For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college—when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers had broken down, and unless she could borrow another, she would fail her midterm project. There was no one she dared ask, except Dan.
This put Dan in a dilemma. He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. ...
From the one work of SF by Richard Stallman that I'm personally aware of, The Right to Read.
Nick@86:
Thanks for the correction. Though I guess the mistake is trapped in amber at this point...
I got curious, so I managed to google up last-few-years circulation figures for the "big three" here, and for a bunch of literary reviews here.
Some data points, in very round numbers:
- Analog: 27,000
- Asimov's: 18,000
- F&SF: 17,000
- Paris Review: 20,000
- Zoetrope: "15-20,000"
- American Poetry Review: 17,000
- Granta: "50-80,000". (Other sources for Granta in particular are universally toward the low end of this range, but still...)
You can easily draw distinctions between the literary reviews and the "big three". But not from sizing the audience.
(BTW, if anyone's curious about the age of the audiences, Charles Brown's talking about that over here...)
Well, a lot of what went wrong during the Awful Oughts was failure to exercise regulatory authority that did exist. The most famous case is the SEC totally blowing it on Bernie Madoff, but there are other examples. (Taibbi's "Big Takeover" article, for instance, describes how the Office of Thrift Supervision totally blew it on AIG-FP. It also says that it would be better for the SEC to have been regulating them instead, but... remember Madoff.)
That said, where new regulations are needed, we could probably do worse than simply restoring the ones that were removed over the past fifteen years or so, under heavy lobbying from Wall Street. Yves's Naked Capitalism today points to an FT article describing one egregious instance: the repeal, in 2000, of laws forbidding traders from buying (in effect) insurance against default on securities they don't actually own --- originally passed after cascading failures in that sort of trading led to the Panic of 1907.
Eloise --- Amazon does try hard to collect information about their customers, but most major merchants do that these days (including brick-and-mortar stores, even small ones --- particularly including at lest three of the locally owned bookshops I regularly patronize, though that typically comes in the form of "loyalty reward" programs from which you can opt out). And at least Amazon uses it to benefit customers at least some of the time ("people who liked ... also liked ..." is what it says it is).
In terms of threats to privacy, I'd tend to rank them behind, say, Google --- which, between its advertising operations and tracking use of its services, collects a truly awesome amount of information on just about anyone who doesn't take specific technical measures to opt out (not accepting their cookies, for starters).
What ticks me off about Amazon in particular is that !$#!@#%!@ one-click shopping patent. But that, I think, is a somewhat more unusual concern...
Johnson and his coauthor James Kwak also have a blog, which is dry and technical at points, but still an interesting read.
(Also worthy of note, Yves Smith's running commentary of the follies of the day at Naked Capitalism, e.g., her dissection of Alan Greenspan's latest attempt to gather up the tattered shreds of his own reputation. Best combination of snark and dead-on technical analysis that I've seen since the late and terribly lamented Tanta stopped blogging at Calculated Risk...)
FWIW, the CIA has a checkered history that precedes the Bush years, particularly as regards its "cowboy mentality" --- viz., for instance, its long and bloody involvement in South America. So, just cleaning up the messes made by Dubya's crew would leave a somewhat messed-up place. So a serious cleanup effort would have to deal with changing a lot more than eight years' worth of history.
As to why the capitol was put in a swamp: the site was chosen by George Washington personally. One rationale, I believe, was that the swamp happened to be at the mouth of the Potomac, which was thought to be good for commerce and industry (particularly in an age when bulk cargo shipment over land was prohibitively expensive). However, it escaped no one's attention that it was also near some of Washington's personal land holdings...
It's working for me, too --- in a browser profile with all Google cookies blocked, a groups search for "nielsen hayden" gets me lots of results; the one that winds up on top of the heap happens to be from 1999. So, from where I sit, no systematic walling off of the archives is obvious.
On the other hand, one of Google's known (and arguably bad) habits is testing out new, and quite possibly buggy, versions of their stuff on a small, randomly selected portion of their normal userbase. So, it's at least possible that Teresa was seeing a new version of Groups query processing which, for whatever reason, doesn't deal well at all with diabetic browsers rejecting their cookies.
For the curious, here's a link to the official web site of the Boston Tea Party, with links to their (extremely brief) platform, (slightly longer) program for government over the next few years, and a campaign ad on the front page, a few blog posts down...
