Blogging on and off since 2003
Digby at Hullabaloo:
But the fact that the white house consciously and knowingly used anal rape to control, interrogate and punish prisoners and went to some length to protect those who were doing it from scrutiny, still has the power to stun me.
Are we really just going to let this stuff go? Really?
[w]hen the GOP enforces a party line vote against the stimulus bill and then goes on Sunday morning talk shows to complain about the lack of bipartisanship in the White House, it’s like a shopkeeper complaining that he’s got no sales while he’s waving a gun at anyone who tries to enter the store.
Via Susan Claire at Facebook:
Place an X by all the things you’ve done and remove the X from the ones you have not, then send it to your friends (including me). […]
Well, it’s very US-centric, and I’m not going to tag other people, but I’ll still have a go at this in my blog.
Things you have done during your lifetime:
(X) Gone on a blind date
(X) Skipped school
( ) Watched someone die
(X) Been to Canada
(X) Been to Mexico
(X) Been to Florida
( ) Been to Hawaii
(X) Been on a plane
( ) Been on a helicopter
(X) Been lost
(X) Gone to Washington, DC
(X) Swam in the ocean
(X) Cried yourself to sleep
(X) Played cops and robbers
(X) Recently colored with crayons
( ) Sang Karaoke
(X) Paid for a meal with coins only
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(X) Been to the top of the Empire State Building
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t.
( ) Made prank phone calls
( ) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Danced in the rain-naked
( ) Gone skinny dipping
( ) Written a letter to Santa Claus
(X) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(X) Watched the sunrise with someone
(X) Paid it forward
(X) Blown bubbles
( ) Gone ice-skating
(X) Gone to the movies
( ) Been deep sea fishing
( ) Driven across the United States
( ) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
( ) Gone snowmobiling
(X) Lived in more than one country
(X) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
(X) Seen a falling star and made a wish
( ) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
(X) Seen the Statue of Liberty
(X) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
(X) Been on a cruise
(X) Traveled by train
(X) Traveled by motorcycle
( ) Been horseback riding
(X) Ridden on a San Francisco CABLE CAR
(X) Been to Disneyland OR Disney World
( ) Been in a rain forest
(X) Seen whales in the ocean
( ) Been to Niagara Falls
(X) Ridden on an elephant
(X) Ridden on a camel
( ) Swam with dolphins(sea turtles)
( ) Been to the Olympics
( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China
( ) Saw and heard a glacier calf
( ) Been spinnaker flying
( ) Been water-skiing
( ) Been snow-skiing
(X) Been to Westminster Abbey
(X) Been to the Louvre
( ) Been to a bull fight in Spain
(X) Swam in the Mediterranean
(X) Been to a Major League Baseball game
(X) Been to a National Football League game
(X) Been moved to tears
(X) Done something to change someone else’s life
Over at Facebook, my old friend John Sundman displayed his results for this BBC-initiated meme….
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
Here’s my response:
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (yes, all of it)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X+
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X+
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Not all, but most)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X+
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X+
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (Not all, but this is silly…)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X (… because this is one of the “Chronicles of Narnia”)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X+
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy X+
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons X+
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X+
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X+
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses – James Joyce X+
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X+
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (As John wrote “Well I haven’t read all of Shakespeare but this gets…) X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Total: 50
This is obviously a “pretentious fiction” list, but there are some puzzling omissions. Where’s Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, for example? And I’d be curious to do the same thing for non-fiction. “A Brief History of Time”. Bill Clinton’s autobiography. “Civilization”. That kind of thing….
UPDATE:joined in.
When politicians use mutually incompatible arguments to attack the same proposal, it’s safe to say that they are more interested in scoring political points than actually participating in a meaningful debate. Here’s Andrew Sullivan on RNC posturing about the stimulus bill:
On the one hand, they seem to be saying (a la McCain) that this is long-term spending, not stimulus; then they are complaining it’s a short-term stimulus that will not create long-term jobs (a la Steele). One can only presume this is mainly about politics, not governing. Like so much of the last eight years.
