The Windkey and the Lamplighter

This is a collection of five stories that was on my bookshelf, so I
assume it belongs to Brian. But when I went looking for something to
read, it was Right There, at eye level. So convenient.
And, it was little—a really fast read, so if I didn’t like it I
wouldn’t be stuck with it for very long.

That was not a problem.

Three of these stories are about family, two are about romance and one
is about Star Trek—and family. They are all really really
good—narratives that make you forget that you’re reading something
in someone else’s head. Of course, William Shatner would not have
bothered telling me I didn’t belong on his bridge, but that’s okay—I
shall have my own starship someday and he can keep doing TV shows.

But, anyway, this was a really fun, fast read. I was sorry when it
ended, which means I need to go find Just a Geek, which I think is
around here somewhere.

Books Read in 2006: 25

But how many worlds are there? And is a double-planet system really
a planet? The IAU says yes. For those of you who don’t want to
read about it in the Bad Astronomy Blog, Pluto is a planet… but
so is Charon (it’s "moon", but their barycenter is not inside either
body) and Ceres. And they’re not real planets—they’re plutons, or
dwarf planets.

There seems to be some dissent, though—not everyone thinks there
ought to be more than 8 planets, and even some Pluto-lovers think that opening
the solar system up to thousands of new planets may not be a good idea.

I’d put off reading this, as it was in the pile of 3 for 2 books which
included Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I liked, and
Slaughterhouse 5, which I really didn’t. I should not have put it
off.

It’s a mystery, sort of, set in World War 1 Britain.
It has a very familiar, though never explicitly named, main
character—"an eighty-nine-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous
detective", to quote the back cover—who leaves his home and bees to help a
nine year old mute German Jewish boy find his missing pet parrot.

It is fantastic, and a really really fast read. It doesn’t hurt that
it’s only 131 pages in the double-spaced moderately large print often
used for this sort of paperback. (It may be a book club
edition—lots of reviews and an interview in the back with the
author, and the same typesetting as Reading Lolita in Tehran, which
had book group discussion questions in the back.)

Books Read in 2006: 24

Charles Stross is a fantastic writer. I like his worlds, his
characters, his style, and, usually, his books. But I am still not
sure if I liked Accelerando. I didn’t like the first few chapters,
but Brian, who had recommended it to me, said I should press on—"It
gets better", he said. So I did. And it did get better. I really
liked the middle third of the book, and was reading it in breaks
during my class this week.

It was terrifically difficult to explain what the book
was about to my coworkers. I settled on "Science fiction written by a
computer scientist, about what happens to people when the AIs don’t
want us around anymore", but I think if I had to explain it to more
technical friends, I’d say "The history of a family experiencing the
information singularity, and what they do afterward".

Books Read in 2006: 23

(I had better get moving if I want to average a book per week!)

I am taking a training class this week, learning Geometric
Dimensioning and Tolerancing. It’s actually neat—way more math
than I anticipated, even if it’s nothing more complicated than trig,
and usually not more than addition and subtraction.

But two things really struck me as interesting in the class.

1. I am one of the youngest people in the class, but part of a
   bimodal distribution.

2. I appear to be more quicker to finish our quizzes than most of the
   others, even though the first few, at least, were mostly just
   writing out definitions from the book.

Number 1 makes sense—I later realized that, in addition to representing
the bimodal distribution of the company, everyone in the class was
either training or retraining after having taken this class or its
equivalent 20 years ago. So of course it will select the very new
and those who need a refresher.

Number 2 actually eventually made sense to me, too, when a couple things
were pointed out to me. First, I got slower as we started having
drawings to dimension and tolerance, so it’s not actually that I
understood the material that much faster than average. But second, I
was one of very few who was going and reading the books we were
given. Most people were looking answers up in the slide handouts,
rather than in the GD&T standard or the reference text we were
given. I also appeared to have better reading comprehension than
some of them—my table-mate kept saying "If I could just figure out
what they wanted, I’d be doing great on these quizzes." We had a
conversation, later in the week, where both my table-mates admitted
to not really ever reading books for pleasure—magazines at most.
Maybe being a regular reader keeps me in practice?

