MemeMachineGo!

Routinely, in discussions about unauthorized reproduction, someone will get huffy about using "pirate" to describe a copyright violator instead of an armed robber at sea.

But book piracy is as old as novels. Don Quixote had an unauthorized sequel out before Cervantes' own (like Harry Potter much later.) And the term "pirate" in this sense is as old. The OED says:

I'll accept this usage of "pirate."

Some cavillers more specifically object to "pirate" to describe someone who acquires copies known to be unauthorized (e.g., by downloading them) as opposed to those distributing them (e.g., by making them available for download.) But anyone using torrents or most other P2P software is implicitly both. I'm not sure how useful it is to draw a distinction.

This weekend, I finally installed my coat hanger antenna in my attic for better reception, in time for the Lost premiere tonight. If I were any more excited, I'd be getting fitted for a Dharma jumpsuit and preparing Dharma snacks.

Lost might be the most complicated tv show ever, but rest easy: anything you've forgotten, anything you never noticed, and even connections I don't doubt were a surprise to the creators is likely to be found in the Lostpedia.

Mild spoilers for the already broadcast five seasons below.

Continue reading "It's all about the Lost premiere, baby" »

A little while ago, I lamented the ongoing deaths of Berkeley's bookstores. So I'd like to take the chance to actually celebrate some good news. Black Oak Books is back in a new location (and an easy walk from my house.)

I was there today. The staff is still unloading boxes, and look to have a lot of work cut out for them. But it's shaping up to be a nice place.

My flight home from my Xmas travels was purchased with frequent flier miles. For whatever airline pricing logic reason, first class and coach cost the same number of miles. So, for the first time ever, I flew first class.

I will now sound like the rubiest rube to ever fall off a turnip truck.

We were seated first, of course, and could get comfortable while everyone else was still milling about at the gate. There was no concern about whether there'd be space for my carry-on bags. A flight attendant asked if he could check my coat.

The seats are as much better than coach as they always looked. There's elbow room, leg room, and you can actually make it through the flight without touching your neighbor. I could cross my legs. The person on the inside could get past the person on the outside as easily as at a decent movie theatre.

There seemed to be two flight attendants assigned just to the 16 of us in first class. Before lunch, one of them came through with hot towels to wipe our hands with. Then we were asked about salad dressing and whether we'd like the seafood appetizer for the first course. They were served with real metal silverware.

We had a choice of three things for the meal, one of which was vegetarian. In coach, your choice was a turkey sandwich.

For the first time ever on a plane, I didn't have my own water but remained adequately hydrated, because they kept offering us drinks. They served them in real glasses, about twice the volume of the plastic cups in coach.

The dedicated bathroom meant no line. But it wasn't any different from a coach bathroom (and even with only the few of us, it was kind of nasty by the end of the flight.)

Another lack of difference from coach was that the entertainment options were the same fixed programming on the same crappy little lcd screens hanging from the ceiling, too close or too far for half of everyone. I watched an episode of "Big Bang Theory" and otherwise stuck to reading and a crossword puzzle.

In what seemed almost like a parody of what one might imagine first class to be, the flight attendants came through and took ice cream sundae orders. It wasn't an especially good sundae, but like the dog walking on his hind legs, you are surprised to find it done at all.

Toward the end, my jacket was returned to me, and we were first off.

I hadn't realized it for a while, but across the aisle from me was Lewis Black, off to do a New Year's Eve show in San Rafael.

I figured it would make flying suck less. The big surprise was that it made flying not suck.

Pity I'm not rich and it's back to coach for me.

It tickles me no end that the condescending UNIX user Dilbert strip is on the cover of the 2d edition of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment.

Everyone who's ever had a cat knows of their unflagging interest in anything new, anything their person is paying attention to, and boxes. So it's little wonder that one would make its way into a tech reviewer's photos of unboxing things:

Related phenomena can be seen at Cat in a box.

German for oral contraceptive is die Antibabypille.

