Not So Fast

Day 29 – Current book obsession

Right at this very moment I’m reading through David Edding’s The Belgariad and The Malloreon. I don’t know if this counts as an obsession or not, though. I am entertained enough to keep reading.

P.J. O’Rourke has some harsh words about the Democrats.

A valid point about usefulness of the American abundance of stuff. I still like to keep it all under control for ease of moving purposes.

Other than the tuning issues, I like this version of White Knuckles better than the released version:

This Too Shall Pass, was definitely better with a Marching Band.

The Hobbit is really going to happen. Peter Jackson directing, Martin Freeman as Bilbo, the dwarves, Bill Nighy as Smaug, it’s going to be awesome.

Mazda apparently has a 70mpg car coming out next year. I’m sure people with legs won’t be able to fit in it, but geez that’s good gas mileage.

Day 28 – First book obsession

In my “adult” reading life, it was probably Asimov’s robot short stories. I had to read them all, and even went to the public library where the homeless guys would sleep in all the comfy chairs to make sure I wasn’t missing any.  Because The Complete Robot? It’s not complete.

Before that, I would go on Through Golden Windows binges and some green hardback about Animals I Have Known or something like that and the Charlie Brown Super Book of Nature or whatever that title was. I remember reading a bunch of the Judy Blume books and then the E.B. White books in a row too.  Tales of the 4th Grade Nothing and The Trumpet of the Swan were the best, btw.

I hold out no hope that this can possibly be worthy to lick the boots of the real Top Gear.

Yes, the guy is probably a drug dealer, but if someone busted into my house, whatever they are shouting—especially if they bust in shouting things at me—I’m not going to process that, I’m going to go for a weapon and/or my phone and/or the nearest exit or some combination of those. Which is what this guy did. I doubt I’d give any thought to what they are wearing either, I would think the guns pointed at me would tend to draw my attention.

I love this:

while they knocked on the door with a battering ram

So, not so much knocked as just bashed the door in, really.

Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer

Um, define mainstream. I will define it as “is not associated with a major publishing house” and therefore choose Wil Wheaton.

Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot

Whenever I come up against WTF? book questions I fall back on my perennial favorite: The Sound and the Fury

Of course, I would have to debate whether or not it actually has a plot. But let’s not talk about that right now.

Broken bones don’t heal stronger. As anyone that has broken a bone could have told you.

Mandelbrot at TED in February.

[NSFW]

I guess Coulton will have to update the song a bit.

Flexible, implantable LEDs.

Day 25 – A book you plan on reading

As soon as I clear up the backlog of books I’m reading now I’ll pick up: Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

Day 24 – Best quote

That’s impossible. It would probably be from Mark Twain or  G.K Chesterton.

Here’s a recent favorite. That’s as good as I can do with this one.

Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them.

Frederick Buechner – Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

Day 23 – Most annoying character

Thomas Covenant. He’s a  self-pitying, whiny rapist. And he’s the protagonist. I read through the first book and thought, surely he can’t remain as bad through another book.  I was wrong.

This is bad news for the internet. It’s good news for the lawyers because the number of potential lawsuits just skyrocketed.

Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax

A Christmas Carol. Walk-er!

To discover that Kyoto didn’t actually cut greenhouse gases, it just outsourced them.

Cell phones cannot cause cancer, because they do not emit enough energy to break the molecular bonds inside cells. …

Where do cell phones fall on this spectrum? According to phys­i­­cist Bernard Leikind in a technical article in Skeptic magazine (Vol. 15, No. 4), known carcinogens such as x-rays, gamma rays and UV rays have energies greater than 480 kilojoules per mole (kJ/mole), which is enough to break chemical bonds. Green-light photons hold 240 kJ/mole of energy, which is enough to bend (but not break) the rhodopsin molecules in our retinas that trigger our photosensitive rod cells to fire. A cell phone generates radiation of less than 0.001 kJ/mole.

Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship

Cordelia and Aral Vorkosigan. It’s awesome, you should read it. And then the glimpses of them we’re given in the other Miles stories are awesome. I need to learn synonyms for awesome. Rad doesn’t quite work in most cases since it’s not 1989 anymore.

