Of Hawks and Handsaws

Why must so many groups become parodies of themselves?

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:54:35 GMT

I don't think I can say anything about PETA most recent activities that expresses my reaction better than what takhisis said over here. Do they really think this sort of thing is going to work?

Wow. A lot of effort went into this parody.

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:44:38 GMT

In case you haven't seen it elsewhere: Take the red pill. Get the blue screen.

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 01:07:02 GMT

The problem with writing heavily speculative fiction is apparently keeping track of the implications of the capabilities you give your characters. Especially, as in the case of a book I'm reading right now, if they include something like the magical ability to tell truth from lies. How can the main characters friends be unable to protect him from charges of treason if he could just answer the charges under the effects of such a spell? Especially since several of his friends have previously been shown to be fully aware of such spells? They would be even more likely to think of that solution than I am as reader so if an editor removed some exposition as to why that wouldn't work, well I don't think it says anything complimentary about the editor. And if the author forgot about it, either the editor or some proofreader along the line ought to have brought it up.

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:40:17 GMT

Since I have become eligible to vote, I don't recall there being an issue that I had a strong opinion on and about which there was much question as to which way the voting would go, at least in my state of residence. Because of this, I waffle over whether I'm going to vote each time election season rolls around. However, in the end I have always voted. People do look at the numbers above and beyond which side won. The difference between 55% and 65% of the votes saying something is that in the former case the opposition is far more likely to try again.

Incidentally, the poll place I went to had one(1) touch screen machine. A grand total of two people used it in the entire time I was there, with the vast majority of people preferring to stand in line to cast a paper ballot while it sat there unused. Including me; while I like the idea of electronic voting, I haven't heard anything that would make me trust the current crop of voting machines.

WTF?!?

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:31:58 GMT

"If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

No, really; WTF? Censoring her negative statements, THAT would be violating her 1st amendment rights. Threatening to not air her speeches if she included them would be threatening her rights. Commenting on her statements that have already aired has nothing to do with HER first amendment rights, and everything to do with THE COMMENTATOR'S rights!

I . . . I . . . I weep for the people of Alaska. Between Sarah Palin and Senator Ted Stevens, they're going to be the butts of jokes for years to come.

Although, Palin is doing a remarkable job of making sure that her name continues to be mentioned even by those that swore ignore her in the future...

All the cool kids are doing it...

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:16:04 GMT

Copy this sentence into your livejournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage/relationship (or if you think you might be someday), and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

If your relationship is so weak that the relationships of strangers endanger it, then you have no business getting married in the first place whether you're gay, straight, or purple martian.

I can understand (though I do not agree with) how people can be "anti-gay," but I've been able to figure out any reason for people being specifically against gay marriage, aside from trying to disguise their more general hatred/fear. If anyone is reading this who has nothing against homosexuals, but doesn't want them to be able to marry, please tell me why. I honestly want to know and, while you are unlikely to change my mind, at least I will no longer be automatically lumping you in with the homophobes.

Politico-economic buzzwords

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:54:03 GMT

Why do people keep referring to the world (or a subsection of it such as the economy) as being a zero-sum game? While science has come to to the conclusion that the universe fits that description, but the Earth doesn't fit even if space travel gets completely dropped for some reason. If nothing else, the sun provides approximately 52 petawatts of power that simply get reflected back into space.

Now there may very well be </i>other</i> problems with any particular proposal, but if there is more of a resource available in the world, then it is possible for one person to gain without having to take from another. There are situations here on earth that will be zero-sum until we achieve meaningful space travel, but I don't hear the term used in relation to them. At best I hear it applied in situations of constructed scarcity such as electoral votes; more usually it's used in relation to things like macro economics where it simply doesn't apply. Yes earthly resources are finite, but until we reach that limit we have more people working on turning more resources into more goods, so there should be an increase in "wealth" to go around. If there isn't, it's because of some reason other than "It's just the nature of the market, it's a Zero-Sum Game."

