Entries feed for zunger

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/friendship-20/201512/6-ways-squash-kids-materialism-holiday

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Sfsignal/~3/-x-6n94BBDs/

http://www.sfsignal.com/?p=131360

Today only, you can get the eBook version of The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman for the low, low price of $1.99 on the Kindle platform (kindles, computers and smartphones)!

Here is the book description:

A brilliantly imaginative and poignant fairy tale from the modern master of wonder and terror, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Neil Gaiman’s first new novel for adults since his #1 New York Times bestseller Anansi Boys.

This bewitching and harrowing tale of mystery and survival, and memory and magic, makes the impossible all too real…

This is good for today only so Grab it while you can!

The post eBook Deal: Get Neil Gaiman’s THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE for Only $1.99! appeared first on SF Signal
Copyright © SF Signal

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/12/18/my-non-spoilery-review-of-the-force-awakens/

http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=27683

Super-short version: It’s not bad! Best since the original trilogy and arguably better than at least one of those. You’ll probably have a whole lot of fun with this film.

Non-super-short version: Star Wars is that friend of yours who you haven’t seen in a while, who was in a long-term relationship where everything was cool for a while and then things just plain went to hell, and the last time you saw them, they’d kind of hit the bottom. Now you’re seeing them again for the first time in years and before they show up you’re humming a little mantra that goes please please please please don’t let this be awkward and weird like it was the last time we saw each other.

And then they show up! And they look great. They sound great. You talk to them and slip into the groove with them, and they catch you up on what’s been going on in their life, including their new relationship with this fab-sounding person who seems to be doing good things for them. And you suddenly realize that for the first time in years your friend actually seems happy. They’re not exactly their old self again — who ever is, after all those years? — but the things you always loved about them are there once more, and you’re so happy to see them happy again that you almost want to cry.

So, yeah: If you’re a Star Wars fan, that’s how you’re going to feel about The Force Awakens.

This is an immense relief, but also, to use the words of a famous Mon Calimarian, it’s a trap. Because it’s Star Wars, and because you’ll have been used to Star Wars films being terrible for so very long, the highly-polished, super-competent and intentionally entertaining film that is The Force Awakens might feel something like a revelation. Finally, a Star Wars film you don’t have to make excuses for! That you don’t have to mumble something like “well, it’s part of a trilogy, you have to wait until the whole thing is done to see the entire structure” to yourself and others in a vain attempt to overlook massive flaws. This is the first Star Wars film in decades that you can relax into, and just sit back and enjoy. It’s not until the tension of having to pre-emptively rationalize your film choices is lifted that you realize what a burden it has been. The absence of that burden might just feel like greatness.

So: is The Force Awakens a great film?

No. It’s not on the level of great cinema. It’s not on the level of the original Star Wars (which I refuse to call A New Hope because fuck you George Lucas you’re not the boss of me) or of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s not the best science fiction film of 2015, or even the best new installment in a long-running science fiction film series (say hello to Fury Road for both, although The Martian and Ex Machina are in the running for the former). It’s not a great film, and you shouldn’t be relieved into thinking it is.

But it is a pretty damn good Star Wars film, which at this point in the series is exactly what it needs to be. This shouldn’t be overlooked, either.

Things to love (or at least really like): The dialogue, by Lawrence Kasdan, JJ Abrams and Michael Arndt, which for the first time since Empire sounds like words that might actually come out of the mouths of actual thinking human beings, and not merely declamatory utterances designed to fill up space. The relationships, of which there are many — more and more believable relationships in this one single film than in the entire run of the series to date. The care with which even minor characters are developed and seem like actual people, rather than toy manufacturing opportunities given a line or two in the film as an excuse to make parents buy the action figure for a stocking stuffer. The fact that Daisy Ridley and John Boyega’s characters (as well as one other character, who you will know when you see the film) are believably young and act like young people do, ie, make some questionable choices, without doing stupid things entirely for plot convenience.

In short, most of the best things about this movie relate to the characters in it — and the care with which the filmmakers use to make them as real as possible. This is the one thing George Lucas could never manage on his own, partly because he’s a leaden writer (Harrison Ford once famously quipped of Lucas’ dialogue “You can type this shit, George, but you can’t say it”), but primarily because I just don’t think he was that interested in it. He needed characters as chess pieces, not as people. In The Force Awakens, we get characters as people, and their game becomes more interesting.

