by putting the right to hunt and fish in the state constitution, it would make it much more difficult to pass that kind of legislation?

DAN: Well, at least it will protect - you know, the hunters and fishermen were - say that they're concerned that they might be swept up in animal cruelty legislation.

CONAN: Pamela Prah, does that make sense?

Ms. PRAH: That's very interesting, yes.

CONAN: Okay. And the same, obviously, would - might apply in the state of Montana, though I don't think in either Arkansas or Montana, these things are under immediate threat.

Ms. PRAH: That's right.

CONAN: All right.

DAN: No, no. And that's one of the, you know, bad things about trying to get any kind of real legislation against cruelty to animals passed. It's the hunting and fishing lobby - and farming also - come out against it pretty strongly.

I'd also like to have a near-future REAL world that I'd like to live in.

Fidelio @ 198:

I started with purl 1 for dots and purl 3 for dashes but found that purls weren't showing up well enough to suit me (I was using Cascade 220, and not using a contrasting colour for the code), so I went with:

Dot: Yarn forward, slip one.

Dash: Yarn forward, slip three.

Space between dots or dashes: knit one.

Space between characters: Knit 3.

It was a *very* short message, one 'word'.

If I ever want to say something complicated or start quoting John Done instead of Great Big Sea I'll probably have to make a blanket. This was a neckwarmer for on the bike, so unless I wanted it to reach to his waist, or else do the message in spiral and have a big chunk of knitting that looked as if I'd hit the gin hard a third of the way through the project and kept going, space was limited. On a scarf the extended apparent randomness might look better than it was coming out on the neckwarmer. As a panel on a sweater might also do well.

I have considered trying chunks of garter stitch on a knit surface, which will require two rows per row of message.

Shakespeare performance in the original accent. I wish it was closer to me, because I would SO go to that. Listening to the scene clip reminded me of my college Chaucer class. (Yes, I know it's not the same thing, but some of the vowel values are similar.)

Marna, 228: Hmm...the garter idea makes me wonder whether illusion knitting would work. (I haven't ever done any, myself. Or not yet, anyway. I keep getting distracted by lace.)

228: How about a transatlantic cable knit?

Charlie Stross @ 224: "I've been reading steampunk since the mid-eighties; what part of Blaylock, Powers, and Jeter did you miss?"

Perhaps I was mislead by the subsequent thousand or so words where you gave a convincing impression of having not read a decent thing since. Oh, sorry, you seem to have read Boneshaker--and to have missed all its commentary on Victorian gender and race issues in a fit of pique over insufficiently rigorous zombie science. When you name-checked Mieville didn't it occur to you that his monstrously good New Crobuzon series blows a rather large hole in your thesis?

I'm not thrilled with the preponderance of crap steampunk, but you do no one any favors by ignoring the spots of good mixed in with the bad. And if you just aren't able to find any good steampunk out there, I offer you your selection of either the timeless "If you don't like it then don't read it" or the particularly apropos "If no one else is writing it then write it yourself." Or both, really.

re 216: Well, there's plenty of solid evidence that red light cameras cause accident rates to increase.

Lee @ #229:

It does mention that they're going to make a recording of the production (though I realise that's not the same thing as seeing it live).

I remember hearing about the original OP productions at the Globe - apparently they did audience response surveys to make sure the pronunciation wasn't putting people off, and found that actually a lot of people found it more accessible than the posh pronunciation that's usually considered appropriate for Shakespeare.

I voted for human beings.

I might not agree with them all.

Not all of them ran for office with completely noble motives.

Every one of them will make mistakes.

But they're all human.

No monsters, ogres, zombies or demons.

I voted for human beings.

The hell with that, Mr. Patrick Connors! I'm voting an all-ogre ticket next year!

I voted against some monsters.

Charlie Stross @ 224...

I think there may have been a slight misunderstanding. That reference to 2006 was indeed a reference to when it went, as you put it, exponential. That's when it entered the culture and so required no explanation. Again, I could have phrased that better, but that is what I meant.

That being said... I am very much aware that steampunk was around long before 2006. Not only had I read Blaylock, but in other posts I also mentionned The Difference Engine, and going even further back, Christopher Priest's The Space Machine. Not only that, but the link to my "Steampunk and Hollywood" talk showed that movies - the root of steampunk - go even farther back. In other words, I know whereof I speak, as much as you do.

Sent to my congresscritter:

"Congratulation on staying [in office].
And please do not cooperate with ANYTHING with Mr Boehner. I have NOTHING polite to say about him. I have a higher opinion of a dead rotting rabid weasel. That's the POLITEST thing I have to say about him."

The POS who is the next House Speaker, had some tears in his eyes doing a speech. But is HE going to get get called "sissy" for it, by the same hypocrites who dump on Democrats for tearing up? I bet not...

But at least the sales and marketing incompetent weasel who destroyed Hewlett-Packard offshoring tens of thousands of jobs to Asia, lost.

Speaking of zombie weasels... It looks like New Mexico now has a Palindrone for governor. I need a drink.

Paula @239 - I've just seen that nice Mr Boehner on the BBC. And apparently its time for Congress to roll up its sleeves and get to work. And listen to the people. Because there is stuff to be done. And the way to do it is to roll up your sleeves and get to work. And do all those things the people want. And not to celebrate. But instead roll up their sleeves and get to work.

"... I will do such things. What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be The terrors of the earth! You think I'll weep. No, I'll not weep..."

Well, except for the part about weeping

Charlie Stross @ 225:

one of my up-coming self-challenges is: to write a near-future SF novel depicting a plausible future which readers would actually like to live in.

There is not enough of it about. (Talk about un-met consumer demand!)

Walter Jon Williams has remarked that he set out to write about some futures in which things went about as well as they could, and also about futures where they went very much the other way. I have to say I find the former more interesting because they are so much less common. They're also harder to write because a good story requires some sort of conflict, and good times usually don't offer as much conflict as bad times.

On the Pratchett arms:
Interesting, the CoH blazon. I have sufficient figure-ground confusion to have blazoned that "Argent, on a cross patty throughout sable, an ankh of the field", and the hell with hangups about charge-on-charge.

I would not have thought the description of the roundels argent (which I would have called "plates", anyway) as saltirewise and issuant would have done. But there you are. My blazon would undoubtedly not have given the ankh sufficient space.

Jacque@111

BarebonesCorp is a multinational enterprise with branches in England, France and the Socialist Republic of Wales. but our Head Office is, as you surmise, in Turkey. (though not in a particularly toujristy bit) Email to follow.

Charlies Stross @ 225

One thing that puzzled me in your initial piece was why something like Moorcock's 'The Warlord of the Air' which mentioned as showing up the problems with Steampunk isn't in fact Steampunk itself. (as well as being E. Nebit fan-fiction, of course.) It seems to bwelong in the genre much more naturally than anything I've read by Tim Powers, for example.

Charlie @225

Don't give up on Dieselpunk.

Sky Captain seems to be one of those movies, like Tron or even Blade Runner which can stand on its own for a very long time.

As you mention, the Vampire stuff took a while to get going.

Steampunk is maybe too much a quasi-Victoriana, and that's been in movies for a long time. The Assassination Bureau comes to mind, and visually there is a huge amount of stuff which is essentially genuine Victorian adventure fiction. Dieselpunk is even less distinctive. It's a period we know, and it takes effort to make a film that's distinct from something such as The Big Sleep. You've really got to pile on the fantasy-tech.

And how do you get the punk into what would once have been contemporary pulp fiction, and within "living memory"? Can you punkify Biggles?

Anyway, back to NaNoWriMo for me. I have a Mexican-born Anarchist skunk in Republican Spain, in the middle of their Civil War, and he needs a disguise. Pepe le Pew in reverse, I guess. Time to get out the fur-clippers.

Linkmeister @226

The laws in Britain which banned foxhunting were very controversial, prompted one of the biggest protest marches ever held in London (and surprisingly peaceful). 400,000 protestors in 2002, and apparently ignored by Parliament.

I can see why there's an attempt to amend a State Constitution in the USA: there is that rural/urban split, though these days my feeling is a more general derision of the political class as being a de facto tool of the robber barons for the modern age.

Heresiarch @232: I was specifically whaling on the stuff that I consider to be sub-standard. China's work -- Perdido Street Station and sequels -- does not fall into the category of sucky second-artist swill, so I didn't mention it. I didn't mention loads of other authors -- Ian R. MacLeod, for example -- because I don't have them in my sights.

In the middle of a good old-fashioned rant about the Bad subset of [X], throwing in references to the Good [X] that's out there is a recipe for confusion and flame wars as people bounce in from half-assed and half-digested news items all over the internet, skim the first paragraph, and set their keyboards to "flame".

Serge @238: The Space Machine slipped my mind; possibly because it's so explicitly Wellsian that I have it mentally filed under "H. G. Wells Pastiche", rather than "steampunk" (and it predated even the mid-eighties steampunks by over a decade).

Bruce @243: Oh, you can easily have conflict in a "better" future -- unless your future is totally utopian, there are going to be islands of bad stuff in it. The trick is to suffuse the background with evidence that the world is, in fact, not going to hell in a hand-basket, whatever's happening in the foreground of the plot. (For example: have one of the characters scanning a news feed for something, and drip in some hints of good outcomes in the other items while they're searching.)

Praisegod Barebones @245: Of course The Warlord of the Air partakes of the steampunk theme -- however, it predates steampunk as a mass movement (as does The Space Machine).

I don't feel there's anything to be gained by pinning modern movement labels on earlier works. The existence of a literary movement provides a social context in which subsequent works can be evaluated; earlier works, written without the surrounding accretion of tropes, cliches and ideas are best looked at on their own merits. -- I wouldn't identify Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" as cyberpunk, and by the same rule of thumb I wouldn't tag "The Warlord of the Air" as steampunk.

Edgar lo Siento @190:

I find this comment intriguing, but I'm not sure I'm really convinced by the thrust of it.

I like the idea that [t]he whole progressive movement from the 1780's on could be seen as an ongoing experiment to test serially distributing privileges to others to see how nice a society they could build. But I don't really see that as a way to preserve those privileges by the [former] ruling class.

That would pretty much require people to embrace change in the pursuit of conserving the status quo, which is contradictory in one of those ways that actually bug people†. I can see that being the logical choice in, for instance, de Klerk's South Africa, where the demographic writing was on the wall for the white minority. But how was that the case for male voters at the turn of the Twentieth Century? And yet women got the franchise**.

Many of the choices that have led to this serial distribution of privilege were not made in the face of revolution or the threat of revolution. Looking at the extension of marriage rights beyond heterosexuals, I don't see a lot of straight people who support it lest the gays take up torches and pitchforks. Most people who are for it without benefiting from it are because they think it is the choice that is in conformance with our stated ideals as a society, with a side helping of benefits to people who don't currently have them*.

In other words, I agree with this statement: I am tempted to ascribe the success of the Progressive project to the large number of relatively comfortable, well off people who had access to education, hot baths, and decent meals, decided that was *normal*, and then worked to include more people. I think that's a solid and useful place to base our politics. It's certainly where mine are based.

But I don't do it [i]f for no other reason initially to prevent starving, smelly, ignorant mobs from burning down their cities every decade or so.

And a certain number of people whose self-worth‡ is caught up in "winning" would actively resist the idea of extending benefits under threat. It's one reason I am uncomfortable with the argument that we should be a more egalitarian society because the peasants are revolting; a certain number of people will call out the National Guard rather than "give in" to even the justest of demands presented by a mob§.

Having said all that, I do agree that the smart money bets that water runs downhill and people vote in their own self-interest. The art of politics is, of course, persuading them that your particular watercourse has the altitude drop they're looking for.

And, by the way, I love this comment:

There's some of the same pathologies that you and Teresa have noted regarding scams in general: the elite have often been scammed, and are not often willing to disavow the systems that scammed them, because that would have to admit to being scammed…

-----
† Plenty of the contradictions in politics don't.
** ...rapidly followed by the blame for Harding's election; he was apparently the handsomer candidate.
* By which I mean not only the gays who get the right to marry, visit their spouses in the hospital, but also the children they can adopt and suchlike.
‡ And, in many cases, gender identity
§ obTroubles, there's a fair argument that this mindset is part of what turned a civil rights movement into a decades-long orgy of violence

re 246: Sky Captain was visually striking but it would have been nice if any of the leads besides Angelina Jolie and Laurence Olivier had decided to actually act.

Charlie Stross @ 248... I call the likes of "The Space Machine" steampunk, even though it predates the official origin of the word because, if I referred to them as RetroSF (a term I was using long before Jeter came up with his label), I'd get a blank stare. If I say 'steampunk', people usually know what I mean. Faster that way than my saying 'tales set in a Victorian-like age, but with technology ahead of what did exist in the known 19th Century'. That definition of mine excludes the likes of "Warlord of the Air" because it really is Edwardian more than Victorian. While I don't include the "HellBoy" movies because adding giant cogs to a story doesn't make it steampunk, I do call the recent "Sherlock Holmes" as steampunk not because of the electrical props, but because it reminds me that what the real Victorians came up with was damned advanced. As someone once pointed out, they went from muscle-based transportation to steam. Steampunk, for me, isn't a harkening to a false Golden Age. Heck, just thinking about their dental care is enough to make me shudder. What it is is a reminder that my world is one filled with wonders.

Sky Captain was a concoction of tasty bits stirred into a doughy mess.

dcb @ #221

> Hints for recognition?

Moose: Labcoat, bow tie, antlers.
Keeper of Moose: Beard, Glasses, (black) Campaign for Surreal Ale sweatshirt, Yellow/Red Kodak carrier bag (probably) .

Election minirant: "Hurt U.S. Congress" beat Periello. dammit.

Dave Luckett @244: A cross paty! THAT was the word I was looking for! I was going through the variations in my mind and going "not formy, not fitchy..." and being too lazy to get up and check my marvelous little book -- a clear, concise paperback called "Discovering Heraldry" by Jacqueline Fearn, which I've had since 1986.

I was under the impression that charge-on-charge was acceptable if the first charge was an ordinary -- I know I've seen PLENTY of charged bends. And crosses are ordinaries, after all.

And now I'm driving myself crazy going "label, *blank*, mollet, martlet" and not being able to remember the differencing for a second son. I can remember that the seventh son's is a rose...

And now I'm driving myself crazy going "label, *blank*, mollet, martlet" and not being able to remember the differencing for a second son.

Crescent. I had to check. :)

Carrie, THANK YOU.

BTW, Superman: Earth One is outstanding. J. Michael Straczynski did a helluva job, and the Shane Davis art is terrific.

If they had the guts, they would make a movie adaptation of this. It would rock.

nerdycellist...