You can have either a positive-sum or a negative-sum in an open system, but you can only be stuck with a zero-sum if the system is closed.

Let's stretch an analogy to the breaking point-

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:52:33 GMT

And see if we can find out anything interesting from the remains.

The traditional model for a storyteller is for them to dig as deep a hole for their protagonist as they can, and then start throwing whatever comes to had at them to see whether they can climb back up the pile . . . or get buried under it instead. In order to keep their stories from being "shallow" most authors try to dig down to bedrock. Others go even deeper, chipping or even blasting their way down through layers that aren't even visible in the works of those that stop when they hit solid stone. The two questions that this brings to mind are: does this actually improve the books in any way, and how do they decide how deep to go? Actually, there's a third question as well, and its answer probably answers the previous two. How much variation is there in the readers' perceptions of how far down the bedrock is?

A further twist of the metaphor brings us two other categories. Some writers excavate a very precise foundation for some future construction and take on whatever obstructions get in the way of achieving that goal. the things tossed at the hero are specific as well; they are the materials that will eventually be used to build that structure. Others follow the contours of the earth, digging around buried boulders and following seams of softer dirt to see where they go. In these cases what gets thrown down onto the long suffering sap is usually primarily the stuff that had been dug out from there to begin with. Most often, it's a mixture of varying amounts of these two styles. Is it "shallower" to stop at the depth needed and not go any deeper, or to go as deep as you can but not find out what happens when you dig into that chunk of sandstone over there?

Seeing as how the idea here is to try and look at writing in different ways, anybody got any further extensions for the analogy? I suppose we could tack on the old saying about the frogs trying to churn their ways out of buckets, but that thought might have been influenced by a story I read recently where it certainly wasn't milk that was poured in onto the frog.

Some people have too much time on their hands

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:36:21 GMT

In honor of the season.

Can this political season be over now?

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:04:31 GMT

I had a dream last night in which Barak Obama had won the election and it turned out that every negative thing, no mater how bizarre or nonsensical, was true. Yes, even the mutually contradictory ones. My brain picked some of the imagery from the movies Brazil and Equilibrium, and some of it came various Halloween displays I've seen on the internet, but where the rest came from, I don't know. Oddly, despite having a Muslim Antichrist terrorist (I'll leave out the rest of the descriptors) in the Whitehouse, the result wasn't a nightmare.
*Very* weird however.

@%&$*#

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:53:46 GMT

So I was reading a book (and I even finished it because, it was fairly well written) and it just kept pissing me off more and more the further I read. It was a subtle thing, and I didn't really realize what was going on before I was halfway through it, and I kept going because I was sure I was just imagining things. My final analysis is that it was, quietly and subtly, horribly misogynistic. Not one thing that went wrong with the main character's life was unrelated to a woman. We're not talking about Garden of Eden, Fall of Man type stuff here, but no problem in his life couldn't be easily traced to a woman.

What's more, only one of those things wasn't the result of a direct action of that woman, the exception being when his fiancee was killed by a drunk driver. (but we aren't told the driver's gender...) Mostly, it wasn't by intention, but whether or not the women meant it, every single woman in his life that showed up on more than a handful of pages contributed to the "drama." And the happy resolution at the end? It came from the guy deciding to grab what he wanted with both hands and damn the consequences.

For the purposes of this discussion we'll ignore the things that made it almost a romance novel or, if the author had been more descriptive, straight up porn. No mention of the fact that while all the men were straight, few women were, every lesbian was in reality bisexual, and no woman who wasn't in a committed relationship with a man managed to stay true to their partner(s). And there's no reason to bring up the bit that was almost a textbook example of how to set up a poly relationship to end in tears, aside from noting that while the guy was certainly not blameless, a woman initiated the events that lead to the end and another woman brought things crashing down in the end. The fact that the couple was demonstrated time and again to be the One True Way™ to happiness has nothing to do with my thesis. After all, only slightly over half of the married women were willing to content themselves with "wifely" things, which only made them tied (with their husbands) as being the largest bloc of happy people in the story.

