Book Corner
Two science fiction novels, both disappointing, and in sort of the same way: they wander here and there and I have no confidence the authors had any direction in mind.
The World Menders by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Another space-anthropology book from
Dr. Biggle. A space anthropologist tries to understand a primitive people and get them to revolt against their feudal overlords. I did not like this one as much as
Monument because, although the ending of World Menders is not terrible, it feels as if Biggle may just have made it up at the last minute. And that important discovery in Chapter Twelve, oh yeah, that's totally inconsistent with the ending, so forget it, that must have been faked. It was a fake clue. That's got to be a cardinal sin of novel-writing.
I see from Wikipedia that this book was originally published in a magazine, in three installments. I bet when he wrote each installment, he had no idea what was going to happen in the next installment.
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Here is
an interview with China Mieville which reads in part:
Cheryl: Has [role-playing] been an inspiration to you in your writing?China: It has. I used to play a lot of games, between the ages of about 10 and 13. I haven't played them for about 12 to 13 years and I have no interest in playing them again, but I have a great interest in them as a cultural phenomenon. I quite often buy and read game manuals because I am interested in the way that people design their worlds, and how they decide to delineate them.Cheryl: That doesn't come over in your writing. There is no way anyone would read Perdido and think, "this is a D&D adventure write-up."Well, I say baloney! Baloney! Baloney! That is
exactly what I thought reading Perdido Street Station. "This is a D&D adventure write-up," I thought to myself.
These are some of the things in Perdido Street Station: bird-people, scarab-people, frog-people, theoretical pseudo-physics, powerful mind-altering drugs, robots, gangsters, weird religions, scary Mothra monsters, cyborgs, vivisection, demons from Hell, crazy god-like teleporting spiders, D&D adventurers, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a police state, artificial intelligence, cactus-people, vampires, prostitutes, newspaper editors. It
is kind of inventive how he packs all that stuff in there and somewhat ties it together. But there's also something shallow about it. It's an inventiveness of quantity rather than quality. Most of his ideas are not very original, but there are a lot of them.
Cherry Flavored Things
I find that most things that purport to be cherry-flavored do not taste very good.
Two significant exceptions are Cherry Garcia ice cream, and actual cherries.
Changing the World for the Better
A little more than a month ago I
brought the world's attention to the ridiculousness of having to tell the ATM that you speak English (or Spanish or whatever you prefer to speak) over and over and over.
The campaign is having an impact! Alan K___ reports that Bank-of-America ATMs in Florida now ask if you want to make English (or Spanish) your default language!
This sensible modification doesn't seem to have come to California yet. But I'm confident that it will.
There's nothing so powerful as an idea.
Shaq Attack
Robot practice was delayed today when the parking lot we planned to drive around turned out to be full of overflow parking from the University of Phoenix graduation ceremony.
Hey, shouldn't the University of Phoenix have an
online graduation ceremony?
Tonight on the news I see that one of the marching graduates was Shaquille O'Neal, who received his MBA from the University of Phoenix today.
California Budget Challenge
Today I took the
California Budget Challenge. I
think the intended purpose of this website is to make me realize how tough it will be for the government of California to balance the budget, the tough choices that will have to be made, etc., but that's not really the impression I walked away with. By just holding the line on real per-capita spending, and throwing in a couple of not-too-unreasonable tax hikes, I not only balanced the budget but created large surpluses. I could have gone back and undone either the spending freeze or the tax hikes, and still had a balanced budget. So really this experience has made me more relaxed about California's future.
Don't worry. Be happy. Don't worry, be happy.
The Very Attractive House
昨日とてもきれいな家を見に行きました。ガビリエラフレズと言う人が家のかたを作りました。
エスタマグリズが庭のかたを作りました。エスタマグリズの会社はRANDの庭も作りました。ガビリエラフレズはインターネットページがないと思います。へんですね。
家はいくらですか。百十五万ドルです。買いません。
Translation:昨日[yesterday]とてもきれいな家を[a very pretty house]見に行きました[we went to see]。ガビリエラフレズと言う人が[a person called Gabriela Frers]家のかたを[the form of the house]作りました[made]。エスタマグリズが[
Esther Margulies]庭のかたを[the form of the garden]作りました[made]。エスタマグリズの会社は[Esther Margulies's company]RANDの庭も[RAND's gardens also]作りました[made]。ガビリエラフレズは[as for Gabriela Frers]インターネットページが[an Internet page]ない[doesn't exist]と思います[I think]。へんですね[that's strange don't you think]。
家は[as for the house]いくらですか[how much is it?]。百十五万ドルです[it's $1.15 million]。買いません[we won't buy it]。
Seventeenth-Century Swirl? Richelieu Ripple?
At the drugstore today I noticed cartons of Medieval Madness ice cream.
Apparently it's called Medieval Madness because it has Three Musketeers bars in it.
The Three Musketeers is set in 1625 which is pretty darn late to be considered medieval. Grand Siecle Gelato?
The Day of the Triffids
I found
The Day of the Triffids packed away in a box, and then I couldn't really put it down until I had read it all again. It really is a triffic book (heh heh), the definitive disastrous-end-of-civilization novel.