And the public seems to have rumbled them. Sully cites Gallup:
Daniel Larison, himself deeply skeptical of any stimulus proposal, skewers the consistency of the RNC’s stupidity:
During the bailout debate, the House Republican leadership voted for creating the TARP, which was also bad policy, and they were oblivious to the political toxicity of that measure among their own constituents. It’s not as if the leadership had some deep reservoir of populist credibility before the bailout. Even if the TARP had been a good idea and even if it had already had some success, it would still be perceived as nothing more than the scam and the giveaway to banks that it actually was. Even though the stimulus bill will probably have no desirable effects and will add vast sums to the debt, the stimulus and its supporters are going to continue to be perceived as acting on behalf of the public. Boehner and Cantor have twice managed to put themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on major pieces of legislation in the last five months, so again I have to wonder why it is they remain in the leadership. I have to assume it is because the members of the conference are as politically clueless as they are.
Amazon has just announced the long-awaited Kindle 2, and the first thing I did this morning was to order one:
I’m particularly looking forward to the “text to speech” capability. As I’ve mentioned before, my mother is blind, and she really misses being able to read as much as she used to. (Yes, I know that the Audible.com, RNIB and other agencies are helpful, but the majority of important books never make it to audio.) So I’m hoping that the text-to-speech on the Kindle 2 will be usable by an unsighted person. ((If not, I’ll have to bug the developers for an SDK….)) If all goes well, I’ll load up a Kindle 2 with books ((Things like recent history, nuclear proliferation, politics, and disarmament.)) and take it over to Oxford.
Meanwhile, I’m going to have to wait another 18 days to receive mine. “Thinner than an iPhone.” Be still, my beating heart. Tick, tick, tick…
UPDATE: Check out this piece by Andrew Sullivan, quoting John Siracusa at Ars Technica. Money quote:
Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word “horse” for “book” and the word “car” for “e-book.” Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really) inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.
“Books will never go away.” True! Horses have not gone away either.
“Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome.” True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don’t go everywhere, nor should they.
“Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can’t match.” True! Cars just can’t match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn’t. I’m sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a “horseless carriage”—and they never did! And then they died.
LOL!!!
(Via Faith Central.)
Every so often an article comes along which triggers a firestorm of debate, and the latest is by Jerry Coyne in The New Republic. He reviews two new books by Giberson and Miller, each of which tries to defend the thesis that science and religion are wholly compatible. Coyne disagrees, fundamentally.
In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin’s colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that “science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.” As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species. Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer. There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations. Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God’s existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it.
Coyne’s essay provoked a series of responses over at the Edge. These included Lisa Randall’s cognitively dissonant experience:
By sheer coincidence the day I read this Edge question, a charming young actor sat next to me on my plane to LA and without any prompting answered it for me.[…] Prior to his acting career he had studied molecular biology and after graduating coordinated science teaching for three middle schools in an urban school system. He described how along with his acting career he would ultimately like to build on his training to start schools worldwide where students can get good science training.
[…]
But he himself believes in Man descending from Adam as opposed to ascending from apes. I didn’t get how someone trained as a biologist could not believe in evolution. He explained how he could learn the science and understand the logic but that it is simply how Man puts things together. In his mind that’s just not the way it is.
I was going to respond in my own words, but then I read Timothy Sandefur’s excellent piece which said everything that I would want to say, and more. Here is his excellent refutation of Ken Miller’s response in Edge:
Then there is Miller himself, who insists once more on his right to have his reason and eat it too. “What science does require is methodological naturalism,†he writes. But why does it require that? That commitment is not an arbitrary postulate—it is an epistemological position, imposed on us by the nature of knowledge and of reality. Miller recognizes this when he acknowledges that “[w]e live in a material world, and we use the materials of nature to study the way nature works.†But of course he then flies to a higher strain—by assuming, without any evidence, that there is some other kind of world in which we also live (a world which, if it is immaterial, by definition has no interaction with our own and would therefore be inaccessible to our knowledge). He, arbitrarily and without foundation, asserts that there is some other world, which he arbitrarily and without foundation asserts can be known by some other method—a method which he arbitrarily and without foundation asserts is religious knowledge. These are three separate assertions about reality which he is willing to endorse not only without reasons, but without even acknowledging the need for reasons. And this he amazingly calls “honest and open empiricismâ€!