One of your photos is now here in the "Making Light and Faces" gallery.
Let me know if you want the caption changed.

abi, 249: a certain number of people will call out the National Guard rather than "give in" to even the justest of demands presented by a mob§.

A great many flamewars begin to make sense.

San Francisco: recommends for things to see while I'm here. City Lights Bookstore has been dropped on me as a potential spot to visit. Of course the Exploratorium. Any other odd bits that should be looked into?

abi @ 249... Many of the choices that have led to this serial distribution of privilege were not made in the face of revolution or the threat of revolution.

I blame that pesky Golden Rule.

Lin D @ 261... City Lights Bookstore has been dropped on me

Were you wearing ruby slippers at the time?

Wesley @135: art critics who, in the authors' view, were reading too much into the symbolism of the paintings they studied.

I, on the other hand, am not an art critic and, in fact, am entirely uncrecentialed. Am, in fact, blowing smoke out of my, uh, left ear.

But I believe your point was well taken, which is that unfounded speculations about an author/artist's neurology is, at the very least, inappropriate. Speculation about their technique, however, I stipulate, is fair game. As long as it, too, is recognized as unfounded.

Dave, #247: IMO there's a distinct difference between foxhunting and, say, deer-hunting. There's no way to even pretend that the foxhunter is doing it to put food on the table. If it's for "the thrill of the chase", why do you even need the fox? Map out a course, lay a drag for the hounds to follow, and Bob's yer uncle.

Edgar lo Siento @190: Maybe there's a difference between elites who gain power via education & hot baths vs. those who are born into it/got it via a coup?

Well, there's certainly something to be said for having a personal basis for comparison.

Various points of interest in SF:

Near Fisherman's Wharf, the Musee Mechanique has a large and eccentric collection of old coin-operated entertainment gear, from player pianos and old kinescopes to arcade games.

Just down the pier from the Musee Mechanique are two ships on exhibit --- the U.S.S. Pampanito, a World War II submarine, and the Jeremiah O'Brien, a liberty ship in operating condition. (The engine room on the J. O'Brien is tricky for those with fear of heights). A few blocks west is the Hyde Street Pier, with several older ships on exhibit; just inland of that, Ghirardelli square, with a nice ice cream shop.

In arts, the De Young museum is hosting an exhibit of post-impressionist masterpieces from the Musee D'Orsay (now under renovation); SF MOMA has a few interesting things up, including the Cartier-Bresson retrospective that was earlier at NY MOMA, I believe.

etc.

Antonia Tiger #246 - they did sort of punkify biggles - they made a film in which he travels in time from 1917 or so to 198something in order to deal with some german super weapon. Cue pictures of biggles walking down the street with WW1 flying gear on, and his boss hides out in London bridge.
I can't remember much more, since I saw it in the cinema when I was a small child. I do of course have something like 40 biggles books.

abi #249: serial distribution of privilege

That phrase sounds like it's coded with additional meaning beyond the simple words.

Serge @259 -

The caption is perfect. Thanks for including me!

In other news, requiem was sung last night, solo was completed with only two mistakes (failed to subdivide a measure, resulting in an early note/chord change, and once again made an entrance a third too high. Luckily that third was in the chord anyway) and failed to bring shame upon myself or ancestors. And there was much rejoicing.

nerdycellist @ 270... And there was much rejoicing.

(Yayyyyyyy...)

Abi@249, TxAnne@260: I don't like the idea of giving in to inappropriate pressure. If faced with an actual mob I might very well make the expedient choice, but in discussing it, I don't like the idea of that becoming mainstream. And reinforcing the behavior increases the frequency, right?

Of course, if I had the power, I'd tend to give in to demands that I considered reasonable rather before it reached the mob stage.

(Note: so far as I know, I'm quite healthy.) I've given, in the past, a bit of consideration to who should be assassinated should I find myself one day expecting 6 months of tolerable health followed by decline and death, and my conclusion has been that we're nowhere near the point where the benefit of getting rid of X, Y, or Z is of greater value than the cost of reintroducing assassination as a political tool. (We haven't had a lot lately; but 4 were a major part of my childhood.) We mustn't do what the assassins want, because if we do they win.

Lee@265: People raising chickens and such might wish not to have foxes as neighbors.

The advantage of chasing a real fox would seem to be the unpredictability.

But it does seem a rather improper way to treat a fox.

Charlie Stross #225: Anyone who reads, say, J.A. Froude would find late-nineteenth century British imperial jingoism far less than palatable (Froude's idea of a joke, for example, is to suggest the introduction of Norwegian bears into the Blue Mountains of Jamaica where they could dine on the local fruit and "occasionally on a negro child" -- quoting from memory -- to the great amusement of the British officers at the cantonment of Newcastle in Jamaica with whom he shared this jeu d'esprit).

Fragano @274: that's the sort of thing I've got in mind. It makes today's anti-muslim feeling in the USA and Europe seem mild in comparison.

On another note ...

Does anyone here have any experience tuning Movable Type and Apache for really heavy loads? Right now my blog is taking on the order of 100,000 page views per hour[*], and while the static content is fine mt-comment.cgi is just about melting.

[*] I accidentally broke a major British political news story and it's gone viral; BoingBoing, Hacker News, Reddit, and a bunch of newspapers are whacking on me.

Lee 265: There's no way to even pretend that the foxhunter is doing it to put food on the table.

Oscar Wilde accurately described foxhunting as "The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."

ddb #272:

Yeah, there's a good general point there: we should oppose bad tactics even where they accomplish good things, lest we encourage the proliferation of bad tactics.

Propaganda campaigns, smear campaigns, lying to us "for our own good," ignoring inconvenient bits of the constitution, banning or legally harassing evil political/social/religious movements, assassinations, mob violence as a way to get desired political change, exertion of monopoly power (government or private) to force desired change, all should be things we push back against, even when they're done to achieve good causes. Because you get more of what you reward.

But this is a very hard thing to do. People being people, most of us have a hard time recognizing the evil means used to get to ends we like, and a very easy time recognizing the evil means used to get to ends we dislike.

#242 Ken

You may not have been listening closely enough to his actual words and the coded terminology in them. He basically indicated extreme obduratism and anti-bipartisanship and pushing the same stinking lying hypocrite agenda that the stinking lying Repukes in the House have been pushing the past two decade.. The Repukes have been a giant almost completely unified bloc in Congress, with an agenda only [fascists] and nihilist could love, looked at from a perspective with the political partisanship tube for tunnelvision and "party discipline" lockstep goosestepping removed. And what Boehner said last night is reinforcement of that.

Unfortunately, albatross, sometimes you find yourself pushed into a corner where you have to either use a bad tactic or perish. For example, the local election I was working on all day yesterday was lost in part because the opposition went negative early and often, and our side wouldn't. I think next time we should tell the truth about them forcefully and call them what they deserve.

Of course, some tactics are still worth resisting even if they ARE winning strategies: the other side was also (according to several people who called us) paying the poor people in the projects $40 each for unsealed absentee ballots. THAT we will NEVER do, because we'd rather lose.

So yeah, sometimes the right answer is "perish." But it's a damn tough choice to make.

abi @208: In related news, a long-haired figure was seen pounding on the door of the Crochet Embassy and demanding asylum, while a mob of knitters (with flaming balls of eyelash acrylic stuck on long needles) approached in menacing fashion*. — * Hand-knit, with really intimidating cables

Sounds like you either need to bring your fever down, or have gotten into the really good drugs.

Charlie Stross @275 -- only way I know of to deal with your current problem would be to split the static pages and comment system across two separate machines, dedicating a server to just the comments. Dunno if that's feasible for you at this time.

@281: not at this time, no (and not on a sane budget -- I'd have to rent an extra server and work on reconfiguring the universe, so in US dollars we're talking a floor of $1000). As this is a really anomalous load I'll just have to suffer for the time being.

#272 ddb and #277 alabatross

a) Political assassination is on-going in the US -- the Unabomber, the murder of MDs who performed abortions in counties where now there are no late term abortion providers whatsoever anymore, murder of some law enforcement official -- rare, but not non-existant in the USA. And there are allegations of murder regarding people who had "adverse information" about the Schmuck.

b) Until/unless the celebration of violent vigilantism and Secret Wars of paranormal high body counts in "entertainment" --film, TV, video and computer games, paranormal romances, urban fantasies, talk radio, Fux TV, etc, drop down to minor notes and entertainment and "news" which celebrates cooperation and progress and peaceful co-prosperity development instead of fearmongerig and high corpse counts and belligerent vile-mannered overgrown vigilante hulk "alpha male" heroes, the social climate is going to continue to be swayed by "everything's UNSAFE! Nothing is Secure! We need Charismatic Leaders to Save Us and Violently Defend Us from the Unworthy who are impoverishing us and scammig us...>!

Business doen't hire people when sales are low--they don't hire people when sales are high and they can squeeze more work out of the same peoople, or hire cheap overseas labor by contrct labor companies which paid tons of money to the Chamber of Commerce and pay them lower if not outright lousy wages with abusive work conditions in particularly Asia...

The Repukes (and the Democrats for that matter) provide no consideration for sole proprietorships/unincorporated individuals tryign to scrape and who aren't eligible for the programs aimed at EMPLOYEES or rather, businesses with employees.... THERE is the huge invisibility curtain, of the self-employed.... as opposed to all the bullshit about "small business." The level of fraud in small businesses doing cash sales is astonishing, as regards reporting of income....

@Charlie#282: Google have just today released mod_pagespeed for Apache: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/11/make-your-websites-run-faster.html If you're looking for a quick fix, this might help a bit.

abi, 249,
first of all, you wrote:
And, by the way, I love this comment:
Which makes me squee with joy and gladness! Yay! I said something clever on Making Light!

Edgar lo Siento @190:
I find this comment intriguing, but I'm not sure I'm really convinced by the thrust of it.
Well, I'm not fully convinced of it either, and it's my comment. :)

One of the things I had in mind, was that people who's basic needs are not threatened, (and particularly people who's basic needs can't be threatened because of their level of privilege) are much more open to the idea of extending their advantage to other people. I can't prove that the logic runs in that direction (necessary but not sufficient error?) but I think it is clear that if you do threaten people's basic needs they flip out and start wrecking society. And by wrecking society, I really do mean barricades in the streets, coups de etat in countries that just got a weak democratic government, a vulnerability to charismatic politicians with a line of hate-speech, that sort of thing.*

I do think that some of the founders of the United States were worried about precisely that sort of scenario in 1787.** I do think many of the subsequent additions of rights were done by people with more than half an eye on what happened in France from 1789-1799. And I do think that those fellows did have a rather more experimental mindset than most elites. Perhaps they really were hypothesis testing.

But how was that the case for male voters at the turn of the Twentieth Century? And yet women got the franchise.
I think I could appeal to the idea that elites look out not only for themselves, but also for their families. It's difficult to think of family members as Other, though goodness knows some try. I think the causes were complex and interlocking.*** Industrialization goes a long way towards making women potential workers and therefore valuable as individuals: e.g. would you rather rely on your smart, hardworking daughter or your opium-addled layabout son in your old age? And if the daughter, why on earth would you deprive her of the same rights enjoyed by your useless son?

I also think that extending rights to the Other has a lot to do with discovering that the Other is actually pretty much like us, and is pretty harmless. I'm working from the "pretty harmless" aspect: if the Other can't harm you because you feel strong, why not invite them to the party? Note the framing still maintains the "Otherness" pretty well, and has strong overtones of "let's just co-opt their revolutionary fervor." Perhaps the wealthy, factory-owning merchant class didn't seem so "Other" any more, so it was obvious that their power should be joined to the wealthy land-owning class, and therefore the franchise was extended.

Most people who are for it without benefiting from it are because they think it is the choice that is in conformance with our stated ideals as a society, with a side helping of benefits to people who don't currently have them*.
I agree!

Earl Cooley III, 269:"serial distribution of privilege"
That phrase sounds like it's coded with additional meaning beyond the simple words.
Not by my intention. I merely mean advantages given to a series of groups. E.g.: Voting in the U.S. -> landed gentlemen -> many educated white men -> some black men -> all men -> most women -> most citizens and most Native Americans. Or scholarships: white men from certain families -> white men who can pass a test -> white men and women who can pass a test -> people who can pass as white and Christian and pass a test -> people who can pass a test.

*heads I win, Godwin, I lose.
**and actually is something I should do some research on. What kinds of failure modes for states had they personally seen by that point?
***I do wonder about specific local election laws and whether some people figured out that they could game the system if they could get two or more votes for their household instead of one. Figure that unmarried daughters, spinster aunts, and mother-in-laws might be included, giving the elite who could afford to maintain them, a 5:1 or better advantage over any particular single male in an election. Perhaps a different angle to maintain the power of the people who held capital over those who worked for them. This might matter quite a bit in the tiny squabbles over city council seats or library trustees. The smaller the stakes, the more bitter the fighting, I think.

Fragano @ 274... That kind of glossing over racism is the real problem I had with 1997's "Wild Wild West" movie. They could have gone the color-blind route like "Brisco County" did, but instead they asked us to believe that someone like Will Smith would have been allowed into the Secret Service.

they asked us to believe that someone like Will Smith would have been allowed into the Secret Service.

Or that someone like Will Smith could have existed at that time.

Xopher @ 287... Indeed. Alas, neither Branagh's scenery-chewing nor Salma Hayek nor the giant mechanical spider were enough to make up for that.

Follow-up: given that it's the mt.cgi causing the problems, mod_pagespeed probably won't help much; you'd only be optimizing the bits that are fast enough already.

I don't get today's xkcd. Diode? What?

Xopher @290:

The pertinent fact about a diode is that electricity can only flow one way through it.

Charlie: I wonder if something like varnish would help you. It's an caching http accelerator for dynamic websites. Wikipedia, project website.

Martin @284, ooh, that looks tasty! I shall talk to my sysadmin about it. It won't fix today's problem, but it may help bulletproof me for future slashdottings. The blog is mostly static content so mt.cgi isn't the problem; it's the sheer load. I've just seen around 16,000 page visits in the past nine minutes ...

(Rubs eyes in disbelief.)

Thanks, abi. Even with that information it still doesn't seem that funny.

Charlie Stross @ 224: Include, at this point, the usual half-formed polemic about how it's a reaction against current cultural perceptions of insecurity/unease about the future and a harking back to some vaguely imagined "golden age".

It was, if not a golden age, at least an iron pyrite one. New bridges, railways, the London Underground, telegraphs, impressive postal systems, and so on. All sorts of technological progress packed into a short amount of time. Contrast that to the modern approach to public spending that refuses to pay for fixing leaky water mains, broken sewers, and creaky electrical distribution systems. It seemed like there was a spirit of "can be done", whereas now it's all about how things can't be.

