Samuel
Delany speculates on the
future
of New York City, and of cities in general, as well as nanotech,
possible social progress, and the difficulty of understanding what
may come.
Samuel
Delany speculates on the
future
of New York City, and of cities in general, as well as nanotech,
possible social progress, and the difficulty of understanding what
may come.
As much of a city lover as I am, I still suspect that, whatever brings its end about, the Great City as we have it today--an enclave of two million to 10 million inhabitants embroiled in culture, commerce, and capital--just can't hang together for an entire thousand years. It's too large and unwieldy, too likely to break up after a few centuries or so and disperse in general sprawl or what sociologists call "edge cities." Consider: There were no cities of more than a million inhabitants before 1800. In 1850 the population of Manhattan was only 500 thousand people with another 200 thousand scattered among the other four boroughs. The population passed the million mark only around 1875. The mega-population center is entirely the result of 19th century industrialization. Only with the advent of steam, iron, glass, electricity, and concomitant transportation advances could those river-and-market communities that had attracted folks around them into a growing township import enough food and materials for life and manufacture and export its growing number of goods--and get rid of a million or so people's garbage. The really big city may just be a 200-to-500-year historical flash-in-the-pan.
Things
are pretty slow right now, so I'm going to use this space for
a Public Service Announcement:
When did you last back up your hard disk? If you don't remember, do it now. Today. Not because this is the end of the world as we know it, but because computers fail every day, and you probably have something on that machine that you don't want to lose.
How long does it take to open a
welded
manhole cover? It's nice to know that the New York City
government is taking precautions against terrorists, but what
are they planning to do if a water main breaks in Times
Square on December 31?
To balance all the best-of lists, Wired asked the
editors of the Annals of
Improbable Research to list the twentieth century's
most
conspicuous technological screw-ups, from N-Rays to Bhopal,
via World War I, the DeHavilland Comet, and the Tacoma Narrows
Bridge. As usual, I'd quarrel with one or two choices--"Wrong-Way"
Corrigan made their list, but he may well have gotten exactly
where he wanted to go--but overall it's pretty solid, unlike some of
the structures it refers to.
Progress in marketing euphemisms:
"The
Human Touch" sells
Alaskan-style knives with handles of wood, or of "cultured ivory"
or "cultured moose antler." It sounds wonderfully wild and rustic,
but someone I know wondered how you culture a moose antler.
You don't, of course: "cultured moose antler" and "cultured ivory"
are polyester resins in disguise. Nothing wrong with a resin handle,
of course, but "antler-shaped plastic" doesn't sound nearly so
exotic. [with thanks to the CELery]
To go with the man of the century and the top movies of the
century and all, the Weather Channel is inviting people to
vote
for the Storm of the Century. Their concept of a "storm"
is somewhat elastic: the Dust Bowl was certainly a major weather
event, but I wouldn't call it a storm.
In the midst of a long argument about South Park on
rec.arts.sf.fandom, Patrick Nielsen Hayden makes some
excellent points about
art,
morality, and the artist's limited ability to realize
his or her vision, moral and otherwise.
You can have refined moral perceptions of the most elevated kind, and a steely determination that your art will reflect them at every point. But the real world consists of measurements that go awry, materials full of impurities, and characters who can't be believably made to march in lockstep to a preconceived agenda.
If you're
running out of time for your Y2K remediation, or aren't
completely confident it will do the job, you can always
buy a bag of
voodoo charms
specifically designed to protect your computer. There are
versions for Mac, Windows, Linux, Solaris, Unix, mainframes,
and "vintage computers," namely
systems that use front panel switches as the primary user interface, systems with anthropomorphic system or sub-system names, anything that uses an S-100 bus, the venerable CP/M OS, and AppleBasic, GEMDos, DRDos, and ProDOS.The charm for each system comes in a different colored bag.
A linguist
refutes
the claim that speakers of tonal languages all have perfect
pitch. He also points out that within-speaker consistency of
tone is greater in English, not a tonal language,
than in Yoruba, which is tonal.
The entire current content of
www.millennium.com,
which claims to be "Your guide to the new millennium," is
a white-on-black note reading
This site is currently under construction. Please visit us again in a few days.It's nice to see someone who doesn't think the millennium begins on 1 January 2000. [via Need to Know]
The
Bonsai
Potato page is exactly what it sounds like.