=v= My first encounter with beer was in Germany, as an exchange student, and when I got back home I couldn't believe how weak American beers were. So I pretty much ignored the stuff, for years. Little did I know, there was a craft beer revolution in the works. I got some inkling of this in Boston, when Samuel Adams (the beer, not the patriot) got underway, but when I moved to California the quality plummeted -- turns out it's an entirely different brewery, and beer, on the West Coast.

Later I visited Ireland and was gobsmacked at how good the Guinness was when it was local and fresh. This was, of course, followed by another buzzkill disappointment when I got back to the States and tasted the imported version. This time, though, my inklings were of the locavore variety and I discovered the virtues of Steelhead Stout. It was my introduction to the craft beer revolution.

The fine folks at Grand Teton Brewing Co. are putting out four "cellar reserve" beers this year, in honor of the four ingredients mandated by Germany's Reinheitsgebot: hops, barley, water and yeast. Each beer is supposed to honor one of the four ingredients.

I think I'll be skipping the beer that honors water. After all, that would be kind of exactly like the type of American beer I've been avoiding all these years.

"There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. ARRRRRR!" Thomas Paine was a pirate.

In his autobiography, Ben Franklin was fairly candid about having been a whoremonger. See anyone in public life today say that.

From its earliest days, Harvard's student body included Native Americans, with at least two Native Americans known to have attended prior to 1650. Only one graduated in the 17th century (in 1665.) The Indian College printing press printed the first bible in North America, translated into Wampanoag by a Puritan missionary, John Eliot (who invented his own transliteration, as the Wampanoags didn't have a writing system.)

Yesterday, looking at UC Berkeley's Campanile, I at least half-convinced myself that campus must derive from place where there's a bell tower.

That's hooey, of course. campus is Latin for "field." Campanile is simply Italian for "bell tower", from th Italian for "bell", campana. It appears to be disputed whether campana comes from the Latin Campania, "land of fields", for the region of Italy that includes Naples, purportedly the home of Italy's first bell foundry.

If we were to assume that we knew campana was unrelated to campus, is there a word for the relationship between the English words campus and campanile? Two things that appear to have a common root but don't? They're not false friends or false cognates.

Though it remains illegal for U.S. citizens to spend money in Cuba, per the terms of the Platt Amendment (re-affirmed in the 1934 Treaty of Relations) the U.S. government writes a $4,085 check to the Cuban government annually to pay the rent on Guantanamo Bay.

Since 1959, Cuba has refused to cash the check. Castro's government cashed the first it received in the confusion of their early days.

In an old school technique of duplicate verification, contracts were written in duplicate or triplicate on the same piece of paper, then cut apart with an arbitrary jagged or wavy pattern. If the two parts fit, you knew they were from the same original. From the toothed pattern, the contracts were called "indentures", hence "indentured servants."

I'd always assumed "plantations" were so-called because they were places where things were planted. And while the OED has citations for that sense dating as far back as 1569, its use to describe the English plantations in Ireland and North America derives from their being an implantation of settlers.

I've often heard Murray Leinster credited with having foreseen home PCs and the Internet better than the rest of the sf field till John Brunner. But somehow I'd managed to never read his 1946 A Logic Named Joe. It really is incredible how much he gets right.

Web filters:

Online porn (sort of):

The potential privacy consequences of everyone doing everything online:

and the consequences of the Net going down:

I can't believe I've gone so long without knowing about this incredible science fiction timeline. It's a great reminder of how many of (what would become) the genre tropes had originated even before the start of the Golden Age as Asimov dated it, 1939. Rocket ships and time machines, generation starships and parallel universes, mutant supermen and portals to other worlds, robots and space opera, unknowable aliens and telepathy, it's all there.

I'm reading David McCullough's 1776 and learned this contrivedly novelistic story. During the siege of Boston, the British officers would entertain themselves at Faneuil Hall.

It would make a better story if that raid on Charlestown had been a decisive turning point in the siege, but the stalemate would remain for another two months.

Exclamations overheard as Pocahontas read The Door into Summer (1956.)

A Google search on 'coprography' demonstrates that a lot of people have it confused with coprophagy.

Some time ago, I noted that the Heinlein Archives were a special collection of UC Santa Cruz, and how a holy pilgrimage was in order.

