My annual geekfest, during which I upgrade a software package which I support, is now thankfully over except for the upgrade announcements. I’m still exhausted, though, so I have only one timely, warblogger link: Disarmament Clinic, from rec.humor.funny. That’s exactly how the whole Iraq thing sounds to me. I wonder if even the French believe otherwise.
1. What book is in your bathroom?
I’m actually a carry-in bathroom reader. Whatever I’m reading at the time accompanies me, generally into the tub.
2. What book is in your purse/backpack?
I carry magazines in my backpack - Analog, Scientific American, and Commentary.
3. What book is on your bedside table?
Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, by Richard Rudgley. Eventually I will finish it and return it to Veronica.
4. What was the last book you lent someone?
I’ve already lent out Bellwether by Connie Willis.
5. What was the last book you lent out that someone brought back to you?
People tend to return Catherine Asaro, though I wish they wouldn’t.
6. What book do you have loaner copies of, solely for the purpose of foisting it on unsuspecting friends and relatives?
None, but I do buy LMB to give away, especially to my lovely sister Veronica.
Filk of the day: “Temper[ature] of Revenge” by Tom Smith [after] Julia Ecklar is the ultimate Khan filk. Tune in to filk radio to hear such timeless lines as:
So find me a ship, Reliant will do,
Find me an anchovy covered in goo,
It will go in the ear of a young Russian jerk,
Who will send out a signal to James T. Kirk.
I’d been thinking of doing a Ceti Alpha V story long before “Not All At Once” led me to “Weeds” and got me thinking just how different my Khan would be from Rabble Rouser’s evil wolf out of Trek history. Khan is the Borg Queen of TOS - the villain who steals the show and comes back for encore face-offs with his nemesis Starfleet captain.
It’s one of the many ways in which VOY is closest to TOS in spirit. Captain Sisko had obscure, or at least muddy, antagonists, like Sloan, Kai Winn, and the Prophets themselves. Picard had Q, of all things. Q is cool and even has his own LiveJournal, but universe-destroying yet strangely attractive evil he’s not. He’s more of a milk-run nemesis. ENT, of course, is satisfied with picking on its own warped view of Vulcans, with a side of Suliban for muddy, mystery enemies. At least with TOS and VOY, you know who the bad guys are, that they want your lungs/ship/planet, and that they’re genuinely, enthusiastically bad.
Work has been a real drag lately, and I’ve also been doing some geeky stuff in my free time. The end result is that I’m too tired to blog. Instead, I’ll point you to the two TOS stories I read and voted for in the ASC Awards lately: Weeds by Rabble Rouser and the sequel Not All At Once by Djinn. They’re about Marla from the TOS episode “Space Seed,” with a little of The Wrath of Khan thrown in. If all TOS fic were about Khan, I’d have a new fandom on my hands. Fortunately, it takes only a paragraph or two of any fic involving Christine Chapel to send me running back to the Delta Quadrant.
I don’t usually read warbloggers, or political blogs more generally. For one thing, they’re more likely to use Blogger, while the geek blogs all have RSS feeds. Blog technology, or lack of it, affects my blog reading more than I ever thought it would when I innocently downloaded NetNewsWire Lite. I’m far, far more likely to read content that’s fully syndicated, like mine, Perversion Tracker’s, and Phil Ringnalda’s, because it shows up right there in NetNewsWire. Next come the blogs that syndicate a summary like Mac OS X Hints - most of the Mac news sites and MovableType blogs do at least that much. The third tier of blogs are those that only syndicate titles, a category which would hardly exist without the half-baked efforts of LiveJournal at providing RSS feeds.
RSS works at the entry level rather than the page level. I don’t right-arrow on nearly as many LJ entries as I used to read before RSS changed my life. I hardly read geek blogs before NetNewsWire, and now I follow a bunch of them. It’s a victory of content over socializing; content won because it costs me fewer click-taxes. Blog content tends to be freestanding and longer, while LJ entries are shorter and more enmeshed in the whole LJ tangle of threads, rumors, memes and wanks. So I get more content per click from blogs.
If Blogger supported RSS, I’d be keeping up better with Lori, who is TNG, and Mike, who’s into politics. Blogger is the only major blogging tool left without free support for some sort of aggregation. I don’t think it’s a wise policy to charge for RSS feeds since it’s not the user who is inconvenienced by their absence - it’s the reader. There’s no direct incentive for Mike to pay money because I want a feed, yet Blogger looks bad for not supporting technology everyone else gives away for free.
Bad Blogger! Get your new sugar daddy to spring for free feeds.
Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and
meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger). […] According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” –The Skeptic’s Dictionary
Fiction is the art of apophenia, especially fanfiction when it makes meaningful connections the original producers neither saw nor dreamt of. The habit isn’t restricted to slash, either - non-canonical or semi-canonical pairings of all sorts arise from the fan’s spontaneous perception. Putting together a plot means making connections that don’t tend to hold in reality - from little actions that fit the theme to it all coming together on the last page.
