Category: Books

The Anthropomorphic Nature of Man

More from Kraken, this is Bill Gilly. Emphasis mine, of course.

An octopus lives on a two-dimensional substrate, can travel a well-practiced route to go to work on its night-shift job, typically has a house, regularly takes out its trash, and loves to eat crab. So we think the octopus is intelligent because it behaves like we do.

A squid, on the other hand… lives in a three-dimensional world with boundaries set by temperature, light, oxygen, and salinity rather than physical objects. They do not have permanent places of residence and are nomadic hunters. They eat mesopelagic [mid-level oceanic] organisms that most people don’t even know about.

In short, they are a life-form quite alien to us, and so I think we tend to think of them as being less advanced or intelligent. Again I think that attitude reflects our limitations of perception and understanding. This is just the anthropomorphic nature of man.

Blasphemy: A Book Based on Movie Based on a Book

I made the mistake of going into Barnes & Noble last night. In the SF section is a bright red copy of John Carter, the film novelization. This is a book, based on a movie, and the movie is based on a book.

Why wouldn’t you just read the original book?

This is like a photocopy of a photocopy. It’s wrong.

If you wanted to read a book about John Carter on Mars, WHY WOULDN’T YOU READ THE ORIGINAL BOOK?

And publishers are doing a lovely job of putting out shiny new editions. Some of them are wonderfully illustrated. They have covers to appeal to a variety of fans. All of them are written by the man who created John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs. So why would you read some Disneyfied adaptation?

This is like saying, oh, I like this, but I only like the fake version of it, not the real thing. This is what separates people who read books from mindless consumers.

Some Things I Don’t Like About the nook

I have one of the first generation nook e-readers. I like it, and when it dies I will be sad. It’s so much better for reading than most of these so-called e-readers available now, even current versions of the nook. But there are some things I don’t like about it.

There is no “go to furthest read point” anymore. I think there used to be. It’s gone now. So if I bookmark something and go back to it later, there’s no easy way to jump back to where I left off.

The text sizing and font choices are not as good as they could be. You’re supposed to be able to pick your font size and your font face. The problem is that some ebooks ignore those settings.

There’s a thing called “The Daily,” which is completely useless but could be really useful. When I go there, I see four things. Dave Barry’s essay on the nook, the instruction manual, something from the nook blog that is always terribly uninteresting, and a “this day is literature history” sort of thing. You cannot change any of this. You cannot subscribe to your own blogs. So… what’s the point of this?

Similarly, the two games available are pretty clumsy, and the web browser is worse than the text only browser lynx ever was. Can we get rid of these please?

I probably won’t see another firmware update. This version of the nook is probably unsupported now. But once upon a time, these were new features- built useless.

Beebe’s Bathysphere

This is from the introduction to Kraken, by Wendy Williams.

In the 1930s popular author and naturalist William Beebe cobbled together the world’s first real-life deep-sea expedition with the help of fellow explorer Otis Barton. The team’s exploration vehicle looked nothing like Jules Verne’s sleek Nautilus. Small and round and crudely engineered by modern standards, the vessel was in diameter less than the height of a man, with three-inch-thick observation portholes and a bolted-shut door that imprisoned the men inside. The steel globe leaked, and to circulate oxygen internally, the men waved palm-leaf hand fans. Without an engine, Beebe’s bathysphere dangled helplessly from the topside support ship like a ball of yarn suspended from knitting needles.

…

On one dive Beebe narrated his descent to an ardent North American and European radio audience. Listeners hung on every word, as avidly as they would decades later when American astronauts walked on the moon.

I’m sure when Beebe did this, everyone told him he was crazy. Everyone questioned the value of plumbing the depths of the ocean. There was probably not a lot of money for that sort of thing. But he did it anyway, “crudely” engineering his own success and exposing the wonders around us to the doubting world.

I wonder if there are recording of that radio broadcast.

Speed is a False Economy

From Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness. Emphasis and notes mine.

On many journeys, speeding will not save any time at all. The spread of synchronized traffic signals means that drivers who flout the speed limit come up against more red lights.¹ Weaving in and out of heavy traffic is often counterproductive, partly because lane speeds are constantly changing. Yet even knowing that speed is a false economy is unlikely to slow people down. The problem with most anti-speeding measures, from radar traps to narrowed roads², is that they rely on coercion… As soon as the coast is clear, they speed up again, sometimes even faster than before.³

1) I see this a lot when I’m biking. Cars zip passed me in a frantic, desperate race to get to the next red light. They often pass dangerously, and then I am right behind them half a block later.

2) While I think traffic calming is a good idea, the “narrowed roads” bit made me think of the proposed “road diet” they are looking into for Madison Ave. If it is successful, traffic on that street will thin out and go slower, but impatient drivers will speed through parallel streets instead.

3) Drivers pass me and gun it. As if to make up for the 5 or 10 seconds they were “stuck” behind me. And then, well, see #1.

A pedestrian hit by a car doing 20 mph stands a 5% chance of dying; at 30 mph that figure jumps to 45%; at 40 mph it is 85%. “We’re all in such a hurry nowadays that we speed in order to save a minute and a half,” [Len Grimshaw] says. “Is it really worth the risk of ruining your life or someone else’s just to arrive ninety seconds earlier?”

And an alternative…

When it comes to making urban areas more liveable, though, learning to obey the speed limit is just the start. As Citta Slow proved, you also have to give less space to the car.¹ To that end, cities everywhere are pedestrianizing roads, laying bicycle lanes, cutting parking, imposing road tolls and even banning traffic outright. Every year, many European cities hold car-free days. Some even empty the streets once a week. Every Friday night, traffic is cleared from swatches of central Paris to make way for an army of in-line skaters. Rome banner traffic for the whole of December 2002 from the fashionable shopping district known as Trident. In 2003, London began charging drivers £5 per day to enter the city centre during weekdays. Overall traffic is down by a fifth, turning the British capital into a much more welcoming place for cyclists and pedestrians. Other major cities are now studying the London charging scheme.

1) An idea that sounds almost unamerican.