perfidy

From the Oatmeal, source of all kinds of awesome. Like, Seven Reasons to Keep Your Tyrannosaur off Crack Cocaine. And How Long Could You Survive Chained to a Bunk Bed with a Velociraptor? Or after Kicking a Bear in the Balls? And then there is the mighty, Motherfucking Pterodactyl.

It's things like this that make me want to agree with Aretae.

ISS Astronauts, not having any real purpose in furthering our conquest of space, took some time off for photography.  Given their privileged vantage point, something like this was bound to come into view eventually.

And that is a pretty amazing something.

Kristian Birkeland, Norwegian physicist and discoverer of the electric currents that bear his name was the first to suggest an electrical explanation for the aurora.  He spent months in the far north, in the deep cold observing and measuring the aurora and divining their nature.  His theories were for decades ignored in favor of the theories of the English mathematician Sydney Chapman, finally being proven right after the advent of space travel.  Birkeland is something of a hero to the plasma cosmology types - he is an archetype for them - brilliant, nominated for the Nobel, dismissed for decades in favor of ideas that were later proved wrong.

The idea that electrical currents connect the various bodies of the Solar System is central to the plasma cosmologist's conception of the universe.  Birkeland was the first in the chain.  In the write-up for that picture, there's this:

This particular aurora is unique in the sense that it was spotted fairly far away from the South Pole over the southern Indian Ocean, likely as a result of a large ejection of energy that burst from the sun on May 24. The photographer is looking south toward Antarctica, though you can't see the southernmost continent in the photograph.

Interesting, no?  We admit that there are electrical phenomena throughout the solar system - Earth and Jupiter's magnetic fields, the braided electrical currents discovered trailing Venus in her orbit, the aurora - seen on many planets, sprites and elves seen above thunderstorms and shooting into space, the coronal mass ejections and numerous other phenomena on and around the sun and their proven effects on Earth - yet there is evidently great resistance to viewing these as a part of a larger, connected whole.  Gravity is all.

Overheard on the Penguins of Madagascar episode my kids were watching a minute ago.  Truer words were never spoken.

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing has a review of The Upside of Irrationality, The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and At Home.  A snip:

...there are sections in which the science of irrationality is readily converted into practical techniques for living better, and these really shine. My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus -- that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.

Here's where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure -- a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship -- you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain -- an unpleasant chore, an awful trip -- you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.

This is so true.  My mom has successfully managed to do this with books - she is able to read a good book over a period of weeks, parcelling it out into bite sized nibbles.  Me, I can't.  The better the book, the faster I read it, and - as I've long suspected, I get less enjoyment out of it.  I'm better at the miserable experiences, I'll plough right through 'til it's done.

I wonder if the author has any advice for procrastination - once I start a painful job, I'll finish it, but my problem is starting it.  The pain of knowing you're avoiding something that needs to be done is real, but it's less in the short term than starting the thing.

This article in wired describes the efforts of some scientists to grapple with perhaps the biggest problem in modern physics - the total disconnect between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.  Both are immensely successful theories - tested and confirmed to the limits of accuracy each within their respective domains.  Both provide useful theoretical predictions, and in the case of the latter, are the basis for literally the entirety of our modern technology.

Yet, they don't match up.  At all.  What these intrepid researchers are doing is dropping a Bose-Einstein condensate - a gas so cold that it acts as a single particle, and thus behaves with all the quantum strangeness we've come to know and love.  So far, they've just been doing proof-of-concept drops, to reassure themselves that the only thing acting on the condensate in the test capsule is gravity.  Soon, though, they hope to start poking at relativity.

What interested me, aside from the general peachy-keenness of the idea, was the implications in terms of the whole plasma cosmology idea.  The basic concept that Wal Thornhill, one of the plasma cosmology bigwigs, has outlined is this:

What is Gravity?

Sansbury argues that gravity is due to radially-orientated electrostatic dipoles inside the Earth's atomic nuclei, with the inner pole more positive and the outer pole more negative [36]. The force between any two aligned electrostatic dipoles varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance between them and the combined force of similarly aligned electro-static dipoles over a given surface is squared. The result is that the dipole-dipole force, which varies inversely as the fourth power between colinear dipoles, becomes the familiar inverse square force of gravity for extended bodies. The gravitational and inertial response o f matter can be seen to be due to an identical cause.

