There's a wonderful thread running over on Ravelry, if you have an account there, called *the* famous dish from where you are from, that would be of great interest to Fluorospherians, I think. A lot of people raving about their characteristic regional favorites, some friendly One True Food sniping between posters, and RECIPES.

Holy cats, firsties? I've never gotten firsties on ML before! *luxuriates*

For people particularly interested in food, this thread may well be good enough to justify making a Rav account just to lurk in it. There are well over 500 posts, and it's only been up two days. Much amused horripilation is involved, since a lot of regional favorites are, um, well. You had to grow up there, YKWIM?

Maybe the same thing happened to Crater that happened to Richard Mayhew.

Open threadiness: TIL that you can get prescription testosterone that you spray in your armpits. For some reason this strikes me as hilarious.

It has never been convincingly demonstrated that Judge Crater wasn't abducted by space aliens.

Lila:

I tremble to ask, but what disease or symptom does the spray treat?

It's transdermal testosterone for those folks with low testosterone levels. It's applied to the armpits to avoid inadvertent transfer to other persons.

Actually, Jim, although you're correct about the purpose, the directions insist that you wash your armpits before skin-to-skin contact anyway.

(In case anyone's wondering, low testosterone is a risk factor for osteoporosis, decreased muscle mass, Alzheimer's disease, and prostate cancer, as well as sexual dysfunction.)

1
Like cioppino recipes that don't involve rock cod? (Cioppino is the Italian version of bouillabaisse. In San Francisco, they found rock cod, which are in the same family as rascasse.)

Just when you thought things couldn't get worse for poor Anthony Weiner (a guy with his own Cake Wrecks page), now, today:

Weiner Slurs Opponent as "Grandpa" at AARP Event to Court Seniors

Dude. Seriously?

As a kid, Judge Crater was mentioned to me in the same sentence as Amelia Earhart, DB Cooper, and Jimmy Hoffa, but I realize now that was because there was probably a news spike in '79 when the case was closed (when I was 7). I certainly can't recall seeing much mention of him in recent years.

I recall, in an old Mad magazine (from sixties, most likely) a character walking on in one frame and saying, "I'm Judge Crater. Is anyone looking for me?"

So since I realized in that "pretty dresses" thread that Charlie Stross occasionally stops by ML:

This past December I started a new job at a startup. It was as mentally taxing as switching to a new job and learning a new system ever is combined with the fact that as a startup one of our biggest fears is that we'll be beaten to market with one aspect or another of the system so there's a lot of push for iterating rapidly.

I also last fall discovered Mr. Stross's "Laundry" series of books and I believe that while ramping up in the new job I was in the middle of The Jennifer Morgue.

The result was a dream about a work conversation discussing a bug report that we needed to ship in the system configuration sufficient containment pentacles for eldritch horrors that could potentially be summoned by the system at runtime and not just for those horrors known to be present in the system when the configuration was built. There was apparently a user workaround involving drawing a few extra pentacles on the floor before activating the system, but the field team was not happy with this and this bug report had been escalated because it was a customer-facing issue.

It didn't help that the naming convention for files in my corner of the system meant that I'd spent the previous two days working on a file named "Epistemology". (A certain character in the Laundry series is described at one point as a "trained combat epistemologist")

I so need to adopt Daniel's technique for dynamic late binding of eldritch horrors.

Funny, I've just been reading up on many of the aces of WWI. The French ones in particular had a way of vanishing.

The great Guynemer went missing, too: though there were fairly solid reports confirming his death, his body and scout were never recovered. Apparently French schoolchildren were told at the time that he just flew so high he couldn't come back down.

And then of course there's St. Exupery -- yeah, yeah, he vanished in WWII, same thing....

Daniel Martin @13: Have you read William Browning Spencer's Resume with Monsters? There's a lot in it similar to your dream. It's the grandpappy of the Cthulhu-meets-modern-work novels, I think.

The Mysterious Vanishing Person linked for me with Judge Crater is Ambrose Bierce. Not that they took off together.

About the Doctor - Neil Gaiman says a black actor was offered the role and turned it down.

Doctor Who role

Have you guys heard about Welcome to Night Vale? It's a lovely little horror comedy surrealist podcast that has somehow, due perhaps to a spectacular geek convergence, become the top podcast on itunes in the US practically overnight.

It is dark, scary, funny, and surprisingly moving at times. Told in the format of a community-update-style local radio show, it covers day-to-day life in a bizarre and bloody little desert town populated by hooded figures and patrolled by secret world government helicopters.

Highly recommended.

I was going to suggest that Edgar Rice Burroughs knew what happened, but concealed it by presenting it as fiction, changing the Judge's first name and transposing two letters of his last name, but alas, the timeline doesn't line up.

If he did disappear, he would be 124 today, which makes it seem unlikely that he is still alive, barring extraordinary means of life extension.

Leah Miller @19: So THAT'S what that is! I saw (what I now know are) Night Vale crossover fanfics start popping up in several of my fandoms over on Archive of Our Own and had no clue.

HLN: Local woman, after more-or-less learning to knit at a local convention, has managed to manufacture a strip of knitting measuring approximately eight inches by 1/2 inches, with (so far) remarkably little feline assistance....

Local woman now needs to figure out how to perl.

(Local woman figures she's got at least a month before she needs to figure out how to cast off the washcloth/potholder/squarish-(one-hopes)-knit-object...)

Cassy B. @22: NB, it's purl. Learning to perl is something entirely different, and less like knitting. :-> Both can iterate, though.

If it helps, my quickie description is that purling is exactly like knitting, only inside-out. Slightly longer: hold the yarn in front and pull it BACK through the working loop to make the new, daughter loop.

Other than that, YouTube is full of videos. :->

22
Stick the right needle through the loop in front of the left needle, and pull the yarn through, so the top of the old loop comes off in front of the new loop, instead of behind it.

Xerox machines rewrite specifications -- in particular, they're changing the numbers. Which, with that sort of document, might cause serious problems. Compression algorithm failure.

It seems to me that purling is more like knitting backward. That is, if you purl some stitches and then turn the "cloth" you are creating over (so that the left side becomes the right side) those stitches will look, and be, knitted. And vice versa. In like fashion, the backs of knitted stitches are purled.

The server didn't like that comment. Oh well. Let's try this one instead.

#27 ::: B. Durbin

I don't see anything from you in the moderation queue or in the spam bucket. What exactly are you seeing when you're getting a server error? Are there circumstances when it always appears, when it sometimes appears, or when it never appears?

Credit to Karen for pointing out the Xerox problem to me; didn't expect it to get its own thread! I expect it's independent discovery.

They weren't plums, and they weren't in the icebox, but I found some black apricots at the fruit market the other day. It seemed a strange enough thing that I ought to get some. They were probably really a dark purple outside, and a nice reddish-purple pluot sort of color inside, with a texture more like an apricot.

I'm generally not that impressed with plums, and fresh apricots seem like they're just a watered-down version of dried apricots, but pluots are wonderful. My wife liked them better than I did, but they were ok and visually interesting.

An NPC in one of my campaigns once said that someone had been Cratered.

"You mean they blew him up?" asked a PC.

"No, kidnapped him via teleport," said the NPC. "Named after the first person it was done to."

Adam 11: As a kid, Judge Crater was mentioned to me

Huh. People hardly ever talk about his childhood.

The Gilberton militia takeover still isn't on NBC or CNN's sites. Why?

Purl. Yes. I used to knit before I developed a problem with my wrists, but I don't have a clear-cut hand dominance, so somehow I ended up making the knit stitches right-handed and the purl stitches left-handed. I'm pretty sure I wasn't taught that way, but the results were good and that was really all that mattered.

Carol Kimball @17: The Mysterious Vanishing Person linked for me with Judge Crater is Ambrose Bierce. Not that they took off together.

There was a Jack Finney short story (warning: spoilers) that had it that, if they hadn't left together, they ended up at the same destination.

Elliot Mason @23 and PJ Evans @24, it wasn't so much a request for help as a crow of accomplishment (Look! Look! I'm MAKING something and it doesn't suck!) -- but thanks(exclamation point); both of your explanations were very helpful!

Rob Rusick @ #34 -

I remember that story!

Saint-Exupéry's plane and ID bracelet have been found; the only mystery remaining is whether or not he was shot down.

Then, of course, there's Benjamin Bathurst.

A very Fluorospherian post about using genderflipping in pop culture as a critiquing technique, and a way of un-invisibling privilege backpacks. I was aware of almost all the concrete examples used to illustrate the piece, but the writing and the conclusions took me places I hadn't gone on my own.

The name is wrong, the memory still right
of the grey trees beside the drystone wall
fruiting in summer; so lush in recall
and seen so clearly in approaching night
as we looked up to see the birds in flight.
The setting sun, that gorgeous red ball
as into the green sea it seemed to fall,
made of it one stark blessing of a sight.
We cannot know what goods may come to pass
on this hard journey up and down the hill
but dare not bid a single minute stay,
yet what we see reflected in the glass
is not the force either of wit or will
but all the markings of the normal way.

The founder of the Nation of Islam, Wallace Fard, also disappeared mysteriously.

Howdy, folks!

Are there any plans for a Fluorospherian Meetup down at LoneStarCon 3? I'm excited to have y'all in my home state!

Jenny Islander@32: The Gilberton militia takeover still isn't on NBC or CNN's sites. Why?

At a guess, because Gilberton PA is a small (population as of the 2010 census, 769), poor, rural Pennsylvania coal-mining town, full of the sort of people that the highly urbanized major media outlets don't really give a damn about until a mine caves in or somebody local finally snaps and commits a spectacularly messy multiple murder.

Cynical? Maybe. But I've lived in a small town for long enough now that I've seen enough instances of urban media only taking notice of local goings-on when they can find a way to tie the problem to their own interests.

I am actually wondering if Judge Crater has simply traveled in time to Mega-City One.

A couple of years ago I read an exhaustive examination of the Benjamin Bathurst case - the kind of thing Jim Macdonald might have posted, if indeed he didn't post the link to it - which looked into the situation and the information available at the time, as the usual offhand references don't.

I think this might be it: The Disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst

As I recall, it came to the conclusion that (1) the contemporary records make it clear he didn't just "walk around the horses" to the other side and vanish, that was a misinterpretation of something one of the witnesses had said about the last time they saw him; (2) it was winter and dark early, so it would have been nearly pitch black at the time he was last outside in the inn's courtyard; (3) there were strong reasons for Napoleonic spies or troops who were operating in that area to have kidnapped him, if they could; (4) notwithstanding point 3, it was most likely that one or both of a couple men working at the inn had murdered him for the cash and valuables he had carelessly shown he was carrying, temporarily hidden the body, and buried him later; (5) some of his clothes were later found in the woods, and a valuable fur coat hidden on the property of a nearby family; (6) forty years later a skeleton was found in a secret grave which roughly matched his physical description, and showed a skull fracture, probably from a violent blow.

It's a rather disappointing explanation compared to the wonderful speculations, but also much more plausible.

The Great South American River is now an art gallery. It vends, entre autres choses, serious impressionist pieces. And the comments are to die for: http://www.amazon.com/Fragment-de-Nymph-as/dp/B00E1TDKZ8/ref=art_owfa_1

#45 Fragano

[still laughing]

Carol Kimball #46: You should also see http://www.amazon.com/LEnfant-tasse-portrait-Jean-Monet/dp/B00E2PAN0Q/ref=art_owfa_1

#44 : Clifton

I posted that very link in the 25 November 2012 Diffractions, the 203rd anniversary of Mr. Bathurst's disappearance.

Skwid @41: Howdy! I'll add you to the list of those attending the Gathering of Light at LoneStarCon 3. The date/time and place are yet to be determined. Any preferences? (I should ask that of everybody attending).

Maybe for the exclamation mark.

["Howdy!" was indeed it. Moaria Niiigi, Duty Gnome]

> Saint-Exupéry's plane and ID bracelet have
> been found; the only mystery remaining is
> whether or not he was shot down.

Oh come on, he naturally would have made it appear that he had died to prevent people from trying to find him. Hence that German pilot's story. It was a put-up job from the start, sheeple*! The asteroid he's living on now along with Nungesser, Guynemer and Earhart doesn't have much room for tourists, after all :)

*I'm sorry, I take that word back.

Stephen Fry compares Sochi 2014 to Berlin 1936, not without some justification. Read the whole thing.

I don't think his solution (have a former Winter Olympics venue take over) is practical, because I don't think any of them could be ready in time. But Russia deserves to be treated the way Apartheid South Africa was: they should not be allowed to host, and their athletes should not be allowed to compete.

Miramon @ 51... I wonder if Saint-Exupéry ever drew a sheep for that kid.

I am rather new here. Please, what does being gnomed involve? And does it tickle at all? I'm afraid I'm terribly ticklish.

Mongoose: Gnomed is what happens when the gnomes decide that your post is objectionable and quarantine it until one of the mods can take a look and make sure it's from a real person. You'll know if it happens (and it can happen because of bad punctuation or the like) because you'll get an error message telling you about the glass and steel towers.

For the Colorado knitters out there with way too much time and money on their hands: Yarn Along The Rockies.

I won't be participating, as I already have enough  crap  stuff in my house, thank you very much.

For, amusingly, trying to tell Mongoose what being gnomed is.

Mongoose @ 54... I seldom get gnomed, as I somehow rarely invoke the words of power that get me caught in the spam filter, but, when I do, it doesn't tickle.

Serge @ 57: thank you - that's a relief! And now I understand what being gnomed is all about.

Add my name to the Gathering of Light at LoneStarCon3. I'm not sure what my preferences are because I haven't been given a schedule of relevant events. Some are not official worldcon events, so details are sketchy. But if I can make it, I most certainly will. (fondly remembering Denvention and Xopher's chocolates and Teresa's influenza cure)

Jacque: and a truly fine potato you are indeed!

The discussion of hope and despair on the Dysfunctional Families thread reminded me of something I wrote a few years back. Re-reading it I don't think it's suitable for that thread so open thread it is:

I put my despair in an empty champagne bottle and corked it. Then I locked it in a box and locked that box in six other boxes, like a Matryoshka doll.

I gave the keys to seven sisters, each more beautiful than the next. They each promised to give the key only to whoever answered their riddles. Their riddles, their inheritance from their grandfather, are the most fiendishly difficult, as well as pointless and aggravating, puzzles ever brought back to the waking world.

The boxes I gave to their brother, who hid them in a cave on a mountain which can only be found by one guide. Sadly this guide was stolen from his home when only three nights old and has not been seen since.

I realise, of course, that these precautions are worse than none at all, as any hero worth their salt will find this quest not only irresistible, but find their eventual victory inevitable. Because of this, next to the bottle I have left a note. Before drinking from the bottle of my despair this hero can read my final warning:

You're welcome to it

Neil W., that is awesome.

iamnothing #49: Please add me (and Gail, my best beloved) to the list for the Gathering of Light. Thanks.

Neil W. @61, that is fantastic.

Xopher @52, people* have been pushing Vancouver again, as the facilities are still in reasonably good condition.

* and by 'people' I mean I heard about it from George Takei's blog

iamnothing@49

I'm planning to attend the Gathering of Light.

As far as timing is concerned, perhaps Thursday evening or Friday evening?

Note that the Masquerade is scheduled for Friday night and the Hugo awards are scheduled for Saturday night.

So, while I wait for my compile to finish, a little bit of follow-up on the events I reported last week. I'm using a few more proper nouns now that the furor has died down a little and the news is getting reported a little more accurately.

The whole sangha* here was heartsick about the murder of Mary Beth, and the near certainty that someone we'd regarded as a brother, however faulty, was responsible. Some leaders of our group pulled together an evening meeting last week at one member's house to give people a chance to privately air their feelings and thoughts about it.

That is where things took a turn from tragic to amazing, without disregarding or disrespecting the tragic side:

When I got to the meeting, a little late, I found a young man and young woman in the group who I didn't recognize. These turned out to be Mary Beth's son and her niece. They had heard about the meeting through a chain of forwarded emails, and showed up to the meeting to express their love and support for our sangha, because it was what she would have wanted, and to reassure us that they have faith that she is fine now and that something positive will come from this.

Mary Beth was closely associated with a Sufi group here - though it sounds like she didn't feel limited to one religion - and I think she must have raised her son with a lot of exposure to Sufi thought and to the Sufi focus on God's love, because he seems to be a truly extraordinary and spiritual young man. No wishy-washy or New Age vagueness; very clear and present, while talking about how he can feel her love around him still.

I had wondered how we could reach out to her family to offer them our support in their grief, without hurting or offending them. It would never have occurred to me that her son would come to us to offer his support in our sadness.

That loving response helped free us as a group to feel comfortable with attending her memorial and to make more of a connection with her family, and it's freed me further to sit with and accept my grief for her suffering and her family's grief. This isn't the end of this - doubtless it will take a year or longer for the trial to begin dragging some truth out - but it feels like a very different road.

Please remember this story the next time somebody tries to tell you that Islam, as a whole, is a violent and vengeful religion.

* "sangha" in Buddhism: congregation, body of the faithful, community.

I could definitely live with Vancouver having the Olympics!

Daily Kos refutes the "Heavily armed militia" Particle.

Neil W -

Add me to the chorus praising you for that. It is my characteristically subdued birthday today (go, me!) and I find that hits me right in the feels.

Happy birthday, nerdycellist.

Uncharacteristically, a subdued happy birthday wish, nerdycellist. (I'm usually exuberant) Celebrate well.

Heh. Someone on HuffPo is proposing leaving the Olympics in Sochi...but banning the Russians from competing!

The IOC will never do this, of course. It would piss off NBC. But it's a brilliant solution, and would humiliate the hell out of the Russians, who totally deserve it.

I predict a whole bunch of skaters would hastily become Ukrainian.

Note that the Masquerade is scheduled for Friday night and the Hugo awards are scheduled for Saturday night.

Michael I @66: Don't you mean Saturday for the Masquerade and Sunday for the Hugos?

I was also thinking we should have the GoL Friday or Thursday, starting a bit after 6:00 pm.

Here's my latest list for the GoL:

iamnothing
Lee
GlendaP
Paula Helm Murray
Christopher Davis
Skwid
Lin Daniel
Fragano Ledgister and Gail
Michael

iamnothing: Me too. (I could swear that I'd posted saying I'd be at the con, but I could be mistaken about that, or you might just have missed it.)

David Goldfarb @74: You did say you'd be at the con but didn't mention the GoL, so I wasn't sure. There are some others I'm not sure about.

iamnothing et al @73: I have been thinking about venues for the GoL. There are a large number of restaurants on the Riverwalk, with a variety of cuisines at various price points. There are also other possibilities.

However, the Riverwalk is below street level and was built before modern standards of accessibility. There are ramps and elevators now, but sometimes involve going quite a long way around*. Also, the walkways are cobblestone** and may be difficult for anyone who is unsteady on their feet. Is this going to be a problem for anyone?

Second question: Vegetarian is probably available almost everywhere, albeit of limited selection. Vegan, gluten-free, etc may be more difficult. Is this an issue for anyone?

*About 20 years ago I navigated it with multiple toddlers in strollers. Since then I haven't had occasion to notice.

**Not the right word, but what do you call flat rocks cemented in place?

You can be uncertain about me because I'm uncertain about myself -- but I'm hoping to attend if I can manage it! I will be at the con, and do feel free to come up and identify yourself if I don't already know you.

The BBC reports on cycling in the Netherlands

Allan Beatty @ #14:

I prefer lexically-bound eldritch horrors, if I can. But should you need to dynamically bind them, the Turing-Wheeler Jump is surely the way to go (some swear by the Wheeler Burrower Transform, but...).

In general, seems I will be in Seattle, WA, beginning of September. If there are any local fluorospherians, maybe we should make plans to have beverage in close-ish proximity in space-time.

Neil W @ 62 and Clifton @ 67: those comments are both, in different but related ways, beautiful. Thank you both for sharing.

So often, we go online and are immediately besieged by news that makes us gloomy, or angry, or simply numb with a sense of powerlessness. Thank you both for reminding us, in different ways, of the light that shines in the darkness: Neil W for showing the light that shines within each one of us, and Clifton for showing the light that shines unexpectedly from elsewhere.

Glenda P @76: what do you call flat rocks cemented in place?

"Setts". Though they often get called "cobblestones" as well, which makes something like the Paris-Roubaix bike race sound even more ridiculously difficult than it already is.

Xopher @52/72: I think the thing that really kicked me in the teeth about the Olympics was when someone pointed out on Twitter that the USOC got super pissy about the knitters who used the term 'Ravelympics' last summer, but they aren't ever going to raise a fuss about Russia's current hate-on for us LGBT folks. I'm not sure why that hit home as hard as it did, because my cynical side says that of course they're going to worry about their money/brand more than they're going to give a damn about human rights, especially where the queers are involved, but--that's what did me in.

Vancouver 2014!

iamnothing@73 Don't you mean Saturday for the Masquerade and Sunday for the Hugos?

Yes.

There's still some pretty worrying elements to the Gilberton business, that "heavily-armed militia". The Kessler guy could be facing a Federal inquiry. It's a one-man police force, him, but he bought an unknown number of guns for the force, and the town want to know where they are. Full-auto weapons are tightly controlled for "civilians", needing an expensive Federal license, less so for Police Forces. So this guy could find the ATF descending on him.

Why did he buy the guns, where did they end up, and why did nobody notice?

It's possible that all we're talking about are a couple of ordinary cop-guns, a Glock on the guy's hip and a shotgun in the car. But why does a town with 900 residents need its own armed cop?

@84: "But why does a town with 900 residents need its own armed cop?"

0.1% police seems like a reasonable number to me. I'd be paying something like $100 of his salary and benefits, if I had that level of protection.

Statistically, per wikipedia, it looks like around 1 in 400 people in the US is a cop- obviously this counts federal, state and local- so 1 in 900, local, doesn't seem ridiculous.

Why _wouldn't_ a town of 900 have a police officer? I mean, not necessarily THIS police officer, I don't know the gentleman, but someone.

Sandy B. @85:

I'd expect a town of that size to rely on county law enforcement, but my experience with towns that small is in the rural Great Plains where the overall population density is considerably lower. If nothing else, that means that you don't have a single point of failure if your lone cop comes down with the flu.

84, 85, 86--In my experience, police forces in very small towns do work closely with the sheriff's office; it's a good plan even if there isn't a flu epidemic.
One advantage to having a local force* even in so small a community is that there is someone who can be on-hand quickly in the event of an emergency, whether it's an accident, a break-in, an attempt to rob the QuickieMart, instead of waiting 15 to 20 minutes for a deputy to show up. You also have someone on-hand to talk to school children about bicycle safety and such. Besides, you'll want someone around in case the stop light malfunctions...

*For values of force = 'one or two people'

iamnothing @ 73... Let us know when the Gathering is likely to happen then I'll be able to confirm. As for the masquerade and the Hugos, I'll be in the masquerade, and some of my handiwork will be seen during the Hugos.

I grew up in a town of about 6,000 and we didn't have a police department. If you needed the police they came from the next town over; with any luck, you didn't need them quickly.

In other news, local man is reading Bitter Seeds, finding it quite enjoyable.

Open threadiness:A good article about the issues raised by NSA surveillance and whistleblowing

The big question we need to consider is how we can have meaningful oversight of secret operations done by our government. It is only a partial solution (though I think still worthwhile) to get rid of as much secret stuff as possible. You will still need undercover cops and spies and hidden technical details about weapons. You will still need to keep internal deliberations secret sometimes, and personnel records and medical records and trade secrets shared with the government to comply with regulations. Some stuff has to be kept secret, and some important things governments do require operating under some level of secrecy. Many of those things will be subject to some level of abuse, ranging from featherbedding and nepotism to collecting dirt on political opponents or running death squads to eliminate the radicals you *really* don't like.

The current solution seems to be, in practice, that oversight is done by people who aren't told much, have no way to check what they're told, and aren't allowed to talk about any problems they find. When the intelligence agencies lie to their overseers, or omit critical data, there are no consequences. This is pretty clearly not a good way to do things. How can we do better?

Carrie S @55--

Strange, but I had always parsed the sequences of events differently. (And I'm pretty sure I have had it happen to me before).

I thought that the quarantining was performed by faceless algorithms, not gnomes. And I had thought that the rescuing was done by the selfless gnomes, not by mods.

After all, isn't it usually the duty gnome who intervenes to save your post from oblivion?

But I now see that several of the steps are open to gestalt-shifty re-interpretation. I had always interpreted the gnomes' statements as taking the form, "here's why the faceless algorithms quarantined you, but don't worry, we rescued you." I suppose you understand them as saying, "here's why we quarantined you ourselves."

And the offerings of food also take on a different significance. I thought that the offerers were saying, "beneficent and philanthropic gnomes, please intercede on my behalf against the faceless algorithms!" Whereas I suppose you interpret them as saying, "all-powerful gnomes, who quarantine whom they will, accept my peace-offering and do not quarantine me!"

And what role had I been assigning the mods? Well, none, of course. They pretty much just sit around and eat bon-bons. Easiest job in the world, when you have algorithms and gnomes to do the heavy-lifting for you.

(and, yes, I am resigned to not seeing this post appear for some time).

Aha--the message from the glass tower tells me that my parsing has been at least partially wrong.

(Still think I'm right about the bon-bons).

