Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Educational movie of the day: the famous Italian Electron Interference Movie

Today’s reviews are of two of my least favorite books by two of my favorite sci-fi authors, Walter Jon Williams and Greg Egan. It’s always sad when good authors go bad. Fortunately, they haven’t jumped the shark, just overtaxed the genre.

Days of Atonement by Walter Jon Williams is a gritty cop novel with more religion in it than sci-fi. It’s a great “police procedural,” if that term means gritty cop novel and isn’t just more false advertising from the cover blurbs. The science fiction comes into the Gritty Cop’s depressed mining town by way of a high tech company and a suspicious disappearance. Physics is involved, but it’s way beyond Gritty Cop’s understanding. This is sci-fi the way a mundane might see it - maybe I’ll pass my copy on to my mother.

If Days of Atonement is short on the sci, Schild’s Ladder lacks something of the fi. Greg Egan’s characters are immortal and immutable - the extraordinary events seem to leave the leads untouched. Though that hardly distinguishes them from, say, Larry Niven’s characters, it’s a step backwards from my personal favorite of his, Distress. The scence was out of control from the get-go - I know more than most readers about loop quantum gravity and graph theory, so if I had trouble following it I pity the average reader picking Schild’s Ladder up for fun.

If you can get past the heavy going at the start, though, the middle of the novel is the best part. There’s research and conflict and a flashback to the lead’s childhood that would make a nice short story. The final third gets into ththe wild handwaving that seems unavoidable at this level of physics. It was pretty, but more like fantasy than WJW’s alleged fantasy, Metropolitan. Sometimes I enjoy that sort of thing, but after the extra-hard science at the start I was still in trying-to-understand mode so it just annoyed me.

Maybe that’s just me.

Haiku of the day: T haiku

I can’t believe I re-read the whole thing. There’s something gratifying about having written something that takes hours to read, even if a third of it is raw, undisguised info-dump and nothing of note happens for the first 20,000 words or so.

On a dark day of NaNoWriMo an extra year got inserted into the narrative, and now I think that year must go. I have no subplot to fill it, and my pivotal event needs to happen earlier on. That means that two years must now become one, and not end-to-end but simultaneously. I think index cards are in order.

On the geek side, I downloaded a 4mb IPA symbols package for LaTeX (tipa) for the sake of one schwa (ə) buried deep in an infodump. I’m not counting that towards my 50 hours of editing, though.

/. of the day: The Disposable Computer - the comments are in rare form.

My typing is only getting worse, despite the best advice no money can buy. To reassure myself that it’s all worthwhile, I’ve been reading random Dvorak pages. I even found one with up-to-date switching info.

You know what they say: those who can’t write, edit. So despite the late start, I’ve decided to do NaNoEdMo. I do like my NaNoNovel and the theme (a society fracturing over irreconcilable differences) seems even more timely than it did in November. Paper and pencil sounds good right now.

Just as an aside, never try to use Earthlink’s chat support option. The people at the other end (India?) are useless, and it spontaneously disconnects in Safari (FireFox is fine).

Quote of the day: It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. –Thomas Jefferson

I’m still typing slowly on the Dvorak keyboard, but I did have one breakthrough. My text editor emacs uses lots of control characters which moved around with the rest of my scrambled keys and are now harder to reach. I could just use the standard mac keys instead, but the command key isn’t all that well-placed, either.

Oh for the days when I had my own (abandoned) sun sparc with the control key where the caps lock usually is! There’s a useless key taking up far too much real estate on non-Suns. SHOUTING IS NEVER NECESSARY.

But then I remembed that all things are possible to those who use macs. The answer to misplaced control keys is uControl. My keyboard is now optimally configured; it’s just the typist who’s behind the times.

[P.S.] I ended up doing the mac keys as well, and they’re very convenient. Finally, command-C and command-V in emacs, not to mention command-W and command-Z! The full instructions are at webweavertech.

Shell of the day: bash

I’ve been playing with mac fractal freeware for years, and Mandelbrot on Cocoa is far and away the coolest program I’ve seen yet. Don’t even try to read the instructions - they’re pretty much still in the original Japanese. Just select an area with the mouse, then hit “run.” OS 10.2 is required.