Things not to like? Basically, the several points where the film has to bow to the tropes of the Star Wars universe mostly for plot convenience and fan service. Yes, yes, lasers and explosions and battles and the cute nods to the previous films, they all have to be in there. I get it (trust me, I get it). But for me all of that was a sideshow to the characters — and think about that! When was the last time you could say that about a Star Wars film? (Empire.) There’s also the fact that almost immediately after I left the theater there were a whole bunch of things about the film that I started to pick apart. Trust me, my friends, if you think the nitpickery of the Star Wars universe was positively Talmudic before, wait until the dust settles with TFA. There will be nitpickery galore.

Here’s the important thing about that last bit: On the drive home, I had things I wanted to nitpick — but the operative part of the phrase is “on the drive home.” When I was watching the film, I was in the film. I wasn’t focused on anything other than where I was. And that, my friends, is the goal. When I was the creative consultant for Stargate: Universe, that was actually my job: To read the scripts early and flag all the things that would throw people out of the story before the end credits rolled. It’s okay for the audience to be nitpicky, just afterwards. Managing that is not as easy as it sounds, and certainly the prequel trilogies never achieved it. TFA does.

Which is a testament to Abrams, his fellow screenwriters and to Disney. When Disney bought Lucasfilm I said that it was “the best thing that could happen, especially if you’re a Star Wars fan.” I said it because Disney, whatever other flaws it has (and it has many) understands better than almost any other studio that the audience must be entertained. You grab the audience, you carry them along for two hours, you keep them busy, and you drop them off at the gift shop when you’re done. Disney is relentless about this, and they’re not stupid about it, either, which is to say, Disney doesn’t treat its audience like marks, to be hustled. It treats them as opportunities for a long-term relationship, involving the transfer of cash to Disney.

Cynical? Well, yes. But, look, if what that means is we get good Star Wars films that aren’t painful to watch and tell a fun story while we’re shoving popcorn into our maws — stories with lightsabers — then I’m okay with that. Especially after having slogged through a Star Wars era where the only thing of interest was the merchandising. We’re getting more out of the Star Wars cinematic universe now than we were with Lucas. I don’t see this as a bad thing. “By the sweet and merry mouse above, you will be entertained,” I wrote, when the Disney deal for Lucasfilm was announced.

I was right. I was entertained. And because of the focus on characters in The Force Awakens — a focus I expect to continue through Episodes VIII and IX, and in the new “anthology” films — I am optimistic I will continue to be entertained in the Star Wars universe for a good while yet. I can’t tell you how giddy that makes me.

I don’t need greatness from Star Wars. I just want to have fun with it. And with The Force Awakens, I did. I’m glad my friend is back, and happy.

So I’ve mentioned the way my wife and my two daughters all decided to get Star Wars tattoos on the week of the release to commemorate our love of the film. And I promised photos when it was all said and done!

(Tattoos done by Matt Madda.)

Gini and I decided to get New Jedi Order tattoos – the school that Luke founded in the old canon, which no longer technically exists, but we are Rebel through and through.  This is my second tattoo, but it’s my first real tattoo, in a sense – I cover up my tattoo of my goddaughter Rebecca with just a regular shirt, but this big blazing black logo is impossible to hide.

Gini, alas, has to be a professional lawyer-type person, and so she could not get hers in the same place. So she got hers on her right thigh. But we are bonded by a tattoo.

Erin had the most work done – an eight-hour sitting, wherein she had a blaster tattooed on her hip with a banner of “Never tell me the odds.”

Amy, well, it was her first tattoo, and she went small but significant – a stylized X-wing flying into view over her ear.

How did we feel about this? Wonderful. We kept high-fiving each other all day.

And then we saw The Film. And later today, after I’ve seen it for the second time, I’ll post my very spoillerriffic thoughts on it in a protected area. I went in not knowing what happened. I think you should, too.

But the film itself doesn’t matter.  What matters is that we love the old films so much we wanted them on our body, and we wanted them together. And now we’ve got a lovely reminder of what surrounds us:

Love.

And big fucking nerdery.

Cross-posted from Ferrett's Real Blog.

http://feeds.nature.com/~r/news/rss/most_recent/~3/MEcZb1ctBPI/nature.2015.19066

Explosion occurred in chemistry building on Beijing campus.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2015.19066

http://feeds.nature.com/~r/news/rss/most_recent/~3/xMrsG5qosiI/nature.2015.19057

Late spending bill gives the NIH and several other research agencies healthy increases.

Nature 528 446 doi: 10.1038/nature.2015.19057

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/18/forgotten-bestsellers-the-ninth-configuration/

http://www.tor.com/?p=199905

Today’s bestsellers are tomorrow’s remainders and Forgotten Bestsellers will run for the next two weeks as a reminder that we were once all in a lather over books that people barely even remember anymore. Have we forgotten great works of literature? Or were these books never more than literary mayflies in the first place? What better time of year than the holiday season for us to remember that all flesh is dust and everything must die?

