This digest is a trip back to about a month and a half ago — the distant past, as far as Internet info-junkies are concerned. Cool online reading you might have missed from September’s second half. Posting this, I excised stuff that wasn’t sufficiently evergreen, as journo slang goes. Back in ye oldie days of late September, offline I was (as I recall) moving from William Gibson’s Zero History to Deidre McNamer’s Red Rover for fiction-reading, and for music, I was moving from I’m not sure what to I’m not sure what, either, so I’ll just suggest you check out James McMurtry and Dan Dubuque for your ears.
At Talking Points Memo, Robert Reich (economist & former Secretary of Labor under Clinton) continues to explain just how doomed the American middle class is. Yo, if you’re in the USA reading this, he’s probably talking about you!
The problem isn’t the cost of capital. Most businesses can get all the money they need. […]
The problem is consumers, who are 70 percent of the economy. They can’t and won’t buy enough to turn the economy around. Most don’t qualify for more credit given how much they already owe […]
Without consumers, businesses have no reason to borrow more. Except to speculate by buying back their own stock and doing mergers and acquisitions […]
Say the White House and Ben Bernanke got everything they wanted to boost the economy. At some point these boosts would have to end. […]
After three decades of flat wages during which almost all the gains of growth have gone to the very top, the middle class no longer has the buying power to keep the economy going. It can’t send more spouses into paid work, can’t work more hours, can’t borrow any more. All the coping mechanisms are exhausted. […]
So what’s the answer? Reorganizing the economy to make sure the vast middle class has a larger share of its benefits. Remaking the basic bargain linking pay to per-capita productivity.
You want to look at this headline-and-picture-only page at The Onion, really, you do, after reading the above; it’ll make you laugh.
Thomas L. Friedman in the NYT can haz what appears to be legit economic troof:
China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a third is in bioscience, where the Beijing Genomics Institute this year ordered 128 DNA sequencers — from America — giving China the largest number in the world in one institute to launch its own stem cell/genetic engineering industry; and, finally, Beijing just announced that it was providing $15 billion in seed money for the country’s leading auto and battery companies to create an electric car industry, starting in 20 pilot cities. […]
Not to worry. America today also has its own multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing moon shot: fixing Afghanistan. […]
What keeps me up at night is China, Germany, India, Brazil — they’re moving. They make decisions, we’re going to pursue clean energy, and the next thing you know they’ve cornered half the clean energy market; we’re going to develop high-speed rail in the span of five years — suddenly they’ve got high-speed rail lines going; we’re going to promote exports, here’s what we’re going to do — boom, they get going.
And if we can’t sort of execute on key issues that will determine our competitiveness over the long term, we’re going to fall behind — we are going to fall behind.
This ~3 minute audio+video NPR animation, which I noticed on Boing Boing, tells about the highways miles above our heads, where billions of bugs travel daily. For me, the video and the information both are strangely moving. There’s always something to learn. And, we hope, life goes on.
the [problematic] human tendency to see things that happen in sequence — first the positive thinking, then the positive results — as forming a chain of cause and effect. […] If we hear only about the crazy coincidences (“I was thinking about getting the job offer, and right then I got the call!”), not the unconnected events (“I thought about getting the offer, but it never came” or “I wasn’t thinking about the offer, then I got it”) or even the nonevents (“I didn’t think I would get the offer, and indeed I didn’t get it”), then we get a distorted picture. […] When Byrne tells her readers to “make a connection” between the good things they do and the good things that come to them, she is focusing their attention on positive examples of the law of attraction, thereby reinforcing the illusion that it actually works.
Lifehacker says Google’s Chrome browser continues to gain favor over Firefox among the Net’s power users (who these users are, I’m not sure, but Cory Doctorow has to be among them, though at last check he’s still a Firefoxer). Me? I use Firefox, for now. Or rather, I POWER-USE Firefox. Anyway, the LifeHacker post offers some reasons for Chrome’s ever-increasing power-popularity.
Speaking of Cory, here he is in The Guardian talking about artists’ e-biz.
The sad truth is that almost everything almost every artist tries to earn money will fail. […] Consider the remarkable statement from Alanis Morissette’s attorney at the Future of Music Conference: 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal. […]
If you’re an artist and you’re interested in trying to give stuff away to sell more, I’ve got some advice for you, as I wrote here […]
But I don’t care if you want to attempt to stop people from copying your work over the internet […]. I mean, it sounds daft to me, but I’ve been surprised before.
But here’s what I do care about. I care if your plan involves using “digital rights management” technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; […] if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate […]
And this is the plan that the entertainment industries have pursued in their doomed attempt to prevent copying.
Boing Boing gives you a glimpse inside a stolen credit card site. Users purchase stolen credit card information using gray-market, anonymizing currencies such as Belize-based Webmoney.
“A team of researchers from Facebook,” starts this SmartBlog on Social Media post, and here I have to stop to evoke the image of a bunch of profile pics becoming self-aware and creeping across cables to gang together all for the purpose of doing research on actual humans: “A team of researchers from Facebook.” Sounds like a horror movie. Anyway. The researchers in question have found a way to predict Facebook users’ ethnicity by fiddling with name data and Census data. Among the team’s findings:
The ethnic makeup of Facebook users has steadily become more diverse and now generally reflects the U.S. population, unlike a few years ago, when Caucasians and Asian/Pacific Islanders were over-represented.
Users are more likely to be friends with, and communicate most often with, people of the same ethnicity.
His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it’s legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect’s car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.
Dan Ariely, a Duke Professor of Psychology & Behavioral Economics, author of The Upside of Irrationality and the NYT Bestseller Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, and Psychology Today blogger, (whew!), writes of forcing people to save, saying, among other things:
I was impressed with [Chile’s] system and wondered how it would fly in the United States, where our own mandated savings program—Social Security—undergoes sporadic efforts to privatize it.
I suspect Americans would consider the Chilean system heavy-handed and limiting—a flagrant example of nanny-state control. […] Paradoxically, we happily accept deeply controlling (and expensive) regulation on our behavior in other areas with little thought or protest. […] Wear a seat belt. Drive this speed. Bear the cost of air bags. Pollute only this much. Don’t text while driving.
Why do we accept so much government intervention in driving but chafe when it comes to a few simple rules that would help us make better financial decisions? It’s probably not because we think we’re smarter about finances than driving. I think the reason has to do with our ability to imagine negative consequences.
Not to mention disinformation designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer; recently, Rick Perry (unfortunately the Governor of Texas) has called for allowing states (including Texas) to secede from (federal) Social Security and health care delivery.
Under the new contract, the branches will be withdrawn from county control and all operations — including hiring staff and buying books — ceded to L.S.S.I. […]
“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization.”
Maybe the Old Spice guy can stop the privatization of libraries.
Rand is an efficient storyteller that way: You know early on what the rules of her world are, she sticks with those rules, and you as the reader are on a rail all the way through the story. […] Basically, I find her storytelling restful, which I suppose isn’t a word used much to describe her technique […]
That said, it’s a totally ridiculous book which can be summed up as Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don’t get enough hugs. […] Indeed, the enduring popularity of Atlas Shrugged lies in the fact that it is nerd revenge porn — if you’re an nerd of an engineering-ish stripe who remembers all too well being slammed into your locker by a bunch of football dickheads, then the idea that people like you could make all those dickheads suffer by “going Galt” has a direct line to the pleasure centers of your brain. [… Rand’s heroes] disappear into a crevasse that Google Maps will not show because the Google people are our kind of people, and a year later they come out and everyone who was ever mean to them will have starved. […]
All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.
she read through a section of her son’s history book and found four pages on Islam and only one reference to the Bible. Asked by a board member what the section was titled, she replied, “Life in the Eastern Hemisphere.”
Don McLeroy, one of the board’s “most conservative members” said
textbook publishers have been biased in favor of Islam for years. He argued that “one of the greatest gifts to the world was medieval Christendom,” citing an essay he had written in 2002 titled “The Gift of Medieval Christendom to the World.”
