MemeMachineGo!

While I’m on the subject…

Wil McCarthy’s SF Career Planning Guide :

It’s important to know just how ambitious you really are, and how much you’re willing to sacrifice. Stephen Covey, in THE 7 HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE, asserts that no terminally ill person ever lamented having spent too little time at work. Apparently, Mr. Covey’s “effective” set doesn’t include any committed artists, who, on their death beds, all too frequently say “I wasn’t finished — I had so much left to do. Oh, all the time I wasted making love on the beach when I could have been writing science fiction!”

Jerry Oltion’s 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work :

• If you’ve been sitting on an idea until you think you’re good enough to do it justice, do it now! You may be run over by a bus tomorrow. Even if you aren’t, by the time you think you’re good enough, the passion for it will be gone. Write it now! Write all your good ideas as quickly as you can after you get them. Don’t worry about getting more; they’ll come faster and faster the more you write. Before you know it, you’ll be begging people to take them, like a gardener with zucchini.
• Outline. Plan everything you’re going to write, scene by scene, all the way through to the end. Do your research while you’re outlining, so by the time you start writing the actual story, you’re already living in that world. With a detailed enough outline, the actual writing becomes a matter of choosing the right words to describe what you’ve already decided to tell. You can concentrate on style and let the plot take care of itself, because you’ve already done that part.
• Don’t outline. Don’t plan ahead at all. Feel the lure of the blank page. Trust your instincts and dive into the story, and don’t look back until you’re done.

Video phones to facilitate lying :

If the technology succeeds, a special setting will allow owners of 3G phones to select the background of their choice before answering a call. The breakthrough might allow a husband who is in a bar to answer the call with a photograph of the office in the background. Alternatively, a wife who wants her husband to believe she is at home would be able to project an image of the living room as a backdrop at the flick of a switch. While the foreground image of the phone owner would be live video, the background would remain static - meaning users would have to be careful not to capture any out-of-date calendars in the background image.

“Honey — that stapler on the desk behind you. Could you please pick it up and hold it in front of you?”

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Paul Cameron :

“Untrammeled homosexuality can take over and destroy a social system,” says Cameron. “If you isolate sexuality as something solely for one’s own personal amusement, and all you want is the most satisfying orgasm you can get- and that is what homosexuality seems to be-then homosexuality seems too powerful to resist. The evidence is that men do a better job on men and women on women, if all you are looking for is orgasm.” So powerful is the allure of gays, Cameron believes, that if society approves that gay people, more and more heterosexuals will be inexorably drawn into homosexuality. […] It’s pure sexuality. It’s almost like pure heroin. It’s such a rush. They are committed in almost a religious way. And they’ll take enormous risks, do anything.” He says that for married men and women, gay sex would be irresistible. “Marital sex tends toward the boring end,” he points out. “Generally, it doesn’t deliver the kind of sheer sexual pleasure that homosexual sex does.”

You can see he’s given this a lot of thought.

(Via Eschaton )

=v= If bills under consideration in the states of Texas and Washington become laws, I will instantly become an ecoterrorist. The Texas Bill defines "ANIMAL RIGHTS OR ECOLOGICAL TERRORISM" (all caps in the original) as "any politically motivated activity intended to obstruct or deter any person from participating in an activity involving animals or an activity involving natural resources."

Apparently these bills are being written by an anti-environmental group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The Washington State bill is worded much like the Texas one, and similar language is being introduced in other states' legislatures.

When my Audubon Society chapter filed a lawsuit intended to get the State of California to follow its own laws and protect Bay Area wetlands, there was one politician who called the lawsuit an act of ecoterrorism. He was generally regarded as a loon (and not the kind of loon favored by the Audubon Society), but I guess he was actually a prophet. But you wouldn't even need to go to those lengths to be an ECOTERRORIST: you'd qualify for holding up a sign or renewing your Sierra Club membership dues.

I'm a cofounder of Trees Not Cars, a group that does nothing but obstruct activities involving natural resources, i.e., tries to keep trees from being chopped down. That probably qualifies me as not only an ECOTERRORIST but, I dunno, an enemy combatant ringleader or something.

Write to me when I get hauled of to Guantanamo.