Sansbury struggled with a cause for the initial and sustained electrical polarisation within celestial bodies. The initial cause is due to the birth o f stars and planets (see later) in powerful plasma discharge events. Once established, gravity itself provides a weak radial atomic polarisation by drawing the heavy nucleus away from the centre of each atom toward the centre of a planetary body. The resulting radially-orientated dipoles form an electret in the non- conducting minerals of the planet. Surface charge on the planet contributes to the strength of the orientated-dipole electret. This global 'electret' may provide the radial electrostatic field required by Sansbury's model. The electrical model may explain the anomalous gravity readings taken down mineshafts, where Newton's constant, G, was measured to be 1.7 - 3.9% lower than in the laboratory [37]. Rather than invent a 'fifth force' or 'modified Newtonian dynamics' (MOND) [38] to complicate things, it seems we simply need to understand the electrical nature of matter and gravity.

There is another important effect of the orientated-dipole model of the interior of a planet to consider. At some depth where pressure ionisation becomes significant and conductivity increases, charge separation will occur as electrons drift up towards the electret inner boundary. Like charges repel and tend to offset the gravitational compression within celestial bodies. Therefore, changing the surface charge on a celestial body may have a significant orbital effect.

Antigravity?

Conducting metals will shield electric fields. However, the lack of movement of electrons in response to gravity explains why we cannot shield against gravity by simply standing on a metal sheet.
If gravity is an electric dipole force between subatomic particles, it is clear that the force 'daisy chains' its way through matter, regardless of whether it is conducting or non- conducting. Sansbury explains:

... electrostatic dipoles within all atomic nuclei are very small but all have a common orientation. Hence their effect on a conductive piece of metal is less to pull the free electrons in the metal to one side toward the center of the earth but to equally attract the similarly oriented electrostatic dipoles inside the nuclei and free electrons of the conductive piece of metal. '[40]

This offers a clue to the reported 'gravity shielding' effects of a spinning, super-conducting disc [41]. Electrons in a superconductor exhibit a 'connectedness', which means that their inertia is increased. Anything that interferes with the ability of the subatomic particles within the spinning disc to align their gravitationally induced dipoles with those of the Earth will exhibit antigravity effects.
Despite a number of experiments demonstrating anti-gravity effects, no-one has been able to convince scientists attached to the theory of general relativity that they have been able to modify gravity. This seems to be a case of turning a blind eye to unwelcome evidence. Support for antigravity implicitly undermines Einstein's theory [42].

'Instantaneous' Gravity

A significant fact, usually overlooked, is that Newton's law of gravity does not involve time. This raises problems for any conventional application of electromagnetic theory to the gravitational force between two bodies in space, since electromagnetic signals are restricted to the speed of light. Gravity must act instantly for the planets to orbit the Sun in a stable fashion. If the Earth were attracted to where the Sun appears in the sky, it would be orbiting a large empty space, because the Sun moves on in the 8.3 minutes it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth. If gravity operated at the speed of light, all planets would experience a torque that would sling them out of the solar system in a few thousand years. Clearly, that doesn't happen. This supports the view that the electric force operates at a near infinite speed on our cosmic scale, as it must inside the electron [43]. It is a significant simplification of all of the tortuous theorising that has gone into the nature of gravity and mass and I believe Einstein's postulates to be wrong [44]. Matter has no effect on empty space. Space is 3- dimensional - something our senses tell us. There is a universal clock, so time travel and variable aging is impossible - something that commonsense has always told us - but most important, the universe is connected and coherent.

If all that, or something like it is true, poking at the quantum behavior of elements in free fall could shed some light.  I'd be interested to see if differently charged condensates behaved differently - especially considering that since they're acting as a single particle, that dipole effect might not apply, or not in the same way.

It's amazing how these women think they can get away with anything.

Hey, wait a minute, maybe I should call the police, too...

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I think in some ways I was primed to accept Moldbug before ever I heard of him.  Not by my growing conviction that Conservatism in philosophy and practice was seriously flawed, not by the obvious dysfunctions of our republic, and of other governments around the world.  But by science fiction.  Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, John Brunner, Robert Heinlein - some of my favorite sf authors - all had in their stories things that cracked the door that Moldbug later kicked open.

Stephenson is the obvious one.  In Snow Crash and Diamond Age, he describes a society descended from, but very different from our own.  In Moldbuggian terms, the USG collapses - and the result is not quite a reset.  There is a remnant USG, the Feds, who are still exhibiting all the dysfunction we've come to love, but unable to inflict it on everyone else.  Everywhere else, the quasi-national franchise state has taken over.  These entities are soveriegn nations competing for customers, and have adopted a bewildering variety of governmental structures.  Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong was the best of these, a free-wheeling nation state run by Mr. Lee and whose citizenship was available for a fee.

