Chrononautic Log

January 31, 2003

Between work and the highly frustrating argument now going on over at Electrolite, I'm too burnt this morning to finish that mythical post I referred to a couple of days ago. (Or to get up to speed on this comment thread. I'll be over in a minute, really.)

In the mean time, though, here's another, smaller-scale model of traffic congestion — but this one isn't about economics, it's about waves. Or crystals. Or artificial life. Or ice-nine.

So, next time you are commuting and you approach a stoppage, don't think of it as a stupid f@#$% traffic jam. Think of it as a pressure wave which has approached your car and engulfed it. Think of it as a simple living thing which is composed of cars rather than molecules. Stay hopeful that the Crystalline Amoeba poops your car out soon. Take an aerial viewpoint, and visualize the wave which is moving backwards as you move forwards.

Comments (1)

January 29, 2003

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Me, too, Teresa.

(To the rest of you, all I can say is, read the story. As if Kissinger wasn't enough.)

Comments (0)

I've got a post I've been wrestling with, on the question of what point I see in this whole speculative fiction business. (And on Jon Hansen's question, too.) Maybe I'll get to it in a couple of days — though I really should be writing instead.

In the mean time, though, I'd just like to call out this insight from China Miéville:

Even the most escapist fantasy, like Tolkien - It may be escapist, but it can't escape. Fiction that thinks it's escapist is among the most intensely ideological there is, because it denies that it's actually about reality, in a mediated way.

(From an interview with Infinity Plus, courtesy of Greg, courtesy of Toby Buckell.)

I could add that there's another sort of intensely ideological fiction, escapist fantasy's shadow brother: fiction that denies it's trying to escape; fiction that claims to be about reality and denies that it's mediating that reality.

I'm trying not to write either kind, and I think Mr. Miéville is, too — though that's not to say either of us is trying not to be ideological.

Comments (6)

January 28, 2003

Yes, Morlock (morlock.chrononaut.org, the server this is running on) was inexplicably down from about one this morning till a couple of hours ago, or at least its Ethernet connection was. This is what I get for buying five-year-old refurbished hardware. One of these years I will decide that a new server is as reasonable an impulse buy as, say an intercontinental airplane ticket, and maybe this will stop happening. (Times like this it would be handy to be able to channel the fifteen-year-old self that actually enjoyed taking computers apart.)

Comments (6)

January 27, 2003

Another gem from Reuben “Tom the Dancing Bug” Bolling: Did You Know? This Week: The Lord of the Rings.

With the second installment of the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy, ring fever has taken over, causing fans the world over to wonder whether a series of ring fun facts could be written by someone who has never seen the movies nor read the books!

I, for one, did not know that the character of Virginia Woolf was added to the film “only to increase its Oscar gravitas.”

Correction

The link works now.

Comments (0)

Rob has an entry noting a Wall Street Journal piece that — well, I'll let him tell it:

The ‘Best of the Web’ column in the online WSJ today uses Oakland’s post-superbowl-loss riots to demonstrate “just how peaceful the denizens of that part of the Country are” and, by implication, suggest that the area's widespread opposition to the war in Iraq is disingenuous. (It even puts “antiwar” in quotes, to make the point even stronger).

(I'd link to the article, but, y’know, registration-only and all that.)

I haven't really got anything to add.

I'd just like to castigate everyone I know in the Bay Area (including my mother, the Green, pacifist, feminist union organizer) for, all these years, pretending not to be citizens of the Raider Nation. (And thanks for not buying me all those war toys when I was a kid, mom, you hypocrite.)

And Rob — I don't want to hear any more ominous news about your brother being posted to the Middle East with the 82nd Airborne; at least, not until you apologize to the good people of Tampa Bay.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Apples is oranges.

Thank you.

Here's the piece itself. (Toward the bottom — “Dispatch from the Peace Belt.”) It's not from the Journal's main page; rather James Taranto's OpinionJournal sideline “Best of the Web”. (The level of discourse of which, I have to say, seems typical of the Journal's editorial staff.) Note that the SF Chronicle story Mr. Taranto's blogging makes no reference to the war, or to the Bay Area's alleged “pro-Saddam” sympathies. That's all WSJ love.

My castigation stands.

Comments (0)

January 24, 2003

Courtesy of Lawrence Lessig, a very funny interview with Mickey Mouse “Bruce the Marsupial” about Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Generally Reason drives me up the wall, but unlike some folks in the anarcho-capitalist camp, at least they seem to understand that government power isn't the only kind that can be abused.

