nancylebov

I started reading Songs of the Dying Earth (stories by other authors (mostly big names) set in Vance's Dying Earth, and liked the first few so much that I decided to Read All the Dying Earth.

I've got Tales of the Dying Earth, an omnibus with The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga, and Rialto the Magnificent, and Shea's Incompleat Nifft (Nifft the Lean and The Mines of Behemoth), The A'rak, and A Quest for Simbilis. Am I missing anything? I'm not counting McHugh-- his work is strongly influenced by Vance, but so far as I know, not actually set on the Dying Earth.

I've started reading the Vance, and so far, his prose is better than what I'm seeing in Songs-- it's simpler and more efficient, not words you'd usually apply to Vance, but it's not very surprising that imitators are likely to overdo distinctive features. I'm especially thinking Robert Silverberg, even though his story went quite well once I got past the overworked thesaurus.

I'll probably finish up with Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord. I've read the beginning, and liked it so much that I've been putting the book off so as not to use it up. Not the worst idea, but I wouldn't want to overdo it. In any case, the sense of humor has some overlap with Vance's-- there's delicate snark at the way characters kid themselves.

Pole gymnastics

Link from Scott Sonnon.

Music by Madboojah.

Belly Dance

I had no idea belly dancing and bagpipe music could go so well together.

Link from Lyssa Poole here.

The story begins:

Y-a-w-n. Was just having a pleasant dream about eviscerating a small family of fieldmice when the can-opener tipped me off her chest by sitting up. Impossible to go back to sleep with the can-openers all aflutter like this. S-t-r-e-t-c-h. They seem to think we're home. I could tell them we're not, but I'll leave them to work that out for themselves. No sense of direction, these people. But hey, since I'm awake, might as well take advantage of the situation to tuck into some moggynosh. I eat at the big table, like everyone else. I have my own bowl with JONES painted on the side so the can-openers won't steal my food.

Posted by

communicator.

It's about time to get beds for the cats so that humans will have a place to throw up.

All the best stuff is in the first few minutes-- he's more interesting as a candidate than as a 14 year old stop motion animator.

I especially like his solution for sealing the border.

Link thanks to The Agitator.

I was thinking it might be fun to torment people with visions of a future where computers work, and when I say work, I mean the simplicity, reliability, and transparency of an old-fashioned landline. You learned how to use a phone when you were a kid, the interface was fairly simple and intuitive, and then you knew how to use a phone. For decades.

The problem is, I have no idea how such a world would work. Would it take "do what I mean" capacity for computers, including the ability to make sense of vague and possibly incoherent desires? That would be the program which could write this story for me.

Greatly increased human intelligence, so that managing computers is no harder than counting to three is now?

Something else?

For that matter, I have no idea what would be a worthwhile story to set in a world where computers work, if the story is not going to be about computers ceasing to work. (Difficulties of interfacing with alien computers?)

The idea lacks dramatic tension. In fact, if there were such a thing as lacking dramatic tension on steroids, this would be it.

People would have to have a war or something.

I guess it's karma. A computer annoyed me (I can't even remember about what, there are so many things), so I thought I could annoy you folks, and I ended up annoying myself some more. Anyway, I hope this question offers some entertainment or annoyance or something.

There may be hope-- it's not quite a Do What I Mean situation, but it was reasonably easy to find out how to recover a file on a Windows 7 machine, and then do it. Who knows what wonders the future may bring?

I will probably outlive the need to reinstall the comments button for Facebook every time Firefox updates.

Celebs look better in their clothes than you do because everything they wear is tailored, including the jeans and t shirts.

Just think of all the work that could be done by tailors if those who could afford such bought fewer clothes, but made sure they fit. OK, there'd be work for a while, till tailoring is computerized.

Link thanks to Hugh Casey at facebook.

madfilkentist wrote very sensibly:

I've seen strong evidence that Amazon suppresses negative reviews if the product seller wants them suppressed. Most don't ask for censorship, so there are still a lot of hostile reviews, but I don't consider Amazon reviews a trustworthy measure.

It's also possible for a competitor or someone with a grudge to flood sites with libelous reviews under different names and IP addresses, so you can't tell much from that either. I don't worry until I see something from identifiable, somewhat trustworthy sources.

I poked around, and found some evidence that amazon sporadically censors negative reviews, though I haven't seen the strong evidence.

Consumeraffairs.com has a very neutral wikipedia page-- nothing about whether it's apt to be used for completely false campaigns.

