But he was a sloppy writer, Your Honor!

Today Matthew Yglesias offers a critique of Isaac Asimov's 1953 novel The Caves of Steel:

For today's nerd break, let's consider Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, an excellent sci-fi novel sadly undermined by a failure to really grasp population density. The setting for the novel is a future version of earth in which the existence of advanced technology has failed to stem a decline in living standards (on the planet Earth, that is, the Spacers are better off than we are). The trouble is that the proposed population of Earth -- 8 billion -- is way to low to produce the effects Asimov is concerned with. Humanity, in this vision of the future, lives in giant, mostly underground mega-cities the better to leave the surface of the planet available for the exploitation of natural resources.

Now, I've read my fair bit of Asimov, but I've never read The Caves of Steel (in fact, I'm largely ignorant of Asimov's whole Robot-verse). So take everything I'm going to say with that in mind.

But I'd say Matthew goes a bit far in his critique of the plausibility of this population density, given that it's all based on Asimov's estimate of 8 billion people living on this future Earth. As scientifically-minded as he may have been, Asimov was hugely inexact with numbers in his fiction. In the Foundation series, for instance, he couldn't be bothered to remember if the planet Trantor had 40 or 400 billion people (pre-Imperial collapse).

He reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle, so unconcerned with consistency in his Sherlock Holmes stories that he couldn't keep Dr. Watson's first name straight. (In one Sherlock Holmes short story of less than 30 pages, Doyle forgot what month he'd already established it as, and inadvertently put all of London through a six-month time distortion.)

I think, when faced with the numbers just not making sense in The Caves of Steel, it would be best to assume that Asimov meant to type "800 billion", and the zero key on his typewriter was just stuck. Of course, like I said I've never actually read the book, and maybe at one point an Evil Overlord type says something like, "And I shall bring death and destruction down on Earth's eight billion people! Yessssss, every single one of the eight billion, the two times four billion, the two and two thirds times three billion, THEY WILL ALL DIE!"

Turtles all the way down

I've liked Wondermark for a while now, but today's strip is one of my all-time favorites. Maybe it's my love of inerrant logic.

Darrell Hammond, History's Pivot

The style section of the Washington Post is speculating about the impact of the TV writers' strike on the 2008 election.

Thanks to the TV writers' strike, millions of citizens have been deprived (for 24 days now!) of their late-night dose of sarcasm and slashing wit, of irony and smart-aleck quips. No Letterman, no Leno, no Stewart or Colbert.

As a compressed schedule of presidential primaries rapidly approaches, the nation's Irony Deficiency comes at the worst possible time. Without late-night comedy, how will we really know what or whom to make fun of? With a few precious weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire, will political journalists be forced to create their own caricatures of the candidates without any help from "Saturday Night Live," Conan or even that Scottish guy?

This is a splendid opportunity for me to dredge up the 2000 Presidential election once again to deliver another opinion that no one asked for.

Darrell Hammond got George W. Bush elected.*

The Saturday Night Live skits mocking the election during the fall of 2000 were some of the show's best material in years. The skit mocking the first Presidential debate is still probably one of SNL's best-remembered moments. ("Strategery." "Lockbox.")

But Will Ferrell's performance as George W. Bush left something to be desired. I'll allow that he had a few of Bush's facial expressions down pretty well, but overall his Bush was more a cartoony character of his own devising than a good impersonation. (I think Ferrell just isn't a good impersonator. His Alex Trebek was amusing, but didn't strike me as terribly analogous to the real Trebek.)

Darrell Hammond, however, nailed his target. For YEARS afterwards, it seemed Americans couldn't try to mimic Al Gore's voice without unconsciously channeling Hammond instead. Hammond's is the definitive Gore. And where Ferrell was slapsticky, Hammond was subtle.

So viewers turning in to SNL in the fall of 2000 were treated to: Will Ferrell playing a cartoony politician running for President, vs. a subtle Al Gore caricature highlighting all of the real politician's on-stage foibles. Which real candidate emerged looking worse?

There's a lesson in there somewhere for political satirists.

* I'm not saying I literally believe this. Please do not accuse me of crying "media bias" or of whining about events of 7 years ago. Thank you.

Dear Businesses in Taiwan

You can put up all the tinsel, snowflakes, and Christmas trees covered with silvery powder that you like. But we're at 25 degrees north latitude, and we all know quite well that only by an act of God is it going to snow here.

(As a Maine native, that makes me sad.)

Why Taiwan Is the Best Place in East Asia

Today, with only a handwritten street address (no map, no directions) to guide me, I successfully located an address in Taipei.

I'd like to see a foreigner on the streets of Tokyo or Seoul do THAT.

God shed His grace on thee

TheMishMash.com's 9 Signs that You're Probably an Asshole can also be interpreted as "Common Negative Stereotypes of Americans".

Although I have to respect the guy in #3.

I don't need nine hundred thousand friends

The big thing in online pessimism this week is Cory Doctorow's column How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook:

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

It's not just Facebook and it's not just me. Every "social networking service" has had this problem and every user I've spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that's why these services are so volatile: why we're so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace's loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It's socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list -- but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who'll groan and wonder why we're dumb enough to think that we're pals).

That's why I don't worry about Facebook taking over the net. As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go -- and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history.

I just quoted the same three paragraphs that everyone else is quoting. But Cory's whole column is worth reading.

Me, I don't think I'm in much danger of a Facebook-created awkward social situation. You know how many Facebook "friends" I have? Twelve, only twelve. And I'm happy with that. That twelve includes my girlfriend and some people who are genuinely good friends and some people I might barely recognize if they walked up to me on the street and said "hi". I really don't lead a sufficiently Facebook-centered existence to need much more.

I'm not going to turn down random people who want to "friend" me if some kind of actual real-world connection to me can be proven. But I'm not going to go to any great lengths to fill out my "friends" list either.

My brother is 24 years old and leads a more computer-centric existence than I do. He's in the exact center of the Facebook demographic, and he isn't on Facebook. So I don't feel terribly bad about not checking my Facebook news feed for days at a time.

And what would my Facebook news feed look like if I had five hundred friends?

Right now the very top item on my news feed is an invitation to lick Seth. I have never met Seth and will probably never meet him. I'm being invited to lick him because he "messaged" one of my friends via an application called "X Me". Looking at my news feed, I can't even imagine how often I'd be invited to do sundry things to people I've never met if my Facebook friends numbered in the hundreds.

Mind the Gap

One of the world's great mass transit systems has been made duller. Reuters says:

An official announcer for London's Tube system has been sacked after making spoof messages mocking American tourists, peeping Toms and sweaty commuters.

Voiceover artist Emma Clarke, 36, recorded the announcements in the same smooth tones that have warned millions of passengers to "Mind The Gap" and posted them on her Web site.

The messages include:

* "We would like to remind our American tourist friends that you are almost certainly talking too loudly."

* "Would the passenger in the red shirt pretending to read the paper but who is actually staring at that woman's chest please stop. You are not fooling anyone, you filthy pervert."

* "Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers."

* "Here we are crammed again into a sweaty Tube carriage ... If you're female smile at the bloke next to you and make his day. He's probably not had sex for months."

Clarke said it was "just a bit of a laugh." But Tube operator Transport for London (TfL) failed to see the funny side and dropped her, after eight years.

"London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Miss Clarke are experiencing severe delays," a TfL spokesman told the Evening Standard on Monday.

Too bad. My own memory of the London Underground involves sullen, gloomy-looking people who look like they'd rather be somewhere else. Or dead. I'm a VERY LOUD AMERICAN and when I was on the Underground I would've liked to hear Miss Clarke liven things up.

Her web site's here, but it's overwhelmed at the moment thanks to the publicity.

In which Romney is Scrutinized

I shall now play the fun old game of pretending to take something a politician says seriously, just to see where I end up.