There’s a fascinating new “thriller of ideas” out called “Daemon”, and on Friday I got the chance to hear the author, Daniel Suarez, speaking about it. I had previously reviewed the book at Amazon, but after discussing things with the author I updated my review. Here’s what I wrote:
80% great (and there’s a reason for that)
If you’re a gamer, or a geek, or simply fascinated (or scared!) about what networked technology is doing to society and business, this book is for you. Or at least the first 80% is; the last 20% may or may not be. Daniel Suarez has constructed a tight, l33t cutting-edge techno-thriller with a premise that’s hard to disagree with: we are now so dependent on technology that the consequences of its manipulation are almost limitless. Control information, and you control money, and then people. Philosophers and the religious reject the possibility of artificial intelligence and claim that computers will never duplicate human experience; they overlook the fact that for many a good-enough simulation is better than a messy reality, and few people really care to tell them apart anyway.
Suarez leads us into his world step by step, using plausible extensions of familiar technologies: cell phones, GPS, intruder detection system, videogames, WiFi, RFID badges. Individually the changes have been previsioned by TV shows or Wired magazine; collectively they have a plausible and sobering power. We remember Ferris Bueller changing his school grades all those years ago, and it’s “trivially obvious” that it would be easy to engineer the release from prison of an otherwise unremarkable criminal. And after watching “Masters of the Universe” destroying prestigious financial companies with a few keystrokes, we accept that a modern corporation could be blackmailed and co-opted over the Internet.
The first 80% of the book is excellent: exciting, terrifying, inexorable, and mind-stretching. There’s a collection of satisfyingly-complex characters, good and bad, and Suarez orchestrates them very nicely. And we keep reading, because we want to know: how will it all turn out? Will the bad guys transform society into a Matrix-like shell, or will the contingency and serendipity of reality disrupt the best laid plans of cyber-mice and undead men?
I’m not going to provide any spoilers. What I will say is that I was disappointed with the resolution that Suarez chose. It’s hard to tell if it was the way he always intended things to unfold, or whether he simply couldn’t figure out a good ending and took the easy way out.
So a five star book with a two star ending. I’ll give it four, because I did enjoy most of it.
UPDATE: A couple of days ago, Daniel Suarez came to Amazon to talk about “Daemon”, and I asked him about the “resolution” issue. Originally the novel was much longer – well over 1,000 pages – and it was rejected by one publisher after another. So Suarez chopped it into two parts, and self-published the first half as “Daemon”. It was slow to take off, but eventually a number of tech-savvy pundits got wind of it and started a buzz, which led to it being picked up by the publishers Dutton (part of the Penguin empire).
So what I interpreted as the “resolution” of the story is, in fact, “climax”. To follow Freytag’s classic analysis, “Daemon” is all “rising action”: we have merely reached the apex of the “pyramid”, and will have to wait for the second half of the story before we get to the resolution and dénouement.
And when will that be? Well, Dutton wants to follow the standard tempo of hardcover and paperback publication, so Suarez has plenty of time for polishing the sequel. Shucks.
If all that “rising action” stuff is Greek to you, check out the Wikipedia article on Freytag’s model of dramatic structure.
So buy it already! And then be patient until, oh, probably some time in 2010 for “Freedom”….
Here’s a wonderful intro to a collection of videos and instructional materials from the 1970s on how to program and operate a DEC PDP-11. First, toggle in your loader, then boot from paper tape…. Very cool, in a retro way. I did a lot of PDP-11 stuff back in the mid-70s.
[The videos are accessible on YouTube; the website with the other materials appears to have been brought to its knees as a result of being mentioned in Boing Boing…]