Hardly a bestseller, The Ninth Configuration is the first book blockbuster author William Peter Blatty published after the massive global success of his possession novel, The Exorcist. Most guys who write a bestselling novel about demonic possession, followed by an Academy-Award-winning adaptation of same, would follow up with the something similar, only different. Maybe this time the demon possesses a little boy instead of a little girl? Or a buffalo? But Blatty’s first book after the movie became an international phenomena was about the crisis of faith suffered by a minor character from The Exorcist. People came to The Exorcist for the pea soup vomit and the scares, but they tended to fast forward past the theological debates. Which makes it inexplicable that The Ninth Configuration is a book that’s almost nothing but those debates.

In 1966, Blatty wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane which was the kind of rambunctious military comedy the world expected from the guy who wrote the screenplay for the second Pink Panther movie. After The Exorcist, he rewrote it from scratch and published it in 1978 as The Ninth Configuration. Two years later, he would direct it as a trippy, surreal film that’s mostly forgotten but has acquired, very rightly, a devoted cult of fans. One part Catch-22 one part the boring bits from The Exorcist, there’s nothing else quite like it, and most people would peg it as career suicide.

In The Exorcist, young possessed Regan invades a post Georgetown dinner party her mom is having to pee on the carpet and tell an astronaut that he’s “going to die up there” which really puts a damper on things. That astronaut is Billy Cutshaw, whom we meet at the beginning of The Ninth Configuration, a man who recently suffered a philosophical panic attack on the launch pad and aborted his mission because he couldn’t bear the idea that he might die all alone in space and that there is no God, no nothing, beyond our planet but an endless void.

Now he’s confined to Center Eighteen, a castle near the Washington Coast, donated to the government by Amy Biltmore and used as a secret mental institution for a rash of nervous breakdowns among high-ranking servicemen with impeccable records who all seem to have suddenly gone stark raving mad. Cutshaw is the leader of this merry crew, which includes Nammack, who believes he’s Superman, Fairbanks, who is desperate to adjust his atoms so he can walk through walls, and Reno, who’s planning to stage the complete works of Shakespeare with an all-dog cast. Everyone’s getting along just great until the arrival of the new psychiatrist and commanding officer, Colonel Kane. But rather than whip these merry pranksters into shape, Kane seems fascinated by their madness, convinced that they need to fulfill their delusional goals in order to have closure and be whole.

As the castle descends into anarchy, Kane and Cutshaw engage in a duel of belief with Cutshaw claiming that he wants to believe in God but he’s never seen any evidence. Kane is a believer and he and Cutshaw decide that if they can find a human being acting out of kindness, and counter to their own self-interests, it will be proof enough that the universe contains goodness and, therefore, a God (I’m simplifying here). Then, chapter after chapter, Kane attempts to show a human being motivated by kindness while Cutshaw shoots down every example as being motivated, on some level, by self-interest.

Blatty viewed The Ninth Configuration as the sequel to The Exorcist, and he states that his three books (The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and Legion) form a loose trilogy (as do the three film versions: The Exorcist, The Ninth Configuration, and The Exorcist III). His tolerance for long-winded theological debate is balanced by his ability to write dialogue like a dream, constantly pulling the rug out from under his high-minded characters with sharp comedy and surreal slapstick. At only 135 pages, the book moves fast, and never bogs down into navel-gazing twaddle, betraying Blatty’s origins as a screenwriter with an emphasis on dialogue and pace.

Always a better writer than he gets credit for, Blatty ends The Ninth Configuration with a moment of sacrifice that gives Cutshaw his one unselfish man, but then in its last pages it unfolds outwards to present a gallery of sacrifices, piling up example after example of people acting against their own self-interests for love, or folly, or for no good reason in particular. Even more fascinating is when the book takes place. Despite coming out seven years after Blatty wrote The Exorcist, it’s set in 1968 and so Cutshaw attends that Georgetown party and is told he’s going to die on a mission long after The Ninth Configuration has ended and he’s reconciled himself to a belief that man is not alone, even in the infinite void of space. I don’t think he has a single line in the film version of the book, but there’s something touching about the fact that Blatty wanted to give even one of his minor characters an inner life, full of hopes and dreams.

You can argue about the existence of God all you want, but for Blatty, human beings are the ultimate proof, his own duck-billed platypus. Would nature have designed a biological machine as ridiculous, as inefficient, as prone to stupidity as humanity? Or does our very existence suggest that there is some kind of God and that he or she has a wicked sense of humor? Since Blatty is the man who wrote the line, “Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world.” It’s pretty easy to guess which side of the argument he comes down on.