Not that going to Santa Cruz is an especially daunting trip, it turns out I don't need to to see most of the contents. They've been digitized and reasonably priced PDFs are available at heinleinarchives.net. There's his critique of the draft of The Mote in God's Eye, notes toward a writing book, story notes and fragments, snide comments written by Heinlein and Virginia Heinlein in the margins of Alexei and Cory Panshin's review of Time Enough for Love, various proposals, treatments, and scripts for TV and film work, including a proposal for Abbot and Costello Move to the Moon (!) and pretty much everything this side of laundry lists and dry cleaning receipts (OK, maybe those, too -- I haven't looked through everything.)

I also recently learned about The Virginia Edition, a deluxe hardcover complete works of Heinlein that can be yours for the low, low price of $1500. Looks like about half of them are already available; the balance will be shipped as they're ready. Want.

Some of my reading of late has been shaped by Jo Walton's reviews on Tor.com; she has frequently picked things I've had on my shelf and meant to get to for a long time. So I finally read Lest Darkness Fall.

For no adequately explained reason, our hero, Martin Padway, an archaeologist in Rome in 1938, finds himself transported to 535. The Roman Empire has fallen, and Italy's ruled by the Ostrogoths. His knowledge of classical Latin and modern Italian allow him to communicate far too easily, and he has equally suspicious ease selling decimal arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping to a money lender, who stakes him in a scheme to distill brandy from wine.

An advantage he has over a moderner is that the change in his pocket is specie, and he's able to convert it to local money.

Spoilers follow:

Continue reading "Lest Darkness Fall" »

When I heard there was a new Tom Robbins book, B Is for Beer, I rushed to the library website to put a hold on it.

If you're a Tom Robbins completist, you'll want to, too. If not, then not so much. The cover says "A children's book for grown-ups" and "A grown-up book for children," but it's mostly "Tom Robbins' love letter to beer."

The narrative, in places, directly addresses a presumptive audience of a child being read aloud to by a parent or grandparent, a device I found mostly annoying in a book few would consider appropriate for a young child. And it tried too often to wring humor from our six-year-old heroine misunderstanding and mispronouncing new words.

I did, though, enjoy the book's guided tour of the history of beer.

As of a few months ago, some of the potential Republican 2012 presidential nominees being discussed were Jindal, Ensign, Sanford, Palin.

I'm wondering if somewhere Newt Gingrich is crossing names off a list and tapping his fingers together, saying "Ex-cellent."

(Gingrich, by the way, is a prolific Amazon reviewer.)

Continue reading "Follow the money" »

Christopher Guest -- Nigel from Spinal Tap, director and co-writer of Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind -- is an honest-to-gosh hereditary peer of the realm, a UK baron. He is perhaps the only baron ever to have said "lick my love pump" when he knew the camera was on.

Tuff Writer Tactical Pens.

I would make fun of the sort of person who'd want one of these, except I kind of want one of these.

Pocahontas and I are fans of the Teaching Company courses of Rufus Fears, a classics scholar at the University of Oklahoma. I googled Dr. Fears and found this scathing review on ratemyprofessor.com:

The class that inspired this review?

Latin.

"OMG! Dude totally wouldn't consider my original thinking on the fifth declension! He was all, like, his way was the right way."

(Yeah, I realize the student's complaint isn't so ridiculous on the face of it given the discussion of Roman culture a Latin class would include. But that's not funny.)

A few months ago, I saw Paperback Dreams, a documentary on the declining bookstore business, focusing on Cody's in Berkeley and Kepler's in Palo Alto.

The movie covers the rise and fall of Cody's Union Square store in San Francisco, and the closing of the flagship Cody's store on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley. The store that once had gas masks in the back room, when it served as a medic station during the People's Park riots. The store that was bombed for continuing to sell Rushdie's The Satanic Verses after the fatwa.

If I recall correctly (at this remove, it's iffy), when the movie leaves off, there was still one Cody's standing, on 4th St. in Berkeley. But I knew how the story ended.

In 1991, I was going to grad school at USC in LA. During a break between the spring and summer sessions, I spent a week in San Francisco and Berkeley. I met Jym in person for the first time; we'd known each other online. I stayed at the San Francisco youth hostel.