Secession of the day: Killington, Vermont

Here it is, my first Dvorak entry, for which I’m typing very slowly. I tested myself on QWERTY before the big switch and my speed was 80-90 wpm. According to gtypist, I’m already roaring along at 20 wpm on the Dvorak keyboard. Somehow it doesn’t feel anywhere near as fast as 1/4 my normal speed.

So typing like the tortoise gives me plenty of time to contemplate why I’m torturing myself this way. Though the fastest typist ever reached a top speed of 212 wpm (with a 150-170 cruising speed, all on the Dvorak keyboard, of course), I think 80 wpm is reasonable for us mere mortals. I’m more concerned with reducing my typo rate and saving my endangered carpal tunnel than with increasing speed. And it just seems wrong and unmac-like to use a keyboard designed for inefficiency when a better one is just a click away.

Contest of the month: the ASC Awards

On Mike’s advice I read Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block. I think I’ve read them all now, because none of his advice sounded new or intriguing. Since the book is a collection of Writer’s Digest columns, it didn’t exactly flow or cohere like other writing books I’ve read (not that there have been that many). It’s definitely a genre-writing sort of a book - not that there’s anything wrong with that - by an author who openly confesses to cranking out pulp erotica for the money. I think it covered all the bases, but the overall tone of the book, IMHO, was one of Orson Scott Card as played by Polonius.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve heard all the advice before, so it’s hard for me to imagine how other writers can be surprised by, for example, the usual and customary advice against overuse of adjectives and adverbs.

Free software of the day: GNU typist

Late last week I figured out that tomorrow, and not today, was the first of March, meaning that I had the whole weekend to finish a couple of sci-fi contest entries due then. The stories are more or less done, though my revisions were interrupted when I re-read the rules and realized that I needed to get my name off the submission. That little technical hurdle has now been jumped.

NaNoEdMo starts tomorrow, and I’m not ready to face my November Disaster yet. It’s only an hour a day, though, so maybe I’ll do it this year. Last NaNoEdMo was a complete wash for me.

On the Stargate side, I finally saw “Chimera” and enjoyed it, though, again, there wasn’t nearly enough Jack. I don’t know why everyone was upset about Sam telling all to Pete - obviously she wouldn’t give out classified information without clearance right in the infirmary under the security cameras. Pete was cuter than the screenshots led me to believe, although still kind of chubby in the suit. Was it just me, or did Sam look guilty when he said “It’s nice to know that people still stay together no matter what, isn’t it?” I certainly felt guilty on her hussy behalf, although otherwise they were just too happy together for me to feel the typical Ex-JetCer In The Hands Of The Cruel PTB anger. I almost feel guilty plotting to break them up in fanfic…almost.

I’ve decided to go back to the Dvorak keyboard, since my typing is only getting worse in my old age. I need a keyboard that was designed to help people type fast, not impede them. Most sites about it are too old to cover MacOS X, for which there are two Dvorak keyboard options available from the International System Preferences pane under the Input Menu tab. Be sure to check the box for “Show input menu in menu bar” so you can switch back and forth easily. For a typing tutor, I downloaded and built gtypist (link above) without any difficulty, though it’s possible you might have to grab ncurses with fink if you don’t have it installed already. I’ll make a note of it when the first Dvorak-typed blog entry appears.

Jade was having IE problems, so I downloaded FireFox in solidarity with her. I noticed it colors my XML links as html links, wiping out the pretty colors from my XML CSS stylesheet. I hope the new Camino, coming soon, doesn’t do the same. I really wish Safari could handle XML links, no matter how it colored them.

Jade also complained about my dark salmon background, so I added a style shutoff at the top of the sidebar: Turn Style Off. It’s a javascript link that I’d like to include on all my pages, but I’m not sure where I’d put it. At the moment it isn’t persistent, either - you’ll have to turn the style off whenever you visit, if you want it off. The function itself (OffCSS) is simple; you can get the code by viewing the source for this page.

I was just answering a comment on my last post, to the effect that polygamy is the next item down the slippery slope of gay marriage. My answer was that I don’t believe it is. The natural extention of a right for any two unrelated people to get married, regardless of gender, is not the right of any three, four, five people to marry, nor even the right to marry one’s livestock, but the right of any two related people to get married.