Via both Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias, here's Mansoor Ijaz on Mitt Romney:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

You do have to feel sorry for Romney. He can't say, "Sure, I'd appoint a qualified Muslim," as long as he needs the votes of the most hysterically anti-Muslim segment of the Republican electorate. But if he just says he won't appoint any Muslims, and doesn't explain further, obviously THAT wouldn't look good either.

So he thinks fast and comes up with incoherence. I'm gonna mock him by pretending to take him seriously. He thinks a Muslim in the cabinet wouldn't be justified based on the percentage of the American population that is Muslim. There are more Mormons in the US than there are Muslims, but what if the numbers were reversed? If only 1% of Americans were Mormon, would a principled Protestant or Catholic President be justified in saying "Sorry! There aren't enough Mormons in this great country to justify giving a Cabinet post to one of you. You do understand, of course?"

Of course I know Romney doesn't really believe this. But isn't it fun to pretend once in a while that a politician really means what he's saying?

Poor Abraham Lincoln

Posthumous diagnoses of famous people fascinate me, whether it's the theory that Edgar Allen Poe died of rabies or that Abraham Lincoln had Marfan Syndrome (or maybe he didn't).

Well, whether or not the Marfan diagnosis is true, modern medicine isn't finished with Mr. Lincoln yet:

Abraham Lincoln was the rarest of men, and John G. Sotos believes that extended all the way to his chromosome 10.

A physician, connoisseur of rare ailments and amateur historian, Sotos believes Lincoln had a genetic syndrome called MEN 2B. He thinks the diagnosis not only accounts for Lincoln's great height, which has been the subject of most medical speculation over the years, but also for many of the president's other reported ailments and behaviors.

He also suspects Lincoln was dying of cancer at the time he was assassinated, and was unlikely to have survived a year. He thinks cancer -- an inevitable element of MEN 2B -- killed at least one of Lincoln's four sons, three of whom died before reaching age 20.

This isn't the first time I've heard the "Lincoln would have died soon of natural causes even if he hadn't been assassinated" theory - before Sotos, many modern doctors suggested Lincoln was dying of heart disease. But MEN 2B is new to me.

The GOP bosses in 1864 probably didn't even suspect that Lincoln may have been dying when they replaced reliable Republican Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with Democrat Andrew Johnson.

Whether he was dying of cancer or of heart disease, either way it would have ruined the fine alternate history Harry Turtledove created in his excellent novel How Few Remain, in which Abraham Lincoln is a healthy and vigorous old Marxist in 1881, crisscrossing the country trying to turn the failing Republican Party into the party of the working man.

Trash Talk

I'm gonna talk about political discourse some more. Everybody get set to roll their eyes at me.

John Scalzi of 'Whatever' started a comment thread about the Australian election. I suspect the politics of Scalzi's readers tend to lean strongly to the left.

In reference to the elation of Australians who didn't like John Howard, he said "I hope to feel the same in about a year’s time". So eventually one 'wolfwalker' made the following comeback:

So do I, actually. Of course, in the US that would mean the majority in Congress changing parties again, and every single one of the treasonous cowards who voted to surrender to the terrorists in Iraq, like Murtha and Pelosi and Reid and Kennedy, getting voted out in total shame and disgrace.

Now, of course I know this is trash talk - just like what you hear among sports fans before and during every big game.

I didn't read wolfwalker's comment and think, "Oh my god! I voted for Democrats last November! Have I helped TREASONOUS COWARDS to take over the American government?!" That would be like a Republican hearing some trash talk by a Democrat, and then wondering if his President really and truly was, in every biological and taxonomic sense, a chimpanzee.

Wolfwalker at least stuck around on the comment thread to make a few more remarks. (Whenever I start a sentence with an uncapitalized proper noun, I always have to think for a moment about whether to capitalize it. I think the convention that the first word in a sentence is always capitalized trumps the uncapitalized nature of the handle 'wolfwalker'.) After other commentors asked him some specific questions about his actual views on the War On Terror, he settled down and said:

I think Musharraf is a generally unpleasant individual, and we should continue to treat him as an ally only because at the moment, we have no choice. I’m quite happy to see Benazir Bhutto back in Pakistan and rebuilding her power base. I’m also happy to see Musharraf arranging for parliamentary elections — although I’m also very concerned that the extremists might gain power as a result of those elections.

As for Basra, I have insufficient information to make any kind of decision. I’ve heard three different versions of what happened there:

1) the Brits did a successful job of non-violently pacifying the area, then pulled back and left a peaceful, functional local government behind.

2) the Brits tried a nonviolent approach to running the area, only to see Iranian-backed, fundamentalist Shi’ite militias move in and take over. The Brits then ran away in confusion because their own political leaders wouldn’t let them do what was necessary to regain control.

3) the Brits tried nonviolence, the militias took over, and then the Brits went back in and stomped them before setting up a functioning government and then withdrawing a second time.

I don’t know which version is correct.

So wolfwalker is capable of talking intelligently about world affairs without just going for the trash talk. Except, don't you think it's possible he's diminished the effect of what he has to say by starting with the "treasonous cowards" talk?

Okay, I know that blog comments tend to be one of the least intelligent venues for political discussion online, perhaps only ahead of Fark.com comments and comments for Youtube videos. I think I still have a point.

Am I picking on wolfwalker just because he's cheering for the GOP? I dunno.

It's true that his "treasonous cowards" trash talk riled me up more than similar stuff coming from a Democrat would have. Even though it shouldn't have - I should not be taking it so seriously.

But people who attack the GOP are just as capable of sabotaging themselves. For example, I'll be reading what's supposed to be a sane critique of Dick Cheney and the author will slip in an implication that Cheney had foreknowledge that 9/11 was going to happen, without any apparent awareness that maybe accusing him of that is just a tad more serious than, say, accusing him of deliberately leaking the name of a CIA agent.

Don't misunderstand me - I respect the right of free speech. Like everybody else, wolfwalker has a right to call Pelosi and Murtha traitors online. And other people have a right to imply Cheney was behind 9/11.

And I have a right to prepare an exhaustively researched and impeccably edited critique of Rudy Giuliani's tenure as Mayor of NYC, and then ruin it by starting off suggesting that Giuliani and Osama bin Laden used to be gay lovers.

But that doesn't mean it's productive.

Korea, Obnoxious Drunks, and the Police

This is going to be a rambling post with no real conclusion about a country I used to live in but don't anymore. Be warned.

I've been getting some disturbing vibes from the Korea expat blogosphere lately.

Michael "The Metropolitician" Hurt called the police to get a drunken asshole to stop harassing him for being a foreigner, and ended up getting arrested and fingerprinted after the drunk made up a bunch of crap about Michael physically assaulting him. Michael posted about it here, and again here.

That's why I don't think I've ever been more a mixture of humiliated and enraged in all my life. Because not only was I not doing anything at ALL wrong or unlawful, but I was actually just trying to play upstanding citizen, which got me arrested and charged with assault.

The Marmot's Hole blogged about the incident here. I read every single one of the comments. If I'd never been to Korea, I'd assume it was an unsafe, unfriendly land for those of us not blessed with northeast-Asian ethic features. Some of those comments were FRIGHTENING.

And it isn't a new phenomenon. Back in 2002, in the months before I first arrived in Korea, numerous online posts and stories described a rising tide of anti-Americanism (and by extension, anti-Westernerism) that made many expats in Korea warn other Westerners not to bother coming.

My own Korean experiences?

I spent about 2 1/2 years living in Seoul, South Korea (Dec. 2002 to Jul. 2004, Feb. 2006 to Feb. 2007).

I lived a trouble-free existence in Korea. Never fell afoul of the law, never had a reason to talk to the police, never got into a brawl with drunken Koreans. Part of it's probably that my idea of a fun night was to go to a cozy live music bar in Samcheondong or Hongdae and chill out, not to dance the night away in a club where the booze flowed like water. (And I hardly ever went to Itaewon after dark, even though it's a mighty useful place during the day.)

