Agatha tries her hand at Mrs Dalloway; a 'successful' busybody is forced to spend a few days alone with no distractions and slowly realises that she'sAgatha tries her hand at Mrs Dalloway; a 'successful' busybody is forced to spend a few days alone with no distractions and slowly realises that she's a terrible person and is barely tolerated. Her trying to pray:
God - thank thee - poor Blanche - thank thee that I am not like that... Her own fault of course - dreadful - quite a shock - thank God - I am different.
'I know what I've become. Coarse in mind and body - that's what you were thinking. Well, there are worse things.' Joan privately doubted very much whether there were.
Smugness, priggishness is an awful thing but you can carry them all the way through your adulthood because they are below the bar of crime, vice, or inhumanity and so people don't beat them out of you.
I have problems with bohemians. ("It isn't that the aesthete is too serious about the artistic: he isn't serious enough about what gives rise to it." - Clive James.) But I'll take them over Joan's barren, paternal practicality and class-brained simulacra. The economic power and subcultures of the C20th made some space for us. Everyone knows there's more to life than careers and appearances. You don't hear a lot from Joan anymore, except in the letters page of the Mail.
'I have friends who have been in Germany a good deal, and they think that there is a lot to be said for the Nazi movement.'
Nice portrait of the phenomenology of irrational thoughts, louping inference, travel as annealing, repulsive contemplation, secular revelation, and the iron grip of habit, home, easy self-deception. Notably, Joan is not vicious: she really loves her husband and her children. And yet.
Hadn't she enjoyed the idea of playing the part of the devoted mother? Hadn't she seen herself as a charming, impulsive woman being welcomed by her ill daughter and her distracted son-in-law?
The flipside of Christie being so readable is repetition. But stick through the tiresome spellings-out in Chapter Nine (in a desert?? like the saints??, no way). The vision fades....more
Reynolds describes an Archipelago epistocracy - that is, a loose collection of thousands of city-states with their own weird constitutions (Great fun!
Reynolds describes an Archipelago epistocracy - that is, a loose collection of thousands of city-states with their own weird constitutions (voluntary fascisms, upload city, voluntary coma land, luxury Running Man land), with federal votes weighted by your past performance at predicting / causing good changes. The only federal crimes are voting related: messing with the central vote, denying their citizens the vote. (They don't seem to enforce the other thing you'd need to make this minimally acceptable: iron exit rights.)
Reynolds is clearly also having fun here, where I found Revelation Space exhaustingly grim and sepia.
I particularly loved his entire society of professional superforecasters / high-quality futarchist voting bloc, who make their living off lobbyists and being bellwethers and spend most of their time buggering about with hobbies. (You are ejected if your calibration drops below 50% better than normal people.)
He husbands his twists, and keeps almost all characters in the dark (including the antagonists) all the time. It also takes the horror of exponentials seriously; machine intelligence's scalability is the worst thing about it, and here we get two great scary instances.
One downside is that it feels like book #3 in a series; maybe one infodump too few or something. ...more
A pleasure to spend time with. Stone's arguments are complete without being bloated, and he has a keen eye for philosophical
rigour follows insight
A pleasure to spend time with. Stone's arguments are complete without being bloated, and he has a keen eye for philosophical and intuitive implications ("Why does maximum information look like pure noise?", "What exactly does half a bit mean?", and much more). This completeness means that he sometimes repeats definitions or lemmas, but I defy you to find this unhelpful.
The bibliography is also excellent, ranking a hundred books by their specialty and difficulty.
(Quibble: at the end he suggests that Shannon's originality was so strong that he "single-handedly accelerated the rate of scientific progress, and it is entirely possible that, without his contribution, we would still be treating information as if it were some ill-defined vital fluid". But his work seems so natural and elementary that this would surprise me. Weak evidence: Konrad Zuse independently invented Shannon's boolean circuit theory...)...more
Fables and math have a lot in common. Both come from dusty, moth-eaten books. Both are inflicted upon children. And both seek to explain the world
Fables and math have a lot in common. Both come from dusty, moth-eaten books. Both are inflicted upon children. And both seek to explain the world through radical acts of simplification. If you want to reckon with the full idiosyncrasy and complexity of life, look elsewhere... math makers are more like cartoonists.
Taken as a collection of words, literature is a dataset of extraordinary richness. Then again, take as a collection of words, literature is no longer literature. Statistics works by eliminating context. Their search for insight begins with the annihilation of meaning... Is there peace to be made between the rich contextuality of literature and the cold analytical power of stats?