Moving this world further into the future, the Diamond Age imagined a world where nanotechnology has become a commonplace.  At the pinacle of prosperity and power in this new age are the Neo-Victorians, who live on islands constructed by advanced technology off the coast near large cities.  Like most of the sovereign states in the books, citizenship is voluntary - but there is no indication that the Victorians practice any sort of democracy.  They have a queen, and the aristocracy are referred to as "Equity-Lords," a term that I would later find particularly apt in light of Moldbug's neo-cameralist ideas.

Stephenson, across the decades of future encompassed in these two books (from contextual clues, Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw is probably about my age) portrays a world unfolding more or less as Moldbug might have imagined - the collapse of Democracy, the growth of thousands of micro-states, a return to classical international law.  What struck me particularly about the New Atlantis of the Neo-Victorians was that the basis of their prosperity was described as being cultural - a culture that rejected most of the political theory of the past two or three centuries.  They were reactionaries, they lived in a society of their own creation designed to correct the flaws of the 20th Century West.  They wrapped themselves in manners and propriety, yet they retained the essential liberty of the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

When I finally read Moldbug a decade after I first read Diamond Age, this was the image that kept popping up in my mind, and probably contributed greatly to its plausibility for me.

Frank Herbert is best known for the Dune series, and for fathering a son who is actively ruining his father's legacy.  As interesting, fully-realized, well-written and just fabulous as Dune is, there is another book that not many have read.  Herbert's Dosadi Experiment is in many ways more interesting than Dune.  Rather than exploring the border between religion and politics, it explores politics more or less straight on.

Since not many people have read Dosadi, here's a primer. In Dosadi, interstellar travel is possible through the efforts of the Caleban, intelligent stars who can teleport you from planet to planet.  The ConSentiency is the interstellar government of a largely peaceful multi-species society.  One of the key elements of this government is the Bureau of Sabotage:

...sometime in the far future, government becomes terrifyingly efficient. Red tape no longer exists: laws are conceived of, passed, funded, and executed within hours, rather than months. The bureaucratic machinery becomes a juggernaut, rolling over human concerns and welfare with terrible speed, jerking the universe of sentients one way, then another, threatening to destroy everything in a fit of spastic reactions. In short, the speed of government goes beyond sentient control.

...BuSab began as a terrorist organization whose sole purpose was to frustrate the workings of government in order to give sentients a chance to reflect upon changes and deal with them. Having saved sentiency from its government, BuSab was officially recognized as a necessary check on the power of government.  First a corps, then a bureau, BuSab gained legally recognized powers to interfere in the workings of any world, of any species, of any government or corporation, answerable only to themselves.

Crucial to the progress of the story are the Gowachin, a frog-like species with an interesting legal system:

The Gowachin regard their legal practices as the strongest evidence that they are civilized. Gowachin law is based upon the notion of a healthy disrespect for all laws; the purpose of this notion is to avoid the stultifying accretion of a body of laws and precedents that bind Gowachin mechanically. In a Gowachin trial, everything is on trial: every participant, including the judges; every law; even the foundational precept of Gowachin law. Legal ideas from other systems are turned on their head: someone pronounced "innocent" (guilty in other terms) by the court is torn to pieces by angry spectators; judges may have bias ("if I can decide for my side, I will"), though not prejudice ("I will decide for my side, regardless"); defendant and plaintiff are chosen at trial by the side bringing the complaint choosing one role or the other; torture is permitted; and all procedural rules may be violated, but only by finding conflict within procedural rules (an example of Nomic).

Gowachin law is illustrative of a dominant theme in Herbert's books set in this universe: that governments, law, and bureaucracy (collectively, society's tools for regulating itself) are dangerous when allowed to escape human (sapient) control. In both novels, the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) plays a major role. An official bureau, its mandate is to slow the workings of government(s) to ensure that the machinery of governance never overpowers those subject to its power. Historically, BuSab was created when government had become terrifyingly efficient, with laws conceived, mandated, and funded within hours, thus subjecting sapients to an overpowering bureaucratic juggernaut.

Gowachin legal practices are to law and the courts what BuSab is to government bureaucracy: a governor on an engine, preventing a static pronouncement on the state of things (real or intended) from ever over-ruling sentient judgement or discreation at the contingent moment. Inasmuch as only sapience or full consciousness is capable of dealing with a dynamic universe, no procedural set judicial algorithm can ever supersede or effectively protect sapience.

This aspect of the novels is echoed in Dune Messiah, when the Emperor, Paul, rejects a request from a subject world for a constitution. Ostensibly, the purpose is to provide basic guarantees for the people; in reality, it's an attempt to check the Emperor's power with legal limits. Paul justifies his decision by arguing, in his official pronouncement, that constitutions are dead things, limited and limiting to what can be currently conceived as a threat from which the people require protection, ultimately enfeebling them by depriving them of the essential human challenge to deal with an ever-changing universe.