And I fell in love with Berkeley. Mostly, with its bookstores. In one block, Telegraph had Cody's, Moe's, Shambalha, Shakespeare & Co. Around the corner was another used bookstore, Cartesian Books. Not to mention dozens of others throughout town. I had a printout of the rec.arts.books East Bay bookstore list in my pocket, and I wasn't afraid to use it.

Cody's was a damn good new bookstore. It didn't displace Wordsworth in Cambridge as my favorite new general bookstore, but damn good. Moe's was the best used bookstore I'd ever seen (this was years before I made the pilgrimage to Powell's.) Shambhala was the best esoteric philosophy bookstore I'd ever seen. (The Aleister Crowley was in a locked, glass-fronted case. Was it somehow such dangerous knowledge that it needed to be kept under lock and key? I asked the clerk why. "Because it gets stolen if it's not," he said.) Comic Relief was the best comics store I'd ever seen. It had not one, but two, outstanding sf bookstores, Dark Carnival and Other Change of Hobbit.

Despite that I'd hurt my shoulder immediately before the trip, and was carrying all my things in an army knapsack, I bought a stupid number of books. And I knew I'd be back for good someday.

That took five years. And in the dozen years since, I've watched bookstore after bookstore fold. Gaia. Shambhala. The huge Barnes & Noble downtown.

And Cody's on 4th St.

But, then, a new Cody's rose all phoenix-like on Shattuck in downtown Berkeley! Comic Relief had moved to Shattuck, just a couple of storefronts down from Other Change. A huge Half Price books had opened just down from that. And now Cody's was a block away from that, and just a couple of blocks up from Pegasus downtown. Shattuck could be the sort of book row destination that Telegraph had been!

Out of the blue, that Cody's, the last Cody's, closed. Cartesian is gone, too -- I'm not even sure when that happened. Black Oak books just closed. It keeps getting grimmer.

Time was, I kept a written list of books I was looking for. Some of them I could have ordered; most of them were out of print. Visiting any new town was an occasion for excitement, as I hit as many used bookstores as I could. This one had Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel. That one had a Dick paperback I didn't have (in those days before the Vintage reprints.) Time was, I went to an honest-to-god book finding service to surprise Jym with Peanuts Revisited, the Peanuts reprint he'd never been able to find.

I wonder what the heck those guys are doing for a living now.

I first heard of a book scout in John Dunning's cop turned antiquarian bookseller mystery, Booked to Die (a pretty good mystery.) What a wonderful, romantic thing -- scouring estate sales, thrift stores, and yard sales, recognizing the hidden treasures of first editions you can buy cheap and sell dear.

Just between Amazon and Half.com, damn near everything is available online. The thrill of the hunt has been replaced by a web search, and deciding whether you really want it enough to order it then and there. The efficiency of the market has driven the middle out -- most common or low-demand things you can get shipped for under $10; it's harder than ever to find a bargain on rare, in demand things. The last couple of times I've sold things to Moe's, they've checked online to make sure they weren't things that weren't moving at 25¢. At library sales, I've seen people scanning barcodes with Scoutpal, taking all the challenge out of it.

A couple of years ago, I sought out James Newman's 4-volume World of Mathematics. Everyone seemed to agree that the one to get was Microsoft Press' edition, whose typesetting improved on the original. I found a used copy listed on-line on the cheap, and ordered.

The seller wrote me a long email a couple of days later, apologizing profusely about how his part-time college student employee had listed it incorrectly, and it was only Vol. 3, not the 4-volume set, and how he was selling books 12 hours a day at $5 a pop trying to support his family, and I could have a discount on my next order, and would I please not leave bad feedback. He'd caught the error before shipping and was offering to refund my money, a situation I consider so clearly no harm, no foul, that I'm distressed by what experiences this bookseller has had that he seemed so fearful in this case.

I order all my new books at Other Change. I buy my new comics from Comic Relief (but ever fewer, as the price range has become $3-4 a comic.) I know I could usually get better prices on-line, but I want my downtown to have bookstores I can browse. I want to do my part to preserve them.