Many of the smaller towns in my area have no police at all, or just one guy; most of the responsibility is handled by the State Police, whose barracks is an hour's drive south. (We have two state guys who cover the entire area.)

A town just east of me (population 298) had a problem with their one-man force a while back. He was arrested for drunk driving in another town. The town tried to fire him, and he sued for wrongful termination. So what happened was, at next town meeting, the citizens voted the police budget to zero. He left, and now that town only has state police.

Another town, just north of me (population 1,012) had a problem when their entire police force was deployed to Iraq with the national guard. What happened there was our town cops covered for them, even though they had no powers greater than any other citizen, to stabilize any situation until the state guys could get there.

Clifton @61: and a truly fine potato you are indeed!

As long a you don't expect me to actually see anything.

Jeez, I didn't know *that* was a word of power, but by their fruits shall ye know 'em.

Clifton 67: That's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing it.

Sufism has been persecuted in the Muslim world, and my (very limited) experience is that Sufis tend to be rather openminded...in fact, I believe there's one Sufi order that accepts non-Muslims.

GlendaP 76, James 81: Flagstones?

k8 82: Just so. They protect their brand, their income, and (I've heard) their personal bribes and kickbacks, but justice? the integrity of sport? Pffft.

oldster (91): I've been fascinated by the evolution of food-offerings to the gnomes. The first mention of food in relation to them was when abi told us that well-behaved visitors were taken into the back room and given tea* and cookies while waiting for their case to be resolved. Shortly after that, a visitor offered the gnomes some cookies to help restock their supplies. And now the custom is for the visitor to feed the gnomes with whatever goodies are on hand.

Hmmm. Gnomes=Noms?

*or preferred drink

Sadly, it looks like the fine art offerings by, as Fragano put it, "the Great South American River", are no longer visible at the links given. Even Google searches for the paintings turn up those links, but the pages they lead to say "Looking for something? We're sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site."

Fortunately, Google cached some of the reviews; they are what you would expect of Amazon reviews of multi-million-dollar masterpieces.

... perhaps for referring to the Great South American River by its proper name, as well as the company named after the mis-spelled version of 1 with 100 zeros.

Sadly, all I have to offer the gnomes is the last bag of real fritos from the lunch room, and a clementine.

For I will consider my gnome Raul.
For he is the servant of the NielsenHaydens, duly and daily serving them.
For at the first sight of spam in the threads he deals with it in his way.
For is this done by tapping it with his hammer seven times with elegant quickness.
For he looks askance upon accident attorneys, escorts in London, and purveyors of on-line poker.
Then he goes to another page to check the IP number to see if it has spammed before, and if so banning it.
For having done duty and unpublishing spam he begins to consider the rest.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon the hidden comments to see if they are from friends.
For secondly if friends were trapped by the filters he offers them tea.
For thirdly he shares the offerings of the commenters who have come to the glass and steel towers, for they bring more toothsome items than spam.
For fourthly he checks in the refrigerator to see if there be plums.
For fifthly if he finds plums he eats them.
For sixthly when the plums are gone he feels sorrow.
For seventhly he pets the hamster.
For eighthly he fetches bon-bons for the mods.
For ninthly he curls his toes.
For tenthly he does it all again.

HLN: Local woman and houseguest Rikibeth both giggled when they got to "For fourthly..."

Jim Macdonald (100): ::applause::

iamnothing please add a +1 next to my name, as my wife is likely to be joining us!

Jim Macdonald @100

You had me at "for eighthly". (Actually, you had me from the very first line...)

@89, HLN: Bookstore employee checks that area man has read Bitter Seeds and A Colder War while selling him Necessary Evil. "Not a trilogy to read out of order," they agree.

Jim Macdonald @ 100: wonderful! And now I know the gnomes like to be fed, I shall bring them gingerbread: http://elinorofkentdale.wordpress.com/recipes/sweet/cakes/gingerbread/

Recipes tend to mutate somewhat as they pass down the generations. My version, as you'll see at the link, is vegan. I believe my sister still uses lard if she is just baking for her family, but she does the vegan version if in any doubt; however, she uses about twice as much ginger as I do. She really loves the stuff.

All gnomes, please tuck in and enjoy, vegan gnomes included. If there are any gnomes on a gluten-free diet, fear not; I can arrange something for you next time.

Dammit. Elizabeth Peters is dead.

Sad, sad day. I love her Amelia Peabody series.

Xopher Halftongue @ 107 - Damn. I'm going to have to dig out my copy of Crocodile on the Sandbank now...

Mongoose @106, that sounds delicious; as an American, what ought I to use where it says golden syrup and black treacle? Also what does "wholemeal" flour signify?

estelendur @109:

Black treacle is molasses; wholemeal flour is whole wheat flour. I'm not sure what to suggest for golden syrup, but someone else might know.

I would just turn the golden syrup into more molasses, use white sugar for the demerara sugar, and call it roughly even. But then I like molasses.

My grocery store (Boston) carries Lyle's Golden Syrup, though.

Xopher @107 - another mourning for Elizabeth Peters. Somehow I could never get into her Amelia Peabody series, but I was alway always hoping for another Jacqueline Kirby novel (The Seventh Sinner, Murders of Richard III, Die for Love, Naked Once More).

oliviacw (112): The Jacqueline Kirby books were my favorites, too. I was also quite fond of some of her early, stand-alone, romantic suspense novels. Time to re-read Devil-May-Care, I think.

estelendur @ 109: I'm not entirely sure about the American equivalents, I'm afraid. I've heard of molasses, but I don't know if it's the same thing as the treacle you can buy over here. British treacle is very black and not very sweet; it has almost a licorice flavour about it. This cake doesn't work well if it's over-sweetened, and the treacle balances out the golden syrup, which on its own is ridiculously sweet.

I shall go and make some enquiries on the Book of Face and see what I can come up with.

Golden syrup is essentially liquid sugar, It feels a lot like (not HF) corn syrup but it's made from sugar cane.

Thanks to Bill Higgins, I am now acquainted with the remarkable book "Endless Amusement", a book written in 1847, and available on Project Gutenberg HERE. (Note: you want a version with images.) While still laughing about how they've got the formula for "fulminating mercury" sandwiched between mathematical puzzles, I came across this, in the vacuum pump section:

Cork heavier than Lead.
Let a large piece of cork be pendent from one end of a balance beam, and a small piece of lead from the other; the lead should rather preponderate. If this apparatus be placed [in a vacuum chamber], you will find that when the air is exhausted, the lead, which seemed the heaviest body, will ascend, and the cork outweigh the lead. Restore the air, and the effect will cease. This phenomenon is only on account of the difference of the size in the two objects. The lead, which owes its heaviness to the operation of the air, yields to a lighter because a larger substance when deprived of its assistance.

Wait, what? Are they crazy, or am I? Are they claiming that the cork is somehow buoyant in the air or something?

A Canadian friend on the Book of the Face informs me that molasses is not sweeter than treacle and works as a straight substitute; she cooks in both countries (lives over here but visits her parents regularly).

eric @ 115: yes. "Liquid sugar" is an excellent description. It's a heavy syrup of sugar and invert sugar, and by "heavy" I mean it's about the consistency of non-set honey. Any syrup of that approximate consistency, and about the sweetness of ordinary sugar, would work.

Speaking of plums, I must check the tree for the last ripening plum. The deer got about half of them this year, but the 5 they didn't get were wonderful.

Everything else seems to be about 2 weeks early -- the raspberries were almost gone by late July, and we've had browsable quantities of blackberries by August first. I put down the first half gallon in the freezer last night, when normally that doesn't happen till after county fair time.

Perhaps it was the total lack of rain in July, or the lovely day of rain on the second. We woke up to damp ground, dry downspouts and the smell of oils and other things liberated from the dryness. But that was soon replaced by 1/2 inch of warm rain throughout the day, that lead to the dry grass greening overnight.

The sweet spot of zucchini -- enough but not too much, was very short this year,about the last week of July. We're now behind, with foot long ones showing up each day. Thankfully, the neighbors haven't started locking their cars. yet. And, there are 3 categories that one can enter them in the fair.

Ooh. Further comment from another knowledgeable person:

"It really depends on what kind of molasses you're using. Black strap is really too strong, but fancy molasses is an okay substitute for treacle. If it's 50% treacle and 50% syrup then you're going to want to go with a 50% fancy molasses and 50% dark corn syrup."

I've got a tree with one plum, as mentioned in the post.

Hm. The lead-cork thing is wrong but it's possible to see what they were thinking.

Imagine a large glass bubble (airtight). The shell is one gram of glass, and the internal volume is one liter of normal air. If you put this on a scale, it will show a weight of one gram(*). But if you repeat the test in a vacuum, the scale will show about 2.2 grams, because the air sealed in the bubble is no longer neutral bouyancy.

If you run this on a balance scale against a (solid) 1.5g weight, you'll see the result the book is trying to describe. It's a very crude barometer, is all.

The problem is that cork is a terrible approximation of an airtight glass bubble. The air in the cork will escape easily -- or if it doesn't, you'll probably get popcork.

(* Don't get all units on my ass here. You know what I mean.)

Andrew Plotkin @120, I just got a spontaneous and irrepressible case of the giggles at the word "popcork". The mental image is priceless. But if I get in trouble with my boss, it's All Your Fault....

Cassy B: You're welcome.

Footnote: I've never actually played with a big piece (a liter) of cork. Maybe it's stronger and more airtight than I think, in which case the book is actually on target.

Dr. Barbara Mertz -- RIP

I was hoping for another Vicky Bliss book, if only to see if she actually got John to the altar...

She will be missed.

A lovely unforced pun!

Open threadiness:

I just read a news article that made me FURIOUS.

Warning: Major triggers. Rape, child abuse.

Link to Salon article

This is barbarism and I'm profoundly ashamed that it can still happen in my country.

I'm going to greatly miss Elizabeth Peters, as she joins Amelia and Adbulla on the path on the ridge under the great Egyptian moon. Her early standalones and the Vicky Bliss and Jacqueline Kirby ones were my favorite airplane reading, making my much more mundane travels somehow more exciting.

Popcork! Popcork!

Ok, SOMEONE here must have a proper vacuum apparatus, right? Anyone? Singer?

I want video of this experiment!

Knitting question from a complete novice:

If you're pretty sure (not positive, but have a bad feeling) that you've made a mistake in a row of knitting (I think perhaps I dropped a stitch; it looks kind of uneven and gappy compared to the rest of the strip), how do you rip out a row without destroying everything you've done so far? There must be a way, short of starting completely over.... (she said, with hope in her voice)

And here I thought I was starting to actually master the knit stitch. <sigh>

Help?

Thanks.

If you dropped the stitch, you might not need to unravel (frog) your knitting so far. A hook of some sort will help you pick up the laddered stitch and work it back up.

I am not feeling up to describing the maneuver, but if you want to try it, I recommend using your search engine of choice to look for instructions on picking up dropped stitches. (The exact variation required will depend on whether you are working stockinette or garter stitch.)

Cassy B @129: You basically unknit it one stitch at a time -- insert your needle into the 'mother' of the last-knit stitch, and then pull the yarn out to remove the stitch. Then move over to the next one, insert your needle into the 'mother' ... and so on.

As you knit, so shall you rip, goes the proverb. :-> This is also referred to as 'tinking back' in some cases, if you see that terminology anywhere on the web.

That being said, it's possible to unravel back to a previous row and pick up the stitches with a knitting needle; I recommend using one that's smaller than the one you're knitting with.

That being said, it's possible to unravel back to a previous row and pick up the stitches with a knitting needle; I recommend using one that's smaller than the one you're knitting with. If you are able to read your knitting enough to follow a row across, you can even pick up the stitches before doing the unraveling: slip the needle through every other vertical bar. The end stitches might be a little hard to see, though.

Whoops, sorry! Not sure what I did there. And I should have thought of tinking; it's the most reliable way of undoing knitting.

Dropping stitches: the best explanation I've seen for fixing a dropped stitch is to crochet it up the rows. But I started with crocheting, so that's what makes sense to me. This is all easier to explain in person, so really, heading to a yarn store is your best bet.

When you look at the knitting, you'll see loops coming out of loops vertically. A dropped stitch is when the loops pull out and run down. You can use a crochet hook to go through a loop (which won't look loopy anymore), then grab the loop above it and pull the above-loop through the below-loop. Now you have the above-loop on the hook in place of the below-loop, and you repeat that a lot. When you're out of above-loops, the loop goes back on the needle. You can keep the hook through the loop so it doesn't run down again and put the loop on the needle when next you need the stitch.

The difference between a knit stitch and a purl stitch matters when picking them back up, but I have been lucky so far and haven't needed to know it.

There are probably videos that explain this better. Knitting: not something that converts to text well.

Naomi and Elliot, thank you both. I think I can figure out how to unknit. (Picking up the probably dropped stitch will be... interesting, however.)

Hmmmm...

Now I seem to have 51 stitches on my needle rather than 50. <scratching head in puzzlement>

Cassie B @129

Also be aware that having to take out stitches, or even whole rows, is a sign of progress. You're challenging yourself. (I challenge myself a lot.)

With regards to frog knitting, I was muttering at my knitting at a con, cursing that I would have to do some frog knitting. A friend asked, what's frog knitting? Another knitting friend, sitting on the other side of the room, joined in when I said "Rippit Rippit". You know you're doing just fine when there's a word for it.

Diatryma, after unknitting per Elliot and Naomi, I managed to pick up the probably-dropped stitch, doing exactly what you described (and thank you for that description!), but now I have one too many stitches. So maybe it wasn't dropped at all. I'm really not quite sure WHAT I did.

On the other hand, nobody is going to notice if a potholder or washcloth is a little uneven.

Right?

<sheepish look>

Cassy B: You're actually attempting to knit at a higher level (achievement unlocked!) than is really necessary for your current project. WHich is good! But it's not that you're awful, it's that you have good taste, if you see what I mean.

As long as you don't gain ten stitches all of a sudden and make the thing fan-shaped your washcloth will be very forgiving. :->

In my opinion, the hardest part of learning to knit is the time it takes to gain muscle memory: so your fingers learn how to knit without you having to devote processor time to WATCHING them knit. And for geeks it's particularly bad trying to get through that period with your brain going "this isn't hard, why am I screwing it up?" Because you don't have the muscle memory yet, that's why ...

If you want to take it back down from 51 stitches to 50 (in no way required, but it might amuse you), then somewhere in the middle of the piece, instead of a normal knit stitch, put your needle through TWO about-to-be-knit stitches, pretend it's one stitch, and knit it. This is known as a decrease, specifically a knit-two-together, or a k2tog in pattern parlance.

Elliot Mason@139, Ah, good. Simple fix. I *like* simple fixes. (You can tell I'm a geek (or maybe a little OCD); I not only counted my initial stitches, I count every single finished row...)

AKICIML. I have an email friend who has a son with high functioning autism. He completed a college degree in history in 2012 and is having trouble finding permanent employment. He has been working as a substitute custodian for a school system for some months now.

Now, finding a job in the current economy is not easy for someone with a BA in history anyway, so the HFA may or may not be in play. I've never met the young man, so can't speak to his social skills, but his mom says he has done well with small-scale leadership in church-related activities. But he's been called in for interviews several times for permanent positions doing what he's currently doing, and he thinks the interview goes well, but he's not getting any offers.

I'm in search of resources I could pass on to them about job search, interviewing, etc., likely to be of particular applicability to a person with HFA, or any tips anyone can offer.

Thanks.

Naomi, Elliott, and Diatryma, THANK you all individually and collectively; I undid it again (fortunately it was only about 10 stitches before I noticed something was funky), reknit it again... and this time it came out to 50 stitches.

I *still* don't know where the extra stitch came from, but it seems to have vanished whence it came.

(1-1/2" completed so far!)

I now return you to your regularly scheduled Open thread, already in progress.

Cassy @140 and 142 - At a guess, you got the yarn over a needle as you were knitting a stitch, and then treated that yarn-over as a new stitch and knitted it on the next row. This is the next most popular failure mode, after dropped stitches, among the people I've taught.

Andrew Plotkin @111, Mongoose @multiple: I tried making the gingerbread with all molasses (not trusting our supplies of syrup) and all the powdered ginger we had, which was more than the recipe but still not enough based on tasting it right out of the oven because of course I don't have enough patience to let it cool. It is tasty; I imagine it would be even better with the addition of chopped candied ginger, because one can hardly ever have enough ginger.

My guess for the extra stitch is that you had the yarn on the wrong side of the needle when you started a row, so instead of having one loop on the needle, you had what looked like two loops, and you treated them both as a stitch. It's what I was warned against and what I've caught myself almost doing.

Heck, I have a scarf where I've taken out a repeat of the pattern and reknit it, counting every single row, and I'm still coming up with the wrong number at a point where it matters greatly. [mutters about the deities of knitting not helping]

OtterB #141: But he's been called in for interviews several times for permanent positions doing what he's currently doing, and he thinks the interview goes well, but he's not getting any offers.

That may not be the autism, as I'm hearing it's typical for most job searchers these days. Too many people chasing too few jobs!

iamnothing, #73: 6:00 might be a little early for me, since I have to be in the dealer room until closing. Apart from that, I think either Thursday or Friday would work. Also, you can add KeithS to the list -- he hasn't been around much of late, but he's room-splitting with us and I'll bring him along. My partner is less likely, as he often has to do paperwork at the end of the day.

GlendaP @76: TA for that information.

Lee @148: That's why I said a bit after 6:00 pm :) how much time will you need? I imagine we'll all meet at the Convention Center since most people will still be there.

I personally favor Friday, since Thursday is Music Night. What about everybody else?

attending the GoL:

iamnothing
Paula Helm Murray
Christopher Davis
Skwid and wife
Lin Daniel
Fragano Ledgister and Gail
Michael I
David Goldfarb
GlendaP
Lee
KeithS

The maybes are:

joann
Tom Whitmore
Serge Broom

I'm also not sure about Bill Stewart.

Generous Large River gift card birthday gifts have enabled me to place a big order including several SF/F books, an historical fiction that I'm sure my roommate had at some point but then donated it somewhere, a book of ice cream recipes, one called "Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses", two jelly roll pans, a cooling rack and a drop spindle. Yay! For generous Large River gift cards!

That order was brought to you by half a bottle of Tempranillo and the sense of well-being that only a freezer full of meat and no fewer than three different cheeses in the cheese drawer can bring you.

Subsisting on diet of pasta, pizza, and gelato. Cannot last much longer.

Andrew Plotkin @121

The description in the book has some underlying science, going back to Archimedes. Both the lead and the cork will displace air, but different amounts

Density of Lead 11340 kg/m³

Density of Cork 250 kg/m³

Density of Air 1.25 kg/m³

Lets assume a liter of cork. That's 250g, and it displaces 1.25g of air

There's about a 45:1 density difference so we have a more than 1g difference in the buoyancy effect, which would be within the plausible limits of a scientific balance of the 1840s

I'm not sure how to figure air trapped in the cork. Maybe the time needed for it to escape is long enough to show an observable effect. Seeing the cork outweigh the lead for a minute or two some a reasonable prediction, but it depends on how fast the pressure drops.

So the science is there, but I would reckon the described experiment is pretty dodgy and aren't the authors lucky that none of their readers have the facilities to conduct the experiment.

Dave Harmon @147, I also think that's possible, that it's not that he's doing anything "wrong" in the interviews but just the way the job market runs.

I'm not sure what tickles me more: Casting Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower, or Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan.

OtterB @ 141

Here's what I've found helpful.

Working on "the goal is to sell yourself, not to answer questions as completely as possible." (I, like many people on the autism spectrum, find this really hard.)

Working on thinking through beforehand "what is this person likely to want."

For me, the most helpful thing was to have real-feeling mock interviews. Campus career services can often arrange those. The key thing is that most people want to do mock interviews mostly to practice; I needed to do mock interviews to get feedback, and then think about that feedback and practice it and get more feedback. (That meant that multiple mock interviews with the same person, and that person being willing and knowledgeable enough to give very specific feedback in a form that I could put into my thinking, was important.) I also needed fairly specific interviews, so that I could practice the "what does this person want to know." Another thing that is helpful is trying (and it's still hard for me) to learn to tell whether the person to whom you are talking wants you to keep talking, or has heard all they need for now.

It occurs to me that it might well be possible to do the lead-cork thing with a block of pine that's been finished and painted with a latex-based paint.

Pine is on the order of 700 kg/m^3. A 10-cm-on-a-side block will weigh about 700 grams and displace a liter of air (as above, ~ 1.25g). Then you just need enough lead to weigh 0.5 g more than the block and a decent vacuum pump.

Allow me to let my molasses freak flag fly. (It's an heirloom; belonged to my father before me.)

"Golden Syrup" can mean a lot of things; here in the southern US it generally means golden cane syrup, which is made from cane sugar, before it's cooked down to the point that sugar begins to condense out. Steen's is one of the brands still available; you may also, in smaller southern stores, especially in rural areas, see ribbon cane syrup; ribbon cane is a sugar cane variant. It tends to be a small-batch, locally produced craft product, unlike corn syrup. In the UK, "Golden Syrup" seems to be pretty much the same thing, and if the Big Doodling Search Engine can be relied upon, Tate & Lyles is the big-name brand.

Molasses in the US is the end-product of sugar-making from sugar cane; it's a dark-colored product, and the longer it's been cooked the darker it is, until you get down to blackstrap molasses, which doesn't have much sugar left in it and can be used as a dietary supplement for humans, or in cattle feed. Wikipedia does not believe that treacle and molasses are quite the same thing, but as they come from the same plant and out of the same process of sugar refining, I will assume they can be substituted for each other--molasses will have a darker, more caramelized flavor than golden cane syrup. (For extra Geek Points, let me note that 'treacle' comes from theriac.) In folk medicine, a mixture of sulfur and molasses performs the same function as one of brimstone and treacle.

In the midsouth, including the Ozarks, where sugar cane is less common as a crop (unless global warming changes that) you will see sorghum molasses. These have a distinct flavor which is not the same as sugar cane molasses, but is equally tasty in baking, barbecue sauce, and on hot (southern-style) biscuits. They are also generally a small-batch, local producer item. I know from talking with my mother and aunts that molasses (sugar or sorghum) were used a lot in baking during World War II to deal with sugar rationing, although these were less effective in coffee and tea. I don't know how the rationing board looked on them, but as sorghum, and in some cases cane syrup were often small-batch farm-to-market products, they may have slid past under the official radar, the way small bee-keeping operations could.

I notice that I am compelled to write and speak of 'molasses' as a plural, although 'treacle' remains singular

fidelio @158 I notice that I am compelled to write and speak of 'molasses' as a plural

My father used to quote what I assume was an old southern joke about "How can I have mo-lasses when I ain't had no-lasses yet?"

OtterB @159. So did my father (and his brothers).

Xopher @ 107 ...
Dammit. Elizabeth Peters is dead.

Damnations!

(also, por favor -- warning of links through to facebook, for those of us that would really rather not go there, and prefer to avoid, rather than spend time cleaning up).

It's interesting, perusing "Endless Amusement" (Project Gutenberg copy from 1847) further, that the author(s) appear to subscribe to the classical elemental theory of matter, describing, for instance, the operation of gunpowder as primarily an interaction between aqueous and aerial humours:

Gunpowder being a principal ingredient in fire-works, it will not be improper to give a short definition of its strange explosive force, and cause of action, which, according to Dr. Shaw's opinion of the chemical cause of the explosive force of gunpowder, is as follows:—"Each grain of gunpowder consisting of a certain proportion of sulphur, nitre, and coal, the coal presently taking fire, upon contact of the smallest spark; at which time both the sulphur and the nitre immediately melt, and by means of the coal interposed between them, burst into flame; which spreading from grain to grain, propagates the same effect almost instantaneously, whence the whole mass of powder comes to be fired; and as nitre contains a large proportion both of air and water, which are now violently rarefied by the heat, a kind of fiery explosive blast is thus produced, wherein the nitre seems, by its aqueous and aërial parts, to act as bellows to the other inflammable bodies (sulphur and coal) to blow them into a flame, and carry off their whole substance in smoke and vapour."

The first, or one of the first, editions of Endless Amusement was written in 1821. Lavoisier had invented modern elemental chemistry by 1790. I suppose a 30 year lag in scientific knowledge isn't too bad. Of course, the copy I'm quoting from is an edition from more than 25 years later; you'd think they might have revised it, modern chemistry being over 50 years old at the time. I've tried to look up "Dr. Shaw", but all I come across are quotes from various editions of "Endless Amusement".

An ISP shuts down its secure mail service.

The claim is that it is no longer possible to promise to safeguard the privacy of your users in the United States.

I don't know anything about Lavabit. I know several of the people involved in Silent Circle, and they are smart, well-intentioned people who know what they're doing. I haven't dug into their reasons for getting rid of their secure email scheme, though--end-to-end encrypted email is old technology, and in fact some of the top people at Silent Circle worked on PGP, which was a widespread program for doing end-to-end encrypted email.

I think the business implications of this sort of thing are going to be pretty ugly for some US internet companies. As I said earlier talking about Google, I'm willing to believe (based on what I've read and heard, notably the EFF "who's got your back" report) that companies like Google will honestly try to preserve their users' privacy. But the laws of the US apparently don't permit any promise to be made about that--there can be secret court orders from secret courts based on secret laws and secret legal opinions[1] which require you to spy on your users, and not to disclose the fact that you're spying on your users.