Spoiler alert: Cryoburn

Continue reading →

Interesting interview of the author of The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War and it’s importance in war for the last 60 years. What I know about the AK-47 I learned from Call of Duty and what I learned is it’s wildly inaccurate at a reasonable distance to be standing from someone shooting at you.  Might have to pick up the book though.

Reason goes to town on the editors that pulled the Non-Sequitur “Where’s Mohammed” cartoon.

You have to admit communist countries always put on a good militaristic show. Kim Jong Un looks like he’ll be a fun-loving and benevolent dictator.

Our national electric grid is so haphazard and unreliable it would be extremely difficult for terrorists to knock it out in one strike.

Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene

I particularly like how Campion and Amanda finally decide to get married. Especially after the way things got weird in The Fashion in Shrouds. I don’t know if that counts for this, but let’s go with that.

Of course, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion would all rate highly on this list. As would Cordeila’s Honor, but I can’t talk about that right now.

I can tell you the biggest relief was when Honor Harrington and Admiral White Haven finally get together after about 1500 or more pages of what the heck are they doing. Admittedly, not all 1500 pages were discussing their relationship, there were a few space battles in there. But still, 4 rather long novels is dragging it out a bit.

How about NASA works on getting my moon apartment and trip to Mars  up and running and let someone else, perhaps with “Environment” in their title worry about the environment?

Letting a computer learn by reading the internet?

There are many jokes about what will happen when it comes across 4chan or LOLcats, for example. But the reality is, those texts are already available to NELL, and it is largely ignoring them because they are so ill-formed and inconsistent.

Maybe it’ll be okay.

Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book

A Christmas Carol. Or any of the good Dickens novels, really. I think especially of Bleak House,  Nicholas Nickleby and the Pickwick Papers. Actually, any of those would objectively probably be a better choice, but I like A Christmas Carol best.

Day 18 – Favorite book cover

Um, okay. I seldom notice book covers. So I’m going with this one:

Since it’s the only one that I have ever consciously noticed as being cool.

Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy

For a long time it was Foundation but you must only read the original three (Foundation, Foundation And Empire and Second Foundation). The later abominations are not to be discussed or even contemplated.

Then I read The Lord of the Rings and it is the winner now.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy gets an Honorable Mention.

Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book

I’m going to say most things written by Mercedes Lackey.

Federalist Paper No. 62.

It is a misfortune incident to republican government, though in a less degree than to other governments, that those who administer it may forget their obligations to their constituents, and prove unfaithful to their important trust.

It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many.

In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.

It’s like the Founding Fathers knew what they were on about or something.

via Instapundit.

Scientists and the Army have figured out what’s killing the honeybees. I’m sure that somehow this will be blamed on global warming. Or cooling, whatever we’re going with this year.

Day 15 – Favorite female character

Cordelia Vorkosigan.

Cordelia’s Honor is about her and it’s a great story, but she pops up in quite a few of Miles’s stories and she’s equally awesome in those.

Honor Harrington is a close runner up. As is Elizabeth Bennet.

In my younger days it would have been Menolly from Dragonsong and Dragonsinger.

Day 14 – Favorite male character

Robinton from The Dragonriders of Pern. I don’t know if he really is my favorite, and I can tell you I didn’t really like The Masterharper of Pern (which I blame on being a later McCaffery novel), but loved him in all the other Pern novels. I choose him based on the theory that it must be what I think since no one else pops to mind.

Hitchen’s visit with Hugo Chavez. I will ruin it by quoting the best line:

Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap.

The Boris apology tour books new stops.

Some economists in Brazil tricked the people into a stable economy.

People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.

The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy.  The only catch: This currency would not be real.  No coins, no bills.  It was fake.

….  All prices were listed in URVs.  And URVs were kept stable — what changed was how many cruzeiros each URV was worth.Say, for example, that milk costs 1 URV. On a given day, 1 URV might be worth 10 cruzeiros. A month later, milk would still cost 1 URV. But that 1 URV might be worth 20 cruzeiros.

The idea was that people would start thinking in URVs — and stop expecting prices to always go up.

Not that I ever studied for tests… It’s a civics test that strays heavily into history and economics.