But I usually check if things are dirt-cheap used on-line before I order them new. An increasing amount of my book acquisition time, energy, and money goes to Paperbackswap. So I'm doing my part to kill bookstores, too.

Obviously, I'm nostalgic for the old days, in which there was some thrill to the hunt for books. There are even a couple of books I've been looking for for ages that I've passed up the opportunity to buy because I want there to be something to hunt. One of them is Greg Egan's Axiomatic, which had been hard to find until a recent British reprint filled much of the demand. I see that at the moment I could get the mass-market edition used shipped for $6.50. Too easy. The other one I'm not going to name, because I don't want to do anything to inflate its demand (though I have no illusions about how much influence this blog doesn't have) -- it's an innocuous-looking mass-market paperback from the '90's that often goes for over a hundred dollars. But someday I'll find it languishing in a clearance bin.

Let me make clear: I wouldn't actually trade my pocket full of book and bookstore lists for what we have now. More books are getting to more people who want them. That's a good thing.

But I'm really going to miss bookstores when they're gone.

Common Errors in English Usage

Wordnik is an on-line dictionary I haven't been able to stump. (It's disappointingly easy to stump most free on-line dictionaries. But Wiktionary is also hard to stump.)

It was just two months ago I was talking about how great the American Heritage dictionary at Bartleby.com was. No more.

The consolation is that you can look up the notes indexes from the Internet Archive:

and then look those words up at dictionary.com whose results include the full American Heritage entries, including the notes.

There doesn't seem to be a way to get to the Indo-European roots appendix.

However, affixes.org, is a great consolation -- a guide to Greek and Latin roots, on online version of Ologies and Isms by the World Wide Word's Michael Quinion.

Wonder how obnoxious it would be to actually buy the electronic AHD.

James Patrick Kelly's Standing in Line with Mr. Jimmy is a story that has stuck with me. Our hero is a feckless youth on the dole. In the course of the story, he discovers that he's truly trapped -- an open secret that he and his friends hadn't been privy to is that once you've been on the dole, you become untouchable to employers. It was capricious, and cruel, and believeable.

Today, the LA Times has a story about a trend of people being denied jobs because they have bad credit.

With a policy like that being applied indiscriminately, once you're behind on your bills, how are you ever going to get out?

The Null Stern Hotel's a Swiss hotel whose name means zero-star hotel. According to Wikipedia, it's the only one.

I just read The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips, based on a recommendation on Ken Jennings' blog. A Jeopardy 5-time champion writes a novel that includes a Jeopardy champion? Yeah, I'm there.

It's a frustrating book. The prologue is a tremendous bit of writing. I read it aloud to Pocahontas. It makes me care more about whether a shouted audience request on a concert LP made it onto the CD re-release than most fiction ever makes me care about whether people live or die.

The prose sometimes hits the same heights as the prologue, but it's in service of a story that grows increasingly strained, culminating in the most contrived situation I've ever seen an author ask me to take seriously, bedroom farce played straight.

I did enjoy the Jeopardy champion, though. He's a minor character, our hero's brother, the kind of verging-on-Asperger's know-it-all I've encountered often in fandom and geekdom. (And, yes, the kind of verging-on-Asperger's know-it-all other people have encountered when they've met me.) I'm wishing now (as I often end up doing) that I hadn't been quite so prompt about returning it the book to the library, so I could share some choice passages about him, like how he'd argue contrarian positions until his victim capitulated, then he'd disprove whatever his assertion had been.

But, in conclusion, I'd advise reading the prologue and skipping the rest. But I thought enough of Phillips' writing that I plan to give The Egyptologist a try.

Pocahontas and I went to Monterey this weekend. Cannery Row is now tourist shops, with no signs of poverty allowed.

Local hotels sell 2-day passes to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the same price the Aquarium sells a one-day pass. On Sunday, it seemed like we were violating some local custom by not having brought a double-wide child stroller, but Monday wasn't so crowded.

Besides the sea otters (there's supposed to be a webcam of them, but right now it's showing an exterior shot of Monterey Bay,) my favorite exhibits were the leafy sea dragon, and the ribbon pipehorse, two of the most incredible animal mimics I've ever seen, even trumping the leaf mimics I posted to the Free Range Memes sidebar.

