It's evening now, here in Europe, so we're really two decades from that night. I can't watch even the announcement without crying. I never have, not since the first time I saw it live, and I don't know if I ever will. I'm not sure I want to; when I can watch sundered families be reunited with dry eyes I think I've lost some part of my humanity.
The nuances of the fall of the Berlin Wall are being debated all over. Anniversaries are good times for awkward questions and complex analyses. Were the East Germans fairly treated in reunification? Has the victory of free-market capitalism been everything it promised, all things considered? How many half-truths and simplifications have buried the ambiguous complexity of that time?
I have nothing useful to add to the discussion, except that I live in a Europe that could not have existed with the Wall intact, and I think it's a good place. I call it a night's work well done.
I think I'll have a drink. It's a suitable matter for a toast. Anyone with me?
It will be printed as 4" x 6" rounded edge postcards. They will be sold in packaged sets of 6 or 12. Each will be numbered and signed as this will be a limited edition of 200! Should be available in about a week.
I would also like to do shirts. Im thinking about some kind of text like "Der Krampus" so it doesn't just look like some weird random devil. Perhaps the text would promt people that don't know of Krampus to ask what it is? I'll shop the design around and see if anyone bites...
I have never liked Lord of Light. If I’ve ever been in a conversation with you and you’ve mentioned how great it is and I’ve nodded and smiled, I apologise. The reason I’d have done that is because my dislike of the book is amorphous and hard to pin down, which makes it hard to defend when I know it’s a much loved classic. There’s also the thing when I haven’t read it for a while and I start believing that it must be the book everybody else seems to find, rather than the one I remember.
The story of Lord of Light is that a group of high tech people with ineluctable European-origin names like Sam, Jan Olvegg, Candi and Madeleine colonized a planet on which they are now pretending to be the Hindu pantheon.
[Read more about about the book and why I don’t like it; no spoilers]
No spoilers.
The local population consists of their descendants and the descendants of the passengers on the ship they crewed. This situation, where the privileged crew rules the unprivileged passengers, isn’t unusual, but having a story about it from the crew point of view is—though actually, as Lord of Light is 1967, it predates A Gift From Earth and most of the other examples I can think of. There are demons who were the original inhabitants of the planet, who happen to be beings of pure energy. The colonists live at a low tech level and in a culture that seems to be somebody’s approximation of ancient India. The “gods” enjoy a high tech level. There is technological reincarnation. Everybody, at the age of sixty unless they’ve been unfortunate enough to die earlier, goes to be judged by the gods, their past lives are seen in detail and they’re given a karmically appropriate new body—age, gender and species chosen by the gods. Most of the gods are not the original settlers—war and attrition and elimination of the opposition—but younger demigods who have been promoted. One of the First, Sam, wants to bring technology to the ordinary people and opposes the gods, at first by starting up Buddhism in opposition to their imposed version of Hinduism, and later by war.
It’s actually possible to argue about whether the book is science fiction of fantasy. It feels like fantasy, but there’s the clear science fictional and technological underpinnings of everything. But the “gods” have aspects and attributes—the attributes are high tech, the “aspects” are apparently psionic skills that work even in new bodies. There are things they do with technology and things they do with the sheer power of their mind—Yama has a death gaze, Sam can bind energy. The lines are blurry in more than one direction. This is one of my problems with it. I think Zelazny wanted it both ways, he wanted the mythic resonance, he wanted war in heaven, and he wanted it all to be grounded. I think he did this better elsewhere.
If someone wrote this book today, we’d probably call the use of Hindu mythology and Indian trappings cultural appropriation. In 1967, I think we call it getting points for being aware that the rest of the world existed. There’s absolutely no explanation for why the First decided on that system of control in particular. It clearly isn’t intended in any way as an authentic portrayal of India or Hindu religion, more a caricature set up deliberately to maximize the power of the “gods”. Then there’s the introduction of Buddhism. I’m not really comfortable with this—unlike the religions Zelazny used so well elsewhere, these are living religions.
My real problem with the book is that I don’t care about the characters or what happens to them. Every time I’ve read this book I’ve forced myself through it as a cold intellectual exercise. There are things about it that I can see are clever and were innovative when it was new. But none of the characters feels real. It’s written in omniscient, not the first-wiseass that Zelazny did so brilliantly, and I think it suffers from that. Sam’s motivations are obscure, the other characters even more so. It’s huge and mythic and it just doesn’t ever warm up for me.