(Both of those quotes are from Wikipedia.)  The main character of the story is Jorj X. McKie, a Sabateur Extraordinaire and the only Human admitted to the Goawachin Bar as a legum.  The center of the story is the planet Dosadi, an experiment conducted with the connivance of one of the Calaban.  Humans and Gowachin are sequestered on the planet Dosadi, a poisonous desert whose only inhabitable area is one river valley.  In this valley is Chu, a city of 89 million humans and Gowachin.  They cannot leave, and every form of poisonous and intoxicating substance known to either species is available.  Many forms of government have been tried on Dosadi - as the story begins, it is a dictatorship.  But one thing that the Dosadi are not allowed to remove is the DemoPol, which is something of a combination of opinion poll, propaganda device, and election tool.  On Dosadi, it is recognized that the DemoPol is one of the chief means of their oppression.

The Dosadi Experiment is monstrously cruel - hundreds of millions of sentient beings forced to lived in horrible conditions over generations, and forbidden any solution that would improve their lot.  It is a cruel society, necessarily; violent and callous.  To maintain a civilization under these conditions is almost impossible, but those most capable of survival under these conditions are very competent indeed.

I imagine that Moldbug would say that Dosadi is an exaggeration of things we see in our society - not so cruel, not on the edge of Malthusian collapse - but similar in its callousness, crime, and most importantly the inability to change what we recognize to be broken.  I remember feeling how odd to entertain the notion that something with "demos" in it could be bad - democracy is the ultimate good, as I had been taught.  If you haven't read the book, do so immediately.

Heinlein has been much more discussed in the context of politics - especially Starship Troopers.  I think that Farnham's Freehold and Moon is a Harsh Mistress are both more accurate representations of Heinlein's actual politics.  Certainly more so than the typical idea that the state in Troopers is fascist, which is obviously false to anyone who has read the book.  Heinlein talked a lot about authority and responsibility, and how they need to be properly aligned for there to be a functional society.  The key bit is that only veterans may participate in the government - people who have demonstrated that they have at least the potential to put society's needs ahead of their own are the only ones allowed near the levers of power.  Others, the taxpayers, are granted all the civil rights we expect save only the franchise.  They are free, but are subjects.

Mistress, on the other hand, introduced me to anarchism and libertarianism in the persons of Prof. de la Paz and Mannie.  But Heinlein did put a royalist in the mix, Stuart Rene "Stu" LaJoie.  I think that reading and enjoying this book was the extent of my serious belief in libertarianism.  Not that I have not (and continue to have) a deep sympathy with many libertarian ideas about many things.  I just don't think it can exist in the pure form.  Heinlein in general was skeptical of democracy, and I think that a lot of that seeped in deep, only to bubble up later.

Finally, John Brunner's Shockwave Rider.  Not a dystopian novel, by any means, but the United States of this world has definitely fallen down in a lot of ways.  A coarsened culture, callousness, violence and crime, corruption in government - what we see now, turned up a few notches.  In many ways, this was a precursor to the cyberpunk genre - computer worms, the hacker hero, bleak environment, corporate and gov't thuggery.  Notably, the book was the first to include the idea of the self-replicating computer virus, and also the Delphi Pool, which bears a passing resemblance to DARPA's Policy Analysis Market.

The politics of Brunner's book verge toward the socialist, but yet with a healthy dose of libertarianism.  While I think his solution is more than a bit utopian; like Snow Crash, his portrayal of a democratic government overwhelmed by organized crime, and the social decay created by too rapidly changing technology is vivid, and powerful.  Shockwave Rider didn't effect me so much with its politics, directly, but by the idea that wisdom is not the same as intelligence.  You hear that a lot of course, but this book showed it.  Rationality and logic and science are only tools, powerful tools to be sure; but if you have a society that is not founded on wisdom you get atomization, grief, violence and cruelty.  Brunner might not agree with this - but I think that the idea that you have to live for something outside yourself is more of an argument for monarchy than a democracy - people link themselves more naturally to people than abstracts.

When I asked for good books to read, Aretae, Foseti and Isegoria all gave me links to “Books that Influenced Me” posts. I guess I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but here’s my list of books that played a part in making me the sicko that I am today.

