Just to put it in one place, here’s what I’ve read and what I hope to read this summer.
Already Read
- Neverwhere by Niel Gaiman
- The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker
- Devices and Desires
- Evil for Evil
- The Escapement
- To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski (2010 0708)
- Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (2010 0715)
- Ghosts of Manhattan (2010 0720)
- Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi (2010 0722)
- Stardust by Neil Gaiman (2010 0724)
- The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction by Max Page (2010 0726)
- Tron by Brian Daley (2010 0731)
- 1453 by Roger Crowley
- The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin
- Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
- The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer
- The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
On the agenda
- The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner
- The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree
Posted in books, personal
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dropbox is one of my favorite “cloud” utilities. It keeps a directory synchronized across many computers, allowing remote access and automatic backup. Whenever you set up dropbox on a new computer, all of the files need to be copied across. As you might imagine, this can take some time. Usually, dropbox pops up a little balloon telling you how many files are left and about how long it will take. But if you are syncing a huge amount of data…
… well, you get the message below.
Neil Irwin explains the current dilemma faced by the Fed by extending a metaphor promoted by guest host Christopher Hayes on Monday’s episode of The Rachel Maddow Show: The Fed is in charge of watering the fields but has exhausted its usual reservoir system. Anything new will be risky and the Fed leaders tend to be conservative about risk.
At this point, the economy is so anemic we should probably be considering nuclear-fueled desalinization plants (whatever their fiscal equivalent would be)…
Billy Goat Tavern
430 N Michigan Ave., Chicago IL
Billed on several sites as home of “Chicago’s best cheeseburger” and made famous by a skit on early Saturday Night Live (“cheezborger! cheezborger! cheezborger!”).
As part of our very-intermittent plan of sampling “the best of…” in Chicago eateries, Annie and I decided to stop at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern on the way back from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
What can I say? Meh. The burger wasn’t bad but it was far from the best I’d ever had. Heck, it wasn’t even the best I’d ever had in Chicago. (That goes to the Jona’s burger we had at Jacky’s on Prairie yesterday.) The Billy Goat burger was, well, ordinary. It was quick and it was priced right. But I think that all the raves reflect more on nostalgia than quality. If I happened to be out and about near the Tribune building, and I happened to be hungry, and someone happened to suggest Billy Goat’s Tavern, I would not be opposed. But it’s not the sort of experience that makes me want to plan a return outing; it’s not the sort of burger that demands a second sampling. The tavern has a real working-class ambiance and the place is decorated with more Chicago history than you can imagine… but the burger? Just OK.
Regarding the fact that Fox News will now have a front-row seat at the White House briefing room:
Fox News is a propaganda outlet, a detail everyone seems to know, but which is apparently impolite to say out loud. The network’s proponents will likely argue a front-row seat is warranted because Fox News has a lot of viewers. Perhaps. But Milli Vanilli sold a lot of records, and success didn’t make them legitimate recording artists.
The quote comes from Steven Benen at Political Animal; the emphasis is mine.
Posted in humor, politics
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I stole the tagline from a commenter at Political Animal and the picture from a public domain image at Flickr, and put it together using the motivational poster generator at Big Huge Labs.
Posted in humor, politics
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Why did the stimulus go wrong?
In the end, we took a soapbox racer to a go-kart track and then realized we were competing against actual cars.
Great analogy — and better analysis — by Ezra Klein.
Posted in law, politics
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 Metatropolis
Edited by Jack Scalzi
Rating on an arbitrary 5-point scale: 4 out of 5 |
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Metatropolis is a science fiction anthology exploring, as it claims, the “future of cities”. That’s not strictly accurate. It’s really a collection of stories that explore the question: If we as a species are going to survive the mistakes of our forebears (particularly ecological mistakes), what will human society have to look like? It’s pretty clear that we won’t be able to ratchet up world living standards to the stereotypical 2.4 kids in the suburbs mid American ideal. Resources are too finite and indeed running out. If our profligate carbon society doesn’t right itself soon, if we face a Century of Judgment, then what will emerge from the drowned coasts and droughted interiors?
The five authors (Jack Scalzi, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder) don’t really offer blueprints and white papers, of course. They off five distinct tales, appropriately interdependent, that explore a possible future. This is a shared world on the model of Aspirin’s Thieves’ World, though not quite so sprawling or tightly woven. It is clear that the authors spent considerable time together thrashing out their shared world — though, in keeping with the theme, much of that might have been online and virtual.
So, does the book succeed?
Continue reading →
From a post by Steve Benen over at Political Animal:
In human history, it’s never been easier to get — and stay — well informed. Folks just have to take some responsibility. If they don’t, the result can be a dysfunctional democracy.
It’s impolitic to say this but not all pastimes and passions are equal. And the next time you bemoan the state of the economy or your due taxes or your summons to jury duty or the latest idiocy out of Washington — just pause for a moment and think about how much time you spend reading gossip columns, or devouring “reality” TV, or watching one overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks beat up on a different overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks. Is it really true that you don’t have the time to keep informed? Or is it that you just don’t want to invest that time?
And if it’s the latter, do you really deserve the vote you’re accorded by virtue of your citizenship in an advanced democracy?
Inception
a Christopher Nolan Film
Arbitrary 5-Point rating: 5 out of 5
Inception is a weird, ambitious, action-packed sci fi thriller-cum-heist flick. It is, in its own way, as ambitious as The Matrix and suffers from the comparison only in that it didn’t come first. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Tom Dom Cobb, a thief of a singular kind: He can enter the dreams of others and “extract” information they’re trying to keep secret. On the run for (at first) unspecified horrible crimes, he parlays his skill into a lucrative, if high-risk, lifestyle. But in the end all he really wants to do is get to go home again and pick up the shards of his former life, including two small children.
More detail, and spoilers, to follow, but in short, this is a fantastic film that’s better than it has any right to be. The pacing is superb, the acting is above-average, and the setting and technology are remarkably well fleshed out. Although everyone draws comparisons to The Matrix, the real spiritual ancestor of this film is The Thirteenth Floor (which, ironically, came out at the same time as — and got lost in the glare of the hoopla of — The Matrix).
Spoilers ho!
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