Last week, I saw a rowbike parked on a Berkeley sidewalk. It’s the first I knew of such a thing — a bike on which you keep your feet in one place and provide the power by rowing. Like a stationary rowing machine, except, um, not stationary.

Spotting an alternative human-powered vehicle parked on a Berkeley sidewalk isn’t so strange.

But in front of KC’s BBQ Pit wouldn’t have been my first guess for where I might do so (which says more about me than anything else.)

A staple of secret society initiations is the simulated murder of the initiate. Southside Masonic Lodge No. 493 missed a memo on the ‘simulated’ part.

A new member of the Fellow Craft Club, a select group within the lodge, would sit in a chair while an older member stood 20 feet away and fired a handgun loaded with blanks. That ritual went terribly wrong. […] The shooter, a 76-year-old Mason, Albert Eid, was carrying two guns, a .22-caliber handgun with blanks in his left pocket, and a .32-caliber gun with live rounds in his right pocket. He reached into his right pants pocket, pulled out the wrong gun and shot William James, a 47-year-old fellow Mason, in the face, killing him, the authorities said.

Mr. Eid […] pleaded not guilty Tuesday afternoon to a charge of second-degree manslaughter. […] “This is a tragedy,” said Mr. Eid’s lawyer, James O’Rourke. “He is absolutely beyond grief-stricken. This is a mistake, not a criminal act.”

(Via Boing Boing )

A 3-year-old girl has a very rare neurological disorder: she literally feels no pain .

Something didn’t seem right when their little baby kept scratching her face. Things got worse when Gabby started teething. “She (was) severely gnawing on her hands, when the teeth come through even a little bit — biting, biting, biting, so they looked like raw hamburger,” Trish says.

[…] Because Gabby feels no pain, she no longer has any teeth. “Didn’t hurt her at all getting a tooth ripped out,” Steve Gingras says.

The teeth she didn’t break off while biting toys were removed by an oral surgeon after Gabby chewed up her mouth and tongue so badly she had to be hospitalized.

[…] Gabby didn’t have pain to save her eyes either. She scratched them so severely, that at one point doctors sewed them shut to keep her fingers out. But, the damage was already done.

Last week Gabby’s family was at Fairview University Medical Center to discuss the removal of her left eye, now swollen and blind from glaucoma brought on by the scratching.

Even with the habits learned from 36 years of the capacity to feel pain, I don’t know how long I’d last in this world were they suddenly to disappear. Growing up without them? It’s hard to imagine.

45% of women would let their husbands have sex with Nicole Kidman. Only 18% would let them have sex with Britney Spears.

No one’s sure why. You can just hear the grant proposals being written.

(Via Amorous Propensities )

The OED is hunting first references of science fictional words . For instance, they’re looking for a reference for extraterrestrial (as a noun) antedating 1942:

Edward Bornstein submitted a 1954 cite from Robert Heinlein’s “Star Lummox”. Ben Ostrowsky submitted a 1951 cite from Mack Reynolds’ “The Case of the Little Green Men”. Cory Panshin submitted a cite from a reprint of Fredric Brown’s “Honeymoon in Hell”; Mike Christie verified the cite in the 1950 first magazine appearance. Mike Christie submitted a 1949 cite from L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Animal-Cracker Plot”. Mike Christie submitted a 1942 cite from Martin Pearson’s “The Embassy”.

Strikes me that 1942 has got to be easy to beat for that one. Not that I have the time to try, or the first editions to be sure.

(Via Languagehat )

What’s worse than getting a membership card for the GOP in your junk mail?

Getting a membership card for the AARP .

Okay, okay, so I’m a married homeowner. That doesn’t make me an old Republican.

So not only are Bush and Kerry both Skull & Bones men,

In researching her book [Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power], Robbins interviewed more than 100 members of Skull and Bones. She inquired about which candidate the secret society would rather have in the White House. “I asked many Bonesmen that question,” she recalled. “The sincere answer to me was, ‘We don’t care — it’s a win-win situation.’ “

but, according to Family Forest , they’re family (9th cousins, twice removed.)

Don’t expect to see the GOP bringing up that relationship .

(Via Unknown News , Eclectica )

You’ve probably heard the canonical definition of chutzpah : that quality required to murder both your parents and then throw yourself on the mercy of the court on account of being an orphan.

Britan’s Home Secretary, David Blunkett, is seriously raising the bar .

Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn’t have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.

Coming next: billing people for damaging police nightsticks with their skulls.

(Via Sore Eyes )

Distinction between library and bookstore division :

A man is at the newsstand, thumbing through assorted fine periodicals. I ask him if he’s finding everything okay. He asks me if I know of anyplace that has the magazines he’s holding for sale. I told him that all of the magazines in front of him, as far as the eye can see, were for sale. He commented that he’d never been in a library that sold things before. He was genuinely shocked when I told him we were a temple of commerce.

I was saddened tonight to notice that my Science Fiction Book Club edition of Watchmen is yellowing. Cheap acidic paper. Some time when I have more money I’ll have to see whether there’s a better hardcover edition.

I’d picked it up to reread my favorite bits. All of chapter 7. Parts of chapter 8. The end. I’m not much of a rereader, and this is about the only book I do that with.

When I was done, I turned to The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore to see what Moore had to say about it there. I was shocked to see that he and Gibbons began it, still the graphic novel with the most tightly interwoven plot, without the ending in mind.

It also contains Alan Moore’s 5 Tips for Would-Be Comics Writers (emphasis in original.)

1. Don’t
2. No, really don’t
3. DEFINITELY don’t — I mean it.
4. Whatever you might be imagining about a life of writing, it’s not like that.

5. OK, if you’re going to anyway, if you’re going to be a writer of any quality, you will have to commit yourself to writing — which is something that, when you’re young and idealistic, sounds incredibly easy to do, but you should commit yourself to writing almost as if you were some ancient Greek or Egyptian commiting yourself to a god.

   If you do right by the god, then the god may, at some point in the future, reward you. But if you slack off and don’t do right by your talent or your god, then you are heading for a world of immense and unimaginable pain. If you have a gift that you choose to pursue, then you have to pursue it seriously. Don’t be half-assed about it, but realize what that commitment means.

   Committing yourself to writing will mean, to a certain extent, your writing will become the most important part of your life — and that’s a big thing to say. It can have a distancing effect upon other relationships. It can be sometimes quite a solitary life. If you’re committed to your writing, you’re going to spend most of your life indoors in a silent, empty room, concentrating on a pen and a piece of paper or their equivalent. Be prepared to take it seriously and be prepared to follow where it takes you, even if that takes you to some very strange places.

   This is by no means the most glamorous profession.

   Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

The writers’ group I’m in critiqued a story of mine yesterday. Wendy was last to comment on my story, and said “Listening to what everyone else said, either I’m stupid or I’m your target audience.”

I once encountered a reflection on how annoying people would be if they behaved as text adventure game players routinely do. Upon entering a room, they’d examine every object, open every container, look under things, take anything that wasn’t bolted down, ask you about everything in sight…

Last night, I had a dream that functioned according to text adventure logic.

I had a conventional subjective full-sensory experience, mind you. I’m sure someone’s actually had a dream as text adventure, all in text, but this wasn’t that.

Points were distributed as dollars in this game, and I had $95 out of a possible hundred. The first $5 one received early in the game without much effort — nearly a freebie. I’d earned the remaining money $10 at a time by solving 9 puzzles.

So I was in the endgame, desperately trying to figure out even what the last puzzle was. By examining every object, opening every container, looking under things, taking anything that wasn’t bolted down, etc.

I encountered the typical problem of there being things I could see but not manipulate — they were just parts of the room description, and not actually represented as objects in the game.

I don’t remember the details, but I remember getting excited about the design on a shirt being a critical clue to whatever it was I was missing.

As a young boy, I had a recurring dream in which I was reading a book, and realized I was dreaming and close to waking. I would try to hurry to finish the book before I woke up. I never made it.

Similar to those cases, I never did finish the game.

The future of advertising (at least until we’re all wearing spex .)

Three-dimensional foaming glasses of beer could soon leap out of TV screens and on to bars, to try to tempt customers into buying drinks. The system, from X3D Technologies in New York City, allows the virtual drinks to jump up to a metre in front of the screen. They can be viewed with the naked eye from anything up to a 120 degree angle. [… X3D’s] 53-inch plasma-screens are already being used to make shampoo bottles loom in front of customers in shops in France, Italy and Spain.