• Heinlein; The Bible - My earliest reading started with Heinlein. My mom read an article in the local paper about good books for kids. It mentioned Heinlein, and specifically Red Planet and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Set the course of my reading for most of the next 35 years. Heinlein’s Juveniles had a profound impact on my thinking - the value and danger of recklessness; the importance of thinking, the martial virtues and competence. It created a huge chunk of my worldview. I later went on to read nearly every thing Heinlein wrote. The other early influence is the Bible, King James Version. I’ve never been particularly religious, but the language of the KJV is second only to Shakespeare. I used to read Ecclesiastes: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” This prepared me well for High School.
• Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus / Schroedinger’s Cat - Shortly after High School, and after leaving college for a major in beer and other intoxicants, I was a bit at sea. Pirsig’s book blew my mind - the idea that some random dude on a motorcycle was challenging the entire edifice of western philosophy was just awesome. Later readings made me appreciate the care with which he drew his analogies. This book was the start of my heretical thinking, as opposed to my earlier reflexive contrarianism. Robert Anton Wilson’s books also blew my mind. Or maybe it was the drugs. Still and all, the big pull from these books was how important perception is to reality - that your worldview can control what you see, and that things that don’t fit really are invisible to most people.
• Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation - Amazing book. Convinced me, before I had heard the word Singularity that it was bound to happen. Also made me realize that most sf writers are frighteningly conservative in their extrapolations.  Nanotechnology, AI and biotech will change the world beyond imagining, and any sf that doesn't wrestle with this is not the true sf.
• Shakespeare - I was trapped in a crappy apartment with no money, not much of a job, and a copy of the complete work I picked up for $13 at an antique store. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I read most of it, and read it slowly. Christ, what a writer. No one compares. No one.
• John Brunner, Shockwave Rider; Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age / Snow Crash - John Brunner and Neal Stephenson are in some ways my favorite sf writers - they not only cram their books with great techojoy, they create vivid societies that result from the technological changes. These books changed the way I looked at technology and its implications.
• Paul Johnson, Birth of the Modern / Intellectuals / Modern Times - Many academic historians give Johnson the cold shoulder. But at least one Academic Historian, my dad, loves him and introduced me. I’d been reading history by the truckload since I left high school, but most of my reading was centered on 1600 and before. Modern Times was the history I should have learned in high school - it is a wonderful tonic for the recieved notions of our recent past. These three books put me on a more conservative path to understanding the world, away from the unfocused quasi-liberalism I had absorbed from my surroundings. Unlike Foseti and Moldbug, I never went through a larval libertarian phase before embracing reaction.  Over time, I developed an appreciation of the flaws of Conservatism, and as soon as I found Moldbug ten years later, went straight to the darkness.
• Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel - fascinating book. I now think that he went way overboard on the geographical determinism - race and IQ have a huge part to play that Diamond discounts utterly. Still, brilliant work.
• V.D. Hanson, The Soul of Battle - really got me going on classical history for starters, but this book, (and Carnage and Culture, too) is a direct opposite to Diamond. Hanson argues that culture is vastly more important than geography. I noticed also that the “West” while having a constant tradition of freedom and individualism was only occasionally democratic. This was the beginning of my questioning why we associate the former with the latter.
• The Writings of Mencius Moldbug - when I first happened upon Moldbug, it was like coming home. I’d built up, over the previous decade, an understanding of the world that had no explanation. Moldbug gave me a philosophical structure that explained things I had already noticed, and thought about. Still feeling the effects of this one. For one, I still resist giving up the faith of my youth, in the inherent goodness of American republicanism.
• The Catastrophists - I hit this one about the same time that I found Moldbug. I read a book by the sf author James Hogan, Kicking the Sacred Chao which details that author’s scientific heresies. Among them was another look at Velikovsky and Catastrophism. I’d read Velikovsky in high school - my local library had his stuff on the shelves - but I read it like science fiction. Hogan convinced me that at the very least, Velikovsky had been the victim of a colossal hit job by mainstream science and Carl Sagan in particular. Since I already knew Sagan was an asshole, that seemed plausible. I started looking into it more, and have concluded that at least some version of the Catastrophist outline is likely, and that the Plasma Cosmology view of astrophysics is almost certainly true. Complete revolution in my scientific and political worldviews in three years!  Electric Sky by Don Scott and Electric Universe by Talbot and Thornhill are the two most accessible.
• Neal Strauss, The Game - I’d read and enjoyed the evolutionary psychology books for years, but here it was put into practice. Strauss is a wonderful writer, and this is an inherently fascinating topic.

Back in aught four, I attempted to compose a top five list of my favorite science fiction novels. In this, I failed utterly - being unable to get the list down anywhere near the target of five books. As I said then, my list is large, it contains multitudes.

In the intervening six years, I've read a couple more sf novels. One or two. Three at the outside. Some of them deserve a place on the list, and in retrospect, some deserve a kick to the curb.  Hard to imagine, but in 2004, I hadn't discovered Charles Stross, Karl Schroeder, or Peter Watts!  They remain excellent novels, just not on my plus-sized top five list.