The first time I read it I had the familiar sensation of thinking the book was too old for me and I should leave it for later. When I was a child books were finite—the house was full of them, but new ones seldom came into it. I didn’t discover the library until I was twelve. Books on the shelves got read and re-read, and if I couldn’t get into them, if they were too old for me, I’d keep nibbling at them. For the record, I eventually got old enough for Lorna Doone, George Eliot, and T.H. White, but I haven’t got there yet with Thomas Hardy. I think I was right that Lord of Light was too old for me when I was twelve—I couldn’t figure out that most of the book is a massive flashback, and the fantastical science fiction fantasy thing confused me. I didn’t like it, but I kept coming back to it. Now I do feel I understand it, but I still don’t like it. Maybe it’ll reveal itself to me as the masterpiece other people say it is when I’m sixty, but I’m not betting on it.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Full of flavor and packed with a powerful caffeine punch, Perky Jerky caters to beef-lovers who want more than just protein to enhance performance. We had the chance to put it to the test last month when the brand co-sponsored Thrillist and JetBlue latest JetMystery trip to Jamaica.
The snack gets its kick from the Brazilian plant Guarana, which bears a fruit with twice the caffeine of coffee, for an energy-drink-like kick without the sugar crash. Boasting a sweetly intense flavor, the popular ingredient also adds a Teriyaki taste to the meat.
Perky Jerky retails at $5 for a two-ounce bag or $60 for a 12-pack from their online store.
Artist Rosemarie Fiore paints with fireworks. Here's more about the process. (via Eric Wareheim, sort of)
(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)
Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.
I hesitate to bring up 9/11 Truth again after the firestorm of commentary I unleashed last week, but read Hofstadter on the pedantry of paranoid literature and tell me that he doesn't nail some of the most contentious of the posters (most of whom were probably not even born when the piece was written) with a psychoanalyst's precision and a novelist's sympathy:
One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.....Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it....
One of last week's more strident posters shared his frustration with members of his on-line forum (yes, I Googled myself, and of course I read all the nasty things they said about me), listing the seminal books I hadn't referenced ("Nafeez Ahmed's "War on Truth," Peter Dale Scott's "Road to 9/11," Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon," Michel Chossudovsky's "War on Terrorism"), pointing out The Complete 9/11 Timeline at historycommons.org that I ignored, and exposing my transparently propagandistic mendacity in allowing one perfervid e-mailer to stand "as an avatar for the supposed pathologies of the 9/11 Truth movement."
Of course he's furious! He's educated, articulate, and politically committed. He's not some disreputable, anti-social obsessive--he's a veritable exegete of 9/11 anomalies, as fluent in the jargon of physics as he is in political dialectics. It's bad enough that he has to endure the studied neutrality or outright hostility of the really big guns of the left--Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein--but then an arrant nobody like me comes along with, as one of his fellow posters put it, "a metric tonne of standard issue boilerplate" and presumes that he can conjure away the whole edifice of 9/11 Truth with a couple of wisecracks. Not only am I smug and ignorant and intellectually dishonest --- it's as if I don't even care about the subtle distinctions between one brand of Truthery and another, as if I can't be bothered to acknowledge the museum's-worth of evidence that he and his colleagues have so assiduously curated.
Imagine that you were a Maria Callas fan. You own every recording she ever made -- 78s, LPs, remastered CDs, even reel-to-reel tapes recorded off of radio broadcasts. You've not only read every book and magazine article about her that was ever committed to print, you've written a few yourself. And then some fly-by-night music journalist casually dismisses her in the pages of a mass circulation magazine as a cracked-voiced diva whose sole claim to fame was that she and Jackie O were rivals for Aristotle Onassis's affections.
Reading through all that commentary, I thought of how misguided missionaries sometimes try to evangelize Jews by calling their attention to passages from the New Testament--a scripture that by definition carries no weight with Jews at all. From my outsider's perspective, most of the Truther's exhibits (the iron spherules, the 2.5 seconds of video-taped free fall, the anecdotes about the dancing Israelis, the housing official trapped in the stairwell of WTC7) aren't evidence at all but rather artifacts of confirmation bias--factoids (many of dubious provenance, some long past their sell-by date) that are plucked out of context and marshaled not to build or close a positive case for one thesis or another, but only to cast doubt on the default position. I can't engage the 9/11 issue on the same terms that a Truther does, because I'd have to be a Truther myself.
