Prosthetic Conscience

I Can Has Kitten Brainz?

[ Posted: 14:17] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Library of Congress subjects

The subject category of one of the books I’m reading right now is “Wizards – Illinois – Chicago – Fiction”. Myself, I’m worried that they have a “Wizards – Illinois – Chicago – Nonfiction” category.

[ Posted: 07:00] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Top 20 Geek Novels

For those who are interested, the Guardian (newspaper) has compiled a list of the top 20 geek novels. I have read 14 of them. Neal Stephenson appears three times. The Terry Pratchett book that made the list is not one of his best. Surprisingly, there is no Arthur C. Clarke on the list, but two (blech) Asimov. One by Iain M. Banks, which makes me genki. Sad but typical that there are no female authors on the list — Ursula K. Leguin should have made the list for either The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. Octavia Butler should have made the list too; maybe because she’s a biology geek rather than a physics geek?

[ Posted: 09:23] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

On Killing

Haven’t read it, and the library doesn’t have it, but there’s a discussion on Sword Forum about On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.

Publishers’ Weekly review:

Drawing on interviews, published personal accounts and academic studies, Grossman investigates the psychology of killing in combat. Stressing that human beings have a powerful, innate resistance to the taking of life, he examines the techniques developed by the military to overcome that aversion. His provocative study focuses in particular on the Vietnam war, revealing how the American soldier was “enabled to kill to a far greater degree than any other soldier in history.” Grossman argues that the breakdown of American society, combined with the pervasive violence in the media and interactive video games, is conditioning our children to kill in a manner siimilar to the army’s conditioning of soldiers: “We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.” Grossman, a professor of military science at Arkansas State University, has written a study of relevance to a society of escalating violence. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

I’d really like to read this, as it could give quite a bit of insight into what’s going on right now in Iraq, esp. regarding the killing of civilians, reporters, wounded combatants, etc.

[ Posted: 16:00] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Latest non-fiction books read

Instead of posting reviews, I’m going to try to catch up on a brief descriptions of books I’ve read recently or am reading, starting with the non-fiction.

• The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly.

  A good book on the corporation, from a libertarian socialist perspective. Kelly champions the free market, but demonstrates how the legal and common-law structures surrounding corporate governance work against the free market and against economic democracy. The best and most important aspect of this book is that she demonstrates that the world view underlying corporatism is essentially the same as that underlying feudalism, based on the principles of Privilege, Property, Governance, and Sovereignty, as opposed to Equality, the Public Good, Democracy, Justice, and Revolution.

  The really interesting thing about this is that if you go to the book’s page on Amazon, the negative reviews all essentially paint this book as in favor of Marxist-Leninist state communism, when in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. It’s fascinating how in some people’s minds, there can only be two possible positions on economics (corporate capitalism and state socialism). This book is more on the spectrum of individualist anarchism, though it’s actually very moderate (some would say wimpy).

• Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control, by Gary Kleck and Don B. Kates

  I’ve just started reading this. It’s been recommended as a good pro-gun book from a liberal perspective. I’m not sure how correct that description is, but it looks to be worth a read.

[ Posted: 16:48] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties

Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties and How to Build Them, by D. C. Beard, was written in 1914 as a guide for Boy Scouts and outdoorsmen. This means it is in the public domain, since it was published before Steamboat Willie (the line at which our cultural progression ended). However, it is not available from Project Gutenberg. It is available in a reasonably-priced edition from The Lyons Press (with a foreword to establish copyright), and the Richland County Public Library has a copy.

The book covers, with clear descriptions and line-art, how to build a few dozen types of shelter. They are arranged in an order that includes simple to complex, temporary to permanent, and few tools required to many tools required. The simplest is a one-night bivy made from a felled tree and branch cover, and the most complex is a multi-room log house. In between are a wide range of structures that might provide adequate shelter for a few seasons or years, and which can be constructed using only native materials, and with no tools other than a hatchet or an axe.