You can look at the original list over here.  Of these, I think that Pattern Recognition is out. Likewise Asimov's Pebble in the Sky and Schismatrix. Pastwatch was a late addition, and gets the boot - though it is still one of my favorite alt-history novels, and so does Bring the Jubilee and Lest Darkness Fall. Man in the High Castle will stand in for all alt-history novels because as fun as they are, they are rarely staggering works of genius when it comes to the writing and ideas.

I tried to think about removing some of the books from authors that have more than one title in the list.  I can't.  So that leaves us with:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
Player of Games, by Iain Banks
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert
Dune, by Frank Herbert
A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
Cryptonomicon, by Neil Stephenson
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Sundiver, by David Brin
Startide Rising, by David Brin
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
Mother of Storms, by John Barnes
Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebroski
Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny
The Greks Bring Gifts, by Murray Leinster
The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clark
Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller
Hyperion Series, by Dan Simmons
The Earth Abides, by George R. Stuart
Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner
Voice of the Whirlwind, by Walter Jon Williams
The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith
The Lensman Series, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Cities in Flight, by James Blish
Tactics of Mistake, by Gordon R. Dickson

And here's my nominations for newly opened spots on the list:

Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross
Ilium/Olympos, by Dan Simmons
Blindsight, by Peter Watts
Permanence, by Karl Schroeder
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Is on his way to Festung Buckethead and when he gets here, he'll be bringing in his purple velvet bag:

• The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began, by Stuart Clark
• The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, by Edward Luttwak
• Governing for Prosperity, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
• The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley
• The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando de Soto
• The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending

And while I was at it, I also pre-ordered:

• A Rainbow of Blood: The Union in Peril An Alternate History, by Peter G. Tsouras
• The Fuller Memorandum (A Laundry Files Novel), by Charles Stross

Rainbow of Blood is a sequel to Britannia's Fist, an alternate history novel where the United States and Britain go to war in the middle of the Civil War - over the British connivance with the Confederates in building armored commerce raiders.  It's somewhat like Harry Harrison's Stars and Stripes series, which also had the US and Britain at war, but over the earlier Trent Affair.  Solid historical speculation, and not bad fiction.  Tsouras has edited numerous volumes of alt-history essays, most of which are pretty good.

Charles Stross is one of my favorite sf authors right now.  I just order anything he publishes.  In this case, this is volume three of a really fun series where Cthulhoid monsters meet bureaucracy in the person of a UNIX geek.

Oh, and I got this, in honor of GeekLethal:

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, and thanks Dad for being an enabler for my addiction.

The Libertarian / Formalist debate continues over at Aretae and Foseti.  Just start at the top and keep reading.  I've been in meetings all day, and haven't done much more than skim - more updates on this tomorrow.

Kids, I have come into possession of a $75 Amazon gift card.  While I could easily fill this with items from my wishlist, I was wondering if anyone has recommendations.  Read a good book lately?  Let me know.

The deathmarch continues, with new entries from Foseti, Devin and Aretae.   A lot of static seems to be arising out of confusion over terminology.   Good government, strong government, weak government... But what does it all mean? I think we need to back away from the word good. The libertarian (we'll take Aretae as an example) feels that the government that governs least governs best. So, by definition, any government that exists, is bad. Maybe a slight exaggeration. Foseti, Devin, and Formalists feel that weak government is necessarily bad government.   So we mean different things when we say good. Obvious? All of our discussions on this center on three issues - whether a government is competent, whether it is strong, and whether or not it is interventionist. So, a three-axis rating could describe a government in a way we could all agree on; and then we argue over what is most important to the success, failure, or irrelevance of that nation and system.  A competent government makes good choices, does whatever it is charged with doing efficiently and well, and selects good leaders.  A strong government can make choices, enforce order, protect its territory, etc.  An interventionist government is one that sticks its fingers into all the orifices of the public, telling them what and where they can and cannot do things. So, our favorite so far seems to be late 18th Century England. How does it rank? I think we could fairly describe it as on the whole competent, strong and non-interventionist. (Could we replace small/big for interventionist? I don't know if that captures it. But a large government is going to need to do something with its time, and an interventionist-minded gov't is going to get big.) We might describe UK 1760 as a 10,10,0. Its opposite might be USSR 1990 - 0,0,10. Our current USG 2010 is perhaps a 5,5,7 and trending lower on the first two and higher on the last. We can quibble about the rankings if we like, but this would separate the idea of "good" from the other qualities we're discussing. Aretae can admit that a government is strong and competent without admitting immediately that it is good.