Of course the system stank if you were poor, foreign, non-white, or whatever else was convenient. I know I look back on the period with disdain at many of the social aspects, but I admire the seeming can-do spirit and technology.

I would certainly like to read a story with a future I'd like to live in.

Prodded by Lee @ 229:

Does anyone have any pointers to information about the great vowel shift suitable for interested laypersons?

C. Wingate @ 250:

I like Sky Captain for the visuals and the sense of fun. The problem with it, which is also one of the main problems with the new Star Wars movies, is that it's amazingly hard to act against nothing but a blue screen.

Edgar lo Siento @ 190/285 and abi @ 249:

I have nothing clever to add at the moment, but I'm getting a lot out of this exchange.

Edgar lo Siento @285:

I said something clever on Making Light!

Quite a lot of clever things, actually. It's not the first time, and I am reasonably confident that it won't be the last.

people who's basic needs are not threatened, (and particularly people who's basic needs can't be threatened because of their level of privilege) are much more open to the idea of extending their advantage to other people

I think this is where we part company, for a couple of reasons.

Basically, I think that there are far more people who are secure in their privilege than think they are. It's like the notion that there are very few rich people in the world, just a bunch of comparatively poor ones with money. This is doubly the case with privilege, which defaults to being invisible to the people who actually have it, kind of by definition.

In other words, though when you threaten people's needs they flip out and blow up society, I don't think the door swings so easily the other way. I think secure people can use their additional resources to strengthen society, but I don't think it's as automatic as the reverse.

This is perhaps the one place where I am an American Exceptionalist. I think that the founders of the United States did something all the more extraordinary because it was not necessary, because they were not driven to it. I think the decision to declare that "all men [sic] are created equal" was even more revolutionary because it was not as inevitable for the privileged as going to the barricades was for the poor.

I do think many of the subsequent additions of rights were done by people with more than half an eye on what happened in France from 1789-1799. And I do think that those fellows did have a rather more *experimental* mindset than most elites. Perhaps they really were hypothesis testing.

I'd agree with this statement.

But then we part company again, because I don't think you really have the flavor of masculine attitudes toward women even at the time of women's suffrage*.

It's difficult to think of family members as Other, though goodness knows some try. [...] would you rather rely on your smart, hardworking daughter or your opium-addled layabout son in your old age? And if the daughter, why on earth would you deprive her of the same rights enjoyed by your useless son?

Your daughter was not the equal of your son. Your wife was not your equal. It was natural for you to assume that the women under your protection were not as capable of the kind of serious intellectual endeavor as men. And that was a significant concern for the extension of the franchise, because voting is a serious responsibility, requiring careful and sober thought. It was an open question whether women, as a class†, were capable of that kind of rational decision-making**.

There is some argument that, under the careful guidance of a husband or a father, a woman might be able to exercise her franchise in a way to further his interests. This would be natural, of course, since her interests must align with his, as is natural for their roles as follower and head of the household respectively. But there's no saying that she might not fall prey to the frivolous impulse to use her vote based on quite trivial and irrational reasoning.

----
* and, indeed, today, in some cases. Can we go back to the invisibility of privilege for a moment here?
† there were always exceptions, women with almost masculine levels of good sense and intelligence. They were credit to the fair sex, though of course it wasn't very womanly to set one's self up in opposition to men in such a fashion. One wouldn't want to marry such a woman, for instance.
** outside of the management of the household, which was well within the capabilities of all but the least sensible of women

Charlie:

Go on, give us some links for who's running with the story.

You know you want to.

abi @ 296... voting is a serious responsibility, requiring careful and sober thought

I did consider having a large drink after the Election was over then I reconsidered. I'd have woken up with a headache (even from a small drink) and I wasn't going to give that victory to the Other Side.

Xopher @ #279, Russ Feingold (D-WI) can tell you all about sticking to principles in the face of massive propaganda assault and refusing to "fight fire with fire." Unfortunately, his principles were overcome, and so after 18 years in the Senate we no longer have one of the most Progressive if iconoclastic Democrats in recent memory.

abi@114, 202: Hope you're both close to feeling better (and that no-one else is afflicted.)

Hyper-local News, Anatolian Edition: Turkish resident's daughter discovered to be under the impression that leading British news-papers include 'The Guardian', 'The Times', 'The Observer' and 'Making Light'

Linkmeister, in other words he ran an incompetent campaign. I'm sick to death of Democrats who won't fucking FIGHT when a fight starts.

OK, I'm feeling bitter about what happened yesterday, but jeez, when the fight's in the mud the choice is get in the mud or lose the fight. I wonder if he thought he could win anyway, and if he thinks it was worth it now.

... and Harry Reid *almost* managed to lose a race with a candidate who comes off as a raving lunatic. No doubt he's patting himself on the back over that victory.

Hyperlocal news: Local resident, distracted by election, mistakenly puts 35-pound plates on bar instead of 25-pound plates, resulting in three sets of squats with 205 pounds resting on shoulders, jumping well ahead of the careful and appropriately-gradual increment to 185 since the hip replacement.

Next day, muscles quite sore but no other damage observed. Resident quite aware that the second day is the key, and hopes he won't be unable to stand in the morning.

Clifton, and he spent a lot of time and effort portraying her as a raving lunatic. Which was true, but he had to "go negative" to say it.

He won, barely. If he hadn't attacked her, he would have lost.

Xopher... Thrown out of better bars?

Charlie @ 248:
Oh, you can easily have conflict in a "better" future -- unless your future is totally utopian, there are going to be islands of bad stuff in it.

Very true. The two stories that I think of as bracketing this technique are

• "Growing up Weightless" by Mike Ford, in a subplot of which the residents of what is certainly a utopian civilization compared to just about anything that exists today confront the Omelas Dilemma up close and personal.


• "Sanity" (IIR the title C) by Fritz Leiber, in which it is revealed that the secret to creating a utopia is the effective use of the citizens' "quirks".

In the first, the badness comes mostly from outside (the sinister Vacuum Corp), and tries to engage with not-quite utopian internal factions. In the second, it turns out that the hero is not precisely the force for utopian goodness he thinks he is.

Steve C. @ 252:
Sky Captain was a concoction of tasty bits stirred into a doughy mess.

I'll agree with you about 75%, but two of those tasty bits made the movie for me: the giant robot attack scene, and that truly grotesque statue in the lair of the villain near the end, the one that looks like one somewhat Socialist Realist figure doing brain surgery on another.

Charlie Stross @ 248: "I was specifically whaling on the stuff that I consider to be sub-standard."

That's hard to see when you're writing things like "But consider this: what would a steampunk novel that took the taproot history of the period seriously look like?" I think it would look a lot like Perdido Street Station, which exists, so what's up with the hypothetical conditionals? If you intended to make a critique of a specific sub-set of steampunk you don't like (I don't like it either!), then you failed: your critique comes across as condemning the genre as a whole for the actions of the, um, many.

"In the middle of a good old-fashioned rant about the Bad subset of [X], throwing in references to the Good [X] that's out there is a recipe for confusion and flame wars as people bounce in from half-assed and half-digested news items all over the internet, skim the first paragraph, and set their keyboards to "flame"."

Sorry, but what? Qualifying your sweeping claims and providing concrete examples of steampunk done right would decrease cogent appreciation of your argument? Even assuming the truth of that novel theory, the downside of doing so is evidently that plenty of people who are predisposed both towards you personally and towards your critiques (i.e. the ML community) nonetheless think you come across as a grumpy lunatic unacquainted with the very thing he's criticizing. And if you're not convincing us, who do you think you are convincing?

albatross @ 277: "Yeah, there's a good general point there: we should oppose bad tactics even where they accomplish good things, lest we encourage the proliferation of bad tactics."

What constitutes a "bad tactic," though? Oftentimes the definition of what gets labeled "bad" and what gets labeled "good" are an awful lot like those laws against stealing bread and sleeping under bridges. The obvious malintent of rioting, for example, is a lot clearer to those who have property at stake and other ways of expressing their political voice than it is to people who have neither.

Now that the election is over, can they hurry up and arrest Angle for sedition, plz?

I'm waiting for Angle, O'Donnell, and Palin to take their show on the road. They'll be the Three (dis)Graces.

Xopher, #294: It's not supposed to be funny. I put it in the same category with How It Works -- a serious comment on a serious topic, but with a geeky twist.

And congratulations, Republicans. You just bought the recession. Have fun!

Xopher, no. Feingold did not run an incompetent campaign. He refused to compromise his principles on campaign finance, even though had he done so he probably could have won.

It was folly, but it was admirable folly.

Linkmeister, I thought you were talking about negative ads. I didn't really follow that race. Principles of campaign finance are in a different category.

Lee, How It Works had a laugh in it. A bitter laugh of recognition, but a laugh nonetheless.

There are principles, and then there are preferences. I'm afraid I'm actually unwilling to make up negative stories about my opponents out of whole cloth, and would withdraw my support from a candidate who did so. On the other hand, I merely think one should be somewhat considered in when and how you present the bad side of your opponent's behavior; I'm not against doing so on principle, I just prefer not to make that the whole campaign.

Let's not forget that some of the people who lost were severely out-spent. They may have run the best campaigns they could. Also, the spending on both sides wasn't mostly through the campaigns this year; it was independent "issue" ads.

Our local loon, Michelle Bachmann, managed to hang on against a fairly serious (and non-crazy, so far as I could see) challenger, but boy did she get funding.

Wow, the people who voted for Michelle Bachmann after her behavior the past two years are evil, crazy, or both.

It felt to me like the D's mobilized about two days too late. I may not have been following things closely, but I didn't see either of these things until Election Day :

http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDYgtJ2mpj4

abi, 296,
I'm afraid I'll just have to...agree with you with almost no reservations whatsoever. (I think.)

That's odd, that never happens on the internet!

As soon as I get over my Halloween candy hangover, I'm going to write the president and suggest he stop being so goddamn polite and understanding.

The Republicans cannot be allowed to claim unopposed that they speak for "The American People."

Moose - "Campaign for Surreal Ale" shirt? Oh.... dear. Wants one, we does..

Charlie - Your blog isn't accepting my comments today, but if you're dealing with a sudden huge increase in traffic, that makes sense, and I shall leave it be rather than poking it until it responds. I was recommending we drink His Lordship's health, since he's obviously had too many over the years to drink any more himself, and delegate you to do it because buying drinks for authors is a generally Good Thing.

But given that silliness and yesterday's US election, it's been occurring to me that it would be really helpful if the US had a House of Lords in addition to the Senate, so politicians who've passed their sell-by date could be kicked upstairs to somewhere that's ceremonially ego-gratifying but also Mostly Harmless.

Bill Stewart @ 319... it would be really helpful if the US had a House of Lords

Jack Lord?
Tracy Lord?

For evidence that the Dems have a nasty case of craniorectal inversion, consider this annoying bit of local incompetence: Several days before the election, one of the half-dozen election workers who swung by my place over the last couple of weeks, asked if I might need a ride to the voting place. I certainly did (it's a trek across an interchange, not bus accessible), so I gave her my number. Then I didn't hear from them, so the day before the election, I asked my mother to drive me, which she did Tuesday morning.

6:30 Tuesday evening, I hear a pounding on my door. It's another of Periello's volunteers, offering me a ride to the voting place. No callback in the interim, no prior arrangements... just a knock on the door at the time when most people would be preparing for, or eating, dinner. Not to mention long after anyone who actually wanted to vote would have long since given up.... This is not the way to bring in uncertain voters!

Steve C @309, on "The Three (dis)Graces", and Xopher on Michelle Bachmann -

CNN's Nancy Grace is on my very very short list of "people who make Michelle Bachmann look sane",
and Bachmann was on my list of "people who make Ann Coulter look calm and unbiased", except that Coulter does her schtick for entertainment and is quite good at it, and that list was getting too long to be maintainable anyway.

There are some partisan Republicans who I can understand people voting for (though I think those people are wrong), but I totally don't get people voting for Bachmann.

Hyper not-directly-local news - local man's mom's grumpy about the Delaware election. She liked Castle, was happy to see O'Donnell trounced, but O'Donnell's opponent Chris Coons will be giving up his seat as head of New Castle County Council, being replaced by somebody she thinks is an idiot. Since she mostly works on local politics, encouraging things like parks and libraries, and since some of Coons's recent predecessors were also idiots, she's grumpy.

So does Foundation X come from Nigeria?

An alternative source for Charlie's server melting story is a politics blogger called Hopi Sen:

http://hopisen.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/the-lord-the-cabinet-minister-foundation-x-and-a-mysterious-5-billion/

With further speculation here:

http://hopisen.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/have-we-uncovered-foundation-x/

OK, so in the election we just lost, our opponent had 79 campaign workers,* right? And one of them got paid $600 for something or other; the rest were paid $40 each, and every single one of those 78 filed an absentee ballot. (I was sure I'd mentioned this here, but can't find anything.) So our side filed a complaint about it. That should be enough to warrant an investigation, right?

Here's the "investigation" the Board of Elections decided to do: They walked around knocking on the doors of the people in question. Most of them weren't home. When they were (about a dozen or so), they asked the person "did you get paid for your vote?" All but one said no. The last one actually admitted it (I don't know if he was stoned or what).

So they threw out the vote of the guy who admitted it. They allowed the rest. End of investigation. As far as I know they didn't even ask the guy who paid him (since in fact they know the answer perfectly well).

The Hudson County Board of Elections is a sham and a fraud.
_____
* A week before the election. Trust me he had hundreds on Election Day.

Keith S, 295
It was, if not a golden age, at least an iron pyrite one.

an iron pie, right in the sky?

Oh, and can I give my commiserations on your recent election results - I thought it was bad enough in Britain with The Coalition (as the hybrid government seems to be styled) but at least most of the elected MPs aren't actually batshit insane. (Lords are a different story, obviously)

Latest horror news here is that going to university is going to cost £9000 per year in tuition fees alone (from costing £0 in fees less than 15 years ago when I started). Goodbye decent higher education to those unfortunate enough not to be born middle class...

Very displeased with results of state legislative & gubernatorial elections. Suspect it will cost my household one or both incomes before the end of 2011.

Trying to convince myself that no, I don't really want to take up marksmanship as a hobby, I'm just spitting mad.

abi @ 296: "In other words, though when you threaten people's needs they flip out and blow up society, I don't think the door swings so easily the other way. I think secure people can use their additional resources to strengthen society, but I don't think it's as automatic as the reverse."