I checked the Better Business Bureau about Purina, and they just had a few complaints listed-- only two of them had details, and neither of them were about extremely bad pet food.

Metafilter had something about the salmonella recall, but nothing about serious current problems. Neither did Snopes.

I've googled on [purina maggots] and [kit and kaboodle complaints +purina] and turned up very little.

I find it bizarre that there might be an energetic anti-purina campaign which is limited to consumeraffairs.com, but that seems like the best explanation so far.

ETA: I checked some more, and there's almost no evidence of serious problems with Purina pet foods other than that at consumeraffairs.com, which suggests to me that the problems don't exist. I think I was had.

Lots of serious complaints-- I'm not the first to post about this. The short version is that a lot of cats and dogs, some of whom had been eating Purina food for years, have been getting very sick, and some of them have died of it. There are problems with maggots and other insects in the dog food, and cats getting diarrhea, vomiting, and lethargy.

No one seems to know what's specifically wrong with the food (or in the case of maggoty dog food, what's gone wrong with the company), but I'd say avoid the stuff. It sounds like some kind of organizational collapse.

No, I just checked.... Salmonella contamination recall for a couple of lines of cat food in July However, I'm not sure that's the problem generally.

Kit and Kaboodle seems especially problematic among the cat foods. Purina One Lamb and Rice came up a lot in the dog complaints.

Oddly, I'm seeing all this at the link above, but a casual look at Purina ratings at amazon doesn't seem to show a lot of serious complaints, so I'm not sure what's going on there. Not very many people review pet food, though.

15 high-circlation magazines. I might be interested in Bird and Bloom.

Then they list 15 little-known highly popular websites. I'd heard of several, and as a public service, I'm listing them so that you don't need to click 15 pages.

City-Data.com has statistics and demographics on many of the nation's cities. About 11.5 million unique visitors check it out per month, which is more than Netflix gets!

Inbox.com gives you 30GB of email storage for free, which is a lot more than Gmail gives you. 12 million people use it per month, which is more than UPS.com gets.

ChaCha.com is a community-based question and answer site that attracts 12 million people per month, which is more than popular job site CareerBuilder.com

Evite.com lets you create free e-cards. 12.5 million people use it per month, which is more than the websites of Best Buy and MTV.

CoolMath-Games.com looks like it was made in the 90s, yet it attracts 13 million unique visitors per month. That's double the traffic of Bloomberg.com.

Squidoo.com Squidoo.com is full of reviews, recipes, gift ideas, and more, all written by real people. 14.5 million people go there every month, which is more than super hot sharing site Reddit.

Apparently, MetroLyrics.com is the place to go for song lyrics. 14.5 million people check it out each month, which is more than People.com.

HubPages.com is for "every day experts," and attracts 15 million unique visitors per month. That's more than MySpace and Cnet.

Legacy.com is the place to find obituaries, tributes, and more. 16 million unique visitors a month check it out, which is more than CNN!

DailyMotion.com is a site for browsing popular videos. It brings in 17 million unique visitors per month, which is twice that of NFL.com.

Wikia.com lets you create wikis (which are like encyclopedia pages) for just about anything. 18 million unique visitors use it per month, which is more than Apple.com!

Manta.com is a search engine for companies and company profiles. It attracts 23 million unique visitors per month, which is more than AT&T's website gets.

Reference.com, which includes Dictionary.com, gets 28 million unique visitors per month. That's twice as many visitors as BankOfAmerica.com gets!

Go.com, a seemingly Disney-owned search engine, racks up 29 million unique visitors per month. That's more than Pandora and Comcast.

Ask.com is apparently still very popular with some people. We haven't used it for years, but Ask.com is still amassing 53 million unique visitors per month! That's more than the New York Times and Yellow Pages' websites combined!

Initial link thanks to Geek Press.

The meme, found on facebook:

Checking out at the grocery store recently, the young cashier suggested I should bring my own grocery bags because plastic bags weren't good for the environment. I apologized and explained, "We didn't have this green thing back in my earlier days." The clerk responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations." She was right about one thing -- our generation didn't have the green thing in “Our” day. So what did we have back then…? After some reflection and soul-searching on "Our" day here's what I remembered we did have.... Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store.

( And so on )

I'm not sure when or where the ranter is talking about.

Here's what I remember from the 60s (I was born in '53), growing up in a middle class suburban family.

Paper grocery bags, which were thrown away. Milk (at least for the earlier part of my childhood) was delivered by a milkman to an insulated box by the house. I think he picked up empty milk bottles.

My family didn't use beer, and very little soda, so I don't know what policy would have been.