Over at Aretae, the debate continues.  Finbarr and Foseti are arguing the Formalist/Moldbug case, and Aretae the Libertarian.  I have to say, this is some of the best debate I've seen on the web.  This is how it should be - people trying to make clear arguments, without making recourse to emotion, or straw men.  This, in other words, is fun.

I haven't had a chance to read thoroughly and weigh in on it all, but I will as soon as I have a moment.

In chronological order, here's the stuff:

• Do the formalists disagree?
• Foseti vs. Aretae
• The formalist libertarian debate part 336
• Formalists vs. Libertarians II

I enjoin you to read it.  And the comments.  There'll be a test.  And while you're at it, go ahead and read Germania and Finbarr's response, The Tribal Origins of Totalitarianism.

I've mentioned a couple times that I think modern cosmology is a little addlepated.  Here is a classic example of why I think this:

IT'S the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent "dark energy" of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.

To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.

120 orders of magnitude is indeed a daunting discrepancy.  Like how they almost slipped that by you?  Now, if your predicted and observed values are in the ballpark - say, within a standard deviation - you might think you've got it nailed.  If your predictions are on the close order of your observed results, well, you might be on to something, but the theory might need some work.

If you're off by a factor of 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.  There's another word for the relation between your predictions and the real world.  Nonewhatsofuckingever.  You're wrong, start over.  Don't try and wedgie your theory to overcome that sort of gap.  If you were aiming at a man-sized target at a range of fifty yards with that sort of accuracy you'd hit the fucking Andromeda galaxy, and I think I'm underestimating the effect of that many zeroes.

Seriously.

[wik] I hope that the journo who wrote that got the number wrong, or was picking his nose when all this was explained to him.  'Cause 120 orders of magnitude is huge.  Huge.

Found this on Foseti.  It's like reading Joyce's Ulysses, but without the comforting assurance of generations of fey English majors that what you are reading is indeed a classic of western literature, no matter how little sense it's making to you as you read.

Start here, if anywhere.  And here's a sort of concordance/glossary that may help you understand what you are reading.  Or may not.  I don't know if I do, but it's fun trying to imagine that I do.  There does seem to be something behind the mangled spelling and odd terminology.  Whether that something is good, I don't know.  I hope he's not typing this in software that has spell-checking, because otherwise the red squigglies would blind him.

From "i luvs you allls  o ye of little faith"

to all the spinsters with cats
who teh fed tricked into spinsterhood/serving debt lxolllozlzl
to all the fanboys in ther single mom’s basements
whose dads they never knew because the fed tookawy fatehrhood lzozlzl
to all the broken familes
who were split up by the need to make two salaries to feed the kids
to all aging necon womenz celeberating secretive tapings of butthex without teh girlths conthent lzozllzlzozlzl they tircked you too
to all the spinster chix again i am sorry they sdesouled you
in asscokcing sessins drugged you up on prozac
told you to abort your kids no wonder your’re d[pressed and all fucjked up no lozlzlzlzling here
my heart goes out to you while tucker max & goldman sax laugh zlzolzlzl
too all the aborted fetushes we ask for forgiveness we deserve not and to all those tricked into aborting the gift of life lzozllzllzl we forgive u too and pray for teh fethuses, but not in school as prayer is illegal in school lozlzllzlz

[wik] One of GBFM's favorite word is butthex.  But it's not pronounced butt-hex.  You are asked to imagine that Barney Frank is saying it - something more like but-thex.

[alsø wik] Not really germane, but considering what I just linked, who the fuck cares?  GBFM uses a the pure quill variant of the Hemingway Black WordPress theme that once powered perfidy before we cleaned house and moved to this new, Buckethead-designed theme.

[alsø wik] I don't think we've ever had a more appropriate use of the 'deranged scribblings' category here on perfidy.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] I just noticed that there is a post at GBFM entitled, 'how the federal reserve system created the PUA community lzozlzlzloozlzllzll!! they DO NO wan t the men to read mises or hayek or jefferson or the us constitution lzozlzlzlz they want to keep the men in the fiat masters’ cave — the fiat butthex matrix — “gaming” and fighting over the table scraps of all the desoulaed, haggaard, std-ridden, vicious, gold-digging, cold, defeminized, prozac-addled womenz the fiat masters buttthexed and deosuled in college during teh primae nocate ceremeonies, instead of manning up and fighting for their dvine irght to something far greater — an honorable, virtuous wife. lzozllzllzllzozzlz' - I believe I'll save that one for lunch tomorrow.

A trio of excellent posts have examined the role and status of Dugout Doug, aka General Douglas MacArthur.  Foseti starts off with a review of "American Caesar" and then Isegoria and Joseph Fouche chime in.  The latter two are a little less convinced of MacArthur's greatness than Foseti.