Yes, I think what changes isn't that the secure class becomes enamored of extending rights to others so much as they simply become unwilling to dedicate the requisite effort to prevent it from happening. Movements extending rights to any disenfranchised group have nearly always been led by the wealthiest, best-educated, privileged members of that group, not benevolent and enlightened members of the enfranchised. The aristocracy was overthrown by the emerging bourgeoisie; the American Revolution (and pretty much every other colonial revolution) was led by the American elites; suffrage was led by women of the wealthiest class.

"This is perhaps the one place where I am an American Exceptionalist. I think that the founders of the United States did something all the more extraordinary because it was not necessary, because they were not driven to it."

I don't know, it seems to me that the rights laid out in the Constitution are fairly well-designed to ensure the freedom and security of the well-off, propertied, well-educated white males that wrote it against the excesses of the British crown. It's very self-interested; that some of their rhetorical choices laid the groundwork for further progressivism says a lot more to me about the difficulty of only being halfway just than it does about the benevolent foresight of the Founding Fathers.

#226, Linkmeister: I wonder if the Arkansas "hunting and fishing is a right" ballot measure is identical to the Arizona one?

#235, Myself: Alas, most of the human beings I voted for lost. Stupid, stupid Arizona rat creatures!

I don't know, it seems to me that the rights laid out in the Constitution are fairly well-designed to ensure the freedom and security of the well-off, propertied, well-educated white males that wrote it against the excesses of the British crown.

It seems to me that, given the times, that was an amazing enough achievement. They could, after all, have set up their own monarchy, or done many things worse than they did. (The compromise over the slave trade and the 3/4ths rule were bad enough, but hardly outside the mainstream of political thought at the time.)

It's also not surprising that elites are often the leaders of (or at least major supporters of) movements to extend rights. They are sufficiently secure that adding women, or blacks, or Catholics to the mix is unlikely to hurt them. It's not unlike how Bill Gates is against the inheritance tax.

Qualifying your sweeping claims and providing concrete examples of steampunk done right would decrease cogent appreciation of your argument?

Yes, because it would inadvertently reveal that his argument can be more concisely expressed as "Sturgeon's Law applies to steampunk", which seems a lot less interesting than the long form. You can't make sweeping statements about a category *after* you've acknowledged its heterogeneity; it just makes you look silly.

I feel a little over-steampunked myself, but sweeping attacks on entire genres never turn out well. Even the people-having-sex-with-people-eating-monsters subgenre of fantasy probably has some good points, somewhere, even if I can't immediately identify them.

Well, as far as the election went, my area remained solidly Democratic, which is fine with me.

On the home front, I've finally figured out how to upload video (crap video from the blackberry, but moving pictures nonetheless!) to my blog. It's a bunch of crazy kittens running around, pouncing, bouncing, going sideways, up and down the steps, and in general being silly. I've also posted a few more photos, but it's so difficult to get the full comprehension of kittens from photos.

Even the people-having-sex-with-people-eating-monsters subgenre of fantasy probably has some good points, somewhere, even if I can't immediately identify them.

How about Buffy? Or did you mean something more specific?

The aristocracy was overthrown by the emerging bourgeoisie; the American Revolution (and pretty much every other colonial revolution) was led by the American elites; suffrage was led by women of the wealthiest class.

ISTM that the simplest explanation for this is that the wealthy are the ones who have the *free time* to take up and lead causes because they can afford servants and labor-saving devices to take care of their routine household drudgery, don't have to hold down a full-time job at the same time they're pursuing their cause (or the boringly time-consuming parts of their aristocratic responsibilities can be delegated to servants), or both.

These days, many of the very wealthy *are* holding down full-time jobs, although they still have the servants and labor-saving devices; the people with the most free time are the elderly. (Of course, it doesn't hurt to be old *and* rich.) How this will affect the source of new political movements, I dunno; most (though certainly not all) old people aren't real big on new ideas.

@334: I was thinking of books, but didn't specify, so it's a fair example. Although I could argue that the parts of _Buffy_ that were good and the parts that involved sex with vampires weren't the same parts, or even particularly overlapping, but maybe that's excessive nitpicking.

I'm getting p***s spam again. I went months and months without getting e-mail asking me about the length of my p***s, inviting me to purchase drugs which would help me increase said length, inquiring about my favorite recreational activities with my (non-existent) p***s, inviting me to visit certain special entertaining websites -- you know which ones. Now, all of a sudden, blam! P***s spam.

I blame the Republicans.

Repeating katster's mantra from last year's NaNoWriMo thread (or, in my case NaNoDraMo*): "Embrace the suck ... embrace the suck ... embrace the suck ...."

I have just finished very possibly the worst drawing I've done this year. Maybe this decade.

"Give yourself permission to suck. It's amazing how freeing this can be." Hm. Presumably after I get over feeling like I want to puke.... (I can't just rip it out, anyway. There are two not-entirely-horrible drawings on the other side.)

*National Novel DrawingMonth?

I am not sure I would want to overlap parts with a vampire. Or have vampire parts over my lap.

Or have sex with people who are eating monsters.

I will have to say this: katster and Mark have between them pushed me into tackling a project I've been putting off for a long time. It feels good to force through that fear. Thank you, guys!

Particulate matter: I suppose I ought to feel positive somehow about how well Doug Henwood's analysis fits with what I see in the American economy.

Kip W at # 17: D. Boone ... Davey Crockett ... fess.

I saw what you did there.

heresiarch:

I haven't thought this out in depth, but it sure seems like a lot of movements to extend rights to currently-being-screwed-over people come from appeals to compassion and morality. Slavery is an obvious example, in which a great majority of the non-slaves opposing slavery were living far away from any slaves, and opposed it, as far as I can tell, because it was such a horrible thing to do to other human beings.

Similarly, gay marriage and other gay rights look to me like they're coming about because of a widespread conviction on the part of a large fraction of straight people that screwing gays over isn't okay. Without that appeal to morality, and without its success, gay rights would be an issue with the support of only that tiny fraction of voters who are gay.

Xopher, #313: Trust me, there are people who will see the bitter humor in this one too. That's why I posted a link to it in the Dysfunctional Families Day thread.

ddb #314:

Yeah, I think many people are reading my comment as being about, say, negative ads. Where I'm thinking of it in terms of stuff like actual lying, disinformation campaigns, smear campaigns, and similar destructive stuff, all the way out to assassination and terrorism and mob violence, or election fraud, or having the IRS or FBI or someone intervene to silence some especially annoying folks.

In many cases, those means can be used to get to valuable ends. Anytime a bad person gets elected, you could imagine that the world might have been made a better place by keeping him out of office--even by election fraud or having his supporters beaten up by your goons or having his whole campaign staff arrested for the last couple weeks leading up to the election. But those means are also destructive to the surrounding society, and having them used successfully once makes them more likely to be used in the future. It's not so hard to have your country become the kind of place where assassinating an irritating opposition leader is a normal part of politics, or where staged, coordinated violence on the part of your side's goons is a routine part of what political campaigns look like, or where the everyone expects leaders in the opposition party to spend a lot of time in jail. That leads us to living in a much worse country.

In less spectacular but similar ways, all forms of lying and misleading voters about your opponents, even if they're effective, are ultimately rather destructive. They mess up the decisionmaking processes of democracy, they foster an environment in which wild horrible rumors are always swirling around about every powerful/important person, they make it easier for real scandals to be reclassified as smear campaigns.

Oh, this is rich. The Tea Party Patriots show what they're really about just a day after the election:

Tea Party Patriots Lay Claim to the Political Center in Debates to Come

The Tea Party Patriots, one of the the largest Tea Party umbrella organizations, with over 1,000 local chapters, hosted a press conference this morning to offer its reactions to last night’s elections and its vision going forward.

Co-founder Mark Meckler tried to pre-empt expectations among the faithful that Washington would shrink and the federal deficit would close overnight, instead alluding to a “forty-year plan” that the group was busy working out with its members. The plan, according to Meckler, was a highway with four lanes, only one of which was explicitly political. The other three were educational, judicial and cultural.

“All civilizations and empires have fallen because their cultures became decadent,” Meckler said. “We need to lift up conservative culture, family values and wholesome things by supporting conservative musicians, writers, artists and producers.”

So much for small government, reducing government influence over people's lives, and concentrating on the deficit.

They're a bunch of meddling, moralizing, nanny-state busy-bodies who want to control what you see, read, and think.

#339 "Or have sex with people who are eating monsters."

What if they shower and use mouthwash first?

A more subtle reason to want to get away from deception (what I think Slactivist would refer to as bearing false witness) is that is breaks democratic decisionmaking processes.

If we all broadly share a similar understanding of the world--with disagreements on some factual details, perhaps, and many disagreements on interpretations of values--we can have some kind of meaningful discussions. It's even possible to hope for sensible decisions to come out of elections, or at least out of the people who are elected.

Spin, propaganda, lies, deception, opinion management, and other bullshitting techniques introduce noise there. They're short-term effective--the Bush administration got us to go to war in Iraq by getting just about everyone in the responsible American media to loudly proclaim that Iraq had WMDs and was about to hand them over to Al Qaida. But along with being terribly destructive, they break democratic processes.

Under the Bush and Obama administrations, we've seen massive amounts of bullshit spread around about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and God knows where else. My sense is that these techniques are quite effective--as witness how much outcry there was when the Apache video came out from Wikileaks.

Now, one result of that is, we as voters are called upon to make judgments about the wars, including ultimately to decide whether the wars
should continue. What information are we using to make those decisions? The information that's being withheld, doctored, spun, and manipulated to serve political and bureaucratic goals. It's easy for this to put us in a horrible position, where the decisionmakers with access to less-spun facts see a completely different picture than Americans, and yet, must make decisions in ways that will make sense to Americans who have a fantasy-land view of those wars.

This happens both for national-level bipartisan bullshit (the war on terror) and for bullshit that's mainly focused on one party. Imagine you're a relatively sane and decent Republican elected president in 2012. Talking to the people who actually know what's going on, you come to the conclusion that, say, Islamic terrorism is a relatively small threat that might be best handled by being really careful whom we issue visas to. Suppose after talking to scientists whose opinions you trust, you come to the conclusion that it's criminally stupid not to start taking what steps you can toward controlling CO2 emissions.

But suppose you came to power loudly proclaiming (as required within your party, and supported by your party's bullshit machine) that global warming is nonsense and that Islamofacists threaten every American's life and freedom every day. You now know the right things to do, but you cannot do them. Your embrace of useful bullshit means you more-or-less can't take the actions you need to take, without losing the support of your party and base.

Stefan #346:

One thing I've found really fascinating and disturbing about the Tea Party is how deftly that movement seems to have been turned from its origins (as a somewhat populist reaction to the huge bailouts of big banks, among other things) to much less troublesome-to-the-powerful stuff, like religious morality.

A cynical person would almost suspect that the goal of having Fox News and various high-profile Republicans support parts of that movement was to turn that populist anger in a more acceptable direction.

David Harmon, #254, I knew Barnett wouldn't win; Wolf has had that seat for a century, I think. But he did get almost exactly a third of the votes, which is a really good sign.

The district next to mine has 820 votes between the two. The good guy has the extra, but there are some provisional votes to be counted, and the bad guy can call for a recount, so they may not have a winner for a week or so. Tom Davis, who used to be a representative, was consulting with local NBC news and when one of the anchors asked him if he missed it, he said "No, I left undefeated and unindicted!" He's never said why he didn't run again.

Jacque, #264, have you seen Wesley's art? Currently there's a Shakespeare faery.

Lee, #265, in this part of Virginia, we get so many deer that the Park Service arranges hunts. There's more food than deer and a lot die of malnutrition. It's a lot better to have it feed a human.

I'm just at a loss to know what can be done this generation. I feel like nobody over the age of 20 can really be swayed in their opinions.

Leaves me sitting there going "So how do we fix our schools?" Because the short term doesn't really seem very fixable to me. At least, not until we start outnumbering the boomers in active voters, which is a pretty straightforward population game, and again, to a great extent, a matter of time.

And please -- I'm willing to admit that some boomers are pretty awesome, as long as y'all admit that there's still a huge values gap between our generations, when you start looking at statistical trends rather than individuals. Particularly on the question of many boomers wanting us to pay for their social services (because they "earned" them), while wanting to cut everything that might benefit the younger generation (but which doesn't directly benefit the boomers, even though they may have benefitted from such support in the past).

I begin to believe that while class warfare is still an issue, it is being assisted by a particularly ugly and self-serving form of generational warfare.

#346 Stefan
Srh Pln and associates as Savonarola & associates.

To be honest, I couldn't be happier to read that pretentious forty year plan / four lane highway quote.

Whenever some teabagger smugs that their movement is just about lowering the deficit and reducing the size of government, I'll have something to rhetorically rub in his face.

Just another bunch of moralizing blowhard conservatives.

Wow. Rarely does one see such a blatant case of bald-faced plagiarism from a commercial entity. Anybody got suggestions as to what can be done about this?

Simon W @324:

I note that the official website for the OITC, the candidate organization that Hopi Sen names, is returning a "bandwidth exceeded" message.

Not the behavior of an ultra-rich foundation with billions to spare to bail out the UK. Even one trying to maintain "plausible deniability".

I smell a 419 fraud writ large.

The wholesale revisionist-history rejection of Enlightenment ideals that originally informed the U.S. Constitution in favor of a modern-fundamentalist neo-Puritan retelling of that history, coupled with the far Right's demonstrable willingness to lie, and lie, and lie some more is plenty bad enough. The natural outcome of rejecting rationalism, though, is a return to entire classes of uniformed, superstitious citizens who can't be trusted to feed themselves, vaccinate their children, or vote responsibly.

Oh, wait...

I cannot, for the very life of me, understand how the Tea Party and Fox News ilk are convincing people who really ought to know better (people who were educated before the Texas Board of Education's decision to eradicate the Age of Reason from textbooks) to vote against their own interests. And to do so with such great, gloating enthusiasm and zeal.

I recently had a long, strange conversation with someone about what constitutes a face, in which he tried to tell me that "facts aren't always so clearcut as all of that, though - try and convince a blind man that the moon is a sphere!" and he honestly seemed completely incapable of understanding that whether or not people believed something didn't somehow effect or define the truth or objective reality of the thing itself.

Gahh. Sorry 'bout that, Abi, et al!

That which we call a Mac by any other name would write as cogently.

I cannot, for the very life of me, understand how the Tea Party and Fox News ilk are convincing people who really ought to know better...to vote against their own interests.

Tribal loyalty. A kind of intellectual essentialism that asserts that what we think determines what we are, and then, transitively, that what we are should constrain what we think.

Ideas and beliefs can be not only something you arrive at through cognition and choose because they represent the underlying reality of the world, but also tribal markers.

