To-day we have eating of plums. Yesterday,
We had daily shopping. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have how to write apologies. But to-day,
To-day we have eating of plums. Prunus
domestica glistens so in the neighbouring icebox
And to-day we have eating of plums.
This is the pit of the stone-fruit. And these
Are the damson and greengage, whose use you will see,
When you are making your jam. And this is the delicious plum,
Which in your case you have not got. The icebox
Holds in its confines the silent absence of stone-fruit,
Which in our case we have not got.
This is the contrition, which is always felt so
With the sweetness in mouth - all plum. And please do not let me
See anyone sorry for eating. You can fake it quite easy
If you have cold plum-fruit, devoured. The stones
Are gleaming and motionless, never letting anyone see
Anyone sorry for eating.
And this you can see is the icebox. The purpost of this
Is to chill the sweet fruit, as you see. We can open it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Searching for fruit. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early thief is seizing and eating the stone-fruit:
They call it searching for fruit.
They call it eating the fruit: it is perfectly easy
If you have cold stone-fruit: devoured! Like the pit,
And the greengage, and the mirabelle, and the damson or damask,
Which in our case we have not got; and the plum-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards
For today we have eating of plums.
(apologies for formatting thusly, but I couldn't get indenting to take...)
James Macdonald @ #82: The two notices sent to scribd are here and here.
The draft statement was written later and not made public, as described by Charles Stross in #78.
Gulp. What a horrible way to run a chain store.
As a customer, this actually makes me feel better about US chain stores. I mean, whatever bad things you might say about Borders or Amazon, you certainly can't deny that they have lots and lots of different books.
PNH @ 34: The design of Wikipedia relies far too much on the sort of lengthily-repeated iterative processes that work fine for software but which wear human beings out. Wikipedia's tag line is "The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit." To be truthful, it should read "The online encyclopedia that anyone can edit if they're willing to engage in unending trial by combat against a cadre of creepy, unblinking ideologues who all seem to know and support one another."
Ouch. Prophesy?
Not all of Wikipedia is this bad. There are entire fields of endeavor where the dominant editors are delightful, and the awful power of Wikipedia bureaucracy is brought to bear only on the trolls.
Seeing the dark underbelly of Wikipedia is a depressing experience.
Malthus @ 173: Stross really is the master of SF politics. I mean, who else would have a People's Libertarian Soviet eagerly proclaiming:
"The dictatorship of the heredity peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production." -Singularity Sky
Gotta love that future shock. Of course our descendants will bizarrely recombine our political beliefs, and get all worked up over issues we can't even imagine today.
TexAnne @ 62: Oh, I'm really sorry to hear that Dagoba's been bought by Hershey. I clearly need to stock up the next time it goes on sale at the grocery store.
Leah @ 60: In Switzerland, the cheapest common chocolate is Toblerone. But at least 50% of the shelf space in small stores (and 90%+ in grocery stores) is dedicated to premium chocolate. So assuming that you prefer high-end US chocolate to a Hershey's bar, then you'd presumably prefer mass-market Swiss chocolate to mass-market American chocolate.
Steve @ 174: "Anyway, that level of training probably wouldn't fit in a 10 hour course which has a heavy book portion."
If there isn't time to teach good muzzle discipline, then I certainly share your concerns about those Ohio gun-safety classes. Where I grew up, we generally learned range safety in Cub Scouts, sometime around our 8th birthdays, which provides a good starting point for more advanced gun safety.
Many of rules you listed, however, should really follow from "Never point a gun at something you don't want bullet holes in," if you consider it as an absolute rule. The key word here is "never," and it needs to be drilled into people's heads in about 6 different ways:
1) Don't ever point guns at people, unless want to kill them immediately.
2) No, really--I'm not kidding about rule (1).
3) Hey! Don't sweep that gun across your partner, you lunatic! Didn't you hear rule (1)? (This rule is best learned with specially-marked fake guns that can't possibly be mistaken for the real thing. There are some nice brightly-colored Glocks that police departments use for this purpose.)
4) You partner just stepped in front of you. Point that muzzle at the floor, you idiot!
5) Hey, watch this video of Navy SEALS clearing a building. Notice the way they never point their guns at each other, even when 6 of them leap through a tiny door and shoot every target in the room?
...and so on. Another critical aspect of this rule (which was drilled into us at a very young age) was:
6) Know what's behind your target. What's on the other side of those bushes? What's behind that wall? If you don't know, you don't raise your gun.
