Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Quote of the day: If John Kerry is elected, he will become the first President who can deliver both the State of the Union address and the rebuttal. –Jay Leno

In The Case of the Uncounted Ballots, La Griffe du Lion “evaluates the minimum IQ needed to cast a proper ballot for every voting system used in Florida” and uses it to predict who would have won the election, had the difficulty of punching chads or otherwise casting a ballot been removed.

[Update: according to iSteve, the IQ by state data does not come from the book cited and therefore the whole thing is presumably a hoax - see the comments.] For a national view, check out this chart of average IQ, average income, and 2000 election results by state - thanks to Matthew Yglesias by way of Gene Expression for the link. (Also from Gene Expression comes the intriguing idea that homosexuality is a meme.) Most of that data is also available from American Assembler in a prettier format. The data for IQ by state comes from IQ and the Wealth of Nations [the American Assembler has retracted this claim] so I assume it’s legit, but I’m still amazed that the average IQ by state can vary by almost two standard deviations. [End hoax. The rest is real.]

According to Richard Lynn, the average IQ in the US is 98. Unfortunately, his country list is in alphabetical order. I’d sort them for you, but this blog category is devoted to weird science, not political incorrectness.

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The Stoneham Theater is presenting Lizze Borden: The Musical throughout the month of May. It’s a shame it’s in Stoneham rather than here or in the original 1892 venue, Fall River.

This is my 900th blog entry - if only it counted towards my word count. I’ve been editing, which is a zero-sum game as far as Total Lifetime Word Count goes. The TLWC is hovering around 500,000, not counting non-fiction or filk. I’m halfway to that elusive first mill.

The title is from a Guardian interview with Ursula K. Le Guin. Thanks to an old rasfcer for the link and the HP quote:

Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

Most of the interview is about her own work, including that seminal work of mpreg, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Today’s belated entry is a random link from my current collection: Why Men Follow Masters. The article meanders, but one bit struck me - this quote from Lysander Spooner about voting:

[H]e is allowed one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and […] he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving, and murdering himself.

So if you’re in one of those states that Just Don’t Count towards the Democratic (or any other) primaries, there’s no reason to feel guilty for not showing up at the polls. The farce will go on without you, as will the robbing, enslaving, and murdering.

I found out about ENC Press from an article by Julia Gorin. ENC sounds like a good place to sell your politically-incorrect genre-busters. Unfortunately they’re closed to submissions this year, but the catalog and coming attractions look interesting.

Today’s reviews of works by up-and-coming authors were made possible by the new book shelves of the Boston Public Library, without which my reading would be restricted to old and hoary writers. Singularity Sky by Charlie Stross is the tale of an outlying colony of a backwards, faux-Russian bureaucratic empire visited by the mysterious Festival. The visit swiftly turns their society hilariously upside-down.

Whenever you see the word hilariously associated with a work of science fiction, it’s a safe bet the author is British. Usually these imported novels that never quite take themselves seriously annoy me, but in Singularity Sky the flaw is minor. I found it hard to care about the menagerie of loosely-associated characters - the novel follows some of the hapless colonists, a civilized engineer working for several parties outside the Empire, the secret policemen assigned to spy on him, a UN liaison, a shipload of the Empire’s inept forces, and possibly others I’ve forgotten.

But for sheer fun, it’s a must-read. You’ll never forget telephones dropping from the sky, the goose that laid the golden egg, or the poor engineer’s difficulties convincing the locals that the UN isn’t a world government.

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow hangs together much better, perhaps because it’s hardly more than a novella. Happily, the dimensions of the hardcover fit the reduced length. That the world can be divided up into tribes living in different timezones is just one of the witty reflections of our slightly unbalanced narrator. He’s an idea guy with girlfriend problems who’s contemplating a new musical toll system for the Mass Turnpike - things get crazier from there. The novel held lots of gratifying local interest for me, being a resident of both the EST time zone and the city of Boston. Perhaps a member of one of the enemy tribes would have been more annoyed.

EST is short, fun, twisty and snarky - you really can’t go wrong with this one.

I had a few things I meant to blog about - the perennial issues, sci-fi and taxes - but I’m having a sudden attack of writing guilt. I was accepted by a summer writing workshop so now I feel like I ought to, you know, write something. Maybe I’ll even get back to posting my daily word count.

Although I admire LMB’s Vorkosigan series, I haven’t felt the temptation to write series myself until this week. Although all of my original fiction is nominally set in the same future universe, recycling the same characters hadn’t occurred to me. Then I started thinking about the backstory of one particular guy/gal (at the time, I thought he might need a sex change to make him more interesting), and his backstory quickly became a prequel plus some vague notions of a third tale in between the one I was revising and the new prequel. Later it occurred to me that an older, bitterer version of my guy could assume the lead in yet another story along the same lines which has been floundering for years now.

