Huh, really? I'm too lazy to search right now, but when Marcus was lying to his parents about what happened after the bombing, I thought he said something about having to take some sort of ferry home. I also thought there was something about not being able to get into the city by BART because the tunnel was bombed.
Regarding the question of whether Marcus is a plausible teenager: when I was 16 (I am now 27), I shared his interest in learning about technology and how to circumvent restrictions, but I had much more respect for existing authorities and was much more cautious. I had friends at my (very snooty) high school who did act like Marcus and, while I was eager to learn technical skills from them, I thought they were being somewhat immature and silly. There is probably some wish fulfillment in reading a character who shares my interests but not my restraint; I might not have liked it as much if I were still Marcus' age and hanging out with people like him.
This morning I was thinking about the racial and class politics of Little Brother. It seems to me that the most rebellious kids are from white upper middle class liberal families. (If I recall correctly, Marcus' mom is an ACLU member of unspecified profession and his Dad is a professor/consultant; Marcus lives in the East Bay but goes to school in SF, which I assume means he is at some sort of magnet school; and both his and Ange's parents permit their children to explore the city and date freely and, in his case, hang out at cons.) His non-white friends are much more aware of the risks they are taking, and object to his pranksterism. The only working class person we see in a resistance role, the Turkish coffeeman, resists in a nearly invisible manner and is reluctant to explain his actions to others. On the other hand, when we see the prisoners freed at the end of the novel, they are almost all minorities.
I think that is basically accurate. Our society codes white kids breaking rules as mischief and, while we monitor and restrict them, we almost never treat them as actual criminals. For this reason, white kids (including my younger self) get a lot more upset at the restrictions placed on us and feel a lot freer to try to circumvent them.
Just finished reading the electronic, creative commons, version of Little Brother. When I started reading it, I figured I would by a copy later in order to repay Cory (and his editor, of course!). Now I want to buy a dozen copies, to leave wherever impressionable high schoolers may be found.
Things that struck me: I have rarely had the experience of enjoying a novel and recognizing it as propaganda at the same time. I'm curious whether this novel could be enjoyed by someone with more authoritarian politics. (It might be possible. For an example in the reverse direction, there's a scene in Xenocide where Valentine is trying to convince the mayor to impose curfews and martial law in order to prevent a riot, and I sympathized with her viewpoint completely.)
Little Brother does a really good job explaining why people who have "nothing" to hide still value their privacy. It also did a nice job showing the kind of mindset that is necessary to protect one's privacy.
The conventions of the children's book allow the author to directly give advice to the reader; I remember C.S. Lewis instructing me on how to clean a sword and whisper effectively. It is neat seeing this sort of interaction being used to give directions on hacking and activism. I think of the voice of this novel as the "corrupting older cousin".
For those who missed the word, Patrick and Teresa are posting updates on the situation at
http://www.sunpig.com/abi/
DavidS
And, oddly, the site seems to have been reset back to March 1, not April 1, which would suggest that TWO months have disappeared.
Malthus 208: "Everyone who creates an account gets 100 points, which they can use to place bounties on new articles, edits, etc.
Once someone writes an article/does an edit with a bounty on it,
everyone who contributed to the bounty gets a msg asking them to vote
on awarding this person the points (except for the editor himself). If,
say, 75% of the pple agree (counting by points), he gets the bounty.
What do people think? Please shoot holes in this idea, add things you think could be accomplished by this mechanism, etc."
One flaw I see is that it is easy for someone to create several
accounts and use them to pay each other bounties. Because each new
account starts with free points, there is an incentive to create
multiple identities.
A technological fix would be to start newcomers at zero, with the initial bounties distributed by the Wikipedia foundation.
Possibly a better fix would for each of us to resolve that, next
time we read a particularly well written Wikipedia article, especially
if it is on an obscure subject, we will write a blog post commending
the editors of that article. Once we establish reputations for doing
this, we can start making requests for new articles.
#19 and #21: Thanks! Those answers make sense to me.
#7 Terry: On a plane, I look to the closest exit, and then I plan on "swimning: over the seats between me and it.
Terry, I've heard people say this and I've always worried about it. It seems to me that, while this might be the fastest route to the exit for me, I'd probably knock down and block a lot of people who were taking the more standard "walk/crawl to the aisle, along the aisle, and out to the exit" route. I don't want to get out fastest if I trap other people as a result. Do you know if there is any sort of expert opinion on the matter?
Answering without having looked at the other posts:
Fellowship: The members of the fellowship walking in a ring
Towers: Maybe the eye? Or an aerial view of Isengard, with a stone wall forming a ring around the boundary and a small horned tower at the center?
Return: A crown
Towers is the hard one because the dominant images are the towers, Gollum and Mordor, none of which are ring shaped. I like the idea of having three images which call to mind the ring, with none of them being the ring itself.
I'm a terrible proofreader because I always subconsciously correct what I see to what would make sense. Case in point: when I saw the news stories about Bush's plan, I thought he was opening up the military airfields, for extra landing strips. I thought "Wow, that creates some security issues. And do they have the baggage handling capacity?" Than I realized what the story actually said.
My favorite WWN story was a headline which was probably perfectly true, yet relied on a completely different view of reality:
"Study finds, 60% of shamans not actual witch doctors!"