Now, after you've read that, you have to read the latest episode of Tom the Dancing Bug, in which — was I talking about romanticizing the comics, a couple of days ago? — Two-Fisted Justice Scalia saves Superman from the menace of the public domain.

Comments (0)

January 23, 2003

I suspect there aren't many schools where you'd find a Professor Emeritus in the English Department saying something like “But the method is worth learning, like calculus.” But the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology is such a school, and Dr. Charles P. Campbell is such a professor.

Obviously, no one could use this sort of full-blown analysis very often. It's not much fun to do, except in the way that solving calculus problems is fun. And it wouldn't exactly be a pleasure to receive such an analysis. But the method is worth learning, like calculus, because it's an active knowledge rather than a passive one.

Passive knowledge is at best semioperational. It requires memorizing rules ("Avoid the passive.") and learning to recognize when to apply them ("Is 'Ed was retired' a passive?"). An active knowledge is always operating in the background, activating itself when it's needed.

——Dr. Charles P. Campbell, “Using Transformational Grammar as an Editing Tool”

Of all the linguistics classes I took in college — with the possible exception of Sandy Chung and Armin Mester's Poetry and Language, which I'm pleased to see they're still teaching — I probably enjoyed Syntax I the most. (Transformational grammar is fun the way calculus is fun. — Yes, calculus is fun. Haven't you seen Stand and Deliver?) But even when I went straight from UCSC to a job editing technical publications for Fujitsu Learning Media (as you can see if you click on the link, they still need the help), it never occurred to me that transformational grammar could be used as an editing tool.

But, as they warned us at FLM, often “know-how are not exposed from project manager's brain.” The knowledge — the internal understanding of grammar that I developed on my own, and the way of thinking about syntax that I learned at UCSC — was still there, “operating in the background,” as Dr. Campbell says.

Which is a damned good thing, because I'd never get any writing done if I had to stop and glue my infinitives back together all the time.

Comments (3)

When I left California I regretted leaving many things behind, but car madness was not one of them. Which is too bad, because it turns out I didn't leave it behind after all.

So I was pleased to see this Seattle Times article. Some researchers have confirmed something I've always suspected: Once your roads are already at capacity, building more roads will not shorten anyone's morning commute.

When the new, wider Interstate 90 bridge across Lake Washington and Mercer Island opened in 1989, state transportation engineers anticipated it would carry more traffic.

What actually happened took them completely by surprise.

Within weeks, daily volume on the new freeway shot up more than 50 percent, exceeding all projections. But traffic on Highway 520, the other bridge across the lake, dipped only slightly, again confounding the experts.

Almost overnight, total cross-lake traffic jumped 20 percent.

Why?

Most transportation experts now agree that building or widening urban highways attracts some traffic that wouldn't be there otherwise. They call it "induced travel" — an increase in traffic that's generated not by growth or other demographic forces but by expansion of the road system itself.

I also discovered a much more detailed economic model from the UK's Department for Transport that I'll have to have a look at.

If I understand the argument correctly, it's really just straightfoward supply-and-demand.

• The average driver is only willing to spend so much time in traffic.
• As the “supply” of roads goes up, this tends to drive the “price”, the amount of time it takes to get from point A to point B, down —
• —but that in turn causes “demand,” the number of people who find driving from point A to point B feasible, up —
• — pushing the “price” back up to its original level.

Simple, right? Almost makes me wonder why so many conservatives don't seem to get it, but I expect there are other reasons.

Not like any of this is going to stop the voters of King Countyfrom demanding additional lanes for the SR 520 floating bridge, or get them to understand that the purpose of mass transit is to have mass transit, not to make life easier for the people who refuse to abandon their cars.

But at least I can look forward to saying “I told you so.”

(Continued)

Comments (10)

January 22, 2003

Jed Hartman has an entry up at Lorem Ipsum on the intellectual property debate between the ‘alpha geeks’ and the SF ‘Old Guard’ — or, you might say, between the Cory Doctorows and Harlan Ellisons of the world. In it Jed notes that the most reactionary of the Old Guard

tend to claim that any reduction of copyright laws is a step on the road to an anarchist future where no art can ever again be created by ordinary people who need to earn a living.

It occurs to me that maybe one reason they feel this way is that they can actually remember a time, not so awfully long ago, when the idea of making a living by writing (as opposed to by having written, with a dozen books perennially reprinted) wasn't an unreasonable one. I can see how it could be painful to have to watch that time slip away, and how one might react with an unreasoning virulence to anything that might tarnish its memory.