You answered 30 out of 33 correctly — 90.91 %

Making me more civically savvy than the average American or college professor. Woo, go me. I can also outrun the average 5 year old.

Day 13 – Favorite childhood book

Through Golden Windows
or
D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths

They were favorites at rather different times in my childhood. I also had a Charlie Brown’s Super Book of Questions and Answers About All Kinds of Animals that I really liked too. Except the picture of the timber rattler that would invariable startle me when I turned the page and it was poised to strike my thumb.

Day 12 – A book you’ve read more than twice.

Good lord, the numbers are in the hundreds. Literally.

I read most fiction books at least twice, and a lot of non-fiction gets read twice too or at least 1.5 times.

Day 11 – A book that disappointed you

Cryptonomicon

Coming off the high of Snow Crash and Diamond Age I was stoked to start Cryptonomicon, but two-thirds of the way through I stopped caring and just didn’t even bother finishing the last 50 pages or so.

Does the phrase “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated” mean anything in the English language anymore?

M Class planets have large amounts of water and a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, and a temperate climate.  In other words, humans can live there with minimal terraforming. Just because the planet is not instantly lethal to all forms of life does not make it M Class.

The planets scientists are finding tend to be in the I, J , S or T gas giant classes. And now that they think they have found rocky planets, until we know what their atmospheres are like we can’t classify them.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving

Bleak House

I thought it would be one of Dicken’s depressing ones, like Hard Times, probably because of the title, but I ended up really liking it.

Germany has paid off the last of it’s World War I debt.

Day 09 – Best scene ever

This one was hard, because I know there have been some scenes in books where I  totally stoked on it and grinning like a fool reading them, but I can’t remember them right now.  So I will answer with the one that I remember: the scene (more like a chapter, I guess) where Victor Hugo introduces Bishop Myriel in Les Miserables. It’s an astounding description of a true Christian.

Day 08 – Your favorite work in translation

Around the World in 80 Days.

The proper response to “why don’t you move to Somolia then?”

O’Hare’s subtle conflation of “society” and “the government” makes this sort of absurd reductio possible. Because of course, while it is true that living in America makes one vastly better able to create wealth than living almost anywhere else, much of that wealthy creation comes not from anything the government provides, but from the infrastructure of people, skills, and norms that surround one. It is a common fiction that government can somehow represent the will of “society”, but this is high-test bunkum; government is its own institution, a part of society, not the instrument of its divine will. Anyone who has studied any political science at all knows that to the limited extent that you can even say that “the will of the people” exists, it is at best only partially and somewhat haphazardly represented by their elected government.

Next crisis: Global cooling.  Let’s see if the taxpayer notices we’ve switched rationalizations on them.

Al Gore, George Soros, Bill Gates, Carol Browner, John Holdren, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Tim Yeo, Michael Mann, Ted Turner, Robert Redford, Phil Jones, Chris Huhne, John Howard (yes really, he was supposed to be a conservative, but he was the man who kicked off Australia’s ETS), Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Yvo de Boer, Rajendra Pachauri….The list of the guilty goes on and on. Each in his own way – and whether through ignorance, naivety idealism or cynicism, it really doesn’t matter for the result has been the same – has done his bit to push the greatest con-trick in the history of science, forcing on global consumers the biggest bill in the history taxation, using “global warming” as an excuse to extend the reach of government further than it has ever gone before.

While we’re on about it: how the envirnomental movement became just another left-leaning lobby.

Day 07 – A writer you don’t like

Since I have covered my dislike for Faulkner I will move on to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Was there ever a more depressing writer? You could be having a great day, but read one of his books and you’ll be looking around a chair and a noose.

Day 06 – Your favorite writer

If you go by the percentage of their books I own it would probably be Lois McMaster Bujold with Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery, David Weber and Isaac Asimov coming right behind.  But with them all it is about good story-telling with good characters. Their writing in and of itself is not actually spectacular.

Neal Stephenson’s writing fascinates me, but I only like about two-thirds of his books.

G.K. Chesterton and Oscar Wilde have similar writing styles that I love. And Jane Austen can turn a phrase too.