Crusades, anyone?
Many worry that because of the size of the Texas market, the State Board of Education’s warnings to publishers have nationwide implications. (A dissent on this point: Secretary of Education Duncan).
you can blame economic reality. The cost of medical care continues to soar upward, and the recession led many healthy people to drop coverage, leaving less-healthy enrollees who cost more to insure.
As for health care reform, the major elements, and major costs, don’t even kick in until 2014. The only provisions with the potential to affect premiums right now are a handful of consumer protections that are popular with the public, and not especially costly to implement.
Sociological Images blogs about ethnic maps of cities made by Eric Fischer. Here’s what he says about the Fort Worth map (which applies, I presume, to the others as well):
This is the sort of thing that belongs in repressive dictatorships or dystopian sci-fi movies; Tea Partiers like to blather about the injustice of their tax dollars going to poor people, but this — the unrestrained exercise of violence by the state — is an actual perversion of America and its values.
In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That’s not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”: in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.
Have you ever wondered the best strategy for surviving an elevator plunge (can I use “wondered” as a transitive verb? Does my poetic license extend that far?)? I used to think you were supposed to jump right when the elevator hit the floor, but NPR (actually, Mary Roach, quoted) says jumping only delays the inevitable. Instead you should lie down, on your bottom.
James K Polk, America’s former president, claimed in 1846 that Mexico “invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil”.
It wasn’t true, but no matter. The lie justified a war […]
“The border patrol has gone from about 10,000 to 20,000 agents in less than a decade, [and] many of their new hires are coming directly out of military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq or other theatres in the ‘war on terror’,” says Geoff Boyce […]
The predator drone itself is “leading the situational awareness revolution” with “surveillance, reconnaissance and hunter-killer missions over land and sea”, according to manufacturers. The drones on the US-Mexico border are to be used for surveillance, not targeted killings, but the Predator B model can be equipped with weapons capability. […]
when Janet Napolitano, the US homeland security secretary, announced new drones and other “security” measures on August 30, she admitted that crime rates were low along the border.
Via Boing Boing (once more!): Columbia law professor Tim Wu, who coined the term Net Neutrality, speaks in this ~35min video about the Google-Verizon alliance against it. Despite what FOX says, Net Neutrality promotes four freedoms: the right to access any internet site, use applications one chooses, hook up one’s gadgets to one’s other gadgets freely, and be dealt with transparently. Google was the most powerful advocate for it in DC, and supposedly they still are, but their interest in the smartphone market (i.e. the pressures of $$$) seems to be reversing their position in actual practice.
As to Net Neutrality: Do you want a choice of, say, only three smartphones, which block you from accessing the other smartphone companies’ websites, and from accessing, say, Wikileaks or Al-Jazeera or whomever DC might want blocked in exchange for granting the companies’ near-(effective)-monopoly power? It’s an ideological war, and smartphones, Wu says, are the computers of the future.
The only moral obligation we have is to first help those in our country. After that, should we have the time and money, we can help in the third world. But there is no moral obligation.
Revkin replied:
This is one of the fundamental issues of our time: Figuring out where borders of various kinds end. When your pants are made in Bangladesh, your cellphone components require minerals from gorilla habitat in Congo, your next deadly flu threat comes from a poultry/pig farm in China and your (and China’s) emissions (slowly) influence the climate and coastal future around the world, where do your interests — and responsibilities — end?
My answer in support of local altruism (as opposed to altruism aimed at foreign recipients) is, despite my preference for a citizen-of-the-planet approach, basically that engagement with one’s community leads to better benefits overall: you get to know more people who can help, you can personally vouch for the success of your charity, you can see the results and adjust your strategies, etc. I don’t have the maths to prove my sense of it, and I imagine a lot of this will continue to change with them thar globalization…and utilitarianism doesn’t seem to cut it in any ethical case…
So is this much ado about nothing? Not if you teach creative writing or judge literary contests. Whenever I find myself talking to people who have done either, I ask them if they’ve noticed any trends in subject matter or form. On three separate occasions recently, this has prompted long, exasperated rants about the present tense. “They can’t even say why they’re doing it,” remarked one writing teacher of his students. “They just see it a lot and start using it because it seems ‘literary’ to them. It’s a mannerism.” I judged a literary prize myself last year, and can testify that a preponderance of enervated, present-tense fiction made up the daily portion of entries I slogged through.
From Wired, noticed off (where else?) Boing Boing, a pamphlet authored by “federal law enforcement” contains tips for spying on your neighbors to see if they’re terrorists — authoritarian snitching culture. Tips include suggestions such as: Watch for “the adoption of a new name”; Watch for “behavior that could indicate participation in surveillance of potential targets”; etc.
Speaking of Neuromancer, here’s a duo of interviews with its author, WilliamGibson, currently promoting his latest, Zero History. Interview #1, at Maud Newton’s place.
[Gibson:] Someone said that if a fourteen-year-old boy writes a novel, it’s got to be set in a post-apocalyptic world, because a fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t know anything about how the world works (laughs). But if you smash the shit out of it, it’s easy to depict, and he can do a rather convincing job of depicting how people would behave in it.
I think I was in somewhat that position when I began to write. I didn’t have the confidence to depict more complex emotional characterization. Some people have unkindly assumed that this is characteristic of much genre SF and fantasy anyway. So it could have something to do with science fiction having been my native literary culture. But as I’ve gone along, with quite a bit of effort, I think I’ve been able to widen that bandwidth a little. […]
I see [the blurring/mixing of meatspace and cyberspace] as inevitable. I mean, in order to stop it, something so drastic would have to happen that none of us would be having a good time at all! It’s just what we do. We live in a world in which change is primarily driven by emergent technology. We live in a world in which, I suspect, technology trumps ideology, every time. I think that’s where it’s at, as people used to say in the sixties. It isn’t as though I have any space in which to stand and say “This is loathsome!” or “This is exciting!” It seems an awful lot like Frederic Jameson’s definition of the postmodern sublime, which if I recall correctly is the mingled apprehension of dread and ecstasy.
Our reaction to these things is amazingly similar to the reaction of the Victorians to technologies like the railroad and the gramophone. If you go back to first-person accounts — diary entries of individuals encountering those things — it wasn’t like, “Wow, that’s wonderful!” They were scared shitless. They were reeling with the shock of the new. They didn’t know where anything was headed, and it made them sort of angry, often as not. I think it’s the way we react to these things.
Interview #2. At an event hosted by Intelligence Squared, Gibson and Cory Doctorow had a wide-ranging hour-long discussion; the complete audio is embedded below (check the link for a pop-out with additional functionality), as is the teaser video; to (legally) watch the full video, you have to pay serious dough to join Intelligence Squared, which you can do here.
As best as anyone can make out — including, I surmise, Wikileaks — end-to-end AES-256 encryption is (now and perhaps forever) an absolutely unbreakable cryptography scheme that allows private citizens to say to one another “Neener-neener, NSA” or to have cybersex with one another or to communicate whatever without being surveilled/wiretapped by the powers-that-probably-shouldn’t-be-and-who-don’t-care-about-warrants. But if your comm gadget sends un-encoded (“plaintext”) messages through the backdoor to the authorities at the same time as it sends top-secret encoded messages to your buddy, your encoding (crypto) efforts are in vain. The NYT says “unscramble encrypted messages” but given AES-256 it seems “bypass encrypted messages” is more what is meant.
Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data […]
Obama isn’t the first U.S. president to seek expanded digital eavesdropping. […] Since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems within the United States.
These laws are dangerous, […] government eavesdropping reduces privacy and liberty; that’s obvious. But the laws also make us less safe. […]
Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured, and we’re not very good at that. Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement will mine collected internet data or eavesdrop on Skype and IM conversations?
These risks are not theoretical. […] The most serious known misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure took place in Greece. Between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government — the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice — and other prominent people. Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, but enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but some still unknown party — a rival political group? organized crime? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.
Now that the midterm elections are over, stopping all this will probably become my next civic-responsibility project.
