Chris Lawson @ 56:
And I only read histories of Etruscans written by Etruscans.
Zombie Etruscan writers, I presume?
abi @ 341:
This page might be helpful.
(I just tested it out on my system -- iTunes 9 on a Mac -- and it seems to work just fine, although since I don't have an iPhone [yet...] I can't personally verify that it works. But iTunes did in fact import the trimmed music clip into its Ringtones section.)
Erik Nelson @ 216:
Saturn picture crashes my browser.
Probably because it's about 7200 x 3800 pixels in size!
You can try this link instead, which starts off with a smaller version of the same image.
Russ @ 164:
As a penance for insufficient rigour before asking the question, I have resolved to buy one of the style guides suggested. Of course, now I have to weigh the virtues of Fowler (original), Fowler (modern), or Merriam-Websters, each of which sound like excellent recommendations.
The relevant dialect is British English - would anyone else who has one or more of these like to chime in with an endorsement?
My impression is that you should certainly avoid the original (1926) Fowler's, except possible for entertainment value (I have never read it, but some claim that it has an idiosyncratic charm). Advice based on late 19th Century English (Fowler was born in 1858!) is not what you really want.
There's a standard "third edition" of Fowler's (edited by Robert Burchfield in 1996) which is less dogmatic and probably more useful than the 1926 original. (I don't know anything about the second book you link to; it gives the impression of being yet another modern variation on the 1926 original.)
The various Fowler's books are written from a British perspective, although the Burchfield edition -- which I actually have, but rarely look at -- includes at least some remarks on American usage. (Though a quick check on "orient/orientate" shows that it fails to tell you that "orientate" is primarily a British usage, and very rare in the US.)
As for Merriam-Webster, it's an American book (which means that, yes, you'll have things like "center" instead of "centre"), but certainly has comparative notes for American vs British usage. You can look at a scanned-in version of the 1994 edition via Google Books here. (It correctly notes the US/British split over "orient/orientate", which I think is a good sign.)
And, if it helps at all, this Language Log post has entertainingly caustic comments by Geoff Pullum on both the 1926 and Burchfield versions of Fowler's:
I'm also seeing commenters say that the book you should really have is Henry Fowler's Modern English Usage! What the hell is going on here? Fowler's book dates from 1926. It's a third of a century older than Elements; and Fowler was a marked eccentric even then. Some of his articles are very scholarly (he was a man who really did know grammatical analysis), but some are completely quixotic. Others are pages and pages of weird raving about things he just happened to have bees in his bonnet about (he prattles on for a page about "Irrelevant allusion", for example). Some of it is very interesting for a serious English language scholar. But as a guide for writers in the 21st century? A book that was clearly in preparation more than a hundred years ago, by a man born in 1858? When Harper's and American Heritage and Merriam-Webster all have much better books out? What is this epidemic of nostalgia?
and as a reply to the first comment:
I hardly know how to break it to you that I don't have a high opinion of Burchfield's work. You'll think I'm some sort of universally negative curmudgeonly usage book smiter. But here is a nice exercise. In Burchfield's rewritten entry "Preposition at end" there are two examples cited where the preposition is not stranded — which would mean it is not a preposition at all under the traditional (and wrong) analysis, but rather an adverb. Can you find those two examples?
Practically speaking, I'd guess you probably can't go too wrong with "modern" versions of Fowler (e.g., Burchfield, or the maybe the one you linked to), though the Merriam-Webster book is probably a bit better overall.
... its very first uses in English, in the 1970s, were almost all satirical; it was deployed by left-wingers and feminists to mock other people of the Left who were trying too hard to be ideologically pure in all things.
Indeed -- my first exposure to it (in the mid-1980s, shortly before it started showing up in wider culture) was at Wesleyan University, where it was used in just that sense. (There's a movie from the early 90s called PCU -- nominally the initials of the fictional "Port Chester University" but obviously intended to mean "Politically Correct University" -- which was written by two guys who went to Wesleyan around the same time I did.)
John Stanning @ 147:
Why not Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage? It gets a shout-out from no less an authority than Geoff Pullum. And if the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language[*] -- and notorious loather of Strunk & White -- likes it, that's a pretty good recommendation:
MWCDEU explains what actually occurs, shows you some of the evidence, tells you what some other usage books say, and then leaves you to make your own reasoned decision. It won't tell you either that you should split infinitives, or that you shouldn't. But it will give you a number of examples of writers who do, and point out that the construction has always occurred in English literature over the last six or seven centuries, and that nearly all careful usage books today agree it is entirely grammatical, and it will then leave you to decide.