And here I thought it was the porn industry that was supposed to always be on the leading edge of new technologies. I’m very disappointed in them right now.

Boing Boing linked to the Everquest Daily Grind recently, chock full of heartbreaking accounts of addiction to the Everquest MMORPG , most of them from the ‘widows/widowers’ of the addicts, some from the addicts themselves.

Well its been about 7 months since I left my husband. After a while the anger and hate is less but you still feel the hurt and pain. He wants me to come back, and to give him another chance but i feel so torn. I still dont trust him after him had that little fling, but he wants me to give him another chance. I dont know I just feel so torn apart. Its like I know I shouldnt go back. theres always that ‘what if’ you know… what if things go back to the way they were, what if he starts spending 10+ hours on the pc again,what if he… he meets someone else and decides to have a fling again, what if… I dont want to go through all that again, and I sure as hell dont want my son living in that kind of inviorment again. But I do want him to have a daddy.

There were a lot more there, but most have been taken down — apparently the site had been posting them without explicit permission and realized this was bad.

Some people get testy about the use of ‘addiction’ to apply to things other than substance abuse, but if you compare and contrast the behaviors of, say, computer game addicts, and their effects on their lives and relationships, you won’t see much difference (other than the direct physical effects of substance abuse.) But call it an OCD if you prefer.

All of which leads me to this: I dipped back into Civilization III (henceforth Civ3) this weekend.

In Civ3, one begins in 4000 BC with a single settler and a worker, maybe a scout, depending on which civilization one’s playing. You explore, research new technology, build cities, construct the Wonders of the World, conduct diplomacy, and wage war progressing from ancient to modern times and slightly beyond, ultimately, building a spaceship destined for Alpha Centauri (one of several means of victory.)

One of the things that’s so compulsive about it is that there’s so much going on at any given time that there’s almost always something exciting just around the corner. Discovering a new technology that lets you build new city improvements, or military units, or a wonder of the world. Finishing a mine or a road or a railroad that’ll boost your production. Waging a war. Circumnavigating the world, making contact with new civilizations, maybe even finding unsettled land.

It’s compelling enough to have inspired multiple fan sites like Civ Fanatics and Apolyton where you can find dozens of articles on strategy including amazing reverse engineering of the algorithms governing game behavior, e.g. :

Corruption calculations do not use Euclidean geometry, nor unit movement points, to get distance. Instead, the distance is based on the shortest path, where each orthogonal move costs 1.0 and each diagonal move costs 1.5. Another way of writing the distance formula is Distance = max(x,y) + 0.5*min(x,y), where x and y are the distance in the NW/SE and NE/SW directions, respectively.

(And there’s lots more where that came from.)

I don’t spend much time playing computer games. And that’s because I have a dangerous weakness for them. As an undergrad, I deleted Tetris from my computer, and I’ve installed and deleted Nethack a dozen times over the years. And I’ve uninstalled Civ3 (and Civ2 before it) in the past.

Lost weekend is an exaggeration. Lost Saturday would be much less of one: I did go to the Farmer’s Market , make chili for dinner, spend time with Pocahontas when she got home from work. But pretty much the rest of the day was occupied by the Americans conquering the world — mostly culturally and technologically, with just one wee bit of a war to capture some Aztec cities. (See, they had coal. I wanted it. In Civ3, I engage in many behaviors I would consider reprehensible with non-virtual lives at stake.)

I can’t remember the last time I spent that much time at the computer in one day. And I’m a great big geek.

I’ve been writing long letters back and forth with Jimcat who knows the game well and has been generously and patiently fielding newbie questions (Civ3 has spent much more time uninstalled on my machines than installed, and it’s a complex game — there’s a lot I don’t know.)

But I’ll have to meter my playing time. Not more than an hour a day, say. Well, maybe just one more turn…

Las Vegas is a city from a Civ2 game, somehow transported into our world. Look at all the Wonders of the World the player built there — the Pyramids , the Eiffel Tower , the Statue of Liberty …

And, c’mon, would anyone in the real world be so dumb as to build a city that big in the middle of a desert?

The Guardian has this article on Stanley Kubrick and his protectiveness of his films, his love of typefaces, and just how detail-oriented he was…

“OK,” I say. “I understand how you might do this [meticulous research] for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?”

“Somewhere here,” says Tony, “is just about every ghost book ever written, and there’ll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world.”