This month CBSDFW.com, the website for KTVT, the CBS station in Dallas – Fort Worth (that’d be channel 11), published some ‘Best of’ pieces I wrote for ’em. Here they are, with a tiny excerpt of each.
All Texans twenty-one-and-up need to have their own great margarita recipe, ideally, or at least know somebody — a bartender buddy, a sister-in-law, somebody close — who does. If a personal margarita can’t be made, however, there are plenty of places in Fort Worth on standby
At Ol’ South Pancake House, everyone — students pulling all-nighters, bikers, high-powered attorneys telling war stories, metalheads, cops — eats in the same few rooms together.
When it comes to alcohol, if you want to keep up with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and James Bond, you’ll have to learn how to enjoy one of their signature drinks: the martini cocktail.
With singers who desperately need surgery on their vocal cords, guitars that do their best to imitate sentient chainsaws, and lyrics straight out an illiterate criminal’s essay paper on “The Lord of the Rings,” heavy metal might not be music that you want to admit listening to.
Press the red button on your comfy chair’s tray and the staff will come take your order for wings, for a margarita, or for another margarita! After the show, be sure to sit out on the balcony — the view is fantastic — and debate the movie’s merits with your friends.
They were fun to write. I haven’t ever seemed to initiate discussion about any of my writing that’s been published, and I’m continuing that trend now. After publication, my primary role in a text’s life is basically done, save I guess for fixing typos or something in a theoretical reprint of whatever.
So: they were fun to write. Really! =D Hope you enjoy.
Whoa, I just earned actual money by writing and self-publishing fiction without an agent or a publisher or an editor or an acquisitions editor. Without any other gatekeeper. The point of this post isn’t the handful (or less) of euros, but another anecdote supporting the march toward what might well be a new paradigm for publishing.
I’ve received fan mail for the story; again, this is not to brag, but to point out that netizens actually read and enjoyed the piece without mediators between them and me. (Artistically, critiquers helped me, of course; and, there are Dreamhost and Flattr and other web companies/organizations, plus the overhead cost of running this website. So in a very loose sense there are, if not mediators, connectors.)
The license allows readers to share (copy) and remix (adapt; e.g., translate) the story so long as they do so on a noncommercial basis, give my name and my story attribution & linkage, and license any remix/adaptation they make similarly. In other words, share the story all you want, freely, and do something cool with it, unless it involves plagiarism or making money. (If you’re Hollywood, email me.)
Yeah, download the short story, the whole thing, and toss a few coins in the tip jar on my digital street corner here where I’m being your bard.
I think magazines and publishing houses are still very necessary. They provide authors with infrastructure for, say, interviews and book tours, among other functions. (After all, most artist types aren’t the greatest biz folk at promoting themselves.) Houses help readers choose between fiction based on reputation. They connect authors with communities and with editors — though tons of editors are already freelancing outside the umbrellas of publishing houses. AND magazines and publishers still have bigger bullhorns than many websites (including mine), bigger wallets than micro-donaters, and they typically bestow more credibility (for opportunities such as speaking gigs) than self-publications. So, sure, I definitely still want to get a bunch of stories past gatekeepers. They’re not all bad or anything!
But the bottom line: in order to connect with readers and score some pocket change, I won’t have to have gatekeepers’ approval. Not anymore. Score one for the Internet.
This post is the sixth in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop (Wikipedia) as a member of the 2008 class. I’ll talk about Week 4 of the workshop, when Connie Willis (Wikipedia) instructed. Here are Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the series. In Part 5 I discussed Cory Doctorow‘s week and ended with a somewhat bizarre dismantling of my psyche. This post is quite the opposite: I brag. Bear with!
“Total exhaustion is the goal,” Mary Rosenblum said, teaching Clarion West during our Week 2, and by Connie’s Week 4 I was totally exhausted; that’s clear to me now as I read over the emails I sent friends and family during that middle of July ’08. In those emails I also now detect a down-on-myself attitude about my fiction-writing, one that I don’t particularly experience anymore (knock on wood). These days I get dejected or grumpy about my fiction-writing at times, of course, but I don’t feel such negativity, pessimism, or bewilderment about the whole process. I have strong confidence in my abilities, and faith that new stories will turn out right eventually, that I’ll be able to revise them into artworks I’m proud of. That confidence is due in part to Wifely Kate, additional and diverse employment experiences, and other factors; but, a huge chunk of it has definitely come from Clarion West. This benefit from Clarion West took a long time to set in; I’ve had to incorporate what all I learned into my writing and my life, and that took me quite a while.
Outside the Clarion West spaceship: replica of Seattle
The additional confidence from Clarion West hasn’t derived so much from the grab-bag of tips I picked up from the instructors or my fellow students (though these have helped!), nor was it any sort of confirming validation that other Clarionites sometimes mention. I gained so much, I think, from the way a Clarion workshop primarily focuses on the process of revision, not creating an ultimate and spotless draft; and, second, making weird friends who accept me for my weirdness-es was an invaluable gift. As Kate puts it, I found my people, my tribe.
About Clarion’s focus on revision — writing and life are pretty much driven by storytelling, or at least by motifs that recur and recur, carrying with them their old meanings and acquiring new ones as they go. I’ll have more to say about how this works when I get to my Week 6 post (the forthcoming Part 8), but for now, the emphasis on revision, the way instructors and fellow students took specific elements of stories and suggested specific changes (with reasons!), gave a real sense that one’s own fiction can work, after all, that the poor draft you wrote does indeed have potential in it. There’s a real feeling of hope there.
Which is why I shouldn’t have been so down on myself. My Week 4 short story was an unfortunately convoluted mystery. I came up with the story from absolute scratch — not even a vague idea of the story before the workshop — which was a specific challenge I’d set myself before arriving at the space station (the Workshop mysteriously floats in orbit over Seattle). In the emails, instead of feeling glad I about actually succeeding at this task I’d set myself, I was all down on how the story didn’t “work.” Well, pretty much no first draft ever works. And, no matter how bungled, the first draft had cool ideas. Why be so negative?
Connie told us it took her eight years of writing before she sold a story; she also asked each of us to tell the group how we started writing. The answers varied; some knew since birth, it seemed, and others were late bloomers. Me? I wanted to be a writer as a kindergartner, but soon switched my hoped-for career to astronaut; in middle school I made up stories often, but then switched to music. When for various reasons I determined a music career was not for me, I tried writing again, and after a few months, maybe even only after a full year, I began to enjoy it. I hope people reading this who are searching for their own directions, whether as a writer or otherwise, come to feel patient with their search. Often — and the psychologist Csíkszentmihályi (gloriously pronounced “Chick-sent-me-high”) makes this point — it can take learning time before you enjoy a career path. For many, beginning to play, for example, tennis (maybe at the behest of a friend) isn’t very fun: all those frustrating, misguided racket swings and terrible serves. But once you can get to where you can actually play not too shabbily, the fun and satisfaction finally starts setting in. If you give up on a career path without giving yourself time to get some basic proficiency, you probably haven’t really tried at all.
More about Connie. She’s a frequent master of ceremonies at science fiction & fantasy events, a respected dame in the field. She was one of the instructors who hung around our quarters of the space station in her spare time, answering questions and just visiting. Before I went to the Workshop, I read one book by each instructor; for her I selected Passage. The book was fast-paced and straightforwardly written — and also very moving. Highly recommended. She’s a real expert at plot.
Her advice mostly centered on plot, too. Here are some of her tips I collected; she gave the caveat that her advice was only her advice, that we should feel, like Agatha Christie, free to break any rules.
But I should note first that during Week 4 an anonymous friend sent me a replacement copy of PeterStraub‘s If You Could See Me Now; the copy I brought with me, oddly, was missing a page. I found it helpful to have a book with me that was totally unrelated to Clarion West. Really reading it was impossible, due to the total exhaustion, but being able to dip into a page here or there and disappear from the Workshop was refreshing.