Grady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today and his latest novel is Horrorstör, about a haunted Ikea.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/18/star-wars-the-force-awakens-spoiler-thread/

http://www.tor.com/?p=200005

Tor.com won’t be posting any spoilery thoughts on Star Wars: The Force Awakens until Monday, December 21st, but we recognize that many in the U.K. and the U.S. will have seen the film by Friday morning, so we’re providing this space for folks who want to talk about the events in the film!

If you would prefer a spoiler-free take on The Force Awakens, read Emily Asher-Perrin’s review here.

Otherwise, LOOK OUT because there are SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS AHEAD.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/18/gary-fisher-carrie-fishers-french-bulldog-action-figure/

http://www.tor.com/?p=200023

You’re going to be shocked by this, but we here at Tor.com com are pretty excited about the new Star Wars movie. By far one of the best bits of the feverish anticipation of The Force Awakens has been following Carrie Fisher’s hilarious press appearances, and one of the best parts of that has been the breakout stardom of Carrie Fisher’s companion Gary, The Greatest French Bulldog Of All Time. Here, you can see him as an action figure, which is clearly something that needs to happen immediately. But that’s just the beginning: delve further into his Twitter and Instagram accounts, and you’ll find a goldmine for those of us who love the intersection of Star Wars references and adorable animals.

Here’s Gary standing guard while his mom settles accounts with a certain villainous Hutt:

And here he is in a scandalous make-out session with Oscar Isaac:

And finally, here he is rocking a familiar hairstyle!

If the third film in the new trilogy features, say, a moon? And it’s populated by French Bulldogs? Who unite to defeat The First Order? And Gary’s their leader? We’ll be completely OK with that. Your move, Rian Johnson.

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/18/michael-moorcock-is-the-eternal-champion/

http://www.tor.com/2013/12/18/michael-moorcock-is-the-eternal-champion/

Today marks the 75th birthday of celebrated and influential author and editor Michael John Moorcock. Involving himself in the SF/Fantasy scene practically as soon as he discovered it, Moorcock began editing Tarzan Adventures in 1957 when he was just 17. His love of high adventure, such as the work of Leigh Brackett and Edgar Rice Burroughs, influenced not only his early editorial work but also his own writing.

He is often self-deprecating about his style, saying in the introduction to Elric: The Stealer of Souls:

“I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas”

Perhaps best known for his books set in the Eternal Champion universe, Moorcock developed the idea of an epic fantasy hero who isn’t limited to a single storyline or canonical biography. Instead, various characters are embodied with a heroic spirit, whether they are aware of it or not! Also popular is the sexually unconventional secret agent Jerry Cornelius, first appearing in The Finale Programme. This character has proven so popular that Moorcock has allowed other SF writers, including Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss and others, to write their own Jerry Cornelius stories.

As the editor of New Worlds in the 1960s, Moorcock’s influence is likely most apparent, in terms of the history of contemporary science fiction. This stint helped establish a whole world of “New Wave” science fiction of which several game-changing writers like Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, and Roger Zelazny were satellites.

Never shy about his opinions on writing, Michael Moorcock firmly believes in the inherent need for SF writing to be inclusive of all races, genders, and orientations. His writing also reflects the human elements of SF/F writing; the idea that we’re all confused paradoxical beings, struggling to find the answers. In this way, as a fantasist, Michael Moorcock is like a soothsayer of a bygone era. In The Elric Saga Part I, he makes plain the relationship between our imperfect world and the musings of soothsayers:

“Elric knew that everything that existed had its opposite. In danger he might find peace. And yet, of course, in peace there was danger. Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.”

We think this imperfect world is made a little more manageable through the magic of Michael Moorcock. Happy Birthday!

This post originally ran December 18, 2012

http://www.tor.com/2015/12/18/the-man-who-demolished-boring-science-fiction-alfred-bester/

http://www.tor.com/2013/12/18/the-man-who-demolished-boring-science-fiction-alfred-bester/

Thinking about telepaths when telepaths are in the room is hard because they know you’re thinking about them. This is why—on most days—I’m glad I never actually had the chance to meet science fiction legend Alfred Bester, because my thoughts about him would have been disgustingly gushing and I’m sure he would have heard those thoughts because he was likely a real deal telepath and I would have been embarrassed. I’m kidding. I’m super sad I didn’t get to meet him! (But he was probably a real telepath…)

Today would have been Bester’s 102nd birthday. He won the first Hugo award for a novel ever, and made everything in SF way more fun. Here’s why he’s still the best.