Some people don’t restrict their apophenia to fiction - Immanuel Velikovsky made bad science out of what would have been a marvelous sci-fi premise in Worlds in Collision. Related phenomena listed in the Dictionary include Jung’s notion of synchronicity or “meaningful coincidences,” which seem to result from ESP or a sort of low-grade miracle, and pareidolia, the bad habit of seeing faces in potato chips and the Cydonia region of Mars.
I found the Skeptic’s Dictionary while looking up something else entirely, but the pseudoscience was interesting enough to keep me reading through many entries. I found that when the Skeptic was arguing against independent, falsifiable scientific data (as in I.Q. and Race or the Bible Code), he beat around the bush without ever disproving anything. Even in cases where his arguments sounded good (multiple personality disorder and the related hypnotism), a little more data would have been nice.
He chalks up the MBTI to the Forer effect (also known as the Barnum effect), the same force that makes your astrological sign seem to predict your personality. That’s from the typee’s end, though - the assessor might still be making a psychometric survey yielding a statistical correlation with people’s skills or career choices. An article linked on the page claims otherwise - Measuring the MBTI and Coming Up Short by David J. Pittenger, in the Journal of Career Planning & Placement Fall 1993. Pittenger cites evidence that S/N and J/P are correlated with one another, though he doesn’t say how.
Although the Skeptic attributes the power of the Forer effect to wishful thinking, it sounds like more apophenia to me. Conspiracy theories would also be a kind of apophenia - the persistent belief that the world is more ordered than it, in fact, is.
Skeptical link of the day: multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder)
I read Analog on the T, where my standards are lower. I even enjoyed Catherine Asaro’s story “Walk in Silence” in the latest issue (April 2003), despite two, count ‘em, two occurrences of “gentle” as an intransitive verb. In general, it shares the strengths and weaknesses of The Last Hawk, Catch the Lightning, and, I can only assume, her other novels: a good plot with weak characterization and a side of wholly unconvincing romance.
At the other end of Analog was part three of “Shootout at the Nokai Corral,” a serial that’s holding my attention over the months despite a very silly setting and intentionally stereotypical characters. “A Deadly Medley of Smedley” doesn’t overcome its silliness nearly as well, and I found “Emma” and “Coming of Age” technically deficient for reasons it probably isn’t worth going into.
On the other hand, Bellwether by Connie Willis was so technically proficient that there’s little I can say about it but go thou and read likewise. It’s a fine example of a subgenre I otherwise wouldn’t have thought existed - sci-fi set in the present time. Usually such books are thrillers about secret corporate conspiracies or, more rarely, secret Amish conspiracies. Bellwether is about scientists working for a think tank, struggling with the inanity of Management Acronyms and the incompetence of their office help. At stake is both pure knowledge and grant money, and the plot is baroque and surprising as usual.
Link to high orbit: The Space Elevator by the folks at HighLift Systems
Today was a good day for surfing the Big Blogs, with the help of my trusty assistant NetNewsWire. The Weird Facts were legion. For example, scientists have decided that Mars has a molten iron core just like Earth and Venus. An extrovert chimes in on the extrovert/introvert divide.
When the science links run out, I turn to mac news. People rarely say they like PC’s better than Macs, but they frequently claim PC’s are cheaper than Macs. Here’s why that isn’t so. My favorite quote: The average Wintel home user spends over 50 hours each year troubleshooting their computer. The average Mac user spends less than 5.
Fifty hours is enough time to do NaNoEdMo, for example. In fact, I find that the average Windows user spends more time complaining to me about their computer troubles per year than I spend troubleshooting my Mac, even though they know they’ll be mocked for it.
Last but not least, TOS and ENT voting are going on now in the ASC Awards, and AAA is also open for J/C business.
Geek humor: a picture of an end tag
Well, if extensive work on my encyclopedia counts, then I’ve been keeping up with NaNoEdMo and then some. Otherwise, I’m four hours behind schedule already.
The lastest addition to my XML encyclopedia is hyperlinks - or in this case, just cross-references between my entries. I was making them directly with XLink, but that was too much typing so I switched to a method of turning plain text into links using JavaScript. I found it in an article on the Apple developers’ site: XML Transformations with CSS and DOM. It took a bit of time to get them working - trying to loop through the different kinds of cross-references led to many mysterious parsing errors in Chimera (uh, Camino), so I switched to one big loop that covered all crosslink cases. Now when I click on a crosslink, it takes me directly to the appropriate entry, and I only had to type “href” once (in the JavaScript file).
Now if only XML could do my dishes, too…
Mac link of the day: Browsers in the Hands of an Angry God - it’s offensive and silly and despite it all, hilarious.
If you don’t follow all the browser technobabble or if you need a bigger push to convert to the One True Browser, take a look at this article on how one blogger switched to Mozilla. He mentioned an old article, A Standard for Site Organization, which was a nice idea but doesn’t seem to have caught on. I surfed around the latter site, and found this amusing prediction from 1999 that “inside of a year” the blogging fad would have run its course. I preferred a newer theory I spotted in my blog rounds but can’t track down now: blogs will eventually replace the Usenet newsgroups.