Anyhow: tips from Connie Willis:
Connie’s definition of plot: “A constantly surprising chain of events with each new scene turning the story to a new point where the logical occurs, unforeseen by the reader.”
Unremitting horror exhausts readers. Use contrast!
The perfect title means one thing when you start the story, and by the end of the story, it means another. It should be evocative, it should add something to the story, and it should have both literal and figurative meaning(s).
PG Wodehouse claimed a 7500 word story needs two big reversals: one at 1500 words, one at 6000 words.
If some things in the story are complicated, make other things simple.
Develop a good filing system (for research and ideas, e.g.)!
Fix one aspect at a time when you revise.
When you read fiction or watch film, look for reversals, raising the stakes (“things get worse”), foreshadowing, climax, dénouement, interior conflict, exterior conflict. Study extensively the books you know well and admire.
Connie also gave us each a critique coupon to snail-mail her along with a short story or novel opening, if we wanted. Finally, a tidbit: in interviews she’s mentioned that when she was very young, she read the fiction section at her local library in alphabetical order. At the space station I asked her how far she made it through the alphabet. I believe her answer was H, that reading Heinlein made her switch to reading all the library’s science fiction.
As I’ve said throughout this series, writing these Clarion West posts induces in me a unique sort of stress that I don’t fully understand; I feel, maybe, as if I’m just not describing the time well enough, not at all portraying just how transformative and wonderful the Workshop was — that these posts are somehow doing violence to a great gestalt from a time that’s gradually starting to feel like long ago. Maybe that’s why I delay these posts: to hang on to my Clarion West experience.
One thing that continues on, however, are my classmates, our relationships. They’re all people I treasure; mostly we keep in touch, sometimes through our email list, sometimes with individual phone calls, even trips here and there.
One way or another, see y’all special Clarionites soon. ;-)
Once more, my futile quest to read everything online and bring you the best of what you didn’t catch from, ah, last month. Offline I’m still finishing Spook Country — I read slowly — and I’m listening to my iPod shuffle everything.
In many cases, Blog Aggregators will have the strongest claim of a transformative [and therefore legal] use of the material because they often provide additional context or commentary alongside the material they use. Blog Aggregators also often bring to the material a unique editorial voice or topic of focus, further distinguishing the resulting use from the purpose of the original article.
Newt Gingrich, a clever moron, is worried we might refer such legal questions to an imam. He’s called for federal legislation banning Sharia law. In related news, his fans probably don’t get out much.
“I snook up behind him and took his Quran. He said something about burning the Quran. I said ‘dude you have no Quran’ and ran off,” Jacob Isom tells NewsChannel 10.
The 23 year-old says he is an Atheist and will not follow any spiritual guidelines written down in a book. However, he does believe in religious freedom.
The NYT Editorial Board isn’t happy with a California plan “to tag preschoolers with radio frequency identification chips to keep track of their whereabouts at school”:
Surveys have found that most Americans believe, incorrectly, that many common techniques used by corporations to keep track of their online activity are illegal. Though it may seem innocuous to attach a chip to our preschoolers’ clothes, do we really want to raise a generation of kids that are accustomed to being tracked, like cattle or warehouse inventory?
But if this TIME article has its info right, the NYT is a bit late with the “do we really want to raise a generation” line:
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
From NPR, noticed off Boing Boing, an article about what parents should worry about for their children (car accidents, drownings, suicide) as opposed to what they do worry about (terrorists, kidnappers, snipers):
As for children, Barnes says that overprotectiveness will hurt them in the long run by making them less resilient. “We’re teaching them to be helpless,” she says. “And because we’re so afraid of the world, we’re teaching them to be afraid of the world.”
The stock market has as much to do with the real economy as the weather has to do with geology. Day by day there’s no relationship at all. Over time, weather and geology interact but the results aren’t evident for many years. The biggest impact of the weather is on peoples’ moods, as are the daily ups and downs of the market.
The real economy is jobs and paychecks, what people buy and what they sell. And the real economy — even viewed from a worldwide perspective — is as precarious as ever, perhaps more so.
But all is not well in leftist (center-left?) land, because Glenn Greenwald is always there at Salon.com pointing out failings of the Obama Administration from a progressive standpoint. Check out those headlines Greenwald mentions. Nevertheless, I fall into the group of those leftists who think Obama’s probably doing the best he can given powerful interests, known and unknown to us, that he can’t successfully combat. (For instance, see this enigmatic tweet from Wikileaks.) Nevertheless, I realize my position basically boils down to “Have faith in the guy,” which isn’t good citizenry; therefore, regardless as to how progressives read the tea leaves for Obama’s motivations, they should keep up pressure on politicians, maintain inquiry and doubt, and vote.
This next item takes away a big chunk of my “Have faith in the guy” sentiment. I haven’t kept up with the news on extrajudicial killings much, mostly because the idea horrifies me, but Glenn Greenwald encapsulates my opposition to them neatly:
Obama supporters who are dutifully insisting that the President not only has the right to order American citizens killed without due process, but to do so in total secrecy, on the ground that Awlaki is a Terrorist and Traitor, are embracing those accusations without having the slightest idea whether they’re actually true. All they know is that Obama has issued these accusations, which is good enough for them. That’s the authoritarian mind, by definition: if the Leader accuses a fellow citizen of something, then it’s true — no trial or any due process at all is needed and there is no need even for judicial review before the decreed sentence is meted out, even when the sentence is death.
I don’t think the executive branch should have carte blanche to secretly kill American citizens who aren’t charged with crimes and who aren’t allowed recourse to the judicial system. I don’t understand why this is controversial.
I’m not at all sure if it’s better to give a kid a unique name so that they can stand out like a shining star or to go with a more generic name so that they can quietly stay invisible if they want. There’s definitely something to be said for naming a child at puberty instead of at birth, but, well, that’s not really how American society is structured.
In 2004 I started using my first name, Douglas, as opposed to the nickname Andy off my middle name, Andrew. For both my byline and for personal use. I didn’t ask people who’d called me Andy before to change; sometimes I wish I’d had. I’ll blog about why I “changed” my name someday.
Especially as someone who chose the humanities in college, I get peeved when people (often bitterly) allege that the humanities are a bad choice of study because they aren’t sufficiently lucrative. This letter-to-the-editor to the NYT says the right thing about the benefit to society from humanities education.
[the humanities] also provide the knowledge and wisdom by which we in the present can better question the values that we live by and those that are imposed on us by organizations, government and society […]
Undervaluing the humanities leads to citizens who are not willing to confront the moral challenges that make them good citizens and protect their freedoms.
Not every humanities major is going to become a great advocate, and many who don’t study the humanities will become so, but without the humanities, everyone would more often encounter the problems mentioned in the excerpt above.
incentive to lie is at the heart of the free-rider problem […] It’s a problem that professionals in these fields have long assumed has no solution that is both efficient and fair.
In fact, for decades it’s been assumed that there is no way to give people an incentive to be honest about the value they place on public goods while maintaining the fairness of the arrangement.
“But this result assumed that the group’s leadership does not have direct information about people’s valuations,” says Rangel. “That’s something that neurotechnology has now made feasible.” […]
the scientists tried to determine whether functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) could allow them to construct informative measures of the value a person assigns to one or another public good. Once they’d determined that fMRI images-analyzed using pattern-classification techniques-can confer at least some information (albeit “noisy” and imprecise) about what a person values, they went on to test whether that information could help them solve the free-rider problem. […]
In fact, the more cooperative subjects are when undergoing this entirely voluntary scanning procedure, “the more accurate the signal is,” Krajbich says. “And that means the less likely they are to pay an inappropriate tax.” […]
This changes the whole free-rider scenario, notes Rangel. “Now, given what we can do with the fMRI,” he says, “everybody’s best strategy in assigning value to a public good is to tell the truth, regardless of what you think everyone else in the group is doing.”
I’m all in favor of honesty overriding almost all other concerns (I can understand some wiggle room for etiquette-ish white lies). I wonder, though, if such fMRI tech would someday get co-opted and mis-used to trick people. Or if it’d help save the day. Stay tuned?