The emergence of the dangerous triffids happens a little too fast to be plausible, best exemplified by the triffid attack at Shirning Farm less than eighteen hours after the fall of civilization. Granted, even the character Dennis realizes that this is suspicious:
"I tell you, there's more to them than we think. How did they know? They started to break loose the moment there was no one to stop them. They were around this house the very next day. Can you account for that?"So, it's "explained," sort of: the rapid attack of the triffids just shows how sinister and sneaky they are. I still find it a little hard to believe that dangerous undocked triffids could get free and wreak such havoc so quickly, in less than a day. Surely fences, passive safeguards, and simple isolation of triffid farms would have lasted longer than that.
Speaking of Dennis, he spent most of a day
devoted to contriving a kind of helmet for himself. He had wire net only of a large mesh, so that he had to construct it of several layers overlapped and tied together. Umm, a wire mesh helmet? What for? He doesn't have to see out of it! He's blind! It would have been quicker and safer for him to put a bucket over his head.
An interesting usage:
Outside it [Shirning Farm] had become spick. How often do you see something referred to as spick, without necessarily being span? Also:
gasoline and Diesel oil. I wonder when we stopped capitalizing Diesel fuel.
Is This Warning Really Necessary?
Maribeth noticed that our carton of organic 2% reduced fat milk follows the ingredients list with this label in boldface:
ALLERGY INFORMATION: CONTAINS MILK.
Doctor Who
My Dad sent me the Volume One DVD from the BBC's new Doctor Who series.
Of course, it is a Region 2 DVD. Note for future reference: to change the Region on our inexpensive Daewoo DVG-3000N DVD player, turn on the DVD player with no disc loaded, press [Setup] [Stop] [ |<< ] [ >>| ], select the new Region, and turn the DVD player off.
I thought the first episode was pretty good, although the Doctor's straight-up invitation to Rose at the end-- "He [your boyfriend]'s not invited"-- had the air of a pick-up line. Not that there's anything wrong with that but it would mark something of a departure from the Doctor's traditional platonic/avuncular style.
Second and third episodes: Well, these are okay. The dialogue is decent, if not stellar. The special effects are fine. The stories could use a bit more plot twist, a little bit less banging-on-the-locked-door-as-danger-creeps-very-very-slowly-closer, and a bit less deus ex electromachina. "You forgot just one thing! I can reverse polarise the omicron field!"
Old Boxes
Today I tried to make some progress on the Herculean task of cleaning up my office and unpacking old boxes. Some of these boxes date from when I moved offices eight months ago. A couple of them date from when I left Caltech three years ago, or before.
Things I found in these boxes include:
- old slides from thesis talk, etc. (throw into trash)
- old papers on ctenophores that I'm never going to read (throw into trash)
- twelve-year-old notes from Caltech physics classes (reluctant to throw these away although I am unlikely to go through them again, and they have embarrassing limericks, etc., in the margins)
- sixteen-year-old notes from Harvard Japanese classes (remarkably, these might actually be useful now)
- stacks of old comic books (what the hell? these have been sitting in my office all this time?)
Although I'm all for projecting a youthful, fun-loving image, I think the old superhero comics might be going a little far. Now I have to hide them again and/or smuggle them out of my office without anyone seeing them.
のどがいたいです
きょう仕事へいきたかったけれどのどがいたくで、疲れていましたから、早くうちにかえりました。びょうきです。
Second try:
今日仕事に行きたかったけれどのどがいたくで、私は疲れていましたから、早く家に帰りました。病気です。
Book Corner
After a long period of being in the middle of a half-dozen books and not finishing any of them, I zipped through a couple of short novels on the plane to Chicago.
Monument by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. I remember liking this Federation-of-Planets space opera when I was about fifteen. I think it holds up pretty well, I still like it.
Maribeth said that the story didn't really need to be science fiction, and maybe that's true. The story does require a setting where a colonizing power is prepared to take over land occupied by the primitive natives, but also possibly prepared to respect the natives' legal rights, so the natives could conceivably win a court case and it would mean something, they wouldn't just be ignored or massacred.
Maybe it could have been a Western, or set somewhere in the British Empire. Or
maybe it could be set in the modern Amazon. But probably not.
Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber. Faculty wives at a small college are practicing witchcraft. Actually, it turns out that most women practice witchcraft to some degree, although some are better at it than others. Once you've read the concept on the book jacket, the first half of the book is predictable, then it gets a bit better for a couple of chapters, then the ending is predictable again. Apparently it was first published in a magazine, so I guess originally there was no book jacket to give away half the story.
Okay, in addition to not being that great, this story is sexist-- the magazine appearance was in 1943-- but still, I've got no sympathy for the reader who scrawled, "This author hates women," "This is sick," and such in the margin. Write your own book and leave this one alone, book-defacer.
Google Hate
My
web page has once again vanished from the Google index. Not just slipped in the page rankings... it's disappeared without a trace.
This happened once before and it took several months before the page showed up again, as suddenly as it had departed. I don't know why.
Hooray
The Golem Group / UCLA was selected for the "Group of 40" in the
DARPA Grand Challenge.
DARPA was peculiarly ham-fisted about making this announcement. First they implied that they would announce the decision on June 1, then on June 1 they said the announcement would be made June 6. (Why?) Then today I received an email saying, "See the attached letter concerning your status in the DARPA Grand Challenge." There was no attachment. Then there was a second email with no attachment. Then a third email, "We apologize for the inconvenience. You will receive an email with an attachment some time today."
I actually found out we had been selected, not from DARPA, but from a reporter, who clued me in to a press release that DARPA had made available to the media (but not to the public directly, or to the teams).
Anyway, hooray for us.
