I've just finshed Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. It's a long time since I read such a sublimely written piece of utter bullshit, so I thought I'd post a review.
The story, set in the near future, revolves around themes taken (apparently at random) from life in the late Nineties early Noughties: CamelCase BrandNames, internet-mediated kiddie porn, and, above all, genetic engineering.
What Crake had said was this: "Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinately. Homo sapiens doesn't seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words — and up to a point, of course — the less we eat, the more we fuck."
Er, no we don't. Like most of the rest of the book, this passage uses well-crafted sentences to describe concepts that are plain wrong.
So, if you're going to read this this work of science fiction for the fiction then you'll probably enjoy it because the quality of the writing is outstanding. (Also noteworthy is the sheer malign rage of the prose — including plentiful and varied use of the f-word. This would have come over as self-conscious swaggering if it had been written by a twentysomething man, but feels genuine from a female author of Ms Atwood's maturity and skill.)
However, if you're looking for any science — or a vaguely well-informed and considered discussion of the perils of genetic engineering — then it would be better to look elsewhere.
There's been quite a few botched experiments [in trying to transfer cat characteristics to human-like animals], as Snowman recalled. One of the trial batch of kids had manifested a tendancy to sprout long whiskers and scramble up the curtains; a couple of the others had vocal expression impediments; one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.
This isn't Molecular Biology 101, it's Tom & Jerry's Greatest Hits. Perhaps it's supposed to be a joke, but it doesn't come over that way, set as it is among almost 400 deadpan, angst-ridden pages. Ms Atwood appears to think that scientists can mix the genes of diverse pairs of animals to derive viable organisms with recognisable characteristics of both just as easily as she mixes the letters of their names to create such mythical beasts such as pigoons and rakunks. Well, they can't.
The book has other credibility problems too: the major genetic engineering disaster upon which the plot relies assumes that it would be quite easy to wrap a malign biological virus in a pharmaceutical product and feed it to a large proportion of the human population before anyone realised what was going on. But it isn't, either technically, legally or logistically. In fact, I can't imagine, even in my worst nightmares, such a thing being possible at all given the way that drugs are developed and regulated — and the trends are towards it becoming more, not less, difficult. (The only virsues for which something like this is possible are the software variety; maybe, somewhere in Ms Atwood's fertile imagination, she's got the two confused.)
Ironically, the world described in this book — depressing, brutal, feral — feels a lot more like the world that mankind emerged from a few thousand years ago than the one towards which we're heading. There are a lot of things worth debating about artificial genetic modification (including selective breeding as well as genetic engineering), but you won't find them in this book. Instead we have a fine example of something else in the modern world that's depressing, and perhaps even dangerous: an outstanding and popular writer wasting their considerable talents on a thesis that holds less water than a macrame eggcup.
Ever wanted to wrap yourself in a magical cloak and become invisible just like Harry Potter? Well, if you live in Japan then just go along to the University of Tokyo and ask Professor Susumu Tachi if you can borrow his optical camouflage jacket. It uses a camera on the back to display an image of whatever it sees on the front of the jacket, rendered with tiny reflectors. The effect makes the wearer appear transparent (sort of, if you're looking from the right direction).
Alternatively you can do what I did and move to London — people here look right through you whatever you're wearing. ;-)
Yup, we're celebrating Fair and Balanced Day over here too, along with all those other good people. (Thanks to The Agonist for the pointer)
Update: The Economist has a bit of background in an article called Patent the Absurd (sadly for subscribers only; summary: absurd as it seems, Fox may have a case). Funnily enough, it's right next to a piece about the commercialisation of blogging (which is free for all :-).
The 7 August issue of The Economist has a wonderfully thought-provoking piece that starts from an uncontroversial premise — we should strive to maximise human happiness — and ends up at a surprising conclusion — we should therefore put up taxes.
How so? Well, it turns out that people value relative wealth much more highly than absolute wealth. As a result, if we were all to work harder and earn more money, none of us would end up any happier. In contrast, people behave very differently in relation to time off work &mdash they welcome having more of it regardless of whether or not other people are getting even longer vacations. The logical conclusion is that the tax system should encourage us to take more time off rather than to work even harder. That means a high marginal rate of income tax.
As someone who would readily consider emigrating again if UK taxes go much higher, I find it hard to go along with this completely (seeing my tax money being frittered away by a bunch of dickheads certainly subtracts from my total sum of happiness), but at least it made me see things in a new light.
Having just returned to London from San Francisco, I am reminded of the three things whose remarkable popularity in America continue to convince me that I can never truly fit in over there:
That last link greeted me on my return courtesy of this posting to Dave Farber's IP list. The article starts off as follows:
Today marks the Roman Catholics' Feast of the Assumption, honoring the moment that they believe God brought the Virgin Mary into Heaven. So here's a fact appropriate for the day: Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).