You know that Gallup poll I mentioned in an earlier digest that showed Republicans as having a historic 10-point lead on the generic Congressional elections ballot? Now Republicans and Democrats are tied on the same poll. Yeah, sometimes polls are quite ephemeral. It ain’t over until the final chad disappears. You’re stillgoing to vote! Here’s the Gallup graphic:
First there is the “day residue” stage, in which emotional events [from some particular day] may work their way into a person’s dreams that night. But that is followed by the more mysterious “dream lag” effect, in which those events disappear from the dream landscape — often to be reincorporated roughly a week later.
I noticed the dream lag effect when I was keeping a dream journal, which I hope to get back to doing. Dream researcher Van de Castle also mentioned the dream lag effect in his book on the subject of dreams. In my dream journal I noticed many more dream themes playing out across week-blocks of time than when I tried to find them in single isolated dreams.
Boing Boing posts a video of an ant death spiral. My understanding of the ant death spiral is that ants sometimes dumbly follow each other’s scent-trails in circles until they all pile up in the center, dying. I believe that from their perspective, they’re walking in an straight line (think of Flatland). The comments on the Boing Boing posts are interesting and funny.
The AP (via NPR) reports on a study that says making more money typically stops increasing happiness (day-to-day happiness, and overall happiness) for Americans once a person hits an income of about $75,000. After that it’s diminishing returns, a hedonic treadmill of lifestyle inflation and consumerism, etc. I guess any additional dough over $75k should mostly be socked away as savings, plus trips &tc.?
A NYT feature discusses a new approach to studying academic/intellectual material that’s an old hat approach for athletes and musicians. Actually, I’ve always studied this “new” way, for the same basic reason:
For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. […] Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
Daniel Ellsberg, heroic leaker of the Pentagon Papers that helped stop the Vietnam War, was interviewed on MSNBC again about Wikileaks. Can’t figure out how to get an embed of this one on here; check out the link.
A clever Toronto Star reporter gave pre-paid credit cards to panhandlers to see 1) if they’d return them as asked, and 2) what they actually used them for (gauged by online transaction history) as opposed to what they said they’d use them for. (LCBO is Ontario’s Liquor Control Board.)
Card 1: $50, handed to Jason. Spends $8.69 at McDonald’s. Returns card. […]
Card 3: $75, to Joanne. Card is stolen. Over two days, $24.95 spent at McDonald’s, $38.35 at the LCBO. […]
Card 5: $75. Laurie buys $74.61 worth of food, phone minutes and cigarettes at a gas station convenience store. Returns card.
Darmouth researchers are building EEG headsets that connect with your phone (plus its GPS, gyroscopes, etc.) and reads your mind to automatically update your social networking, to update the scientists who are studying you, etc. Like seriously. For real. I’m not making this up. A commentator says:
This however seriously scared the crap out of me.
I wonder what Jaron Lanier will have to say about this. You Are A Gadget, quite literally. Lumbering meat relays for Twitter data, in the omnipresent, omniscient God Machine.
Members of the board’s social conservative bloc asked for the resolution […] A preliminary draft of the resolution states that “diverse reviewers have repeatedly documented gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions in social studies texts” across the U.S. and that past social studies textbooks in Texas also have been “tainted” with pro-Islamic, anti-Christian views.
The New Yorker exposes the Koch brothers, who’ve funded libertarian organizations (such as think tanks including Cato, tea parties, etc.) for decades from behind the scenes.
The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization […] Its mission, Kibbe said, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions […] We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.” […]
[Koch brothers’] Americans for Prosperity launched “Porkulus” rallies against Obama’s stimulus-spending measures. Then the Mercatus Center released a report claiming that stimulus funds had been directed disproportionately toward Democratic districts; eventually, the author was forced to correct the report, but not before Rush Limbaugh, citing the paper, had labelled Obama’s program “a slush fund,” and Fox News and other conservative outlets had echoed the sentiment.
The book seems really interesting; especially as a substitute teacher, I WANT! From the interview:
We’re teaching kids what it means to be a citizen in our country. And what I fear we’re doing is teaching them that what it means to be an American is that you accept authority without question and that you have absolutely no rights to question punishment. It’s very Big Brother-ish in a way. Kids are being taught that you should expect to be drug tested if you want to participate in an organization, that walking past a police officer every day and being constantly under the gaze of a security camera is normal. And my concern is that these children are going to grow up and be less critical and thoughtful of these sorts of mechanisms. And so the types of political discussions we have now, like for example, whether or not wiretapping is OK, these might not happen in 10 years. […]
I acknowledge I don’t have to deal with 30 unruly kids as I teach in front of a class. So I have great sympathy for teachers who have to struggle with that misbehavior. That’s not their fault. But what I’m saying is that we have evidence-based ways of dealing with that misbehavior that are much more likely to stop it, and we don’t use them.
The longest I’ve worked in any one particular classroom as a substitute has been a full week; most of the time I see a class only once. So I don’t have the experience most teachers have with students where they get to know each other well across several months. Nevertheless I can say I consider myself good at classroom management, aka crowd control, aka discipline. Managing a classroom comes down to capturing the students’ interest, and being fair, patient, and kind. Too many teachers I watch up close (and I worry that Kupchik lets them off the hook, as the interview excerpt seems to suggest he does) fail by trying — unsuccessfully — to scare the kids with meanness, including empty threats, which undermines what authority these teachers might have.
I find this New Yorker profile of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg completely fascinating, much more fascinating than I thought I would. But for now I’ll keep the privacy setting as to why I find it fascinating checked, since I don’t want to go there myself, much less bring you there. Whatever ‘there’ is. Anyway.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself […]
some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” […] Does the need to think constantly about [this sort of] epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.
Smart phone users will use QR reading apps to snap a picture of [barcode stickers at bus stops], then their phones will be shown relevant real-time information corresponding to the bus stop they are at.
The military, which has forbidden its servicemembers from looking at the Wikileaks website, even if the servicemembers are good and eat all their dinners, has now purchased and destroyed 9500 copies of the 10,000-copy uncensored first edition of Operation Dark Heart, CNN says, trying to keep the information from the citizenry. Some of the 500 copies the military didn’t manage to destroy (burn?) have sold for around $2000 on eBay. A censored second edition is out now, and of course the uncensored first version is available on them thar interwebs.
the manuscript contained secret activities of the U.S. Special Operations Command, CIA and National Security Agency […]
In the memoir, Shaffer recalls his time in Afghanistan leading a black-ops team during the Bush administration. The Bronze Star medal recipient told CNN he believes the Bush administraton’s biggest mistake during that time was misunderstanding the culture there.
BUYERS of the highly-anticipated Halo Reach will be served by staff trained to ask them what exactly they are doing with their lives. […]
there is no ‘respawn’ in real life and that regret is not an option once your overdeveloped thumbs are rotting in the ground […]
Some game creators have pledged that future releases will display real-life achievements in the corner of the screen that players could have managed while they have been playing, including reading a book, forming a meaningful relationship […]
But software developer Wayne Hayes said: “If I was an overweight teenager living in an identikit provincial pisshole with a tawdry family, no social skills and a horrifying IQ, I think I’d want to be a space soldier from the future, too.”
3d-printing, right outta Cory Doctorow’s novel MAKERS, is “spurring a manufacturing revolution,” says the NYT.