( More details )

This one is pretty charming, and also pretty.

Even though I saw it because people liked it without knowing anything else about it, and had a vague impression it was about Victor Hugo, my wondering whether the station guard was an inspiration for Javert didn't really do any damage, and I eventually figured out that it's simply cyberpunk fiction about an invented character.

I could write more about the plot and the setting, but if you want that, you could look it up elsewhere. Sometimes it's a pleasure to go in with a "tell me a story" attitude.

It's possible that there will be a sequel, but the story is complete in one movie.

It's a message movie, but the message is only underlined once, and the general point that what's needed is kindness and ingenuity is remarkably refreshing. There aren't any scenes of coercive interrogation by the good guys. As a bonus, romance isn't reserved for the pretty people.

With all this going for it, I'm willing to forgive an idiot plot (no one notices that the clock guy's salary isn't being collected, a large train station apparently only has one guard) and giving dogs human body language.

Huge quantities of good sense.....

Voting is the dangerous but essential tool of democracy. In art, voting is dangerous without being essential. Often it’s not even appropriate. In art, even given a carefully selected jury of peers, there’s no way to guarantee that a vote reflects informed, unprejudiced judgment not influenced by fashion, faction, or mere personal quirk. Anybody who’s juried an award, or just argued about a book, knows that.All canons of art are overly restrictive. And all of them are out of date before they are declared.

Used with great caution and suspicion, a literary canon, a list-of-the-best, may have some use in guiding and informing inexperienced readers, but I think probably it’s far more useful as a target of intelligent argument and dissent.

Literary awards are useless for guiding and informing and don’t even make good targets. In declaring a book as “the best,” a literary award serves that book. It does not serve literature. On the contrary, it does literature a considerable disservice.

I'm not sure it's as much of a winner take all system as Le Guin says, but she knows the field better than I do.

Three things that point in the direction of people not needing as much competition as we've got. One of my friends was in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, and when he was trying to explain Americans, he said we'd turn anything into a competition. I've heard that traditional Japanese bonsai doesn't include awards. The trees are just displayed for people to look at. I've also heard that read medieval tourneys didn't have an overall winner. It was just a chance to watch various sorts of fighting.

I'm also reminded of a bit from Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing to the effect that when you hear the word good, you should ask "Good for who? Good for what?". The same should apply to "best".

Link thanks to

sartorias.

A minute and a half of a dog clearly loving music-- I didn't realize dogs could respond to rhythm, I though that was limited to parrots.

My domains are up for renewal. Is there a consensus about a better place to put them?

Found here:

It is common to take a sort of smug satisfaction in reports of colossal failures of automatic systems, but for every failure of automation, the failures of humans are legion. Exhortations to “write better code” plans for more code reviews, pair programming, and so on just don’t cut it, especially in an environment with dozens of programmers under a lot of time pressure. The value in catching even the small subset of errors that are tractable to static analysis every single time is huge.

I noticed that each time PVS-Studio was updated, it found something in our codebase with the new rules. This seems to imply that if you have a large enough codebase, any class of error that is syntactically legal probably exists there. In a large project, code quality is every bit as statistical as physical material properties – flaws exist all over the place, you can only hope to minimize the impact they have on your users.

In case you were wondering, static code analysis is what you can find out about what's wrong without running the program.

Fair warning: as is sometimes the case, I'm posting this because it sounds interesting and reasonable, not because I'm able to evaluate the technical details.

Link thanks to

andrewducker.

If you're in the mood for something charming and cheerful.

Three arrested, accused of illegally feeding homeless

Jewish legends about why Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed

First link thanks to

supergee.

Prettiest thing I've seen in a while-- even the goofy bits are hypnotic, but the graceful ones are amazing, not to mention some lovely shots of rippling fur.

Link thanks to

andrewducker.

My computer died recently, and I now have an Inspiron which seems to be very good-- it's certainly a lot faster.

However, like any laptop, it's an ergonomic nightmare because the keyboard and screen are too close together. I've got it hooked to my keyboard and trackball, even though it's got the first pleasant touchpad (slightly rough surface!) I've ever used, just so I don't need to hunch while I'm using it.

Do you think it would be physically possible to have a laptop with a screen on an extensible stalk so that it could be at a good height? Of course, when I say physically possible, I mean durable enough so that it's worth having on a device that's likely to have the stalk used repeatedly.

A general discussion of ergonomics.

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nancylebov

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Recent Entries

Dying Earth binge

Dance and such.... with bagpipe music

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