Category: family fun

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

The promo copy contains this grotesquely patronizing bit of gratuitously insulting analysis of science fiction, apparently aimed at ensuring that any science fiction fans who enjoy the work are put firmly in their place and instructed that this is different from that crappy rocket-ship stuff that they’re accustomed to. I thought that this kind of thinking was dead and buried, but apparently, it’s alive and well at A&E’s marketing department.

Gee, it’s alive and well here too . . . .

I read a lot of science fiction in my formative years but moved on (to say I outgrew it would be needlessly inflammatory). I have picked up a couple of examples of the genre lately (Shockwave Rider (sorry, no cover art available)) and I have ordered Snow Crash from the library, since my only exposure to Stephenson is his epic “hacker journalist” piece in WIRED a few years back.

What I seem to be missing is where science fiction crosses over into mainstream or literary fiction: I have yet to meet an ardent science fiction reader who loves Faulkner or Garcia Marquez, who can talk about “Mrs Dalloway” or “The Iliad” with the same fervor.

And of course, this whole notion is a huge and, by definition, inaccurate generalization. But the A&E promo piece does say that science fiction is “typically seen as non-literary.” This should be news to no one, especially someone who is an active practitioner. The unduly shrill tone of the comments undermines their content: rather than give A&E credit for taking a chance on bringing “non-literary” content from an arguably ghetto-ized genre to a national cable audience, Cory attacks them for trying to find some way to tie the quality (with awards and sales as evidence) of the author’s catholic ouevre with this new production.

Perhaps next time, they’ll think twice: if screeds like this keep people from watching it, is that what a fan of the genre would want?

Cost of War

[on the linked page] you will find a running total of the amount of money spent by the US Government to finance the war in Iraq. This total is based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

When I first looked at this, it was ticking along at about $1,000 a minute second, and the total was at $82 billion dollars.

The Obvious?: Great story

I’ve seen this before but it is worth repeating:

[ A Cherokee elder tells of the battle within himself ]

“My son, it is between two wolves…

One is filled with anger, hatred, envy, sorrow, regret, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego…

The other is filled with joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith…”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which one wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied “the one I feed”.

Suitable for kids? That’s just a G-up – www.smh.com.au

The other day I took a preschool child to see the first 20 minutes of Nemo, which was as much as she could bear before I had to remove her from the cinema, shaking with terror and begging to get away. As I carried her up the stairs I could see the rest of the audience.

Everybody over the age of maybe seven or eight was enjoying it hugely. However, almost every child under that age, about a quarter of the audience, was more or less paralysed with fear. They knew something was up when Nemo’s mother and siblings were eaten in the opening minutes, but the chase through the sunken submarine by a giant, murderous shark in a feeding frenzy sealed the deal.

Fortunately, I heard about nightmare potential before it got popular, so I have been able to avoid dealing the aftermath. Still, it would useful if the ratings really reflected the content of the movie.

Art Watch – September 7, 2003 – MP3s Are Not the Devil – The Ornery American

Orson Scott Card explains how owning a record label is a better way to get rich than actually playing music . . . .

The irony is that we’ve played out this whole scenario before, more than once. When radio first started broadcasting records instead of live performances, the music publishing industry became livid. This was going to hurt sales!
[ . . . ]
Same thing with TV and movies. Yes, TV wiped out the B-movie market segment and it killed newsreels — but it opened up a lucrative aftermarket that kept movies alive long after they would have stopped earning money.
[ . . . . ]
The internet is similar, but not identical, to these situations.

First, most of the people who are getting those free MP3s would not be buying the CDs anyway. They’re doing this in order to get far more music than they can actually afford. That means that if they weren’t sharing MP3s online, they would simply have less music — or share CDs hand to hand. It does not mean that they would have bought CDs to get the tunes they’re downloading from Napster-like sharing schemes.

I have suspected as much: while I sympathize with people’s gripes about $18.99 CDs (it sure doesn’t encourage me to buy any), I have assumed a lot of file-sharing activity was just a way of listening to music without paying for it.

PermaLink

Microsoft is a weird place to work. Before I joined Microsoft, I was a developer. I had a whole bunch of time to figure out what was going on out there. It was easy to be one of the first kids on the block to play with a new technology – whether that was NCSA Mosaic, early versions of Linux, the first JDK… at Microsoft, it sometimes seems like we live “inside the hedges” as we used to say in college – kind of disconnected from alot of stuff that’s going on.

Found this weblog through meta douglasp. This posting seemed to point out a couple of things . . . . in a way it amplified some other postings that demonstrated some hesitance, akin to fear, about working with non-MSFT tools. I mean, MovableType? Despite my self-inflicted problems with it, it’s not that hard. And you leverage a community, something he also opines about Radio Userland not having much of.

But the idea that the World’s Largest Software company doesn’t spend a lot of time looking at what’s going on in the world, coming from the inside, seemed odd. I suppose it could be interpreted that when you’re inventing the future, you don’t worry about the present. Not that I think that’s a sensible strategy . . . .

Given the recent security issues, largely attributed to sloppiness and bad judgment, perhaps taking a look at the wider world would be healthy.

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto

My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.

Teaching school — the set of rules and protocols that society insists we obey — isn’t the same as imparting Knowledge, as this essay makes clear.

Ben Hammersley, as usual, has some good stuff to share:

The Nutshell

1. The Internet isn’t complicated
2. The Internet isn’t a thing. It’s an agreement.
3. The Internet is stupid.
4. Adding value to the Internet lowers its value.
5. All the Internet’s value grows on its edges.
6. Money moves to the suburbs.
7. The end of the world? Nah, the world of ends.
8. The Internet’s three virtues:
• a. No one owns it
• b. Everyone can use it
• c. Anyone can improve it
9. If the Internet is so simple, why have so many been so boneheaded about it?
10. Some mistakes we can stop making already

Office surfers may face wipeout – Tech News – CNET.com

One network performance analyst at a Fortune 10 company estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all network traffic is nonwork-related. The analyst, who didn’t want to be named, said that can add up quickly.

“If you’re looking at a company with an $82 million IT budget, and 10 percent of the network is going to nonwork uses, you’re saving $8 million if you can stop it,” he said, adding that file-swapping, streaming news media, and gaming are among the most common activities.

This is easy to verify: monitor the network and see how much of it is being used throughout the day. Sure, there will be a ramp up at 9 AM, a spike a noon and then a downward slide at 4 PM, mirroring CNN’s inbound traffic (I wish these were stilll accessible).

But if the network isn’t constrained, how do you claim users are wasting bandwidth? You can make a case they’re wasting time, but that reflects badly on what passes for management. It’s always easier to blame external sites or those shiftless employees than the ones who are really responsible.

Well, the stent — all 26 cm of it — came out: the doc offered to let me take it out myself, but I opted out. It was, um, profoundly weird, but not so much as last time: I was prone as opposed to upright, and I guess that helps. Still, bleacgh.

The last one I had was only about 6 inches, but this one went from kidney to bladder which explained the odd sensations I was feeling.

The procedure went well: the stone mostly shattered on the first go with the laser, but a chunk of it drifted up into the kidney. They fired sound waves at it and reduced it to sand.

Now I have these anesthesia byproducts to deal with: intense pressure in the lower abdomen, which seems to be slackening, thank goodness. More indescribable weirdness.

I also visited the family practice to see about these ticker issues: nothing to report there. The heart sounds good, the EKG showed no damage or other events, so I’m feeling much relief.

Next up: I get to catch all the my pee for a 24 hours in a jug so they can determine why these things keep forming. That and a 6 month X-ray and we may have seen the last of these horrid things.