Complete with Zen quotes, photos, and a fine FAQ.
[via Honeyguide]
Pakistan's Supreme Court has ruled that
charging
or paying interest is un-Islamic and thus illegal.
Until recently, Pakistani banks were allowed to pay or
charge interest, but had to call it something like
"mark-up" or "loss sharing"; the court
has decided this isn't good enough, and has given the
government about two years to evolve an interest-free
economy. The
consequences
of this ruling could be interesting, to put it mildly: everything
rom IMF loans to pensions to the current legal actions against
people who have defaulted on loans could be affected.
I suspect that any number of foreign governments that thought
Islamic law was fine as long as it only affected the status of
women will have second thoughts if their precious dollars are
at stake.
A
new paper
examines the assumptions in Mills's Forbes
article about the electricity use of the Internet, and plausibly argues
that the actual usage is approximately one-eighth of what he claimed.
The authors also note that Mills seems to be asking the wrong, or
at least too simple, a question: not only does he ignore any power
savings caused by the Internet (for example, if you're online you
probably aren't watching television, and telecommuters save energy
by not driving to work), but he doesn't address the problem of
distinguishing between "Internet-related" use of a computer and
all the other things people do with the same machine. [via
More
Like This]
From a page of "Tolkien Crackpot Theories,"
the
truth about Tom Bombadil offers an entirely new (if not
entirely convincing) look at this enigmatic character. The
attribution has, alas, been omitted.
Dr. Robert Mills has a novel theory of physics that he claims
could produce everything from
cheap,
clean power to magnetic plastics to flying saucers; most other
physicists are unconvinced, because his theory of the hydrogen atom
is so unconventional, and because it looks like cold fusion.
On the other hand, a chunk of his funding comes from utility
companies and such: even if he's wrong about the underlying
physics, if he can produce clean power at a decent price, they
don't care if he understands the structure of the hydrogen atom.
[via slashdot]
An
important open question in astronomy and exobiology was first
posed by Enrico Fermi: Where is everyone? In other words, Why haven't
we detected any extraterrestrial civilizations? Oliver Morton
suggests that the answer may be that
gamma
ray bursts have destroyed most alien civilizations. These
explosions are powerful enough to wipe out any life within 100
light years, and do serious damage within a range of thousands
of light years. And they're common: our new detectors
find them on a daily basis. One possibility is that gamma
ray bursts are less common now than in the distant past, and that
the universe has
thus become a less dangerous place for life, and thus civilization.
[via Arts and
Letters Daily]
In case you've gotten email telling you that tonight's full moon
will be incredibly bright, the Astronomy Picture of the Day
compares
perigee and apogee full moons and includes some figures.
Yes, the moon will be bright, but the difference probably won't be
noticeable to the naked eye. Come back next month, for a total
lunar eclipse.
English spelling is notoriously complicated: so much so, it
seems, that English
takes
longer to read aloud than Italian, whose spelling is much
simpler and more straightforward. In particular, an Italian-speaker
can tell at once how to pronounce an invented nonsense-word;
English-speakers may have to choose between several guesses.
My current
favorite
Y2K
statement.
This one is long but important: as part of a "notes and
recommendations" piece, Phil Agre discusses the
deliberate,
professional twisting of language and the dangers it poses for
democracy and rational debate. After analyzing one example, he writes
So what's going on? The passage depends for its rhetorical force on its ambiguity. Without the ambiguity, the sentence would be obviously false no matter what. But with the ambiguity, the mind gets lost trying to follow all of the logical pathways, and somehow the sentence ends up making a dim kind of sense. What kind of sense? The kind of sense that you understand with your lizard brain: broad, vague, emotionally primitive dichotomies. Do the editors of the WSJ operate solely from their lizard brains? It's an empirical question. Either they understand what they are doing, or they don't. You decide which is worse.