And I'm not denying that there are subtle ways in which the government is not that welcoming to expats. Marmot brings up a part of it here. And when the Korean government does make a gesture of magnanimity towards the foreign population, it's usually so half-assed that it would have been less insulting for them to just do nothing.

But the country just felt different to me than the country that all these expat-in-Korea bloggers are describing. Despite the presence of a certain 0.1% of the Korean population who are programmed to be obnoxious to foreigners, particularly when drunk (for Lord knows what reason), I never felt physically threatened. Good thing, too, since in person I'm one of the most non-confrontational people alive and wouldn't know what to do in a fight. (Maybe Korea would have been worse for me if I'd been a foreign woman.) I don't know if it's my demeanor (more than one person has called me quiet and unassuming) or just luck.

Maybe it's just luck. I don't want to just dismiss any of these anecdotes about foreigner harassment.

I've met Michael Hurt personally a few times. I have a lot of respect for him. In person he's very affable and funny. He speaks Korean quite well. He may seem otherwise if you know him only through his blog posts, but I cannot believe he has an ax to grind about Korea. Or that he's trying to stir up trouble. I believe him.

And I don't want to just dismiss all of these stories of foreigners being harassed in Korea, and the legal system that doesn't care. I just don't know how to relate it to my own trouble-free experience.

Maybe, like I said, I've just been extraordinarily lucky.

Maybe I hate God!

Hey, maybe this post is me coming out of the closet as one of those anti-religious bigots that you hear people fighting the Culture Wars going on about.

I think I first heard of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy via a post on Kevin Drum's blog ages ago, when he wondered why the same Religious Right who claim Harry Potter is full of unwholesome influences haven't gotten their panties in a bunch over Philip Pullman, whose stuff is reportedly far more actively insulting to Christianity than anything J. K. Rowling has dreamt up.

I figured it was because, like most demagogues, the loud anti-Harry Potter voices have no interest in ideological purity or logical consistency. Harry Potter's a big part of mass American pop culture (as British as he may be) and a big part of the Culture Wars is finding ways to smear large swathes of American pop culture as something decadent and potentially harmful. And since Philip Pullman didn't have Rowling's mass marketing, he wasn't even on their radar.

Now The Golden Compass, the first His Dark Materials movie, is coming to theaters, and the forces who opposed Harry Potter are readying their forces. The Carpetbagger Report opines about it here.

Naturally, this being the United States, some of the more controversial themes of the series have been toned down in the film version. But [Baptist Press] still warns that interest in the movie will lead more kids to the books and from there straight to hell.

But Kevin Drum opines thusly (and he's on the record as an atheist who is not a fan of the Religious Right):

I'm not in the habit of defending the Religious Right, but I have to say that just this once they have a point. I'm sure the movie itself will indeed be harmless, but the books are every conservative Christian's nightmare of what the secular left's real agenda is — assuming you get past the first two volumes, that is. Pullman's attack on Christianity is foreshadowed in those books, but in the third it's laid bare with no attempt at even unsubtle Narnia-esque analogies. The Amber Spyglass is the story of how God (yes, the God of Abraham, the one in the Bible) has ruled despotically and malevolently over the Earth for 30,000 years and the forces of good and decency are finally going to kill him. And they do.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I'd sure want to know about it beforehand if I were a serious Christian browsing around for fantasy books for my kids. And if I were a mucky-muck in the Southern Baptist Convention, I'd be warning parents away from it too. Yeah, they've cried wolf too often over stuff like Harry Potter to have much credibility left, but in this case they're standing on pretty solid ground. These books are about as rabidly anti-Christian as a kids series can get.

What does it say about me that now I wanna read Pullman's stuff? Mostly out of curiosity, although he seems to be a fairly decent enough writer that I'd probably enjoy his stuff.

Am I a closet rabid anti-Christian?

We're gonna break it

Apparently just by being sentient beings making observations, we're shortening the universe's life:

The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang.

But there is an odd feature of the theory that philosophers and scientists still argue about. In a nutshell, the theory suggests that we change things simply by looking at them and theorists have puzzled over the implications for years.

They often illustrate their concerns about what the theory means with boggling mind experiments, notably Schrodinger's cat in which, thanks to a fancy experimental set up, the moggy is both alive and dead until someone decides to look, when it either carries on living, or dies. That is, by one interpetation (by another, the universe splits into two, one with a live cat and one with a dead one.)

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have accidentally nudged the universe closer to its death by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

Before we get all guilt-stricken about the horrific damage we've been wreaking on the universe with our godlike powers we didn't even realize we had, I'd like to ask: if there are intelligent extraterrestrials who are bright enough to figure this all out, doesn't that let us off the hook? Then dark energy has already been studied, and surely restudying it couldn't do any harm?

Or am I betraying some deep and fundamental misunderstanding of quantum mechanics? I probably am.

Update: Once again, BoingBoing commenters are smarter than I am.

Nov. 23. 2007 YouTube

One of the all-time great covers: the Pet Shop Boys simultaneously do U2 and Frankie Valli.

No Full Stops

I've never visited India. But I think Indian food is the king of the world's cuisines, and I find Indian philosophy and theology strangely compelling (not that I'm that great at keeping the Sanskrit names straight), and my girlfriend's a major Indophile who's been to the country several times and is not bad at cooking the food.

BBC correspondent Mark Tully's No Full Stops in India was a fascinating read for me, the budding Indophile, despite some nagging issues. The book was written in 1991, practically ancient history as far as a country study is concerned. But I learned something about Indian politics, and gained an appreciation for how things work in India.

Tully himself seems to be a post-colonial type that maybe I just can't relate to as an American. He was born in India in the days of the British Empire, lived there until he was ten, returned there as an adult and lived there for most of his adult life. By my estimation he's got more of a right to call himself Indian than Sonia Gandhi. But he makes it clear again and again that he doesn't consider himself Indian, but rather British, and his views on India are those of a knowledgeable foreigner.

Tully's book was written for someone better-informed than me about Indian affairs. I kept asking my girlfriend to confirm my inferences on exactly who "Rajputs" are, or about some aspects of Indian religious life. He goes into very great detail about Operation Black Thunder, when Indian police forces dealt with the occupation of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Sikh separatists in 1988. But he assumes his readers already know the political background to the incident - including the extremely bloody shootout between government forces and separatists that occurred on the exact same spot four years earlier. I'd known that the 1984 incident happened, but I didn't know anything more than extremely sketchy details, so to fully understand the chapter on Operation Black Thunder I had to do some catch-up studying on Wikipedia.

There's one particular statistic that Tully references twice, and that I found rather questionable. On page 8:

"[The English-speaking elite] insist that English must be preserved as the common language of multilingual India, even though less than 3 per cent of the population have even a basic understanding of it."

And on pages 69-70:

"Because the teaching of English is so bad in most schools, less than 3 per cent of Indians are reasonably competent in the language. The British Council feels that Tamil Nadu is probably above the average and reckons that there is no 'zero level of English' in the state, which apparently means that everyone has at least some acquaintance with the language. If that is true, I can only say there is plenty of 0.001 level English in Tamil Nadu."

Granted, Tully is writing in 1991, when the general level of English in India was probably lower than today. But everyone I've talked to who knows anything about India says that 3 percent is a very low figure. Tully's very anti-elitist and very pro-common man in his writing; he tends to see English as the language of the upper class, which may have led him to understate its pervasiveness in India.

(By the way, my credulity's getting strained in the opposite direction by Rory MacLean's book on Burma, Under the Dragon: Travels in a Betrayed Land, which I am currently reading. MacLean doesn't cite any statistics, but from his anecdotal evidence it seems like English is very prevalent in Burma, even among rickshaw pullers and restaurant owners. True, Burma was a British colony, but since independence it's isolated itself to such a degree that I find it a bit unbelievable that decent English speakers are still so easy to find, even in the hinterlands. But I'm only assuming here - I have no personal experience with Burma whatsoever.)

Questionable bits aside, Tully has an experienced journalist's eye for character and is very good at telling narratives.

