Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

My desktop is a mess, so I’m cleaning it up with another link dump.

• I wanted to set up an Atom feed, but the Four Easy Steps involved downloading MT 2.65, which happens to include its own Atom template, so gee, you’d think that would be one hard step, not four easy ones.
• If you thought installing a new version of MT was bad, try Step 3, getting your webserver to serve Atom files with a new mime-type. Any step that suggests getting a better web hosting service is not an “easy” step.
• So I thought I’d try Mark Pilgrim’s Atom 0.3 template, but that requires two plugins. I don’t even know if they’re installed here, and I don’t care enough about Atom to harass my host over it.
• Atom: it’s not just a feed, it’s a way of life. If you have an Atom 0.3 template that works with MT 2.63 out of the box, please share it with me. Otherwise, I’m going to start saying nice things about Dave Winer.
• Skia is a lovely font owned by Apple - it’s a shame more people can’t use it. Abstract fonts lists it as free, but that may not be the genuine Skia. To be safe, you should get a Mac.
• Visibone has a nice browsershare survey, in case you’re curious about who can see what fonts.
• Sean Wilson has some more nice bookmarklets, which Windows people tend to call favelets.
• Although Stargate SG-1 is headed into a record-breaking eighth season, other shows are busy doing the Firefly. As everyone knows by now, the WB kicked Joss out on his Buffy-neglecting behind. If you ask me, a show can get only so far when the lead actor can’t act his way out of a paper bag.
• Speaking of which, UPN is still threatening to give Enterprise the old heave-ho.
• And while we’re on the topic of dogs (I mean Porthos, of course), the Canine Genome Project has distinguished ten families of man’s best friend.
• Scientists have been sphere-packing with M&M’s - mmm-mmm, math!
• A white dwarf star gives a whole new meaning to like a diamond in the sky.
• Did you know the Hubble recently spotted the most distant known object in the entire universe? It used gravitational lensing to see the ancient cluster of stars. But that’s not the point.
• The point is that the Hubble is going to be left to rot up there and will stop working in just a few years. Why? Because NASA has new safety regulations forbidding the astronauts from doing a space walk to the Hubble. How many times, I ask you, has a shuttle blown up because someone went on a spacewalk? Tooling around in space is the least deadly of all shuttle endeavors. If they ever launch another one of those aging behemoths again, the only thing they should be doing with it is fixing the Hubble. (If crazy people want to travel to and from the International Space Station, let them use rockets.)
• But then again, I remember the debacle at the beginning of the Hubble’s tour of duty; maybe this death-by-too-scared-to-fix-it is a fitting end to its star-crossed career.
• Speaking of star-crossed spaceships, someone found the wrong Beagle.
• Apparently, Mars really is red. Who knew?
• Which scifi writer are you? I was Heinlein, which is odd since the only thing I ever got out of him was grok.
• There’s a Speculative Literature Foundation, with nice links to resources for writers.
• Greg Egan has a home page, but only the bibliography is up-to-date.
• Barbie and Ken play Arwen and Aragorn - and I thought the movies were wonky…
• A List Apart lists cool custom css underlines.
• Speaking of lists, learn about the little-known but versatile tags for HTML definition lists
• Robert Wade lists the rules according to guys.
• Silence is for sale again at the iTunes Store.
• A nifty little app called Wiretap will let you record your own silence (OSX 10.2+).
• Dinner time: TastyBite InstantIndia, available at a Trader Joe’s near me. (Shaw’s has them way overpriced.)
• TastyBite’s store locator for Massachusetts is an entertaining example of the perils of off-shore database entry. Who knew that Massachusetts had cities like Malibu, Mamaroneck, Mayland (Wayland, Maynard, or a combination of the two?), Mlt, Mit (perhaps an indication that MIT has seceded from Cambridge), Morrissey Boulevard, Hyannis Mall, Lexington Street, Newport (RI), Narragansett (RI), Pawtucket (RI), Providence (the capital of RI), Norwalk (CT), Old Saybrook (CT), Stamford (CT), Meriden (CT), Middletown (CT), Vernon (CT), Allston Plus (is that anywhere near Lower Allston?), Franklin Plus, Mt. Auburn Plus (seceded from Cambridge and supersized), Brighton Mills (a step up for Brighton?), Porter Square (presumably named after the world-famous T stop), Newburgh, Hedley (with a Mountain Farm Mell), and “Salem, Mass” (scare quotes in original)? All out-of-state towns are listed with a genuine MA after them.