It goes on to describe how Americans are becoming more religious and fundamentalist in their views even while most of the rest of the world is, if anything, becoming more secular and rational.
I recently finished reading A Devils Chaplain by Richard Dawkins. Predictably enough, he takes a lot of swipes at religion. Also predictably enough, I quite enjoyed them. His discussion of transubstantiation (the Roman Catholic belief that the wine of the Sacrament actually becomes the blood of Christ) was particularly entertaining. Religion, Dawkins explains, requires mystery, and transubstantiation handily conjours up two whole mysteries — (i) that wine has become blood and (ii) that it nevertheless continues to look and taste just like wine — out of thin air where there was previously only one completely mundane fact — it's just wine.
Should we be worried that a large proportion of the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth, including many of their leaders, are willing — nay, eager — to believe in this sort of thing? Is it a cause for concern when 83% of them accept that Mary was a virgin despite the fact that the oldest known written accounts make no mention of this fact and the story probably arose from a mistranslation of a word meaning "young woman"? Don't these people shown themselves to be even more credulous when they accept Mary's own Immaculate Conception, which was only added to the official story in 1854? Is it potentially dangerous when people irrational enough to believe all of the above, but at the same time dismiss evolution, hold sway over the world?
I think the answers to all these questions are yes. But I don't know what to do about it — I can always turn down the sourdough or turn off Fox TV, but those gullible carriers of the Hebrew Myths meme are just about everywhere.
A week or so ago the blogosphere lit up with news of a bright spark to rival Einstein. Peter Lynds, a 27-year-old with no academic affiliation had achieved the impressive feat of having his paper about the nature of time not only published in a peer-reviewed journal but also publicly praised by some professional physicists.
However, though there were lots of postings on this news, I didn't see any from people who'd actually read the paper. Perhaps this is partly because the original (more general) paper seems to be behind the subscriber-only access system of the journal in question. But Lynds' follow-up paper (which concentrates on much narrower implications for Zeno's Paradox and related puzzles) is freely available online. So I took a look.
The first thing that struck me about it was the quality of the writing, which is poor. It's full of typos, uses some strange turns of phrase that aren't quite English and, when it gets to the really important parts, becomes bogged down in dense blocks of opaque text. For example:
After all, before the second half of the distance can be travelled, one must cover the first half. But before that distance can be travelled, the first quarter must be completed, and before that can be done, one must traverse the first eight [sic], and so on, and so on to infinitum [sic].
and:
Zeno would of [sic] known full well...
and:
One could certainly also assert that there were no interval in time, and so if one wishes, there were a precise static instant underlying a physical process, without it being dependent on there actually being interval: as is the case with the hypothetical absence of mass and energy, and the resulting absence of 3 spatial dimensions [sic, sic, sic, sic, ...].
But these are signs of incompetent editing as well as authoring. And, in any case, they shouldn't be allowed to distract us from any interesting ideas contained in the text. The trouble is, I can't find many.
The main claim is as follows:
[I]n all cases a time value indicates an interval of time rather than a precise static instant in time at which the relative position of a body in relative motion or a specific physical magnitude would theoretically be precisely determined.
As a result, a body in relative motion does not have a precisely determined relative position:
[T]his is not associated with the preciseness of the measurement, a question of renormalizing infinitesimals or the result of quantum uncertainty... It simply does not have one. There is a very significant and important difference.
Mmm... maybe. But this approach isn't required to explain Zeno's Paradox. That depends only on understanding that an infinite series can sum to a finite quantity (resulting in a finite time for Achilles to overtake the tortoise). Lynds dismisses this approach as a mathematical fiction. I disagree.
Lynds bolder claim is that his approach is required to allow any change at all. To me, it boils down to saying that any physical quantity that is changing with time has an degree of indeterminacy associated with it's value during any specified time interval; the smaller the interval (and slower the change) the less the indeterminacy. This is a trivial statement. Lynds seems to be claiming that, on the contrary, his statement is profound. But if it is then I have missed the reason why.
In any case, none of this deals with the really interesting things about time, which relate to its qualitative differences from space (something I've written about before. In my (admittedly limited) experience, better places to read about the nature of time are:
On the other hand, if you want a more prosaic, but no less entertaining, discussion of time, read this piece by David Adam in The Guardian is well worth a read.
Since the days when my love affair with the web was at the embarrassed fumbling stage, Jon Udell has always been an inspiring read and, if the truth be told, something of a hero to me. So it's great to see him writing about a subject that's been close to my heart lately: RSS and RDF.
The exciting thing about Jon's latest posting is that he seems to get it:
What I hadn't fully appreciated, until just now, is the deep connection between RDF and namespace-mixing.
Yes, being able to mix different XML namespaces easily requires a higher-level data model, and RDF is it (or at least the best candidate we have today). Hallelujah!