The only workaround for this is probably to simply arrange your operations so that you do not ever have any information that could be seized profitably. If you collect information on your users for benign purposes, that information can be demanded from you for malign purposes. (Or really for any purposes--how would you know how they're being used? Congressmen on the intelligence oversight committees have been blindsided by some of the revelations from Snowden's leaks.) If you never have the information in the first place, you're in a better position--now someone has to pass a law and force you to change your operations to collect that information if they want it.

[1] I know this sounds like I'm piling it on for effect, but honestly, this isn't an exaggeration. You really can get a secret order issued by a secret court, whose justification is based on case law and legal opinions that are also secret.

gnomed

It's much higher level than necessary for washcloth work, but a friend of mine who does more complicated patterns will periodically run a strand of cheap yarn through through a row of knitting. Usually between repeats in a pattern. That way, if she finds she made a serious mistake and needs to rip back, she can just rip back, instead of tinking, and have it stop on the safety line instead of accidentally ripping too far.

Fade Manley @164, can you expound on this a little?

I'm the sort of person who invented (I'm sure it's been independently invented elsewhere, but I'd not heard of the technique) a method for reducing crossstitch counting mistakes, after a miscount cost me a week of work; I vowed it would never happen again. (And pulling out cross-stitch thread often leaves tiny threadlets of color behind, which is infuriating.) You makes a grid with monofiliment fishing line on the linen before you start cross-stitching, so you can see mistakes in placement; monofiliment line can be easily slid right out of the pattern when completed and will NEVER snag or leave color behind.

Does she thread the stop-yarn along a needle through the loops, before she knits another row? (How? With a large-eyed sewing needle?) Or does she somehow knit it in?

And when it turns out thankfully not to have been necessary, how does she remove it without harming the work? (I'm actually contemplating monofiliment fishing line again....)

If I can figure out how to apply this trick, it will remove about 3/4 of the stress from knitting. This would be a Good Thing, since knitting is supposed to be a stress-reliever, not a stress-inflicter.

(Note that I'm still such a novice that I haven't actually successfully purled. Don't worry; I have some helpful-looking videos bookmarked for when I get up the nerve to try it...)

Cassy B, I wish I could, but I've only seen it done and had it explained to me, not done it myself. But as near as I can tell, it's something like this:

For a full row of stitches--ideally a really simple row, like a full row of knit stitches--you thread a piece of yarn in a clearly contrasting color through the whole row. (I'm not sure if she runs it along her needles somehow, or just sticks it through with a tapestry needle after every few stitches.) It's basically going through the loop where your needle does when the row is sitting on your needles, so it's acting like a needle left in the row. And because it's a contrasting color, you can knit the next row on top without accidentally picking up and binding in the contrasting thread.

So every five or ten rows or what not, you'll have this Other Yarn just hanging there. Something long enough that there's a few inches hanging over on each edge, and it won't just slip out accidentally, but not so long it's going to make a mess of tangles.

If you need to rip down to that row, you rip down while keeping hold of the contrasting yarn so it won't get jostled out, and it acts like the yarn is sitting on needles. Just...very soft, flexible needles. Then you thread your needles back along the, er, thread, and start up again as if you had just gotten to that row.

If you don't need to rip down, then when you finish your piece (or after you've inserted another emergency line to rip to, and are sure what's below it is fine), you just pull carefully on one end, and it all slips out. Because it's just running through a single line of loops, without being bound into the rest of the piece. If it gets a little stuck, you can pick it out stitch by stitch with a crochet hook, because with two loose ends and no effect on the fabric of the work, it's just sort of...sitting in there.

Does that help any? I kinda want to wave my hands and draw diagrams, but that's hard in text.

fidelio @158, that's fascinating! I'm now curious to look around for some local syrup/molasses, but fear that Michigan is a wee bit too far north (I think we may have sugar beets, though).

I hadn't heard of theriac before; that's nifty. And I feel compelled to note that 'molasses' does not even remotely parse as plural for me. This must be a regional dialect thing?

HLN: Local human went to local bookstore and bought Howl (for research) and a collection of Robert Frost (because browsing it was causing them to rhyme their text messages), then suggested to Cashier-type Person that the bookstore might want to sell some Jim C Hines books, as a Michigan Author They Do Not Currently Stock. Local human suspects that they are bookstore-ing in the neighborhood of correctly.

estelendur @ 168: What kind of research?

I am feeling quite chipper and adventurous -- there's a set of yeast-dough-based homemade cinnamon rolls in my oven, happily perking away in clouds of steam (caused by tossing cupfuls of water into a baking pan sitting on the bottom of the oven). There is the other half-ish of the dough recipe waiting on the counter puffing nicely to become spherical savory rolls.

Because I'm making cinnaswirls and not just what the recipe recommends, cooking times are approximate; I'm checking about every 10min (and adding more steam).

Smells amazing in there.

For those interested, you make yeast-dough-based cinnaswirls by taking a sufficient quantity of the dough (after its first rising and before its second) and make it into as flat and thin a rectangle as you can manage; I like a 3/1 aspect ratio or thereabouts. If you can get it almost the full size of a sheet pan and quite thin that's lovely. Then you take a bowlful of cinnamon-and-sugar, mixed (I like it heavier on the brown than the white), and sprinkle evenly and heavily on MOST of the rectangle's surface, leaving about an inch along one long end unsprinkled. Dab water on that bare part, then start rolling up the rectangle from the opposite long end towards the bewetted one (the water helps it stick shut). I like to squidge the log a bit more to even it out and lengthen slightly (this helps drive the flavor mix into the dough a little). Then get a nice sharp knife and cut off .5-1" sections, depositing each flat into an oil-sprayed muffin tin opening (or, of course, a paper liner).

Then you let them have their second rise in the muffin tins before popping them into an oven and baking as the recipe recommends.

Update: now they're cooked and smell so good; I needs must wait until I am not biting into lava. WAITING IS HARD.

Fade, Cassy: That's called a lifeline, for obvious reasons. I would not ever EVER use monofilament nylon for anything other than fishing, because it's so much stronger than the other fibers being used. If you tug wrong, you will destroy your ground fabric. Moreover, if you're not careful, you will change the tension of the stitches on top of the nylon. If you're worried about lint on your fabric, I suggest using a single ply of rayon in a similar color. (Dark gray on black, light gray or beige on white, etc.) Rayon doesn't shed as much as cotton, though I've never had a problem with it. You can also remove the grid as you go, once you're sure you've done the pattern right--so you don't need the extreme slipperiness of the nylon. (OTOH, my personal method for fixing counted cross stitch mistakes is ignoring them completely. OTGH: no stitching/knitting police. If it bugs you, fix it; but if not, not.)

The other Sekrit Trick to lifelines is to be very utterly absolutely 100% sure that you don't split the working yarn with your lifeline. For this reason, I use those huge blunt plastic needles.

/ex-LNS employee who apparently continues to hold views

John A Arkansawyer @168, I'm doing a year-long thesis on a topic* pertinent to the development of countercultural and subcultural streams and forces in American culture, particularly over the last decade or so. But of course, in order to talk about where culture went, I have to know where it came from, and the Beats** are a large part of that history. Although the bulk of my thesis is possibly/hopefully going to derive from oral interviews with people who currently consider themselves outside the mainstream of American culture, I have a long list of things to read.

*This is one of those things where I will not know the topic until I have practically finished writing the paper, I imagine.
**I ought to read On The Road at some point, but I do have limited reading time (and find Ginsberg more instinctively appealing than Kerouac)

Elliot Mason @170: oooh. I wonder if one could use sourdough starter as the dough base, thereby creating a more interesting/savory cinnamon experience... *plots*

I'd probably use pearl cotton in a size that's smaller than the yarn. I have a piece of my mother's knitting with a lifeline; she used sewing thread in a contrasting color.
The important thing is that it shouldn't want to Become One With The Knitting Yarn.

Cassy @#166: I'm in the middle of the first project I've ever done that I'm using that kind of grid on*, and I did mine in bright red sewing thread and am stitching right over it. This is viable because it's 2 strands of floss over 25-ct linen, and every square has a stitch. Fishing line would scare me for the reasons TexAnne mentions, but I think her idea of rayon would be great--especially the stuff they sell on great big spools for machine embroidery. You'd go years without running out, for one thing.

*: A reproduction of Waterhouse's "Boreas". I can't die till I finish it, so I figure I'm good till...111 or so?

In reading here and there, I came across the concept promoted by some group or other of southwest native americans who make rugs (navaho? hopi? I don't remember and it's not relevant). The rug makers put a single contrasting bit of yarn in their rugs to make sure the rugs are never perfect. The rationale is that only the gods are perfect.

So every time I make an ignorable mistake (one that won't trash the pattern), I am pleased to tell myself that I'm not in any way challenging the gods.

Cinnamon rolls accomplished and nommed upon; perhaps a tad less crust would be better, next time (less clouds of steam, or a slightly shorter bake time), but I enjoy them greatly as it is. I have an inordinate fondness for crust, and am very pleased that this recipe can provide it.

Fiction recommendation: if you like Jeeves and Wooster, I have found an author on An Archive Of Our Own who can write simply topping Bertie pastiche at a level I had not thought possible. The best one so far for imitative dialogue that I have found is Jeeves and the Secret of Service (caution: contains explicit m/m sex, if that's a problem). Less plummily wonderful, but also less explicit and with an SF plot: Jeeves and the Hole in Time, which features lovely scenes of J&W being forced to confront Our Modern Life.

Fade Manley @167; your explanation makes perfect sense even without diagrams. Thank you. I can *do* this. (SO much less stressful, having a backstop. I shall have to try it tonight.)

Elliott: your links are broken.

Cally: Argh, ack, thank you. The cloverleaf key on the left side of my keyboard has utterly given up the ghost, and all my cut-and-paste reflexes use it. I'm trying to retrain my muscles to use the one on the RIGHT side of my keyboard, or failing that to right-click, but.

Jeeves and the Secret of Service (explicit sex scenes that can be skipped past)
Jeeves and the Hole in Time

Cassy @177: It may also help to remember that every single decorative technique in knitting I have ever heard of is easily performable by mistake when one is first learning. So later when you're up to it, you only have to do them again on purpose in a pattern and Bob is your mother's brother, as they say.

(Good gracious, I've been reading a lot of Woosterian verbiage of late, eh what? It's beginning to leak out my pores and puddle like a thingummy)

Cally in #116:

Best I can tell, Endless Amusement* first appeared in 1818 in England. It went through at least seven editions. I think the first American publication was 1847, which may be the one you are looking at. 1820 edition here.

I looked at that demonstration with approval, it being one of the Wonders of the Air Pump that doesn't end with glass shards flying around the parlor. Didn't really have enough time to prepare, nor decent equipment for it. I wonder whether something might be done with a vacuum cleaner?

I did recognize that it would not work unless the bit of lead and the cork were very carefully matched.

Dave Bell in 153:

...but I would reckon the described experiment is pretty dodgy

As was pointed out in the talk Todd Johnson and I gave at Musecon last Saturday, the dodginess of the book's experiments adds a whole new layer of amusement to Endless Amusement.

and aren't the authors lucky that none of their readers have the facilities to conduct the experiment.

Oh, the anonymous authors definitely expect that (some of) their readers will have the facilties:

We shall not occupy the time of our readers by describing the form and nature of the air-pump; since those persons whose circumstances will enable them to have it, can purchase it properly made at an optician's, at less expense, and with far less trouble, than they can construct, or cause it to be constructed, themselves.

The reader is also presumed to have ready access to such household items as aqua regia, sugar of lead, Glauber's Spirits of Nitre, brimstone, blue vitriol, and small Aleppo galls, slightly bruised.

Why opticians of 1820 peddled Air Pumps remains a mystery to me.

* Endless Amusement, A Collection Of Nearly 400 Entertaining Experiments in Various Branches of Science, Including Acoustics, Arithmetic, Chemistry, Electricity, Hydraulics, Hydrostatics, Magnetism, Mechanics, Optics, Wonders of the Air Pump, All the Popular Tricks and Changes of the Cards, &c., &c., &c. To Which Is Added, a Complete System of Pyrotechny; or the Art of making Fireworks. The Whole so clearly explained as to be within the reach of the most limited Capacity. Second Edition, with Considerable Alterations and Improvements.

Fidelio @158; Estelendur @168, molasses to me is neither singular nor plural; it's indefinite, like water or milk. It parses, to me, as "how much" rather than "how many". I'd only say "a molasses" as a shortcut for "A (type of) molasses."

What is the proper term for things which, like water, are neither singular or plural (unless one is in a poetical frame of mind, in which case one can rhapsodise about the waters...)?

My, what a clumsy sentence that was. Ah, well.

Things like water and milk are "mass nouns", as distinct from "count nouns" like dogs and trees.

Carrie S @182, Thank you. I knew there must be a term for it (and that I probably even knew that term), but I was grasping for the word and coming back with handfuls of nothing. So frustrating.

So much appreciated!

Cassy B. @#126:

Ouch, that is bad, from the link title alone. I can't click that link - I appreciate the trigger warning. Of course, then I ran across something else near the bottom of the comments on Charlie Stross's "Who ordered *that*?" post on his website. And made the mistake of reading.

Big flashing neon trigger warning here.

Barbarism, indeed.

I did not and cannot watch the videos in that link, and I'm having a hell of a time holding it together here. Cute Overload helps. A bit.

If this happened to my wife/daughter/mother in law/friend?

Gnarr, there are not words for this level of anger and despair.

Oh, and NFL bans most bags from games.

To heck with this. I'm officially more scared of the security measures than the security risks.

And something that is a mass noun in one language may be a count noun in another. When I first started learning Italian, I was intrigued to discover that "spaghetti" (and indeed most other words meaning types of pasta) is not a mass noun in Italian, but a plural count noun. Not that you'd ever hear an Italian speaker talking about "un spaghetto", any more than an English speaker would talk about "a scissor" or "a bagpipe".

...gah, and if they *did* talk about a singular "spaghetto" it would be "uno" and not "un". Sorry. Half asleep, obviously.

You do get fashion designers discussing "a pant", like "This is a flat-front pant with welt pockets" or whatever.

I'm pretty sure you can say "un pantalón" in Spanish for what in English would be a pair of pants. I've certainly heard native speakers saying it, but it may be some kind of local dialect thing.

cajunfj40 @ #184: So, if you don't want to have backscatter photos/patdowns, don't fly.

If you don't want to have public, unsafe [name of technique redacted] searches, don't drive.

If you don't want to be shot in your own driveway, don't leave the house.

What next?

Estelendur in #168:

This anecdote may be relevant, not only to your concern with the history of the counterculture, but also your concern with agricultural products of Michigan.

It's not every day I converse with someone who needs to be informed of this incident as much as you do.

re: "a pant"

We get "a pair of pants" because in the dim mists of time, one pant was one leg. The two overlapped in the back and were joined in the front with a codpiece, named because you could keep your fish there on the way home from angling (or the market).

The feet of the wiki say cod run 11-26#, so that can't be right.

Never mind.

The mental image of a man with a fish in his codpiece caused me to guffaw so loudly that I got a funny look from the cat.

estelendur @ 172: I'd also strongly recommend picking up Go, by John Clellon Holmes. He's lesser-known and was more with the Beats than of them, but--or maybe therefore--he's essential to understanding them. If you can find his essays via interlibrary loan--all those books are out of print and I suspect they aren't too cheap, though I'd be pleased to be surprised--you'll find a lot of interest in Representative Men and Passionate Opinions.

Essential reading from the latter: This Is The Beat Generation.

"Pants" (or, in my British-influenced idiolect, "trousers") is a singular word in Dutch: broek. "Glasses" is as well: bril

Using plural verbs with them is one of the markers of an imperfectly Dutchified Anglophone. Needless to say, I do it a lot.

Abi #195: Once more into the breech?

mongoose @#193, me too, but it's actually from a word meaning a bag or husk, as in "peascod" (pea-pod).

The scumbag Putinite neo-Nazis have released another video of them tormenting another innocent kid (a gay 15-year-old). Whether these are the same ones who tortured a different kid to death doesn't really matter; this kid doesn't have much hope of survival. Closeted with a homophobic father, he's now been humiliated on camera and exposed to the world.

Too late to put that genie back in the bottle; hoping spreading it may help raise public outrage. The page linked below discusses what they did, and why (apparently they claim they're trying to stop pedophiles, but doing that by torturing the victims makes that an implausible motive; they're just looking for someone to make miserable, and they know they won't be punished for doing it to a gay kid).

I haven't watched the actual video. I didn't make it all the way down the stills, they're so upsetting.

New this time: apparently there's a woman on this one, urging the men to murder the kid.

There might not be physical torture on this one. Maybe it scared them when they killed that other kid. The Russian authorities are now saying that if they catch anyone they'll put them in jail for 3 months. Considering that you get 5 years for shooting a cat in Russia, 3 months for torturing a child doesn't seem like much to me.

You all know I lost friends and coworkers on 9/11, right? And that I had horrific torture-murder fantasies directed at Osama bin Laden? And that I still want every member of Al Qaeda dead?

I want these bastards dead at least as much as I do AQ. And those horrific fantasies are haunting my brain again.

After all that, perhaps this is redundant, but: TRIGGER WARNING for upsetting descriptions of tormenting a young kid. Latest video released by evil motherfuckers who should die.

Oh, and in today's press conference, POTUS said "No one is more offended than me" about Russia's anti-gay laws. With respect, Mr. President, bullshit. You're not even as "offended" as me, let alone gays in Russia, who are now at constant risk of being kidnapped and torture-murdered, now that everyone knows the authorities aren't going to take any serious action.

For abi's son...

"You must witness the girth of my improbable genius before I apply it to your death."
"Pushing us into lava is an act of genius now?"

So responds Atomic Robo to the very evil and very dim Dr. Dinosaur in the 2nd issue of "Atomic Robo and the Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur".

(By the way, did your son see the animated "Robo"?)

Lila @#190:
What next?
I don't know. I can't think about it anymore today.
Be well.

Lila @ 197: many thanks - didn't know that, even though I was familiar with the word "peascod". I'd never put the two together in my head.

Xopher Halftongue @ 198: I don't know if this is also happening in America, but there is certainly a petition going round in the UK asking our government to boycott the Winter Olympics. I signed it partly because I think it's an effective form of protest, and partly because I don't want LGBT athletes to be put in the position where they're forced to choose between participating and being exposed to risk, or not participating and possibly harming their career. Nobody should have to face a choice like that.

I have been gnomed... now I need to keep my promise of a tasty gluten-free recipe. But not tonight, dear gnomes; can you wait till breakfast?

TexAnne @171: Lifeline! That's the word I was looking for! Thank you. I dimly recalled that one wanted a Different Type Of Yarn, as well as a different color, but couldn't remember why that was the case. Makes perfect sense when you explain it.

It's late, but I've changed my mind. I recall that my favourite gluten-free recipe has an anecdote attached to it, and I can never resist a good anecdote.

I have quite a number of friends who are professional singers specialising in baroque and early music. One of them in particular is an outstanding tenor who sings all over the world, and I try to get to his concerts when I can. For reasons I may explain at a later stage but don't want to clutter this post with now, when I go to a concert I bring some baking.

Well, Star Tenor happened to be one of the soloists in a concert performed by one of the UK's best-known early music ensembles in... for the protection of the innocent, let's just say a charming city in the Benelux region. Star Tenor is extremely fond of chocolate, and I had an inspiration about this. I had a recipe for a very frou-frou chocolate meringue creation, and it occurred to me that I could make the constituent parts and assemble it at the venue. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility to schlep a box of carefully packed meringue bases and a bag of chocolate custard on the Eurostar, but I would not have fancied my chances with the assembled meringue.

However, I didn't know the venue and I wasn't sure whether there would be anywhere I could do this last-minute assembling, so I did the sensible thing and e-mailed the ensemble. They knew who I was, having tucked into my chocolate lemon caramel shortbread on a previous occasion, so it wasn't as if I was just some crazy person contacting them out of nowhere.

I got a reply. A very panicky reply, from the maestro himself. He begged me not to bring the meringue, although I was perfectly welcome to bake something else. His reasoning? He was afraid that his musicians would drop it all over the venue, make a terrible mess, and never be asked back. I had no idea they were such messy eaters.

Well, we must not frighten famous early music maestros with meringue, so I assured him I would bake something else, and I did. This was it. May you, and the gnomes, enjoy it as much as the musicians did!

Rich Chocolate Cake

For cake:

175g (6 oz) plain chocolate
125g (4 oz) butter
125g (4 oz) caster sugar
200g (7 oz) ground almonds
4 eggs, separated

For topping:

75g (3 oz) plain chocolate
50g (2 oz) butter

Preheat oven to 180C/350F/gas mark 4.

Line base of round 22 cm cake tin and brush with melted butter. Melt chocolate.

Cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Stir in ground almonds, egg yolks and melted chocolate. Beat together.

Whisk egg whites until stiff and fold into chocolate mixture. Pour into tin and bake for 50-55 minutes until firm to the touch.

Leave for a few minutes, then turn onto a wire rack and leave to cool.

Melt chocolate and butter together for topping. Spread on top of cake, allowing it to run down the sides. Decorate as desired.

A friend posted this insightful essay -- The Fake Church vs the Real Church -- on his F/B feed. Applies to non-Christians, too.

Xopher @96: Flagstones, of course. Why my brain refused to cough up that word...

Mongoose (186): I've heard Long Islanders ask for 'a scissor'. Takes me aback every time.

Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey @191: *falls over laughing* Indeed, vital to my intellectual explorations!

John A Arkansawyer @194, thank you :) *adds to reading list*

Lila @197: That's arguably even more amusing.

Xopher Halftongue @198: I haven't anything coherent to say, except that I hope that every one of these bastards gets what they deserve, on all levels.

Tracie @205: Yes. Appreciated by this non-Christian, whose church did talk about Trayvon Martin (the message was "all of us here have some kind of privilege in this matter. Know that our job is not to try to fix it; our job is to support, and to listen, and to be humble enough to learn." Surprising, and good to hear.)

Bill Higgins - Beam Jockey @191: That's fabulous! I immediately turned around and sent it to my dad and a couple of my best friends who will also appreciate the laugh. (:

Mongoose @201: You've just helped something click in my brain. A lot of people are talking about how boycotting the Sochi Olympics isn't fair to those athletes that have trained all their lives, this is their only shot, etc. And frankly, they're right - it isn't fair to the queer athletes who've trained just as hard to be told that their options are to either go and pretend to be someone they're not, and hope they don't get hurt or killed anyway, or to stay home and give up on their dream because we've chosen to hold the Olympics in a place that does everything it can to deny their humanity, up to and including beating them to death for the simple truth of their existence. I do love how the implication of that argument (the 'we can't boycott, think of the athletes!' argument, not yours) is that it would be tragic for the straight athletes to not get the chance to compete. (It's probably an obvious point, but sometimes my brain fails to notice the obvious.)

Xopher @198: It feels sort of horrifically inadequate on my part, but I'm sorry, both for your loss on 9/11 and the way that this bullshit is bringing all of those similar feelings up all over again. To steal a line from the DF threads: Reading, witnessing.

Want to have a better day? Read this story.

SamChevre @156 Thanks, I'll pass that on.

Teresa's Particle about having bodies is NOT by Elizabeth Bear; it's by Hanne Blank, from here: http://www.hanneblank.com/blog/2011/06/23/real-women/

Bear's Tumblr style doesn't make it obvious where quotes begin and end, but she did attribute it correctly at the bottom.

Serge Broom with Robbie the Robot at a showing of "Forbidden Planet" at George RR Martin's Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe

Having the Crl Drg thread pop back up and seeing mention of the Michigan Militia in it made this come into mind:

Nearly four years ago, I was waiting in a downtown Iowa City garage for my car to be pronounced terminal when I struck up a conversation with another waitee. He, it turned out, was the nephew of Viola Liuzzo, one of the civil rights martyrs killed at Selma. He told me there'd recently been a documentary made about her murder, Home of the Brave. Once I got home, I looked it up online and discovered it was available for purchase for public showing on very reasonable terms and I ordered it.

It sat round my house while I waited for the right time to show it. I never did watch it myself; I wanted to see it for the first time with others. When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, passed in the aftermath of bloody Selma, I knew the time had come and I scheduled a showing last month at church. It was not the movie I'd expected. When it was over, I had learned that one of Liuzzo's five children had become a reclusive racist and another had joined the Michigan Militia.

The slugline for the movie was "Heroism exacts a total price". Until I'd seen the wreckage from Liuzzo's murder, those beautiful children from the old footage having gone through the horror of losing their mother, then seeing her slimed and smeared by J. Edgar Hoover's compliant media tools, I had no idea what that line really meant. "a total price". That murder has just kept on killing and killing. God knows what will be visited on the next generation of that family. It's just too awful to think about.

Just to note: The web site linked to in Jim's "Fukushima Vegetables" Diffraction now has a partial retraction up.

Waaaaay back up near the beginning of the thread, Jim MacDonald asked what type of server error I was getting; it wasn't a message. It was taking forever to submit and then timing out. I honestly have no clue if what I had in my comment had anything to do with it but I didn't feel it was important enough to really worry about.