In which Kofi Annan wins

The old Euroafrican ruler Ian Smith is dead. He's one of those old fogeys on the world political scene whose deaths shock me because I'd thought they'd already been dead for a decade.

His death became extra meaningful for me when I realized that he'd been the most famous living person who shared my birthday (April 8). Of course I went to Wikipedia to try to determine who the most famous person with my birthday is now.

Seymour Hersh? Perhaps. I must admit I've never read anything of his.

Kofi Annan? Maybe. Why not?

Douglas Trumbull? There's a name I remember from watching the Sci-Fi channel late at night.

Tom DeLay? Bleh.

Barbara Kingslover? Another writer I ought to have read, but haven't.

Katee Sackhoff? Truth be told, I've never seen Battlestar Galactica. But Katee Sackhoff does hold the distinction of being the most famous person who was actually born the same day as me.

Taran Noah Smith? I remember watching Home Improvement years ago.

I declare Kofi Annan the winner! Kofi Annan, you are now the most famous living person I share a birthday with!

The Conservapedia

Has everyone heard of the Conservapedia, the great conservative, wholesome, Family Values-promoting antidote to the terminally worldly and degenerate Wikipedia?

Andrew Sullivan got curious and looked at the "Most Viewed Pages" statistics page.

Most viewed pages

1. Main Page [1,894,429]
2. Homosexuality [1,475,437]
3. Homosexuality and Hepatitis [515,993]
4. Homosexuality and Promiscuity [416,375]
5. Homosexuality and Parasites [387,265]
6. Homosexuality and Gonorrhea [327,795]
7. Homosexuality and Domestic Violence [319,073]
8. Gay Bowel Syndrome [305,261]
9. Homosexuality and Syphilis [261,781]
10. Homosexuality and Mental Health [243,293]

In all fairness, I should point out that commenters at BoingBoing.net smell a rat.

Escape Pod

I walk a lot. I get most of my exercise from walking - well, walking and climbing the stairs to my 6th-floor-apartment-with-no-elevator. And I like to use my cheapo, no-name-brand mp3 player.

I should probably be using it for Chinese listening practice, but lately I've become addicted to fiction podcasts. And ever since I discovered the science fiction/fantasy/horror podcast site Escape Pod, I've been working my way through the archives chronologically. I've listened to everything up to episode 27, which is only November 2005. The site's got 132 stories available now (not counting flash fiction and assorted non-fiction podcasts), so there's enough to keep me busy for a long time to come.

The stories are roughly evenly divided into "science fiction" and "fantasy" categories (and host Steve Eley had some interesting stuff to say about the sf vs. fantasy divide back in October and November 2005), though the occasional unclassifiable is thrown in, such as the theological fable The Life and Times of Penguin. There are also deconstructionist pop culture parodies, such as the superhero story The Death Trap of Dr. Nefario. And The Great Old Pumpkin, which can be described as H. P. Lovecraft meets Charles Schulz. (Seriously. That's exactly what it is.) As for what The Burning Bush might be about, just try to think of the dirtiest possible interpretation of that title.

Others that I deem early highlights include Snow Day, The Trouble with Death Traps, Herd Mentality, Implications, and Platypus Girl.

FeetManSeoul

AND, on a totally different note...

I don't know squat about fashion. And I'm not all that good at street photography, despite taking an informal class from a pro - the famed Metropolitician - last year in Seoul. (It's my fault, not his, that I'm not that good at it.)

Well, that pro, under the name of FeetManSeoul, now has an awesome Korean street photography/fashion blog up and running. Almost makes me miss Korea again. Well, truth be told, the thought of cheap kimbap for breakfast, dwaenjang jigae for lunch, and a samgyupsal dinner makes me miss Korea again. But the Seoul pictures do too.

My origin story

I'm cynical about politics. But what I'm even more cynical about are people who talk about politics. I wrote about it the other day, and rereading that post, I think I was on to something. It's why I just can't bring myself to take the vast majority of political punditry seriously. It all seems so fake to me.

I don't even think I'm being all that unfair to political pundits. It's not like they're trying to be principled. Principles in punditry would be as out of place as 18th-century French aristocratic etiquette at a family picnic.

The great recent event that still looms large in my mind is the great comedic Presidential Election of 2000. It seems so much bigger in retrospect than the elections of 1996 or 2004. Of course there was the comedy of the Florida recount, but what sticks with me are the events that led up to the recount.

During that race it was fashionable for people to say that they supported their candidate because they thought he was simply a better human being than his opponent, completely apart from any kind of political bias. That's right - the person who voted for Reagan twice, George H. W. Bush twice, and Bob Dole once, voted for Bush because he didn't like Al Gore's personality. Right. To be fair, I was probably guilty of this too. I tend to like Democrats more than Republicans. I have never, ever been terribly fond of Al Gore, but he was the man I voted for and hoped would win. And I thought he was personally far more suited to the job than George W. Bush. Coincidence? Or am I due for a bit of self-criticism?

There were other bits of dumbness and hypocrisy during the race, but it was the immediate aftermath of the election that caused me to give up all my faith in the rationality of people who opinionate about politics.

Okay, so Al Gore won the nationwide popular vote but lost in the electoral college. (I will not will not WILL NOT get into Florida here.)

In the weeks before the election, there was a lot of speculation that Gore might lose the nationwide popular vote but win in the Electoral College.

If that had happened, millions of Bush supporters would have complained about Bush getting screwed over even though he'd won the popular vote, and millions of Gore voters would be all sanctimonious and take the moral high ground, reminding Republicans of the wisdom of the Founders blah blah blah. Of course I can't predict what any specific person would have said in this alternate timeline. But can anyone seriously argue it wouldn't have happened?

That was the election that snapped whatever faith I had in American political punditry, whether written by amateurs on Internet bulletin boards or by professionals on newspaper op-ed pages. Hell, America ain't special - I lost all faith in all political opinion writing. There are no principles. You write whatever sounds good in the situation you're in at the moment, and nobody cares if it doesn't make sense or if it will achieve absolutely nothing beyond making you sound vaguely smart. Politics is not real life!

I couldn't bring myself to take the humorous Presidential election of 2000 all that seriously, and I wanted to believe that it didn't really matter which candidate won. The next year there was 9/11, and I saw it as part of the Real World, quite unconnected to the election. In my view, 9/11 would have happened even with Gore in the White House. Ditto for the Afghan invasion; it's difficult to imagine President Gore not sending in the troops. But what about the Iraq War? Would it have happened on Gore's watch? If not, then did it happen because of the outcome of the election? But the election wasn't real - the behavior of millions upon millions of people can attest to that. But the Iraq War damn well seems like part of real life. What was going on?

A few years after the stupid election, one Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a book entitled On Bullshit. The book did fairly well, Frankfurt promoted it on Jon Stewart, and most importantly, it was short enough that I could easily read the whole thing in Barnes & Noble. Maybe it's because my education up to that point had been lacking, but I was profoundly affected by the idea that there was a third sort of state apart from truth or lies.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

At last I had the intellectual framework to understand ninety-nine percent of the political opinions I was exposed to!

The 2000 election taught me that everything, as Strong Bad would say, is full of crap. And it doesn't even try to hide being full of crap.

But as long as I'm talking about the stupid little election of 2000, there's one more observation I want to make. During the weeks of the mess in Florida, when Bush was claiming victory but Gore wouldn't concede, how many Americans died in election-related violence?

Zero.

For all the dishonesty, bullshit, grandstanding, and hypocrisy, that's one reason for me to be proud of my country's politics.

Perhaps I shall shower

I'm looking for part-time work to supplement my main job. I found this in an ad on an online classifieds board:

Important things to consider during interview:

Attitude (evidenced clothes, body posture, things you say about your previous experiences and how you talk about them), personality (evidenced by your handshake, talk, and the way you look at me), looks (clothes/haircut/ smell), experience (length, kind, and estimation), education (got one or not; evidenced in the language you use).

