Category Archives: Musings

More Significant than a Riot

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Carrying on civil discourse is difficult in this day of heated exchanges and vile rhetoric, and a conversation with a friend on a writing forum reminded me of this Robert A. Heinlein quote (from his novel FRIDAY):

Sick cultures show a complex of symptoms … but a dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

Given the excesses of this very medium, I wonder if we can rein in the invective and stop our disagreements from becoming unbridgeable divides. Mud-slinging used to be the purview of a select few; now, everyone seems to want to take a turn. As a result, we’re all a lot dirtier than ever before.

On that somewhat somber note, Happy All Hallow’s Eve!

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Happy Discoverer’s Day … and A Publisher’s Public Slushpile

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Those who know me well know that I prefer politeness to political correctness, so my personal reference to Columbus Day as Discoverer’s Day is not (I repeat, not) (I tell you three times, NOT) the usual anti-Columbian protest on behalf of the American aborigines.* Rather, when the government decided that Presidents Washington and Lincoln would share a holiday with all the others who have occupied that office, I decided that other holidays named after famous people should also be renamed to share with those with similar accomplishments. The obvious exception to this is Christmas, since I can’t find anyone else in history who has changed the world as profoundly as did Jesus Christ.

End of rant/sermonette, and Happy Discoverer’s Day to one and all.

In other news, I was pointed to what appears to be an experiment by Harper Collins to let the online reading public sort through their slush pile for them. Called authonomy, it’s “a brand new community site for writers, readers and publishers, conceived and developed by book editors at HarperCollins.”

From their FAQ page,

authonomy invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project – and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read.

Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.

…. HarperCollins hopes to find new, talented writers we can sign up for our traditional book publishing programmes – once we’re fully launched we’ll be reading the most popular manuscripts each month as part of this search.

In a way, this is similar to the process on Baen’s Bar whereby short story submissions to Jim Baen’s Universe can be critiqued and catch the eyes of the editors. The electronic slushpile for Baen Books works a little differently — the submissions aren’t available to every member of the Bar.

I’ll be interested to see how the Harper Collins experiment works out.

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*Disclosure: I may fall into this category myself, having a percentage of Cherokee blood; I’ve never gone the route of documenting how much to see if I qualify for tribal membership.

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NC State of Business Post Reference

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Yesterday I wrote a post on “NC State of Business,” the blog we started at the Industrial Extension Service. I should probably just cross-post it, but I’m too lazy this morning to worry with rebuilding all the links. Instead, I just offer a single link to the post itself: “Multitasking, Procrastination, and Corporate Failure.”

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Wife Injured; Playing Nursemaid For Awhile

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My lovely bride took a tumble this morning in her classroom; she called me from Urgent Care, and I got there in time to help her back to X-ray. Turns out she cracked two ribs, so she’s in a good deal of pain right now and I’m doing my best to help her around and fetch and carry what she needs (like ice packs).

I’ll still post on the blog from time to time, but I don’t expect to do a lot of writing in the next little while. Priorities, you know?

I’m just glad that the University folks let me work from home when I have to … and of course I can do my reading for Baen from almost anywhere.

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Is SPORE an advertisement for Intelligent Design?

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Disclaimer: I’m not an on-line game player (not since playing on-line chess occasionally while I was stationed overseas), so I haven’t played “Spore.” Maybe I will, but I doubt it.

The first things I heard about the game Spore focused on the evolution aspect of the game, and made it sound as if the game was a computer simulation of evolution and natural selection. I didn’t see how that kind of long-term, random mutation simulation could be any fun to play, but it turns out that’s not the focus of the game at all. It’s a game that lets the player act as God, guiding the actions and development of little creatures in the computer.

So I wondered if the game might be a subtle advertisement for Intelligent Design as an alternative theory to evolution. I couldn’t imagine that was the case — not since the game has a tie-in to a National Geographic video. But the ID possibility remained: after all, the player is presumably intelligent. And the player’s intelligence apparently guides the actions of a virtual creature that normally would be acting without volition (i.e., by stimulus-response and “instinct,” however that developed.)

I went to the Spore web site to see if my suspicions were correct. On the “What is Spore?” page, the opening text is, “How will you create the universe?” Then the page enjoins the player to “create and guide your creature through five stages of evolution.”

But life on the virtual planet doesn’t spring out of the local primordial ooze, nor does it give the player the option to “create” life — instead, life arrives inside a meteorite in a computer version of panspermia. So maybe Spore isn’t the best advertisement for ID, since it doesn’t address the central idea of where that life really came from.

I’ll leave the answer to that question up to God.

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Year of the Jubilee

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Another of those strange thoughts that come to me from time to time: did the Israelites ever actually celebrate the year of the Jubilee?

The book of Leviticus outlines the requirements for the Jubilee year, which was to come after the seven sabbaths of years (7 * 7 = 49 years), so that every 50th year they should “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Yet the Bible doesn’t tell us that they actually did all that was required in the year of the Jubilee: releasing bondservants, cancelling debts, etc. All we have are the instructions in Leviticus 25 and 27, and another reference in Numbers 36. That’s not to say they never did it, just that it’s not plainly recorded.

I wonder if they did, or if they even tried.

And I wonder if I’m better off sometimes not asking these kinds of questions.

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LOLcats Repudiated

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I’m not a LOLcat fan, although I admit some of them are funny. And if you’re not familiar with the LOLcat phenomenon, the great anti-LOLcat on the Fabianspace Blog won’t make any sense to you. But I liked it. 😀

Fabianspace is run by Karina Fabian, a talented writer whose husband Rob was a speechwriter with me on the Air Staff and is now a Squadron Commander at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota. Karina agreed to be the Anti-Running-Mate in the Anti-Campaign, and posted a fake news story about the Anti-Candidate on the same “Labor Day Funnies” page of her blog. I suspect Rob had a hand in producing that segment.

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Public Art News: Artist Selections, Temporary Exhibits

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Last night’s meeting of the Cary Public Art Advisory Board went well. I agreed to serve on two Artist Selection Panels: one for the art to accompany the Walker Street Extension project, and another for art associated with the Symphony Bridge at Koka Booth Amphitheatre.

In related news, Cary Visual Arts’ temporary outdoor exhibit is now in place, with ten different sculptures arranged around the Town Hall campus. If you find yourself near Cary Town Hall with a few minutes to spare, stop and take a walk around; some of the pieces are magnificent.

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Great Video: The Barbeque Song

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This was posted on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, but I just found it today — and as one who appreciates barbeque in most all its forms, I found the rundown of different styles to be a delightful tribute to one of my favorite foods.

I particularly liked the bit about whether or not Florida is a Southern state* — down to using the outline of California.

Enjoy!

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*To most of us who consider ourselves Southern, it isn’t.

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