A 3-D printer, which has nothing to do with paper printers, creates an object by stacking one layer of material — typically plastic or metal — on top of another […]
[3d-printing] is giving rise to a string of never-before-possible businesses that are selling iPhone cases, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing and architectural models. And while some wonder how successfully the technology will make the transition from manufacturing applications to producing consumer goods, its use is exploding. […]
MakerBot Industries sells a hobbyist [3d-printer] kit for under $1,000 […]
the concept may seem out of place in a world trained to appreciate the merits of mass consumption
Using Wikileaks as context, Peter Ludlow at The Nation discusses the hacktivist ethic. Note: Wikileaks contests the article’s brief assertion that five human rights groups disapprove of Wikileaks disclosures. From the Nation article:
The political compass of these hacktivist groups has never pointed true right or true left—at least by our typical way of charting the political landscape. They have been consistently unified in their adherence to the basic hacker principles as outlined by Levy and The Mentor in the 1980s: information should not be hoarded by powerful constituencies—it needs to be placed in the hands of the general public. […]
As described in Khatchadourian’s New Yorker profile, Assange’s philosophy blends in seamlessly with the hacktivist tradition: it can’t be characterized in terms of left versus right so much as individual versus institution. In particular, Assange holds that truth, creativity, etc. are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, or what he calls “patronage networks,” and that much of illegitimate power is perpetuated by the hoarding of information. […]
This is not a one-man or even one-group operation. It is a network of thousands motivated by a shared hacktivist culture and ethic. And with or without Assange, it is not going away.
William Gibson came to Austin Wednesday, 15 September 2010, and it was very, very cool. The occasion was his new book, Zero History. I talk about my trip down there in my preceding blog post.
The Reading Portion
The Gibson event was, like all Gaul, divided into three parts: a reading (pictured above), a Q&A session (pictured below), and signings (pictured way below). There were maybe 75 people there, some with phones and laptops in constant use during the event, which seemed to me fittingly Gibson-esque.
The Q&A Portion
Notes from the Q&A, things Gibson said. Everything in quotation marks is pretty darn close to what he said; stuff without quotation marks is my paraphrase. Any mistakes are mine, of course.
“In the 20th century I seemed to be a futurist writing about the 21st century; in the 21st century I seem to be some sort of naturalist with a science fiction toolkit.”
“When you get to the real future, it doesn’t have any capital F; it’s just ‘today.'”
He has “trouble with villains.” He said, “As a grown-up, I sort of don’t believe in villainy in the same way I might have done as when I was younger and as our folk culture encourages us to. The bad guys in my books tend to have way too much money and time on their hands, and in my early, sort of further-future fiction, they tended to live way too long, which gave them even more time on their hands […] The real antagonist in all my work is the way the world is — and that’s what undoes the good guys and the bad guys in these books […] and the way people are, or the way I see the world or I see people as being.”
I asked Gibson about Wikileaks, and he said he doesn’t have a position on the organization; he said he needs to think about it in more detail. I encouraged him to blog on the subject. :-p (A lot of people are curious as to what he thinks on the issue.)
Gibson did say “when [Wikileaks] announced and hinted about the link [to the Afghan War Collateral Murder video], I thought, ‘ahh, here it comes, I could have done with this not happening for a few more years.'” I take that last not as a commentary on Wikileaks content, but rather — since Gibson has mentioned the inevitability of radical transparency or at least something approximating it — a remark meaning Wikileaks and any similar organizations are going to be such game-changers that we and the world at large will have to seriously and quite stressfully adapt. Here’s my post about Wikileaks.
In the course of praising the movie Inception, he said: “If you’ve been doing your job right and doing it long enough, you digest all your influences. So when you’re younger there’s like lumps of gristle in your work and it’s not attractive and you realize you should have airbrushed those lumps a bit before you put [the early work] out.”
His debut novel Neuromancer doesn’t make it obvious, but he thought of that one as set in approximately 2035.
One great question someone asked was: Overall, do you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist? Gibson replied, “Actually I think I’m quite optimistic. People said Neuromancer was oh, this grim dystopian vision of large cities with poor people dealing drugs, where could this have come from, this young man’s imagination is too much! [laughter]
“I think today, there’s any number of people in, for instance, Africa, who would migrate to the Sprawl [the above-mentioned fictional setting in Neuromancer] in an instant, and they’d be way better off. The Sprawl looked dystopian if you were really, really better off […] When I wrote Neuromancer, any rational, well-informed individual knew the world could end at any second [due to nuclear holocaust]. [For understanding the] second half of the 20th century, the great historical secret: people my age grew up knowing the world could end at any minute. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory; it almost did [end] a few times, and nobody knew. There was a Russian radar operator / missle man who didn’t launch [missles] when he saw the American bombers coming, and they were coming accidently. Those are the real nodal points [of history]. [The bombers] got called back, and they’d gotten past the point where the guy was supposed to push the button, and the guy was on the phone with the Kremlin saying there was something wrong, ‘I don’t want to shoot.’ I hope this guy got a medal. Everybody should give that man a medal.
“Coming from a world with that stuff going on I thought I was pretty optimistic to write about a world with people in it! In Neuromancer the big corproations decided nuclear war was bad for business anyway.”
The Signing Portion
During the signing portion of the event, I got four books signed, two (Spook Country and Zero History) for me, one (Pattern Recognition) for Wifely, and one (Idoru) for a friend. I was near the back of the at-least-fifty-something-people line, so when I got to the table, I didn’t want to pester him with any additional questions. :) Instead, I blabbled a bit about Wifely and the friend for whom he was signing — I got the books autographed to our Twitter user names, by the way. If I could go back in time, I’d have just said: “I feel like I’m supposed to be saying something, but I’m really happy, so I’m just going to stand here and beam.” Yeah, it was totally worth the drive from DFW to Austin and back (each trip in the same day!). The event definitely made my week.
Now that I’m here, I’m gonna get some work done while I wait, or maybe just socialize (speaking of the billboard above). If any of y’all out there in Twitter cyberspace are also in here in meatspace, or otherwise want to participate, hashtag this event #AustinGD!
It’s totally been too long since I posted one of these digests of what I’m reading online. So think of these selections as “recent-ish news stuffs you might have missed.” Offline: I’m reading Spook Country by William Gibson in preparation for his new, related-but-standalone novel Zero History, and I’m listening to the first cello concerto by Shostakovich as well as, ah, the song “#1 Crush” by Garbage. Now, let’s have at it:
On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. […]
“The president had no interest in the intelligence,” said the CIA officer. The other officer said, “Bush didn’t give a [expletive] about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”
If you’d like to worry about running out of things lighter than oil, apparently we’re facing peak helium, too. From Boing Boing.
Since apparently the Defense Department has never heard of the Streisand Effect, they haz a plan, according to the NYT: “buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir [alleged to contain] intelligence secrets […]”
veterans of the publishing industry and intelligence agencies could not recall another case in which an agency sought to dispose of a book that had already been printed.
Army reviewers suggested various changes and redactions and signed off on the edited book in January […] But when the Defense Intelligence Agency saw the manuscript in July [it set] off a scramble by Pentagon officials to stop the book’s distribution.
Such a plan, the Streisand Effect says, will backfire because the publicity will just cause more people to purchase the book. Is the plan some sort of reverse psychology to get people to buy Operation Dark Heart, or are the planners just that stupid?
Is this all pretty upsetting? Well, have some chocolate (Sociological Images) — for moments when your aspirations to perfection fall short, an advertiser says; because, like, they couldn’t just say that it’s okay to be imperfect, that perfection is, after all, impossible. They gotta sell the stuff, you know. And you gotta buy it, too. Here’s more worthwhile hating on advertising, from the Psychology Today blog Ulterior Motives.
Ok, everyone, I am trying to get something positive in here. I know! A cat!
“Mrkgnao!”
The cat snuck onto a Dublin DART, was re-united with its human via Twitter, and received a genuine rail pass for being awesome. Thus spoke RTÉ news.
People the length and breadth of the land have talked about Obama’s privately-funded redecoration of the Oval Office, but USA Today (also know as USA? OKAY!) gives the five quotes Obama picked for the rug:
1. “The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt
2. “The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long, But it Bends Towards Justice,” Martin Luther King Jr.
3. “Government of the People, By the People, For the People,” President Abraham Lincoln
4. “No Problem of Human Destiny is Beyond Human Beings,” President John F. Kennedy
5. “The Welfare of Each of Us is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us,” President Theodore Roosevelt
Incomes started to become more equal in the 1930s and then became dramatically more equal in the 1940s. Income distribution remained roughly stable through the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. […] The deep nostalgia for that period felt by the World War II generation—the era of Life magazine and the bowling league—reflects something more than mere sentimentality. Assuming you were white, not of draft age, and Christian, there probably was no better time to belong to America’s middle class.