Though Bester isn’t breaking any records for number of novels written or short stories published, he does reign supreme in terms of influence of those who are hardcore science fiction readers. If you want to blow someone’s mind in terms of a novel that is booth baffling and wonderful at the same time, it doesn’t get much better than The Stars My Destination. By seemingly mashing-up the aesthetic of golden age science fiction with a literary epic, plus comic-book super-powers, it is emblematic of Bester’s tendencies to surprise. Fronted by an anti-hero named Gully Foyle, The Stars My Destination is also notable for being a kind of science fiction pastiche of The Count of Monte Cristo, assuming Alexander Dumas was a crazy person driven into a synesthesia-laden mental breakdown precipitated by the ability to accidentally teleport across vast regions of space. (Spoiler alert: something like this, sans Dumas, may actually happen in the novel.)

But it’s probably in the influence on how science fiction literature approaches telepaths where Alfred Bester’s true lasting impact exists. In The Demolished Man, Bester depicts a future world where crime is outrageously difficult to commit owing to the existence of an efficient network of telepaths or ‘espers.’ How a person would commit a crime in such a world is not only the central theme, but also the specific plot of the novel, which eventually earned it the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1953, the first book ever to receive the award. Part of the reason this book was probably so successful and still adamantly recommended by people like me is the totally detailed and convincing way in which a society is changed by one science fiction element, in this case, telepaths. In fact, Bester’s rules for telepaths are probably just as influential as Asimov’s laws or robotics; everyone from Harlan Ellison to Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski cribs from Bester when it comes to the machinations of their espers. The latter even named Walter Koenig’s fictional reoccurring B5 conniving baddie after the author. (Which was super-confusing for my teenage self considering Koenig played a guy named Chekov on Star Trek. Wait. Chekhov? Or Chekov? Guy from Star Trek writes stories? Walter Koenig played two fictional characters with names kind of borrowed from writers?)

Though lauded for those two famous novels (his other ones like The Computer Connection and Rat Race are less good, and less talked about) it’s in his short fiction where I find Bester to be the most readable and memorable. This era of science fiction tends to be thought of as stuffy, or at the very least, old fashioned, but the short stories in Bester’s collection The Dark Side of the Earth are anything but. My favorite of these is probably as story called, innocently enough, “Out of This World.” Here, a man working in an office building in 1950s Manhattan gets a phone call accidentally wired to his desk which turns out to be a wrong number. The young woman calls back again, saying she was connected again on accident to his line. From her end, she’s dialing the right number, and neither party can figure out why they keep getting connected. After both chalk up the problem to literal crossed wires (of the switchboard kind!) they agree to meet for lunch in the city, but never find each other.

If you’re expecting Rod Serling to step out and explain all of this to you at some point, you should, because the subtle Twilight Zone-esque twist is this: she’s from an alternate universe, one where the layout of Manhattan is very different owing specifically to events of a certain World War going a different way her dimension than they went in ours. “Out of this World” is both charming and chilling, original and funny, and most of all, demonstrates what Bester is a master of, making a science fiction premise seem as smooth as any other fiction convention. In short, Bester didn’t pretend like science fiction was weird, instead he played his science fiction the way he clearly thought about it: like it was cool.

The primary rule of being cool is that you have to actually be cool to be cool. You can’t fake coolness, which is the main reason why I’d never want to meet a real, telepathic Alfred Bester. He’d be on to me immediately as a total phony trying to play it cool about being in his presence. In this universe, Alfred Bester’s telepaths would have created a world in which uncool people don’t exist, routing them out through mind-reading. Which is where I would be screwed.

Though I never met him, nor am I old enough to remember him when he was really alive, I miss him. Thanks for everything you gave us, Alfie!

This article was originally published December 18, 2013

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22859

In "A quantitative history of which-hunting", I reproduced a plot due to (an anonymous colleague of) Jonathan Owen, showing that texts from the last half of the 20th century saw a decrease in the relative frequency of NOUN which VERB, and an increase in the relative frequency of NOUN that VERB. Jonathan took this to indicate the success of (usage guides like) Strunk & White's The Elements of Style in persuading writers and copy-editors to avoid which in "restrictive" (AKA "defining" or "integrated") relative clauses

Here are some plots showing the effect, for data (without smoothing) from the Google Books ngram corpus. The "British English" dataset shows about the same increase in NOUN that as the "American English" collection does, but somewhat less decrease in NOUN which:

American English	British English

Note that I have NOT simply plotted the frequency of the forms, but rather the proportional change over the course of the century, relative to the mean during that period. Thus if WHICH is the vector of frequency values for the pattern NOUN which from 1900 to 2000, the red curves represent \(WHICH/mean(WHICH)\).