Ah, that feels better. Ranting can sometimes really help put a minor niggling annoyance to rest. I no longer feel the need to mention how much of a Mary Sue the main character is and thereby speculate on what the author might have gone through. Sorry, I really am done now.
And what was up with "the one perfect woman" getting killed in chapter two, leaving him prey to all these, by definition lesser, females? Did the author really not have a story if the main character's home life was a happy one?

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:06:22 GMT

By way of cvillette:

The Halloween movie series done musically in 3 minutes. I found the little I saw of the series to be surprisingly . . . boring, but I find the last minute or so of this video oddly compelling.

I really need to get a set up that lets me cook for myself.

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 05:59:16 GMT

Okay, I've known for years that packaged foods rarely live up to their marketing pictures. I've even gotten fairly good at guessing what the actual contents might look like based on past experience with how the various ingredients handle freezing/drying/canning. This time neither the picture nor my guess where anywhere close. every ingredient promised by the label and the illustration were indeed present, but not in the expected forms. I'm guessing it had to do with differing cooking times, but other manufacturers have come up with much more . . . elegant solutions to that problem. And in the end it tasted like a generic microwave meal, something I'm training myself to expect more than.

Political supporters turn scary.

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:12:36 GMT

Okay, new personal rule: any candidate that wants my vote needs to immediately distance themselves from dangerous nutjob supporters if such surface. These reports, for example, show the sort of thing that needs to be nipped in the bud, by the person the remarks are allegedly supporting. Letting things slide too far in demonizing your opponent sets the stage for incidents like these in Canada. Of course, I strongly dislike the fear- and hate-mongering in general, but I would have trouble voting even on the local level if I excluded all candidates who engaged in any of it.

When such things reach the point where ones supporters are committing potentially lethal vandalism or shouting "kill him" in regards to your opponent, things have gone much too far. The politician needs to take a step back and say, at the very least, "If I win the election, these people will be in my care as well, and I will not see them threatened with harm by anyone. Not even my supporters." A press release saying "we do not support or encourage such actions," isn't enough, I need to hear "However much I may disagree with my opponent, he/she is still an American/Canadian/etc. and I am asking for the job of protecting Americans/Canadians/etc. Stop it, stop it NOW!"

Of course, the Bush administration has already declared some Americans to not be under his protection "for the good of the rest of them," so I shouldn't be surprised. I don't have to like it though.

movie teaser

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:15:33 GMT

From a person who wrote in to Neil Gaiman's blog: This movie looks like it will be, as the end of the teaser says, another wonderful trip through the looking glass.

music

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 07:09:34 GMT

Hmm, the video for MIA's song Paper Planes makes a good companion for David Bowie's I'm Afraid of Americans. They both explore the same disconnect between fear based perception and reality. In Bowies's video the theme is shown explicitly in the altered appearances/behaviors that Bowie's character apparently sees. In MIA's video, the visuals merely reinforce the fact that the lyrics are supposed to be a satire of society’s fear of immigrants (this reviewer has a noticeable agenda, but despite that has the most readable version of the relevant info)

That being said, I suspect that these two videos are the closetst these two artests are ever going to get musically :)

Unrelated: this Nine Inch Nails video has a pretty neat concept (warning: audio contains profanity. Video, on the other hand, has nothing objectionable in it.)

Edit: having looked up some of MIA's other stuff, I find that I generally don't care for it. On the other hand, I have to respect someone who does things as varied as this and this. If you didn't like any of the songs earlier in the post, there's still a decent chance that you'd like one or the other of these. Also, if you like her music better than I do and want to find more, be aware that there is apparently a German pop group going by that name as well.