Now, this is just a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation — and, obviously, leaves novels out of the equation — but I believe I remember Jay Lake telling me that he'd figured that in a given month there were about 25 or 30 ‘pro’ slots for SF short stories. If we say that each market pays 6 cents a word and that the average story is 5000 words — again, back-of-the-envelope — I figure that comes out to a pot, for the entire pro SF short story market, of about $100,000. Not a lot of livings to be made there.

Naturally I'd rather be paid for my work than not — the occasional check for $100, or $200, or even $10 never hurts — and naturally I dream of the day when I have a shelf of my own at Elliott Bay, just after China Miéville and just before Michael Moorcock. But I'm too sane to be in this for the money — which, I think, goes a long way toward explaining why I had to side with the People in People vs. Mickey Mouse.

So what am I in this for?

Time to trot out Samuel Johnson: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’

I'm going to go oil and polish my head now.

Comments (5)

January 21, 2003

I'm a sucker for Shepard Fairey's André the Giant gag in all of its manifestations.

In general I'm not that impressed with the fark.com forums — if Photoshop and the Internet had been around when I was in high school I'd have been a whole lot better at that sort of thing, you betcha — but, sucker that I am, I'm pleased to be informed (via Ars Technica) that

kim jong il has a posse

I am, however, disappointed to realize that the site hosting that particular image is totaltapeservices.com and not, as I had first thought, totalapeservices.

It does appear, by the way, that totalapeservices is still up for grabs.

Comments (1)

usa today's top headline yesterday:

U.S. units intensify hunt for Saddam

As the Bush administration moves into what officials call the last phase of the showdown with Iraq, the United States is undertaking a vigorous military and intelligence effort to track, and possibly kill, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

I don't know about you, but I found it highly disorienting — the geopolitical equivalent of the dream where you show up for the midterm having somehow completely forgotten to attend the first six weeks of class.

Comments (14)

All right; all the templates have been depositioned and entabulated, and you should have a fighting chance of seeing this as it was meant to be seen in almost any browser but Netscape 4.x.

This is why I hate the Web.

Comments (3)

January 20, 2003

By popular demand — well, by popular frank assessment of the existing situation, at least — I've thrown out the CSS absolute positioning and gone back to laying out my HTML with tables, the way God intended it.

I've also added a hack to the front page that should prevent the background image from showing through and making the text illegible on browsers that don't understand the CSS “background” attribute. I'll have to do something similar for the archives and the comment preview, but since I do have to get up for work tomorrow, it will have to wait.

Comments (5)

Okay; if William Gibson can bite the bullet and start a weblog, I guess I should stop making excuses. (Anyway, it was embarrassing at Conjosé, having to tell Ben Rosenbaum that I didn’t have one.)

This doesn’t come as naturally as it would have a few years ago. In — oh — October of 1995, say, when I was really really excited about this “Internet” thing, it would have been another story, but a few years of working in the industry have burned most of that out of me. Now the whole idea seems vaguely pretentious. If I find my own personal life rather dull, I can only imagine what soporific effect it might have on strangers. And while various people — friends and enemies both — have pointed out that I never have a shortage of opinions, there are plenty of equally opinionated people out there who are much more energetic about their opinions than I am about mine. (You can find links to some of the more interesting ones over at Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite.)

I expect I’ll get over that — probably about a week after I get over being self-conscious about writing speculative fiction.

So bear with me.

Technical note

Updates may be intermittent for a while; ridiculously, the one place from which I can’t actually access the site is my home network, including the server the site is actually running on — the vagaries of Network Address Translation prevent me from using the external address www.chrononaut.org from my side of the DSL router. I've been running Mozilla off a box in San Francisco using an SSH port-forwarded X session, but that's even slower than this Internet thing was in 1995, and anyway Brandon probably doesn’t appreciate it when I steal all his outgoing bandwidth. Sooner or later I’ll have to set up my own internal DNS server or something, but in the mean time I'll have to brush up on my warchalking.

Also, I’m aware the site looks like crap in Internet Explorer for Windows, and that parts of it look quite odd even in Internet Explorer for Macintosh. It looks great — modulo your graphic design tastes — in Mozilla, honest. :). It also looks pretty decent in Lynx, and in any antique browser that doesn’t even try to support Cascading Style Sheets. Sometime soon I’ll risk the flashbacks and dig out some of that old browser-detection code from my SGI days, and do something about it.

Comments (17)