Chrononautic Log

April 30, 2003

Molly Ivins proposes what’s definitely the most entertaining answer yet to the question I posed here a few days ago:

If there are no WMDs, I would seriously advise this administration NOT to try to spin its way out of the problem. Bad idea. Will not fly. There’s plenty of evidence that we believed in the WMDs — took along chemical suits, antidotes, etc. So if there are no WMDs, it’s time for a blame-game witchhunt. I really hate those things, but someone needs to go around roaring, “WHOSE FAULT WAS THIS?!” It’s a splendid opportunity to fire half the CIA, which has needed to be done for years anyway. Let it be a lesson to all intelligence analysts not to let political pressure sway them on evidence.

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April 28, 2003

I’ve just started rereading Walter Jon Williams’ City on Fire. It, and Metropolitan, to which City is the sequel, would be close to the top of my list of all-time favorite books in any case; but to read City now — well, I’ll let Mr. Williams explain it.

There are a lot of revolutions and governmental restorations and so on going on in science fiction and fantasy, and it usually ends there. You overthrow the tyranny, or restore the lost king, and then everyone gets married and it’s a happy ending. No one ever has to deal with actually running a country that has been devastated, first by a hideously inefficient tyranny that’s sucking up all the available wealth, and secondly by a civil war. So that’s a lot of City on Fire's concerns, simply coping with what is essentially a Third World economy and trying to vault it over into something better while maintaining a minimum of your political idealism along the way.

[Interview, Nova Express, 1996]

Now what does that remind you of?

Anyone who thinks SF is escapist ought to put down the detective-psychologist mysteries and the 60s Southern coming-of-age stories — and, for God’s sake, the technothrillers, if you want to talk escapism — just for a week, and read these books.

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Okay, maybe Lord Whorfin and John Bigbooté aren’t part of the picture. But, nonetheless, we’re up against a world-ending catastrophe, as Planet X

will pass between the Earth and the Sun causing a pole shift in 2003. The pole shift will set off worldwide cataclysms — massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and hurricane force winds.

Planet X (now visible to the naked eye!) explains everything from SARS to global warming to giant squid:

Planet X is affecting Earth in a number of different ways as it is approaching the solar system... extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity, meteors, odd animal behaviour, unusual or rampant disease outbreaks, and other stories pertinent to earth changes.

The site also has handy tips on supplies, food, and postapocalyptic gardening. If you haven’t already started preparing for the Aftertime, you’d better get to it — the Pole Shift is due any day now.

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April 26, 2003

Courtesy of Rob, an article — I should say a disturbing article, but I guess I’m just resigned to this sort of thing — from ABC News:

To build its case for war with Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but some officials now privately acknowledge the White House had another reason for war — a global show of American power and democracy. ...

(We’ve shown the power. I’m still not sure how we’re going to go about showing the democracy. But anyway —)

If weapons of mass destruction were not the primary reason for war, what was? Here’s the answer officials and advisers gave ABCNEWS.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks changed everything, including the Bush administration's thinking about the Middle East — and not just Saddam Hussein. ...

[T]he Bush administration decided it must flex muscle to show it would fight terrorism, not just here at home and not just in Afghanistan against the Taliban, but in the Middle East, where it was thriving.

Officials said that even if Saddam had backed down and avoided war by admitting to having weapons of mass destruction, the world would have received the same message: Don't mess with the United States.

As Rob points out, this undoubtedly needs to be taken with at least one grain of salt. Whether it’s; true or not isn’t something I’m particularly interested in. I mean, I am interested, obviously, but the only way we’ll ever find out is if someone turns up hard physical evidence one way or the other. In the absence of that, I just can’t work up much enthusiasm for the argument.

What I think is significantly more interesting is that plenty of Americans would probably be totally OK with this.

And that — not the meaning of international law, or the role of the UN in world affairs, or the level of threat posed by WMDs Iraq may or may not have had — is the argument we, as a country, need to be having. We need to stop sweeping our differences under the rug and talking past each other and having our politicians say one thing to one consistituency and one thing to another. We need to publicly, and forthrightly, decide what kind of country we’re going to be.