HLN: Local woman travels to Boston and Maine for a wedding. "Maine is remarkably pretty. The areas we drove through looked just like the picture postcards." She was bowled over by the Boston Public Library's McKim building. "The lions! The reading room! The John Singer Sargent* murals! I love the phrase carved across the top of one facade: 'FOUNDED THROUGH THE MUNIFICENCE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT OF CITIZENS'. I should like to see more of that attitude today," she said heatedly.

"What I don't understand, is why that beautiful courtyard with its dancing fountain isn't jammed with people on such a lovely summer day," she mused. She was also struck by the card catalog still in use on the 3rd floor.

She is going to miss lobster rolls.

*He was having a lot of fun with Egyptian imagery in the "Oh, I'm just illustrating the old testament here!" section, wasn't he?

Because there was a smoke detector discussion on the previous open thread:

HLN Report: Area woman awakened two nights running at mumble-o-clock by smoke detector going off inappropriately. On the first night, area woman reports the detector silencing itself after about 10 seconds. But on the second night, she had to smack it with her hand to shut it up. After the third such rude awakening, she was obliged to disconnect its power to save the remains of the night's sleep.

"The Handyguys Podcast suggests vacuuming, in case the detector was set off by dust," she reports. "I'm going to try that, and maybe blowing it out with compressed air." She expressed cautious optimism about putting the detector back in service this afternoon.

(Area woman would also like to thank Leah Miller @19 for brightening up her life and her Boulder/Longmont commute, which is just about the length of one episode of Welcome to Night Vale.)

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little #218:

Did Area Woman's alarm go full-on, or just chirp? (If the latter, it is usually because it is complaining that its battery is getting low. For some reason, this happens only at owl-fart-thirty. And yes, AC-powered alarms also have batteries in, for some perverse reason.)

joann, maybe the "perverse reason" is that a) fires can happen when the grid power is out and/or b) fires can take out the AC?

I work at a university library, and had been out for a week because I hurt my wrist and subsequently could perform zero actual job duties. I came back in today, and lo, the universe hath rewarded me, for what should I find among the returns but a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus?

It's an art piece of incomparable beauty*, and I hadn't imagined that I would ever get to page through a physical copy. I'm almost sad that I have to send it off to its proper place in the stacks.

*While one may find other things more beautiful, one certainly can't compare it to any of them ;) the Voynich Manuscript being the obvious potential exception

#218, 220, 221

In the Department of Bad Design submissions:

My smoke detectors go off noisily when the power comes back on after being off for a while. Not just a battery-low chirp.

Just what one really wants to be waked up to learn.

#220 - Joann I find myself deeply grateful for the term owl-fart-thirty and plan on using it to make my brother snort coffee out his nose when we visit next week. Thank you very much.

Inspired by Jim's wonderful riff on Kit Smart, I give you E.A. Poe on "The Gnomes."

See the tower of the gnomes
--busy gnomes!
Digitally vigilant, they guard our peaceful homes.
Reading thread, thread, thread
In their tower of glass and steel,
they review what's being said
and review without appeal.
See them ply their doughty hammers,
on the heads of naughty spammers,
in their glass and steel tower,
where they watch for Words of Power,
fighting crime and keeping order,
on the web's anarchic border,
on the web of Nielsen-Hayden that abounds with grateful poems
to the gnomes, gnomes, gnomes, gnomes,
gnomes, gnomes, gnomes,
To the beauties and the duties of the gnomes.

See the feeding of the gnomes
Greedy gnomes!
See them offered teas and cakes and fragrant honey-combs.
They are honored and adored,
they are given their reward,
to propitiate their greed,
from the kitchens of the horde.
See them feed feed feed,
as the commentators plead,
that their comments be restored,
by the gnomes, gnomes, gnomes, gnomes,
gnomes, gnomes, gnomes,
By the kindly intercession of the gnomes!

oldster:

Applause!

estelendur -- the Codex Seraphinianus was remaindered back when it came out. I remember buying one. You wouldn't guess that from the prices copies bring now!

oldster @ 225: further applause!

As an experiment, a Whovian Olive Garden Server spent a whole night conversing with his tables entirely in quotes from the Doctor's dialogue.

He made out like a bandit on tips, even from tables that had no idea what he was doing. :->

I fondly remember a server in Williamsburg, VA, who thoughtfully labeled our takeaway leftovers as "The Salmon Mousse."

Elliott: I could totally see my daughter the super-hostess doing that, and getting away with it. (Her workplace is excellent.)

Lila @230: One of my fondest roadtripping memories as a kid (ok, high schooler; still) was me and my mom and her best friend and her best friend's kid (we were tummies together in their lamaze class; she's kinda my cousin sorta) in a minivan headed for the East Coast.

My mother is of the DEATHMARCH roadtrip method, only stopping when utterly necessary and do-everything-then (pee, gas, food, etc) so you can then go a long time before stopping next.

We were hungry; we saw a sign for a restaurant that turned out to be attached to a hotel that was formerly a Howard Johnson's, distinctive roofline and all. Anyhow, looked good; went in. The place was utterly utterly dead (middle of nowhere Ohio, early in the dinner block). We only ever saw the one waiter.

Who was visibly, flamboyantly, hilariously campy-gay -- high trays and calling everything fabulous and every member of our party daaaaahling and so on. In 1989 in rural Ohio. We were shocked but pleased, and tipped the heck out of him (also, the service was good).

Getting back on the highway, a mile or two further down the road we passed a sign for a sizable community college. My mom blinked, turned to her friend, and said, "I wonder if he's an acting student, and on Thursdays he's French?"

Elliott: oh God, the MILEAGE OR DIE model of road trips. My father was like that. Georgia to DC in one day with minimal potty stops. It's a wonder we didn't all get blood clots.

Also: "on Thursdays he's French" is awesome. (Now we know where Thomas Raith spent 1989?)

O gnomes, is it my new website you don't like? I was just trying to applaud oldster's poem!

[Indeed. Weebly.com is the home to many-many spammers. -- Borin O'Borou, Duty Gnome]

Re the sexual harassment comic sidelight: the comment thread of the original post, and the comments on PZ Myers' blog, are busily proving Jim's point. In spades.

Ya know, it's bad enough watching a train wreck. But I have new sympathy for TNH, PNH, Elise, Jim Hines, Scalzi, and all the others who keep having to watch THE SAME DAMN TRAIN WRECK over and over.

Tom Whitmore @227: Huh. Actually that vaguely explains why a collector-quality edition is going for $2500 on Large South American River…

Elliott Mason @228: Excellent :D

Elliott @231, Lila @232: I did MI to CT in one day, spent a day there, and took one day driving back. The stops weren't minimal, though, as my mother was along and requires frequent breaks. This was how I learned that although it's not pleasant I can indeed spend 16 hours on the road (counting stops) without turning into a highway zombie. I did come down with a godawful cold on the middle day, however, which healed up quickly enough that it might have just been a reaction to the driving.

(Now we know where Thomas Raith spend 1989?) Yes I approve

I'm another very focused roadtripper; I was raised on annual trips from Illinois to New York, about fourteen hours each way, and long car vacations elsewhere. One Christmas, we drove twenty-seven hours to Key Largo, mostly my father driving. He says he slept a little while my mother drove in Georgia, but I doubt it.

This year, I drove out to Alpha with a friend who was moving to Pittsburgh. Most of her worldly goods in the trunk, her mattress rolled up in the back seat, my luggage on top of it, and two cats. We stopped a fair amount because our bladders weren't synchronized, and since it was a cool day, we could leave the cats in the car and eat at tables. On the way back, I was much more focused on getting home. I generally forget to eat or make eating a lower priority than finding the right road food. Point the car west, set the cruise at seventy or thereabouts, and I was home in good time.

I love the Thomas Raith idea!

I can also second the relatively wide availability of Steen's Golden Syrup (you can get it at many grocery stores in North Texas, anyway) and that it is delicious on pancakes.

My recent marathon roadtrip. Via bus, not car.

estelendur @236:

(Wall-of-Text roadtrip warning)

We visit my inlaws in Rhode Island/Connecticut annually over the Thanksgiving holiday. The trip from Chicago to Rhode Island we take sensibly in two days, stopping after about ten hours at a cheesy little truck stop in middle Pennsylvania. (Mmmm, greasy trucker food...)

Pennsylvania just goes on, and on, and on, and on. Rather like Texas, I'm told, only bumpier and not so hot.

The trip back from Connecticut we do not-quite-so-sensibly in one day; it takes about 14 hours these day, but before they raised the speed limits in most of the states we travel through, it took between 16 and 18 hours. I should note, however, that we have two drivers. Cruise control helps moderate road fatigue (and our speed; when you get tired, you speed up or slow down...) And I heartily recommend the Day After Thanksgiving as the PERFECT day for a grueling grind-out-the-miles roadtrip; the weather is largely ok (pace a lake-effect-blizard in Indiana) and the only traffic jams on the road are outside of shopping malls.

Lila @ 235: Yes, I was noticing the same thing about the comments on that comic.

Re: Abi's Barrayar Dreaming link

Many of the pictures fit my mental images fairly well. But Bothari was not *nearly* ugly or sinister-looking enough.

Cassy B. @138: So maybe it wasn't dropped at all. I'm really not quite sure WHAT I did.

When adjusting knitting, one wants to be careful not to drop stitches over into parallel dimensions.

estelendur @222: I live in the same state and also, at the moment, work in the library of an institution of higher education. Wonder if it's the same one? (No need to reveal it if you'd rather not; but here's a video made in my building.)

xeger @161: (also, por favor -- warning of links through to facebook, for those of us that would really rather not go there, and prefer to avoid, rather than spend time cleaning up).

Don't know about Chrome or Firefox, but both Safari and IE have "status bars" along the bottom of the browser window that will, upon mouseover, display the url that a link points to. I use this to determine if I really want to click the link or not.

Jacque @243, When adjusting knitting, one wants to be careful not to drop stitches over into parallel dimensions.

Yes. This, exactly! (I'm using the lifeline trick now. It's undoubtably unnecessary for something as trivial as an oh-my-ghod-I-actually-made-a-washcloth! project, but it's surprisingly reassuring to know that Mistakes Are Not Unrecoverable.)

Open threadiness: recent Popehat post makes me wonder whether there's something in the water up there in New Hampshire.

(Meanwhile, our local police are upset because they don't have Tasers. The local University police force has had them for 4 years and has not yet used them.

Lin Daniel @175: So every time I make an ignorable mistake (one that won't trash the pattern), I am pleased to tell myself that I'm not in any way challenging the gods.

My dad held this view, as well. "Leave in at least one mistake, to prove that it was handmade."

I prefer, "Leave in at least one mistake, so the ghods don't strike you down for hubris." Which is the same as what you say, only with fancier words, so I sound snootier. :)

Jacque @ 245: yes, both Chrome and Firefox also have this feature. It's very useful.

These gnomes really do not like my website. I'm sorry about that; I used to have it on WordPress, but unfortunately there's some issue between my broadband provider and WordPress which is still showing no signs of being resolved, so I have thrown in the towel and moved the site over to Weebly. I really didn't intend to give anyone the Weeblies over that.

By way of atonement, here are some date and walnut slices.

250g dates
100g walnuts
1 unwaxed lemon
50 ml rum
75 ml water
2 large eggs
100g plain flour

Chop the dates as finely as possible. Put into a small pan with the rum, the water, and the juice and zest of the lemon. Heat gently, stirring all the time, until you have a paste similar in consistency to stewed apple. Allow to cool, then mix with the walnuts.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, then fold in the flour. Spread into an 8" tin and bake at 180 C for about 30-40 minutes.

[We've disabled the "weebly.com" filter. Let's see if there's a huge influx of spam making it through the other filters. -- Eilis Xerso, Duty Gnome]

Susie @244, I work in that building's smaller, formerly-uglier sibling! Although I worked in HH for one summer and it was, yes, architecturally entertaining. I never got lost, at least. Experiential sense of direction is a Very Good Thing to have in a library. Also the six-story-high bookcases with gaps are apparently a humidity-and-heat-mitigation measure? (Airflow!) And also a severe fire hazard. The video is pretty fantastic.

Lila @239: I've never used Megabus, mostly because they don't cross Cleveland (so there's east of Cleveland and west of Cleveland) and all of my relevant travel is from one of those regions to the other. Sounds like as long as I can afford it I'll stick with Amtrak, but about as reasonable as public transit ever gets in the US.

Fountain of the happy lactating she-wolves!

And pigeons.

If you want to look at the blog post Patrick pointed to in the sidelights as "A simple desultory heuristic"—which I recommend—it's probably a good idea to do so soon. Similarly, to save it for future reference, a copy on your own machine is probably a better idea than bookmarking the page at freethoughtblogs: PZ Myers has gotten a letter from a law firm demanding that he take the post down, and is consulting with Popehat for advice.

I'm not sure why I got the gnomes attention, since I included no actual links; maybe weird punctuation?

I can offer the gnomes some homemade tzatziki, or fresh blackberries (the berries ought to be eaten quickly anyhow).

I can do either form of road trip, but when there are kids involved I prefer my parents' idea of stopping every hour and trying to make some of those stops interesting. The fun part is that my kids have been on long road trips since they were very very small, so they're the ones most likely to say, "Let's go!"

It's kind of odd being told by a five-year-old that he's had enough time at the playground and it's time to get back in the car for the rest of the 10-hour trip. After twenty minutes. You'd think it would be otherwise.

"On Thursdays he's French" is an awesome phrase.

Workplace rumors strongly indicate that I did not get that job I wasn't sure I wanted in the first place. I'm afraid that gives me a bit of the feels: first, unexpectedly, relief. I like the security inherent in my Union position, I'm really good at what I do (even if the asshole VP considers those of us in my department as too stupid to get other jobs in the division) and I like knowing that if I need to work overtime, they have to pay me. On the other hand, I still feel kind of rejected. And of course, there's the fact that the people in charge of hiring, with whom I work (especially the one who used to be my supervisor) haven't bothered to tell me, and yet other people in the department know. Gutless, and it makes me lose a little respect for them. Eh - at least I won't feel bad about requesting Xmas 2014 off, even though there is an annual task so important and arcane only I can do it. Maybe they'll just have to find another "unskilled" person to handle my window-licker workload.

Otherwise, I got all my birthday presents from Large South American River today, including the drop spindle. Thus far I have made a hideous fuzzy dreadlock and some lumpy, somewhat coiled yarn. I think I'm getting better. I'm going to watch a couple more Youtube videos to see what I'm doing wrong, and then I'm taking it to work; I'm already enjoying it (like a cat with a ball of yarn) and I look forward to sitting out by the pond and spinning on my lunch break.

Open threaded movie stuff - I saw Pacific Rim over the weekend because I wanted to catch it before it disappeared from theaters.

I was impressed. The main difference between this movie and crap like Transformers was the difference between story and spectacle. Pacific Rim, for all its FX, was about its story. Michael Bay's idiocy was about fireworks.

And fireworks are fine if you have meaning behind them, but by themselves, they're just light and noise.

Guillermo del Toro cared about this movie. It wasn't perfect (I think it was about 20 minutes too long), but the action scenes actually advanced the plot and I didn't get the feeling that I was just being thrown motion for motion's sake. I could tell what was going on.

The character's were unique. They weren't formulaic cutouts.

I'll buy the movie when it hits Blu-Ray.

HLN: Local woman's first novel is now listed in an assortment of online sales venues with a publication date of Jan 14, 2014. I offer, for those who are interested, the listing at Powell's. (Alas, the blurb included in the listing is the publisher's original draft and not my suggested revision. I hold out hopes that the revised version will be featured on the actual physical object.)

I do hope people understand that this is "sharing the bubbling-over excitement" not "fishing for repetitive congratulations". I'll be a lot calmer over book 2.

Meanwhile, it appears that the Fairfax County public library system is going through a project to trash the books in the library to make way for an internet cafe-based system, with no librarians on staff. They have apparently destroyed some 200,000 books already. Not sold, not gave away, destroyed.

nerdycellist @ 256: I've also got a drop spindle. It's very hard to get right. I think I go the other way; rather than making a fuzzy dreadlock, I think I overspin it, because I tend to end up with yarn that coils itself into a complicated fractal mass if not immediately stretched out and wound.

Heather @ 258: congratulations! I took the easy way out and self-published mine online - that was back in November. So far I've had precisely one download. At least they liked it enough to give it a good review. I'll go and have a look at your link once I've posted this comment, otherwise I'll have to type it again.

Steve C.: I really loved Pacific Rim, but I didn't have at all the same reaction as you. I thought the characters were the very thinnest of cardboard cutouts, and I could have largely have guessed which ones would live, die, change, make a speech etc. within 5 minutes of seeing each of them on screen.

I thought it was a big, dumb spectacle of giant robots fighting alien dinosaurs. The difference between this and Transformers was this was a well shot, beautiful spectacle, and Transormers was a stupid, confused mess.

Jacque @ #245:

From some quick experimentation, Firefox and Chrome both do.

Spinning hurray!! Wall of text follows.

There are a ton of helpful groups on Ravelry, aimed at all levels and styles of spinning. (Stay away from Spindle Candy and Spinners' Marketplace if you value your budget.)

Overspinning and fuzzy dreadlocks alternating with fractal wire are both extremely common beginner yarns. Park-and-draft helped me get the muscle memory I needed. I felt a lot better when my spinning group told me that perfectly consistent yarn is just not ever going to happen. You know how your knitting gauge changes with your mood? Like that.

The other thing I learned about being a beginning spinner is that after the initial thick-and-thin phase is over, you start spinning finer and finer until your hands find their preferred weight. (Mine seems to be kind of a heavy laceweight, with the occasional slub, which I've been told not to worry about...otherwise how would you know it was handspun?) Apparently spinning worsted-weight yarn is a thing you have to consciously learn to do. I haven't tried it yet, since I'm still going "OMG THIS IS YARN AND I MADE IT MYSELF." You also get more yardage, which is a plus. Good fluff is expensive, but the entertainment value is nearly infinite.

There's also stuff you should know about setting the twist, but it's probably time I stopped talking. (The Law of Unintended Consequences: Teresa's post many years ago about stupid knitting tricks is what pushed me over the edge in the first place.)

Niall McAuley @261: I had to look up Ebert's review of one of the Transformers movies. I was gratified that the actual quote was pretty close to my memory of it:

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments [..] If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

"I just can't seem to get my focus on my center," Tom said elliptically.

"It doesn't need a bullet to make a loud noise," Tom said blankly.

Sorry--just came to me in the shower.

Heather Rose Jones, how wonderful!

C. Wingate, that is appalling. How can they DO that? (Well, actually, I know how. I heard of a local school district that used to post guards to stand by as discarded textbooks were bulldozed into the landfill.)

oldster, *snork*

Well I guess I'm going to have to join Ravelry then! One of my knitting friends assured me that knitters who enjoy working with hand-spun yarn adore the product of beginning spinners; they like the chunkiness and the slubs. I still have about $35 in gift card, so if I run out of roving before I stop overspinning, I suppose I can get some more.

nerdycellist @267: The thing that makes beginner yarn particularly valuable is how hard it is to make it on PURPOSE after you've trained your hands to spin evenly. :->

Heather, congratulations! Your publisher's blurb is sufficiently intriguing that if your revised one is better, the book must be fascinating

In what may be an interesting demonstration of the relative lead times between print publishing and digital-first, my own book, which was accepted after yours (I distinctly remember squashing down my envy to congratulate you the first time!) is currently on sale, directly at the publisher (where the link goes) and also at Large South American River and The Other Big One. I was asked to write my blurb myself, so I did, and have only myself to blame if it doesn't do a good job of representing the book.

I have a very nice .pdf in my possession (with only one typo that I've spotted, phew) but I haven't seen the physical object yet. I'm hoping my author copies will be here soon!

On the subject of Pacific Rim, story, and meaning... I found a short essay about Pacific Rim on tumblr, written by a college-age girl. It's rough and unpolished, but it hits me where I live.

A couple days ago i saw someone raise the question of why Pacific Rim only seems to be resonating with millennials, and i didn’t know the answer, but i’ve been thinking about it a lot and suddenly i understand.

It’s because it’s a movie about young people who are smart and capable but nonetheless handed a broken and nightmarish dying world, which is hurting everybody but especially them because they’re the ones who have to live their whole lives in it.

And maybe it’s somebody’s fault but maybe it’s nobody’s fault, it doesn’t matter, but there is a solution—which is literally to allow those young people to connect with and lean on each other and to give them the resources to take care of it themselves—but those in power refuse to take that solution seriously, so all the money and resources and power that should be going to fixing the problem are going into useless holes that aren’t going to save anybody.

And everyone knows there’s no chance that things will get better. they know that everything is going to be terrible for the rest of time.

And these young people take that world and the pathetic bottom of the barrel that’s been left for them and they spit and rebel in the faces of all of that, screaming that they won’t let it take them down after all.

It’s a story about young people, together, exercising hope and power when they are afforded none and the stakes are so high.

And it’s your story, too, if you make it be.

That essay makes me cry every time, and I think it explains why tumblr is where I've seen the strongest response to this film.

There's also this interesting essay on the visual intelligence of Pacific Rim, and how much additional story is told through stuff other than dialogue.

One of the things it touches on is the Kaidonovskys, the pilots of the Russian Jaeger Cherno Alpha. These guys are hugely popular in fandom, despite having very little screen time in the movie. What time they do have is strangely evocative, though. Sasha, the female pilot, is shown as the more assertive one, beckoning her partner over to sit on her lap, and shouting commands when they pilot their Jaeger. Supplementary materials reveal that they are a married couple, she is seven years older than him, and she was his superior officer. Yeah, they're on camera for maybe fifteen minutes, but how often have we seen characters like that? A strong woman and a strong man together, affectionate and loving? It's enough to build a world on. It's enough to generate tons of fan art, hundreds of young girls saying "this is the kind of person I want to be."

I don't know. I enjoyed this movie, but watching kids explore it on the internet has made it feel... important. This movie is doing something for a generation of young fans, something real.

I'm guessing links, weird punctuation, the usual.

I have, a time or two, griped about how self-publishing on Kindle forces you to deal with the IRS, because Amazon's KDP operation is based in the USA.

I don;'t know how long they have been running, maybe not very long, but today I discovered Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing. Free books only, PDF only, maybe a few tricky little format details, and possibly with a bias to STEM publishing, but they do have a small amount of fiction.

Presumably, Sturgeon's Law applies.

estelendur @ 251, we seem to have traded buildings! (I used to work in yours.)

About the multistory bookcases, I don't know the original reason for constructing them that way. I've heard that they are integral to the structure and can't be taken out. Which gives me hope that they will always hold physical books, provided fire does not intervene.

Rikibeth @ 269

I understand all about squashing down envy and congratulating others! (Been doing it for a long long time.) Fortunately, getting published isn't a zero-sum game.

Heather @273: it certainly isn't a zero-sum game, and it seems that the authors in my particular niche (LGBT historical romance, especially Age of Sail) have often come up from the ranks of fandom and are SUPER helpful to others aspiring to do so.

Your first announcement hit me right in the Maximum Envy Zone because I'd only just started sending mine out at the time and hadn't heard back. Before I had anything to send out: less envy, because wile it was something I aspired to do, I didn't have a concrete book of my own. After I'd gotten that lovely acceptance: great benevolence, with envy only reserved for financial details I might catch wind of. Those (looking back on it, remarkably few) months between when I sent my story out into the world and someone offering me a contract? Nerves did not make me pretty!

Now I just feel like jumping up and down with you, grinning and saying "It's going to be a real book!"

Heather Rose Jones... Congratulations!

joann @220: For some reason, this happens only at owl-fart-thirty.

And, true to form, this is when my neighbor's smoke alarm decided to complain last night (this morning). I would seriously like to get my hands around the throat of whoever designed this particular function. Because:

a) The chirping occurs at fifteen- to sixty-second intervals, and

b) The accoustic nature of the chirp means that it's really hard to localize, especially in accoustically-bright spaces, such as stairwells and apartments with hard-wood floors, so that

c) One spends at least five to ten minutes...not being able to figure out where the f*ck it's coming from.

d) At owl-fart-thirty.

e) On a work night.

Fortunately, it seems that it did, in fact, belong to the upstairs neighbor, who was apparently finally woken up by it about the time I gave up looking and went back to bed (after shutting all my windows in the hopes that I could ignore it.)

We hates smoke alarms with a passion, we does Precious.

Further to PNH's Sidelights "A Simple Desultory Heuristic" and "Sexual Harassment Conversations, In Comic Form, in the comments on the former, someone linked to this: The Rape of Mr Smith ("a holdup victim is asked questions similar in form to those usually asked a victim of rape", which I think is very well done. Reminded me of a case I once heard about where the judge explained to the jury that s/he had to tell them that they were allowed to take the victim's word for it that the guy in the dock was the guy she woke up to find robbing her house - but shouldn't take her word for it that he was the guy who raped her...

I think I've linked to articles on The Toast before, but here's one more, their take on the new California "kids get to use the changeroom of their felt/presented gender, not what gender police SAY is their gender" law.

It is amazing not just for the article itself, but for the comments and commentariat, which reminds me a lot of Making Light, if the Fluorosphere were (a) more overwhelmingly female and (b) an awful lot snarkier/verbally vulgar (while never at all being abusive or crass).