It’s not OCD when it makes you rich and famous.

(Via Linkmachinego )

A British TV show for the deaf has banned the use of several British Sign Language signs concerning ethnicity .

The abandoned signs include “Jewish”, in which a hand mimes a hooked nose; the sign for “gay”, a flick of a limp wrist; and “Chinese”, in which the index fingertips pull the eyes into a slant. Another dropped sign is that for “Indian”, which is a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of a forehead.

[…] Other signs that have been accused of being politically incorrect - such as the sign for German, which is a fist held to the forehead with a finger pointing straight up, mimicking the shape of a Prussian spiked helmet - are widely used. The sign for disabled, in which a finger on each hand depicts a limping movement, is used by some deaf people.

Specialists in sign language have also pointed out that in China, the sign for a Westerner is a hand depicting a round eye, which has not sparked any criticism from deaf people in Britain.

[…] Evelyn Gee, the chairman of the Jewish Deaf Association which published
the first guide to Jewish cultural signs in December, said that the preferred sign for “Jewish” was the hand resting against the chin and then making a short movement down in the shape of a beard.

She said that she would be offended if someone put their hand to their nose to sign the word Jewish. “I think that now that this book has been accepted by the Chief Rabbi, people should stick to it.”

(N.B.: British Sign Language is a different language from American Sign Language .)

When is a stereotype a slur? I’d be offended by an English speaker referring to Asians as slant-eyes or Jews as hook-noses. But we’ve got perfectly good words that are accepted as value-neutral. In sign-language, invoking slanted or round eyes seems like an obvious and not inherently judgemental choice.

The hooked nose makes my knee jerk, but couldn’t Jewish women be offended by a beard signifying Jews (Ms. Gee notwithstanding)?

And, as I often wonder in these cases, were there real live cases of people being offended? Or did they go looking for this problem?

(Via Languagehat )

Malcom Gladwell rocks. And SUVs suck, as he explains in this New Yorker article .

In the summer of 1996, the Ford Motor Company began building the Expedition, its new, full-sized S.U.V., at the Michigan Truck Plant, in the Detroit suburb of Wayne. The Expedition was essentially the F-150 pickup truck with an extra set of doors and two more rows of seats—and the fact that it was a truck was critical. Cars have to meet stringent fuel-efficiency regulations. Trucks don’t. The handling and suspension and braking of cars have to be built to the demanding standards of drivers and passengers. Trucks only have to handle like, well, trucks. Cars are built with what is called unit-body construction. To be light enough to meet fuel standards and safe enough to meet safety standards, they have expensive and elaborately engineered steel skeletons, with built-in crumple zones to absorb the impact of a crash. Making a truck is a lot more rudimentary. You build a rectangular steel frame. The engine gets bolted to the front. The seats get bolted to the middle. The body gets lowered over the top. The result is heavy and rigid and not particularly safe. But it’s an awfully inexpensive way to build an automobile.

[…] Internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills. Ford’s S.U.V. designers took their cues from seeing “fashionably dressed women wearing hiking boots or even work boots while walking through expensive malls.” Toyota’s top marketing executive in the United States, Bradsher writes, loves to tell the story of how at a focus group in Los Angeles “an elegant woman in the group said that she needed her full-sized Lexus LX 470 to drive up over the curb and onto lawns to park at large parties in Beverly Hills.”

[…] Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational—what he calls “cortex”—impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, “reptilian” responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. “The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give,” Rapaille told me. “There should be air bags everywhere. Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has.”

(Via Sore Eyes )

What passes for reasonable :

The essay collection “What Makes a Man” was inspired by Rebecca Walker’s 11-year-old son’s commenting, “Maybe girls will like me if I play sports.” The statement starts Walker ruminating about the paths that have been laid out for American boys. “And then there was the final and most chilling thought of all: A bat, a ‘joy stick.’ What’s next, a gun?” This might strike some as a hypervigilant parent’s overreaction; to others, however, given the murder rate (to mention just one fact of American life), Walker’s alarm seems quite reasonable.

Yeah, baseball to murder. A perfectly sound leap. Murders exist, and thus any conjecture about their cause is reasonable.

Hey, it worked for Bush with terrorism and the justifications for the war in Iraq.