Interesting Links for 8-5-2011

[andrewducker]

• Thomah the Tank Engine slash. I am totally not advising you to click on this.
  (tags: slash ThomasTheTankEngine fanfic)
• UK government will not block Scottish independence referendum
  (tags: government scotland independence)
• Doctor Who 6.3: The Curse of the Black Spot - a Review. (More holes than a big bit of swiss cheese)
  (tags: doctorwho tv review)
• Holiday snaps with Cthulhu
  (tags: photography cthulhu)
• In Which I Make No Apologies for Calling Bullshit on Ridiculous eBook Pricing
  (tags: ebooks prices books business)
• Donors to US schools insist that Ayn Rand is taught in schools. Huzzah for Capitalism!
  (tags: AynRand usa education EpicFail)
• AV referendum results by standard deviations from the mean (redder = further to yes, bluer=further to no)
  (tags: av results referendum uk)
• Anyone want to buy part of the true cross? On ebay?
  (tags: religion funny ebay)
• Jesus Versus Batman
  (tags: religion batman jesus)
• What happens when you forget to register your name as a URL when you're running for government...
  (tags: politics parody funny)
• Scientists afflict computers with schizophrenia to better understand the human brain
  (tags: brain schizophrenia psychology)
• Scientists reject link between nuclear plants and leukaemia
  (tags: camcer nuclear)
• Tiny wood-burning stove is more efficient, less polluting _and_ allows you to charge your mobile phone!
  (tags: energy sustainability green environment stove wood)
• A history of the SNP
  (tags: snp scotland politics)

Comments

[supergee]

I love "Together we can make delicious soup from the bones of the poor."

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

You know, I think it might be a good idea for Randianism to be taught in the schools. Seriously. There are two major schools of economic thought of the 20th century, Marxism and Randianism

Both are idealistic and look great on paper but when put into practical application suck. But, both are well intentioned and socialistic values as well as severe capitalism are still part of the ongoing political debate.

Students should learn about both ideas so they can make up their own mind. Perhaps if we do so, one of those students someday might create a new economic and social theory that works both on paper and in real life.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

"There are two major schools of economic thought of the 20th century, Marxism and Randianism"

There was also Keynesianism, which unlike the first two led to relatively few deaths.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

But also works much better on paper than in real life.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I know the Marxists and Objectivists both make the same complaint as this one, but I'd have to say that Keynesian economics have failed to the degree they have because of implementation more than fundamental flaws.

The basic concept, of using government to damp out the boom-bust cycle by deficit spending during busts (to increase economic activity and lay down the infrastructure needed for the next upturn) and surplus budgets during booms (to pay down the debts encurred during busts while reigning in inflation), was proved sound. It's what got the US out of the Great Depression, between the New Deal and wartime spending, and into the extended boom of the '50s and '60s.

The biggest problem with Keynesian economics comes during boom times, when too many people don't want to lower high growth rates even when those rates become obviously unsustainable and heading towards a bust... and there are those who object to surplus taxation in any form, and therefor the deficits never get paid down.

Another major issue is that some governments try to do too much fine control of the economy with Keynesian poliices and thereby run into the problems of planned/centralised economies... without any of the (few) benefits of such.

I guess really the issue is expectation management. I don't say that to diminish the problem; it's a big problem in a lot of areas both public and private.

-- Steve is amused that Keynesian economics is essentially a synthesis of the thesis of laissez-faire and its antithesis of communism. Such a quaintly Marxist way to ditch Marx...

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

The problem is all three theories ignore the realities of human nature.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

This.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

AV referendum results by standard deviations from the mean (redder = further to yes, bluer=further to no)

Isn't it the other way round? Cambridge and Oxford are dark red.

[andrewducker]

Red means further towards yes, and Oxbridge voted yes, and are red. I'm not sure where the confusion lies...

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

Sorry, yes; sleep-deprived stupidity on my part :/

[andrewducker]

I did wonder if you'd taken "Further to yes" to mean "Further from yes" :->

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I now check the experience and/or background of persons holding opinions about electronic books and publication thereof. If they're spods rather than something to do with the book-trade, I can ignore their opinion because it'll be the sound of someone talking shite.

[andrewducker]

Oddly, I feel the exact opposite when it comes to the music business.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more or less the same thing. I'm not convinced that the two things are usefully comparable, and it makes a right old mess of the arguments when people try. I mean, as the first daft example that fell into my head, many of my favourite records are crunchy lo-fi things that were made by people who could barely play their instruments, recorded on kit from the age of rock-banging and pressed onto plastic discs where the noise was mechanically reproduced.