[This] ended in the 1970s [hi, Nixon!]. […]
Why don’t Americans pay more attention to growing income disparity? One reason may be our enduring belief in social mobility. Economic inequality is less troubling if you live in a country where any child, no matter how humble his or her origins, can grow up to be president. […] But when it comes to real as opposed to imagined social mobility, surveys find less in the United States than in much of (what we consider) the class-bound Old World. France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain—not to mention some newer nations like Canada and Australia—are all places where your chances of rising from the bottom are better than they are in the land of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick.
Oh, and suggestions for how to center these object embeds within the li bullet point, anyone? Because I’m that OCD.
Russia’s finance minister has a very unusual scheme, mentioned in UK’s Daily Mail. Talking of what we in the States call “sin taxes,” he says:
“If you smoke a pack of cigarettes, that means you are giving more to help solve social problems […] People should understand [that] those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state”
As I return to substitute-teaching, this Lifehacker how-to for remembering names already is coming in handy. If you’re just meeting a Sasha and exchanging names, Philip Guo advises:
[Typically] you totally forget Sasha’s name because your mind is too pre-occupied thinking about the next thing you’re going to say to carry the conversation forward, or too focused on listening to Sasha talk […] As soon as you hear her name, start repeating SASHA in your head loudly a few times [even as you give her your name] — SASHA, SASHA, SASHA. If you want to practice saying it out loud a few times, ask her about her name. “Sasha, that’s spelled S-A-S-H-A?” […] The purpose of these questions is to simply get you and Sasha to repeat her name a few times to help you to remember.
Talking Points Memo mentions a Newsweek poll showing most Republicans (52%) believe that Obama “definitely” or “probably” wants to impose Islamic law (Sharia).
Lefties paying attention to politics are seriously worried about the Democratic base’s “enthusiasm gap” which, at this point, has contributed strongly to the Republicans’ record-breakingly huge 10-point lead (at the moment) in the midterm election generic Congressional ballot, and has increased fears of a November of Doom: if Republicans win the House, Obama in many ways can’t get much good lawmaking accomplished. In The Nation, Thomas Geoghegan advances some obviously good proposals and some good but risky (to my mind) proposals to excite the left and up voter turnout. Here are some of the obviously good ones:
1. Keep it simple. […] Every initiative should be capable of being put down [summarized?] in a single sentence or two.
2. Make it universal. People on the left have all sorts of ideas for programs that turn out to be available only to a select few. By contrast take FDR’s big ideas, like Social Security. […] Likewise, Medicare: we’ll all get there.
3. Make it add up to a plan. […] FDR did not end the Depression, either. But people were patient because they knew he had a plan. He was rebuilding the economy from the bottom up, and it paid off, not in the 1930s but in the unionized, high-benefits postwar decades after he died […] People will be patient with us and keep us in power if they think we have a plan.
Regardless of his wise advice, Geoghegan’s article is quite a bit harsh, and in the regard I sent a letter to the editor about some of my quibbles (they’re not connected with the excerpt above), so I’ll let you know if anything happens with that. And concerning explanations for Democrats’ dismal poll numbers, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo snarks:
everybody picks the theory that validates their assumptions.
Dems and Obama’s poll numbers are so bad because …
Republicans: Terrible policies and he’s probably a Muslim.
Right Democrats: No CEOs in the administration. And why does he keep getting into the black thing?
Down-the-Line Obamaites: Economy’s bad. Nothing he could do. Give it a rest.
Left Democrats: He wasn’t liberal or tough enough and me and my eight friends are deeply disillusioned.
NY Daily News reports on CuteCircuit’s new dress, the M-Dress (Mobile Phone Dress): you insert your SIM card into the dress label, and voila, one of your sleeve’s palms is now also a cell phone. Pop singer Katy Perry wore it some event(s) or other.
Brain Mysteries adapts a meatspace-meets-cyberspace press release by the FECYT – Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, saying:
Researchers at the University of Barcelona have created a system which measures human physiological parameters, such as respiration or heart rate, and introduces them into computer designed characters in real time. […]
The system […] uses sensors and wireless devices to measure three physiological parameters […]. Immediately, the data is processed with a software programme that is used to control the behaviour of a virtual character who is sitting in a waiting room.
“We maintain that the linking of subjective corporal states to a virtual reality can improve the sensation of realism that a person has of this reality and, eventually, create a stronger link between humans and this virtual reality”, [researcher] Groenegress concludes.
This is heartbreaking. The WSJ reports that many Japanese men, who already play the game Love Plus+ in which they maintain relationships with virtual girlfriends, can do well enough in the game (with tasks such as virtual exercise for attractiveness) to win a trip to the real-life resort town of Atami, where they pretend to be on a date with their handheld virtual girlfriend.
In Atami, the Love Plus+ fans—mostly men in their twenties and thirties—stand out. Unlike the deeply tanned beach crowd wearing very little, they are often pasty and overdressed for the heat in heavy jeans and button-down shirts. […]
“There isn’t a lot of romance in my life and this helps me cope with some of the loneliness,” said Mr. Fukazawa
From the description of this YouTube video — I noticed the video on Boing Boing — “Alex Halderman and Ari Feldman replaced […] voting software with Pac-Man. They did this in three afternoons, without breaking any tamper-evident seals. It would be easy to modify the software to steal votes, but that’s been done before, and Pac-Man is more fun.” You can learn more about their hack here. Give the video a watch:
Scientist J. Craig Venter, who famously sequenced the human genome and also created a cell with a synthetic genome, is now going after, well, just read it, from the NYT:
At Synthetic Genomics, [Dr. Venter] wants to create living creatures — bacteria, algae or even plants — that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels.
“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.”
His star power has attracted $110 million in investment so far, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars in research financing […] “If you think of an iconic, Steve Jobs character in the life sciences field, he comes to mind,” says Steve Jurvetson […]
Synthetic Genomics is also exploring the use of algae to produce food oils and, possibly, other edible products. […]
The Vatican […] cautiously praised [Venter’s synthetic biology] work as a potential way of treating diseases, saying it did not regard the synthesis of DNA as the creation of life.
Brain Mysteries, adapting a news release by the Elsevier, notes that in the cases studied, oxytocin — sometimes perhaps-too-broadly called the “trust” and the “bonding” hormone — affects new fathers just as much as new mothers. No more teasing Wifely @cckaty82 about oxytocin. (NO! We are not pregnant.)
I have many more links, but I’ll have to carry them over to my next digest, which I’ll try to make happen sooner rather than later.
I’d really appreciate hearing in the comments if people are finding these digests useful. They help me keep track of interesting info stuffs; but, at the same time, they’re a lot of work.
Yesterday, partly in a quest to be more sociable — and partly in a quest to save (improve?) the universe — I volunteered, phonebanking, for Democrat Bill White‘s campaign (Twitter; Twitter) for the Texas governor’s office.
Some bullet-points about Bill White:
The Houston area led the nation in job growth during Bill White’s years in office. It added more jobs than 37 states combined.
Houston voters returned him to office as Mayor with overwhelming re-election margins of 91% and 86%.
Bill White’s parents were schoolteachers, and he calls “education the most important business of state government.” He pledges to work toward increasing public education’s share of the state budget and toward making two- and four-year colleges more affordable.
He helped Houston free up an additional $80 million for parks and $40 million for libraries.
His main opponent, incumbent governor Rick Perry:
Perry opposes consensual oral or anal sex between anyone, gay or straight, as does the 2010 Republican Party of Texas; both want those acts to be illegal.
In 2009, with Texas unemployment at 8%, Perry expressed disbelief when others said Texas was in a recession. Earlier, that January, in the middle of Texas-record job losses, Perry turned down half a billion in federal stimulus funds targeted toward unemployment benefits for Texans.
