On my Livejournal friends list, I have about forty people, at least three of whom keep pet rats. Our intuition says this is an unusually large number. If 3 out of 40 were typical, there'd be about 22 million people in the US with pet rats, and that just doesn't seem reasonable. So there must be something going on, not quite obvious, that ties rat owners together and makes them more likely to appear in the same, otherwise unrelated group, and maybe that same thing makes it more likely that these are the sorts of friends and acquaintances that'll appeal to me.
Or at least, that's what our brains tell us to figure out. Because we're human, we are hard-wired to detect correlations and seek out causations; it's how you survive in a world of unpredictable weather and unreliable food supplies (plus occasional leopards).
But, as a consequence of always looking for correlation-causations, our intuition is actually really bad at detecting when there's not a correlation, when it's just random chance.
This is where mathematics comes in. Math is just one of the ways we have figured out to use our really big brains' general processing capacity to route around the things that confuse our specific processing modules.
My cousin Whitney has a long article about Eight Belles' injuries, including raising doubts about the amount of pain she was suffering, and raising the issue that we are far too quick to dismiss prosthetic treatment for horses with even catastrophic leg injuries.
Only one filly before today had come in 2nd at the Kentucky Derby (only three had won). Eight Belles finished a strong second today.
As she was slowing after the race, her jockey heard the sound every horseman fears, the sound of a condylar fracture, a break in the horse's cannon bone. Seconds later, the same bone in her now overburdened other front leg also broke.
She was euthanized on the track seven minutes after crossing the finish line.
If local police enforce immigration law, con artists, rapists, and murderers can target illegal immigrants with impunity, because their victims will be scared to go to the police. This is obvious to anyone who thinks about it at all.
That you get instances like Sheriff Tommy Thompson of Harris County pledging to get his deputies trained in immigration law (via Kuff) simply means that the people involved have decided that illegal immigrants are sufficiently immoral that they deserve anything that happens to them. This is the same ethical system that justifies torturing random Arabs because they're bad people. (How can you tell they're bad? They confessed under torture!)
It's a popular ethical system, and it is completely wrong. The notion that a bad person deserves anything that happens to them is antithetical to any concept of fair justice, antithetical to the rule of law, and antithetical to Christian morality, as well as the ethical systems of all the world's other major religions and philosophies.
It is popular because it's simple: Bad things should happen to bad people! But that is immature and naive, the ethical analysis of a child who has considered only the core of his idea. It takes something more like experience and wisdom to consider the edge cases. Very bad things shouldn't happen to slightly bad people! Things that are bad in one way shouldn't happen to people who are only bad in another way. And so on.
Again, the people like Sheriff Tommy Thompson have decided that those cases just don't matter. They think it's fair that only some people are protected from crime.
Fifty years ago, the same thinking, that only some people were worth protecting, led to sundown towns. Ten years from now, perhaps only the people living in walled enclaves will be worth protecting.
As it happens, Sheriff Tommy Thompson is up for election this year. Adrian Garcia would like to replace him. I think it'd be a good idea.
The development of Christian identity politics will, I think, be recognized as the most important cultural factor in the United States' loss of world power. By "Christian identity politics", I mean megachurches, evolution, gays, "war on Christmas", FCC broadcast decency regulation, home schooling, magnetic fish stickers, the entire shadow culture of Christian rock, Left Behind, and Expelled.
Unlike other identity politics, the fact that Christian identity politics appears mainstream means that it can easily attract large number of adherents and affect the broader culture in a way that smaller, more "other" identity politics cannot.
The key to its complicity in our retreat in world significance is that Christian identity politics comprehensively rejects facts in favor of faith; its faith in America will keep it from observing that America is losing its power and stature and its faith in lower taxes will keep it from observing the degradation in the American economy. The losses themselves, of course, are due to the turning away from reason, stopping the engine of research and technology domestically and causing us to waste resources and lose respect by taking senseless actions internationally.
Faith cannot solve a financial crisis. Faith has already caused biotechnology to flee America. Faith will help convince the next generation of scientists to stay at home in Hyderabad and Shanghai.
Out here, in the real world, facts matter. Out here, in the real world, your ignorant faith in the poisonous words of your ignorant preachers is hurting America.
[Very few people will get that title.]
Steven Gould's novel Jumper: Griffin's Story is tied-in to the recent movie and is not related to his earlier novel Jumper and its sequel.
It is, I suppose, not bad by objective standards of craft, but lord, it isn't good.
Griffin is Davy (the original jumper), with dead parents instead of child abuse, and on his own from much earlier. Also, he sketches. Since he wasn't abused, he doesn't doubt his own worth. Other than that, his personality is pretty much Davy's, and his drive to build a life is pretty much indistinguishable from Davy's.
The book is relatively slim, so the rest of it is taken up with the movie's paladins and their hunt for Griffin. They are implacable, influential, and inexplicable; certainly not human. It's like being hunted by a thunderstorm. I admit to only skimming the last quarter of the book, so perhaps I missed something, but the last quarter of the book is not really the place to start making your villains work.