Mark Twain’s journalistic type writings are genius (his novels bore me).

To sum up, I can’t really just answer that question

Day 05 – A book you hate

So is it a book I didn’t like so much I didn’t finish or a book I finished and therefore hate knowing full well it’s terrible?

In the books I didn’t like so much I didn’t finish are two strong contenders: Wuthering Heights and The Eye of the World. I should have liked Eye of the World, but it didn’t work for me.

Contenders for books I finished and hated come mostly from high school lit classes, but the winner has to be  The Sound and the Fury. What a waste of paper that is. Deliberately confusing, disjointed and depressing. Yay, that’s what I want to spend my free time with.

Tilt-shift Van Gogh.

Day 04 – Your favorite book ever

I’m going to say: Pride And Prejudice.

This was a very hard one. I should probably do a bracket playoff of all my books to be sure. I might have been more stoked while reading other books,  but Pride and Prejudice is awesome and so re-readable, I think it would win.

Day 03 – Your favorite recent book

Beneath the Bleeding

I’m torn between that one, The Mermaids Singing and  The Torment of Others. You really need to read at least Mermaid Singing before jumping in to Beneath The Bleeding.

Stephen Colbert to testify before Congress about immigration. This is why Congress can’t have nice things.

You know that joke about the government taking your paycheck and giving you what it feels like after it’s done with it? It’s not so funny anymore in the UK.

Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

There’s a lot of awesome quotes in it and people look at me strangely when I bust them out. It’d be nice if more people got them.

From an essay regarding the upcoming book, Mao’s Great Famine:

All have Party secretaries who manage them in conjunction with the CEO. In big questions, such as leadership or overseas acquisitions, Party meetings precede board meetings, which largely give routine approval to Party decisions. The Party’s overarching control was driven home a few years ago when China’s large telecom companies had their CEOs shuffled like a pack of cards because of a decision by the Party’s Organization Department. It would have been like the US Department of Commerce ordering the heads of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile to play musical chairs. For the Organization Department, which acts as the Party’s personnel department, it was normal; it often shifts senior Party officials every few years to prevent empire building and corruption.

And here’s what frightens me: I could see that happening here after another bailout or two. We could ask GM or the banks for pointers.

I can’t wait for the book to come out in paperback though, it should be an interesting read.

Your favorite series of books (with more than 3 in the series):

I don’t know if it counts, but the Vorkosigan Saga is probably my favorite. If that doesn’t count then Honor Harrington.

Probably. I feel like I’m forgetting something from earlier in my life though.

Isaac Asimov kindled my love of science fiction,  super-computers that run planets and whose names end in -vac, robots, the future, space travel and Galactic Empires, so I must spread the link about what he actually said about the Star Spangled Banner.

Yeah, I don’t care what.

Egypt can desaturate with the best of them but Iran needs help with the clone button.

I kinda like these urns. And not necessarily for the Star Trek theme, the whole square thing appeals to me (though the Star Trek thing is cool too).

Awesome pictures of atomic tests [warning: slideshow].

A video of engineers climbing to the top of a 1760 ft. antenna. It’s frightening just watching it from the comfort of a chair not even 2′ off the ground. Just when you think they’re at the top, they go out on an even sketchier part. Gah.

I’m having a hard time working up sympathy for would-be lawyers that can’t find jobs in the legal profession.

Justice Breyer: Burning a Koran may not be protected speech. I’m pretty sure the lesson here is that threats of violence gets you more rights. Might not be the lesson the government wants to send people.

New Jersey Transit worker fired for burning a Koran. I’d like to see what happens when someone burns a Bible, or Bhagavad Gita for control purposes.

This mini-rant is about education, but I believe it can be applied to a broad selection of government interference.

It is also to illustrate, once again, that when we let government fund something, it is political calculus – not educational benefits, economic effectiveness, or what’s best for taxpayers – that ultimately drives the policies.

The downside 0f being an astronaut (aside from the not insignificant chance of being blown up): losing your fingernails. The thought of which makes me cringe more than the thought of being blown up.

NASA looking at a Wile E. Coyote inspired rail gun to launch stuff.

The poor, sad billionaires. Forced to move their money around into other economies.