I don't know what the publishing equivalent might be. Zine culture?

I don't think I could read a book with wilfully low production values because the poor spelling and formatting would drive me to lob it across the room.

[andrewducker]

And yet fanfic seems remarkably successful :->

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh, good point.

Although, I think, it's remarkably successful in a lot of the same ways that American hardcore punk is/was. He said, using the same flawed analogy that he thought was bunk only a comment ago.

[andrewducker]

You're probably right - I have no idea what percentage of people read fanfic, but it's probably a lot lower than the percentage that read professionally published fiction.

We might see more and more stuff going that way though. Have to wait and see.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Inasmuch as that scene (the hardcore one, I'm a relative latecomer to the entirety of [skiffy] fandom, which confuses the hell out of me still) is self-sufficient, inward-looking and has a set of traditions and observances that are rather impenetrable and will cause you trouble when you get them wrong.

On the other hand, I may have read one too many issues of MRR.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I would be very interested in reading the publishing version of 'Some of your friends are already this fucked'

[simont]

Personally, I'd be willing to put a little effort into proofreading. Give me ebook reading software with a convenient edit mode, and an ebook with not too many typos in it, and I'd be more than happy to fix the typos and submit a patch back to the publisher if the software made it easy to do so. I'm already conditioned to do that by Wikipedia, and I'd find it preferable to not being able to do anything about the typos at all.

(Hell, even if I could just fix the typos in my own copy so they didn't irritate me on rereads, that would be a start! But if I could submit them back too, then fixing that sort of error could be crowdsourced and one or two people with my attitude would improve the experience for everyone else too.)

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ye-es.

On one hand, I am a fellow traveller with the whole fix it yourself/patches welcome! coding ideal.

However, I suspect most writers wouldn't know a Github account if it ran up and bit them in the leg.

[simont]

I expect autopope could cope, but you're probably right that he'd be atypical in that regard...

But yes. Perhaps a prerequisite would be some sort of software designed to make accepting typo-fix style patches easy for the writer, without insisting on involving them with branch management, merging strategies and 40-hex-digit revision identifiers.

Ideally I'd fix a few typos and press a "Submit Fixes To Author" button in my e-reader, and at the writer's end they'd get an email attachment whose default handler app would present a user interface which basically showed a collection of snippets along the lines of

Chapter 3: ... wondered if Frad Fred would have liked it better ...
Chapter 6: ... "Sheila had to go out, Fred", said Fred Jim.

and then had a nice friendly button saying "Accept These Changes" which the writer could press if they were obviously right.

I'd guess that in sensible patches that just fix typos, it would be really quite rare to find any merge conflict more difficult than "someone else's patch has already fixed the same typo in the same way, ignore this change". (And if anyone did submit a sillier patch, the author would just press the "No, Don't Be Silly" button.) Big restructurings and semantic changes are the author's job, not the proofreader's!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I guess if one arse-u-me-s ePub format on the target (which I believe is XHTML + stuff) then your diffs are in a familiar format for upstream submission. As in there are tools which can show the changes in-line.

My understanding is that Scrivener (a fine editor optimised for writers) can emit ePub, so it is only a simple matter of code to close that loop. (for appropriate values of 'simple' and 'code', obviously... :) )

Obviously a save-to-remote-repo option for Scrivener would be a happy thing also.

However.

The commonly-accepted submission format to (online) magazines and publishing houses is 10-point double-spaced make-it-look-like-you-write-on-an-Underwood-portable. A sop to the existence of the last few decades is that online submissions are expected to be Word flavours of .rtf. The back and forth between writer and editor is performed in Word's collaboration tools. (At least this has been my experience)

I would be overjoyed to be able to use the same toolset for fiction and code - it's the same bit of brain after all. I don't think I'm going to get that lucky, though.

Interestingly enough, China Mieville has some fascinating things to say about the forking and 'remixing' of written work. With the sort of toolchain hackers are used to, the mechanical bits become relatively easy.

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

Heh. Regarding the 'true cross', apparently the Imperial Treasury in Vienna did a count of their relics some time last century and discovered 3 right arms of John the Baptist. There's something I never knew about the decapitated evangelical. I bet he could have been really happy clappy with that many hands.

[andrewducker]

Clearly Da Vinci was inspired by John the Baptist!

[innerbrat]

A lot of the Jesus folks are using pretty much the same arguments that Superfans use when trying to cliam that their hero could beat Batman.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

Totally agree on ebook pricing. It's ridiculous.