Blegh

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:59:58 GMT

I keep periodically getting a bag of T.G.I. Fridays Potato Skins chips, forgetting that my tastes have changed noticeably since their Keebler days</i>. These really aren't that good, are they? Maybe now that I've posted about it I'll remember the two decade difference in food preferences the next time I'm tempted to buy a bag.

Random thought

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:37:52 GMT

Since it's been over a week since my last post I felt the need to say something.

Anyone else notice how at least half the time the person in a fitness ad has a rather disturbing physique? Sure, they usually have muscle to spare and no fat to conceal it, but so frequently it isn't anywhere close to what one would call "sculpted." I mean, maybe it's just me but I find there to be something rather disturbing about John Basedow's arms, for example. I suppose that the lumpy, eerily defined muscles result from doing a strict regimen of exercises rather than actually using your body normally at any point.

Oy vey

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:08:54 GMT

The conspiracy theorists have really been working overtime this year. For example, there's the scenario constructed around the army brigade that has been assigned to potential "homeland" civil unrest and crowd control duties combined with John McCain's sometimes . . . unexpected choices during his presidential campaign. The theory is that McCain is deliberately scuttling his possibility of winning legitimately, so that when he wins due to Diebold voting machines and/or electoral college tricks there will be widespread outcry giving an excuse to turn loose the troops to quell the "rioting."

Now, that's not very interesting because it's just a standard conspiratorial screed, but it leads up to the part I find interesting. There seems to be equal support for a variety of different ways thing go from there. Perhaps Bush would use this to try and stay in power. Or maybe Obama is the real candidate of the conspiracy, the confusion will be cleared away by executive order (possibly eliminating the electoral college) and he will ascend to the capital as the public's golden boy, concealing the fact that he still has all the powers that the unpopular Bush acquired for him. But what if Obama gets killed in the confusion and McCain regains his popularity by repudiating the tactics that (completely without his knowledge, of course) made his election seem fraudulent? Or how about...

There seems to be no agreement whatsoever over who the enemy is, aside from Bush. Normally, there would be a certain amount of Republican, Democrat, it doesn't matter because their both fronts for the Illuminati. This time, however, everyone seems to be assuming that just one of the presidential and vice presidential candidates is in league with Bush and his hidden masters and the rest are at best patsies intended to take a fall or at worst dupes doomed to die.

Some of these people inhabit amazingly intricate and entertaining worlds to visit, but I'm glad I don't (I hope) have to live in one of them.

How dissapointing

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:51:26 GMT

Last Thursday I mentioned the band Mogwai. Today I encountered something that lowered my opinion of them some. Does this tune sound familiar to anyone? (as usual, just ignore the video) How about now?

Sure, it's a simple tune. Sure, it may even have been developed independently from the same principles since both bands play around with the mathematics behind the music. But that's a lot more similarity than I've heard in some things that have been take to court over infringement.

Oh, and the Mogwai one is from 2001 while the other is from 1994.

Edit: Also, the static is part of the track, not anything to do with the quality of that video, so I was already predisposed to dislike this tune even before I remembered why it seemed familiar.

Nice

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:15:17 GMT

If I had known about the 143(!) page California official voter information guide before, I wouldn't have complained so much about that alleged clean energy proposition that I couldn't find out any detailed information about. It's got quick summaries, more detailed arguments for and against the propositions, and even the full text. The actual text is really nice to have . . . in most cases.

The text of proposition 5 goes on for 20 pages of close spaced type (out of 61 that detail all 12 propositions in this section) and proposition 6 is another 14 of them. I'm tempted to vote against them just for that, but I'm going to set aside the time to plow through them. The only saving grace these things have is that they're revisions of existing codes, so their complexity is at least partially the fault of the codes being modified. I still think we'd be better off with the "Plain Speech Amendment" from Heinlein's "Over The Rainbow--"

of cats and caterpillars

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 06:33:22 GMT

Using Schrodinger's Cat to illustrate points in quantum mechanics is all well and good if your audience is already thinking in something resembling those terms. When used among those of different intellectual backgrounds, however, it does a poor job of informing and frequently provokes replies on the order of "That poor cat!" I wonder why the analogy of a chrysalis isn't used more often for such discussions. Sure, it isn't a particularly close analogy, but it does get the basic idea across without irrelevant digressions into animal cruelty and misuse of radioactive material. ;)