The tone of this book is, to be honest, hilarious. Some of the humour appears to be intended; some of it is just because the author was writing at such a different time from us. It is full of stiff upper lip and old fashioned manliness, of the kind that predates and is infinitely superior to the macho posturing of today. A choice quote from the section on an “American boys’ hogan”:

The top of the ventilator should be protected by slats, as in Fig. 161, or by wire netting with about one-quarter-inch mesh in order to keep small animals from jumping or hopping down into your club-house. Of course, a few toads and frogs, field-mice and chipmunks, or even some lizards and harmless snakes would not frighten any real boy, but at the same time they do not want any such creatures living in the same house with them.

One other interesting feature, notable and admirable given the time the book was written, is that the author gives proper credit to the architectural skills of Native Americans. Most of the designs in the book are drawn from Native American models, from various regions, but mostly from the Northeast (bark cover), and the Southwest.

I want to discuss this book with some of the (quasi?)homeless anarchist youth today at FNB. At least one or two of them showed some enthusiasm at the idea, discussed last week, of building a camouflaged wattle-and-daub walled, thatch-roofed hut on a woodlot. One thing this book showed that I was grateful for, because I couldn’t find it on the Web, was the details of how to thatch a roof. It didn’t have anything on wattle and daub, but there are good descriptions of that elsewhere. We’ll see how that goes. Also, probably some guerrilla gardening today.

[ Posted: 08:42] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Best one-liner definition

A review of the Fall Revolutions cycle is going to have to wait, but for now, I wanted to share the best one-liner definition ever given of the Singularity: “It’s the Rapture for nerds!”

[ Posted: 15:27] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Recently read

One of my goals in keeping this log is to make a little record of what I’m reading, with a little bit of commentary. However, my reading choices sometimes seem to conform to Sturgeon’s Law. Nevertheless, here’s a little catch-up.

Zodiac by Neal Stephenson is described on the cover as an “eco-thriller”, but really, it’s more of a hardboiled detective novel, except that the hardboiled gumshoe is a chemist working for a Greenpeace-like environmental organization. It’s told in first person, and you can almost hear the voice-overs. It was a fun, fast read, and very hard to put down. The main character is an asshole, but he’s an asshole to the right people. There’s not much in there that’s really thought-provoking. The book could have supported a discussion of the ethics of direct-action activism, but it doesn’t really. The bad-guys get what’s coming to them, and the good-guys have fun giving it to them in ways that are nonviolent, but extremely unfriendly.

Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer is a science fiction novel involving anthropology and physics. The premise is that in a parallel universe, anatomically modern humans died out and Neanderthals prospered, eventually developing a global, highly technological civilization. A Neanderthal physicist working on a quantum computing experiment finds himself thrown into our universe, where he must struggle to adapt and to get home, while his partner is investigated for his disappearance. The author seems to have done his homework on the Neanderthals (clearly more than I ever did, anyway), though of course the social organization of the modern Neanderthals is purely speculative. He does an excellent job of creating a non-agrarian technological society, which is something I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen done in science fiction. There are a few weak points, though. The Neanderthal society seems relentlessly utopian (compared to ours). I love utopian SF, especially Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, and Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. However, it seems to me that if you are setting out to write about a utopia, you should do so more or less explicitly, and you shouldn’t try to accomplish something else in designing the same society. The Neanderthal society in this novel is both a speculative “alien” society and a utopia, and I think it is a bit overloaded. Also, one of the plot points hinges on Robert Penrose’s quantum interpretation of consciousness, which is rather ridiculous IMO. It does fit the plot well, however. This is the first volume of a trilogy, and I plan on at least starting the next one.

Vampire$ by John Steakley is the novel that served as the basis for John Carpenter’s Vampires. I haven’t seen the movie, but from what I can tell of the reviews, the book is much better. It’s far from high literature, but in amid the vampire action and macho posturing, there’s a fair amount of psychological insight, into victimization, and into keeping on a task you know is doomed to end in failure.

[ Posted: 11:48] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Category test

This is just a test of the categories code.

[ Posted: 12:42] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]