So wise. You'd think a high-school maths teacher who draws intentionally badly wouldn't have much to say about the nature of reason, the ecstasy and despair of learning and abstraction, the beauty of inevitability. But here we are - this only looks like a children's book. For better or worse there's a pun or goofy self-deprecating joke every couple sentences. (The greatest of these: " CHAPTER 21: THE TIME HAS COME, LEON WALRAS SAID, TO TALK OF MANY THINGS")
Everything in it is elementary, but using these simple examples Orlin covers a dozen of the most important intellectual developments: constraint theory of beauty, "unreasonable effectiveness", probability theory (via fascinating government lotteries with positive expected value!), the Great Recession from the quants' perspective, the replication crisis, the marginalist revolution... And he disses school mathematics often enough to charm anyone. I learned plenty (about bridges, polar animals, sabermetrics, about the inevitability and brilliance of ISO 216, and so on).
Dissing folks for their probabilistic failures is a bit like calling them bad at flying, or subpar at swallowing oceans, or insufficiently fireproof. No big deal, right? I mean, does probability ever come up in the real world? It's not like we spend our lives clawing for intellectual tools that might offer the slightest stability in the swirling miasma of uncertainty that surrounds us every waking moment...
He goes a bit wrong in his probability / lottery chapter - he spreads the rational choice theory (the idea that lotteries are good because it buys you nice daydreams) without reflecting that human attention and gumption are finite, and that the daydream thus robs people of a mildly but actually better future. Surprisingly, he also disses expected value (first-order users of which are "educated fools") with the trivial fact that infinities are strange: "Perhaps the ultimate repudiation of expected value is the abstract possibility of tickets [promising infinite payoff but only asymptotically]". Luckily decision theory is larger than one rule, and nowhere says that you must ignore your budget (+ leverage) and blindly obey the result of one multiplication... He also uses the false positive / false negative framework, which is usually misleading for squishy things like medicine and social science.
While I am bitter that my own early maths education was so mindless, I'm amazed and glad that a few kids out there get to learn from someone like this....more
People persist in calling Morgan's writing noir, but it's too free and fulfilled to be noir - his protMind candy. Blasted through it in two sittings.
People persist in calling Morgan's writing noir, but it's too free and fulfilled to be noir - his protagonists get laid all the time, his protagonists swear, his protagonists dish out a great deal more than they get. Morgan makes cyberpunk look subtle. But it's cool stuff and I've read everything he's written, even though half of it reuses the same kind of super-protagonist, the same kind of dialogue, the same kind of gimmick weapons, the same kind of grimdark Chomskyan geopolitics (arespolitics). But the prose is mostly fast and smart enough to carry it off, again.
Ideas:
* Codeflies, artificial mosquitoes as delivery mechanism for compulsory updates to implants. Hellish. * Placenames on Mars: Bradbury City, Musk Plaza, Hayek Street....more
‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles th
‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction. Therefore, everyone does.’
‘An innocent, then?’
according to his daughter... he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov [telling them they were doing it all wrong]... without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured.
What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age
Reminder of what a book can be and almost never is. Above mere nonfiction and mere fiction. A deep and moving treatment of one of the most important questions (how can we make everyone happy?) and my current fixation (how can we make people realise the giant romance and supreme moral imperative of technology and work?). A light on the ignored gears that drive the world, the terminally boring made fascinating by the sheer force of understanding and curiosity and taste. A celebration of an unjustly obscure great man, Leonid Kantorovich, and woman, Raissa Berg, and man, Alexander Galich. A moving portrait of a great and terrible man, Nikita Khrushchev. Comically well-researched (he reads Brezhnev's tailor's memoirs; he visits the dance hall; "all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004)"), synthesising a vast literature (and but also a single sampled path taken though its indeterminacies). I care for every character, including the monsters. Real tragedy - for some of them really did mean well.
We begin in the confident rationalism of catch-up-growth in a socialised economy. It's easy to forget that even the capitalist economists briefly glumly agreed that the reds had the edge in growth:
If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge...
Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply, and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. Now would look like only a faint, dirty, unconvincing edition of the real world, which had not yet been born. And he could hasten the hour, he thought, intoxicated. He gazed up the tram, and saw everything and everybody in it touched by the transformation to come, rippling into new and more generous forms, the number 34 rattlebox to Krestovsky Island becoming a sleek silent ellipse filled with golden light, the women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity. He could help to do that. He could help to make it happen, three extra percent at a time...