I should also note that both patterns will cover some things that are not relative clauses at all — complement-clauses with that (e.g. "the way that", "the idea that", etc.), and question-word uses of which (e.g. "ask John which he prefers", "asked in a quiet voice which road to take"). But it's striking that Strunk & White's publication date of 1959 corresponds so neatly to an apparent inflection point in the plots.

However, if we look at the trends for more specific patterns, the simple which-hunting story is not so clear. At least, it interacts with other trends that may obscure or overwhelm it in particular cases. For example, we find some evidence for an overall decline in the frequency of (some types of) relative clauses, at least from 1900 to 1970 or 1980.

The plots below show the proportional changes in four sets (also merging upper and lower case):

Google Ngrams "English"	COHA

And if we look across a range of subject pronouns in a similar set of relative clause structures, we see some other effects as well. For some of the pronouns (I, you, we, she), the decline in relative-clause frequencies sharply reverses about 1965, while others (they, he) level off similarly to the overall pattern shown above. At least, that's what happens for relative clauses with that and those that start with the bare pronoun:

"the things PRO"	"the things that PRO

The same structures with which just keep on declining:

This all seems to mean that at least the following things are going on:

1. An overall 20th-century decline in relative-clause frequency, probably correlated with declining sentence length and complexity (see e.g. "Real trends in word and sentence length", 10/31/2011; "Inaugural embedding", 9/9/2005; "The evolution of disornamentation", 2/21/2005.
2. A change since the 1960s (in overall writing style, or in the Google Books ngram corpus sample, or both) towards increased use of first- and second-person pronouns.
3. A change since the 1960s (in overall writing style, or in the Google Books ngram corpus sample, or both) towards increased discussion of women.
4. Which-hunting — which may have started before 1959, due to the influence of the Fowlers, but seems to have been strongly boosted by The Elements of Style.

I'm sure that further investigation would uncover additional complexities.

Note: If you still think that E.B. White's conversion to the which-hunting faith was a recognition of the Truth, see Geoff Pullum's essay "A Rule Which Will Live In infamy", Lingua Franca 12/7/2012.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22853

In "Remember the First 100 Digits of Pi Using This Basic Technique" (mental_floss, 12/11/15), Caitlin Schneider describes a "memory palace" in which one can use letters to recall long strings of numbers.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scotusblog/pFXs/~3/GwOXJdSdAlI/

http://www.scotusblog.com/?p=236182

As Lyle Denniston reported yesterday for this blog, “the Obama administration urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday not to allow two states to sue Colorado directly in the Supreme Court over their claim of cross-border crime traced to their neighbor’s regime of legal sales of marijuana.”  Tony Mauro covers the government’s filing for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required).

Writing for The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that a “rare alliance between both houses of Congress and the Obama administration is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to clear the path for American victims of Iranian-backed terrorism to recover damages from Iran’s central bank” in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, scheduled for oral argument in mid-January.  The Citizen’s Guide to the Supreme Court has a podcast on the case and the issues related to it, “including why judgments are the most important part of every civil case, the Court’s view on Separation of Powers issues, whether this is a Bill of Attainder and what is a Bill of Attainder.”  

Briefly:

• Writing for Bloomberg Politics, Greg Stohr reports that “Chief Justice John Roberts overlooked a conflict of interest when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected two appeals in an environmental-cleanup case earlier this year.”
• In Harvard Magazine, Lincoln Caplan profiles Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner, including his disdain for the Court.
• At the Stanford Law Review Online, Daniel Townsend considers what Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, in which the Court heard oral arguments last month, “is really about: who should decide what ‘counts’ as an injury. The Court has been clear that Article III requires injury.But what is less clear is whether the Court should accept an injury Congress defines via statute as sufficient for constitutional purposes.”
• At casetext, Leah Litman argues “that the Supreme Court should exercise its discretion to weigh in on whether it has made” its decision in Johnson v. United States “retroactive by way of one of the extraordinary writs it has the power to issue.”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/marginalrevolution/feed/~3/AkfrznIg1bE/roland-fryers-outstanding-seminar.html

http://marginalrevolution.com/?p=67303

Roland Fryer gave an outstanding seminar last week on Education, Inequality, & Incentives as part of GMU’s Buchanan Speaker Series. Fryer was passionate, funny, and informed as he recounted his journey pounding away at Stata in the late 1990s in an effort to show that Neal and Johnson were wrong and that racism just had to account for differences in wages and other outcomes between blacks and whites; to coming to accept that a large portion of the difference is determined by differences in human capital; to his shocking discovery that the Harlem Children’s Zone was dramatically increasing human capital among minorities; and finally to abandoning the academic game of estimating the different effects of beef and chicken soup (but in really cool and precise ways!) to instead throw himself into the messy work of taking the lessons from the best charter schools and applying and scaling those lessons to public schools across the nation.