Good trigger discipline was something that I didn't truly learn until later, when I first shot handguns on a range. My earlier experience had all been with rifles, and many rifle-safety classes are weak in this area. But that's another absolute rule: Your finger rests on the trigger guard, not the trigger, until the moment that you actually fire.
And if you're going to carry a handgun, you need to get very good at weapon retention. I know a police officer who once had a 6-year-old girl attempt to draw his handgun from behind. Fortunately, his gun retention skills were exceptionally good, and totally reflexive; he didn't lose control of his gun for even an instant. But that's because he treated handgun use as a martial art, and because he trained constantly.
I just contacted both my senators, saying, "I know this is a silly issue (compared to, say, torture), but it's symptomatic of larger problems at the FDA, and you might want to keep your eye on things."
I was recently given several Dagoba Xocolatl bars which are absolutely delicious--the mild heat goes remarkably well with the dark chocolate, and there are yummy, crunchy cocoa nibs (a vastly underrated ingredient, IMHO).
Unfortunately, I don't think they're Fair Trade certified (although many other Dagoba products are).
Steve @ 41: If you don't know muzzle disipline, or know what I am saying with that phrase (the course didn't cover it...)
What on earth does Ohio include in gun safety classes if they don't talk about muzzle discipline? I mean, gun safety 101 is basically:
1) Don't ever point a gun at something you don't want perforated, and
2) Guns are always loaded, thanks to the Evil Bullet Fairy. See rule (1).
Any gun safety class which doesn't drill (1) and (2) into the students' heads is going to get someone into bad trouble.
Things that don't bother me:
1) Widespread gun ownership.
I grew up in a rural area with an enormous number of firearms--hunting rifles, shotguns, handguns, you name it. And these guns were owned by a wide range of people, including idiot teenagers, drunks, self-proclaimed rednecks, and hard-core poachers.
Now, all this sounds like it should be terrifying. But in fact, none of it ever bothered me. At least in a gun-owning rural culture, people tend to get saner in the presence of firearms. Pointing a gun at someone is as unthinkable as swerving a car into oncoming traffic.
2) Concealed-carry permits.
In most states, getting a concealed-carry permit requires filling out a stack of paperwork and taking firearm safety courses. People who go through this process are predisposed to be responsible, and empirically tend to be the sort of people whom you wouldn't mind carrying guns.
Things that scare the living daylights out of me:
1) Inexperienced urban handgun owners.
If you're going to own a gun, you need to be familiar with firearms. That means training and practice. The accident rates for urban handgun owners are terrifying, because so few of them know what they're doing.
2) Self-defense nutjobs starring in their own private movies.
You know the type: "Well, if somebody invaded my home, I'd blahblahblah clear the house blahblahblah tactical light blahblahblah..." And they never stop worrying about these scenarios. Somethin' just ain't right with these folks.
Ironically, I think that the key phrase here is "author identity."
If you crave to call yourself An Author, then (1) you need to get your book published, and (2) the publisher had better not admit to being a vanity press. So you can't publish your book through Lulu, because they're quite honest about publishing anyone and anything.
A clever scammer is more-or-less compelled to brag about their exclusivity. I suspect that it's the whole point.
(Self-publishing trivia: Edward Tufte mortgaged his house to publish The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. And most of us, I suspect, would be happy with his reviews. So Yog's Law does have the occasional exception.)
Non toccare i fili. Pericolo di morte.
In light of what Iain wrote at #9, it's worth mentioning what Cooks Illustrated discovered about heirloom turkeys: They tend to survive overcooking better than commercial birds. The relative flavor advantage was most pronounced when the tested turkeys had stayed in too long.
So while I can't speak about the merits of injected turkeys (I've never cooked one), don't write off a bird from a local farm. If Cooks Illustrated is to be believed, it may actually be more forgiving.
(That said, you can face other dangers: If you buy a turkey far in advance, you don't always know how big it will be. We wound up with 3.5 pounds of turkey per person this year, much to our surprise... extremely tasty, but we'll be eating it until Christmas.)
Abi @ #92: I don't think anybody here is implying that all law enforcement officers are bad. I--and presumably many others--have friends who've worn the uniform, acted honorably, de-escalated dangerous situations, and generally behaved as professionals.
But to digress for a moment, consider the burn-out rates among people who do tech support. They start out happy and friendly, and within about 6 months, most of them are laughing at stories of the BOFH tormenting users. To survive in tech support for more than a couple of years, you need an angelic personality.