One suspects that Gould is grappling with problems inherited from the movie, for which he has my sympathy, but not my forgiveness. The paladins are utter fanatics about killing children. They can make the American and Mexican governments jump through hoops without explanation. (And Jumper had it right about the American government; they're going to want to control the power, not kill it.) They have no qualms about making big public attacks. They hate jumpers for their inhuman power, but rely on their members who can psychically sense the location of nearby jumps. It makes no sense.
One problem I can blame Gould for is the way the paladins find Griffin in Mexico: He had a couple of fillings done by a local dentist, and they matched his dental records. I simply do not believe that a local Mexican community dentist uploads dental records anywhere but a patient file in his office, and certainly not anywhere searchable; I also tend to doubt that dental records from age nine are that readily matchable to age thirteen, what with, oh, tooth replacement still going on, plus cavities.
Go read something else that Gould has written. Wildside is a good one.
The president of our company, a man I greatly liked and admired, died unexpectedly last night.
When he arrived to take over three and a half years ago, I said at the time "Is this business leadership? I don't think I've ever seen it before." My morale soared, and I stopped thinking about leaving the company. He turned us around and got us going in the right direction. While we now have a lot of talent in the upper positions, including a CEO who impresses me, his death is going to leave a big hole.
I don't think we're going to get a lot done today.
My calves are sore today, after a weekend of standing up and leaning over a large table.
I am about ready to say that this was our best effort in the history of the Master Maze Tournament event. Jason and Angelo helped me put on a huge D&D tournament, and I think nearly everybody involved had a great time.
The tournament ended on a moment so perfect, in afterthought, that it could never be planned. Twelve angry players versus a horde of dragons involved in a strange ritual. They get a surprise round, and then the big bad of the scenario, a huge red dragon, rolls dead last in the initiative count, so after two full rounds of getting pounded on, the dragon finally gets an action and breathes fire on the party...
...killing the first character of the round
...triggering a retributive strike from a defensive spell the cleric had up
...which killed the critically wounded dragon.
How awesome is that!
Even better is how well it fits into the backstory--the dragon was laying the groundwork for a ceremony (involving time paradoxes) to enable her to skip over her prophesied death, which manipulated the characters, which got them to attack her, which brought about her prophesied death. Killing someone to get killed herself is a symbol of her entire plot!
Huge thanks to the Owlcon staff. We've got a great crew who work tirelessly to put on the con, and the commitment and effort really show through. The attendees complained a little, complimented a lot.
For me, the most difficult part of doing detail cleanup on miniatures is seeing the paint, not the figure. The default behavior of the human visual apparatus is to build objects out of the visual field. Once it's in your head as an object, the specific visual details are abstracted away and you literally aren't aware that there's an anomalous speck of color.
But when you're painting, you need to be able to hold the actual visual field in mind as well as the abstract object representation. And when you're doing detail cleanup, you don't want the abstract object representation at all.
Three Oz books I will probably not write:
- Dorothy in the Frozen South of Oz: The Wizard sends Dorothy, the Tin Soldier*, and the Glass Cat to explore the new fairyland he's discovered at the South Pole, where they have many adventures with the creatures and tyrannical ruler of Uq. Featuring Ominable the Snow Monster and Franklin, the cast iron man with a stove in his belly.
- The General of Oz: The General of one of the militaristic little subkingdoms of Oz (Battleburg, possibly) gives Ozma, the Princesses of Oz, the Wizard, and Glinda, gifts (diadems and the like, with emeralds, rubies, sapphires, topazes, and amethysts to symbolize the four regions of Oz plus the Emerald City) that control their minds. Soon he is engaged to Ozma and ruling Oz. It's up to Omby Amby, the Soldier with the Green Whiskers, to find allies, start a rebellion, and save the day.
- The Warlock of Oz: Ozma grants a charter for a Good Witch of the West, so Nick Chopper (the Tin Woodsman, King of the Winkies) starts a competition to find someone for the role. A boy disguises himself as a girl (or transforms himself into a girl) in order to take part in the competition. Harry Potter, Oz-style, slash The Apprentice, as the winner will become a trainee under Glinda and/or the Wizard. There's room for some reprise of the denouement of The Marvelous Land of Oz, too, original or reversed.
*Not the Tin Woodsman, but another guy who had the same thing happen to him. It's not as rare as you think.
It wouldn't be a horrible idea to merge the first two of these, either. The takeover in Oz strands Dorothy in Uq since the Wizard isn't available to retrieve her. The ruler of Uq becomes friends with the General and they plot the takeover of other fairylands. Dorothy is able to escape, hook up with Omby's team, and save the day. Thematically, bringing in Queen Zixi of Ix and King Evardo of Ev would be appropriate. At the end, tease the fairylands of Aj and Yk.