I had long been aware of Fryer’s academic work but I had not realized how much he and his team at the Harvard EdLabs have actually done on the ground to remake dozens of schools in Houston, Denver and elsewhere–in the process showing that the best practices of the best charter schools can be scaled to the entire nation. Remarkable.

He starts off at 3:10 slightly hesitant but he really builds.

http://feeds.nature.com/~r/news/rss/most_recent/~3/6c1CFWn7e8M/nature.2015.19042

Test your knowledge of the year in science.

Nature News doi: 10.1038/nature.2015.19042

Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer. Reread. I find that I am less enthusiastic about this over a decade later, but the science- and scientist-related poems are still of interest. I think other Ackerman volumes will be where I find my favorites. I may find that I am wrong.

Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad. Usually when I read a short story collection I like to call out particular favorites. This whole thing is my particular favorite. Read the whole thing. This is so good. I–so from the very beginning, if you have any Malaysian friends, the dialog. Oh, the dialog. There is this comfortable confident feeling that she is telling the truth about your friends, and that makes you feel like she is also telling the truth about whatever speculative element. This is what good dialog does. (See also: good whatever else.) If you give readers the sense that people don’t really talk like that, it’s a short hop to these aren’t really people, they’re just ink marks on a page. These are really people. They are really particular, beautifully drawn people. Doing various things with heart and interest. I liked Sorcerer to the Crown a lot a lot, but this–I love this so much.

A.M. Dellamonica, A Daughter of No Nation. Discussed elsewhere.

Angelica Gorodischer, Prodigies. This is about the house of a poet, in Berlin. It is not the masterwork Kalpa Imperial is, and it makes me so very happy to have the chance to read something secondary, to get a translation that isn’t the One Biggest Best Thing. What a great future it is where I can read not just one Angelica Gorodischer book, oh yay yay yay. I mean, this is an interesting book. I just…don’t take translations for granted.

Ryan North and Erica Henderson, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Power. Extremely exuberant. Punny. Pugnacious. I heard someone say that it talks like the internet; yep. There are better audiences than me for this book, but I smiled at bits of it all the same. It pretty much does what it says on the tin, though.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti. I feel like this is a book that is doing a lot–a lot–to try to reach audiences who are unfamiliar with some aspects of African cultures and get them African-based alien interaction SF that they can be okay with. I love alien interaction SF and am pretty comfortable with less hand-holding through African cultures, so rock on.

Greg Rucka, Lazarus Three. Near future dystopian comic continues. Don’t start here, see if you like the early ones. I’m feeling pretty lukewarm at this point and would rather have his prose in something like Alpha, but writers are allowed their choice of projects and not mine. (What is this free will nonsense. What.)

Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. I keep saying that things do what they say on the tin; this does not. I am deeply interested in the future of neurodiversity, and there is almost nothing about that in this book. It is substantially Awful Things People Have Done To the Autistic Through History. I wanted to read it to see what mainstream people will think about my autistic/other neurodiverse friends and family, since it’s a pretty popular pop-science book, and aside from a few moments of historical diagnosis (staaaaaap) it didn’t have a lot that I’m going to have to beat out of people with my shoe. But it’s not very much fun to read if you already know the Awful Things Etc., and it does pretty much nothing for the future of neurodiversity if you’re a nerd/proto-activist in that direction. Well. We’ll just have to build it ourselves, folks. (And by “we’ll just have to build it ourselves,” I mean “I will be calling on you to build this with me, so saddle up.”)

Molly Tanzer, The Pleasure Merchant. Eighteenth century…science fiction? ish? or just historical fiction, depending on how you read it. Not like anything else out there, that I know of. Proto-mesmerism, and sex, and people’s best and worst natures, and oh my goodness so very eighteenth century. I love the eighteenth century, and Molly hits on so many things about it. Recommended.

The Hmong American Writers’ Circle, How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Quite a lot of poetry, some fiction, a little nonfiction, some art. An interesting mix. I’m a little frustrated by how many people told these writers that they had to “speak for their people” when white writers are put under no such constraint, but having a forum for their voices to be heard is a good thing regardless of whether you’re leaning that on them.

Derek Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013. Lots to love here. Some political, some highly personal, and not clustered at one end of his career or another, either. You can watch him struggle with the legacy of colonialism pretty explicitly and in a fantastically erudite way. You can also just revel in what he does with language. Gorgeous, great. More.

http://xkcd.com/1618/

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Sfsignal/~3/wWnmj3GIhDk/

http://www.sfsignal.com/?p=131279

REVIEW SUMMARY: Red Star Tales offers us a unique look at the development of Russian sci-fi. From well-known writers (to Western readers) like the Strugatsky brothers, to authors never before translated into English, we have here a rich, eclectic blend of stories that are quintessentially Russian.