Entry title courtesy of the Tick.

First televised image of Mars was color-by-numbers [via Sore Eyes]

The Netherlands is closing prisons: not enough criminals. [via Bob Harris]

If your dad is a chemistry professor, asking why can be dangerous

A new genetic study has determined that the ancient Egyptians were latecomers to cat domestication, which now looks like it began around ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent.

There's no disputing of the Egyptians' pioneering contributions to cat worship, however.

Last Thursday, the 14th, I ordered Civilization IV: the Complete Edition, like I planned, from Amazon. It was eligible for Free Super Shipping Saving, which I chose. On Sunday, they emailed that it had shipped via USPS, and gave a tracking number. Of course, that just meant that they'd printed the label; they couldn't get it to the Post Office before Monday.

As of now, Wednesday morning, USPS still hasn't heard of it. Order tracking on Amazon describes it as having shipped on Sunday with the details "Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit."

Maybe the Amazon warehouse in New Castle, Delaware is really far from the Post Office. Maybe it's lost or there's been some other screw-up. Maybe it's even the case that every truck out of the warehouse in the past two days has been filled to capacity with higher-priority packages.

But it's seeming a little more likely that it's simply sitting, waiting to be shipped until I've been adequately punished for my cheapness.

Updated: In the comments, Doug G. points out that USPS' tracking isn't reliable enough to conclude that an item hasn't shipped. He's right, and I withdraw my speculation that Amazon was sitting on my package.

Civilization IV: the Complete Edition, -- Civ4 with all three supplements, including the recent Colonization, is finally out. It's all on a single DVD for $37 at Amazon, and with no DRM, which should make it a lot easier to get it to work under Wine. I'm not buying anything with DRM anymore (not counting functionally non-existent DRM like DVDs') so I'd figured I'd never see the two Civ4 supplements I don't have. Way to actually give people what they want, 2K Games.

I'm holding off on purchasing it, though, 'cause I don't want the time hit right now.

The Linux Hauppauge HVR-2250 driver looks to be in usable condition, so I should be able to disassemble the Rube Goldberg arrangement by which I have a device attached to my serial port that sends IR remote control signals to a digital TV converter box to change channels so I can record things on my analog TV tuner card. (Yeah, I'm amazed it works at all, too.) I'll be able to record in HD, too, for all the good it'll do me, what with still chugging along with a non-HD CRT TV and an original Xbox for an HTPC.

William Shatner was a (non-flying) Karamazov Brother.

Isaac Newton fought crime.

Zachary Taylor's adventures beyond the grave:

I've posted previously about the reference works available at Bartleby.com. I wanted to call attention to the links on the American Heritage dictionary page, which spotlight some special features:

From the last, I learned that pagoda, nebbish, porgy, and esophagus all stem from the same root.

These are some things that have made me happy lately:

A hot topic in the blogosphere during the current 15 minutes is a young woman who was a minor league con artist. Here's Jezebel's take:

The article rightly hastens to point out that she's not emblematic of women, or Asians, or Asian women. Funny, though, how the men she defrauded were all such... emblems.

Wikipedia has a fun entry on common misconceptions including:

Via Lisa Gold's blog, I learned that Moby Lives lives again, and found these wonderful links to pictures of interesting bookstores, libraries, and more libraries.

I had always been under the impression that Canada was immensely larger than the U.S., but, according to the CIA World Factbook, Canada's total area is 9.98 million sq. km and the U.S.' is 9.83 million sq. km. If one goes strictly by land area, the U.S. is slightly ahead at 9.16 million sq. km to 9.09 million.

Of course, I have to wonder whether the CIA's measurements might differ from Canada's own, given the U.S.' predilection for sending submarines into water the U.S. calls international that Canada considers its territory.¹

And I'm amused by the fact that the CIA uses encrypted communications for all of their web traffic, even to look at their home page.

¹ This entry's title is just a Ramones reference for my own entertainment, not an assertion that the CIA is actually up to shenanigans with the Factbook.