Now, I was going to wear a ratty old white T-shirt with ketchup and deodorant stains to this interview, and maybe also pick my teeth very visibly while the guy was talking to me so he'd be able to see how confident I was. And of course I'd avoid eye contact and look at the floor the entire time, so the interviewer wouldn't think I was challenging him and attack me. And I was thinking of not showering for a few days beforehand so the interviewer would get the full-on Brendan experience. But now maybe I won't.

I've never seen a help wanted ad say what they expected so... explicitly. Maybe they'd had a string of applicants who looked like they'd come straight from an all-night gaming session in their parents' basement?

Lord Aberdeen

Paper Cuts is promoting the newly published anthology Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities.

Living as I do in Taiwan, I suppose it's my duty to find Correctly English in Hundred Days hellaciously funny. But I almost think I prefer the quieter humor of Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen and, of course, the seminal classic Faulty Bread.

Betting on Ron Paul

I keep obsessively checking Slate.com's 2008 political futures predictions. And something has struck me as very odd.

On the Republican side, at the moment Giuliani is comfortably in first place, Romney is running a very strong second, and McCain, Paul, Huckabee, and Thompson are in a 4-way approximate tie for 3rd. No big surprises so far for people who have been following the race.

But here's what goes very strongly against what I thought was conventional wisdom:

1. This isn't a poll. This measures the prices these candidates are trading at, for people who are betting on the outcome. Effectively, it measures how political junkies with money to burn really and truly expect the nomination battle to turn out.

But:

2. Although John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson are seen as possible (if improbable) candidates by most political junkies, Ron Paul is not. Besides maybe some fanatical Ron Paul supporters, almost nobody really expects him to have a shot at the nomination. He's widely seen as running a protest candidacy with the aim of getting media attention for his views and giving the mainstream GOP candidates a good scare. He's getting a lot of good online press, but that's usually attributed to the fact that libertarians (his core audience) are overrepresented online.

Ron Paul's performance in the futures market suggests that a fairly sizable contingent of political junkies genuinely see him as a possible nominee, and are willing to bet real money on it. That strikes me as remarkable. I don't live in the United States; I get all my election news from the Washington Post, New York Times, and Slate.com websites, and the blogs listed on the right (and the ones they link to). Is it possible there's some sentiment favorable to Paul over in the States that I'm missing?

Of course, it's also possible that there are a lot of Ron Paul supporters betting lots of money on their man to artifically drive his numbers up. Wouldn't surprise me.

The Wildcard

The big wildcard in the 2008 general election is the possibility of a major third-party candidate. The most talked-about scenario is if the Republicans nominate somebody religious conservatives don't like much, and the conservatives field their own candidate. Their candidate wouldn't have to do terribly well to hand the election to the Democrats; many people are still blaming Ralph Nader for helping Bush get elected President in 2000, and Nader got a fairly miniscule percentage of the vote.

Even more interesting is the prospect of a centrist candidate. Michael Bloomberg has spent the past year denying at every opportunity that he is interested in running; many people interpret this to mean that he wants to be President and is being very obvious about it. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post makes another case that Bloomberg may run. (Cohen doesn't say Bloomberg will run. He says Bloomberg may run. And just try and prove Cohen wrong!)

If he does, it will radically, hugely change the race. At the very least, he'd be another 1992 Ross Perot. Perot came in 3rd in a 3-person race, but no one denies that he helped shape that election, as both Bush and Clinton had to respond to him. And of course, it can be argued (but never proven) that he ruined Bush's chances for reelection and handed the election to Clinton. (Had all of Perot's voters voted for Bush instead, Bush would easily have been reelected. And had everyone wearing black socks voted for Bob Dole in 1996, Dole would have been elected. Which proves absolutely nothing.) And maybe Bloomberg could be like Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, drawing more votes than one of the major parties.

Of course, Bloomberg continues to say he will not run, which everyone interprets to mean of course he will run. As long as he teases us junkies like this, he'll be the great potential wildcard. And as for me, I will follow Richard Cohen's lead and not give any kind of opinion about it that I can be held to.

Those starship-flying primitives

New Technology Can Be Operated by Thought

Neuroscientists have significantly advanced brain-machine interface (BMI) technology to the point where severely handicapped people who cannot contract even one leg or arm muscle now can independently compose and send e-mails and operate a TV in their homes. They are using only their thoughts to execute these actions.

Okay, Trekkies. Now I want to know why Captain Christopher Pike was only able to communicate by blinking his light once for "yes" and twice for "no".

Yet another area in which our technology now surpasses that of the United Federation of Planets. I'm so proud of this century.

Smartitude

An article in the Washington Post about boosting your brainpower makes me think about how I'd rate my own intelligence.

I do really well on multiple-choice standardized tests. I got a great score on the SAT and an awesome score on the GRE. I suspect that if I took an IQ test I'd do very well indeed. Does that make me Lord Smartingford of Braintonshire? Uh, I'd say not.

All through my high school education I got excellent grades in math. My SAT math score was nothing to be ashamed of. (I didn't take calculus in high school, though, which in retrospect was a major mistake.) My freshman year as a college student majoring in Undecided, I took a year-long course called "Calculus with Precalculus". When I first grasped the basic priciples of differential calculus during a professor's lecture, I felt like everything was suddenly clear. I felt like it all made perfect sense. I felt like I was learning.

In my first semester, I got a D. Second semester, I got a C-. What the hell happened?

In its entry on the word "stupidity", Wikipedia says:

As an English word, [stupid] implies that the attributed party is not mentally retarded but rather is willfully ignorant and/or unintelligent, and displays poor use of judgement or insensitivity to nuances.

I wasn't bad at math. I wasn't too feebleminded to understand the material. The material wasn't taught badly. I wasn't living under conditions that made it too difficult to study. I was stupid.

It wasn't a habit of mine to talk to the professors or the TAs. I didn't study together with other students. I didn't focus on studying for the tests; I thought if I had a good theoretical understanding of the material, I'd be bright enough to do well on the tests anyway. I was an idiot. I wasn't even smart enough to pull myself together after that first disasterous semester.

I didn't take another math course. When I took the GRE three years later, I got an excellent score on the math section, which made me regret my stupidity even more. I feel bad enough that now I'm working my way through a college-level algebra textbook I picked up at a used bookstore, in preparation for tackling two calculus textbooks sitting on my bookshelf. I know I've got the brainpower. I've just got to show that I'm better than my 18-year-old self.

That little disaster was caused by bad habits. I've also got a more ingrained bit of unintelligence. It is really difficult for me to follow oral instructions. If someone's telling me how to do a task requiring several steps and I can't take notes, I have to use so much mental energy just to remember the steps that I probably look quite unintelligent with my furrowed brow. And then about half the time I screw it up anyway. I have no problem following written instructions. And once I do something right, I can do it again correctly without help. This is probably due to something in my own neurological makeup that I just have to learn to work around.

It's clear to me that there are different kinds of intelligence. I have no faith in the idea that a person's intelligence is something that can be measured by a single number.

There are plenty of people my age or younger have accomplished much more than I have. (A lot of the links on the right side of this page go to people who are either younger than me, or just barely older than me, but who leave me in awe at their apparent smartitude. Yes, I believe I have a right to use words like smartitude.) I don't think they're smarter than me in absolute terms. I don't think they're experiencing life with more clarity than I am. I do think I procrastinate a lot. Hell, I think I'm flat-out lazy. But I've got the brainpower.

Successful Assassins

Matthew Yglesias posted an interesting comment referring to Yigal Amir (the man who killed Yitzak Rabin):

It's hardly an original-to-me observation, but Amir really does seem like the rare assassin who actually managed to be quite effective at advancing his agenda.