Religious fanatics, political radicals, obsessive fans -- the worlds they live in are closed systems, governed by dogmas and articles of faith. Discipline is strictly enforced; members are punished or purged for their lapses in ideological or doctrinal purity. Outsiders are regarded with suspicion and hostility -- milquetoast accommodationists who are presumptuous enough to suppose they can make common cause on one issue or another even more so than overt enemies. It's a pressure cooker -- turn up the temperature and you get sectarianism and schisms, higher still and you get witch hunts, show trials, Cultural Revolutions, and Nuremberg laws.
With its congeries of black sheep constituencies (Alex Jones Libertarian populists, movement leftists, anarchists, white supremacists, New World Order reactionaries, Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semites, crusading architects and theologians) and its lack of a dominant leader or organization, the 9/11 Movement will likely never become unified enough to tear itself apart. But it has not been altogether innocuous either. "One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement," Noam Chomsky said, "Has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state...crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work."
Just as the missionary can't understand how the Jew can contemplate the prospect of his eternal damnation with such unnatural equanimity, the Truther can't fathom why the rest of us would rather look at the forest than the trees. There's a certain poignancy in their predicament. As Hofstadter wrote, "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."
guest post by mikl-em
San Francisco musician Mark Growden is having a blockbuster concert event this Friday, November 13th at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater to celebrate then release of his new album “Saint Judas”.
Tickets are on sale now for Friday’s show, and it is likely to sell out. Here’s a quote from a message that Mark sent to his mailing list last week:
This is the most important show of my career to date and I hope you can make it. It’s going to be special as it will feature my full sextet plus a beautiful set design by Isabella De Meulenaere and light design by Stephen Clifford.
Soon I will be posting some brand new footage of Mark performing a song off the new album and an interview that I conducted with him about the show, the new CD, and much more.
In the meantime, here’s a sample of Mark’s talent and musical inventiveness. A year ago, Doctor Popular filmed Mark playing bicycle handlebars as a wind instrument and talked to him about it–enjoy!
This is a blog post from Laughing Squid, subscribe via RSS, Twitter, Facebook & FriendFeed.
Violet Blue directs our attention to a bizzare Chinese infomercial for “She’s Mine!”, an inflatable bra that helps “grow” breasts using advanced “God’s Hand” technology developed in Japan.
This is a blog post from Laughing Squid, subscribe via RSS, Twitter, Facebook & FriendFeed.
Ford is going ahead with seatbelt airbags in the next generation Ford Explorer. The system uses compressed gas which, for safety, inflates the seatbelt at a slower speed than traditional airbags using chemical explosives. Apparently, Lexus is planning to release a similar system in its higher end vehicles next year.
Press release: Ford Introduces Industry's First Inflatable Seat Belts to Enhance Rear Seat Safety ...
(hat tip: Engadget)
In the latest IEEE Spectrum, Jeffrey T. Borenstein of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (MEEI) in Boston gives a detailed overview of the innovative drug delivery device his team is building. The implantable system is soft and stretchable, and it uses embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and microfluidics to control drug delivery on a tight schedule over long periods of time.
A quote from the article:
Our system, which is still under development, consists of a programmable micropump powered by a small battery and controlled by an electronic circuit. It pulses precise quantities of a drug from a small reservoir into the inner ear. A flow sensor meters the delivery and sends out an alert if anything goes wrong. What we have so far is about the size of a D-cell battery, but we're working to get it down to the volume of a single AA battery, which ought to be small enough to suit most patients. The device's reservoir would hold enough medication for about one year. We've already tested the system on guinea pigs, and our results show that it can successfully deliver medication to the inner ear without damaging hearing.
Image: A prototype of the device from 2007 which is currently being miniaturized and outfitted with a push-pull pump.
IEEE Spectrum: Flexible Microsystems Deliver Drugs Through the Ear ...
The Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics this month is featuring a set of articles that looks at "how far magnetic nanoparticles for application in biomedicine have come and what exciting promise they hold for the future."
