There's no money in the "Star Trek" universe. We never learn what they do instead of money, though. They clearly still have scarcity of resources, at minimum time, energy, people, and interest in dull jobs. How do they allocate these limited resources to satisfy their needs? They never tell us, they just say there's no money and leave it at that.
I have subscribed to HBO and Starz/Encore. That costs $25/month, which is wikkid expensive, unless you're only doing it for a month. See, I have 140 hours of capacity on my Tivo now, and those two channels are showing at least 30 movies that we want to see. I can fill up my Tivo with movies to watch later. Less than a buck a movie is pretty good.
Have you noticed how car rental companies assume that a rental car customer will always prefer the larger vehicle? For one thing, they cost more. For another, if you reserve a compact car, and they don't have one available, they'll give you larger vehicle, even a large SUV. Never mind that they're harder to drive and burn more gas. I don't blame the rental companies; I think this reflects the preferences of their customer base. Our wasteful ways are subtle and pervasive.
I guess it's nice that compact fluorescent bulbs save energy, but mainly I like them because I can get a lot of light. The maximium wattage limits on fixtures are because of heat, not light output. A fixture limited to 40 W can take a CFL with the same light output as a 150 W CFL because what matters is that it's only 40 W worth of heat (sort of). That's pretty bright.
Among the 88 Precepts of neo-Nazi white nationalist David Lane you will find number 11: "Truth requires little explanation. Therefore, beware of verbose doctrines. The great principles are revealed in brevity." 88 precepts, mind you.
We ditched Uma and went to see the film adaptation of "The Namesake" this weekend. In a word, it was disappointing. In more words, it was a 3-hour movie excessively trimmed in the editing room to an unhealthily skinny 2 hours. There was little development, and the movie shifted times, places, and situations abruptly. There were several sub-plots that were introduced and then unceremoniously dropped without explanation. A few of the performances could have been better (Kal Penn) and director Mira Nair indulged in some gratuitous tricks, but by far the problem was that too much was left out. I realize that it's a near impossibility for a director to faithfully bring Jhumpa Lahiri's evocative descriptions and affecting prose to the big screen, but that's not where this movie failed. At times, Nair managed to hit the right notes, such as conveying the crushing loneliness of an immigrant housewife in a cold, isolated home in a foreign country. For every such scene, though, there were a handful more that missed their mark because the pacing was off and the transitions nonexistent. While it couldn't be perfect, it could have been a lot better.
A lot of websites use Javascript auto-focus to save you the click to put your input cursor into the right form field. The problem is that you might have already gotten there if the site load is slow. That's because the Javascript to set the focus usually runs only when the page has completely loaded. As the page is loading, you click your mouse pointer on the input field and start typing. When the page finishes loading, the script runs and moves the pointer to the input field where you're already typing. Sometimes this will delete what you've already typed, while other times you may end up typing the second part of your input in front of the first part. Either way, the fix is simple: don't set focus if the value in the input field has changed.
I keep reading. One of the books I read was Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives," a surprising mix of Lovecraftian horror with a spy thriller via "Office Space." Strange though it may sound, it really works. The book is actually a combination of two stories with the same characters and setting. You can read an excerpt from the first story, The Atrocity Archive, the whole second story, The Concrete Jungle, and A Colder War, a similar story with different characters and a somewhat different backdrop.
I read another 2 story collection, this time by Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Chasm City. "Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days" is the two-part title, each being the title of one of the stories. "Diamond Dogs" is the story of a mission of discovery concerning a bizarre and deadly artifact on a distant planet. "Turquoise Days" concerns a human colony on an isolated world shared with a semi-sentient alien life that receives some unexpected visitors. Of the two, "Diamond Dogs" is definitely the better one, as good as Reynolds's full-length novels.
Somewhere in there I fit Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," a novel of two men seeking to return magic to an alternate England in time of the Napoleonic Wars. This book won a lot of awards, but I'm not sure why. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. It took a long time to get going. Clarke certainly was effective in establishing the setting, with an extensive fictional backdrop, skillful use of contemporary language, and excellent descriptions. Overall, I just didn't find the whole all that compelling.
I also read Neal Asher's "Skinner," another science fiction one. Based on this and his later book, Cowl, I think he needs to work on his characters. There's no connection there, no depth, they're just pawns to move through the story. That said, the story itself is interesting. Three travellers land on an Earth-like planet teeming with dangerous life forms, getting caught up in the final resolution of a conflict hundreds of years before.
Finally, I read a book that was neither science fiction nor fantasy, Tom Perrotta's "Little Children" (basis for the recent movie starring Kate Winslet), about the affair between a stay-at-home mother and a stay-at-home father. This was also a good but not great book. Some of Perrotta's writing is pitch perfect, including the bizarre and often frustrating behavior of young children, the silly pettiness of small lives, and the angst of suburbia. His writing is funny and insightful, with well-developed, flawed characters depicted honestly but without judgment. As an overall story, I think he erred in broadening his scope to include additional characters from the neighborhood, losing the focus on what I saw as the core of the story, the affair. Nevertheless, writing skill and a keen awareness of modern life make this a book worth recommending.