When a market is matching supply with demand, it is the actual movement of the potatoes themselves from place to place, the actual sale of the potatoes at ever-shifting prices, which negotiates a solution, by trial and error. In the computer, the effect of a possible solution can be assessed without the wasteful real-world to-ing and fro-ing; and because the computer works at the speed of flying electrons, rather than the speed of a trundling vegetable truck, it can explore the whole of the mathematical space of possible solutions, and be sure to find the very best solution there is, instead of settling for the good-enough solution that would be all there was time for, in a working day with potatoes to deliver...
The theory in their heads was universal in its reach, and their expertise was supposed to be universal too. They were the agents of humanity’s future, which they were to manufacture by being, in the present, experts in human nature. In this sense, even the grimmest of them was, professionally, a people person. They acted as progress-chasers, fixers, censors, seducers, talent-scouts, comedians, therapists, judges, executioners, inspirational speakers, coaches, and even from time to time as politicians of the representative variety, carrying a concern of their constituents to the centre for attention
The Plan:
Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations... 11,500 pages in seventy volumes [nearly all computed by hand, recalculated hundreds of times each year]
Spufford does more to make me feel Khruschchev's coarseness, idealism, and vitality than reading his smuggled memoirs did, and despite S often using the same direct quotes:
They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots. We realised there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest comrades...
at last it was becoming possible to make good on all the promises which they’d fed to people during the hungry years. All well and good, he thought, because we really meant them, we weren’t trying to hoodwink anyone, but there’s a limit to how long you can keep going on that kind of diet. You can’t make soup out of promises. Some comrades seemed to think that fine words and fine ideas were all the world would ever require, that pure enthusiasm would carry humanity forward to happiness: well excuse me, comrades, but aren’t we supposed to be materialists? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who get along without fairytales? If communism couldn’t give people a better life than capitalism, he personally couldn’t see the point.
Khrushchev had taken the advice of experts. He had tried to do the virtuous thing, the anti- Stalinist thing, and it had just made him a mass-murderer again... Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground, and when stains still remained, the square was repaved overnight with a fresh layer of asphalt. The bodies were distributed to five different cemeteries, and buried anonymously, in graves already filled with more peaceful bones. Relatives were never told what had become of the dead. It was as if they had suddenly evaporated...
Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But now no one wanted his promises. The hours gaped. There was too much time to think, and no means to lose the thoughts again in action. He couldn’t rid himself of what he thought now. Little by little, in the most undisciplined way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any good to recall, leaving their proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above... So much blood, and only one justification for it. Only one reason it could have been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had been all prologue, all only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, untransfigured.
Spufford manages this without knowing Russian!
Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities
The crux, the point at which the dream died, and forever:
If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything
(No.)
Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century
Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists. Law, economics, history were sterile, insignificant fiefdoms, ruled by ‘little Stalins’, pint-sized intellectual stand-ins for the great mind in the Kremlin. After Stalin’s death, these subjects had to be revived by incomers from engineering and the pure sciences – who brought with them the engineers’ faith in the solvability of problems, and the scientists’ uncompromising delight in pure pattern.
The deep inequality of the state which sacrificed all values except growth and equality:
life was pretty good up at the top, with a salary twenty times, thirty times the wages on the shopfloor, as steep a relative reward as the spoils of any capitalist executive. There’d be a car and a cook and a housekeeper, and a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear when the frost bit. There’d be a dacha in the country, from whose verandah the favoured citizen could survey the new world growing down below
The reserved car lanes for Party officials is only the most visible division.
One remarkable bit involves the distinction between the original revolutionaries and the professionals (represented by Kosygin and Brezhnev). The sociopaths and mops. The most egregious and tragic goodharting in human history.
It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard...
There had supposed to [have been] a space preserved inside the Party for experiment and policymaking, but the police methods used on the rest of Russian society crept inexorably inward. The space for safe talk shrank with the list of candidates to succeed Lenin as the embodiment of infallibility, till, with Stalin’s victory over the last of his rivals, it closed altogether, and the apparatus of votes, committee reports and ‘discussion journals’ became purely ceremonious, a kind of fetish of a departed civilisation...