Boycott of the day: Shaw’s Supermarket

Boskone has left town, perhaps due to the biting windchill here in America’s windiest city. I enjoyed the talk on interpretations of quantum mechanics given by John G. Cramer. He’s a good speaker and must make a great professor. I had no idea he had his own: the Transactional Interpretation. I’m a pilot-wave girl myself, but I don’t know that the pilot wave survives the experiment he spoke about. Then again, the Transactional Interpretation involves time travel and we all know that leads to being a monkey’s uncle.

The session on Fermi’s Paradox (that is, if the universe is as full of alien life as Drake’s equation seems to predict, then where are they?) gave me some good ideas. I’m firmly in the they don’t exist camp, but the discussion of how likely it is that aliens would colonize the galaxy of course also applies to us, even if we are the only intelligent life in the universe.

It might take a million years to colonize the galaxy, and our current motives for doing stuff - economics and religion, mainly - don’t seem up to that kind of sustained effort. The only “human” effort that took that long was that whole Out of Africa thing. But is there really no economic incentive to spread across the galaxy? What other force besides capitalism and religion might drive people out into space? I thought the answer was obvious, but maybe that’s just me.

Recommended books:

• Schroedinger’s Kittens
• …Where is Everybody?
• Rare Earth

I almost forgot to mention that Michael A. Burstein is a very funny guy.

It’s not often I get to be one of the least geeky of a room full of people. In fact, it’s only at cons. This year’s guest of honor at Boskone is Stephen Baxter, who doesn’t have the axen to grind that David Brin had. I’m looking forward to next year, though, when we get Orson Scott Card. September brings Noreascon to town, but the price is steep. There’s only so much I’m willing to pay to be one of the least geeky people in a room.

Mac hint of the day: View any number of days in iCal

It’s that time of year again, when local fen spend Valentine’s Day at Boskone. If you’re in Boston and you want to see off-line fandom in the flesh, stop by for a day. Sunday is cheapest. The preliminary schedule is already up.

It’s the middle of the night and I’ve been up geeking. As a result, there’s a new version of the color wheel that saves all your colors in a hidden list. Click “show full list” to see them all. Many thanks to Nate Steiner for the suggestion, and to Nicolas Taffin for the French translation.

I’ve also tried to explain the web-safe/web-smart/unsafe colors and provide some other fun and useful color links on the new color index page.

Security Fence of the Day: in Saudi Arabia.

I’ve never had much use for AppleScript, but a couple of MacOSXHints today used it and one intrigued me: dumbing the clipboard down to plain text. With that script, if I’m reading something in a Really Big Purple Font in Safari and want to cut and paste it into iChat, I can turn it into plain black text and it will come out the normal size. There was also a clunky script to toggle image loading in Safari. Other scripts in the Apple Safari AppleScript collection are more appealing - window-resizing ones like the javascript bookmarklets I mentioned a few posts back, and my personal favorite, Combine Windows, a script that takes all your open Safari windows and merges them into one window with tabs. It’s very handy for sites that insist on opening links in new windows.

The AppleScript menu isn’t on by default, but this page makes it easy to set up. Some of the Safari scripts require that you turn on GUI scripting, which as far as I can tell just means checking the “Enable access for assistive devices” checkbox in the Universal Access system preference pane. You can download collections of AppleScripts for other scriptable programs from Apple.

While I’m geeking, I should mention some other Mac links I’ve come across lately:

• SideTrack, a trackpad driver that adds scrolling to your trackpad - I’m using just the vertical scrolling and I haven’t had a kernel panic yet
• A MacDevCenter article on doing backups without commercial backup software
• MacDevCenter on building your own browser with WebKit
• MacDevCenter on LaTeX for MacOS X
• HandBrake, DVD ripping software for the Mac - see also the latest DivX macosxhint
• Folding@home for the Mac

Birthday of the day: Happy Birthday, Rocky!

Since the sudden and unexpected demise of my Baby Ben alarm clock, I’ve been wondering whether the ever-versatile Mac could replace yet another home appliance. Apparently, it can. The simplest way to do it is to use Schedule tab of the Energy Saver preferences to set the Mac to start up at a certain time. There are certain disadvantages to this approach, though: you have to shut the mac down if you want to start it up again (and if you need to reboot your computer every day, you may as well be running Windows), and the actual behavior of the mac on starting up depends on how you have it configured. I have my login screen on, so the most I get from starting up in the morning is the startup tone. On the other hand, if you log in automatically and allow Quicktime to autorun, you can play an mp3 or some such. Detailed instructions for this approach are at Low End Mac.

Making an alarm clock that will wake your mac from sleep in order to wake you from sleep is harder. Like people, macs normally require an external stimulus to wake up - keyboard input, a phone call, administrative access by ethernet, etc. Alarm clock programs work around this difficulty by either requiring you to keep your mac awake the whole time (Alarm Clock S.E., iRooster), or by using the BSD subsystem to wake the mac up from sleep (Alarm Clock Pro). The latter is apparently what the shareware program iAlarm does as well, though details are scarce - iAlarm may just be feigning sleep.