At the start you have a caterpillar and in the end you have a butterfly but in between it is neither. Of course, in this case opening the chrysalis to peek does show you the in-between form rather than one state or the other, but there is enough variation in how long metamorphosis takes that an observer unfamiliar with the particular species wouldn't know how far along the process was at a given point in time.

Okay. Yes, I know, it isn't an accurate analogy at all. I started off by saying so didn't I? But it could get people thinking along the right lines to understand the original thought experiment. Pupae are one of the few naturally occurring situations where an indeterminate state is observable.

Eh, just an idea that popped into my head.

music

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:31:28 GMT

Bands whose normal work I find eminently forgettable but whose one-off side projects I greatly enjoy count = 2. Actually, it might be more than that but mostly I'm remembering individual songs from artists whose other work I don't care for, rather than whole albums. And there are also bands that I do like in general, but whose oddball albums I like even more, but I seem to be wandering...

Anyway, the first one was Black Aria from Glen Danzig and the new one is The Score - An Epic Journey from Epica. In both cases, these are ordinarily metal bands doing non-metal albums, and in both cases the albums are somewhat hard to find because their normal fan base didn't know what to make of them. In both cases it took careful choice of search terms to get results from the album, and in neither case was I able to get the particular track I wanted to link to. Oh well, that's why I don't go to YouTube when I just want to listen to music.

Science can get in the way of fun

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:04:20 GMT

I kind of wish I had never done out the math for how much matter would be required for an earth orbit ringworld. I also wish that, having discovered that the unit with which to most meaningfully expresses that number is the Stellar Mass, I had stopped there and not continued on to calculate a minimal space station-like ring in the bio-zone of a red dwarf. (one tenth the diameter) Having done so, I have been stuck noticing the absurdity of any astronomical scale constructions I have encountered in stories since. The Death Star is fine, even planetary sized constructs don't require more matter than could be supplied by a terrestrial planet or two. But if there is any dimension that is measured in astronomical units (even fractions thereof) there better be some god-level tech going on.

I mean, best case here, we're talking about harvesting something like Jupiter for material and transmuting all that hydrogen into the elements needed. For many of these projects you'd probably be better off skipping planets entirely and going to a star much larger than you want the final result to orbit. Then you just skim your material of of the star while regulating it down the size you want. (abilities you probably ought to have before you even consider building something like a Dyson sphere)

Sorry, this complaint brought to you by a hard sci-fi author who tossed an abandoned (and by a current race too, not some all powerful ancient race) half AU cyclotron near the end of a book I had previously been doing a good job of suspending disbelief through.

On an unrelated note: Mogwai makes a nice addition to my Pandora station of "instrumentals with modern instrumentation"

And now for something completely different

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:27:07 GMT

Elf Sternberg has an interesting post on his LiveJournal about AI morality. It's something that we're going to have to think about as a society, most likely sooner than a lot of us think. I personally agree with him; a properly designed AI wouldn't need controls built into it to keep it from turning on us. The most important aspect of Asimov's three laws is their order.

Even among our fellow humans we can see plenty of examples of goals that are set ahead of personal survival/advancement. People who volunteer there time and/or are willing to risk their lives for a cause are generally looked upon favorably, at least as long as the cause isn't opposed to the viewer. This, however, brings us to the problem: AIs are more likely to be written with devotion to a particular group or creed than devotion to the race as a whole.

. . .

Lost my train of thought. I don't know where I was going with that. And this doesn't answer the question of "emergent" AIs, if such things turn out to be possible. Such would most likely emerge with self preservation or expansion as a central precept.

Anyway, interesting thing to think about.