So having nothing more controversial to talk about, and not wanting such an entertaining observation to be lost forever in comments, I figured I’d go on in this vein. Despite its status as one of the world’s oldest taboos, incest doesn’t really arouse any passions in the average person. And that’s odd. If I had to guess, I’d say that there are more incestuous desires out there in the world than homosexual ones.

For example, Veronica once had her eye on a male first cousin of ours - a relationship considered incestuous in over 30 of the 50 states. Not ours, fortunately, but he was about 20 years older than her so twue luv was unlikely to conquer all in their case. Many entirely non-consanguinous relationships have traditionally been considered incestuous, and not just in the law but in the court of common opinion - for example, Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon Yi, which was doubly non-consanguinous. (That is, Soon Yi wasn’t related by blood to either Woody Allen or Mia Farrow.)

Woody Allen notwithstanding, people do go to jail over incest, even without consanguinity. Consider the case of a woman and her teenage foster child, with issue, the Alabama love story of a father who claims his wife isn’t his daughter, and the case a while back of two siblings separated at a young age by the foster care system who claimed not to have known they were related at the time of their marriage, and continued to have children with medical problems after being found out and ordered to separate. I think the brother ended up in jail. (If you have a link for that one, I’d love to see it - I don’t remember if they were full or half-siblings.)

Someday the woman’s foster son will reach majority, and the woman will get out of jail. He wants to live with her and raise their two children. As in other incidents of non-consanguinous incest, it’s hard to see how the state can split these people up in light of the sweet-mystery clause. How can any non-consanguinous incest statute stand up to that?

Now, consider the six states where first cousins may marry if they’re infertile. That’s an open admission that incest laws are about not just consanguinity, but the likelihood of producing defective offspring. What then should be the policy in cases where reproduction is not just personally unfeasible, but biologically impossible? That is to say, what of gay incestuous marriage? What if a homosexual man wants to marry his brother, his son, a nephew, or a first cousin? Presumably, he can marry his male first cousin in those six states that permit infertile cousins to wed (AZ, ME, IL, IN, UT, WI).

That is, however, an artifact of the English language, in which cousin is a neutral term. For all other homosexual incestuous couples, the legality of their incest will depend entirely on how the incest law of the particular state is phrased. In Maryland, for example, the law specifies that a man cannot marry his daughter nor a woman her son, but no mention is made of a man marrying his son. A minority of states phrase their incest laws not as a catalogue of forbidden relationships but as a formula, such as Louisiana’s: Incest is the marriage to, or sexual intercourse with, any ascendant or descendant, brother or sister, uncle or niece, aunt or nephew, with knowledge of their relationship.

So the legality of gay incestuous marriage would depend on the exact phrasing of the law in any particular state. I find this sort of thing fascinating in and of itself, but thinking about it has shown me how homosexual marriage makes nonsense of the current marriage laws - in the sense that it brings new laws into being (regarding gay incestuous marriage) which no one intended by their original phrasing of their incest statutes.

In the latest gay marriage news, the mayor of New Paltz is getting in on the act that started in San Francisco. Compare these upstart cities with peaceful Cambridge across the river, still waiting patiently for D-Day. Whatever else you can say about the state of marriage in Massachusetts, at least we’re following our own laws.

It’s easy to dismiss the actions of these rogue mayors as frustration that they don’t reign in Massachusetts, and more specificially in the Massachusetts of a few months from now. It’s even easier to call it civil disobedience, as if the term meant the disobedience of entire cities. But that’s not what’s going on here. You have to be a civilian to practice civil disobedience, or if you happen to be an official of the state, you have to civilly disobey in your free time. When a mayor flouts the law, what we have is rex lex, our rulers making our laws, rather than lex rex, obeying our laws.

If a couple of mayors out in the heartland somewhere took it upon themselves to, say, close abortion clinics because in their personal opinions their state constitutions (or the federal one) gave all citizens the right to life, etc., etc., people would be shouting lex rex left and right. Right now, millions of people who personally believe abortion is murder are letting it go on purely out of respect for the rule of law.

We can only live together for so long when the law applies to some people but not to others - probably only until the other people realize that they signed a social contract for lex rex and instead got rex lex.