To learn more about the journal's review articles check out this statement by Institute of Physics, or head to the following open access papers:
Progress in applications of magnetic nanoparticles in biomedicine by Kevin O'Grady
Progress in applications of magnetic nanoparticles in biomedicine by Q A Pankhurst, N K T Thanh, S K Jones and J Dobson
Progress in the preparation of magnetic nanoparticles for applications in biomedicine by A G Roca, R Costo, A F Rebolledo, S Veintemillas-Verdaguer, P Tartaj, T González-Carreño, M P Morales and C J Serna
Progress in functionalization of magnetic nanoparticles for applications in biomedicine by Catherine C Berry
Image: Map showing magnetic flux lines for nickel nanoparticles. ... (Brookhaven NL)
The Progressive Automotive X-Prize is heating up as the May 2010 start date approaches, and one of our favorite entrants is the eVARO, a three-wheeled plug-in hybrid from Future Vehicles Technology. The sleek electric vehicle can go from 0 to 60 MPH in 5 seconds and purportedly reaches 275 mpg under certain conditions. And for those times when there isn’t a gas station in site, the eVARO can cruise for up to 90 miles on pure battery power.
Read the rest of 275 MPG eVARO Electric Vehicle Goes From 0 to 60 in 5 Seconds
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Post tags: auto x prize, electric vehicle, ev, evaro, green design, green transportation, phev, plug in electric vehicle, sema, sustainable design
It’s not clear what actual work they’re putting us to. Can you tell? The only new thing I can see on this stretch of Tenderloin District is the Wonderland public art graffiti experiment.
See the eyes on the left? They’re all over Mid Market dees days:
Click to expand
“PUTTING AMERICA TO WORK”
“PROJECT FUNDED BY THE American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” of 2009 (ARRA)
USDOT TIGER.
But maybe you can figure things out – have at it.
San Francisco is only getting stimulated 354 different ways, so this task should take you no time at all.
Dear EarthTalk: I’ve heard that hybrid engine technology is now being used to power boats. What’s happening with that? --D. Smith, Portland, ME [More]
The following is the first chapter in R. Scott Bakker's book Neuropath, out now from Tor Books. For the cover copy:
Tom's life is not what it once was. His marriage to the beautiful Nora is on the rocks and he now sees his two young children only on her say-so. His best friend Neil has moved to California to teach neurology. He has one success - a book on human psychology. Tom wiles away the time trying to teach bored grad students. But that all changes when Neil comes back into his life. For it seems that Tom's best friend was working for the National Security Agency, cracking the minds of suspected terrorists. Now it is Neil himself who has cracked and gone AWOL - what's more, he has left behind evidence that he has been employing his unique skills on civilians - obsessed with the idea that he can control the human brain. . . .
[Read on of the first chapter]
Mind Hacks blog Googles the phrase "psychologist says", with headesky results. The problem: "Psychologist" doesn't always mean what you think it means. Some stories quoted from peer-reviewed research, others turned to therapists with little-to-no academic or research experience, and everything in between.
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makinglight : It was twenty years ago today [+0] - missmonstermel : krampus postcardsm [+0]
- tordotcom : Fantasy disguised as science fiction disguised as fantasy: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light [+0]
- coolhunting_com : Perky Jerky [+0]
- boingboing_net : Rosemarie Fiore: Fireworks paintings [+0]
- boingboing_net : 9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style [+0]
- boingboing_net : Fake Steve Jobs v. NYT over Zynga-gate [+0]
- pennyarcaderss : Comic: At The Midnight Hour [+1]
- laughsquidfeen : Mark Growden Concert & Party at Cowell Theater To Celebrate Release of Saint Judas Album [+0]
- laughsquidfeen : She’s Mine! Inflatable Bra That Uses “God’s Hand” Technology Developed in Japan [+0]
- medgadgets : Ford's Inflatable Airbags to Bring Extra Safety Up Close [+0]
- medgadgets : IEEE Spectrum: Flexible Microsystems Deliver Drugs Through the Ear [+0]
- medgadgets : Review of Magnetic Nanoparticles In The Life Sciences [+0]
- inhabitat : 275 MPG eVARO Electric Vehicle Goes From 0 to 60 in 5 Seconds [+0]
- sf_citizen : The Feds Sure are Proud About Putting San Francisco to Work in the Tenderloin [+0]
- scimerican : Recreational Boat Motors Get Greener with New EPA Emission Standards [+0]
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darkvictoria :: crimsonbiblio : Three slim volumes [+0] - tordotcom : Neuropath, Chapter One, by R. Scott Bakker [+0]
- jito : (no subject) [+0]
- boingboing_net : Fun Experiment [+0]