And while I’m at it, of course I’d like a pony.

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April 25, 2003

Rumsfeld said the United States — which has promised to let Iraqis choose their own leaders — will not permit the establishment of a religious government comparable to the one in neighboring Iran.

“If you're suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn't going to happen,” Rumsfeld told The Associated Press.

[AP]

First, that’s not how Iran works. Maybe in 1983, but not now. Iran now still has some serious problems — imagine the federal judiciary hand-picked by John Ashcroft — but it’s more democratic than plenty of our so-called allies.

Second, I thought we were supposed to be establishing democracy in Iraq — real democracy, not the kind where as soon as you elect someone we don’t like, we change your regime.

Third, Rumsfeld knows both of those things.

Okay, maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe he’s expressing confidence in the political wisdom of the Iraqi people.

Or maybe he just thinks we’re stupid.

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Tim Pratt has been invited to Rio Hondo.

He is now in the unenviable position of having to figure out what to cook.

It doesn’t matter; I’m envying him anyway. Go Tim!

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It’s been a slow morning here at the Institute for Applied Chrononautics, and, now that I’ve got enough entries to archive, I’ve finally got ‘round to doing something about the archive pages. In particular, I’ve added category archives, and a master archive page listing them. Also, the icons for each entry should now take you to the appropriate category archive.

So those of you who’ve been wondering about the funny pictures can finally find out what they’re supposed to mean.

And complain about ithe system, I hope. :)

Apologies to the people running IE 6, by the way, which apparently has some weird behavior involving tables or CSS or something. I’ll hook up the Windows box again one of these days and try to do something about it.

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I already have a DVD player. I already have a region-free DVD player. And yet, I still find myself stronly tempted by this.

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April 24, 2003

Final Exam, Spin Doctoring 101: Consider the following hypothetical scenario:

In summer 2004, after more than a year of investigation, the US occupying forces conclude that all or nearly all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were destroyed well before the US invasion in March 2003. (It’s too late to suppress the information or disavow the conclusions; a copy of the investigating team’s report has already been leaked to the press.)

In your own words, compose a brief public statement for the President to make in response to the news. Extra credit if the statement is not made as part of an appearance at a military base or conservative think tank.

“He tried to fool the United Nations and did for 12 years by hiding these weapons. And so it’s going to take time to find them,” the president said at the Lima Army Tank Plant. “But we know he had them. And whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we’re going to find out the truth.”

[AP]

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We’ve all heard

one too many stories about some recluse who, when their neighbors finally got the city to act on repeated complaints about noxious odors, turned out to be living in filth and squalor with 137 live cats, all of them in pitiable condition, plus the rotting or mummified or partly cannibalized or refrigerated carcasses of an indeterminate number of dead cats.

[Pithy summary courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light]

And that seems to be pretty much the case with this guy down in Riverside, too, too.

Only in his case, it wasn’t Felis domestica. It was Felis tigris.

Sometimes, I don’t even know why I bother to make stuff up.

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April 22, 2003

I spent a couple of hours this evening trying to rustle up an author pic for Say... what time is it? and discovered that, one, I have almost no pictures of myself, and two, I like almost none of the ones I do have. (Anyone who’s studied psychology could probably have a field day with that information. Brandon, Susan: go nuts.)

I ransacked the apartment (unsuccessfully) for the original of this picture my mother took some time in ‘99 or ‘00, before Printers Inc. in Mountain View got bought out and started to suck. I dug through several boxes for my old Japanese ID, and couldn’t find that, either, though I probably wouldn’t have been able to scan it at high enough resolution.

But I did find this. It ought to do.

There are at least four lies in this picture. Among them:

1. David does not wear glasses.
2. David is not losing his hair.
3. David can juggle.

I ought to be too young to be playing this sort of game, but what the hell.