But it's one thing for these tribal markers to be about the nature of the Trinity* or the merits of the Giants. It's another when they are about the remedies for economic recession or the rights of people to marry as they will.

Hm. This is the other side of that post on essentialism I've been noodling about with for a couple of weeks now. It's the mirror-image bookend to the argument that anti-Islamic sentiment is "not racist".

-----
* Though groups with different beliefs about the Trinity went on to have very real wars with each other.

heresiarch @329:

I think what changes isn't that the secure class becomes enamored of extending rights to others so much as they simply become unwilling to dedicate the requisite effort to prevent it from happening. Movements extending rights to any disenfranchised group have nearly always been led by the wealthiest, best-educated, privileged members of that group, not benevolent and enlightened members of the enfranchised.

Well, the exception would be Abolition, which was substantially led by whites.

I don't think we can make a rule that fits all of the different ways that people decide that something is sufficiently Not Right that they have to change it. I think history varies too much for that.

suffrage was led by women of the wealthiest class.

There was a lot of debate at the time about how much suffrage was won on the backs of maids-of-all-work. Or their knees.

that some of their rhetorical choices laid the groundwork for further progressivism says a lot more to me about the difficulty of only being halfway just than it does about the benevolent foresight of the Founding Fathers.

Starting down that road was revolutionary and exceptional. If course they didn't see where it would lead. They could have created a new monarchy and aristocracy, but didn't.

A birthday moment: I was gifted with a bread machine. Annoyingly, the manual only has about 8 recipes included. Anyone got a good bread machine recipe book to suggest?

I don't know how frequently I'm gonna use this thing, but it looks like it should make delicious bread and wonderful aromas.

Linkmeister @ 360: There's a nice little book "Fresh Bread in the Morning" (subtitle "from your bread machine") by Annette Yates (0-7160-2154-4). Ingredient quantities given in g and oz.

There's a much larger book "Bread Machine" (subtitle "how to prepare and bake the perfect loaf") by Jennie Shapter (1-84309-399-5). It looks good but I haven't actually used it yet (got it as a present). Ingredient quantities given in g and oz and cups.

Note: whatever book you use, remember to add the ingredients in the correct order for your bread machine - mine for example starts with the yeast, then the flour, other ingredients, finally the water, while some use the opposite order.

Enjoy - the bread is so much nicer than shop bought, and comes without all those pesky "mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids" etc.

Bill @319: as of 10am this morning, my server had served up my most recent blog entry 1.5 million times in 23 hours.

Ahem. That's just slightly more traffic than I'm used to ...

Lee: There's no way to even pretend that the foxhunter is doing it to put food on the table.

Actually, this is one justification they use: foxes aren't edible, but they eat edible things like chickens.

Movements extending rights to any disenfranchised group have nearly always been led by the wealthiest, best-educated, privileged members of that group, not benevolent and enlightened members of the enfranchised.

Abolition: William Wilberforce was not black.
Parliamentary reform: many of the leaders of the Chartist movement were already radical MPs.
Peasants' Revolt: John Ball was a priest.
Irish home rule: Parnell was a rich Anglican landowner, and thus not subject to penal laws.

KayTei, #351: Particularly on the question of many boomers wanting us to pay for their social services (because they "earned" them), while wanting to cut everything that might benefit the younger generation (but which doesn't directly benefit the boomers, even though they may have benefitted from such support in the past).

What drives me crazy is when people fail to understand how things that don't benefit them directly might still benefit them indirectly. Take schools--occasionally you'll get people complaining they shouldn't have to pay for schools if they don't currently have any kids attending them. As though they're insulated from all those other people's kids--as though those kids won't grow up to be their doctors, lawyers, plumbers and mechanics. Do they really not care how well, or badly, educated these people are?

Marilee, #350: I should probably mention that I wrote that comic a few weeks ago, after reading Contested Will, so it's not connected to any conversations here.

Dave @ 244, Rikibeth @ 255: Except that a cross paty is still a cross, with internal angles that come to a point. The main difference between a cross paty and the ground of Sir Pterry's escutcheon, apart from overall thickness, is that interior rounding.

Jacque @ 340: Who, me? I just told you it was OK. You pushed yourself. :)

Ginger at 333: Oh, the kittens are awesome. Thanks for the link to the video and pix.

Unless my records are inaccurate, today is the birthday of linkmeister... And of Paul A...

Wesley @ 364

Yeah, definitely. I think what kills me about the "I earned it" argument, in particular, is that it assumes that everything I might ever contribute to the world is valueless against what the people making that argument have already done. It will never be possible, if they have their way, for me to earn equal priviliges to theirs. But they're all so focused on what they'll lose that they can't see or don't care about what they're taking away from other people...

MacAllister @356: I recently had a long, strange conversation with someone about what constitutes a fac[t]

For some reason, I had recently been thinking of an exchange attributed to A. Lincoln:

So, if we say a tail is a leg, then dogs have five legs?

Correct.

No. Just because you call a tail a leg does not make it so.

Ginger @ 333... The kittens. The kittens!

ajay @ 363... foxes aren't edible, but they eat edible things like chickens

...and disease-carrying mice.

Charlie Stross @ 320: I think that's known as "too much of a good thing"...

Linkmeister, Paul A and anyone else relevant: Happy Birthday

Linkmeister (again): I like putting our bread machine on overnight, with that lovely fresh-baked bread smell greeting me in the morning. We average about two loaves (made with 500 g flour each) a week, for two people. Making a "wholemeal" loaf but with about 150g of the flour being malted/granary rather than wholemeal makes a nice loaf - that's our staple. I'd make raisin-cinnamon bread more often but I eat it too fast.

Wesley, #364: I refer to that mode of thinking as, "Oh, it's okay -- the leak isn't on OUR end of the lifeboat!"

KayTei @369:

Cut the Boomers a little slack -- perhaps you're not aware that Reagan Administration DOUBLED the OASDI tax in 1983 so that the Boomer's Social Security benefits could be paid without bankrupting the USA.

This year, for the FIRST time in the history of Social Security, the program paid out more in benefits than it received in revenues -- not because there are more retirees, but because there are so many people who are unemployed.

Getting people back to work will take care of the revenue problem. Increasing the amount of wages subject to the OASDI tax (currently $106,800 per year) to $250,000 would keep the system solvent through the beginning of the next century.

For most of my working career I've paid my fair share to Social Security -- you better damn well believe I've earned it.

I like the Bullshit Detection 101 link.

A useful tool I've found is to look for seas of linked-together people who have strong markers of expertise in some area. The science blogging and podcasting community is a nice place to look for those groups. If you can successfully distinguish a good network from a bad one up front, you can find more high-quality sources of information. Finding revere led me to Orac and Moving Meat. Gene Expression led me to Mystery Rays which led me to the Vincent Raccaniello's Virology blog and wonderful podcasts. And so on. At each step, I could cross link those blogs/people.

The flipside of this is the danger--you can find yourself in a kind of parallel world of "alternative" experts. These might be real researchers with a valid but minority take on some question, or quacks selling snake oil. Checking credentials and Googling and looking for other linked comments from other blogs all help with that, but at some point, you need some independent knowledge or references from people who know what they're talking about to get started. And you need a willingness to skeptically question their claims from time to time, and to recognize when there are areas where those trustworthy sources aren't too trustworthy.

A really useful tool for evaluating claims about the world (especially claims within a network of trusted sources) is Greg Cocharan's question: How would the world look different if this were true? It's surprising how often a plausible-sounding claim falls apart if you ask that question.

For example, it's a pretty common claim in some parts of the US political world that a large fraction of Muslims are terrorists, or would be terrorists if they had the chance, and pose a deadly danger to the US. And yet, this poses a Fermi's-paradox-like question: Where are all the terrorists? With 2-3 million Muslims in the US, wandering around free, why don't I see stuff blowing up all the time? Once you start asking "what would life be like in a country where, say 1% of the population were supporters of terrorism, and maybe 1/10000 were active terrorists?", it becomes clear that this claim is nonsense.

It's good to subject your own assumptions/beliefs to this measure, too. If my beliefs about X are true, then what would I expect to see in observable data Y? (Ideally, this is something you don't yet know about, so you get a meaningful check on the data.)

albatross @376:

A really useful tool for evaluating claims about the world (especially claims within a network of trusted sources) is Greg Cocharan's question: *How would the world look different if this were true?* It's surprising how often a plausible-sounding claim falls apart if you ask that question.

obXKCD

#363 ajay

The leaders of the many labor and trades union movements, for both men and women, in Europe, England, Russia and the U.S. seem pretty much exceptions to your assertion.

Emma Goldman, Samuel Gompers, A. Philip Randolph, the famous black organizer who organized the railroad company's largely black Pullman Porters, Ralph Hosea Chaplin who worked with Mother Jones organizing miners, and so many other leders and organizers were not of that profile.

This also pertains to the leaders and organizers of farm workers in the U.S. today.

The assertion that all progress comes from the middle class and aristos is very like, "What these people/tribes/nation/etc. needs is a honky."

But labor organizing and activism is very hard, very dirty, very dangerous and very heartbreaking, thus perfectly appropriate to leave to the non-sexy under and lower classes.

Love, C.

ajay, Constance:

Before we get too far into this, I'd like to reiterate what I said in 359:

I don't think we can make a rule that fits all of the different ways that people decide that something is sufficiently Not Right that they have to change it. I think history varies too much for that.

Please at least consider this explanation before going where this argument looks to me to be going.

For the past few months I've been away from this site, haring after various pursuits (including an almost-clean house), but political anguish drives me back -- and leaves me surprised that discussion of the US midterm election has only crept into this Open Thread, rather than getting a place of its own: a place to mourn and rant, in the aftermath.

Of course, a decade ago I moved from CA to AZ, a state where some degree of moderation has given way to a sea of gloating Red. All my candidates lost, to rogues and fools. Listening to them cackle and seeing them preen has been nearly unbearable.

It might almost be entertaining to see how biased cluelessness tries to deal with genuine problems, if school kids, Arizona's natural beauty, and anything resembling Reason were less likely to be trashed along the way.

Taking up activism at this point would require a complete personality transplant, and soon I may vanish back into my book reviews and hobbies. But for now, I rage and mourn!

On Buffy, at least, they went to considerable lengths to justify the "sleeping with monsters" bits -- various ways to force a soul back into a vampire, a control chip, and a spell, as I remember it. And several times ran into trouble with other anti-vampire forces on the issue.

I would still not want to go so far as to say those were the better parts of the show, though.

Not to mention the Civil Rights and Voting Act movements here in the U.S.

Love, c.

Mark @366: Who, me? I just told you it was OK. You pushed yourself. :)

Well, okay. But you did point out the 1pic=1kw equivalence to me. So there. ;-P

Oh, &BTW, six frames in, now. Three of which are actually non-horrible!

Faren @ 380... New Mexico elected a Palindrone for governor after the current Democratic was forced out by term limits - which is yet another argument against what may have seemed like a good idea to 'some' people, but has been anything but. As a result, I've been trying to focus on non-political pursuits and thoughts.

Yesterday I had a maddening conversation with a conservative friend of mine who is in high dudgeon about the results of California's elections. "Now we've got Jerry Brown who's going to tax us, and the ballot measure that makes it easier for him to do so! I've got to move!"

And I'm thinking... you're the same one who's thrilled that the city Arborist comes to trim your trees so they don't hit the power lines. Do you assume he's a volunteer, trimming trees for the excercise? Thanks to Prop 13, your home's taxes have been kept artificially low for lo these many years! You may not have, nor ever have had, kids in the schools (and neither have or will I) but do you want to be surrounded by more and more ignorant people? Did you not attend a public school paid for by others, including the childless? I hope you never complain about a pot-hole again!

I just get really cranky about those people who pull the ladder out as soon as they've made it to the top, and also otherwise intelligent people who claim to know how to budget better than any of these lousy politicians, and yet can't seem to make the connection between taxes and fire, police, highway, and every other damn service we pay for. I mean, I'd love to go into the grocery store and just walk off with the foods I want to eat that week, but I do have to pay for my groceries, whether I think it's "fair" or not.

David Harmon @321: asked if I might need a ride to the voting place. Then I didn't hear from them, ... 6:30 Tuesday evening, I hear a pounding on my door.

You sure that volunteer was a Democrat?

Marilee @350: have you seen Wesley's art? Currently there's a Shakespeare faery.

See? See!? My point exactly! ("Wait, what?")

KayTei @351: I'm willing to admit that some boomers are pretty awesome, as long as y'all admit that there's still a huge values gap between our generations

I've heard reference to this values gap, but (at least from the vantage point here under my rock) it's not apparent to me what it is? Care to espand?

If it helps any at all (and I'm sure it doesn't) I'm a late boomer, and I'm pretty confident that all of the money I've paid into Social Security will have gone up in smoke by the time I'm in a position to use it.

KayTei@351: To the extent that Social Security works right (and doesn't get gutted or raided too badly or etc.), the idea is that you pay at about the same rates we paid, and the difference (caused by our larger numbers) is made up out of the trust fund, which was built up while we paid in (since there were more of us than the previous generation that we were paying for). That doesn't seem unfair to me -- we and you pay the same amount of our income for social security, and get the same amount when we collect it. It's both fair and sustainable.

It's a good reason to resist raids on the trust fund, though.

In terms of practical politics, far too many of us are going to be heavily dependent on those social security payouts, and will certainly vote to keep them coming -- it's a very high-ranking issue.

There might be some tweaking to SS in the future, but the idea that the funds will be exhausted is primarily a scare story.

And ddb is right -- retired people have nothing to do on Election day but vote. :-)

I also disagree with you all re Abolition, at least in England. Abolition in the empire, particularly the Caribbean only succeeded when the planter class itself found slavery more expensive than lucrative -- as their plantation lands played out from their capitalist like extraction, and the price of their cash generating crops fell against competition from less expensive substitutes and newer, more fertile, lands.

Abolition of the slave TRADE in England, that is something that owes to the aristos, but no one would have bothered if the small people, particularly of religious persuasions, hadn't been so insistent on keep it as an issue alive. Also, again, it got too expensive in lots of ways -- not mention the cheaper African goods were unwelcome competition for the locally raised, trained and acclimated ones.

Ultimate emancipastion in this country was a different story. It took a war.

No other nation needed a war for this. I think about what that means every day, and have done so for the last 30 years. Economics were at the bottom of it -- competing economic visions by two competing power elites in this nation -- for manifest economic destiny throughout the western hemisphere.

Love, C.

KayTei 369:

Please tell me how my wanting the social contract the US Government has made with taxpayers enforced prevents you from getting what you need?