MY RATING: 

MY REVIEW:
PROS: RST introduces us to many previously-unknown names in Russian sci-fi; large selection of stories
CONS:  Only ONE story by a woman?!
BOTTOM LINE: You like Russian sci-fi, yes? You like LOTS of Russian sci-fi written over the course of the 20th century, yes? Well, what are you waiting for? Эта книга для тебя!

Red Star Tales began as a Kickstarter initiative to publish “the first comprehensive edition of truly notable Russian and Soviet science fiction – works chosen for their artistic and scientific merit, not because of any political or ideological agenda.” None of the 18 stories included in the collection has ever been translated into English until now, and because of this book we can truly appreciate the dramatic and dynamic scope of Russian science fiction from the end of the 19th century, through the Soviet era, and into modern times.

As such a book should do, Red Star Tales includes a useful introduction to the development of the genre in relation to Russian political and social changes, as well as a section dedicated to information about each of the authors and the translators who have made them available to us English-language readers. Editor Yvonne Howell comments on each story in this introduction, providing much-needed context and background so that readers can more readily appreciate the extent of this unique volume. Especially appreciated by this reviewer is the book’s three-part structure, which helps us contextualize each story in terms of its genesis in a particular era of Russian/Soviet history (Part I: Red Star Rising [1892-1915]; Part II: Red Star in Retrograde [1926-1946]; Part III: Red Star Reforming [1958-1992]).

So what were Russian sci-fi writers preoccupied with during the long twentieth century? Well, you know, EVERYTHING. We have robots and “teleportation” doors, adventures on the moon and reanimated heads, hyper-intelligent chimpanzees and human consciousness transformed into radio-wave signals. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Part I includes two tantalizing and unfinished pieces by Valery Bryusov (“Rebellion of the Machines: From the Chronicles of the Thirtieth Century,” 1908, and “Mutiny of the Machines: A Fantastic Tale,” 1915, both translated by Anindita Bannerjee), and I think you can guess this particular writer’s preoccupation. In the first story, Bryusov’s narrator chronicles how humans let their machines take over so much of their lives that soon the machines were in control. Without warning, some of these machines started using technology in people’s homes to attack them. The second piece details the rise of the machines in a slightly different way, but in a note, the author explains that Germany’s belief in the power of technology during the Great War invites speculation about the results of such faith.

Included in Part II are stories about severed heads that are brought back to life by an unscrupulous scientist (“Professor Dowell’s Head” by Alexander Belyaev, 1926, translated by Muireann Maguire) and the Tunguska explosion (“Explosion: The Story of a Hypothesis” by Alexander Kazantsev, 1946, translated by Nora Seligman Favorov), both of which imagine alternate vivid realities in the fields of medical and nuclear research.

We have two (count ’em, TWO) previously untranslated Strugatsky pieces, one of which is an excerpt (“The Spontaneous Reflex,” 1958 and Those Burdened by Evil, 1988, both translated by Kevin Reese) concerning a big, hulking, complex robot and a “Demiurge.” One of my particular favorites in this volume, included in Part III, is an excerpt from Doorinda (1990) by Daliya Truskinovskaya, in which a hard-working single mother who has been beaten down by life discovers that her apartment door can act as a magic portal. Truskinovskaya’s deft mixture of mystery and humor makes me want to read more of her work, and thus hope that more of her stories are/will be translated into English.

If this has whetted your appetite for newly-translated 20th century Russian sci-fi, then by all means grab a copy of Red Star Tales. You’ll be glad you did.

The post RED STAR TALES: A CENTURY OF RUSSIAN AND SOVIET SCIENCE FICTION ed. by Yvonne Howell is a Rich, Eclectic Story Collection appeared first on SF Signal
Copyright © SF Signal

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Sfsignal/~3/MwoPJobPZXM/

http://www.sfsignal.com/?p=131345

I love the Bad Lip Reading video series. Apparently some celebrities do, too. In this latest series of videos, not only do they tackle the original Star Wars trilogy, but they enlist the vocal talens of Jack Black, Maya Rudolph, and Bill Hader.

“I want a wooden snowman, but no one sells them. I’LL BE RIGHT OUT!”

“Vader’s after my pelican”

“I like dookie buttons…”

The post Avoid Star Wars Spoilers by Watching a Bad Lip Reading of The Original Trilogy appeared first on SF Signal
Copyright © SF Signal