Judging from the flaky interface of Alarm Clock Pro’s Wake from Sleep menu item, and the flakiness rumors about iAlarm, I’d say that using the BSD subsystem to wake from sleep is an iffy venture at best. I’ll see how it works out.

Link of the day: The Aether - A Reasonably Complex Guide To Special Relativity

I’m not sure whether I mentioned before that I don’t believe in dark matter. The Dark Matter Skeptics came out of the woodwork to challenge the Dark Matter Mafia at Slashdot. My favorite comment was about the Dark Matter Zombies, but the most useful one pointed me to the MOND pages.

According to the FAQ, MOND stands for MOdified Newtonian Dynamics. It is a modification of the usual Newtonian force law hypothesized in 1983 by Moti Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute as an alternative to Dark Matter. That is to say, there’s no dark matter out there. What’s actually happening is that gravity behaves differently at very small accelerations. So far it’s mostly ad hoc, but no more so than filling the universe with dark matter no one has ever seen.

Which would you rather have, variable gravity or heavy aether?

Quote of the day: We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. –John Adams, 1798

As you may know, our own Senator Kerry, the non-Irishman, has come out against gay marriage. The legislature is working on that Constitutional amendment to define marriage. I’m thinking it’s time to move to a state where they already know what marriage is. Then again, the gallantry would probably follow me there.

I’ve been following a kerfluffle about a writer who mentioned an unfavorable review to her fans, who in turn went forth and challenged the review. The kerfluffle itself is fairly simple - I’d never tell my mailing list about an unfavorable review. I think it’s iffy enough telling them about contests I’m entered in (because the implication is go and vote for me), but I figure that if they like my fic they’d like similar fic. It’s a public service announcement.

The kerfluffle led to a couple of discussions of what a Mary Sue is. Everyone can spot your basic Flaming Mary Sue: purple eyes, flowing locks, super powers, beloved by all, saves the ship, dies tragically at the end, etc., etc. But other definitions of Mary Sue are more controversial. To some people, any OC is a Mary Sue (or if male, a Marty Stu) by analogy, because all OC’s detract from the canon characters to some extent, just as Flaming Mary Sue supersedes the canon characters in all respects.

To me, canon characters can themselves be Mary Sues: when Seven saves the ship without needing anyone else’s help, she’s a Mary Sue for Brannon Braga. He didn’t want to deal with an ensemble show, so he tossed Seven in there and everything after that happened in relation to her. Likewise Wesley Crusher, to whom Gene Roddenberry gave Marty Stu superpowers so that eventually he had to ascend to a higher plane of geeking. And that’s just in canon - fanfic writers can also take the canon characters and turn them into authorial insertions.

Speaking of which, I don’t consider “authorial insertion” to be the primary definition of Mary Sue, and for that reason I don’ t think Yenta Sue (the name is from Rana Bob’s Field Guide to Mary Sues), the matchmaking Mary Sue of slash fandom, is a Mary Sue at all, unless she befriends all and saves the ship while she’s matchmaking. I’ve written too many matchmakers into my fic (both alien and canon characters) to disown them now as Mary Sues.

Yenta Sue is clearly an authorial insertion. My purpose in writing schmoop fic is to match up two characters (of opposite sex, but I don’t think the slash case differs in any important respect). Anyone who participates in the matchmaking activity, be it Tom Paris or Seven of Nine or Q or a convenient planetful of matchmaking aliens is acting transparently on my behalf as author. Calling Yenta Sue Crewman Pereira or Jemiminika the Alien doesn’t make much difference.

You might say that Jemiminika the Purple-eyed Alien is an authorial insertion while Tom Paris is not, but I don’t have purple eyes or superpowers and I don’t save the planet on a regular (or even semi-regular) basis. Real authorial insertion isn’t that common in fandom, though you do find the authorial narrative voice in those annoying inline notes (i.e., Isn’t Legolas SO cute!!!) and author-turned-character in I’m Janeway’s Teenage Daughter fics.

So there are three different sorts of Sue here:

1. Flaming Mary Sue: the impossibly perfect character
2. Yenta Sue: the character who acts on the author’s behalf
3. Me Sue: the direct authorial insertion

I don’t think they overlap nearly as much as they’re made out to. Of all of them, only Flaming Mary Sue is prima facie bad writing, because the character is by definition all out of proportion to the milieu and genre. Yenta Sue is merely a stock character there to push the plot along. Me Sue could be anywhere - how would you know? Do you know the author so well that you can tell when she appears in her own fic? I don’t.