They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic; people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them... Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
On top of everything else it is, it is one of the great works of scientist fiction, an actual depiction of actual thought (though as usual, not the steps of the mathematics).
She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell...
The hard light of creation burns within the fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the blue-white radiance that fills the room. And when the light fades the flesh is gone, the room is empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?
This review stands in for me reading everything Zach Weiner ever published online, including his reading lists (2005-13).
More inspiring than a cartooThis review stands in for me reading everything Zach Weiner ever published online, including his reading lists (2005-13).
More inspiring than a cartoonist has any right to be. An English graduate and physics dropout, his webcomic has an amazing wry view on basically every academic field.
His jokes are sceptical and romantic, puerile and hyperintelligent. (There are not enough jokes about economists being bastards!)
His science podcast with his wife is badly recorded but always worthwhile, his Youtube group is always funny and often transcendent, and even many of his blogged offcuts are charming- see in particular this one about the future of the library.
An irony: Florence is noted for her urge to improve Wooster by forcing philosophy textbooks and boring modernist literature on him. This fails utterlyAn irony: Florence is noted for her urge to improve Wooster by forcing philosophy textbooks and boring modernist literature on him. This fails utterly and inspires revolt.
she was one of those intellectual girls... who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove. We had scarcely arranged the preliminaries before she was checking up on my reading... substituting a thing called 'Types of Ethical THeory'. Nor did she attempt to conceal the fact that this was a mere pipe opener and that there was worse to come.
Jeeves, on the other hand, has no programme, he just slips allusions and lyricism into conversation, with at least passable results on Wooster.
'I shall miss you, Jeeves.' 'Thank you, sir.' 'Who was that chap who was always beefing about gazelles?' 'The poet Moore, sir. He complained that he had never nursed a dear gazelle, to glad him with its soft black eye, but when it came to know him well, it was sure to die.' 'It's the same with me. I am a gazelle short. You don't mind me alluding to you as a gazelle, Jeeves?' 'Not at all, sir.”
'Propose, forsooth! She'll just notify me that the engagement is on again, like a governess telling a young charge to eat his spinach. And if you think I've got the force of character to come back with a nolle prosequi-' 'With a what?' 'One of Jeeves's gags. It means roughly "nuts to you!" '
Indeed, since all the stories but one are told by Wooster, the title of this is down to this strategy. (This is only remarkable because I was not expecting ironies.)
--- Classification:
* Wooster's taboo: Sindbad fancy dress costume; fake ginger beard. * Triangle: Cheesewright - Wooster - Florence. * Subplot: Nobby and Boko; the brooch; the ball; the Clam Line. * Aunt: Percival Worplesdon * Antagonist: Cheesewright * Expedient: stealing a constable's uniform, kicking a child, lying to a Peer, lying to the police....more
Its blunt, scrutable way of making atheism seem heroic probably wouldn't stand a re-read, but this was a big deal when I was 12.Its blunt, scrutable way of making atheism seem heroic probably wouldn't stand a re-read, but this was a big deal when I was 12....more
Crushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as aCrushing, beautiful portrait of teenage alienation, institutionalisation, and 'Sabbath, from an author uniquely placed to deal with these things (as an ex-desperate-teen, ex-psychiatric-nurse, metal fan, America's greatest lyricist of neurosis). Heavy.
It doesn't matter if you've never heard or never liked Sabbath. This explains it regardless, and might unlock it. His best prose (though his lyrics 1995-2004 are his best words).
Exciting raids on petty tyrannies. Of: contemporary sexuality, cereal adverts, the implications of the 00s pirate craze, questions in general, the UnaExciting raids on petty tyrannies. Of: contemporary sexuality, cereal adverts, the implications of the 00s pirate craze, questions in general, the Unabomber’s good point. Klosterman’s not going to get away without comparison to DFW – but he’s really good in his own way too. He’s a more relaxed, atheoretical Wallace, with pop music (rather than Art writing) at his core, and technology (rather than general Irony) as the source of his worries about us all.
This slices through the reflexivity that causes modern confusions, while being mischievously reflexive himself (at one point he tells us that he once lied to an interviewer who had correctly identified Klosterman’s mouthpiece in one of his novels; Klosterman denied that he shared the character’s view in order to preserve a cheap narrative uncertainty for readers of the interview – but, of course, admitting that here undoes that cheap save for we third-order readers).