I'm currently involved in a project that involves aggregating and querying a lot of RSS data. The only extension modules we can deal with in a fully generic way are the RDF-types ones designed to work with RSS 1.0. To deal with RSS 2.0 modules (which don't use an RDF structure, at least currently) we either have to manually add routines for each one to our code (a maintainability nightmare) or skip them all together (which means we lose data).
I seem to remember that the idea if making RSS 2.0 and its immediate predecessors non-RDF-like was to make programmers' lives simpler. Well it hasn't for us, not by a long shot. That's why we still use RSS 1.0 and all it's RDF goodness whenever we have a choice.
A report from the yacht Melina (sailed by my dad, with my mum currently guest starring for a few weeks) has reached Camden, Maine. Meanwhile this branch of the family remains firmly in Camden, London.
Why do we need weblog ethics? I'm not questioning the need for ethics per se, but why do we need to separate out the rules that govern blogging from those that guide us during the rest of our lives?
This highly cited piece on the subject — which is well-written and thoughtful — lists rules such as the following (to which I have appended the same rules more generally stated):
Lighten up! Medicine needs ethics because it determines whether people live or die. By comparison, blogging is insignificant[inconsequential, so it's OK to take a more laissez faire approach]. [Otherwise] what next, a moral philosophy [for making phone calls? A code of conduct ]for brushing our teeth? Your blog is your own so write it as you would lead the rest of your life. And if people don't like your approach then they won't read you.
BTW, while we're on the subject, I found it hilariously ironic that this even-tempered and thoughtful post on blogging ethics should elicit as its very first comment a thoroughly different response from a leading light of the blogosphere. Don't you sometimes get the feeling that a few people live in a parallel universe to the rest of us? I guess that some people's personal rules don't include "Thou shalt not take offence where none is intended, and neither shall thou needlessly flame". But that's cool: we can always exercise our fundamental human right to ignore.
After reading this, I was wondering whether or not I'm a MOUSE. More like a MUSE, I thought at first. But now I've settled on being an OS; that describes me best.
SCO now say that they'll leave you and your Linux box alone if you give them $1,399. (But for you, my friend, if you're quick, the price is only $699.) It's a steal!
Meanwhile, everyone's suing everyone else.
Back in the real world, Eben Moglen explains why SCO's claims look strange and full of ill intent, even to a lawyer. Perhaps the most interesting bit of his essay is this:
Imagine the literary equivalent of SCO's current bluster: Publishing house A alleges that the bestselling novel by Author X topping the charts from Publisher B plagiarizes its own more obscure novel by Author Y. "But," the chairman of Publisher A announces at a news conference, "we're not suing Author X or Publisher B; we're only suing all the people who bought X's book. They have to pay us for a license to read the book immediately, or we’ll come after them." That doesn’t happen, because that’s not the law.
It may not be the law, but it's clearly what SCO's rich friends would like them to do. Coincidence?
I've just received the following remarkable piece of correspondence from London Energy, my electricity and gas supplier:
As you may remember, we wrote to you recently informing you of proposed changs to our tariffs.The changes to your terms and the date, from which these changes take place, were outlined in such correspondence. As a result of this notice confirming the change to your terms we are now required to advise you of your loegal entitlement to give valid notice to terminate our contract. Should you exercise this right within 14 days of receipt of this leaflet, by notifying us at London Energy, Admail 1025, London, WC1V 6LA, we will not seek to enforce this variation.
Forget for a moment the obvious inability to punctuate correctly and concentrate instead on the message, which I translate here into English:
"We recently wrote to you to tell you that we're raising our prices. But if you have the time and presence of mind to decode this deliberately obfuscated letter and write back to us, we won't put up your prices after all."
Which planet is London Energy on? Do they really think that playing games like this will create loyal cusomers? Gits.
Marshall Stoneham of University College London reckons that he can put a silicon-based quantum computer on your desk by 2010.
No word yet when he expects the software to arrive. ;-)
The US government has stolen $44 trillion. How can they get away with it? Easy, the people they've stolen it from haven't been born yet. The Economist has the scoop (subscribers only, I fear).
Following on from his flawed but intriguing Snapster idea, Bob Cringely has posted version 2.0, which involves members contributing their own CDs to a truly global jukebox. I like this one a lot. It'll be interesting to see if the lawyers can pick holes in it. As before, I wonder whether this idea (and probably all others like it) isn't vulnerable to the record companies issuing CD user licences (like software licences) that simply forbid this type of use. I hope not, but fear so.
Lest there be any doubt that the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is one of history's greatest hypocrites, reflect for a moment on the fact that even while he uses his money and influence to put himself beyond prosecution on numerous counts of commercial and political dishonesty, he's using the same legal system to try to silence his critics.
This advice just in: don't post your password on your website. Other handy tips: look both ways before crossing the road, don't try to disembark until the plane has fully touched down, and don't go jogging with a lemming.