A police force is (among other things) tech support for society. But instead of dealing with people who forget to plug their computer in, you get to deal with wife-beaters and drug dealers. And after a while, some officers begin to dislike that segment of the public they usually encounter. But unlike sysadmins, police officers get tasers and weapons. Imagine a real-life BOFH, equipped with a cattle-prod and a bit of privacy.
This is a fundamental dynamic of law enforcement. Combine it with the human tendency to abuse power just for kicks, and you have a deep, systemic problem.
Now, the US works extremely hard to overcome this dynamic. Police officers are carefully screened; bullies and psychopaths are kept out; and a professional culture is carefully built. Miranda is a key piece of this professional culture, as are habeas corpus and the rights of the accused.
And thus, we get many excellent police departments, as you've experienced. But all this can break down, either in certain cities (LA), or by undermining the professional culture. And then you no longer have competent police officers; you only have pigs (as they used to say).
And a lot of people are OK with that: They enjoy watching violence against anyone who is different, and they always argue, "Hey, the perp had it coming!" I mentioned Milgram upthread, because his research on this subject was clear: People generally defer to anyone in uniform, no matter how inhumanly cruel, unless somebody else challenges the abuse of power loudly and swiftly.
If you're ever willing to say, "Hey, he mouthed off to the cops; he had it coming," you're willing to do anything: Turn your neighbors in to the secret police, lynch the uppity black folk, or personally torture an innocent victim. You're just waiting for somebody in uniform to ask.
And this is why I'm complaining so loudly about the officers in the video: Their behavior is what happens when cops go bad, and if we don't oppose it loudly and swiftly, the rot will spread, infecting both the police and the public.
An angry kid gets caught in a school library without an ID. The responding officers restrain the kid, taser him, and immobilize him.[1] At this point, all the police need to do is handcuff him and frog-march him out of the building.
Instead, the officers begin to repeatedly inflict severe pain on the kid. He's screaming in agony, and the onlookers are clearly freaked out by the officers' behavior. The police refuse requests for their badge numbers, repeatedly threaten non-violent bystanders with tasers, and continue tormenting the kid.
Given this situation, one of the most common American reactions is, "He's a mouthy kid and he had it coming." Apparently, the reason that the United States runs secret prisons and tortures prisoners is that roughly 30-40% of Americans like it that way.[2]
See also: Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram.
[1] Unless we make some awfully generous assumptions about the situation, the police are using excessive force the first time they taser the student. Since these are the same officers who later threaten to taser an onlooker for requesting badge numbers, I have reason to believe these officers are predisposed to brutality.
[2] As many as 58% of Americans reject torture under all circumstances, though some surveys have reported lower numbers. Another chunk only believe in torture under various hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenarios.
Wilfred Owen:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
JESR, #17: ...most of them are fueled by fear and/or anger, and addicted to the rush they feel when channeling their fear and/or anger into lots of words.
I wasn't so much complaining about the blind believers in disinformation, but the professional purveyors. The believers are scary enough, and no small number of them appear to have an alien brain slug (ABS?). But I hold out hope for the believers--with a good 3-to-5 years of deprogramming, they can recover.
But what about the people who pump out the propaganda and the astroturf--the creators of all the specialized content designed to open up a root exploit on the human brain? I mean, there's no need for super-human AIs, fancy fractals or old-fashioned brain slugs. Madison Avenue already controls the bit of our brain that tells the difference between friendly apes and the ones we're supposed to hit with sticks. What else do they need?
The professional purveyors of disinformation--they're the ones who've (quite literally) sold their souls. And most of them can only be saved by something like real repentance.
TNH, #8: The effect is the same: looks like a human, functions as a walking press release.
I believe the colloquial term for a human press release is "meat puppet." It's not a very nice term, but then, I'm growing incredibly tired of the phenomenon it describes.
It's sad, really. In Stross's Iron Sunrise, meat puppets were created by sophisticated neural tampering. In the real world, it seems to be much easier--just offer up a bag of cash, or some power.
We've all known plenty of people who might as well be under the control of an alien brain slug, at least when their corporate or political interests are involved.
#35: Who was it that said "Anyone that can be discouraged from writing... should be"?
Sadly, this rule of thumb would have lost us the Lord of the Rings, which was only coaxed out of Tolkien by the ongoing support of Stanley and Rayner Unwin. Granted, he couldn't have been discouraged from writing per se, but genre fiction would be a very different place today if Tolkien had skipped straight to the Silmarillion.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 1 |
| 2007 | 10 |
| 2006 | 10 |
| 2005 | 10 |
Total: 32 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Eric:
Show all comments by Eric.