Kevin Drum responds, writing about some historical assassins and wonders which ones were truly successful:

Gavrilo Princip? Serbia certainly didn't do well in the aftermath of WWI, but then again, neither did Austria-Hungary. Brutus? That didn't turn out as planned, did it? Ditto for Nikolai Rysakov et. al., though I suppose one might argue that in the long run they got what they wanted. Nathuram Godse? Hard to say. If his goal was eternal enmity between India and Pakistan, I suppose he got it. Christer Pettersson? Apparently there was no motivation at all.

So: who's the most successful assassin in history? That is, the one who most effectively advanced his stated goals? Is it Yigal Amir, or does someone have a good case to make for someone else?

OK, I wanna play. Looking at the history of the country where I spent 2 1/2 years of my life, how about Kim Jae-kyu, the guy who killed South Korea's Cold War-era dictator Park Chung-hee?

Park was a classic "he made the trains run on time" sort of dictator. He was utterly ruthless, and had countless opponents detained, tortured, and executed. But he's also remembered for taking charge of a poor country with a corrupt government in 1961, and after his assassination in 1979, leaving behind a Korea which had become a leading exporter ready to take its place as one of the 4 Asian Tigers.

Although he'd seized power in a military coup, Park maintained the pretense of transitioning the country to democracy, running as a candidate in free elections in 1971. As it happened, political dissident Kim Dae-jung almost defeated him. Spooked by the close call, Park gave himself emergency powers, dissolved Parliament, and re-wrote the Korean constitution to make himself dictator for life.

Kim Jae-kyu was Park's own intelligence chief. He shot his boss to death in 1979, explaining his actions thusly:

I shot the heart of Yusin Constitution like a beast. I did that for democracy of this country. Nothing more nothing less.

Kim was executed a few months later.

So did democracy flourish with Park dead? Not immediately. A military coup two months after Park's assassination put a bunch of generals led by Chun Doo-hwan in power.

But things were different under Chun. As far as I can tell (I may be wrong here), Park had enjoyed something akin to respect among the ordinary Korean people; he's still remembered fondly by many older Koreans for bringing the nation out of poverty. Chun enjoyed no such respect. In 1980 political dissidents seized control of the southwestern city of Gwangju. Government forces retook the city in a bloody crackdown in which hundreds of people were killed. These dead people were considered martyrs for democracy, and the 1980s became characterized by near-continuous anti-government protests.

After weeks of heavy protests in 1987 (which attracted considerable attention in the international media - remember, Korea was gearing up for the 1988 Olympics), Chun finally relented and promised free elections. The anti-government vote was split between three candidates, and a member of the ruling junta named Roh Tae-woo was elected President. Roh was a corrupt little slimeball, but he stepped down at the end of his term like he was supposed to.

That was the real birth of South Korean democracy. The country's politics are enormously messy, with frequent street protests, factionalism, and more political parties than I can count forming, dissolving, and re-forming. But there's been no danger of the country slipping back into authoritarianism.

Can this be traced back to Kim Jae-kyu? I don't know. Some alternate-history scenarios have posited that, had he lived, Park would have gradually liberalized, and stepped down in the 1990s as a respected, Lee Kuan Yew-like elder statesman. (Though I suspect it's more likely Park would have ended up like Ferdinand Marcos.) And in any event, it's hard to imagine Korea remaining an authoritarian state with its standard of living increasing to today's levels.

The fashionably dressed ho

The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten has brought us another Googlenope column.

Even though I'm usually not as fond of Weingarten's weekly column as I am of his weekly online chat and his feature writing, I must say he knows how to milk the Googlenope concept for all it's worth. I like how the swipe at Bush at the end is done in such a way that it's non-partisan.

Really a shame

This has been bugging me for a while. A good example comes from Giuliani campaign worker Katie Levinson ripping into John McCain, quoted by Marc Ambinder:

“Is this what desperation looks like? Bernie Kerik’s issues have been known since 2004 and John McCain still had glowing things to say about Rudy Giuliani and his leadership. What, exactly, changed today? Best as I can tell, it’s just John McCain’s pure desperation in the face of a failing and flailing campaign trumping his so-called straight talk. It is truly a shame that John McCain has chosen to stoop this low.”

I'm not interested the content of what Levinson said - but rather, that final sentence.

“It is truly a shame that John McCain has chosen to stoop this low.”

I suspect that "It's a shame that . . ." or "It's sad that . . ." or variations, are sentence patterns that turn up in political commentary with a far greater frequency than they do elsewhere.

It's easy to see why this sentence structure is so popular in politics. It's used exclusively for attacking someone else, but the phrasing makes it sound like you wish you didn't have to. And the sentence structure sounds like you're not making an assertion about the person - you're commenting on something that's already accepted knowledge and doesn't need to be further proven.

Here are some examples I made:

It's sad that Hillary's denouncing the slave trade now, in light of the fate of her illegitimate baby from the 1960s.

It's sad that Fred Thompson can't follow Romney's example in making a clean break from his past as a male hooker.

I don't know how they do things in Indonesia, but it's a shame that, in an America that grows more averse to animal cruelty every year, Barack Obama still drinks his daily hamster smoothie.

Punditry is Fiction

I read a lot of opinion pieces. Even ones I don't agree with. Even ones that I believe are flat-out wrong. (Why shouldn't I? Why just read stuff that reinforces my own prejudices?)

And so, here's a scientific model to describe opinion pieces. It explains the evidence better, and leaves fewer unanswered questions than the standard model (eg, pundits write what they really believe).

--

Punditry is fiction.

When a pundit spills his thoughts on some issue, he is writing a short story. He is creating a little fictional universe. The real world is considered canonical, but there is no requirement that he stick to canon. If a reader tries to explain away any discrepancies between the fictional world his favorite pundit created and the real world, he is engaging in impromptu fan-fiction. If he tries to explain away a contradiction within a bit of punditry, or between two opinion pieces in the same series, then that is fanwank.

fanwank

To fill in plot holes or explain away lapses in continuity in fictional works by coming up with (often convoluted) explanations of how it could have happened.

"But David used Sarah's real name even though he never knew her before she changed her identity."

"He could have read her file. He had access to it in episode seventeen and there were a few minutes when he could have flicked through it."

--The Urban Dictionary

Let's say you read an opinion piece, and it repeats some old libel about John Kerry that's been fully refuted on Snopes.com since 2004. Now let's say you email the pundit in question and challenge him to explain himself.

You, my friend, are like a hardcore Trekkie who reads a Star Trek novel that contradicts information given in an episode of the fourth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and emails the author asking him to account for the discrepancy.

It's a sign of disease in our culture that we keep pretending pundits, in their job, are capable of "lying". Pundits don't lie. They might write something that they know is not true in order to support a pre-conceived conclusion, but they don't lie. The novelist Harry Turtledove has written many novels set in a universe in which the South won the American Civil War. In reality, the South lost the American Civil War. Does that make Turtledove a liar?

--
So anyway, my model for explaining political punditry is far better than the lousy old standard model. My suspicion is that people like Ann Coulter understand things the same way, and for the last decade Coulter has been using her performance art to satirize the stupidity of it all. And because Ann Coulter is an amoral sociopathic twat, she doesn't care that many people don't realize that it's all a game and are taking her seriously.

Written Science Fiction

I've finished a 1950s-era collection of science fiction novellas called Strange Tomorrows.

In John D. MacDonald's Shadow on the Sand, the planet Strada is home to an ancient civilization which encompasses hundreds of inhabited planets. In their millenia of recorded history, Stradans have developed impressive telepathic abilities. Their society is divided into two factions which despise each other. But because the two factions occupy the same space, and each relies on the other for materials and logistics, any armed conflict would quickly bring about the Mutual Assured Destruction of civilization. One last, crucial detail: Strada is a parallel-universe Earth. And one Stradan faction figures out how to open a dimensional gateway, giving it a decisive edge over the other faction once and for all...

In Theodore Sturgeon's The Comedian's Children, a popular television comedian is beloved by millions for setting up a foundation to treat children afflicted with a terrible, disfiguring disease. So one can imagine that he's mighty pissed off when a scientist comes close to finding a cure...