Over on those three posts, you'll get a deluge of information about MacArthur, all factually accurate and fascinating.  While I am dubious of MacArthur's Alexandrine brilliance, I will fully grant Foseti's point that his role as proconsul in Japan was near genius, perfectly executed, and of long-term significance.  And he is certainly not the worst American general - Foseti names Mark Clark in WWII, and I could add Bradley and others to the list.  But to get to the worst American commander, you'd probably have to look back to the Civil War, where Union generals in the early phases of the war (the first two years, mostly, but some lasted much longer) were frighteningly incompetent, or administrative geniuses totally lacking in a martial spirit.  Ambrose Burnside and George McClellan are the two exemplars of each type.  Even the better Union commanders were noticeably flawed - Meade, Hooker, and the like lost their nerve at key points.

My view is that the greatest American general of the Second World War was undoubtedly Patton.  Three times Patton broke free, and started making huge advances against the Germans - and each time, he was reined in and forced to slow his advance.  And each time he did, the Germans were able to dig in and the whole process had to be repeated.  The Third Army advanced further, and captured more German soldiers than any other element of the European war.  Had Patton been given operational freedom, I believe he would have been across the Rhine in October '44 at the latest.  Hell, the rumor of his command of an army of invasion aimed at Calais was one of the factors that kept German forces concentrated out of Normandy.

Bradley defenders will generally argue that the hard facts of logistics are what led to Patton's leash being yanked.  That's true to an extent, but resources were diverted from Patton's rapidly advancing formations to units that units that were not achieving similar success, or in fact were stationary.  And then you have the whole Market Garden disaster.  I think Montgomery and MacArthur have a lot in common, and not the good stuff.

It's inarguable that Patton and MacArthur shared the view, "I am the greatest general now living."  MacArthur's lauded island hopping strategy resulted in a slow slog through strategically unimportant territory.  At the operational level, his strategy resulted in brutal frontal assaults against prepared positions.  Where he was most successful, it was the result of his enemy being isolated or starved into ineffectiveness by the efforts of his real rivals, the US Navy.  The signal victories of the Pacific Campaign are mostly owned by the Navy - which is to be expected, they don't call it the Pacific Campaign for nothing.  But the significant land victories were most often won by the Marines.  (A Marine friend of mine said that MacArthur designed his strategy to kill Marines.)

And on top of that, MacArthur was fighting the Imperial Army.  Of the Japanese Army and Navy, it's clear that the Navy got most of the brains in the family.  The Japanese never did figure out how to kill an American soldier without losing ten of his own.  I don't think anyone would rank the Imperial Army even in the top ten of the 20th Century.  Maybe in the top ten of WWII.

Patton, on the other hand was up against what is widely regarded to be one of the best armies of modern times.  The Wehrmacht was better trained, better equipped, and better led at the lower levels than the Americans could hope to match.  They were often fighting from prepared positions, and had the advantage of interior lines and better logistics.  What the Americans had was air support, and Patton.

Yet, over and over, Patton forced them out of their positions and onto the tun.  I think that Patton has a much stronger claim to being right.

[wik] I'd say that the three greatest generals in American history are, more or less in order, Sherman, Patton, Stonewall Jackson.  They are the best of the best of the best.  Other candidates for rounding out a top five would be Winfield Scott, Lee, Grant, and Washington.

Interesting.

Sure, men were a good idea. They were a good idea when the world needed immature, aggressive,  reckless, “overemotional” brutes who could hunt and plow.

Describing men, in opposition to women, as "overemotional" is new to me.  I've been somewhat insulated from the effects described in the post I linked - working in IT.  IT remains a predominantly male preserve.

Would it be completely un-PC of me to note that we've seen a drastic decline in innovation in nearly all fields, over the period that women have increased their role in the workplace, save only in the two fields that have not seen a vast influx of women?

Maybe "immature, agressive, reckless, 'overemotional' brutes have some value that isn't currently recognized by the leading lights of our culture.  In fact, maybe if we rephrased that description to, "confident, assertive, daring, passionate men" we'd see more of it.  One (among many) of the reasons that we've decided to homeschool is the treatment of boys in the public schools - whenever a boy acts like a boy, they generally get prescribed ritalin, and they are indoctrinated into viewing their own nature as "immature, aggressive, reckless, 'overemotional' brutes.  I have no brief against women in the workplace, but not at the cost of training boys not to be men.

And while I'm on about it, a little emotional stoicism would likely do us all a lot of good.  Except for Jerry Springer and Oprah.  A rebirth of emotional stoicism would kill them.