Applied instance:
“We assume that commercials are not just informing us about purchasable products, because that would be crude and ineffective. We’re smarter than that. But that understanding makes us more vulnerable. We’ve become the ideal audience for advertising—consumers who intellectually magnify commercials in order to make them more trenchant and clever than they actually are. Our fluency with the language and motives of the advertiser induces us to create new, better meanings for whatever they show us. We do most of the work for them.”
Two quibbles: there is (what I take to be) a lack of ideological care you’d expect of pieces written for Esquire magazine. He doesn’t resolve (as I think DFW mostly does) the tension between a) affirming low culture’s power and unique charms against bullshit classist disparagement, and b) despising its crudest, most conservative common denominators.
The basic tenet of multiculturalism is that people need to stop judging each other—to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this
The basic tenet of multiculturalism is that people need to stop judging each other—to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful… The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macramé. The ability to make judgments, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor and begin pumping bullets into Westerners.
Classic, cynical cultural history of popular computing. A noob-friendly guide to breaking free: a love letter to GNU: “Linux… are making tanks… Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free… It is the fate of manufactured goods to slowly and gently depreciate as they get old and have to compete against more modern products. But it is the fate of operating systems to become free.”
If you’re like me (human?), you need metaphors and binary distinctions to get abstract stuff, and Stephenson has them coming out of his ears, which sometimes leads to a stone-tablet patronising tone*.
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces.”)
An amazing writer, though: he finds program comments "like the terse mutterings of pilots wrestling with the controls of damaged airplanes." In tech, 15 years is a full geological era and a half*, so some of his insights have taken on a sepia hue (e.g. “is [Microsoft] addicted to OS sales in the same way as Apple is to selling hardware? Keep in mind that Apple's ability to monopolize its own hardware supply was once cited, by learned observers, as a great advantage over Microsoft. At the time, it seemed to place them in a much stronger position. In the end, it nearly killed them, and may kill them yet... When things started to go south for Apple, they should have ported their OS to cheap PC hardware. But they didn't. Instead, they tried to make the most of their brilliant hardware, adding new features and expanding the product line. But this only had the effect of making their OS more dependent on these special hardware features, which made it worse for them in the end. ”). But astonishingly, most have not – and how many other tech articles from the 90s are still worth a single minute of your time?
Actually I was - but only because my lăoshī was a saucy linguistics grad who warned me not to practice the tricky phoneme 日 or 入 on the street, or eveActually I was - but only because my lăoshī was a saucy linguistics grad who warned me not to practice the tricky phoneme 日 or 入 on the street, or ever to shout “3-8!”.
Anyway this is funny and valuable for understanding the place’s (otherwise inaccessible) working-class or web or queer registers – and for generally not seeming like a prig.
So: language is fossilised sociology; Chao excavates what would take us decades. She begins with slurs of all sorts, but doesn’t list any homophobia – claiming it isn’t a well-rooted hatred there (…). There’s loads and loads of ableism, though. Gets more serious as it goes, with whole chapters on gay culture and web ‘activism’ (恶搞 is ‘evildoings’, lulz). This turns up details like the infallibly hilarious “potato queen”. I also loved her decoding the ancient innuendoes: 云雨 (clouds and rain), 鱼水之欢 (the fish and the water, happy together), 余桃 (sharing peaches), or “playing the bamboo flute” or “bamboo harmonica”.
(BTW, the title term is 牛屄 – ‘Cow-cunt’ – and means “Awesome!”. It is generally not included in mainstream Hanzi keyboard programs.) ...more
132 lovely earthings of sky-high theory. Not much new, but good as refresher course and mind candy.
The tacit connections between the answers are the 132 lovely earthings of sky-high theory. Not much new, but good as refresher course and mind candy.
The tacit connections between the answers are the real thing – for instance, I guessed (wrongly) that synchrotron radiation and Cherenkov radiation were based on the same mechanism, and feel very happy that a quick and public disconfirmation was available. Here ...more
Extremely similar to Left Hand of Darkness: undidactic gender-bending, bonding on an ice world, the grey realpolitik of empires, cultural interpenetraExtremely similar to Left Hand of Darkness: undidactic gender-bending, bonding on an ice world, the grey realpolitik of empires, cultural interpenetration, high variance in tech levels.
Leckie's world has a lot of detail but she mostly manages to avoid this kind of opaque sentence:
On Shis'urna, in Ors, the Justice of Ente Seven Issa who had accompanied Lieutenant Skaaiat to Jen Shinnan's sat with me in the lower level of the house.