I not only expect the Social Security Administration to pay me my benefits -- I expect them to be paying you those you earned when you reach retirement age (or paying you disability should your health fail before you reach retirement age).

In case you haven't been following the Social Security cutters' public statements -- they're talking about going after the potential benefits of those born 1970 and after. The Baby Boom officially ended in 1965...

Now if you're angry with the Boomer-age politians who are trying to cut Social Security benefits to your generation -- I'm disgusted with them as well and intend to keep working towards getting them out of office, and doing my damndest to keep their plans from succeeding.

albatross @376 -- I've forwarded a link to your comment to Howard R, as I thought he might be interested.

#360: I bought a few bread machine recipe books from GoodWill. I can't say I've tried more than a half dozen or so breads.

One that I keep going back to: The standard white bread recipe from the Oster instruction manual, with the addition of a cup of oatmeal (rolled) and an egg.

It makes a nice solid bread that is great for toasting.

#354 Lee
Martha Coakley is the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Since the publication is in Massachusetts, one approach might be to contact the MA Attorney General's office with a complaint against the magazine and its ownership....

Bread recipes -- google, also go to site of bread machine flour makers, such as King Arthur...

on another topic--economics where something takes a large investment to change, things tend to not get changed until forced to it. E.g., recycling water for cooling and processing is less expensive over time than running more water from a river or lake or ocean through, but industrialists refused to recycle until forced to The investment in the tech and equipment to recycle the water the companies saw as impractical for any or all reasons of capital expense, effect on product price, downtime for installation and setup and lost production time, personnel training, changes in corporate thinking, effort involved, etc.. Once the changes got made, the operational costs were lower than the old no-water-recycling operations costs, for production--but until the changes got made, no one was going to believe/expect that, since there was no data to show that and no experience with it.

I saw firsthand conservative, "we mustn't do something new because we don't know how it's going to break!" thinking in place, when I was in the Air Force. The old way, the failure mechanisms were manifold, exactly how they happened wasn't necessarily known, but it was known that there WOULD be failures. They were -afraid=- to try doing thing differently because they didn't go in already -knowing- there were giong to be failures...

Yes, I know, it sounds insane. It IS insane, but that's what happens when hidebound conservatism takes over, you mustn't have ANYTHING change for fear of the unknown, even if the unknown might IMPROVE things! All those unknowns and the Experts' knowledge no longer applies/become superfluous-- OH! THAT is the true issue, that someone ELSE will get to be The Expert and get the perks and the attention and the funding and the accolades an Expert Status.

OH!

Linkmeister:

If you like traditional style breads (grainy, sourdough, rye, pumpernickel, etc.) I highly recommend Rustic European Breads From Your Bread Machine. It has a lot of recipes where you use the bread machine to prepare the dough, then form it into a hand-shaped loaf and bake it, but also a fair number which you just bake in the machine. It also includes a number of techniques for doing a sponge or poolish right in the bread machine, then adding the rest of the ingredients later and running a second cycle to get a sourdough-style bread with virtually zero work.

Paula Lieberman @ 394... conservative, "we mustn't do something new because we don't know how it's going to break!" thinking

Like starting a new country?

Dr. Benjamin Franklin: Tell me, Mr. Wilson, when you were a judge, how in hell did you ever make a decision?
James Wilson: The decisions I made were based on legality and precedent. But there is no legality here, and certainly no precedent.
Dr. Benjamin Franklin: Because, it's a new idea, you CLOD! We'll be making our own precedent!

Paula #394:

This might go better in the global warming thread, but your comment made me wonder about what changes we can and can't do with current technology, at acceptable cost.

I want to try a thought experiment here. Imagine we have a genie who will, upon request, replace as much of our physical plant (power generating, transmitting, and using infrastructure, cars, heat pumps, insulation, lights, appliances, etc.). Whatever we ask her for, we will then have to pay to operate and maintain and replace as it wears out (that is, if we ask her for trillion-dollar high efficiency solar plants that wear out every ten years, we have to pay depreciation on those plants every year). The catch is, we can only ask her for stuff that's existing, on-the-market-today technology, not something as yet uninvented. (We can't ask her for fusion power plants, for example.)

My question is, with access to this genie, can we get to an acceptable CO2 emissions level as a country, without suffering a substantial fall in standard of living? (That is, maybe I drive a smaller car or am more careful about turning off lights in my house, but I can still afford a car and a house.) I'm visualizing something like, say, replacing our electrical generation infrastructure with modern nuclear plants, replacing our stock of cars with electric cars or very efficient hybrids, properly insulating all the houses in the country, replacing old appliances with more energy efficient modern ones, etc. We can add more wind power, though my understanding is that it's quite hard to get anywhere close to US power demand with wind, and that it's rather expensive per kWh.

It seems to me that this is kind-of the defining question w.r.t. how we can realistically respond to AGW. If, given access to such a genie, we could make this transition without suffering a big fall in quality of life, then this is fundamentally doable. There's still a hard political problem to solve, but it's not hopeless. Further, developing countries currently growing into a first-world standard of living, and turnover in our physical stock of power plants and cars and appliances and houses and such, can be made to move us in the direction of an acceptable level of CO2 emissions.

If we can't do this even given access to the "capital replacement genie," then I think there's no real chance we'll address CO2 emissions until we get better technology fielded. Because in even minimally democratic countries (and even in not at all democratic countries), imposing a big fall in quality of life on the citizens is a recipe for regime change.

This is a kind of useful way to think about a lot of issues. For example, while it may or may not work out to reform US healthcare in practice, we can look across the Canadian border and see a working system that's possible at our level of technological and economic development.

Remember the old joke? The reason God could create the world in 7 days is because he didn't have an installed base.

Big changes in infrastructure will happen, but it's not going to be immediate. Hell, in 1940, we still had horse-drawn delivery vehicles.

Incremental changes in technology will be the key. In 1920 biplanes flew at 150 mph. In 1940, aircraft were doing 400. In 1960, they flew at 1200 mph. Not all technologies will progress at that pace, but they will move forward.

At one time, oil was an alternative energy source.

We can't move our computing away from mainframes! Think of the DANGERS! The COSTS!!!!!!

We can't move our computing away from mainframes! Think of the DANGERS! The COSTS!!!!!!

Think of my job!

They will pry my punched cards from my cold dead fingers!

Well, yes, Serge, but do you know what we call refactoring code around my office?

Ripping out your debugged code to start a bug farm.

The conservative perspective that "we already know where the bugs are in this implementation" may not be the way to move to a juster and more honorable society, but it's an argument worth addressing on its merits.

abi @ 402... True, but you and I would never have known each other if people had let that stop them. Mind you, more than once, in my 33 years as a programmer, I have seen tools touted that WOULD CHANGE THE WAY PROGRAMMING IS DONE, for the better of course, and most of them didn't work. That's given me a bit of a BS detector. That though is different from saying 'don't even think about changes'. I think it is anyway.

abi @ 402:

Lightbulb!

Refactoring is supposed to be simple, logical transformations of the code until you get it to an equivalent, but architecturally better, design. At every point in the process the code should remain working the same way as before. Once you've started to do some housekeeping, then you can also start fixing the bugs because they should be much easier to see, and fixing them won't make such a tangle of things. The alternative is to rip out the old, mostly working code, and replace it with new code with its own sets of bugs.

It strikes me that a parallel can be made here with regards to policy. Taking power generation, for example, some people view alternative energies as ripping out the old to put in the new, and put forward that we know the current advantages and disadvantages of what we have, but we don't know everything about the new. The other view would be that of refactoring or rearchitecting, where we can phase in alternative technologies, learn them, work with them, still generate the power we need, and then start working on cleaning up the old bugs.

KeithS @ 404... The alternative is to rip out the old, mostly working code, and replace it with new code with its own sets of bugs.

You've been talking to my group's manager, haven't you?

Hyperlocal news...

Programmer receives email from other group within corporation.
Other person mangles man's name from 'Serge' into 'Server'.

Fascinating post on the limits of Hallowe'en costuming for 5-year-olds: My son is gay. Or not.

Note that the author is the wife of a police officer.

Steve C:

Right. But imagine telling someone without oil, living at the beginning of the industrial revolution, that they must do without coal. Just stop using those steam engines and coal furnaces, and suffer a massive fall in wealth and standard of living.

What I want to know is, by analogy, do we basically have oil now, and so the barrier to ceasing to burn coal is the changeover cost? Or are we looking at going back to wood? Those are two very different situations.

My understanding is that hydro and nuclear are basically what we could do now along these lines, along with efficiency improvements in buildings and appliances. Hydro plants only work in particular places, and I don't think we could find anything like enough places to build all the dams we'd need to power the country. Nuclear plants are expensive to build and operate, and we might run into fuel issues, but we could actually switch over to them if we needed to. From what I've read, biofuels don't really scale up to being a useful fuel source yet, though there's a lot of work being done on getting that to happen. How do wind and solar work in terms of operating and depreciation cost? (ISTR that solar panels take several years of operation to pay back the energy used in their manufacture.) Aren't most of the operations using those as power sources now heavily subsidized--that suggests that we couldn't afford to ask the genie for them.

Y'know the Sidelight "Managing editor of Cook's Source magazine to writer she plagiarized: 'The web is considered public domain'"?

This apparently isn't the first or only time she's done it.

Among other sources: Martha Stewart, Weight Watchers, The Food Network, CNN, and WebMD: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=196994196748&topic=23238

The Cook's Source complaint is spreading dramatically. Story's hit the Washington Post, and apparently they lifted stuff from Martha Stewart and Cooks Illustrated as well.

Stupid, stupid rat creatures. And they could probably have kept going just fine if they hadn't written the snotty note back. I sense a firing about to happen.... Once again, it's not so much the crime as the attempt to deny it that's causing the problem to get much worse.

albatross @ 408:

There are other technologies for solar power beyond photovoltaic cells. The others that I'm familiar with rely on mirrors to focus the solar energy to boil water, and from there drive a turbine.

albatross @ 408 -

Right. But imagine telling someone without oil, living at the beginning of the industrial revolution, that they must do without coal. Just stop using those steam engines and coal furnaces, and suffer a massive fall in wealth and standard of living.

People will accept almost anything except a setback in economic progress. If they feel that climate change adjustments will lower their standard of living, it simply won't happen.

Bread Machine: We have one. I need a sticker on the side that says "This machine kills diets." 2 lb. of bread, that is delicious for the first day, among two people. Do the math.

Sustainability:
I want to try a thought experiment here. Imagine we have a genie who will, upon request, replace as much of our physical plant (power generating, transmitting, and using infrastructure, cars, heat pumps, insulation, lights, appliances, etc.). Whatever we ask her for, we will then have to pay to operate and maintain and replace as it wears out (that is, if we ask her for trillion-dollar high efficiency solar plants that wear out every ten years, we have to pay depreciation on those plants every year). The catch is, we can only ask her for stuff that's existing, on-the-market-today technology, not something as yet uninvented. (We can't ask her for fusion power plants, for example.)

If I'm understanding the question right, seven hells yes. If you GAVE me the first generation, I'd have 20 years to save up for the next generation. O&M is, like, 5% of the levelized cost of a solar plant and 95% of the cost is capital. We don't need the next generation of power plants for 20 years, so that's [conservatively] 5% of the levelized cost to save up for the next generation.

I could do a LOT if I was paying in ten-cent dollars. Or even fifteen-cent dollars. Seventy-cent dollars [which we have now on cost of capital] make wind cost-effective. Fifty-cent dollars make a lot of solar projects cost-effective. One-hundred-cent dollars make new refrigerators and insulation and new windows and new lights cost-effective.

Here's the industry standard (including 30% credit for renewables) for levelized cost of energy.

And here, the McKinsey study slide, is the stereotypical "Things we could do that would save money AND carbon dioxide" list.

With madly-cheap money, I'd look at CAES power storage, which lets you throw a lot more wind on the grid and get use out of it, I'd modernize a BUNCH of coal plants and maybe put a solar "first stage" on there, I would absolutely put a couple of 500 KV HVDC lines across the country so the sunny and windy parts can get energy to the parts with the people in them... and I'd build quite a lot of wind turbines and [probably] some power towers.

So there's a potential scholarly dissertation in the Cook's Source incident: "Internet Flash Mobs as a Force For Positive Change". heh.

Hyperlocal news: Vet gives cat weeks; woman thinks that's better than days.

It seems I misunderstood the genie's offer. Drat. (also, many people posted while I was writing.)

If the idea is that the genie lets us swap, say, a $1 billion coal plant for $1 billion of renewables... let me think about that and do some more writing.

Albatross @397

There are differing opinions on what an acceptable level of emissions is. However, roughly 50% of CO2 emissions are from coal-burning power plants, and we do have well-tested technology to replace them. Just replacing coal with nuclear power for electricity generation would cut CO2 emissions about 50%.

For cripes sake, we're not talking about going back to whale oil and wooden teeth.

Is living in a well insulated house decreasing your standard of living?

Not making your daily commute in a vehicle designed for transporting a family's worth of camping gear into the mountains?

Using an on-demand water heater rather than a tank that keep water hot in an empty house 16 hours a day?

There are many, many, many things that Americans due that are wasteful, thoughtless that are easily avoided or many wasteful, inefficient things they use that are easily replaced.

Not being stupid is half the battle.

James Macdonald #409--I rather suspect that a great big bus called Martha Stewart Omnimedia is about to hit that idiot, unless of course a great big bus labeled Food Network gets there first. Either way it won't be pretty.

#419: She's allegedly hit Disney too. That's a train.

Sabdy B @ 416... It seems I misunderstood the genie's offer

Or the genie misunderstood your request - a distinct possibility if it looks like Barbara Eden.

There's a town in northwestern Missouri, Rock Port, which now gets all its electricity from wind generators. They needed outside funding to help with this, of course--4 of the big turbines, plus all the necessary bells and whistles don't some cheap, but they've done it. I think, as (and if) funding is obtainable, we'll see more small towns take steps to follow Rock Port and other places that have similar plans underway. That doesn't say anything about supplying the needs of larger places, of course, but Rock Port is a data point.

There's a town in east Tennessee called Alcoa--because Alcoa built a big plant there (starting just before World War I), using hydroelectic power from the Little Tennessee River for the smelting process. Certainly that part of the world had little more to recommend it as the site for a major industrial operation--eastern Tennessee is not exactly a transportation-friendly area, and in the early 20th century, a lot of upgrading in rail service was surely required to handle both the delivery of raw materials and of the processed aluminum. It's interesting to speculate what sort of relocations in industry we may see develop, in order to take advantage of proximity to wind power sources.

Marilee @350 "in this part of Virginia, we get so many deer that the Park Service arranges hunts. There's more food than deer and a lot die of malnutrition. It's a lot better to have it feed a human."