There are definite advantages to recycling characters - creating them is enough work that recycling is better than reinventing. Think of the potential of having your protagonist walk into the story with a major chip on his shoulder - longstanding difficulties with government bureaucracy could give my guy/gal the conflict his story badly needs. On the other hand, I don’t usually like short-story series. Whenever that blurb appears about the previous adventures of so-and-so having been published in this and that old issue of Analog or F&SF, I cringe inside. I feel that I’m being cheated - I paid for an original character and I got a tattered, used one.

Fortunately, I don’t intend to read these stories, just to sell them. Personal preferences aside, there are other disadvantages to character recycling. As mentioned above, all my stories are set in the same universe, but the timeline doesn’t firm up properly for a thousand years or so. Usually it’s not a problem since I don’t mention any dates for the near future, but having a character live through more than one story puts bounds on when certain technological advances happened. (Or is that willan on-happen?) The entire milieu is determined, to some extent, by what happens in a particular story.

Nevertheless, I’m heading down the yellow brick road to a series.

Governor Romney’s legal counsel has advised justices of the peace to quit now or forever hold their peace. We also have a handy 1913 law that will prohibit non-residents from marrying in Massachusetts if their home states forbid homosexual marriage. The Article 8 Alliance is working on removing the offending judges from the Supreme Judicial Court before May 17th.

I’m a Romney fan and also an Orson Scott Card fan, but I never expected to bring the two of them together in one blog entry. I accidentally stumbled over an article by OSC about Homosexual “Marriage” and Civilization. He makes all the standard con points, but being a great writer he does it better than I’ve seen elsewhere. Take, for example, the timeless lines:

Supporters of homosexual “marriage” dismiss warnings like mine as the predictable ranting of people who hate progress. But the Massachusetts Supreme Court [sic] has made its decision without even a cursory attempt to ascertain the social costs. The judges have taken it on faith that it will do no harm.
You can’t add a runway to an airport in America without years of carefully researched environmental impact statements. But you can radically reorder the fundamental social unit of society without political process or serious research.

I wonder if OSC knows that adding runways to Logan Airport was, until homosexual marriage, the hottest topic at the SJC, or if the irony is entirely accidental.

Like OSC, I’m of the let-the-dead-marry-their-dead persuasion:

The proponents of this anti-family revolution are counting on most Americans to do what they have done through every stage of the monstrous social revolution that we are still suffering through — nothing at all.
But that “nothing” is deceptive. In fact, the pro-family forces are already taking their most decisive action. It looks like “nothing” to the anti-family, politically correct elite, because it isn’t using their ranting methodology.
The pro-family response consists of quietly withdrawing allegiance from the society that is attacking the family.

So when I blog about gay marriage, as I have a few times already, my interest is not a literal interest in what happens to the culture - I’ve withdrawn my mental funds from that bank - but the detached sociological interest of an aspiring sci-fi writer and all-around INTP. For me, the most notable point OSC made was when he touched briefly on the myth that homosexuals are “born that way” - he gives more credit to direct environmental influences such as seduction and abuse.

So far it looks like the classic nature/nurture debate, but there’s a third possible explanation: homosexuality could be, quite literally, a disease - an infectious disease caused by a pathogen. That’s part of the thesis put forth in Infectious causation of disease: an evolutionary perspective. It’s a big PDF with only a few paragraphs on homosexuality, so let me summarize:

Homosexuality does not follow the usual pattern of genetic expression (for example, high correlation between identical twins), nor can such a counter-reproductive strategy sustain itself in the gene pool. Whether or not you consider genetic abnormalities a disease, homosexuality isn’t directly genetic. (See the article for more about what can and cannot be attributed to genetic causes.) Like many people, the scientists speculate that normal heterosexual drives are too strong for purely cultural influences to overcome - that is, the gay man is to be believed when he says that he is just that way. (And homosexual sheep have no gay culture to account for their tendencies.) So if he’s just that way, but wasn’t born that way, how did he get that way?

Enter the pathogen. The authors speculate that homosexuality, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, various cancers, and other diseases have unknown infectious causes. Like ulcers, these diseases show a certain statistical incidence which will eventually be traced back to pathogens, and cured. Like MS, homosexuality may be the result of an untraceable childhood infection.

Thus say the scientists. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter all that much whether homosexuality is genetic, infectious, environmental, or all of the above, because in principle (which is short for in the future) such factors can be corrected. Given the opportunity to cure the common gay, heterosexual parents will choose to do so.

The only refuge of homosexuality from science is the option no one is buying, not even OSC - that is, that being gay is purely a personal lifestyle choice. Anything that isn’t a choice is susceptible to a future cure. Strangely enough, lesbians are less likely to attribute their orientation to genetic or environmental influences. They may not even have the nameless disease, if there is a disease.