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April 21, 2003

I spent Saturday afternoon at Norwescon, hanging out with (and being relentlessly introduced to folks by) Jay Lake, attending the usual sorts of panels... and carrying a case and a half of Polyphony 2 the length of the Doubletree Hotel, in order to make sure there were copies in the dealers’ room.

While I was balancing boxes on my shoulders, a Klingon with a loose forehead complimented me on my Cardboard Man costume, but that was just par for the con. The indescribable part was the sensation of holding an actual paper book with my actual name on it and my actual words in it. People I don’t even know may be reading those words as we speak.

Gosh.

I know some of you much-published readers are already blasé about this sort of thing, but I’m not, yet.

---

UPDATE: Amazon and Powell’s, so far, only seem to have Volume 1. Which is excellent. But it doesn’t have my story in it.

UPDATE: Looks like Amazon does have Volume 2 after all.

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For those who are still wondering what Spirited Away is and why you should vote for it, go read Rob’s post.

For another view, go read Jed’s. I agree with him about the voice acting in the English dub, by the way, but I’d have to chalk most of the rest of his issues up to having the wrong expectations.

(And talking of expectations, I wasn’t nearly as happy with Two Towers as Rob. But I’m reserving judgment until I’ve seen the extended version.)

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Update: The link to Rob’s post now points directly to the entry in question. Mea culpa.

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April 18, 2003

Another year, another completely unrecognizable Hugo ballot. I was going to say that not a single one of my nominations made it, but that’s not actually true: Spirited Away, Donato Giancola, and “Presence” all made my list.

And I’m sure The Scar would have, if I hadn’t been waiting for the UK paperback edition that matches my copy of Perdido Street Station.

But still.

Apparently I read all the wrong books.

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Finally, a private manned space project I can actually believe in.

“The event is not about dreams, predictions or mockups,” Rutan explained in a pre-debut statement. “We will show actual flight hardware: an aircraft for high-altitude airborne launch, a flight-ready manned spaceship, a new, ground-tested rocket propulsion system and much more. This is not just the development of another research aircraft, but a complete manned space program with all its support elements,” he said.

Rutan makes it clear that the unveiling is not a marketing event.

“We are not seeking funding and are not selling anything. We are in the middle of an important research program…to see if manned space access can be done by other than the expensive government programs,” Rutan explained.

Given Scaled Composites’ record for achieving neat stuff, I have no doubt that if they say they’re going to put people in space, they mean it. Plus, their spaceship looks really cool.

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Update: The Scaled Composites site is no longer Slashdotted. Many more pictures, as well as a FAQ and some other stuff.

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April 16, 2003

• Catching up on “self-inflated neo-pro” gossip with Susan and Heather.
• Touring Blowfish warehouse and being intrigued by repurposing of various industrial technologies for home use.
• Getting strong dose of Cool Brittania at Susan’s favorite trendy soap shop in Union Square.
• Drinking lemonade at SF MOMA café and nearly figuring out beginning of middle of novel.
• Getting worst service ever at former favorite restaurant Park Chow on 9th. (Former due, however, not to service on this occasion, but to removal from menu of bruschetta that, at three-month intervals, served as sole source of vitamin C while living in Japan and England.)
• Finding two almost-suitable-for-mailing ING Barings post cards and one from some trendy gym in the back of The Little Shamrock on Lincoln, and deciding that I can get away with almost this trip, since everyone has Golden Gate Bridge postcards already.
• Listening to Fran’s capsule summary of domestic and international politics, pivoting on wonder at and outrage over stupidity and ignorance of “other seventy percent”. Resolving to hassle Brandon into getting Fran to start a blog.
• Waking to weather suitable only for playing video games. Discovering that Civilization monkey is still on back. Retaining enough will power not to buy Macintosh version of Civ III.
• Nearly freezing to death in Pac Bell Park while watching Giants and Dodgers alternately play beautiful and terrible baseball. (Hot dogs not bad, though.)
• Taking abuse from cabbie for leaving with game tied at top of eighth.
• Watching ninth through twelfth innings in comfort of Brandon and Fran’s living room.
• Seeing Jonathan Rhys Meyers play not particularly creepy character at all in Bend It Like Beckham. Reflecting on advantages adhering to talented actors whose faces do not appear to have rolled off Madison Avenue assembly line.
• Talking futures of scholarly communication and automobile manufacture with Brandon in car on way down to San Jose.
• Failing to interest Mom in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales.
• Failing to write post cards until en route to airport Tuesday.
• Discovering that all mail drops in San Jose airport have been removed, presumably for security reasons.
• Mailing aforementioned post cards, including two addressed to Seattle, from my apartment, in Seattle.
• With the help of gin, tonic, muttar paneer tikka masala, and considerable quantity of “World Peace” tea, clearing sinuses and finally figuring out most of beginning of middle of novel.
• Finding that combination of obsolete British safety razor (Wilkinson Sword) and trendy British shaving cream (Lush Razorantium) actually works, unlike combinations attempted last several years.