Perry-appointed chairperson for the current Texas State Board of Education, Gail Lowe, removed Thomas Jefferson from the curriculum standards’ list of world philosophers, making space instead for 16th-century theologian John Calvin (among others); according to Max Weber and more, much Calvinism, if not Calvin, considered great success in money-making to be a sign that a person is one of the elect going to heaven.
Sarah Palin is endorsing Rick Perry’s gubernatorial run. The two appeared together at the Super Sunday with Sarah! event along with Ted Nugent, where Perry said: “Sarah Palin was a great person to put on the [Republican Presidential] ticket.”
I had a lot of fun phonebanking. Most of the time I was just leaving answering machine messages or marking numbers as disconnected (“or no longer in service”); when I did get a person on the phone, most all of them were very polite, even the Perry supporters. I got the hang of it quick, and definitely talked a few people into yard signs or text-message updates or whatnot. ;-) If you’re able to volunteer, I bet you’ll get the hang of it quick, too. Find out how to volunteer for Bill White!
A digest of what I’m reading online. Offline, still finishing up William Gibson‘s novel Mona Lisa Overdrive, and also, I’m listening to Joey Ramone‘s solo album. Has anyone else noticed we’ve had some slow news days lately?
In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up […] inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on […]
These [self-identified] patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. […]
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. […]
Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51.
The comments on this fun LifeHacker post/thread about what people carry in their always-with-them backpacks led to a post that highlights the top five comments — itemized descriptions of five personal backpacks.
Stealing this CNET lede: “A Pennsylvania school that was caught secretly snapping photos of students via laptop Webcams will not face criminal charges in the case.”
The allegation brought to light that the district had activated the Webcams on student laptops over a 14-month period through the use of a remote control system. School officials said that the tracking system was set up only to locate lost or stolen laptops, but they soon admitted that the software had stayed active even after a laptop was found. As a result, the program took images every 15 minutes, capturing a total of 56,000 pictures in total
Gawker.com reposts a video from space shuttle mission STS-124 “taken from a tiny camera mounted on one of its solid rocket boosters. The booster separates at around 146,000 feet [about 2 minutes into the video], eventually drifting to Earth via parachute.” In other words, this is basically what it’d look like if you jumped out of a spaceship — relatively close to Earth where there’s enough atmosphere for sound — and fell to our planet.
NPR reports that the economy seems to be worsening again, with rising unemployment insurance claims appearing to indicate more employers are laying off workers.
In a healthy economy, jobless claims usually drop below 400,000. But the recent increases in claims provide further evidence that the economy has slowed and could slip back into a recession. Many analysts are worried that economic growth will ebb further in the second half of this year.
A Boing Boing post concerning studies of “a parasitic fungus that infects ants, affects their behavior, then sends them to a fungus-friendly death.”
it seems [wikileaks] may be using encryption as insurance against legal and other threats to the information it holds.
The insurance.aes256 file has been posted alongside the already published leaked war logs and can be downloaded by anyone.
From the file name, it is believed that it has been encrypted using the AES256 algorithm – described as “extremely strong” by Professor Whitfield Diffie […] could prove too tough even for US intelligence agencies to break.
While no-one knows what the insurance file contains
From the department of Related News, the NYT reports on the war of words between the Pentagon and Wikileaks.
As I continue to work on my office, I need to neaten the cables. Lifehacker has some how-to in this regard.
Frustrated by the two choices of gender that hegemonic society allows you? (‘Scuse the Eurojive.) Yeah, so’s Sociological Images, a recent post of which goes off on the B&N screenshot below:
Keep It Simple, Stupid
One component of newlywedhood is getting all your official stuffs in order; Wifely and I have done some of that, but we haven’t yet turned to the morbid. For anyone getting around to it, however, here’s a Lifehacker post about how to ensure your estate’s executors can do what you want them to with your cyberspace identities after your meatspace identity goes kaput. (Un?)fortunately, Maas-Neotek hasn’t yet designed you a biochip box to live in.
“Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,” said Jackie Skaggs
“Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them,” Ms. Skaggs said. “The answer is that you are up there for the night.”
Some cognitive benefits afforded by wine benefit only women, not men, says CBS11. (Video.) Summary from the CBS11 RSS feed:
“Women looking for more ‘mental muscle’ may only need to lift a glass of wine, according to a recent study. Wine, the study says, can give women an intellectual edge over men.”
First the genes, then the memes, and now the temes, as Susan Blackmore philosophizes about them in the NYT.
Each request to Google, Alta Vista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages — a new combination of items selected by that search engine according to its own clever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches and link structures.
This is a radically new kind of copying, varying and selecting, and means that a new evolutionary process is starting up. This copying is quite different from the way cells copy strands of DNA or humans copy memes. The information itself is also different, consisting of highly stable digital information stored and processed by machines rather than living cells. This, I submit, signals the emergence of temes and teme machines, the third replicator.
What should we expect of this dramatic step? It might make as much difference as the advent of human imitation did. Just as human meme machines spread over the planet, using up its resources and altering its ecosystems to suit their own needs, so the new teme machines will do the same, only faster
Well, most techno-philo/socio/anthro/othero-pology stuff I read seems phony — buzzwords mixed with second-rate Eurojive (lit crit talk); this piece, I’m not sure about either way, because I’m hungry right now and can’t really concentrate on abstractions, just low-level sensory data: FOOD FOOD FOOD. I’m definitely a low-tech replicator.
Dr Shostak says that artificially intelligent alien life would be likely to migrate to places where both matter and energy – the only things he says would be of interest to the machines – would be in plentiful supply. That means the Seti hunt may need to focus its attentions near hot, young stars or even near the centres of galaxies.
The first message from the alien artificial intelligence, of course, will be HELLO WORLD!.
Some worry with the recent USA healthcare reform legislation that insurers will over time raise rates in response to (or perhaps “in response to”) the new consumer protections &tc. But we can haz a plan for that, and also other related plans, one of which is coming into effect imminently:
under the new federal law, insurance companies will be required to justify to federal and state regulators “unreasonable” rate increases before imposing them. Companies also will have to post that information on their websites. […]
Last week, federal officials distributed $46 million of $250 million in grants to the states. The $1 million that Texas received was expected to go toward developing the data required for the greater number of rate reviews.
A big sign on a hotel dominating Main Street read:
Mansion House Inn Believes Anyone Who Has
Passed Health Care Reform
Signed Economic Stimulus Bills
Recast America’s Global Image
Commands Two War Zones
Won the Nobel Peace Prize
Named 2 Supreme Court Judges
Overhauled Financial Regulations
DESERVES A GREAT VACATION!
Great DailyKos post about the multi-use community center near Ground Zero; explains a lot.
It should come as no surprise that as the November election draws closer, the conservative movement would choose to stop focusing on things that legislators are responsible for (such as what sort of legislation to pass–and focus instead on something they have no control over (such as where a private entity builds a community center and house of worship). Democrats may be unpopular right now, but Republicans are just as unpopular. Meanwhile, the last thing conservatives want is to have a fight about actual legislation; they tried running briefly on the idea of repealing health care reform, but that fizzled. They certainly can’t run on opposition to Wall Street reform, or the Lily Ledbetter Act, any other of the good pieces of legislation passed by the Democratic Congress and signed by President Obama […]
The Republicans are trying to go back to the playbook from 2004 and 2006 and use the Park 51 project as a referendum for exploring how concerned Democrats are about “national security” and “protecting America” […]
Democrats have an opportunity to use their support for Park 51 to reinforce their existing narrative about supporting the little guy. Democrats support the right of middle-class moderate Muslims to worship in peace for the same reasons that we support extending unemployment insurance for those hard-hit in these economic times. For the same reasons that we support the right of the LGBT community to get married. Because even when it’s slightly unpopular, our fundamental values is to stand up for people’s basic fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
Email: DAL@RISEUP.NET (ask for pgp key or check keyservers if you want encryption)
Snailmail (United States Postal Service only): Douglas Lucas / PO Box 75656 / Seattle WA 98175 / United States
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