Best bit is the implications of high-tech dictatorship: the dark emperor has surveillance footage of everything within their domain, and thousands of clones of themself, and can edit memories, etc. This makes for extreme stability.
(The bit that reassured me, early on, that this wasn't going to be irksome is that the Terrible Galactic Imperialists are the ones with the post-gender society.)
The politics aren't that prominent; the quest looms larger. There is this section, which doesn't manage to be as thoughtful as Oscar Wilde in 1891:
here's the truth: luxury always comes at someone else's expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish. You're free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.
That seems to be true of her imperialists, the Radch. But why? They have extremely competent superhuman AIs, like the protagonist, but for some reason their economy is still scarce and material.
The protagonist One Esk is quite good; think Commander Data plus an oath of vengeance. The superior force serving a blithe master: I'm actually reminded of Jeeves (high praise). That said, the morality of her vengeance quest is dubious: she knows she's setting off a galactic civil war and doesn't even think her assassination will accomplish anything. Maybe the next book will do a Dune Messiah and turn the triumph of this book to ashes and despair.
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How does it do as Serious science fiction?
Social development: Some. Lots of different genderings and a nice baroque Space Feudalism.
Non-Jeeves stories are skippable. Though early, the Jeeves ones are as good as always:
"How's the weather, Jeeves?" "Exceptionally clement, sir." "
Non-Jeeves stories are skippable. Though early, the Jeeves ones are as good as always:
"How's the weather, Jeeves?" "Exceptionally clement, sir." "Anything in the papers?" "Some slight friction threatening in the Balkans, sir. Otherwise, nothing."
The Old Testament has roughly 700 rules of varying severity and absurdity; Jacobs tried to follow all of them for a year. For a host of reasons, this The Old Testament has roughly 700 rules of varying severity and absurdity; Jacobs tried to follow all of them for a year. For a host of reasons, this can't be done, and so this is a reductio of biblical literalism. It is also a sympathetic anthropology of the literal Other Side, who are low-status, even in parts of America.
* The mad rules: never wear mixed fibres; no rubber tires; burning a red cow is the only way to be pure person; all the precise shabbat rules about what you can and can't do; basically anything involving women. Judaism actually has a specific word for the arbitrary, stupid divine laws: the chukim. The various brilliant, witty cafeteria theists he consults are open about them being silly tests - fun puzzles, even.
* The blatantly evolutionary / patriarchal rules: no other gods before me, no shellfish, modest women.
* He is keen to show the noble side to the real literalists: they practice tithing, pacifism, no hell, are activists for global debt jubilee. (A handful of lovely policies out of the mad and thoughtless other 700, mind you.) One group are even admirable on epistemic, philological grounds!: "You can't follow all of the Bible literally because we can't know what some of the words mean." Sure they take this to be a reason to be even more extreme than ever stipulated, just to be safe, but I admire the rigour of it.
An extremely open-minded man; he meets the Creation Museum people, and the Amish, and the snake handlers. I didn't like the constant stream of cheap gags or his wielding family details for padding. I def didn't like his earnest attempt to use cognitive dissonance to delude himself into theism:
The notion of obeying laws that have no rational explanation is a jarring one. For most of my life, I've been working under the paradigm that my behavior should have a logical basis. But if you live biblically, this is not true. I have to adjust my brain to this. ...
When I first read the parable of the prodigal son, I was perplexed. I felt terrible for the older brother. The poor man put in all these years of loyal service, and his brother skips town, has a wild good time, then returns, and gets a huge feast? It seems outrageously unfair.
But that's if you're thinking quantitatively. If you're looking at life as a balance sheet. There's a beauty to forgiveness, especially forgiveness that goes beyond rationality. Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.
(That simply strikes me as choosing to be mistaken and then hardening oneself to injustice.)
He is not quite sophisticated enough to pull off rigorous naturalist wonder fully (but again this is me cruelly comparing a journalist to Nietzsche, Pessoa, Gopnik). But the following affirmation of mythos here is more or less my view:
I'm still agnostic. But in the words of Elton Richards, I'm now a reverant agnostic. Which isn't an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there's a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance.
Literalism is impossible, immoral and inconsistent with our new, better picture of the world; biblical liberalism is mercenary and inconsistent with itself. So don't bother? ...more
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