They have hilarious satire pieces worthy of the Onion, and then other thinky or heartfelt or difficult stuff, all with these amazing commenters, and it's amazing. The site only started up a few months ago.

Elliott, 279: Oh, wow, what a step forward.

Since nobody has responded negatively to GlendaP @76 (on Aug. 08), I take it that Riverwalk venues for the GoL can still be under consideration. Is everybody OK with Friday evening (Art Night), meeting at the convention center around 6:15 pm?

iamnothing@281: I expect I'll show up for the start and have to run off to help Karen get the dance together, but I'll be glad to see folks!

Vampire alert! People who have problems reading about blood donation, stop now.

I went to give platelets today, and made an interesting discovery: I've gotten used to the finger stick. You know how they prick your finger with a spring-loaded lancet, to get a couple of drops to test for hematocrit? That was always the worst part of donation for me: not the stick itself, that was never so bad, but the moment of stress when the lancet was on my finger but not yet triggered. But I've been donating often enough lately (you can give platelets once a week, rather than once every eight) that I've actually become jaded to it. That's rather a good thing, really.

The last time but one that I donated, they took red blood cells as well as platelets. Today's donation was eight weeks from that...less one day. So they couldn't do it again. Sigh. They did take 450 mL of plasma. I guess I should go in next week (you can go in once a week for platelets, but I've been doing more like once a month) and let them do platelets + RBC's.

On the up side, their promotion this month is a gift certificate for a pint of Blue Bell ice cream. If I go back next week, I can get another one!

I love pint-for-pint promotions. My blood center is platelets every month, not every week, and they have a points reward system. I'll donate at the end of the month, then spend two years' points in a catalog of prizes. I've gotten a knife block, a kitchen scale, and an ice cream maker so far.

I'm not inured to the finger-stick, but I have discovered I have very firm Opinions about the donation process and the people performing it. And I will correct them if they do something like try to stick the wrong side of my finger.

My center also has a points reward system, but it sounds like yours has better merchandise. Mine runs very heavily to t-shirts -- I've also gotten from it an umbrella and a backpack, but I'd love to get (for instance) a kitchen scale. I've seen people with Commit For Life lawn chairs, but there haven't been those on the store since I've been part of the system.

I have gotten an 8-gig thumb drive: I once worked out that given the number of points required and so on, it comes out to 39 platelets per bit.

Elliott @ 279: oh, that's good to hear.

I don't really understand why people get so hung up about gender; there are not many contexts in which it matters. I'm androgynous and identify as gender-neutral. Yesterday, on the tram, a conductor identified me as one gender, then decided I was the other one and apologised profusely. I said, no problem, I don't mind which you call me, because I don't really have a gender in the first place. He didn't seem to hear that. He just apologised again for thinking I was Gender A rather than Gender B.

Listen, very nice and well-meaning tram conductor. It doesn't matter whether I'm male, female, neither, both, or little green alien to whom the concept of "gender" doesn't make an atom of sense. All you have to do is sell me a tram ticket.

Mongoose #286: The full complexities of the world are too much for a human mind... and so we all produce structures to overlay upon the world and make sense of it. And having built those, we are much disinclined to change them -- and when we encounter something that just doesn't fit into our world-schema, we have difficulty perceiving it properly, let alone grasping "what sort of thing is this".

Of course, a lot of those maps and guides we make for the world concern the most complicated objects in them, which are other people. Someone who has put "either male or female" into their most basic concept of humanity, is going to have a lot of trouble dealing with someone insisting they're neither.

Hyperlocal news... After reading Catherynne Valente's "The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making", the 7-year-old daughter of local writer Daniel Abraham cooked up a joke for her mother, the punchline of which is that when stars reach the iron stage, they go boom.

Heather Rose Jones: many congratulations :D

Jacque @277: The intervals seem precisely timed to come when you have just relaxed from the last one.

Mongoose @286: I got sir'd by a waiter the other day and my mom corrected him the, like, third time he did it? After which I told her, "Stop correcting them; I don't actually care." I'm pretty sure it didn't stick, though.

Leah Miller @270, yes. It didn't hit me as hard as it hit some of my other friends, but also? In this time and place where moral ambiguity and outright lack of morality is hailed as "realistic" and considered desirable in the media we consume, Pacific Rim holds up a giant metal finger to all of that and says: it is not foolish, but brave, to hope. Humanity can overcome unimaginable obstacles. If we try hard enough, and marshal our resources correctly, we can do more than we ever dreamed possible. There may come a day when the strength of men will fail, but by the gods, when it does, we are taking them down with us. It says, we refuse to give in, give up, drop out. We're tuning in, suiting up, and heading out to fight. Because we believe. Because we care. Because we love.

Mongoose:

I think part of what's going on is that the range of people's responses to being misgendered range from "no problem" to verbal hostility and threats. Most people would rather not get into a fight, especially when they're in a customer service position, and the tram conductor risks much less by apologizing to you than by ignoring the issue since you didn't object. "She doesn't care" looks the same as "she's giving me an opening to apologize before complaining." And "she doesn't care enough to make a fuss" looks the same as "this person doesn't identify with a gender and really doesn't care."

On the relatively rare occasions when someone calls me "sir" I ignore it and go on with the conversation, which tends to be something like "pastrami on rye, please." But even though I haven't called them on the gendered honorific, they hear my voice, conclude that I'm female, and apologize.

On blood: they used to do branded merchandise and a year's-end special thing, which is why I used to have all sorts of Hawkeye gear I never used, but now they have an outside fundraising catalog. I like that it's a two-year promotion, too, as it means I can get better things.

On pronouns: my first thought was, "Why not use something neutral, like 'messere'?" Then I realized I've been watching too much Dragon Age.

I occasionally get identified as female (the long hair, I suppose) by inattentive wait staff -- it doesn't bother me either, and I'm pretty solidly male-identified in terms of gender presentation. It's sometimes amusing to watch them back-and-fill....

iamnothing, #149: I should be clear of the dealer room by 6:30 at the latest -- it just takes a bit of time to cover and shut everything down after the room officially closes. And yes, meeting in the convention center lobby would be fine; I suggest somewhere near the voodoo board.

OtterB, #159: That joke (which I believe may have come out of old blackface vaudeville routines) is also one of the things my fannish fount of trivia comes up with for "molasses". ISTR that I first encountered it in the children's book Cheaper by the Dozen, where it's described as something the father would occasionally do to amuse the family.

albatross, #163: This is exactly why libraries no longer keep records of who has checked out which books once the books have been returned. This step was taken after an attempted (warrantless) fishing expedition by DHS in 2005, which was foiled by the simple expedient of the head librarian calling the police and having the DHS agents ejected from the library. The incident was the genesis of this shirt.

Lin, #175: I've heard a modern variant on that -- apparently the rug-makers also introduce one deliberate error in each item to prove that it is handmade (because a machine-made copy wouldn't have a random error in it). I rather like that idea, and would consider incorporating it into my own jewelry if I were making more complex stuff.

Lila, #190: Note that these are exactly the same things said to women over and over again about "keeping yourself safe from rape". It's not just sharia law we're looking at here, it's total lockdown for everyone.

Oh, and incidentally, the backscatter machines at airports are now being replaced by a much less intrusive (and safer) variety that merely shows a stylized body image with "questionable areas" highlighted; this strikes me as being not so different from the metal detector and wand combination. The backscatter machines, having been purchased at enormous taxpayer expense, are now going to sit in a warehouse somewhere gathering dust, because they're boat anchors. But at least Bush II's cronies got a shitload of money out of the deal.

joann, #220: I believe this is what's known as "battery backup", a common belt-plus-suspenders mode of operation for critical equipment. Or even not-so-critical; I recently replaced my 25-year-old bedside clock with a new one that has battery backup because I was tired of having to reset the old one every time we had a power blip.

Elliott / Lila, #232-233: Our preferred mode of travel is a slightly less doctrinaire version of that -- we try to make one stop serve multiple purposes, but bow to necessity when needs must. Of course, we're sometimes doing trips like the one we just got back from (Houston to Baltimore in 2 days, return in 3 with a longish stop in the Dallas area), and there's not always a lot of flex time in the schedule.

Elliott, #268: *snerk*

iamnothing, #281: I can probably make 6:15. If I'm going to be significantly later, I'll send KeithS on ahead to let you know.

HLN: local herpestid's friend Flavio has just got himself into the finals of the singing competition at the Innsbruck Early Music Festival. Local herpestid is quite ridiculously proud of him:

http://www.altemusik.at/en/singing-competition/cesti-singing-competition/latest-information/

...apparently for my last link. Oh well. *rummages around for edibles* There's this, which I'm making for Sunday's concert.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/8059974/Moist-lemon-cake-recipe.html

Mongoose, as long as you keep offering delicious recipes when gnomed, it's hard for me not to add psychic energy to them coming down on you!

Lee (293): ...why libraries no longer keep records of who has checked out which books once the books have been returned. This step was taken after an attempted (warrantless) fishing expedition by DHS in 2005

Small correction: libraries had been not-keeping such records for much longer than that. Deliberately discarding/destroying that information was established practice when I started library school in 1985.

Carol @ 295: heh. Next time, they're getting a jam sandwich!

My uncle was very much of the all things done at one stop method of car trips. It had its flaws.

Mark, age four-ish: Daddy, there's a moth.
Uncle/Dad: We'll take care of it at the next stop.
Mark: Daddy, there's a moth!
Dad: Mark, we'll take care of it at the next stop.
(possibly some additional iterations)

next stop
Dad: OK, Mark, where's the moth?
Mark's sister: Mark ate it.

Anyone know Colorado law? Because this makes me wonder if a court could actually order these neighbors to eat shit and die. Clearly that would be the right resolution to the dispute.

To corroborate Mary Aileen @297: I began working at a University library circa 1996. We'd just switched over to a new back-end system (including circulation management) and despite some queries from the administration, the librarians and library systems managers were adamant that we did not keep records of who had checked out books once they were returned, and we would not engineer such capabilities into the system.

Xopher @ #300, the damage to property value of living that close to a bunch of known assholes is probably severe. Countersuit?

Mongoe(@286) I am fairly often identified as "the other" gender (in spite of how unobservant a person would have to be to reach this conclusion) and I have never been able to persuade anyone that it really really doesn't matter to me.

We need a new polite for of address, to replace "sir" and "ma'am" where one wishes to do so.

Sorry, *form* of address

Tom Whitmore @292: I occasionally get identified as female (the long hair, I suppose) by inattentive wait staff

I would have thought that the muttonchops would be a heavy clue.

Xopher Halftongue @300: Seems like Colorado would be an especially bad place to take that attitude.

Older @303: I tend to use "gentlebeings", at least when addressing people in the plural. I think I got that one from Poul Anderson, though I could be mistaken there.

iamnothing@281

6:15 pm on Friday for the GoL sounds fine.

In the SCA they often say "Gentles," or did when I was in. Nothing wrong, methinks, with "Gentle" by itself as a singular form of address.

Might sound a little archaic, a little overly courteous. I don't see either as such a bad thing.

I have been reading the chapter-by-chapter takedown of the 50 Shades books by Jenny Trout, and I can safely say that anyone who talks about their inner goddess as much as the protagonist of those books does should walk off a short pier. I don't mind people buying porn; I mind people buying BAD porn. The quality of the writing displayed makes me long for Penthouse Letters. ("I never thought it would happen to me...")

Delurking, with a query on fingerprint cards:

I'm up for a freelance translation job which would require a security clearance, and the employer in question has sent me a set of fingerprint cards to get done and returned to them. For my freelance tax preparation work, I already had fingerprints taken at the behest of the IRS earlier this year.

1. Is there a way I can verify that my fingerprints are on file somewhere that can be referenced? Maybe I don't need to do it again.

2. Would I be risking any future weirdness from the Powers That Be if I have two sets of fingerprints on file with the Powers That Be? Buttle turning into Tuttle, dogs and cats living together, suchlike?

Thanks muchly!

My first time! I'm so proud. I have Dominican takeout sopa de pollo I'm willing to share.

Jacque, between long hair and muttonchops, I'm calling it neutral. Facial hair of whatever configuration is but one clue when choosing pronouns for strangers.

Diatryma (@312) This is true. In my days of delivering mail and other things (it seems to have been my Calling), I have met at least two women with considerable facial hair.

In my own case, not much facial hair. I used to imagine the mental process that could lead someone to address me as "sir" -- long hair, check; boobs, check; wide hips, check; must be a man. I would have preferred to be called "sir" simply because it denoted an adult person.

Two of my children have been in the Air Force, where the common worker is ranked as, and addressed as, "Airman", regardless of gender. I approved entirely, but I thought they should go all the way with it and call their female officers "Sir".

Thanks for the suggestions, Mongoose and Xopher, but somehow "gentle" doesn't seem quite easy on the tongue, although I like the implication.

Back in the early hippie days, I often met people who pretended not to be able to discern my gender. I ended up telling all such that the information was available on a need-to-know basis and they didn't need to know.

I believe that "gentle" in that sense derives from "gentile", and so might be problematic for a large portion of the population (to Jews, for example, or many non-LDS Christians). At least, that's the etymology I was taught many years ago!

Also, Older -- the sideburns are pretty darn bushy, and I've lost a lot of hair on top. As I said, someone not paying a lot of attention, but not completely incomprehensible.

As with facial hair, the body shapes for the male and female dimorphs of humans overlap significantly more than they differ. The dimorphic differentiation is much more statistical than absolute.

Tom @ 314: yes and no. "Gentle" is indeed derived from "gentile", as is "genteel" (which has kept more of the original meaning), but not from "Gentile". [Warning: Language Nerd Wall of Text alert.]

I don't know the derivation of "Gentile", but it is, as far as I know, completely unrelated. I do know about "gentile". It occurs in both Old Italian and Old French with the approximate meaning of "noble"; you'll find it in Dante and Petrarch. Like many other words in Old French it came over with the Normans, who imposed their own aristocracy on the Saxons, and with it a great many words of the sort you'd expect to find alongside an aristocracy.

The word has managed to hang onto some of its original meaning in compound words ("gentlefolk" and so forth), although even here it has been rather diluted; "gentleman" is now simply a polite way of saying "man", rather than specifically meaning an aristocrat. On its own, it has shifted more radically in meaning in all three languages under discussion. In French and Italian, it now means not much more than "nice", whereas in English it has taken on a slightly different connotation - "gentleness" is a specific type of niceness.

Like other words which have shifted in meaning, this one can cause problems for unwary modern readers trying to make sense of, say, Dante (who, let's face it, gets pretty weird in places anyway); however, I'd say they were particularly pronounced in this case because there has also been a massive cultural shift regarding the concept of aristocracy itself. In the Vita Nova, Dante repeatedly describes Beatrice as "gentile"; he means she's of noble birth, not that she's sweet-natured, although it seems she is that as well. (Not that it's entirely easy to tell, since she never speaks to him.) These days, if we understand what he's talking about, we're tempted to wonder what the big deal is; but of course in Dante's time the upper classes were considered to be somehow intrinsically better than everyone else, and so Dante is emphasising her aristocratic birth to make it clear that she is a Superior Being.

Yes, I know. I love Dante to bits, but he didn't so much have issues as subscriptions. Just wait till I dig out my translation of the poem with the gruesome heart-eating metaphor - would you believe that was supposed to be the height of romantic?

Anyway, so that's "gentile/gentil/gentle/genteel/&c". No reference to religious groups of any kind implied.

Gentile and gentle both derive originally from the Latin gens, meaning race/birth/clan/family. Other words derived from the same source include genitals, generation, and gendarme.

Anyone who objects to the term on the basis of its late Latin roots should be ignored.

Jim @ 317: ah, OK. So not so much "unrelated" as "so distantly related that they're no longer sending each other birthday cards".

Bruce E. Durocher II @309, in re the badness of the porn in the Fifty Shades books

I have not read them myself, but I have skimmed the deconstructions over at Something Short and Snappy (where they are also doing awesome Ender's Game deep reads) and something has become clear: Fifty Shades is D/s porn written by someone who's had no real-world (or detailed fiction-intake) experience of healthy, organized D/s. In exactly the same way that Twilight is a vampire novel written by someone who's never read a vampire novel before.

The quoted passage that made me realize they're not just bad porn but are actively dangerous was the one where The Dominant Master croons to his slave that if you're really in love you don't need safewords!

People are going to try this, and people are going to get hurt, because they don't realize (a) the book is lying to them and (b) there are other people who ALREADY KNOW how to do this without hurting yourself or your partner, who can be ASKED. For FREE. On the Internet, where nobody knows if you're a dog (or a kindergarten teacher).

Cecelia Tan recently posted about a gushing longform review of her newest erotic novel; the reviewers were ecstatic that her D/s protagonists don't ever slip over the line into being abusive with each other. Because NOT slipping over that line is, apparently, rare in the genre Fifty Shades has encouraged ... sigh.

Probably for illicit linkage (though I checked they all worked). It's a fair cop. In a few hours I should have homemade cinnamon rolls (I will gladly pay you this afternoon for an un-gnomed post right now?).

@Casey B, re road trips from southern New England to the midwest.

I live in Ann Arbor, MI and have family in CT; I've driven between them several times. I suspect that this means my trip is essentially a subset of yours.

Have you considered avoiding PA by getting up to the Mass Pike and then taking 90 west to Cleveland (where 80 and 90 join)? From Providence to Cleveland, according to Google Maps, RI146+90 is only 14 miles longer than 95+80.

The advantage, in my opinion, is that upstate NY has attractive scenery and has cities about every hour (Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse-Albany) to make you feel like you are making progress. PA, as you say, just goes on and on and on.

Apologies to Cassy B. for misspelling her name.

On the subject of racist, sexist, homophobic dipshits (from another thread), given the recent revival of Orson Scott Card's batshittery (http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/08/14/orson_scott_card_worries_about_obama_turning_urban_gangs_into_his_personal.html) is anyone going to see Ender's Game?

Fragano @ 323... is anyone going to see Ender's Game?

Not me. Instead I'm looking forward to Lake Bell's "In A World" because it's Lake Bell, and because I get to hear her say "These are not the droids you are looking for" with a Russian accent.

Elliot:

It strikes me that one of the "look at all of us in our pretty dresses" effects of both commercial and government privacy violations will be fewer people willing to look into such resources. Don't want to get added to a watchlist, after all.

As an aside, I'm not too sure the genre of one-handed reads[1] is in general noted for its careful attention to either safety or healthy relationships.

[1] Into which I'm provisionally putting 50 Shades, despite having never read it myself.

#323 : Fragano Ledgister

...is anyone going to see Ender's Game?

There's already a formal campaign to boycott the film: "Skip-Enders"

I fear that it won't have any effect; the tons of people who will buy tickets won't know/care about it or the reason for it, and the lesson that it teaches Hollywood will be to ignore the folks calling for it.

DavidS @ 321: My route from A2 to New England starts similarly, but after Erie, PA, I veer off onto I-86/US-17.[1] It's toll-free, less trafficky than the cross-Pennsylvania routes or the NY Thruway, and beautiful (provided you like hills). I especially love the eastbound rest area that overlooks Lake Chautauqua.

[1] Why does the hyphen look right in I-86 and wrong in US-17?

I am dubious about seeing Ender's Game even without referring to Card's politics. The story is about a boy, and the adults are peripheral. When they cast Harrison Ford, someone automatically wrote him a big part, and thus the movie is unlikely to be faithful to the book.

YMMV.

I doubt I will go see the movie, but I wouldn't avoid such a movie based on the repugnant political views of the author. If this kind of boycotts were successful on a large scale, so that writers who expressed really unpopular political or social views were unable to sell their books or get them made into movies, would you expect this to make the world a better place, or a worse place? Keeping in mind that 40 years ago, Card's views on gays would have been the popular view that writers had to express to be able to sell books.

gnomed

David S@321, don't sweat misspelling my name; doesn't bother me as long as it's close enough I can figure out that it's me that's meant. <smile>

Regarding I90; it looks like an interesting alternative. My two possible issues are that we're going to the Newport area, not Providence (and that looks like a more substantial detour), and (more implortantly) that we take the drive in late November.

I-90 looks like it runs next to the Great Lakes for a considerably longer distance than the I-80 route. We've hit lake-effect blizzards in Ohio and Indiana two or three times in the last five years, so I'm concerned that the additional couple of hundred miles of near-Great-Lake driving wouldn't yield beautiful vistas but knuckle-whitening snowstorms, instead. <wry>

Older, #313: Back in the early hippie days, I often met people who pretended not to be able to discern my gender. I ended up telling all such that the information was available on a need-to-know basis and they didn't need to know.

I used to be in an apa with someone who was very hostile about people whose gender he couldn't immediately identify from a distance. It always struck me as a "don't want to slip up and treat the second-class citizens like REAL people" sort of thing. I recall asking him once why he cared, since he was happily married and therefore presumably not in search of a potential sexual partner!

Re being addressed as the other gender, I've been called "sir" on occasion despite being visibly, unmistakably female. I think many times it's a genuine slip of the tongue, related less to the person's actual appearance than to ingrained habits of speech and perhaps someone having a tiring day.

Fragano, #323: No. The book was never one of my favorites (too formulaic -- I consider Speaker for the Dead to be a much better book), and I'm not much of a movie-goer to begin with. That's two strikes before you even get to Card's having gone batshit-insane. I don't count this as boycotting the movie, because it's not something I'd have been likely to see in the first place.

Brenda, #328: Good point.

Fragano:

Reading Card's essay was really odd, in a through-the-looking-glass sense. He hedged everything around with hypotheticals, but then built a story that would seem plausible, if only the last five years had been completely different.

In some alternative universe, Obama is a dictatorial control freak, who continuously bends the powerful to his will. He's a secret Muslim who refuses to make war on Muslims or permit surveillance of them, and who trusts Muslim countries implicitly to keep their promises. In that alternative universe, the Muslim world is unified, militarily powerful, technologically advanced, and poses a genuine threat to the US, like the old Soviet Union when there were still a lot of true believers in communism. In the alternative universe, Obama, through his close connection with the urban black street[1], can call on urban blacks to riot or terrorize his opponents on demand, and can fill an alternative police organization with a bunch of gang members who will be his muscle-squad. In the alternative universe, Obama's health care reform was single-payer with absolute government oversight of who gets care, so as to ensure that withholding medical care can be used as a mechanism of social control. And on and on.

Card is a good writer, and he could probably spin out a dystopian story that was internally consistent in that universe. But it would be very weird to read, like reading a story in which Reagan was a gay intellectual elitist, George HW Bush was a populist man of the people, Bill Clinton was highborn but intellectually stunted and uninterested in women, etc. Because it has so little to do with the universe we actually live in.

[1] Think of the common phrase "the Arab street"

Such an alternative universe might be interesting to read about. But it doesn't have much to do with *our* universe.

Cassy B.

Welcome to the world of knitting! I see our fellow Knitlanders have been taking good care of you.

Have you discovered the Ravelry web site yet?

Jim Macdonald #326: I agree that the formal boycott isn't likely to have much effect. I'm not going to give my two bits to Orson Scott Card, even though I enjoyed the novel when I read it, long before he came out as a homophobe or as another of the idiots who appears to think that a moderate Christian Democrat is the second coming of Huey Newton.

I agree with Lee that Speaker for the Dead is a better novel, although Ender's Game is a superb example of the bildungsroman, and concur with her on Brenda's point.

Older @313: I have met at least two women with considerable facial hair.

Well, in point of fact, through much of my school career, the bullies liked to call me "moustachio."

And there was a very beautiful young woman from India, at my last job, who had quite a thick moustache. And fangs.

I approved entirely, but I thought they should go all the way with it and call their female officers "Sir".

Some TV shows seem to be promoting that practice. Castle comes to mind.

I, personally, have been lobbying for years to use "Person." Per. Marshall. "Thank you, per." (Actually, now that I look at it, maybe it's too evokative of "pervert." Hm.)

Mongoose @316: I love Dante to bits, but he didn't so much have issues as subscriptions.

::grin:: I'm going to have to file this one. :-)

WRT Ender's Game, the trailer looks like the story had changed fundamentally from the book. If memory serves, the puncline of the book is that Raqre guvaxf ur'f cynlvat n jne tnzr, naq vg gheaf bhg ur unf npghnyyl naavuvyngrq n jubyr fcrpvrf, naq gur cflpubybytvpny vzcnpg bs gung qrprcgvba. Granted, It's been decades since I read it. But I don't get that at all from the movie trailers.

Victoria @333, Ummmm <guardedly> I've heard it mentioned. And I've heard it's addicting...

Lee @332

There are identities which I have used on the net, and are old enough to vote, which are "real" to me and the folks I use them amongst. They're different to the real-world me, but they don't do things that feel wrong to the real-world me. And, if need were there, the link could be traced.

[Waves to the NSA: does your mother know what you're doing?]

There are people in positions of authority who seem to care more about knowing exactly who you are than about the basic validity of the facts you point out. I am thinking about politicians in particular, who set themselves up with such things as Facebook accounts, and get all worked up when you respond to their propaganda with even a simple, "I can't see how that works."

Or perhaps somebody is wittering about how we need to get out of Europe, and we will be better up under the control of our politicians. Well, those politicians, under the system of the EU, have to pass into national law all the bad EU laws, and we never heard them object.