Agre ends by commenting
Evil hides best when all attention is focused on another evil, real or imagined, somewhere else. Josef Stalin really was evil, and his existence provided a hiding place for a complementary evil in the political culture of the United States. That evil is now coming to power, now showing itself, now naming its nebulous enemies, now publicly flouting all reason, now howling in the words of the talking heads, now daring anyone to name it. It is a hard thing: because evil begins by naming evil, those who name evil fall under suspicion themselves. But I name it here, this authoritarian thought-pattern now settling down on my country, and now I suppose I will see if my country retains enough sanity to care.
Me, I hope our country even sees this analysis, which is not in the interests of the spinmasters and PR people to spread, and I wish he'd put it at the beginning of this document, not the end. Skip past the material on Moore's law, Seattle, and the socialization of graduate students if you're in a hurry, but do read this.
On a
related note, Molly Ivins, who
"truly believe[s] that dragging Jesus into partisan
politics is a grave mistake," turns it around and tries to show
conservatives what it would be like if
liberals
used Jesus to promote their political goals.
Seamus Heaney's evocation of the
solstice
moves from the distant past to the modern Ireland, ancient
kings rubbing shoulders with car parks as the Earth turns.
I stand with pilgrims, tourists, media folk
And all admitted to the wired-off hill.
Headlights of juggernauts heading for Dundalk,
The Vermont Supreme Court hasn't
recognized
same-sex marriages, but it has ordered the state legislature
to either do so or construct a system of domestic partnerships
that provides all the same protections as marriage, several
hundred of them. The ruling is based on the Vermont
constitution, and cannot be appealed. The underlying principle is
"the constitutional imperative to afford all Vermonters the
common benefit, protection, and security of the law."
A
scathing
investigation of a profit-sharing arrangement on a special
issue of the Los Angeles Times magazine, in which
ad revenue was divided between the newspaper and the sporting
arena that was the subject of the special issue.
The Times' credibility and integrity--ultimately the only commodities a newspaper has to offer--have been severely compromised at a time when public confidence in the press is already in deep decline.The publication of this self-criticism by the Times may not be sufficient to end the controversy about the newspaper's current management--the top executives have no newspaper background and admit to "a 'fundamental misunderstanding' of basic journalistic principles."
Sasha Walton's
Three
Wise Penguins is a charming Christmas story.
He's probably
in favor of motherhood and apple pie, too: (St. Louis, Missiouri)
Riverfront Times columnist Ray Hartmann
is calling for a
crusade
against sex with animals.
[via the Obscure Store and
Reading Room]
Nice
cartoon on the drug industry and the importance of
knowing
what you're buying.
Quote of the
day (overheard from a telephone call): "I'm not upset. I'm angry.
There's a difference." (All this was said calmly, if loudly.)
The handover of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, in 1997, got a lot of
attention. Now Portugal is
handing over Macau
at midnight on 19 December, local time (4 p.m. on December
18, GMT) and few foreigners have even noticed.
Jon Carroll
parodies
an investment roundtable. "Change is a constant.
Muscularity is a constant. That's our position."
"They have shipped 5 million units a year to date,
although where the damn things are going no one knows."
I think I'll let my CD roll over; it's simpler.
Just in case the London mayoral race wasn't interesting enough:
Malcolm
McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols, has declared his candidacy.
A Web log is a clipping service without portfolio, in which someone collects things she (or he) finds interesting and passes them along. Sort of a primitive version of an anthology: none of the material is actually in the log, all you get is the pointers.
The inspiration for this Web log is Raphael Carter's Honeyguide Web Log, which is well worth a look, and not just because Raphael has been doing this quite a bit longer than I have. Web loggers all seem to read each other's work, but I'm trying not to duplicate too much of what I see elsewhere.
YAWL is broken up into chunks based on size; at the moment that seems to be working out to about two weeks per section. The newest links in each segment are at the top of the page, of course. Stale links are in the nature of such a project, but please let me know if any new links appear broken. Note: dates given here are when I add an item to the log; items are added when I notice them, not necessarily when they first reach the Web.
YAWL is updated most weekdays (sometimes more than once a day) and occasionally on weekends. (For some reason, less of the material I'm interested in is posted on weekends.) However, this is purely an amateur project. If there are no updates for a few days, that might mean I'm traveling or otherwise busy, and not surfing the Web, or just that I haven't come across anything that seems to belong here.
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.