Alvin York is fantastically cool. All the history buffs here have
probably already heard of him, but for the rest of us:

He was awarded the Medal of Honor for leading an attack on a German
machine-gun nest, killing 32 German soldiers and capturing 132 others, on 8 October 1918.

From Slashdot, so you probably already saw it: Nitric Oxide, which
is released by the thalmus, triggers higher-level processing
functions in the brain according to input that the brain is
receiving. So, in a sense, the thalmus is the kernel of the
computer in your head.

From the same website (LiveScience.com) as that article, also comes [Your
Brain Works Like the Internet][]. Luckily, they mean that your
brain works like a network, not that you’re running TCP/IP.

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060817_brain_boot.html
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/14298010/article.pl

Andy over at Cozy Corner says:

And here we have it: the renunciation of the rule of God, King, and
Mob. And that is why America, Britain, and Israel often look like
inseparable allies: all three are founded in the rule of Law, and the
expectation that today’s rules will still exist tomorrow.

And he also links to an example of Sharansky’s Town Square
Test. My local community had its own version a year or so ago, when
MIT’s administration methodically invented new "safety" rules until it
could forbid the posting of Israeli flags in dormitory windows,
visible from the street. It was instigated by Muslim students
offended by the view. It was clear that everybody involved understood
the real purpose of the exercise: to extract that office of the
administration from the midpoint of an ethnic conflict. Those damn
ethnics, getting their local border wars in the way of a safe, quiet
school. Better to just make both sides shut up and go away.

But one of those sides is our side. We don’t always have to agree
with its government or its policies—I’m not a fan of their
copyright laws, for example—but we must not sit by in a fight
between the past and the future. The state of Israel, a
representative democracy, is part of the future. The groups of
strongmen and feudalists in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Iran are the
past. If they win, we get to repeat the last millennium of history, an
empire falling and a climb out of darkness again.

The civilization we enjoy is a thin crust over an ocean of barbarism.
We can debate policy with our civilized opponents, but have no shared
axioms with barbarians. When we do not even share the desire to raise
our families in peace, left alone, what do we have? I can talk about
the copyright policy of Israel, about disagreements over points of
contract law. Can we debate such details of policy with Hezbollah?
With Teheran? With the democratically elected government of the
Palestinian Authority? Until we can, we’ve got to remember: civil
debate within the family of civilization, and an unyielding wall
against the barbaric night outside.

I can’t reasonably wear a cape to the office. But I have prepared
this sign, with the flags of the US, Great Britain and its
Commonwealth, and Israel: it really is Brittania and her far-flung
children who have maintained the rule of law, and now compose the Free
West.

Print one out and post it in your office. But be prepared to answer
some very scary questions! The flags will offend the Left, and the
words will offend Republicans. I’m not sure how Transnationalists,
Objectivists, and Orthogonal Moderates will take it. But since I’ve
got some of each on my hallway, perhaps I’ll find out.

Download your own sign today.

src="http://echosphere.net/star_trek_insp/insp_captkirk_preview.jpg">

They’re all fun. Go read them. You know you’re that much of a
dork—you’ll get the jokes.

I’m so confused by Cozy Corner today. Not by the ideas
presented, but by what they must be responding to.
In case you haven’t yet followed the link, the part I’m referring to
is "I believe Islamic fascism and Islamic terrorism are real".

Um… moon landing skeptics aside, how could you not believe that
Islamic fascism and terrorism are real? New York, London, Madrid,
Jerusalem, Baghdad, (Mumbai?). Yup, terrorists are real.

Iran. Yup, fascists are real.

Am I missing something?

EDIT: Clarification, or perhaps what I was missing

When I say "Islamic fascism" or "Islamic terrorism", I mean "Terrorism
that is inspired by and directed by Muslims who claim these actions
are required by their faith." I do not mean that all Muslims
are fascists or terrorists. I do not mean that I think terrorism
or fascism are inseparably linked to Islam, and I do not think
Islam is inseparably linked to fascism and terrorism. There are
lots of Muslims who are peaceful, and I think they are our best
allies against the terrorists and fascists.

http://www.cozikin.com/2006/08/i_believe_that_islamic_fascism.html
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/08/06/time.coverstory.tm/&sa=X&oi=news&ct=result&cd=3&sig=__FM5r6118V1fjPnpVNakWCGU1f5c=e