But if I use "zhochaka" as a tag, I'm not real. That invented word has been part of domain names I have used since 1995. It has history. But to them it is nothing.

They're the people who send me an unsolicited email about the wonderful things they're doing.

I'm living in a different world, and they're not of my tribe, and they do things I find repugnant, without apparent shame.

It's not about gender, or rather these things are not just about gender. It's about conformity. We've been reading that wacky sci-fi stuff for so long that we don't know right from wrong any more. We're the weirdos who would fuck Spock, or T'Pol, or even that Six of Eight or whatever that machine is called.

We're not their sort of decent God-fearing people who will scrape and bow in their general direction.

And some of us have read more of the Bible than they ever do. We're homo sapiens sapiens, the product of generations of cultural and physical evolution. We know, and live by, that simple human trick which eludes them.

We gang up on problems.

We teach each other.

We know we can't know everything, but somebody has Jon Singer's phone number. Or casts Summon Librarian.

We have our own spirits from the vasty deep, and they do come when we do call them.

[Still there, Mr. NSA man? We know the difference between propulsion systems and weapons.]

I have taken the plums
which were in the icebox
and added them to a one-million-ton ice cream sundae
which will be dropped on the White House
with a cherry on top.

This is not
A Hollywood plot
It can only be done
on the wireless.

Ying-tong-iddle-i-po!

Porting Lee's comment from the DF families thread so as not to threadjack there: Oh, yes, definitely. But one caveat for anyone wanting to read the series -- the last 3 books (Swordhunt, Honor Blade, and The Empty Chair) are effectively one long story that's been broken up oddly, and should be bought and read together; they don't stand alone very well.

They also, in my opinion, don't do what Duane claimed was her goal, that being explaining how we got from TOS Romulans to TNG Romulans. That doesn't mean I don't like them, of course, but they didn't explain to me how we got from mnhei'sahe to a thinly-veiled Communism allegory.

It's disheartening to have to watch the on-screen versions going, "But, but, the Rihannsu are SO MUCH BETTER."

#319 Elliott
Wait Wait Don't Tell Me already used a report of a fire department gettting a major uptick in (expensive) emergency ambulance trips because of idiots reading Fifty Shades of Gray playing copycat.

#310 Chris
Ha, ha, ha.
I think I've been fingerprinted at least four different times for the Federales.

339
I always figured that trying to merge the two was the official excuse for the books - they're clearly TOS, and never get to TNG.

Chris,

I've been fingerprinted several times by different organizations (different employers, the Catholic church when I volunteered to work with kids). There appeared to be no way to get any of these organizations to communicate with one another.

I wrote another post awhile back, and it seems to have been eaten by gnomes, or perhaps to have disappeared into the ether.

Cassy B. @ 337 Ummmm I've heard it mentioned. And I've heard it's addicting...

Some people find it addicting. I, personally, don't. But then I'm not a knitting geek. I'm just a geek who knits. And crochets. Tats (the needle kind) Basic weaving is my latest acquisition of the yarn/string-based crafting activities. Ravelry, as far as I can tell, is the yarn/string/craft equivalent of Making Light. I like to go there and shop for ideas in the pattern section when I can't figure out how to do something myself.

I'm not OCD about my stash and tools and library. Plus, I'm a goal oriented knitter - if I want something that I can't find in the stores, I'll make it myself. Ravelry has a lot of patterns (free and for sale) for people who want to try new things.

Victoria @345, good to know. Ravelry.com?

Dave:

I suspect the attributes of politicians you're describing have less to do with their nature or beliefs, and more to do with their incentives and situation, than you might imagine.

Politicians deal in social proofs--X is true because lots of the people I care about (my voters, my constituents, those I must please to get appointed to some desired job) say X is true. Even when politicians believe X is nonsense, they will still act as though X is true. (When they accidentally let on that they don't really think X is true, it's called a "gaffe".) Most politicians, by the nature of their job, will defend the belief in X from all comers, and will indeed be (or act) outraged that some nobody dares question X, when all right thinking people clearly know X is true.

There's a selection effect at work here. Politicians who don't do this most of the time tend not to get elected or appointed to higher offices, tend not to be given assignments on important committees, etc.

And the people whose opinions they mirror are themselves subject to a similar selection effect. Media personalities and newspaper/TV news editors who too often say "X is wrong" when the important people are all saying it's right tend to be out of a job. Politicians in safe Republican or Democratic districts can be and are challenged from their own party when they challenge some X that is widely believed in their party, even when it's transparent nonsense. What sounds credible or crazy is largely a function of what you're used to hearing.

The ultimate arbiter of truth for essentially this whole class of people is social proof. It's like the Paris Hiltons of the world, who are famous for being famous. Many of these beliefs are widely believed (or claimed) to be true because they're widely believed (or claimed) to be true. That makes for really uncomfortable discussions with people who don't trust social proof as a way to figure out what's true. The social proof people and the evidence or logic people don't speak the same language, don't play by the same rules, and talk past each other.

Ravelry has 3 main useful bits (IMHO): the pattern-searcher, the forums, and the self-logging parts (your 'notebook'). You can use or not use any aspects of the site; using one doesn't obligate you to the others, though there are useful cross-connect functions if you DO use more than one.

Patterns: oh so many. You can search the Rav database just for patterns that are (for example)
* knitted
* lace
* difficulty 1-3 stars (user chosen/crowdsourced)
* uses less than 400yds of
* fingering-weight yarn

And you'll get hundreds of results, probably. You can then limit it just to patterns you can click to download free off the web. Killer app. Amazeballs. All the patterns IN THE WURRRRLD at your fingertip-clicks.

Forums for to talk about the things you, y'know, might want to talk about. Participation, moderators, and level of discourse highly variable; effectively, each sub-forum is its own social site (with a common member list with all the others).

Self-logging in your notebook is useful for me because it makes me feel accomplishy. Also, if I'm careful to 'start' a project when I put it on the needles, then when I finish it some unknown long time later (after finding it abandoned in a pile of bagged cruft from some convention last year), I can go on Ravelry, click that it's done, and see how long it took me to do it. I can also take notes to myself about it to make it easier to do again the same (or different). Also you can 'stash' yarn you own, so you can see it all at once, and add it to a project you're working on seamlessly, which lets you see what projects you've done all with the same yarn, etc.

Cross-connecting: Any pattern that you can find on Ravelry, you can tag to an in-progress project, and everybody ELSE who did that pattern, you can see what they got (and their comments about how it was to work with). You can see what yarns people made it with, and whether they liked them or not. You can share photos uploaded to your projects on the forums pretty simply (you can share other photos out on the web, but it's a little more complex).

albatross @344:

How long back? There's nothing in the moderation queueueueue. I've dug through the spam midden for the last 24 hours searching for your name and found nothing either. It might be gone.

Thanks to Jim for the sidebar link to "Man Lures Drunken Girl: What would you do?" It's powerful to see regular folks modeling caring for each other, to hear the specific words they use.

re: fingerprinting, as a student my wife had to get fingerprinted and photographed twice, something like six months apart, to work with two different organizations within the same university-affiliated healthcare institution. Both fingerprintings were handled by the same outside contractor, who probably isn't allowed to keep the fingerprints on file, and certainly has no financial incentive to say "no point re-doing this one, we just printed her a while ago".

Dave Bell @339: With modern CGI, of course, that's no longer true.

@Dave Bell:

This is just to say

I've taken the cake
You took so long to make
And left it out
In the rain

It was wrong, but
I just had to watch
The icing flowing down,
So green.
So sweet.

Small win for the day: today's batch of yeast-based cinnamon rolls are nearing my platonic ideal very quickly. Not too sweet, but a flavorful dough with a ribbon of cinna-kick in it. Nom om. They're not nearly as nice on Day 3 after baking, so I have to KEEP making them, and I really wish I had enough clean work surface to roll it out nice and thin for the proper Yule-log-esque pinwheel, but still. Very close.

Also I made bunny breads*, and they actually look bunny-esque today. The last batch ended up sort of cat-like, and my 4yo was not impressed with their bunny-ness, though their taste was pleasing to her. Today's look kind of like the creepy goth-cartoon version, but still! Proper genus! I can work on 'cute' later.

* When I roll up my log of cinnaswirl dough etc. and cut slices to be the actual buns, the two ends of the log end up with much less cinnamon filling in them. So I cut them off, knead thoroughly until swirly-looking, and pull off dinner-roll-sized pieces of the dough to make into bunny breads. Not very sweet at all, but sufficiently cinnamonned to not taste bland (which, unfortunately, the dough I'm using tends to if just baked in solo rolls. Great texture! No flavor to speak of, even with a 16hr pre-ferment).

… I posted the 140 character version of my last entry on Tweedle and was wished a happy Jimmy Webb birthday in return.

I, of course, replied I KNEW THAT and sincerely hope my delivery was convincing.

Pursuant to my @354, Pix Or It Didn't Happen. Also a couple of them could be convincing trilobites; something I hadn't thought of with the technique.

(My kid is more impressed by bunnies at the moment than trilobites; le sigh. Great for a Girl Genius room party, though)

Elliott at # 348: accomplishy

I like that word!

Probably for linking to a url-shortening pix-sharing site.

As mentioned above, gentleman is originally racist and classist as well as sexist. In England it meant any man of Norman rather than Saxon descent. But in those barely literate times, most people could not trace their ancestry very far back. So they came up with a functional definition—a gentleman was anyone who had the right to bear arms.

By the 2nd Amendment, all Americans are gentlemen.

bOINGbOING recently mentioned a Welsh URL lengthening site, to make your links more Welsh. All in all, it's still a wonderful world, full of wonders.

Allan Beatty @ 358... By the 2nd Amendment, all Americans are gentlemen.

And. according to a movie from a few years ago, America's Tom Sawyer was an *extraordinary* one.

Paula Lieberman #341: The London Fire Brigade '50 Shades' story is ideal for Wait Wait, who specialise in stories that are too good to check. However, the increase in calls was well within the margin of random variation, and the '50 Shades' thing was an anecdotal impression by one firefighter, not part of the data. (says me)

Carrie, #340: I'm pretty sure that mnhei'sahe was never in the show at all -- that was part of Duane's own worldbuilding. And I suspect that the answer to "how we got from Point A to Point B" is contained in the line from The Empty Chair about how they might go into complete isolation for a while and would likely be very different when they came back out again -- IOW, it's the equivalent of, "Yes, they are Klingons, and we do NOT discuss it with outsiders."

BTW, did you notice that the Rihannsu language is to some extent a recycling of the Draconic language from The Door Into Shadow? Or maybe vice versa.

thomas, #362: Hey, that's a cool trick for estimating margins of error! (My college Statistics class was a disaster, so pretty much everything I know about the topic is self-taught from other sources.)

Lee: No, mnhei'sahe wasn't canon, but the OS Romulans certainly acted like they had it, which the Next Gen Romulans did not. :)

how they might go into complete isolation for a while and would likely be very different when they came back out again

Yeah, and I guess in theory that could work? But it didn't ring true for me. It felt like Duane doing handwaving.

IOW, it's the equivalent of, "Yes, they are Klingons, and we do NOT discuss it with outsiders."

DS9 handled that all wrong, all wrong! They should've just put Michael Dorn in the old-fashioned makeup and had no one say a word about it.

BTW, did you notice that the Rihannsu language is to some extent a recycling of the Draconic language from The Door Into Shadow?

I haven't read the Door Into books, so no.

Rihannsu is not, alas, a very good conlang. I've managed to extract enough grammar for a couple of stock phrases, but that's about it.

My gnomulated post is back, for those who've already scrolled past.

abi:

I see it now. If it wasn't with the gnomes before, I must have missed it when I looked last time. Sorry about sending you in a dive through the Swamp of Spam.

A bit more on Card's weird counterfactual Obama as dictator story.

I see this as a cautionary tale, alongside Romney and various ofher Republicans being apparently surprised not to won the election despite the polls. Propaganda from your own side is in many ways fun to read and listen to. It's relentlessly undemanding--your side is always in the right, and the other guys are always knaves and fools, and you need never worry that there are bad people on your side, or dangerous tendencies that need to be countered, or blind spots your ideology doesn't address. You need never feel a conflict between what you know or suspect and your team spirit.

But it's poison. It's too damned easy to turn off your critical thinking brain and just swallow all kinds of nonsense, because it's reassuring nonsense that says good things about people you like and bad things about people you hate. You hear stuff from people you trust, you hear some things repeated again and again till your brain absorbs it as true without going through the formality of thinking about it at all.

And then, you start thinking and acting like it's true, because it *feels* true--it's what you hear on the background chatter on the radio all day, on the TV, among your friends who soak in the same pool of propaganda.

Card is a smart guy, as is Romney, as is George Will. All three fell prey to the same thing. You and I are vulnerable as well, unless we take precautions not to soak in a propaganda bath. Find media and fiction and conversation that disagrees with your assumptions. Take the arguments and worldview seriously enough to engage with them, to actually understand them in a non-dismissive way even if you fundamentally disagree. Or find yourself spouting idiocy that you swallowed without ever realizing where it was coming from.

AKICIML: (Warning: Wall 'O Text)

Ok, a confession: I'm feeling rather like a fraud. A small local convention asked my twin and me to be co-Fan Guests of Honor in about a month, because the theme of the convention is "clones" and, well, we're clones.

I'm not feeling fraudulent about being a clone, mind you; I'm quite confident of that fact. My problem is Small Local Convention asked me (and my twin) to do two panels. Now, as any self-respecting convention-going SF fan has, I've seen many many panels where I thought to myself, "Self, you know as much as the panelist, or more!" Until now. I've never actually been on a panel in my life. I'm having a crisis of self-confidence, and my mind is completely blank as to topic ideas.

Well, not *completely* blank -- I have exactly one idea. (Halfway there, right?)

I want to do "Clones in fiction: How to get it right -- or really, really wrong". With examples. I figure Bujold's Brother in Arms is done right, and Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, although well-written, got clones completely wrong. What I'd like to ask for is suggestions of prominent books and/or movies which feature cloning and do it right... or spectacularly wrong. (In movies, "Aeon Flux" comes to mind for risible clones. I actually can't come up with a movie offhand that does it right...)

(Also, any brilliant clone-related panel ideas would be welcome....)

Casey B. @368 -- Ursula Le Guin's "Nine Lives"? Good or bad? I think it was the first thing of hers I ever read and it left a very powerful impression. And I just watched the Doctor Who ep "The Doctor's Daughter"; that might be something to look at, but as a first time viewer (who suspects Jenny will be back), I don't know how it plays out in the end. Still, the instant classification of the Doctor's clone as his daughter rather than his sister is interesting in light of what Bujold does.

I've always maintained that clone law should be based on how we treat identical twins—that is, Hey look! We already have clones in front of us! And the world has not ended, and they are not the same person!

On that note, first day of kindergarten for the Dude. There's triplets in his class. A quick survey indicates that they are fraternal, but really, really similar in looks. Ought to be interesting.

Just in the Vorkosigan stories, you have:

Miles/Mark

The Duronas

The clones created for the brain transplants

That's a lot of contrast right there.

Some random topics that come to mind (may or may not be useful):

a. Clones as replacements for lost people

People have sold cloning services for pets on this basis. It's not hard to imagine someone having a clone of their tragically dead kid or spouse or sibling or parent made.

What would it be like to raise a clone of your dead grandmother? It sounds creepy, but I can imagine some culture or family in which it was just the thing people did, and it would seem no more creepy than the (uncommon in the US, common elsewhere) practice of marrying your first cousin.

b. Clones as mini-mes for the egotistical (justly or not)

Would it be easier or harder to do a good job raising someone with 100% of your genes? Or a house full of genetically identical kids at different ages, all identical to you as well. Certainly, you would have a handle on a lot of their likely flaws and strengths, at least to the extent they were genetic.

c. Clones as walking spare-parts warehouses.

This is easy to see as wrong and yucky, but there have been cases of parents having another kid in hopes that he can donate matching bone marrow or kidney or whatever to the ailing first kid--it's not obvious to me that this is wrong or evil. And ISTR Heinlein using the idea of clones whose brains were never permitted to form for spare parts--this is uncomfortably close to the Jackson's Whole brain transplant business to my mind.

What if you intentionally had yourself impregnated with identical twins, partly as insurance--if one needs an organ or marrow transplant, the other can always provide it. What if you decided to have five or six kids with identical genomes, spread out every couple years? (I wonder if your whole family would get absolutely clobbered by some bug once in awhile, as the whole family had the same hole in their immunological reportoire.)

d. Clones as attempts to reproduce extraordinary performance. (Imagine you could make 20 clones of Richard Feynman and give them all first-rate educations. Would you get another genius physicist?)

To think about this, you have to think about narrow-sense heritability and regression to the mean. If 50% of intelligence is genetic, and I chose to clone you because of your remarkable intelligence, then your clones will average about halfway between your intelligence and the average intelligence for the population. (Unfortunately, there's good data on narrow-sense heritability of IQ, but it's not clear how well that would track with reproducing a one of a kind genius like Feynman or Von Neumann. Maybe you make 20 clones and get 20 very clever guys who are good enough at math and physics to get PhDs in some hard field and get tenure somewhere, but no geniuses anywhere close to the level of their progenitors.)

e. New family structures

What if you had a society where lots of families like the Duronas existed? (Brin's book _Glory Season_ has something like this.). What would that be like?

What if the normal family strucure in some society was that a couple got married and usually had one clone from each parent?

f. Current cloning

Have human clones been made by now? Animals have been cloned successfully, so it's possible. It would presumably be hard to get anyone capable of doing it to clone a human, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone had tried by now, to be honest.

I honestly don't know what I said, but I will offer some of the chocolate-covered cinnamon bears that were kindly shipped to me by a friend.

Older @ 313: ...I have met at least two women with considerable facial hair.

I suspect that you have met a great number of women with a lot of actively growing facial hair—which they were assiduously plucking, waxing, shaving, and so on. Maintaining the "innate differences" between the sexes can be a lot of work!

Faith-healing parents charged with murder after their 8-month-old son dies of untreated pneumonia.

Note that this is the second child they've lost in exactly this way, and that after the first death part of the conditions for their probation were that they were NOT to deny medical care to their other children. The remaining 7(!) children have been placed in the foster system.

There is a serious ethical issue when parents are allowed to kill their children in the name of "freedom of religion".

Tom Whitmore (@315) "the body shapes for the male and female dimorphs of humans overlap significantly more than they differ. The dimorphic differentiation is much more statistical than absolute."

I keep telling people this. It's not true just for body shapes, but also for psychological profiles, height, strength, you name it. I got a great lesson in how not true it is as an undergrad (if I had needed it, being pretty much of an outlier generally myself).

In my endocrinology class in college, the instructor opened the class the first day by showing slides of "a typical male figure" and "a typical female figure" taken from the back. Then he showed us the front view. The "typical male" was a woman, the "typical male" a man. There followed some discussion about the differences individual endocrine systems could make, and about how "untypical" almost everyone actually is.

Lee @ 373: The Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City has quite a few small graves in its cemetery. According to Wikipedia, their child mortality rate is 26 times that of the general population. Oregon used to have a law on the books that gave parents a religious exemption from providing medical treatment for their children. That law was finally changed. When a baby died recently, the parents were sent to jail for 6 years.

janetl (@372) I am aware of that. What I really should have said was that I had met at least two women who were brave enough, or confident enough, to wear their beards and mustaches with pride.

These were the real deal I am sure. For one thing, it was back in the 50's and 60's and their womanly shapes were enclosed in the usual flowered house dresses of the day. This was not before Christine Jorgensen, but it was before ordinary people in small city neighborhoods were getting sex-reassignment surgery. Also, if they were into becoming men I doubt they would have been wearing flowered house dresses. So I'm pretty confident of what I was looking at.

I've sometimes wished for a mustache. I am way too lazy for a lot of painful depilation, so if I had it, I'd wear it even if I didn't like it a lot. Luckily, my husband has one I can enjoy.

Concerning a non-gendered form of address: I would be happy to go with "Friend" which is widely used among Quakers, as are a lot of other commendable practices.

But if it were going to catch on widely, it probably already would have.

AKICIML:

I'm trying to remember a book I read when I was a child, and my Google-fu is insufficient to the task.

It takes place in New Zealand. As I recall, the story starts when... something? happens to the parents of the family. Whether they die, or are in the hospital, or simply away, I don't remember. The children, who may be four siblings, or maybe include one cousin? scheme to get out of going where they are meant to be sent. Whether this is social services, or some other family member, I don't know. They successfully get themselves to where they want to go: the family seaside cottage, and spend the summer? there. There is a nearby Maori village, who may or may not know that the children are living adult-free (I remember that this was the first book I had ever read about NZ, and the first time I'd ever heard of Maoris).

I recall one scene in particular, in which the children are swimming in the sea, and they see a fin and run out of the water thinking a shark has come into the bay, but then realise that it's a dolphin.

Any ideas?

Any ML people who have heard of the latest swarm of earthquakes her in New Zealand:

Current status is no reported injuries, no major damage, a fair bit of disruption as buildings are cleared pending checks, and the trains re not running until the tracks are checked.

Aftershocks continue.

J Homes

Cassy B., there's also Cherryh's Cyteen, which contains:

1. a Parental Replicate, or "vanity clone," who is nothing more than a genetic twin to his father;

2. stories of a failed attempt to recreate a genius through cloning;

3. a couple of azi (tape-raised humans) who, with identical genes and identical tape, should be the identical people, and aren't, quite; and

4. one case of a CIT (regular person) replicated with genes and experiences as close as they can duplicate them, including having her mother die when she's very young.

It's a great, grand story. Won a Hugo. Its sequel isn't really worth your time, but Cyteen is really special.

Cheryl @378 -- sounds like it might be a Lucy Sussex novel, but I don't know which one! She's done some lovely YA ANZ fiction.

Cheryl #378 Roughly when was this (or when do you think the book was published?).

None of the Lucy Sussex books I can find look right. Joan de Hamel was also possible but doesn't fit.

In re clones, and especially albatross@370's points b/e: David Brin's Glory Season is really interesting for an exploration of a culture steeped in clonage. A group with lots of doctors and man-hating feminists (note: specific subtype, not implication that all B are A) sponsors a planet-colonizing ship. They modify all the colonists before settlement to radically change the nature of human reproduction, tying it into the planet's very long year: ovulations in winter produce clones of the mother (but, like lacertid lizards, require exposure to mating and sperm to trigger), while the summer ovulations produce bi-gametic offspring.

In this world, bi-gametic offspring are the strange, 'weird' case, because the powerful families of clone-sisters would rather produce known quantities to bolster their economic existences. Summer children are raised to maturity and then set loose to find their fortunes. Our protagonists are a pair of identical summer girls, who in a classically YA sort of setup (for a not very YA novel) 'swipe' a Brilliant Idea from a popular novel to go out and pretend to be two clones of a small House in an attempt to hustle their way to economic security.

And then the plot happens, but BOY HOWDY are there a lot of neat clonage issues throughout the book. And a neat exploration of what it might be like to live in a multigenerational all-clone environment. In the medium-big Houses, they cover most economic needs (accountants, cooks, household crafting, livestock-tending; think late-medieval city-state) with sisters, but often have a specialty or something they are acknowledge as being particularly good at.

(and then there's what the men are doing, but that's wrapped up in Plot and possibly Spoilers, whereas most of the above is on the back cover blurb)

Cassy B @368 (Possible spoilers for films where the twist is CLONES! follow)

I don't know about films that get cloning right, but The Boys From Brazil is a perfectly good clone-based thriller with a dark twist on Albatross @370's category d.

Of stupid cloning films, the least stupid that comes to mind is The Island which has a quick glance at category c. Moon is a fairly intelligent film that is not especially interested in the cloning that's going on.

A lot of sci-fi (a term I use here deliberately) treats cloning as essentially duplication: one of you gets into a box, two of you get out. In order to do this, they have to hand-wave some form of forced growth, despite that (so far as I know) there is no indication that such a thing is even possible. You then have to have some sort of mind transfer or memory replication, despite there being no indication that that's possible, either.

One of this year's Best Novel Hugo nominees uses it that way, and it just broke my suspension of disbelief. (Yes, I could suspend my disbelief in gur mbzovr ivehf, but not in that.)

David Goldfarb:

One honorable exception is Greg Egan, who assumes spare-parts cloning and mind duplication, but has a lot of short stories looking at the problems. His collection Axiomatic is great on these topics, and others [eg, The Infinite Assassin is the best response I know to Niven's All the Myriad Ways]

Cloning? Anybody remembers the "Wonder Woman" episode where someone clones Hitler, boots and uniform included, and WW declones him?

Giant Wall Of Answers...

Janet Brennan Croft @369 - I haven't thought of "Nine Lives" for years. I'll have to give it a re-read. "The Doctor's Daughter" is an excellent suggestion; because this Small Local Con is at a college, I expect that many of the attendees will be half my age; Doctor Who is a good connection point.

B. Durbin @370 - Speaking as a clone myself, I agree.

Albatross @371 - Lots of excellent ideas there! I'm not sure I can whitter on about any single topic there for an hour, but fold in two or three of them... well, a panel calld "The Ethics of Cloning" has just been born! Thanks!

Xopher Halftongue @381, how did I ever forget Cyteen? And Cherryh's treatment of azi in general -- who are only not quite fully human because of intensive mental programming from an early age. Actually, that brings to mind one of the first novels in the genre: Huxley's "Brave New World"...