If only the deer could figure out farming, they could grow their own forage and take full advantage of the fact that humans have killed or driven off most of their natural predators. My brain is now full of a series of rather charming children's-book mental images.

Sam Chevre: But we don't have a nuclear power industry that's reliably either honest or competent, and we also don't have a strong ongoing regulatory apparatus that could detect their errors and frauds early and compel genuine repairs.

Of course we don't have that for oil or coal either, but there is an argument - conservative in its Hippocratic Oath way - that we can at least avoid bringing more crooks into the mix knowingly.

Stefan Jones@418: I added wall insulation in my last house, haven't in this one. They're both stucco exteriors, and there are a lot of houses around town that still show the places holes were drilled to put in the insulation, years and decades later. In the old house I had it done from inside; plaster is easier to patch (and paint) than stucco is to fix to match. But it's at least expensive, and may actually reduce the value of your house if you leave it looking ratty.

Giving up having a vehicle suitable for family camping trips into the mountains is most definitely a huge loss in standard of living, for people who like to do that. Most of them can't afford a dedicated vehicle just for the camping trips, and given manufacturing resource use there's a question whether that's a solution. So presumably the solution is to rent, but that can easily add an hour to the start and end of each trip, and constrain when you can leave and when you can come back. We need a rental industry better adapted to repeat short-term renters.

But they also need that vehicle to take the neighborhood kids to the Little League game, don't they?

I have only brief experience with on-demand water heaters from 15 years ago in England, but the two I used absolutely sucked dead diseased rats through a straw. There's also a problem with location, plumbing, and power supply -- and most of us heat our water with gas; switching to electric (which is the only reasonable choice for aftermarket on-demand, because too many bathrooms are interior) involves an energy efficiency loss.

I think we'd need 5 flow-through hot water heaters to do the job -- and we have fewer bathrooms per person than most Americans. This is starting to sound expensive.

While I'm sure this isn't a serious resource issue overall, I wonder just what the effect on water usage would be of not running out of hot water in the shower?

Writing us all off (or just most of us) as stupid is the usual mistake. Lots of us are making active efforts to be more efficient, and STILL ending up in places you don't approve of, for various reasons, which are mostly not our own inability to think.

Albatross @397: yes, you need to ask the genie for a new supergrid, about a thousand fast breeder reactors, and about as much wind power as the UK (per capita) and as much solar as Germany (ditto) -- in both cases, 10-20% of total generating capacity.

This will not get the USA off oil for transport, but that's less than 40% of energy consumption; what it will do is break the reliance on coal, which is by far the worst source of carbon.

Cost estimate: $3-8Tn, or the entire US defense budget for a decade. In other words, it's entirely affordable but requires a major change in priorities.

KeithS, #404 (how appropriate! *g*): Huh. I never knew that the process which made up a large part of my work at my last major programming job actually had a separate name. Technically, I was migrating the system from one machine to another, but in the process I was also converting it from spaghetti code into top-down structured design. And yes, we ran parallel tests on every piece of it until we were sure it worked the same way on both systems.

ddb@425 On-demand water heaters have improved a great deal in the past few years--both in rate of heating, and in capacity, and there are quite a few gas models avaiable--they usually aren't situated directly at the point-of-use her in the US. You see them a lot on home-renovation shows, if you watch those much. I'd suggest goggling around and seeing what the latest technology has to offer, as they are something that's discussed a fair bit out on the internets--and there are several companies with web presences selling them.

ddb @425: firstly, give us another 30 years and we'll have fully autonomous self-driving cars. You want to rent a car? You pay, and it turns up at your door, empty and ready to go, half an hour later.

As for the on-demand water heaters, they've come a long way in the past two decades. I don't want to replace my central heating system just yet, but as/when I do, I'll be moving to a modern combi boiler -- runs the central heating, and provides gas-heated water on demand. (That's methane, not petrol.)

#397 Albatross
If you could pursuade the poorest 2 billion in the world to replace wood fires with cardboard boxes covered with tinfoil (and supply the tin foil and cardboard boxes) you could reduce global co2 emissions by 2 billion tons per year apparently. Or so it implies
here

That's a long way towards the US's current yearly emissions of 7 billion tons - and all it takes is cardboard boxes and tinfoil.

So yes, I think that we could bring down world co2 emissions, improve the lives of billions of people and slow the rate of extinction; and create a large number of new jobs while we were at it. And we wouldn't need hair-shirts, the abolition of the car or a retreat to caves to do it. Germany (hardly a third-world country) manages on one half the per-capita energy use of the US, without any strong green measures, simply be not being as wasteful. It is sobering to reflect that the average American must be spending twice as much as they need to on energy.

Stefan Jones @418: Some folks may be stupid. Others just may not have the cash on hand to do the necessary updates and modifications.

Instead of a tax credit, why not set up something through the Department of Energy or HUD that would offer micro-loans to those who wished to make their homes and businesses more energy efficient?

I'd love to replace all my windows, improve the insulation, and go geothermal for my source of heating -- but I don't have the funds. Unless I hit the lottery or inherit money (not bloody likely) it isn't going to happen. I'm betting a lot of people are in a similar situation.

Charlie Stross @ 429... give us another 30 years and we'll have fully autonomous self-driving cars

Why does that make me only slightly less nervous than the idea of flying cars?

So, the GOP leaders outright said that their goal over the next 2 years is to prevent Obama's reelection.

This is going to be fun.
Not.

The state of the economy will determine if Obama is reelected or not. If unemployment drops enough, he's got it.

Steve C @ 434... True, but I can see them doing everything they can to make sure the Economy doesn't improve. They've proven again and again that power is what they're interested, not governing and doing what's best for the Country.

Next time someone tells me the Democratic Party is no different from the GOP, he/she will get an earful.

It might help Obama if he started another war, or such.... (Not thinking that he would, mind you!)

Refactoring, 402 et al:
The key (and I know I'm not imparting any actual information here) is that you write the tests first, and confirm that the current code matches the tests, and (attempt to confirm) that the tests are complete. If you can't write a set of tests you're reasonably comfortable are complete, then the job's too big for refactoring at once - refactor a smaller bit.

Only then do you rip out debugged code to put in a new bug farm. But it sits private and hidden until it passes the tests, at which point it should be as debugged as the old bug farm.

Of course, if the tests aren't complete, what you get is something that meets Schneier's rule, in context - anybody can write code that they can't break. And the first few times people do this, they're very very bad at building complete test farms (and unless the company has bought in to more than just buzzword bingo, "writing the tests" won't be counted as development time, so there will be a strong incentive to skimp on the test farm, even after the first few times), so what you get is abi's 402.

The other half of that is QA and bugfixing: in code-ready-to-refactor, when a problem is found, the test reproducing the bug is written first and added to the suite. *Then* the code is fixed. Again, that process is going to work well in shops that buy in, and will fail, spectacularly, in buzzword bingo shops.

I like the *concept* of agile programming - but I have years of experience trying to get "overhead" past the suits, and am less idealistic than I was before.

Lori: You don't have the funds in cash. Do you have the funds over time(ie can you pay back the microloan?) I see two possibilities:

1) You'd be able to repay the loan with the amount you saved, ie the microloan pays for itself, or
2) You wouldn't be, and that's not a good deal to ask the genie for.

There may already be loans for your state.

(As an example, here's a nice one for New Jersey:
http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=NJ17F&re=0&ee=1 )

One of my favorite examples of programming mish-mash is a complex program that was designed to feed clean data into a system. This was done decades ago for a city water board. It took months to develop. It had edits and validations out the wazoo. It was perfectly structured, and when they ran it, it ran without error - nothing got through. Not one single record.

So they sat sat down and examined the requirements, and every requirement was deemed necessary, and every piece was code was unit tested and it was 100% on the money. Every record of the input had something that triggered a rejection.

Eventually they scrapped it and came up with programs that were less unforgiving.

#439: You mean, "requirements that were less unforgiving." The world is filled with people who don't really want what they ask for.

Hmm... that statement ties back into the politics part of this thread nicely.

ddb- a lot of people (est. 90%) buy a huge SUV for what a compact station wagon could do. In most cases SUV's have startlingly little cargo room. The reason SUV's are so popular is that they're considered "light trucks" so they're allowed to get appalling MPG, and they are allegedly cooler than minivans. Heck, a lot of them aren't any better at going camping in the mountains than the compact station wagon would be. In that sense, yes, we could cut the oil spent on the highways by 10% or 20% quite easily. That is a visible, if not necessarily meaningful, cut in the "standard of living". Cars are status symbols.

More on the "genie that swaps out powerplant" - rooftop solar hot water heating is very practical in a lot of the country [a lot geographically, maybe not by population.] Insulation (remember, the genie doesn't have to punch holes in the walls, it's magic) is quite cost effective, I'm told but have not researched. I don't know if wind is truly cost-effective by comparison; it's worth doing with a 30% federal subsidy. Much of this depends on where you're building the wind towers. Solar thermal "power towers" - we have the technology, although we only have a few pilot-sized actual towers- make claims of being comparable in cost to coal, although we don't have any long-term proof. So speckling southern California, Nevada, and the like with them is a pretty good bet. Especially if concrete heat storage continues to look good when applied on an industrial scale.

Hybrid coal-solar power plants [3-10% less coal per MWh, using solar to preheat] are also very cost-effective.

Compressed Air Energy Storage looks like a pretty good bet to me, although it is also an undertested technology. There are two systems in the entire world using it and they're working on two more pilot systems. I don't know if that meets the bar for "existing technology", though.

New refrigerators, new air conditioning, getting people to open the windows at night and close them at 6 AM, those are also cost-effective right now, right here. Apparently the fans on most home A/C units make heat transfer guys cry in their beer.

Sandy, 441: I agree with almost everything you say, but my asthmatic lungs require me to take issue with the "open your windows" idea. Pollen in the country, smog in the city...plus the fact that many people live in areas where open windows are at best an invitation to be robbed.

Loans and grants to weatherize homes would be, in the long run, much cheaper than (say) a war against Iran to ensure cheap oil supplies.

Of course, the parts of the economy this would stimulate aren't the industries that traditionally pay big lobbying dollars.

Serge 401: They will pry my punched cards from my cold dead fingers!

Ah, the old days. I remember when my friend Marjorie moved into a new apartment, the station wagon (remember those?) hit a bump, and her compiler wound up all over the hillside.

That sentence is imparsable by Kids Today.

Tom 407: Definitely shows what the reasonable people are up against. It particularly struck me that moms ABC were bullying the kid (as well as the mom) allegedly because they were afraid he'd be bullied!

Sandy B., #441,
Insulation (remember, the genie doesn't have to punch holes in the walls, it's magic) is quite cost effective, I'm told but have not researched.
getting people to open the windows at night and close them at 6 AM, those are also cost-effective right now, right here.

Three things:
1. Insulation: Insulating and using a radiant barrier in your attic to prevent heat getting in is effective. (Powered attic vent fans are not effective - air doesn't transfer heat from solids very well, and moving air nullifies the effectiveness of fiber insulation.)
2. That said, a fan that vents the house through a duct from the upstairs ceiling to the outside (even through the attic) can make a big difference. Opening the windows at night can work quite well paired with this. (Try #1 first.)

3. I have a love of usable shutters, which make open windows at night, or during storms much more viable. Can anyone living in Europe tell me if they are useful? I understand that they are actually used there. (They are decorative plastic in most places I've lived in the United States.)

4. Humans, thanks to our moist skin, transfer heat pretty okay in a breeze. Thus using ceiling fans can let you save 2-4 degrees of air chilling, provided the humans are moist enough and the air dry enough. (But try #1 first.)

5. I understand from reading Consumer Reports and the This Old House website, that the average length of time you need to have new windows to pay off the energy savings is...25 years. They don't actually say "make sure your storm windows fit right and spend the money on higher R-value insulation" but...try #1 first.

Serge #320: Duke Ellington.

Lori, #431: Exactly. We live in a 60-year-old house; energy efficiency wasn't something to be thought of when it was built. We've added insulation where we can (rather a lot in the attic, some foam-seal stuff that has to be blown thru the walls), but there is much more that we'd like to be able to do and simply can't afford. Double-glazed panes for the heat-sink picture window in the living room; a completely new sliding patio door; repair of the foundation so that the doors don't leak like sieves around the edges despite weatherstripping; the list goes on and on. We do what we can; do we save more by pulling the heavy curtains over the windows in the winter than we use by then having to run the (CF) lights all day long? We'd like to have an on-demand water heater (actually two, one for the kitchen/laundry and one for the bathrooms), but they're STINKING expensive. (Also, having hot showers available while the power was out after Ike was nice -- giving up our gas water heater would have lost us that.)

Oh, and the car issue. I'd love to have a smaller around-town car than the minivan. But we use that minivan as a con-going vehicle, because it'll haul 3 tables' worth of stuff with all the rear seats taken out. Adding another car to the insurance is out of budget, so I drive that one.

Tom, #436: Setting aside completely the moral bankruptcy of invading another country to jump-start your own economy -- no, even that wouldn't work, because it would be the Republicans leading the hue and cry against it. Remember, war as an economy-booster is a Republican-patented solution.

Stefan, #443: I fear you've touched on one of the cruxes of the problem.

On solar power, I always direct people to the Scientific American special on a plan to have the USA replace fossil fuels with solar power by 2050. More here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=1

Their summary:
A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.

Note that the expected subsidy cost which will cascade downwards in the proper Keynesian way, is less than half a trillion dollars. Not 3 trillion which I seem to recall seeing someone say upthread. This is all a lot cheaper than people think, and definitely cheaper than invading other countries.

Here in the UK the idiot government has subsidised photovoltaic power, when you can get more energy for your money with wind or as I mentioned up thread, solar water heating.
Myself, I have cavity wall insulation, pretty much every concrete and brick and breezeblock house can have it done, but only about 20% are done so far. I havn't added the numbers up but last winter when it was around freezing, my heating came on half as often, ie every 2 or 3 hours instead of every 1 to 2. (Yes I know there are issues with older housing being very hard/ impossible to retrofit with insulation. But if we can't even build new ones properly, what chance have we got with the old ones?)

As far as I cam concerned, building houses with high insulation is a mature technology, just for whatever reason (cough cough) the government doesn't seem to want to mandate near zero energy houses.

In hotter areas, what is far more cost effective than air con, which ideally would be banned as being such a waste of energy, is redesigning houses in hot areas to deal with the heat. Thick walls, no or small south facing windows etc. THis is all mature technology, been known about for centuries.