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April 9, 2003

This is not exactly news. (Teresa noted it ages ago.) But I’ve just heard that a relative of mine with perennial financial problems has decided to compound them by joining one of these things. She’s more than old enough to make her own mistakes, and maybe I should just figure it’s not my problem. But she’s got kids.

My next approach was to question the fundamental premise of multilevel marketing, the sketchy business of selling not a product, but a dream. The conversation was making Mark uncomfortable. I saw a flash of panic in his eyes before they glazed over. Then he said this: “They told us there’d be ripe apples who are ready — who see it. They told us there’d be green apples that weren’t ripe yet. And they told us there’d be rotten apples. ... You're a rotten apple,” he said. There was an uncomfortable silence. I smiled thinly and suggested we both go home.

You can make money in an MLM scheme, if you have the conscience of Al Pacino’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross and the tenacity of Alec Baldwin’s. But this relative of mine isn’t like that. She’s a ripe apple. And she’s going to get picked. Picked, peeled, sliced, steamed, boiled, and canned.

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April 7, 2003

For what it’s worth, Borges’ Library of Babel contains only 101,823,342 unique books, exclusive of those in the Crimson Hexagon.

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April 4, 2003

A transcript is up at the Federal Reserve of a lengthy speech by Alan Greenspan on the economics of intellectual property. It’s a bit dry, naturally —

In the case of physical property, we take it for granted that the ownership right should have the potential of persisting as long as the physical object itself. In the case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a different balance in recognition of the chaos that could follow from having to trace back all the thoughts implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty to the originator of each one.

— and Mr. Greenspan isn’t the world’s clearest speaker (legend has it that it took his then-girlfriend 24 hours to work out that he had in fact proposed to her).

But it’s interesting, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. And if you are, there are some gems:

According to the legends of the early American West, the only law west of the Pecos River was administered by Judge Bean. I am not sure how much law that was, but I do know that much protection of property in sparsely settled western communities just after the Civil War had to be privately provided.

— for example, and:

Ownership of physical property is capable of being defended by police, the militia, or private mercenaries. Ownership of ideas is far less easily protected.

I still think it’s a bit creepy that the entire US economy is being run by an old chum of Ayn Rand. But he’s obviously much too clear a thinker to let himself be blinded by dogma — which must be why the modern Randites aren’t exactly happy with him.

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April 3, 2003

Polyphony 2 appears to have been officially announced. (Nick Gevers over at Locus gave it an excellent review, but it’s not up on the web site.)

The cover is a deeper shade of blue than I’d expected.

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John Keegan, possibly the world’s foremost military historian, professes to be mystified by the tactics that Iraq is using, or rather not using, in the current war, or rather non-war.