Elliott Mason @384 - Somehow, I think I missed Brin's Glory Season I'll have to look it up!

Neil W @385 - The Boys From Brazil was in the back of my head, but I've never seen it. Looking at the wiki entry, it looks like it might be half-way sensible in its treatment of clones; at least, the kids apparently aren't monsters...

David Goldfarb @386 - yes, I had the same issue with that particular novel. I managd to hang onto a thread of suspension of disbelief only because it was the CDC who did it, who had had unlimitted black budgets and no monitoring for twenty years because of the aforementioned mbzovr ivehf. But I voted for Redshirts instead. (2312 was also a strong contender. Actually, the whole ballot was strong...)

Thomas @387, I've read some Egan, but nothing on clones. I'll have to look up Axiomatic.

Thanks, all for your EXCELLENT suggestions on Cloning Done Right.

Now, has anyone read any really risible Cloning Done Wrong recently? Other than the novel David Goldfarb elliptically refers to...? Bad movies would also be good...

I knew I could count on ML to save me from looking foolish. I'm desperately afraid of falling on my face here, and you folks have provided lots of material to cushion my landing!

Serge @388, I never watched Wonder Woman, but that's EXACTLY the sort of Bad Cloning I need for counterexamples. Thanks!

albatross #333: That would be a fascinating novel. I'd read it, if it were written by someone other than the egregious Card.

Enthusiastically seconding the recommendation for Cyteen, if it's still in print. My copy is ancient and missing its original cover; I was given it by a certain guerrilla bookshop owner as a small "thank you" for having helped them sort out their shop. They apologised because the book was in such a poor state, but assured me that I would enjoy the story.

I did. And I made it a new cover out of A4 card.

Cassie B @ 390... Glad to help. By the way, I'm not so sure anymore that the cloning had included the uniform. HERE though is the decloning scene.

I thought that the novel "Joshuah, Son of None" had dealt well with cloning.

#350 ::: Sumana Harihareswara

It's good that most bystanders intervened, but it's a relatively easy case. The bars were quiet and well lit, so it was easy to hear what the man and women were saying. The man wasn't especially large and wasn't belligerant. The woman was talking instead of being completely foggy.

And I wonder if the off-duty policeman is going to get identified. Sometimes blurring a face isn't enough.

#367 ::: albatross

IIRC, there were people on this blog who thought GWBush would stage a coup. In retrospect, I think it was a result of confusion between "do not expect to lose" and "will do whatever to stay in power". People who *really* don't expect to lose may not do even the ordinary work needed to win.

#368 ::: Cassy B.

Kate Wilhelm got one thing abstractly right in When Late the Sweet Birds Sang. When I read the book, I thought "Silly science fiction author, don't you know clones are biologically identical?". And then it turned out that in some cases, clones are less healthy than the original. This is much less dramatic that Wilhelm's ideas, but I wrong to trust that an untested technology would completely accomplish what it said on the label.

#384 ::: Elliott Mason

One thing that impressed me about Glory Season is that it's an (unintentional?) attack on Heinlein's "Specialization is for insects". Men are expected to be good at so many things that they don't have time to accumulate political power.

Other than that, I was underwhelmed by the book. The only thing that stuck, aside from the premise, was a terrifying scene where the coal starts breaking down the internal compartments in a cargo ship. On the one hand, it could have been from a historical novel, and on the other, I probably never would have seen it if it had been in a historical novel.

Nancy Farmer's In the House of the Scorpion has organ clones, but that's not the entire story. I wasn't thrilled with it in general. I want to say there's a lot of YA about genetic manipulation lately, but I'm not sure to what extent it's clones. You could argue that Westerfeld's Uglies books are a type of cloning. Oh, and Buckell's Ragamuffin and Sly Mongoose.

Cassy: technically, you and your twin are *a* clone; just as a bamboo grove is a clone.

One interesting fact that doesn't get mentioned often is that female identical twins are "less identical" than male identical twins, because of the phenomenon of x-inactivation. In every cell of your body, one of your X chromosomes is inactive, and the selection is random.

possibly for links to information about clones.

Serge Broom #394: I was racking my brain trying to recall that novel.

Following up albatross @ 347

"Social proof" is a weak form of what Steve Randy Waldman refers to as a "Rational Astrology"--something that you act on, knowing it to be false, because acting on it is reasonable given social norms. The post is very well worth reading.

Nancy:

Also, in Glory Season, the clone families have continuity at a level that non-clone groups like companies don't. It's a planet where the role of churches and corporations and governments is largely taken over by Durona-style clone-clans. I think that's a lot of why they manage to have political power--they have staying power that an individual cannot. I'm not sure that's a natural result of their engineered biology, but it's at least plausible.

In general, I don't recall seeing much SF that deals with regression to the mean. One example I can think of at a small scale is Sam Yeager and Jonathan Yeager in Turtledove's Worldwar series, but that's not very systematic. For anything that's not 100% genetic (which is most stuff we care about, like musical talent, mathematical genius, work ethic, social skills, etc.), clones should average less spectacular than their progenitor, because while they'll have the same genes, their environment and upbringing and developmental noise and all will be different.

Let me try to explain the idea a bit, because it's important. I am probably messing some of this up, but someone (thomas?) will probably catch my errors. I'm very far outside my expertise here.

Imagine you want to measure the same thing several times. For example, to test my memory, you give me some kind of memory test (like "how long a list of numbers can you remember") twice a week apart. Let's assume that giving me the test once doesn't help me much the next time.

Now, you can imagine each of these tests as a noisy measurement of some underlying thing. So you might say

test#1 = how good my memory is + random stuff
test#2 = how good my memory is + other random stuff

Those two tests are correlated--knowing I did well on one tells you I'll probably do well on the other, and the better I do on the first one, the better you should expect me to do on the second. However, they will also exhibit regression to the mean. If I do especially well on test#1, you should expect me to do well on test#2, but not as well as I did on test#1.

The intuition here is that some part of each test outcome is random stuff--was I having a good or bad day, was I distracted or hungry, did the numbers somehow fall into some pattern I recognized by good luck, etc. And some part is how good my memory is. When I get a really high score, your best bet is that this reflects both a good underlying memory and some good luck. And then the next test, I'll keep the good underlying memory, but I'll probably have worse luck.

This phenomenon happens all the time, and it always fools people into thinking there's some pattern there. Any group of people who did badly this year can be expected to improve a bit thanks to regression to the mean, which can easily convince you that your attempts to help them out were more useful than they really were. Anybody who made a ton of money this year can expect to make a little less next year, convincing him that he must have changed something. (Even though it was just the random stuff that changed.) And so on.

For heritable things that fall on a bell curve, people talk about narrow-sense heritability (written like h squared). Suppose in some environment, IQ has a 0.5 narrow-sense heritability. That means, roughly, that about half the distance between your IQ score and the average IQ score can be explained by genetic factors, and the rest can be explained by random stuff (childhood environment, developmental noise while you were growing in the womb, whatever). So, your identical twin or your clone is going to have an IQ rather similar to yours, but not identical to it. (And this is true even for identical twins who were separated at birth and raised separately--that kind of study is one source for the estimate of narrow-sense heritability of a bunch of stuff.)

Let's throw some numbers around, but again, someone who knows more should correct me if I mess up.

Suppose the clone progenitor is Alice, who has an IQ of 160. (I'm sure IQ doesn't tell most of the story of who is a genius who discovers new physics or something, but it's what we can measure, so it's what we have numbers for.) We make 10 clones of Alice. If the narrow sense heritability of IQ is 0.5, then their expected average IQ is 130--half the distance to the population mean. That's the half or so of Alice's really high IQ score that can be attributed to her genes; the rest is random stuff that we probably can't replicate for her clones.

The standard deviation for IQ scores is 15, so this is a big difference. Alice's clones are, on average, very bright--they are 1 in 50 sorts of thinkers, like the brightest kid in your eighth grade class. But Alice was a super bright, 1 in 300,000 sort of thinker--like the brightest kid in your graduate program in physics. If I'm doing the math right, you'd need to make something like 50 clones of Alice to expect to get one with her IQ.

These numbers aren't all that important, but the big idea is: if you make a clone of someone, they will in general be less outstanding in all sorts of good and bad ways. Your Einstein clones will be bright, but you'll have to make a whole lot of them to get another revolutionary genius physicist, your Mozart clones will be musically talented but mostly won't be writing symphonies anyone wants to hear, your Hitler clones will be good public speakers and manipulators, but not at a level that will let them take over any countries or mass murder anyone.

On the other hand, every human has a *vast* number of attributes. Einstein's clones will hardly ever be the physicist he was, but they may be outstanding in other ways--maybe one will be a really good musician, for example.

gnomed again

[Three blank spaces in a row do it ... Noris b'Kher, Duty Gnome]

Sam:

You're right, it was very much worth reading. Contrast with this.

There's a lot going on in Waldman's essay.

One interesting tension is between making good decisions and being seen to make good decisions. (If you're the boss, you can just hire the guy you think is best; if you have a boss, you have to justify your hiring decisions and so you may fall back on paper credentials because they make your decision easier to justify.) I suspect this is a built-in advantage of smaller, less formal organizations, that you spend less time documenting your decisions and more time making them.

Another interesting tension is dealing with stuff nobody really believes, but everyone acts as if they believed--like trusting ratings agencies. Everyone knows they're not all that great, but lacking an alternative, people use the ratings anyway. That seems like it is extremely unstable--if a shift ever starts away from trusting them, the ratings agencies could go from giants to bit players in a year or two.

Cassy @389: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go infuriates me, but mostly because it fails to explore any of the interesting bits of cloning-for-organs in favor a high school love story.

(I may be mis-remembering the exact plot of the book--I was so frustrated by the feeling that it started from an interesting point and ignored all the good stuff that it may have polluted the rest of my experience and memory.)

So, Are You Still a Brain Surgeon?

Danielle Steele discusses men (she says it's not all men, but never women at all) who open up small talk with "So, are you still writing?" as though she hasn't been writing steadily and professionally for umpty-ump years. As though her writing was just a fun little hobby, something she might drop to do something else at any moment.

Do men ever get that sort of question?

Lee @ 405

Do men ever get that sort of question?

I definitely do. (Are you still an actuary/still programming?) In my case, I work in a notoriously unstable field,and for a company that has had round after round of layoffs--so I consider it a reasonable question.

Just because I'm procrastinating and avoiding real work for another minute:

_The Rainbow Cadenza_ has a social custom that it is common to have clones of yourself and raise them as your kids. "Clone-raper" is an insult approximately equal to "motherfucker" in our world.

_Time Enough for Love_ has LL's two clone sisters ("with the Y chromosome changed to X"). I don't recall if they were supposed to have gotten the other X chromosome from someone else, or just have duplicated LL's one X chromosome. And that motherfucker also fucked (but didn't rape) his clones.

Lee:

In Isabel Allende's autobiographical La Suma de los Dias, she recounts a conversation with a dentist at a party who tells her he plans to write books when he retires. She responds that she plans to pull teeth when she retires.

Pretty certain for punctuation.

I just had awesome dim sum for lunch, but all I have to offer is cold coffee; I will thus offer a recipe.

Sweet Rolls:
1 pound flour (4 cups)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp yeast
1 cup very warm water
1/4 cup butter

Start in the morning; knead 5 minutes, put in refrigerator for the day. In the evening, shape into rolls and put back in the refrigerator. In the morning, bake at 350 until done and serve with butter.

iamnothing@73ff: I will be around from Monday, but I'd prefer Friday for the get-together because by Thursday evening I will be either completely dead or spending several hours dead for sanity purposes. (I'm doing the layout of the exhibit space -- almost 3 acres -- and probably something with art show setup. I have reasonable hopes that I will not be given new plans on Tuesday night, as happened in Montreal, because my immediate management is sane.)

cassyb@389:
= the idea of a mind-cultured clone as replacement isn't original to Cyteen or even Joshua, Son of None; cf Sturgeon's "It's You!" (1970). OTOH, it's an interesting trap; when we talked about Regenesis at Boskone recently, Jo Walton came up with a chilling vision(*) of Ari III or IV attempting to apply Ari I's solutions and/or live Ari I's life several centuries later.
= albatross offered multiple clones of Feynman attempting to get another genius. Bova's The Multiple Man varied this, deliberately specializing the multiples (clones so they can substitute for each other): one campaigns well, one knows economy, one knows military.... A thriller but IME not badly done.
= related: Blish & Lowndes wrote The Duplicated Man back in 1953, with a deliberate hack: the copying (not cloning) machine requires a person focusing for each copy, so all of the copies are bent according to individual perceptions (cf O. W. Holmes discussion of the 6 people present in any 2-person conversation).
= I'm not sure Brave New World exactly counts. I don't remember how the fertilized eggs are generated, but the artificial wombs are specifically said to interfere with development to produce desired results: e.g., tall Alphas / short Epsilons, people spun so much in utero that they can't be made dizzy (good for spacemen).

I'm trying to think of laughably bad clone stories, but memory appears to be merciful today....

* I think Jo phrased this more sympathetically; I caught horror from it, but I think Brigadoon is a horror story -- a sort of prolonged version of Zelazny's "The Set".)

#401 ::: albatross

Another angle on regression to the mean is that extraordinary people have extraordinary talent, but they probably also needed to be in circumstances which were a good fit for their talent.

I'm not sure Brave New World exactly counts. I don't remember how the fertilized eggs are generated
For the lower castes, they use the "Bokanovsky process", where up to 96 copies of an individual are made -- it's about mass twinning, rather than clones of a pre-existing adult.

Orphan Black has, so far, handled cloning pretty well (and showcased Tatiana Maslany’s marvelous acting abilities). The only thing I that thought sounded a bit off was that for plot reasons, clones/twins are treated as having fingerprints that, if not perfectly identical, are close enough to flag a match in a police investigation; whereas I thought fingerprint ridges had an element of randomness in their formation and never duplicated exactly, even in individuals with identical DNA.

Oh – and while the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars handwaves the science behind cloning, I’ve enjoyed its portrayal of the Clone Troopers as individuals struggling to deal with the knowledge that they have been bred and raised as cannon fodder, as well as finding comfort in being a literal band of brothers.

Cassy B

While I'm not sure it meets all your criteria, have a look at Cordwainer Smith's The Ballad of Lost C'Mell. It is about genetic manipulation.

Xopher: In Amsterdam, the City Council (local government) has put Gay Pride flags up on all council-owned offices and buildings for Putin's visit - thought you would like to know. And in Stockholm, apparently someone went and painted the Zebra Crossing in front of the Russian Embassy rainbow...

On the clones-in-sf thread:

albatross @ 371

Would it be easier or harder to do a good job raising someone with 100% of your genes? Or a house full of genetically identical kids at different ages, all identical to you as well. Certainly, you would have a handle on a lot of their likely flaws and strengths, at least to the extent they were genetic.

This gets touched on, at least in passing, in Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines. (Briefly: all-female society reproduces by hand-wavy parthenogenesis resulting in a relatively small number of genetically identical "motherlines" from the original founders.) It's been a long time since I read it, but I recall in-passing comments like "the so-and-sos are all good at X" or "so-and-sos all tend to have bad teeth" and the like.

dcb @416:

The visit in question was in April. I went to the spot in the photograph on Monday and it had its ordinary flags up.

On the other hand, Amsterdam didn't wait for that law to pass to make its point. They did it even without the egregious law as a trigger.

@383 thomas

I read it in the 70s, but I had a lot of second-hand books, so it could have been published anywhere from the 40s on.

Not cloning exactly, but –

Bioshock Infinity has two characters, Rosalind and Robert Lutece, who ner erirnyrq gb or NH irefvbaf bs gur fnzr vaqvivqhny; ab bgure punenpgref va gur fgbel jub ghea bhg gb or NH qhcyvpngrf ner traqre-fjnccrq, naq gur Yhgrprf fgngr gung gurl qvssre “ol n fvatyr puebzbfbzr,” juvpu gb zr vzcyvrf gung Eboreg vf n Xyrvasrygre’f znyr – va uvf havirefr n gevfbzl va gur svefg pryy qvivfvba nqqrq na rkgen L puebzbfbzr gb uvf QAN (abgr – abg n fpvragvfg, fb yrg zr xabj vs V’z qrfpevovat guvf vapbeerpgyl). Ur vf gnyyre guna Ebfnyvaq (Xyrvasrygre’f znyrf graq gb or nobir nirentr va urvtug), ohg gung zvtug whfg or gur traqre qvssrerapr. Vg nyfb ybbxf nf gubhtu ur unq n zbhfgnpur va gur pbaprcg neg ohg gung vg jnf qebccrq qhevat tnzr qrirybczrag (Xyrvasrygre’f znyrf nyfb graq gb abg unir gung zhpu snpvny unve). V pna’g svaq nalbar ryfr envfvat guvf gurbel va gur tnzr sbehzf, ubjrire, fb znlor V’z bireguvaxvat vg.

Abi @418

I recall a few stories from other fans who were at Confiction (the 1990 Worldcon in Scheveningen) about the essentially friendly attitude of Dutch Police. It wasn't "Gay scum" but "how on earth did you make that outfit?"

I reckon there was some smart police work there, noticing something odd, and checking things out, without being provocative. I expect the general "don't annoy a cop" rule applies everywhere, but, more so than today, being gay in the wrong place annoyed cops.

And people who had to notice were telling me the Dutch cops were the good guys.

Cassy 389: She even calls them alphas, betas etc., and her tape bears some passing resemblance to his hypnopaedic system. I think she was taking the ideas and running with them, myself.

You could also open with this song.

dcb 416: I'll add that to my list of reasons to move to Amsterdam (unlikely to overcome the reasons not to, but it's getting closer all the time). And I love the Stockholm street art!

In Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, the main character's family has been reproducing via cloning for several generations; he's on Earth to arrange for his own clone-son. IIRC (it's been a long time since I've read it) the family members think enough alike to predict each others' arguments and reactions--more like arguing with oneself than with another person. This is both good and bad, in-story; gur znva punenpgre hygvzngryl qrpvqrf gb pybar fbzrbar ryfr gb znxr uvf fba.

Well, the "bad" news is that I officially did not get the Job I Wasn't Sure I Wanted. The good news is, of course, I get to keep my union benefits. Actually, the further good news is I got to talk to my manager, who wants to give me some feedback on the interview. He says he thinks there may be more opportunities coming up and he'd like me to be ready for the right one. Happy are they that hear their detractions and can put them to mending. I will just need to set up a meeting with him at some point next week when I am certain that I won't get defensive and weird.

I just realized also that I've been itching to fail at something. I don't have a lot of practice with failure without linking it to rejection, and since I find that particular feeling so icky, I have managed to make it over 40 years without taking enough chances. I was thinking along the lines of auditions for choirs, but the only one around here that I think I'm not qualified for has mail-in auditions, and if they like your recording, then you're in. It's not the sort of face-to-face opportunity to screw up that I think would be helpful. I think this interview actually fit the bill: I came in, I did my best, they went with someone else and the world did not end.

nerdycellist:

Great personal best(s)!

Elliot @ 319 -- from the review you linked to:
"Slow Surrender made me love the billionaire Dom again and you should definitely check out this perfect example of everything this subgenre should be."

I guess I'd been subliminally aware that the Billionaire Dom (or the Billionaire Dom's Club) was a trope; I don't read enough porn, so I'd usually encountered him/them as the villains in thrillers. The trope always reads to me like fantasies of what the Cool Kids get up to at the parties to which you are not invited. Sadly, I suspect the rich & powerful are usually too busy consolidating their wealth and power to have any really creative orgies.

A hidden form of cloning is important in Varley's "9 Worlds" series. He does sex-changing by growing a new body and moving the consciousness from one body to another. This occasionally results in problems. Cloning is not done to produce more people, but just to move the individuals around (in general), though this becomes a plot device once or twice.

Spares, by Michael Marshall Smith, is another "clones as spare parts" book. The protagonist works in a "clone farm" where the clones of the wealthy live until their originals need an organ or two.

I'm also trying to remember, but failing, which book had temporary clones. They were brightly colored, lasted a fairly short time, and then disintegrated or died. Originals used them to run errands or do work on their behalf. I'd thought it was Spares, but checking back, it isn't.

abi @ 428... I think John Varley also wrote a story about clones being raised a donors for their originals.

Le Guin wrote a story of someone who'd grown many clones of himself, but with some of them switched during growth to the opposite sex. That takes keeping-to-yourself to an extreme.

Carrie S. #340 and P J Evans #342
IIRC, the Bloodwing Chronicles were popular enough that Pocket Books didn't want to just leave it hanging, but Swordhunt and Honor Blade came out about the time that Roddenberry was taking much stricter creative control over Trek books. Ultimately, Duane was allowed to finish the series, with the unwritten caveat that they weren't canon.

And that's a shame. My personal head-canon for Trek will always favor the Bloodwing Chronicles and Spock's World.

Carrie S. #364
Yeah, in her own words, she didn't actually gen up much of a language, she just wrote a program that built words using rules that would output something "halfway between Latin and Welsh", and picked words she liked. Stole the grammar from the Five Kingdoms Draconic, and she was off to the races.

Cassy B. #368
As I recall, Heinlein's Lazarus Long books involve clones grown without brains, specifically for replacement parts. ANd LL's clone-sisters. And for bad cloning in comics, in Marvel alone there was Jean Grey (Madelyne Pryor), Nathan Summers (Stryfe), the Spider-Man Clone Saga, just off the top of my head.

For laughs, the short-lived Men in Black animated series included quick-clones. You could always tell when a quick-clone was about to expire because it would start talking gibberish. "The underwear wrench undoes the laughing lumbago" is a catch-phrase in our house for "I can't brain so good."

abi @418: Oh well. I was shown it by someone, on their smart phone, while at a bere festival today and my so-called mobile broadband wasn't working very well, so I didn't check it.

abi @428: That's David Brin's Kil'n People

That should have been "beer festival" of course - and I saw it just after I pressed "post", naturally

My personal head-canon for Trek will always favor the Bloodwing Chronicles and Spock's World.

Yeah.

In Star Trek Online, a bunch of stuff about the Romulans' background is taken from Duane--the ancient Vulcan swordsmith S'harien, the fact that their new homeworld is called Mol'Rihan, that kind of thing--and it makes me smile. I've hammered out a couple of stock phrases in Rihannsu for my Romulan character to use, which is fun.

Spock's World was the first place I encountered the idea that Spock had to have been genetically engineered. It was very much a "and the student was enlightened" moment. :)

Apparently Roddenberry didn't like the Rihannsu, alas.

Stole the grammar from the Five Kingdoms Draconic, and she was off to the races.

If there's much in the way of grammar, it's not easily extractable from the bits in the books. I had a brief email exchange with her about this topic several years ago, and she said, basically, "I can give you the word generator I used, but I don't have any of the other notes anymore". The word generator's online these days.

Thank you, dcb. It was Kil'n People. It was annoying me not to be able to remember.

I don't remember brainless clones grown for parts in Heinlein, and I'm hoping someone can track down a more specific reference.

Nancy, 435: One of them was used to fake Maureen's death in Time Enough for Love. (or maybe the retcon in...I dunno...all the Dirty Old Man books kinda blur together for me.)

IIRC, the retcon was in To Sail Beyond The Sunset.

Brainless clones might also have been mentioned near the end of The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls, when a clone was used to donate a body part for another character.

Carrie @433

The genetic history of wheat is a bit strange too with wild grasses crossing, and one or two extremely significant mutations to make the result fertile, and a radical change in the structure of the seed head.

It looks like the reason for ancient astronauts that Von Daniken never knew.

I never gave much thought to Spock, but I knew there was some brute-force genetic mucking about needed for Triticale to exist.

Carrie @433

The genetic history of wheat is a bit strange too with wild grasses crossing, and one or two extremely significant mutations to make the result fertile, and a radical change in the structure of the seed head.

It looks like the reason for ancient astronauts that Von Daniken never knew.

I never gave much thought to Spock, but I knew there was some brute-force genetic mucking about needed for Triticale to exist.

Nancy @ #435 -

In Time Enough for Love, one character makes reference to an impostor who showed up at the rejuvenation clinic claiming to be Lazarus. He received a heart from a "cloned pseudobody" and it killed him (the impostor).

Albatross (@371) and Heather Rose Jones (@417) -- we adopted a number of children and heard a whole lot of "well, he's adopted, you know" about both our kids and other kids.

At one point, I was discussing getting along with one of mine with his soccer coach, and he said "It's probably more difficult because he comes from a different background."

I said "Actually, of all my children both born and adopted, T is the most like me temperamentally, but that doesn't make it easy for us to get along. Quite the contrary, in fact." I expect it would depend on the actual temperament involved. Some of us are just prickly and "prickly-squared" is likely to be a difficult relationship to keep on an even keel.

430
Of course they're canon. (The Great Bird was neither omniscient nor omnipotent.)

(note: I'm writing this on a computer named Moerrdel, on a nonexistent network named Artaleirh. I might be a little biased....)

a computer named Moerrdel, on a nonexistent network named Artaleirh

PJ: I cannot find either of those words. Where'd you get 'em?

TexAnne and Steve C.: Thanks for the Heinlein details-- now that it's mentioned, I remember about faking Maureen's death, but not the bit about the impostor at the rejuvenation clinic.