In other words it treats you like a grown-up. Strunk and White treat you like the abused 9-year-old daughter of a pair of grumpy dads ("Omit needless words, damn you! And fetch my slippers. And bring his slippers too. Now fix our supper. And don't let us hear you beginning any sentences with however"). Don't put up with the abuse.
[*] Not what you want, since it's a thousand-page compendium of modern linguistic research on the grammatical structure of English.
Terry Karney @ 60:
This is somewhat different to Sean Connery's Russian in "The Hunt for Red October" which seemed clean enough (grammatically; unlike Oldman in "Air Force One"), but the Scots burr on top of it was... charming, and distracting.
Ah, but his character was actually (part?) Lithuanian, so we might expect him to speak Russian with a funny accent...
Charlie @18:
When I saw Trainspotting in Wisconsin, it was not subtitled, and I don't think it was elsewhere.
You may be thinking of Ken Loach's film Riff Raff, which I think was released with subtitles in the US.
Bruce Cohen @ 88:
Thanks for the recommendation! (I was not very impressed by Darwin's Radio, and the fact that Bear had mainly seemed to be writing one or another kind of contemporary technothriller from then on made me lose interest in him for a while.)
Re "metaphysical fiction" -- yes, that's an interesting category. I had a rather similar reaction when I first started reading Borges -- that it was something akin to science fiction, but using philosophy rather than science as the speculative starting point.
I might add some of Greg Egan's stuff to your list, particularly Permutation City. And John M. Ford's brilliant novella "Fugue State" comes to mind as well.
Would Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series (particularly The Urth of the New Sun) qualify?
Martin Schafer @ 49:
If you want to keep consistency with the apparent age of the site, then you need to have Byzantines, who by the 8th Century I imagine had long abandoned the classical legion camp styles.
There's apparently some evidence for a Roman envoy, sent by either Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius, making it all the way to Han Chinese territory in what's now central Vietnam around 166 AD, though some argue that these were Roman merchants claiming to be envoys. This expedition probably traveled by sea, though; overland travel would have been difficult due to the Parthian Empire[*].
[*] In the sense that the Parthians were often enemies of Rome, and wouldn't have wanted to give up their control of trade coming along the Silk Road. There are Chinese records which explicitly state that the Parthians tried to prevent direct contact between Rome and China.
ajay @ 71:
With the exception of Vinge (whose last far-future novel was in 1999) and maybe Bujold (last SF novel in 2002, I think), that looks like a reasonable list. I would have discounted Greg Bear on the basis that he's mostly been writing near-future/thriller books recently, but then I noticed I'd missed seeing City at the End of Time, which must now go on my list of Things to Buy Sometime Soon...
(I would maybe add C.J. Cherryh, Wil McCarthy, and Tobias Buckell...)
The web site pointed out by Brooks Moses (@8) and TomB (@10) notes that Por Baijin is currently the focus of a fairly major archaeological survey, partly because they're afraid it may get submerged within the next five years(!).
It also appears that the military architecture was Chinese:
As early as the first stage the academics came to the conclusion that Por-Bajin was built under the strong influence of traditional Chinese architecture. Technologies widely in use during the time of the Tan [sic] dynasty were employed in the construction of the fortress.
Images of large-eared Chinese dragons, which protected Por-Bajin from evil spirits, were found during the excavations. One more interesting find: not far from the fortress a rock quarry was discovered.
(I'm guessing "Tan dynasty" is "Tang dynasty", which is the right time frame.)
I'll confess that I do like the idea of a lost Roman unit -- perhaps the survivors of one of the various Persian-Roman battles in Mesopotamia -- somehow making its way east, like the Czech "legion" that ended up in Vladivostok in the aftermath of the First World War.
Leaving aside the "hard sf/soft sf vs near-future/space opera" confusion -- I'd argue that they are largely orthogonal issues -- Jeffries' preface seems like a confused reference to some arguments that were floating around a few years back, to the effect that British SF writers were now optimistic and willing to write about the future (near or far), but American writers had become pessimistic and were avoiding it (e.g., writing fantasy or alternate history instead).
This blog post by Charlie Stross (or this one a year later) is an example -- although he was in fact suggesting that American SF writers were avoiding the future in general, including near-future SF!