What I loved about the WWN was that, while other tabloids announced news that would be surprising if true, the WWN assumed that the world of the tabloids was true and then asked what news would still be surprising to inhabitants of that world. Thus "Elvis dead!" and "Hillary found in bed with alien!"
In the Latin translations of Harry Potter, are the spells in English?
A few people above have complained about the middle section, where HH&R basically troop around England for a number of months hoping to stumble on a horcrux. I actually liked this part. The mission of finding the horcruxes always struck me as nearly impossible because there just isn't enough data to start the search with. If our heroes are not going to rely on luck or outside help, the only thing they have available is a brute force search of all of the known locations Voldemort has visited. This would be a pretty boring and frustrating project, and I thought that JKR did a good job of depicting this without making me feel bored and frustrated as well. I think any plot where they got the relevant information right away would strike me as too contrived.
Now, a question. When and why did Draco become master of the wand? Is there some scene in Book 6 that I've forgotten where he picks up Dumbledore's wand? Thanks!
Hey, I'm posting in order to decompress.
About an hour ago, my wife Lark and I were driving home when we passed a man leaning up against a telephone pole and just looking -- wrong somehow. By time I'd processed what I'd seen, I was already a block from home so Lark and I decided to park at home and walk back the few blocks to see if something was wrong. When we got there we found a man in his mid seventies with short cut hair, dressed in a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants and carrying a plastic bag with the emblem of the local hospital, about 1/2 a mile away. He was leaning against the pole and breathing a bit heavily.
"Are you alright sir?"
"No."
"Can we do anything for you?"
"I'm going to XXXX YYYYY street."
"This is YYYYY street sir, you're about two blocks away from XXXX. Can you walk two blocks, sir?"
"No, I can't."
We offered the man a ride, which he accepted, and walked back to get the car. As he tried to get into the car, the man stumbled, falling like a rigid tree against the side of the car. Once we helped him up though, he was able to stand and get into the car seat OK. He spoke perfectly coherently, if slowly, saying he had just gotten out of the hospital and repeatedly telling us we were really nice people.
It took some driving around looking for street addresses in the dark, but we finally found XXXX. Our passenger spotted it before we were able to make the number out, and it indeed was XXXX. He stumbled again as we got him out of the car, but then walked to the back door under his own power. He seemed at home around the house, relaxing in a way that suggested this was his space.
The gentleman had told us that there would be people waiting for him, but in fact the house was dark and silent, with no cars in the driveway. We pounded on the door, and nobody answered. The man leaned up against a wall of the back porch and looked to be near falling asleep. We asked if there was anyone we could call for him, or if we should bring him back to the hospital, or do anything else, but he told us that he was as well as he could be. He said he was very grateful to us and would be fine; he'd just wait where he was. We were very uncomfortable with this; I wondered whether he was secretly hoping to die on these people's porch and be found in the morning. On the other hand, we had neither the power nor the right to force him to come with us. The temperature was in the eighties and the night was calm, so I thought it was unlikely something would go wrong immediately. We helped the gentleman into a lawn chair and drove off.
We discussed options with each other in the car and decided to call the 911 operator and ask his advice. The operator said he would send a police car by to see if they could offer any better help.
That was the point when I started writing this post, and I was on tenterhooks hoping that the man's condition hadn't worsened while we left him. In the time that it has taken me to type all of this out, we got a call back from the police. The fellow accepted an offer of a ride to a local hotel with which they have an arrangement, and he doesn't seem in any urgent medical danger.
My apologies for the length of this message. Before we got the call back, I needed someplace to dump all this stress and, afterwards, it seemed that I might as well post it
fidelio @85: James Beard has a wonderful poached salmon recipe in one of his books. I'm not at home to check which one it is right now, but Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" turned up what looks like a very similar recipe on pages 135 and 136 of "James Beard's American Cookery". See the recipes "A Simple Court Bouillon" and "Cold Poached Salmon Steaks". You can do a whole side of salmon instead of the steaks, see the information earlier in the book for adjusting the cooking time.
The good thing about this recipe is that is just as good cold, so you don't have to eat it in one sitting.
From the Harvard Crimson, a few years ago:
HARVARD SCIENTISTS DISCOVER SOLAR SYSTEM
Only a few centuries behind Copernicus...
Hmmm, I was also unaware of Dorothy's first rot-13'd item, and ate some just yesterday (with no effects that I can notice). This seems like the sort of thing that people would be glad to be spoiled about, so here it is in plain text.
WARNING -- POST CONTAINS A SPOILER FOR YOUR NEXT SNACK: raw rhubarb is poisonous
My other discovery of yesterday -- chop two stalks of rhubarb finely and cook on low heat with a spoonful of honey and a couple spoonfuls of cider vinegar. The result is apple sauce like in texture and sour in a very tasty way.
Gursky @ 66 I read The Man who Folded Himself some time in the mid 90's, when I was a teenager. So all of this is with the caveat that my memory is imperfect and my reading sophistication has increased since then.
It was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end, but when I got done I didn't see the point. Our protagonist falls into the possession of a time machine and uses it to explore all sorts of paradoxes, alternate histories and sexual escapades with alternate versions of himself. Ultimately, he is an extremely bored dilettante who keeps hoping to find something interesting in some timeline somewhere. I wound up feeling like "well, that was amusing, but couldn't this guy find something worthwhile to do with all this power?" I don't know, maybe that was the point.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2008 | 11 |
| 2007 | 14 |
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