Carrie, #443: They're both from The Empty Chair. Artaleirh is the system in which the opening battle in that book is fought, and the first of the colony worlds to openly rebel against the Empire. I think (being too lazy to go get my copy and look it up) that Moerrdel was the name of the planetary governor, or perhaps the battle-commander.

Oh, thanks, Lee. My copies of the books are lent out at the moment (which is sad, because I'm in the mood to reread them).

out of the Bloodwing books - the name of a system, and one of the Rihannsu ships that didn't get destroyed. (Steal from the best.)

albatross #371: Vinge has a short story in the AFUtD universe, based on what turns out to be a failed attempt at clone+experience duplication.

In my own case the spoiler would be that I'm on the spectrum. The traits for it do run in my family (though Mom would never admit the ones she shows) -- but I was also a premature birth with complications, and that surely had an effect. My family runs smart in any case though -- my next-younger sister was full-term, and is about as smart as me without the autism.

Thanks, abi, for that 'The Shape of Rome' Parhelia. That was a fascinating read.

I want to drop 'that' so I get "[..] for 'The Shape of Rome' [..] " or 'The' so I get "[..] for that 'Shape of Rome' [..]". Apparently my parser has problems with insertions.

Re: Clones.

Thematically linked to Serge's suggestion "Joshuah, Son of None" is Ben Bova's "The Multiple Man".

I hadn't read "Joshuah, Son of None", but a friend described it to me as John Kennedy's DNA is sampled and used to produce a clone, whose life is manipulated to assure a temperament similar to the original, and eventually becomes President and is also assassinated. This may not be correct, as this is a memory-reconstruction of a conversation about a book I never read.

In "The Multiple Man", a Joseph Kennedy-like character with ambitions that his son should be President - and also realizes the scope of the job has grown beyond the reach of any one man to handle - creates a creche of clones who pass as an individual. One is trained in science, one is trained in economics, one is trained in international cultures and languages, one is trained political gamesmanship (and I think there may have been a couple more). The story unfolds from the viewpoint of a Secret Security agent who is asked to investigate the apparent murder of a man in a back alley who is a dead-ringer (pun-intended) of the President - currently on the job in the White House. Complicating his life is that a former girlfriend is the current First Lady. One of the other characters is a police investigator who I continued to visual as Dennis Weaver in the role of McCloud. If I haven't spoiled enough, the villain is one of the clones who turned on the other clones because he didn't want to share the power of the Presidency.

Arg. I was previewing and hit post - I intended to Rot 13 much of that.

Also, for 'visual' read 'visualize'.

Or, for 'ivfhny' read 'ivfhnyvmr'.

Rob Rusick @ 450... That is an accurate synopsis of "Joshua, Son of None".

Heather Rose Jones @417

This sounds uncomfortably like Virgin Planet, Poul Anderson's first novel. It's a satire. "The Burkes" are mostly administrators, "the Dyckmans" are good at flattery, etc. They also use handwaving parthenogenesis.

Does anyone know if there is a market for unused promotional material for feature films? We've been going through some boxes and have found a bunch of studio release promotional miniposters and large posters (not to be confused with actual theater-release posters, which are usually on heavier paper stock so GCC could use them in multiple theaters) from the 70's through the 90's in various quantities (boxes of miniposters for The Scorpion King and almost a box for the re-release of E.T.) as well as some art posters which we'll be asking Tom "You ever heard of this guy? We have no idea who in hell he is." about.

IME, it depends entirely on the film (anyone want a Dark City mousepad?). Large quantities of the same one -- not likely to have any more value than a single one, and possibly less if you try to sell them all at once.

I've got a Dark City mousepad as well, and have had folks ask about where I got it. We'll have to show you the prints: the large one sustained water damage and protected the rest, but M. and I were caught in one of those "Well, I didn't bring it home" discussions when we opened the box.

When I cleaned up / thinned down during my recent move, I agonized briefly over a couple of handfuls of buttons, and a couple of small posters, promoting genre films.

I ended up tossing them all. It felt good.

I'm four days from the end of my trip through northern Italy , and suddenly feeling sick as a dog. Not sick to my stomach, but coughing and sneezing and headaching.

Tomorrow is Venice. I'm wondering how hard to push myself.

My sister kindly provided benadryl and Tylenol. I hope that doesb the trick.

Fwiw, Verona is lovely.

I'm four days from the end of my trip through northern Italy , and suddenly feeling sick as a dog. Not sick to my stomach, but coughing and sneezing and headaching.

Tomorrow is Venice. I'm wondering how hard to push myself.

My sister kindly provided benadryl and Tylenol. I hope that doesb the trick.

Fwiw, Verona is lovely.

Too I'll to wonder why.

Sorry all the bicotti are taken

[A comma with a blank space to either side. -- Ponneo Cufret, Duty Gnome]

Too I'll to wonder why.

Sorry all the bicotti are taken

Another clone story, about clones as disposable people. Unfortunately even mentioning the title is spoilery: Obar Qnapr, ol Rzzn Ohyy.

Gur cebgntbavfg vf n flagurgvp pybarq obql, jub fubhyqa'g or n crefba ohg vf. Bar bs gur jnlf lbh pna ernq gur obbx vf nf nobhg jung unccraf jura aba-crbcyr trg n ibvpr "Gurer'f tbaan or oybbq, naq sver, naq gur qrnq tbaan qnapr va gur fgerrgf".

Regarding the Sidelight "Report: If you travel to the wrong country, Google Books will delete your books", a couple of points. Firstly, that title is misleading, the reported issue was not being able to re-download already-purchased books after an update to Google Play (on an iPad). Secondly, as noted by The Ditigal Reader, it seems odd that this issue, which would presumably impact all types of media purchased through Play, hasn't come to light earlier. Possible, credible, but a bit odd. Is Play's market share so small that the tech/publishing blogopshere hasn't noticed earlier?

But yes, I do strip DRM from those few purchases I make with DRM, and back up my Calibre library.

Thomas, ah, yes, Emma Bull. I have to re-read her works; I've not read them in quite a while and I did enjoy them.

I watched the Blu-Ray of Oblivion tonight and I liked it. It was smarter than I thought it would be, and remarkably understated.

Anyone else?

thomas, that's my favorite Emma Bull book, except when I've just read Finder.

abi, I've sometimes wished for some of Brin's kiln clones. That way, there would be enough of me to get some jobs done (like the yard work AND watching the kids) and I'd still have all the memories.

Random open-threadiness: Self-propelled cars are well underway and currently legal in California, though not publicly available yet. I've seen so many people wondering why anyone would want such a thing, and I'm surprised that it hasn't occurred to them that there's a huge potential market:

People who are disabled. People who have lost the ability to drive because of age-related causes. People who have *never* had the ability to drive. People who can't drive due to invisible medical issues. In other words, people who currently have to rely on others for transportation, and who often live very circumscribed lives because said transportation is limited and relegated to certain hours.

Can you imagine the possibilities for someone who has had to turn down social activities for years because the bus they need stops running at 7PM? Or the little old lady who just wants to go grocery shopping? Heck, what about the person who has had trouble getting medical appointments because the transport medical van is unreliable?

I know the technology isn't quite here yet, but I will be interested to see what happens when it does get here.

Self-driving cars would also give young people a lot more freedom.

B. Durbin @467: I've been saying for a few years that several things will become much different with the widespread adoption of self-driving cars:

- DUI becomes much less of an issue; the remainder of the problem would be "going manual while impaired".

- Would under-aged kids be allowed to travel alone via self-driving car? Reminds me of the "free-range kids" discussions about kids traveling on their own by city bus, without the "they might sit next to a scary stranger" concerns.

- And, as you say, a whole new range of "handicapped drivers". I think Google's already done a PR video with a legally blind person in the "driver's seat".

- Should there be any restrictions on unoccupied cars? Instead of parking, you could send your car back home until you need it again. Instead of paying through the nose to park downtown, your car could drop you off, then go park someplace cheap on the edge of town until needed. What if many people decide it's cheaper or handier to just have their car keep driving slowly around the block until they need it, instead of paying for parking?

- If fuel is cheap enough, what about unmanned mobile billboards wandering around town? (Ugh!)

- If you can call for a car whenever you need one, and it combines the convenience of a taxi while being cheaper than a rental car (less collision insurance, reduced wear and tear from lead-footed drivers), maybe private ownership of cars declines in built-up areas?

By the time my kids have kids of their own, knowing how to drive may be like driving a manual transmission today; something many people used to do, some people still do, and many people will never see the need to learn.

What are the second- and third-order effects of driverless cars? Some things that come to mind:

a. Everyone will want a limo. Not a literal limo, but if I had a self-driving car, I'd want a much more comfortable back seat setup, so I could enjoy the drive in comfort. If I'm in work mode, I want a nice place to sit with my laptop and a way to make some hot tea; if I'm not, I want a place to sit comfortably with my ipad or a book and read, play games, surf the net, etc. An SUV or minivan has plenty of room in the back for an extremely comfortable backseat.

b. More long roadtrips. The whole flying vs driving equation changes radically if I can just have my *car* do the driving. If I can make the car do the driving while we sit in the back and watch movies or read books or play Monopoly, that two day car trip to visit my family will look a lot more appealing relative to the much more expensive 4-hour flight.

c. Pressure for nicer accomodations on planes. As we get used to relatively comfortable self-driving cars, planes will have to compete or will lose out. People will start *expecting* to have enough legroom to stretch out, and a decent space in which to work, and any airline that wants to capture the St Louis to Chicago traffic, or even the St Louis to Denver traffic, is going to have to accomodate them.

d. The effect on traffic enforcement will be really interesting. I assume self-driving cars will not be easy to catch in speed traps, not least because Google or whomever is operating them will notice statistical patterns and never drive through the speed trap towns. Some small towns will have a major revenue loss. (I'll shed lots of tears for them, honest.)

e. Sex on the highway will be a much more routine thing. Why not--you're sitting together on a couch with the car driving anyway, it's not like you've *got* to keep watching the movie or surfing the net on your ipad.

f. Rationing of houses/jobs by tolerance of commute will change radically. I'm not sure if this will lead to more people living in the exurbs 90 miles from the city, or living downtown because the rush-hour commute isn't really all that bad if you don't have to do the driving.

What else?

John Barnes has obviously put some thought into the issues around self-driving cars in Mother of Storms. He casually mentions a lot of the same things albatross has noted, and a few more besides. Living in your car becomes much more practical if it's got that much workspace, and people with highly-mobile lifestyles (one of his characters is a freelance reporter/blogger) often do. Also, freeway rest areas are more like truck stops -- you can get gas, food, a shower, and the interior of your vehicle freshened up all at the same stop.

Cheyrl @379

Sorry, I'm coming up blank on your book. While I can list some authors who it isn't (the plot sounds like Anne De Roo, but I've read all hers, and it's not Maurice Gee, and probably not Mahy unless it was quite a young book), I can't get any further.

About what year did you read it, and what age group/reading level was it aimed at? And do you think it was by a New Zealand author?

A couple of tagmash lists form librarything that might jog your memory
http://www.librarything.com/tag/New+Zealand,+young+adult
http://www.librarything.com/tag/Maori,+children%27s

One possibility might be Ruth Dallas' "The Children in the Bush", published in 1969 and the first of a series of 7, but I can't find any synopsis of it. One cover for it is shown here: http://www.otago.ac.nz/library/exhibitions/burns/ruthdallas.html

A first for me!

*carefully offers meatloaf and salad because it's dinner time at this end of the world*

B. Durbin: #467.

That's I how feel about the two books. However, since my copy of Finder is falling apart and it's not available as an e-book (can you say 'market failure', boys and girls?), I'm not that often in the state of having just read it.

Cassy B: IIRC, when I started having enough money to buy new books, Emma Bull was the second person to make my "Buy on sight, no questions asked" list. (The first was Terry Pratchett.)

I stupidly managed to lose my copy of Freedom and Necessity on a recent international trip, when I was most of the way through rereading it. Sadly, Air Canada will probably have just thrown it out.

"I assume self-driving cars will not be easy to catch in speed traps, not least because Google or whomever is operating them will notice statistical patterns and never drive through the speed trap towns."

I'd have expected a self-driving car would be able to conform to whatever speed limits it's informed about, though that'd have much the same effects on revenue.

Albatross @470, More consequences:

0. Lots of unemployed taxi drivers and truckers.

1. Human-driven cars will gradually be made illegal without legislation -- by insurance. 90% of RTAs are due to driver error, so the accident rate for self-driving cars should be at least ten times lower; this will be reflected in insurance premiums. As more and more people opt for cheap self-drive-only insurance, premiums for human-driven vehicles will rise steeply to reflect the higher relative risk and smaller pool of people willing to insure for it.

2. Drunk-driving, underage driving, and driving without a license will gradually become obsolescent offenses: what kind of driver qualification do you need to drive a self-driving car?

3. Change in working hour patterns will ensue when your 8 year old can climb in the car and tell it to take them to school. Or to their friends' house.

4. Road markings and sidewalks will largely become obsolete. (I note that Volvo are already selling cars with pedestrian-avoidance radar that try to hit the brakes if they spot an obstacle ahead and the driver doesn't react in time. This is only going to get better.) With distributed metropolitan level computing and "smart dust" we can expect roads to inform oncoming cars about the 4 year old chasing their pet cat into the street the car is planning on turning into, and to route them another way.

5. Corollary of 4: "drive on the right [or left] side of the road" will gradually be replaced by "drive on the unoccupied side of the road". And anti-jaywalking regs will fade because the expectation will be that cars and trucks avoid pedestrians (or balls, or cats, or bicycles) automatically. (There may be a new offense of intentionally obstructing traffic by playing chicken.)

6. Fractional-reserve car ownership: the association of UK car park operators estimate that at peak rush-hour, 95% of the UK's automobile fleet is parked in garages or at the roadside. Even a heavy driver doing 30,000 miles a year probably only operates their vehicle during 10% of their waking hours. Why own a Ford Focus if for the same money you can buy a time-share in a Rolls Royce, from a car rental outfit that will send a Rolls to take you wherever you want, for as long as you need, whenever you call for it via your smartphone? (Especially important in the UK, where houses are closer together and the average dwelling is 75 years old and was built before mass car ownership brought the concept of the built-in garage.)

Upshot:

The city of the future, with self-driving cars, will look a lot like the city of 1900, minus the horses and with better road surfaces -- no (or few) street signs, no (or few) painted markings or parking bays, far fewer vehicles in sight.

Oh, and the current carnage -- as many people dead on US roads every 6 weeks as perished on 9/11 -- will be a thing of the past, much like the tuberculosis deaths resulting from living cheek-by-jowl with horses in an earlier century.

Charlie Stross @477, I think a thing or two in there might run up against the difficulties of quickly stopping or redirecting a tonne of metal moving at 60 mph, though....

I have my doubts and discomforts about self-driving cars. We're assuming a lot more affluence in our predictions than I'm convinced we have to spare.

For instance, if insurance companies start increasing the price of human-driven vehicles, the people who will be hit are the ones who can't upgrade their vehicles, which is to say, the poor? If people can't drive the new cars they don't have, and can't drive the older cars because they can't insure them, what then?

A rise in uninsured drivers. Better public transport? Maybe where I'm living, but not in the UK or the US, the way things are trending. But if not that, then...what? Can we afford to strand that many people in their formerly affordable suburbs? Will they lose their jobs and become part of the underclass? Will they use electric bicycles, even in the winter with the snow?

It's all very well talking car-shares, but those are also part of affluence: the buy-ins are generally prohibitive, to prevent tragedy-of-the-commons carelessness to shared resources. And the hypothetical 8 year old can be driven to school if the family has enough resources to be able to plan its schedule so that that car isn't needed elsewhere right then. But in a society that also includes zero-hour contracts with floating shift patterns, that's not a universal experience.

How does the other half get around, in this driverless future? How do driverless cars intersect with the economic world we live in? At the moment, I'm not enthusiastic about self-driving cars, because all I can see is another way that new technology will squeeze people with no squeeze left in them. The fact that the people with the money to live in the new world have a much sexier morning commute doesn't seem like very good compensation to me.

I'm not always a Luddite. But I'm not particularly enthused about this particular brave new world, given the circumstances into which it is being introduced.

B. Durbin @467, in re self-driving cars, said: Self-propelled cars are well underway and currently legal in California, though not publicly available yet. I've seen so many people wondering why anyone would want such a thing, and I'm surprised that it hasn't occurred to them that there's a huge potential market:

Or just people like me who find driving stressful, difficult, and in no way 'fun'. I seriously un-grok this "fun to drive" thing they talk about in car commercials and that my husband natters on about. Driving is never 'fun' for me. It is something I can do competently because I need to be able to get the transportational outcomes it can bring me, but every time I do it I have to gird my loins and carefully respoon, because my backbrain spends the whole trip yelling "If you make one tiny mistake YOU COULD KILL A WHOLE SIDEWALK OF NUNS. And babies. You baby-killer!"

It is a cognitively-complex tax with extremely high downside risk, from my point of view.

Charlie Stross @ 477: I like the sound of that. I've never been able to drive due to a disability affecting my wrists, and I can no longer even ride a regular bicycle, so a self-driving car (or a share in one) would be just what the doctor ordered for me.

I'm in the UK, where public transport is not bad in general, especially if you live in a city. Even so, it's quite difficult to match up public transport efficiently with all the different ways people are trying to move about, and you can still end up having to go a long way out of your way for certain journeys. And, of course, no matter how good your public transport is, it can still be awkward if you have anything to shunt around.

Stefan: Venice is wonderful and ever so slightly unreal, and I hope you feel better in time to see it. I advise getting lost in it, which is not something anyone can ever do for very long, since all you have to do is keep walking and you will eventually hit either a notable landmark, a signpost or the lagoon. My sister and I got lost in it once and walked straight into a beautiful old church; of course there are any number of those in Venice, but this one was running a two-day exhibition of mediaeval musical instruments, in many cases showing how they were made. There are unexpected delights like this all over Venice.

Driver-less cars?

Besides what Abi said, I'll add...
Zelazny's "auto da fe".
Ron Goulart.

#479 ::: abi

I think that people who can't afford their own driverless cars will be able to rent them-- driverless taxis.

This may actually be a good deal-- are cell phones cheaper than being able to use the now almost non-existent pay phones? Especially considering that you don't have to pay a taxi driver. On the other hand, there are trust issues with driverless taxis. How do you know it won't hold you for ransom?

Will cars tend to become smaller or larger? Both?

On one hand, there will be less need for four-to-six passenger cars if people can split up rather than travelling together. On another, the desire for comfort may eliminate the smallest cars. And people might want long narrow cars that they can stretch out and sleep in.

Ridesharing in addition to buses, hopefully run by the transit authority to eliminate scamming. Put the desired address into an app, it tells you when 2-4 more people want to end up within a block or two. Or between towns, as an expansion of Bolt Bus or SuperShuttle. (There's no reason that one couldn't happen now, though I don't know how the costs would work.)

thomas @ 475 ...
I stupidly managed to lose my copy of Freedom and Necessity on a recent international trip, when I was most of the way through rereading it. Sadly, Air Canada will probably have just thrown it out.

I'd be very surprised if that was the case. In my experience, the flight crew(s) tend to have enough downtime that they're constantly in need of something to read. I've ended up passing along several novels (in good condition) that I didn't expect to read again after the flight, and they've been happy to take them.

Charlie, #477: I take issue with your #4, because it assumes that people will completely stop walking for any purpose whatsoever. (Also, note that there are already plenty of US cities where sidewalks are present only in the older sections. I live in one of them.)

Nancy, #483: there will be less need for four-to-six passenger cars if people can split up rather than traveling together.

This doesn't parse for me at all. If I'm going somewhere with a group of friends, riding together serves 2 purposes: (1) it ensures that we all get there at the same time, and (2) it provides more time for socialization on the way to and from whatever the event is.

OTOH, as a teenager I would have jumped at the option of being able to avoid Captive Lecture Time by not having to be in the same car with my parents, so there's that as well. :-)

Driverless cars also imply the following:

Wireless communication between vehicles, or between each car and a traffic control system - more surveillance

The necessary ability to shut down a vehicle remotely

Hacking into a car's control systems

It'll be awesome to be rich in the future.

thomas #475, xeger #485:

I once deliberately left a novel (Caleb Carr's The Alienist) on a European flight. Imagine my annoyance when the local office called up to arrange for me to collect it.

Lee @486: you read my point #4 completely back-to-front. I suspect people will walk more once there are no human drivers to succumb to road rage or use "oops, I didn't see you there" as an excuse for running pedestrians over.

Sidewalks and street markings and annoying pedestrian crossings get in our way, impede pedestrian progress, and they're only there because human drivers are pedestrian-blind. (I know. I'm a pedestrian; I'm a driver, too, and it's shocking how hard it is to pay attention to pedestrians when you're focusing on the other steel boxes around you.)

Charlie @ 490: I once went to Rome, where I was told that the way to cross the road was simply to walk out into the traffic and people would drive round you. In great trepidation I tried it, and discovered that this was absolutely correct. They do exactly that.

Driverless cars: B. Durbin @467 raised something near to the heart of this parent of a 19-year-old who, due to special needs, is unlikely to ever learn to drive but can operate a laptop or an ipod, and thus would be capable of learning to direct a vehicle she didn't have to operate in real time. My daughter had a volunteer job this summer that was great, except that it wasn't accessible by public transit and I had to hire someone to drive her since the hours weren't compatible with my own work.

Charlie Stross @490 and earlier, when I think of my driving and walking in Washington DC, I think some system of pedestrian crossings and control will still be necessary even with driverless cars, because otherwise at peak times the cars will never get through.

abi @479 and Nancy Lebovitz @483, some US cities already have the shared-car "Zip Car" franchises; I have several colleagues who live in downtown DC, own no car, and check out zip cars when they need to go somewhere off the transit path. Combining this with the effort I was reading of recently to help cover the annual fee for bikeshare membership for low income individuals, and it seems like something could be worked out.

@472 Aquila

About what year did you read it, and what age group/reading level was it aimed at? And do you think it was by a New Zealand author?

I have always gone through books like a fish does water, so year and age is hard to pin down. It was probably in the 70s-ish (could be early 80s), and I might have been anywhere between 7 and 15. I don't think it was purchased new (most of my new books came from the in-school Owl Book Club), so I may have inherited it from a family member, picked it up at a garage sale, or maybe from a library or church sale.

Just because of the age of the protagonists, I think it was aimed at the 12-13ish age group. I had always supposed the author was from NZ, but have nothing to back that up.

Thanks so much for your help! I'll definitely look at those librarything links.

OtterB @ 492, abi @479 and Nancy Lebovitz @483 - It will be interesting to see how the costs/pricing of these new car options evolve over time, and how they complement mass transit and private cars.

Today, a Zipcar must be picked up at its designated spot and returned to it, which is very limiting. If you used one to go to dinner and a movie, you're paying by the hour for a rather long time and it gets spendy. If you want one to pick up something heavy and get it back to your house, it works. If you want a car for an all-day trip to the beach, it's probably cheaper to get a rental car.

Car2Go is in fewer cities, but has a more flexible model. You pick it up wherever the last person left it, and park it wherever you want to leave it—as long as you stay within the boundaries of their service area. They use Smart cars, which aren't going to haul much of anything, but was adequate for my groceries. I find that using a Car2Go is about two or three times the cost of a bus ticket (assuming one, rather than 2 people, in the car), but half the cost of a taxi. It's a good supplement to using mass transit, but not a replacement. Car2Go really requires a smart phone. The model only works when you can quickly look up the nearest car, and reserve it while you walk towards it.

Joining Car2Go costs $35, unless you get one of their (frequent) free promotions. Zipcar costs $25 to join, plus $60 per year to stay enrolled.

Both these services require you to have a credit card, unlike mass transit.

I suspect that the length of time between driverless cars with a driver ready in case of emergency being common and completely autonomous cars being allowed will be measured in decades, so not much help for those unable to drive

Bjorn @495: cars with adaptive cruise control (keep to constant set speed or slow down to keep constant distance behind car in front) are here today. Cars with highway lane tracking and lane departure warnings are going on sale within the next year. (Volvo last year demo'd a convoy of cars driving for 200km on an autobahn using this system). That's your minimal "driverless car with a driver ready in case of emergency" scenario, in showrooms in 2014.

Given that the half-life of a car is 7 years, this suggests that by 2020 more than half the autos on the roads will have some self-driving capability, even if at first it's just like a fancy cruise control for use on long-haul highways. And the most recent ones by 2020 will do a lot more than that.

The key factor we tend to forget is Moore's Law. The DARPA Grand Challenge winning autonomous vehicles of a few years ago bore sensors and computers that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But today, your regular cheap Android smartphone contains differential GPS, cellular data transceiver, inertial sensor platform, compass, and video cameras along with a 2000-era workstation equivalent processor, on a circuit board the size of a large postage stamp and costing a few tens of dollars. An entry-level iPhone today is probably capable of doing a better navigation/control job than the guidance computer of a Tomahawk cruise missile -- hence worries over drone proliferation. And this same mass production process that's giving us hundreds of millions of dirt-cheap smartphones is going to drive the cost of the ICE to manage autonomous automobiles down below the cost of an automatic gearbox (itself a couple of thousand bucks) within a very few years.