My main energy uses are the car and heating my flat. I expect in 10-20 years time the gas powered heating will get replaced by electric again, since gas will be too expensive to burn given the cost of importing it. Possibly getting rid of the night storage heater was a bad idea. (Although it did give me a nice stretch of wall for bookshelves)

What I actually want for the bathroom is a small electric water heater, you can get them quite easily now. There's no point firing up the gas boiler just to give me a bit of hot water when I'm washing my hands, that has to come through 7 metres of piping.

Albatros #408 - Spain should now have 3 gigawatts of solar power generation. Thats 3 nuclear reactors worth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Spain

I don't however quite understand what you mean by

"What I want to know is, by analogy, do we basically have oil now, and so the barrier to ceasing to burn coal is the changeover cost? Or are we looking at going back to wood?"

The way I see it, we can maintain something like our current level of energy use by switching to renewables (solar, wind, wave, hydro, a wee bit of biomass) and efficiency improvements, and nuclear. Doing so will allow us to stop burning coal, oil and gas. We can save the oil for plastics, which it is just so useful for, and eke the gas out a bit longer for fertiliser. Hopefully that'll give us enough time to see teh population reduce later in this century, improve and change our farming techniques to save soil and not need so much fertiliser and pesticides, and avoid the worst problems with global warming. Although in the latter case it looks like we're going to get at least 2 degrees average, which to me still seems like we're fucked, but I'd rather not get too depressed right now.

Constance #389: Eric Williams pointed out that the British abolished slavery because the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain (fueled by capital produced by slavery in the West Indies) found West Indian slavery and other pre-industrial capitalist formations a drag on its profits.

The abolition of slavery in the West Indies was a result of an alliance between the emergent middle class and working class in Britain, given a significant fillip by slave revolts in the West Indies. It's no accident that Buxton's Abolition Act was passed after the Great Reform Act,and after the Christmas Rebellion of 1831-1832 in Jamaica.

Lee #447 - how expensive is stinking expensive? Here in the UK, ok its online, I can find this:
http://www.discountedheating.co.uk/shop/acatalog/Ariston_Eureka_Electric_Water_Heater_2kW_13_Litres.html
for £116, which isn't too bad, I'd be tempted to buy it myself.

I wonder if it would be worth giving money to people to improve their home enery efficiency and then they pay me back over the next few years?

Edgar #445 is correct - insulation comes ahead of double glazing. Insulation in walls and roof will make far more difference than going form 1 to 2 panes of glass. When you do get double glazing, make sure it has wooden or plastic frames, since metal ones conduct the heat nicely.

Car wise, my ford mondeo estate is one of the largest cars you can get in the UK, and does indeed have interior space as great as many suv type vehicles. And yet it has a top speed of 130mph and does around 45 miles to the imperial gallon.
The next step would be for me to get a job that I can commute to by walking/ public transport, and end up sharing a car or two with other people. I can see that happening quite soon if things get as bad as they might here in the UK. Sharing a car would help with depreciation and mean you don't have 1.5 tonnes of metal sitting about doing nothing most days.

Serge @432
Why does that make me only slightly less nervous than the idea of flying cars?

I don't know. Why does it?

Seriously, in the time span Charlie is talking about, we should have autonomous vehicles that are a lot safer than all too many drivers today. At very least, they can be relied on not to be engaged in a dick length contest, or to have had a skinful before setting out.

At last, I'll be able to afford a chauffeur.

J Homes.

My apartment is a mixture of stupid and efficient.

The insulation and windows are incredibly efficient. I don't need to turn on the (electric) heaters very often.

The water heater arrangement really bothers me. The tank is in a closet off of the balcony, while all of the taps, the shower, and the washing machine are within about 15' of each other. In the morning, I catch the "warming up" water in a garbage can and use it to flush the toilet. When I do a warm or hot wash, I do it right after the shower.

If I didn't have a dog, or she had a yard to run in, I'd bike or walk to work. A 7 mile round trip, but I'd do it.

The bike thing might work now, in the summer months at least. I'd have to arrange my schedule carefully, to be back in time for "walkies."

re 394: I don't know how much this figures in the thinking of Big Power but the history of big private infrastructure development is that they go broke before becoming viable. Or at least a lot of them go broke, and then the survivors pick up the pieces at deep discount. For a pretty recent example we have the Iridium system, which went belly-up but has since proven viable when bought at $25M (compared to $6B start-up cost) after the bankruptcy sale.

We can't move our computing away from mainframes! Think of the DANGERS! The COSTS!!!!!!

I'm getting this argument as our library starts to ponder a plan for discontinuing acquisitions of VHS tapes. Everyone's whining about the cost of replacing tapes with DVDs and what to do about items that don't have DVD editions

"But some materials are only available on VHS!" is the biggest argument against so far form faculty. Perhaps updating your curriculum to something made within the last 15 years would help.

It's as if this idea that VHS would be going away snuck up on them.

Stefan: I would LOVE to make the house more energy-efficient than it is. This year we've had to replace the HVAC (which did have a significant savings on our summer bills) and the windows (likewise.)

However, these things come with a significant cost, and though we did get fairly nice savings on the energy bill, it does not completely offset the cost of the improvements. To put it mildly, we're tapped out. So no new insulation for the attic (thirty years old and very tamped down) even though that would be another huge improvement; no replacement dishwasher, though that would save us a ton on our newly metered water bill*. No replacement for the light fixtures that need replacing or the sinks that do as well.

When you buy an expensive piece of equipment, you do so with the understanding that you need to make it last for as long as possible. A lot of businesses are in that situation— their equipment isn't at the level of the "beater" car, just at the level of the car that's a decade old. A Camry, perhaps. Maybe the mileage isn't what it used to be. Maybe you need to give it oil more often. But the brakes work and it's reliable, and you just don't have the money to replace it right now...

*The guy who told me they were installing a meter said, "Some people find their bill goes down." Ha. The only way my bill would go down would be if I were to let the lawn die off entirely (which would raise the A/C bills, FWIW), not do the dishes, AND never do the laundry.

I've also got to call them and have them explain the bill structure since there is no "Understanding Your Bill" on the website, and if I'm reading it correctly, they're charging me twice what the website says for the meter.

Via Ravelry: A SPINNER IS HER. Cat Bordhi does it again, this time making yarn with 4 rubber balls and 3 coffee mugs.

Fragano @ 446... And BB KinG?

Xopher @ 444... Another reminder that steampunk is fine for stories, but not as something to live in.

J Homes @ 451... How many stories did Ron Goulart write where a car goes crazy? Asimov did a few too. And Zelazny wrote "Auto Da Fe".

Serge @ #459, not to mention Stephen King's Christine.

Imagine if Herbie had had a nasty disposition.

Even Heinlein did a "cars go crazy" (or, rather, "stop crazy") story, in "Waldo". Lots more out there that are very obvious.

I just discovered a new form of self-reproducing code. The app I was testing threw an exception with an error message I'd never seen before. I entered it into the issue tracker, and when I pasted in the error message, the issue tracker crashed with the same message.

#401 Serge
a) SPLAT! 027 keypunch on your head
b) CHAD!

Kate Shaw, #423, and I realized late last night that I swapped the words. It should be more deer than food. They still have some predators -- I live in the middle of a small city and we had wolves come down the branch behind us and kill everything. But it's true that deer will stay in environments that their predators can't.

Charlie Stross, #429, Google already has a self-driving car. I saw it on the news. They're still putting a person behind the wheel at this point, but they've never had to use them.

Let me see if I can clarify my thoughts on this somewhat, without completely exploding things. Apologies; I know this is somewhat disconnected.

I've zero problem with social security, as an institution. Single-handedly responsible for preventing a lot of elder poverty, and that's wonderful. I'm not arguing to get rid of it, at all.

But it looks a lot like the politicians used "raising your social security taxes" to fund other things. Which means that money is spent, on things that have already been used up. Which means it falls to my generation to pay -- at the same rates you are -- either for your benefits, or for those services consumed at that prior time. At the same time, we are being told to prepare to have our benefits reduced, but probably not until the cuts are absolutely unavoidable, by which point they will have to be draconian to catch up.

I'm aware of the argument that Social Security is stable, but I see no protection against further raids, so that doesn't seem like something I can rely on.

Maybe it looks different in other places. California's budget "dialogue" is ... beyond weird, and I'm sure that influences how I see things.

But I do think we all have an equal obligation to each other, to make sure that if cuts have to be made, they don't just hurt one segment of the population. That they don't benefit one generation, while another generation, paying the same taxes in the same amounts, gets stuck with minimal services, because the money's already spent and has to be caught up. I do not perceive that adequate care or consideration is being taken in that regard. I am really afraid that this is the path that California is on. It worries me that Congress is on this path too.

I'm extremely glad that there are people willing to fight that sort of thing.

465
The claim is that they put IOUs into the pot - but since Social Security taxes are put into special treasury bonds, they really can't do that, if I understand it correctly.

What I see are people who think that SS is not really run by the government (because 'government can't do anything right' in their way of thinking), or it really can't be working as well as it appears to be. (I think there's also a certain amount of racism involved: these are, a lot of them, people who don't believe non-white-males should have jobs that pay more than minimum wage.)

Well, any bond constitutes an IOU, a promise to pay. If SS funds had purchased equities, such as stocks, I wouldn't have felt very secure.

But in terms of functional relationships, payroll taxes go into one place, and SS checks are paid out of one place. A trust fund, or lockbox, or what have you, is a convenient fiction.

And that's basically what money itself is -- it has value only because we believe it has value.

Serge @459 et al,

Oh, I'm not claiming that autonomous vehicles will be perfect, or immune from the occasional nasty failure. Just no worse than, and quite likely better than, the present crop of nuts behind the wheel.

Real life failures of meat-platform driving software, resulting in catastrophe, are even more common than science fiction stories of autonomous cars Going Wrong.

And if you want to cite Zelazny, make it "Devil Car" rather than "Auto Da Fe". "Auto Da Fe" is about vehicles that were intended to be dangerous, as if you cited the real-life bullring as an argument against oxcarts.

J Homes

Sure, but those IOUs have to be paid by someone -- in this case, by someone in the future, who isn't benefitting from what those funds went to purchase. That's pretty harsh on the people who end up paying the IOUs.

It's not the lack of security that gets to me. I've done enough future saving and planning, I shouldn't need it, barring something really unforseen. But the dialogue that seems to run "I don't owe you anything, but you have to pay for the debts I've been running up for years, and I expect you to do without until they're paid up" ... that subtext really bothers me. And it is sounding really loud, all throughout California's politics.

Linkmeister #460: not to mention Stephen King's Christine. Imagine if Herbie had had a nasty disposition.

Imagine crossover fan fiction of a Herbie/Christine/KITT love triangle. I do not think it would end well....

I keep wanting to say, "Hyperlocal news: area electron shifts between orbitals. 'He seemed like such a nice lepton,' says neighbor."

Maybe somebody already made that joke.

Anyhow. My news is that I seem to have raised a big pile of money for text adventure development, in the past three days. Sufficient for to let me quit my job at the end of the year, to be a starving game developer full-time. And this means that I'll have quite a while before I start starving.

Details, very early game demo, and (if you are inclined to support crazed life-changing decisions) a contribution/pre-order page is at http://eblong.com/kick .

Earl @ #470, add a cross-species subplot by introducing Airwolf to the other three.

Fragano at # 446, Serge at #457:

Don't forget Count Basie.

Earl Cooley III: Imagine crossover fan fiction of a Herbie/Christine/KITT love triangle. I do not think it would end well....

Neil Gaiman's comments comes to mind: "(although I still find the idea of Good Omens slash fiction fairly mindboggling) (er, and Knight Rider slash fiction. I think that Knight Rider slash fiction is pretty weird, to be honest)." And the followup: "(I wasn't making up the Knight Rider thing either: I remember a table selling printed fanzine slash fiction, before there was ever a world wide web, with several volumes of "Now impale yourself upon my throbbing gearshift" stories which I thumbed through with delighted and horrified amusement. But then, I was never a David Hasselhof fan.)"

Well, I was initially a little hesitant about kicking in $25 to get a CD that is going to clutter up the place like all my other CDs. Especially since people with iPhones will be able to get it for only $5; while I don't have an iPhone nor plan to get one.

Then I asked myself, "Self, have you gotten $25 worth of entertainment from playing Zarf's games?" And myself shot back a "Fuck yes!" (And I, like Beowulf Shaeffer, am not the sort of person who often uses profanity for emphasis.) So I went for it.

Linkmeister #472: Earl @ #470, add a cross-species subplot by introducing Airwolf to the other three.

After Herbie, Christine and KITT amicably resolved their differences, nature took its course and chapters two through seven are slash fiction. Airwolf, jealous at being left out of the party, makes a compromising video of the other three with terahertz surveillance equipment (which sees through walls), narrates the video with snarky comments, and posts it to YouTube.

Sandy B @441:

I think you underestimate the psychological reasons people by SUVs, particularly in cities.

Station wagons sit lower. SUV's are bigger, more visible, with a more commanding presence. And as someone who comes back to the SF Bay Area every few years, I've been watching the subtle arms race on the roads that makes that visibility desirable. Everyone's driving faster, closer together, in among all the trucks, on roads that feel dangerous because they're so bumpy.

A high driving position gives a feeling of control in a situation that pushes all of the driver's "this is unsafe!" buttons. SUVs may not actually be safer, but they feel it.

(At home in the Netherlands we drive† a Hyundai Matiz*, which is small enough to put in your handbag if parking is scarce. I'd never drive that in the Bay Area.)

-----
† An average of three trips a week: two to climbing, one to the grocery store. All else is bike and bus.
* Unfortunately, we won't be able to drive it for many more years. Not only is it falling prey to more, and more expensive, mechanical difficulties, but we're about two eldest-kid growth spurts from the back seat being uncomfortably small.

J Homes @ 468... I stand corrected, regarding Zelazny's auto tales. Still, should a car designed to be like a bull escape into the wild - unless its name is Ferdinand, of course...

That being said, yes, robocars wouldn't be worse than many humans. Still, I'd rather not go around in something with an O/S designed by Bill Gates. Also, what if all the street sensors went on the blink because of the grid having failed while I'm on a highway surrounded by other robocars also going at 75mph...

My Mother the Car would be safer, being spiritually motivated, but she'd drive me (literally) crazy. (You've never met my mom.)

'As You Know' Bob @ 473... And the Court's spiritual counselor would be Thelonius Monk?

Earl Cooley III @ 470... fan fiction of a Herbie/Christine/KITT love triangle

CrashFic?

Paula Lieberman @ 463...

Ow! Ow! Stop! And here are my paper tapes too!

Off topic (and off road?)... HERE is a photo (taken by their mom) of my two oldest nephews with two MythBusters. Woot!