In William Tenn's Firewater!, enigmatic aliens came to Earth years ago, and since then have done... basically nothing. Humans who manage to communicate with the aliens gain psychic powers, but also go batshit crazy. As an anti-alien "Humanity First!" movement gains power, one CEO makes millions by figuring out bits of alien science from the crazy ones and turning it to marketable goods...

In Jack Williamson's The Greatest Invention, the Galaxy contains a highly rational, scientific human civilization, but many planets are gripped by intense religous fundamentalism. One academic type is convinced that all humans are originally descended from a culture on ancient Earth (really ancient Earth - the novella takes place in the 20th Century and Earth people are considered by other humans to be uncivilized savages not even worth contacting), but he has trouble winning over the dogmatic, conservative bureaucrats whom he must deal with...

In Hal Clement's Planetfall, an alien made of some kind of rock or crystal lands his starship on Earth and tries to deal with the curious locals, but is severely handicapped by his inability to conceive of organic life. He can't shake the idea that human beings are just robots remote-controlled by a real life form somewhere else. And his senses are not really attuned to dealing with events on a planet's surface... This story ought to be required reading for anyone who can't conceive of an extraterrestrial character more alien than Chewbacca or Lieutenant Worf. (I wonder if Planetfall inspired Terry Bisson's famous short story They're Made Out of Meat.)

Each of these novellas bears a copyright date between 1950 and 1958. And yet, as a whole these stories are far more inventive than most science fiction you see on TV or at the movies nowadays. I'm not here to bash all SF film and TV - there's a lot of it I like, and my brain is a repository for more useless Star Trek trivia than I'd care to admit - but it seems there's an inventiveness, a vitality, in written SF that you don't see as much in TV and movies.

Of course, a huge amount - maybe a majority - of SF on TV and in the movies is really just fantasy or action in a science-fictiony setting. That's not necessarily bad - I've liked Star Wars since I was a kid, and Star Wars is obviously a fantasy/action film series with starships.

But it seems that when interesting ideas do pop up on televised SF, very often the screenwriters don't follow them to an interesting payoff, or present them in such a way that the audience loses its suspension of disbelief. Or both.

One of Star Trek: Voyager's best episodes (it's up to you to decide whether or not that's exceedingly faint praise) dealt with an alien race descended from dinosaurs that developed space flight and left Earth way back in the distant past. That's a potentially interesting setup. But I flat-out don't accept the idea that, even though these guys have obviously been living among the stars for millions upon millions of years, they have a technological level and society comparable to our 24th-century human protagonists.

I realize that a TV series is a different medium, and is going to have a different goal than a short story or a novel. But it seems like SF movies and TV shows could probably muster a bit more of the inventiveness of written SF.

Historical Fiction

I've just finished Philippa Gregory's historical fiction novel The Queen's Fool. It's about a Jewish refugee girl from Spain with an apparently genuine - if limited - ability to see into the future, who becomes a fool/advisor to Queen Mary I of England.

I liked it more than I expected to. Occasionally I cringed at the main character's thoughts sounding like a modern feminist (nothing wrong with strong, independent 16th-century women, or with modern feminism, but there are probably ways to express it without sounding too obviously modern) but the novel held my interest for a good 500 pages.

I rather like historical fiction, and I'm willing to admit that Gregory's book taught me something, at least in the sense of giving me a good idea of the important events of Mary's reign, their chronological order, and something of the historical background. But I wonder if I should be admitting that publicly, because apparently many history-minded people (by which I mean, people who write random stuff on the Internet) have blasted Gregory for her habit of taking liberties with the historical facts.

Now, it seems to me that as historical novelists go, Gregory isn't all that bad at sticking to actual history. Based on my admittedly spotty Wikipedia-based fact-checking, it seems that all of the major historical events of the novel really happened the way she described them, in the order in which she described them, and to the people that she had them happen to. Granted, she repeated the unprovable old rumor that Elizabeth I was having an affair with Robert Dudley, but she's something like the sixteen thousandth writer to do so. (She also has the not-yet-queen Elizabeth engaged in heavy flirtation with, at various times, Thomas Seymour and King Philip. I'm not sure whether this is meant to be historically accurate or just meant to draw a contrast between Elizabeth and the dour Queen Mary.)

Some people want to rake Gregory over the coals for some comparatively minor historical transgressions. But the last bit of historical fiction I read (if you don't count Harry Turtledove), Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, gets away with much worse without the same kind of criticism. Why? I think it's all about expectations and audience.

Stephenson's known for writing science fiction and technothrillers, not historical fiction (although that may have changed now that The Baroque Cycle's out). His readers overlap somewhat with readers of mainstream historical fiction, but in general he attracts a rather different sort of crowd than Gregory. (His readership is probably also a lot more male, if that matters.) And his books are written to be fun. That's not to say that The Queen's Fool is 500 pages of dour drudgery (I quite enjoyed reading it), but Stephenson fills his books with implausible action sequences, dialogue that oscillates between authentic period English and subtle anachronisms, and, well, humor.

Also, Stephenson doesn't give the impression of trying to stay beholden to the historical record. The Baroque Cycle was written as a precursor to Stephenson's modern technothriller Cryptonomicon, and clearly takes place in the same world, which contains (at least) two entirely fictional countries. It's also a world where at least one character has made himself immortal by alchemical means, and where some (alchemy-based?) physical processes unknown to modern science apparently exist. It's not completely detatched from reality - Stephenson evidentally did a huge amount of historical research, and it shows - but it's not presenting itself as a work of unparalleled historical accuracy. By contrast, in Gregory's book the protagonist's clairvoyancy is apparently meant to be real (though I'm not sure if the author herself believes in such phenomena ), but otherwise the book is strictly reality-based. I can see how Gregory left herself open to charges of historical inaccuracies more than Stephenson.

I'm not criticizing either writer - I liked The Queen's Fool, and I liked everything by Stephenson I've ever read. They're just different. But if I ever write historical fiction, I think following Stephenson's model might be a bit safer.

Immigration and DC Food

Matthew Yglesias makes a point that hits close to my heart on the immigration issue.

One irony here is that in my view one of the big problems with Washington DC is, indeed, that Northern Virginia has too many immigrants and I wish more of them would move to the city. There's tons of great, affordable ethnic restaurants of the sort that usually provide the spice of urban life but instead of being in the city, they're overwhelmingly located in Virginia strip malls like the legendary Eden Center in Falls Church. This is great for Tyler Cowen, Northern Virginia's premiere foodie, but it's not so great for me. So on some level, I kind of hope Virginia politicians do come up with some scheme to drive immigrants out of their precious suburbs thus paving the way for a Brave New World of delicious DC cuisine (but do try Thai X-ing in the District which is great, albeit a logistical nightmare).

I lived in DC (or parts of Arlington so close to the Potomac that they may as well have been DC) for several years, and never owned a car. There were times when it seemed that the strip malls of suburban Virginia really did offer far more choices for good ethnic cuisine than the Metro-accessible neighborhoods of DC and Arlington. Decent Ethiopian, or Indian, or Vietnamese food can be found without having to drive into the suburbs, but just try to get affordable Korean food without a car. It finally got so bad I had to move to Seoul.

A View of Japan

British science fiction writer Charlie Stross types up impressions from a recent trip to Japan:

At street level the congestion tends towards extremes unheard of in the UK since the last of the rookeries was demolished by Victorian public- spiritedness. This really brings itself home when you try to locate a backstreet bar and restaurant. If you're lucky, it'll open off the stairwell of a commercial block — lucky because it's easy to find. (Japanese addresses and street numbering systems are a thing of beauty, if you are a many-tentacled horror from beyond spacetime and an afficionado of non-Euclidean geometries to boot.) If you're not lucky, you'll find yourself in an alleyway that's literally ten centimetres wider than your shoulders, going back and back until it ends in a pool of light around a sign advertising Asahi beer, in front of what looks like somebody's back door. A cat, sitting in a cardboard box on a table in the window next to the door looks at you lazily and yawns, and you wonder if this is really a restaurant. Then you hesitantly open the door, and see a cluttered bar with menus on it, and a staircase off to one side. As you sit and work your way through a creditable meal, you realize that the yard is indeed someone's back yard — because the staircase leads up to the owner's apartment, and her family are going in and out about their business even as she holds court over the counter top.