The New York Times Magazine has an article about how animal shelters are trying harder to make adoptions work, featuring Austin's own Town Lake Animal Shelter, which is where our dog Molly came from.
Research shows that breast-fed children are less likely to be obese when they're older than formula-fed children. I have a hypothesis to explain part of it: there's no gauge on a breast telling you how much is left. When I feed Uma, I get a little goal-oriented. I want her to finish what's on her plate, especially if it's only a little bit. I recognized that as bad, and I'm a lot better now than I was before
1
. Naturally, I assume that everyone has that same instinct. It's easy to tell when a bottle is empty, and I think a lot of people have a reluctance to throw away perfectly good formula
2
. I suggest that doing so teaches babies and toddlers to ignore their bodies' satiety signals, so that they continue eating until they're full. That lack of sensitivity to being full probably sticks around, so they're more likely to overeat when they're older, too. I figure a way to test this would be to compare children whose breast milk is "directly-sourced" to those whose mothers pump and feed them with bottles.
1
It's not like she chose how much to put on the plate, after all; it's not her fault there's waste.
I finished Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series last weekend. The series is named after the two main characters, Jack Aubrey, an officer in the Royal Navy, and his friend Stephen Maturin, a physician and naturalist. The 20 books that make up the series take place during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. The movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" that came out a few years ago was mostly based on a few of the books (at least 3 by my count). I liked the movie well enough, and it was certainly realistic, but it was a three star movie and these are four star books.
O'Brian writes in a style that fits the era, and he has a talent for exquisite description. He knows his characters very well, and writes them as real people, not pawns for advancing the story. Much of the plot arc depends on the technical details of sailing, which might be off-putting to some, but it also emphasizes the degree to which sailors were at the mercy of the weather. It's simply amazing what sophisticated things they were able to accomplish in this pre-Industrial time, when missions ran for years thousands of miles from any friendly port, and out of communication for months at a time. Then there's the unsettlingly primitive nature of other things, which is amply illustrated by one of the characters being a physician; what passed for medicine in 1810 is scary. It's not just about sailing; a few of the books take place with practically no ships, and much of the plot often concerns the personal or political. Using the Royal Navy as a centerpiece also affords an author ample opportunity for teaching us about the world of that time, when colonialism was still strong, but the earthquakes of the American and French Revolutions were shifting the world's foundations, and there was still much to be explored and discovered. Then there are the insights into the bizarre politics of the day, that odd mixture of democracy and monarchy and corruption that created the British Empire.
To be sure, it can be a little confusing at times, as a lot of the language is nautical (Wikipedia can tell you a lot, though), and even when it isn't, it's 19th century British English. However, all of that is necessary for O'Brian to pull you into the time and place, which he does really, really well. I do wish each book devoted a dozen pages to maps and diagrams, however, and another dozen to a glossary.
There were actually more than 20 books. O'Brian died at the ripe old age of 80 when he was 3 chapters into the 21st book. A word of advice: don't start a long series of novels when you're 56 years old, because you're going to piss off a lot of people if you die before you finish (not that he expected to write 20 when he started). I get annoyed when the estates of famous writers like Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert flog their works and turn out sequels to series that were done and done when their creators were still alive. This is different. O'Brian ended in the middle of a book, and clearly the story had legs. I don't know which author could write the way O'Brian did and do justice to his vision, but I sure want more.
Sitcoms are notorious for all having the same basic characters. There's the funny one, the neurotic one, the vain one, the ditzy one, the weird one, etc. I'm starting to think that it's not so much a lack of imagination as it is being true to reality. The key concept here is "adaptive radiation," taken from evolutionary biology. Basically, in adaptive radiation, what happens is that a single species will fracture to fill available ecological niches over time, no matter what the starting point. Darwin's Galapagos finches are the prototypical example.
I've noticed something similar in people. You'd think that the student population of Rice is all nerds. You'd be mostly right, if you were comparing against the general population, and yet Rice had the same groups as any other university or even high school. There were the jocks, the stoners, the goths, the earnest thespians, etc. Even though Rice had higher admissions standards, there were still variations along the axes secondary to selection for entry. These became more pronounced over time once the academic attributes were more normalized. You may have distinguished yourself as the smart guy in high school, but in a place where most everyone was smart, you branched out (possibly by being extra smart).
I figure the same thing happens in social groups. Once you factor out the common ingredient that brought you together, "the other stuff" becomes more significant. Furthermore, there's an inevitable conflict that will usually keep two people from occupying the same niche. The loser either finds a different niche or leaves the group entirely. These roles are not fixed to the person, but rather to the group; a single person could be the funny one in one group and the smart one in a different one. This subtle jockeying tends to shake out similarly across social groups, no matter their nucleus. Thus, you inevitably end up with the funny one, the neurotic one, the vain one, the ditzy one, and the weird one in every group.