On the "Onion outdone" particle... Yves Klein may have outdone the Onion, but I believe Sherrie Levine has outdone Klein. She's a New York-based "conceptual artist" who made her first big splash with an gallery show which consisted entirely of famous Walker Evans photographs (the illustrations from "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men") re-photographed from an exhibition catalog, framed (without any cropping, retouching, or any other alteration at all), and re-attributed to Levine.
I remember reading a write-up on Levine's, well, work in the New Yorker, and taking it for an unusally dry, but very funny satire --- until I started seeing "her" work, attributed as such and exactly as described, in shows at top-shelf museums...
On the subject of folks gone 'round the bend, there were already drugged-out drifters plotting assassination at the Democratic convention.
On "States' Rights" as a rationale for the Civil War: if you're talking to anyone who might be swayed by rational evidence, that's easy to counter. All you have to do is look at what Southern politicians themselves said about the matter --- not after the war, when they were making excuses, but before, when they were trying to justify it themselves.
The "States' Rights" excuse was cooked up by former Confederate veep Alexander Stephens after the war. But the same guy gave a famous speech before the war --- the "cornerstone speech" --- in which he said that the Confederacy's "cornerstone rests" on the principle of racial inequality, drawing that as the principal contrast with the North, while barely mentioning States' rights at all.
If that's not enough, there are several speeches extant, including Jefferson Davis's farewell address to the U.S. Senate, in which the secessionists decry attempts by Northern states to repudiate the Fugitive Slave Act.
I've got an old blog entry here with pointers and quotes...
As long as we're on the subject of Palin and her associates --- a couple of interesting Google searches: palin dominionist and mccain imprecatory prayer.
To summarize: the far-right Christianist wingnuts are at least acting as if Palin is one of their own, and the wackiest of the wackos are openly praying for McCain to get elected and die, so she can take over.
They call themselves Christians, but (as I've said before) they seem to act more like devotees of The Other Guy...
Mark@75 --- does your friend have any references on visa requirements?
Best wishes, take your time, and don't rush.
(And if excitement is counter-indicated, avoid the news.)
Good luck, and hope you recover soon...
Biden's talking about issues. However, the Republicans' avowed strategy is to avoid issues, and focus on character --- the intent being to put voters in a mental bubble where issue-talk just doesn't penetrate. (See, e.g., Krugman's column today, or the oft-reported remark from McCain's campaign manager that the election is "not about issues" --- meaning that if they want to win, it better not be.) And issue-talk itself, no matter how loud and proud, won't prick that bubble once it's in place.
So I'd trade just about all of this for one quick, cutting sound bite about Cindy McCain's earrings being worth more than the median American house...
John@322: And yet no James Bond villain ever gets any credit for their affection for their cats...
The "http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite" mirror of Making Light is still stuck at March 1st, which is potentially confusing to people who still have it in their bookmarks. (If the intent is to getmethese peculiar folks to update their bookmarks, replacing it with static HTML saying "update your bookmarks" would probably work better than the status quo.)
Blogs are free. Only worthless books are.
Hmmm... are you aware that you're calling Charlie's Hugo-nominated Accelerando worthless?
Well, as an existence proof, I don't think anyone broke the bank
promoting Peter Watts's Blindsight, but it did have a net-based video
promo scientific lecture on vampires
which held my attention well enough. (Witness also the no-budget
political videos that are now crowding YouTube, or the promo
screencasts that are increasingly common for, e.g., MIT-licensed
freebie Rails plugins... but I digress.)
More generally, a lot of what you're paying for with professional
video production is knowledge of the tools, which don't have to be all
that expensive by themselves (viz. the credits list
for Final Cut Pro, including Cold Mountain, which was an Oscar nominee
for edting). But the cheap stuff isn't necessarily what expensive pros
know how to use, and that can result in, well... incongruities. My
favorite concerns The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a full-length fan
tribute to '50s skiffy B-movies which was shot in video on the cheap,
and then bleached to black and white. This involved set construction
and location work, and still came in under $50,000. When the film got a
studio distribution deal, the first thing the studio did was produce a
quickie professional trailer --- for which they paid, as I recall,
something like double the cost of the movie itself.
So, while video is a field in which the unwary can blow huge amounts
of money very quickly, it seems to be possible these days to do
interesting stuff on the cheap...
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 7 |
| 2008 | 24 |
| 2007 | 68 |
| 2006 | 60 |
| 2005 | 26 |
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