What is Saddam up to? Does he believe he can inflict such casualties on the Americans outside Baghdad that they will lose heart and go home? Does he believe he can fight and win a battle of Baghdad? Did he so much underestimate his enemies that he made no proper preparations? Did he so much overestimate the importance of Franco-German protest against this war that he was persuaded he did not need to? Or is it simply that Saddam is disabled or dead and that no one of his megalomaniac determination is running the Iraqi war effort?

What I’m eerily reminded of is Cheradinine Zakalwe’s tactics in Use of Weapons. I don’t think Saddam Hussein is the general Zakalwe was, though, and I don’t think he has the Culture behind him. If he does, the Minds are playing a very deep game.

But then, they always do.

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April 2, 2003

My very good friend from high school (the one who prefers not to have his name bandied about anywhere ECHELON might notice it) once said of me that someone should pay me to design user interfaces. After several years of working in the software field I’ve lost much of my enthusiasm for the idea, largely as a result of finding that

1. no one actually gives a damn about good UI design, and
2. no matter how clueless they are, they all think they’re UI experts.

(This is not strictly true. It is, however, true of almost everywhere I’ve had the misfortune to work over the last ten years. I’m sure management at most of those places would deny the accusation, but they’ve never been willing to put their money where their mouths are. [Except Aashima Narula at RealNetworks. Aashima was great.] “Good enough” has always been good enough, even when it clearly wasn’t.)

That said, user interface design is still a minor passion of mine, and one I look forward to indulging when I retire at 35 to my horse ranch in the California wine country. (Why, yes, I did buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Why do you ask?) I still enjoy reading about it and griping about it. And I particularly enjoy articles like this one, from John Siracusa of Ars Technica, on the rise and fall of the Macintosh Finder.

The illusion was so powerful and so like the familiar physical world that the Finder itself disappeared as a separate entity. It has been said that “the interface is the computer”, meaning that the average user makes no distinction between the way he interacts with the computer and the reality of the computer's internal operation. If the interface is hard to use, the computer is hard to use, and so on. The interface is the computer.

In the days of classic Mac OS, the Finder was the interface--and, by extension, was the computer. When people raved about the Mac’s “ease of use” (especially back in the days when the Mac was home to the only mass-market personal computer GUI) what they were really raving about was the Finder. Applications may or may not have had pleasing, usable interfaces, but they were clearly “not the computer.” Applications ran on the computer. You launched applications, and then quit them. The Finder was what you saw when all the applications were closed. There was no closing the Finder. To close the Finder meant to turn off the computer. The Finder was the computer.

And, no, it wasn’t the single-tasking nature of the early Mac operating system that caused this feeling, for it continued long after the introduction of MultiFinder and, later, System 7. It was the meticulously constructed, relentlessly maintained illusion that files and folders were real, physical things existing inside the computer that you could manipulate in familiar, direct, predictable ways. [Emphasis in original]

A lot of people have excused the collapse of this illusion on the grounds that computers, and the way we use them, have “outgrown the desktop metaphor”. These people are wrong. (Or, rather, they’re missing the point. They may be right, but that’s not an excuse for crappy interfaces.) The desktop — the physical desktop — was essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. The human brain, however, appears to be here for the long haul.

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April 1, 2003

What they say...

What I think there is no question about is that when there is a democratic Iraq, and that is our goal, an Iraq that preserves the territorial integrity of that country... that truly cares for the welfare of its own people. It won't be only the people of Iraq that benefit from that; it will be the whole world and very much this region.

—— Paul Wolfowitz, July 2002

And what they mean...

Decisions on the government’s composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen [Jay] Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government, has had to accept the inclusion of a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

The most controversial of Mr Wolfowitz’s proposed appointees is Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, together with his close associates, including his nephew.

During his years in exile, Mr Chalabi has cultivated links with Congress to raise funds, and has become the Pentagon’s darling among the Iraqi opposition. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is one of his strongest supporters. The state department and the CIA, on the other hand, regard him with deep suspicion.

He has not lived in Iraq since 1956, apart from a short period organising resistance in the Kurdish north in the 1990s, and is thought to have little support in the country.

—— The Guardian, April 2003

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