I was in Tokyo for a weekend in September, but I didn't quite have Stross' descriptive gift.

Scandal Juicy Scandal

I have learned of journalist Ron Rosenbaum's enticing recent blog post in which he writes:

So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that “everyone knows” The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. “Everyone knows” meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. “Sitting on it” because the paper couldn’t decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they’d had it for a while but don’t know what to do. The person who told me (not an LAT person) knows I write and didn’t say “don’t write about this”. . . . I’ve been sensing hints that something’s going on, something’s going unspoken in certain insider coverage of the campaign (and by the way this rumor the LA Times is supposedly sitting on is one I never heard in this specific form before. By the way, t’s not the Edwards rumor, it’s something else.

I heard about this via an Overcoming Bias post wherein James Miller proposes using this secret-scandal-that-everyone-but-us-ordinary-people-know-about to test the political futures markets that I wrote about just yesterday.

This is deliciously evil. I'm supposed to be better than this. American politics is supposed to be better than this. (Obvious retort: No it's not.) I would so like to be the kind of political junkie who rolls his eyes at this kind of gossip tidbit. But I'm not. I'm evil. Stewie Griffin-evil. I find this fascinating and I really really want to know what the details are and what's going to happen.
Tellmetellmetellme.

It's a bit distasteful that some of the commenters on Ron Rosenbaum's blog are saying, "If the Mainstream Media is sitting on this story it's got to be about a Democrat because if it were a Republican they'd have run it already liberal bias blah blah blah." Look, most of us know that for the past few years it's been traditional for conservatives to complain that the mainstream media have a pro-Democratic bias, and for liberals to complain that the mainstream media have a pro-Republican bias. It's really not cool to act like your point of view alone determines the universe.

And what do I think this magnificently juicy scandal is that the LA Times is sitting on? Oh, I don't think it exists.

Bad Jokes + Quantum Physics =

I've just finished The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? by Leon Lederman and Dick Teresi, in which Lederman relates the history of particle physics, interspersed with very bad jokes, humorous anecdotes, and more very bad jokes.

I'm curious about exactly what Dick Teresi's contribution was, since the book is written in one consistent voice, which I assume is Lederman's. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and Fermilab director comes across as somebody's lovable eccentric Jewish grandfather, which is OK by me. The book's written for the non-scientist, but despite the badness of many of his jokes Lederman doesn't dumb down the material. His approach is not to just dump all of the findings of modern quantum physics in the reader's lap in the beginning, but rather to relate the history of particle physics ever since the ancient Greeks first came up with the idea of atoms. Yes, I learned something.

I actually ended up feeling kind of bad that the Superconducting Super Collider, under construction in Texas as Lederman was writing, got killed by Congress not long after the book was published. I mean, I felt bad for Lederman personally. At least it was some consolation that Fermilab finally found the top quark shortly thereafter.

The Wisdom of Crowds

You know what's fun for a political junkie like me? Slate's 2008 political futures market guide.

If a single prediction market is wiser than the pundits and the polls, imagine how wise all the prediction markets are together. That's the idea behind Slate's "Political Futures," which offers a comprehensive guide to all the big political prediction markets. From now until Election Day 2008, we'll publish regular updates of the key data from Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade.com, Newsfutures.com, and Casualobserver.net. (Casualobserver has not yet launched its 2008 political prediction market, but we will add it as soon as it goes up.) In these early days of the campaign, we are tracking four markets: 1) Democratic nominee for president, 2) Republican nominee for president, 3) presidential victor, and 4) party control of the presidency. We'll add Senate and House races as they heat up next year.

As of November 4, 2007, the page tracking bettors' predictions for the Democratic nominee is highly depressing for Barack Obama, John Edwards, and in fact just about everybody but Hillary. I like Al Gore's short-lived spike back in mid-October, which I assume was caused by (a) Gore getting the Nobel Peace Prize, and (b) a few days later, Gore reminding people that he really didn't want to run for President.

Right now the bettors' predictions for the Republican nominee are far more interesting. Giuliani's consistently been in the lead, but his lead is far less certain than Clinton's, and the remainder of the Republican pack is far more dynamic and uncertain than the Democratic field. I like how Fred Thompson, the world's most exciting man, has been steadily falling ever since he officially entered the race. I also find the growth of Ron Paul to be fascinating; I'd never vote for the man for President but the political junkie in me is wickedly hoping he gives the frontrunners a good scare come primary season.

I still kinda suspect that the candidate who is offensive to the fewest Republicans, Mike Huckabee, is going to end up winning the nomination next year. But bear in mind I suck at predicting these things.

11/03/2007 YouTube

The Beatles' "I Am the Walrus". Mid-1960s British surrealism. Good stuff.

After sputtering in confusion, my girlfriend said that, if someone gave me the money to design and shoot my own music video, this is exactly what she'd expect me to come up with.

Sullivan on Obama

I ought to post about American politics more, so: Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic Monthly story on why he likes Barack Obama is worth reading. It's worth a look even if you're one of those who thinks Andrew Sullivan is the stupidest person on the planet.

I'm still unclear as to what, exactly, Sullivan's big problem with Hillary Clinton is. Is it that: (a) he genuinely dislikes her, (b) he dislikes her because as part of his brand image as a Reagan-era conservative, he's supposed to dislike her, (c) he doesn't really have much of a problem with her personally but he's afraid the Republicans will win if she gets the nomination, or (d) he doesn't really have much of a problem with her personally but, as he's said on several occasions, he's afraid the stupid culture wars of the past few decades will continue if she's elected President? My guess is that it's (d) mixed with a bit of (c). (If it had been almost any other political commentator, I would have said (b). I'm being really generous to Sullivan here.)

Negative Customer Service

Cory Doctorow's BoingBoing.net post, entitled "British Telecom -- like sticking your head in a blender, but less fun", which is all about the joys of BT customer service, reminds me of the intro to Gene Weingarten's October 5 chat, in which Weingarten described the joys of dealing with the customer service division of a oorporation which he would only call "Tsacmoc Elbac Oc".

Now, none of this surprised me, a former customer of Tsacmoc Elbac Oc (fun fact: even after they'd been cashing my checks for over a year and a half, they still insisted on spelling my name "Brandan"). Tsacmoc continually surprised me with their blatant illogic and their variety of inconvenient rules that made no sense.

Personal experience and other people's anecdotes have led me to come up with the concept of "negative customer service." This is a seperate concept from "bad customer service", which is when a company is too disorganized, or just can't be arsed, to give something approaching decent customer service. "Negative customer service" is when a company actually expends effort to be more annoying or inconvenient to the customer.

I must admit that I don't really understand how the company benefits from doing this. The economics of it don't make sense. But there's a lot in this universe I don't understand, and I've learned to just go with the flow. And in the future, I'll not use the services of British Telecom or Tsacmoc Elbac, if I can help it.

How to Be Safe

I may suck at making predictions about the future (just look at every attempt I've ever made to guess which way an election would go) but I've noticed something important. Something important for people who don't ever want to be proven wrong.

Let's say:

Person A believes that Hillary Clinton can be elected President in 2008.

Person B believes that Hillary Clinton can not be elected President in 2008.

Person A has a huge advantage here, because there's no way Person A can ever be proven wrong. Even if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination and goes down to defeat in the general election, who's to say she couldn't have won if things had gone differently?

Similarly, there's no way Person B can ever be proven right.

I'm not trying to be pro-Hillary here. You could replace her name with Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney, or Santa Claus and it would work out the same.

I hope I've been able to help out everyone who wants to predict the future but doesn't want to run the risk of being wrong.