The curious thing about John Scalzi's reply is that, as far as I can tell, all of the writers he cites really are predominantly military SF writers, while none of the writers that Jeffries mentions seem to be. Now, I can certainly see "military SF" as being a kind of subset of space opera, but the question would then be: are there many prominent/successful American SF writers who are currently writing non-military far-future SF?
Re restaurants in Madison:
The two Himalayan restaurants on State St. that others have mentioned are:
Himal Chuli -- traditional Nepali and Tibetan food
Chautara -- experimental variations on Nepali and Indian food, run by the son of the couple who run Himal Chuli. Hands down my favorite restaurant in Madison at the time I left (2000), and it seemed to be just as good when I visited four weeks ago...
Also on State Street:
Buraka -- mentioned by Kayjayoh @ 377; it's actually an East African restaurant (primarily Ethiopian and Somali cuisine; the owner is Ethiopian, I think). The actual restaurant is downstairs, below street level, but I think they have tables outside on the sidewalk as well.
Kabul -- the Afghan restaurant (almost?) next door to Buraka.
Sunprint -- down at the University end of the street (State St. runs between the University campus and Capitol Square); good for breakfast/brunch.
I have good memories of El Dorado (not on State St.), as well.
Oops -- hit "post" before I was quite finished. So the last paragraph of my previous post ought to be:
Now, I think there probably are some examples of more-or-less classical terrorist groups actually succeeding in their aims -- the birth of Israel is one, and so is the suppression of black voting in the post-Civil-War American South by the KKK and similar groups [*]. But the overall success rate of terrorist groups is quite low.
[*] The earliest use of the term "terrorism" that I've come across is a report by General Phil Sheridan condemning such actions in the late 1860s.
heresiarch @ 52:
The trouble with your definition ("use of violence by a radical minority to achieve political ends") is that it's different from -- to begin with, substantially broader than -- what Micah was originally talking about, which was (nonstate) terrorism.
Micah's argument, as I understood it, was that the use of "violent protest" by groups not part of the power structure was not as effective as nonviolent protest movements.
The triumph of the Chinese communists in 1949 and the Viet Minh in 1954 (or, to pick an example from the last 50 years, the Sandinistas in 1979) were the result of sustained guerilla warfare, not terrorism. In the case of China and Vietnam, final triumph came from full-scale conventional military warfare.
Military coups are the results of groups who already have military power -- frequently, those in direct charge of the military itself. Again, it's not the same thing as terrorism.
Your definition would apply equally well to the conquests of Genghis Khan, or the First Crusade, or the Arab conquests of the 7th Century.
Now, I think there probably are some examples of more-or-less classical terrorist groups actually succeeding in their aims -- the birth of Israel is one, and so is the suppression of black voting in the post-Civil-War American South by the KKK and other groups [*]
[*] The earliest use of the term "terrorism" that I've come across is a report by General Phil Sheridan condemning such actions in the late 1860s.
heresiarch @ 32:
Off the top of my head: Iran, China, Vietnam, Indonesia until 1999, and Russia. These are all countries where within the past fifty years the leadership was determined by violence. Violence is actually quite an effective way of capturing political power--you just don't end up with a particularly stable country, or with clean hands.
Which of those countries are cases where the leadership was determined from below by violence, in the last fifty years? (The only one that I can see which might qualify is Iran; the rest are all outside that window.) That's what I think Micah was getting at with the idea of "violent protest."
More generally: Full-scale popular uprising/insurrection/civil war can sometimes succeed, especially if there is outside support. But terrorism by itself has a very poor record of success, if by "success" we mean "achieving most or all of a group's goals." Most terrorist groups end up disbanding, being suppressed/eliminated by the police, or giving up violence and joining the political process.
Erik Nelson @ 886:
This post has some pictures of a double-crested cormorant seen in Auburn Lake (Mt. Auburn Cemetery, which I'm guessing is sort of near the Charles River[?]). The author also mentions that she sees "lots of them" in the Charles River.
David Harmon @ 157:
It's also worth noting that the phrase's meaning has recently bifurcated. The newer meaning applies specifically to scientific reasoning, and works as follows: ...
Do you have any references showing this particular usage in a scientific context? It strikes me as extremely odd and unlikely; I've never heard it used that way in any scientific situation or writing I've come across.
(And I'm afraid your explanation doesn't make much sense: what's the "rule" and what's the "exception" in such cases?)
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