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4
Jan 12

When I have the time, I want to read more science fiction. When I read more science fiction, I like it when someone has already given me a sense of what is worth reading and what is not worth reading. It’s not because I will follow their advice, but if I get part way into a story and find myself struggling to want to finish it, it’s nice to know someone else had the same reaction — and it’s just as nice to race through a story constantly saying “Wow!” out loud because the writing is so good and know that somebody also had that reaction.

In other words, I guess I don’t like to read alone. Well, I do, but I like to know other people are out there.

Somewhere.

And so thank you to Locus magazine for reviewing a month’s worth of science fiction periodical contents. Very cool. And so thank you to Slashdot to linking to the Cory Doctorow video that he himself linked to on BoingBoing but then that got me reading BoingBoing and Doctorow links to himself a lot and I actually clicked on one of those links, and while the link itself — the one about how to talk about the future that was in Locus magazine on-line — turned out to be really not worth reading — see, I have now returned the favor! — there was other stuff on Locus that was worth reading.

Doctorow, by the way, is a very smart guy, and prolific to boot. So if he occasionally publishes something that doesn’t quite hit the mark, he also regularly publishes stuff which is not only very smart but completely from his heart. In fact, he is not only to be admired for the way he conducts his career but to be emulated. And by that I mean me. I want to write more from my heart and less from the weird technocratic perspective that a lot of academic publishing requires.

And, sigh, that probably means that I will be less successful as an academic than I would like — I’ll admit it, I would like to be successful in terms of being cited and linked, but my editor at the University Press of Mississippi assured me that my prose is too novelistic for most academics. It’s not very quotable in the traditional, scholarly way.

And sigh again.

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30
Dec 11

Forbes asks “How did capitalism get into this mess?”

The question is in the middle of an article reviewing a new business book that points out that managing a business to “maximize” shareholder value is, according both to the book’s author as well as the Forbes’ reviewer, “the dumbest idea in the world.”

I have long maintained that one key to the massive profits of the nineties and the first decade of the twenty-first century was the investment bubble created by the baby boomers after the Reagan era’s creation of IRAs. With that, a whole lot of money started flowing into the stock market, driving up prices. Of course, the only people who really profited from this were market professionals, bankers, and top executives. Employees saw little in their paychecks and only those investors who cashed out before the various crashes, and there is one more big one to come, made it rich.

But those who did were very rich indeed, and the finance and investment industry, which thanks to banking and insurance industry deregulation are pretty much all the same thing now, is going to make sure that that money won’t slip through their fingers again.

What I want to know is: what about piddling little investors like me who would like to invest in companies who make things and earn a return on our investment the old-fashioned way?

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29
Dec 11

“People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.”

Any discussion of leadership that proceeds, if only in part, through a discussion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has got to be worth the time it takes to read it.

Here’s one passage I like which proceeds through Heart of Darkness:

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.

Perhaps it will surprise some readers that this comes from William Deresiewicz’s address at West Point in October 2009. One of his observations: after so much success, we have developed a cadre of individuals who think they are leaders because they can answer the same old questions. But they cannot themselves formulate any original questions. That is our task ahead…

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29
Dec 11

M-Edge Accuses Amazon of Bullying

It’s not that I am particularly interested in tracking Amazon’s bad behavior, but as a consumer who has become somewhat invested in their infrastructure, I do like to know all I can about the folks with whom I do business. Ethics matter. In this particular case, according to the lawsuit, Amazon raised its percentage of its take on Kindle accessories, from 8% to 25%, and then tried to bully a supplier, M-Edge, into paying more money for a period of time leading up to the change. When the supplier balked, Amazon threatened to de-list their products.

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27
Dec 11

Refilling a Sheaffer Snorkel

I have my great uncle’s Sheaffer pen and pencil set. Both have his name inscribed in the gold band that circles the middle of each pen, Bill Mayfield. I never met the man, but he clearly had good taste. He had a Sheaffer set and he married my Aunt Ann. Nothing more needs to be said.

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23
Dec 11

Laudun Cosmetics

One of the things most overlooked in discussions about search and searching is the fact that adjacency, also known as happy accidents, plays such an important role in some forms of thinking, and living. Yes, being able to drill down into results is something I want to be able to do, but I cannot enumerate now how often my own intellectual development was forwarded by a book that I found that wasn’t the book for which I was looking but the one next to it, or one shelf up, or one bay over, or one aisle over, or … “what’s this corner of the library full of” over.

Sometimes the web delivers similar results, and this is one of them:

Now I know what I am getting for birthday presents for family this next year. Laudun Cosmetics: Passion is what drives us.

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22
Dec 11

Capella’s Seven Liberal Arts

From a notebook I kept in 1991, I find Capella’s Sevel Liberal Arts inscribed on the first page:

The Facts You Need to Know

Music Theory: for singing hymns
Geometry: for measuring things
Arithmetic: for adding things
Astronomy: for knowing what day it is

How to Use the Things You Know

Grammar: for getting it right
Rhetoric: for putting it in letters
Logic: to explain things clearly

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21
Dec 11

WTF Wednesday: Rick Perry

This one has to be seen to be believed: Rick Perry on how gay people apparently undermine America.

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20
Dec 11

Corked?

During the holidays, I am re-working my home office a little bit to fit a bit better for the way I work and to have the kind of look that excites my imagination. One of the things I realized flipping through various catalogs is that, yes, the current fashion for natural materials does speak to me. Then again, I have always like the look of wood, stone, and glass. It’s what makes Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses so appealing, his respect for those materials and where a synthetic material is called for, it’s glass so that again the natural world can shine through.

I am lucky that my small office already offers so much of one of those materials, glass. Though only eight feet in length and width, one of those walls disappears thanks to a six foot square sliding door. Another wall has a three foot square window. The wall opposite the sliding door does not exist but is simply an archway giving onto a small hallway leading from the garage to the kitchen. On the opposite side of the hallway is a six foot square window giving onto the dining room. Above my head the roof slopes up to a four foot square skylight.

Right now, the walls are covered in a light tan that Sherwin Williams calls “Ecru” and which is almost ubiquitous in the house, a neutral tone we introduced to cover the bright white walls when we first moved in and which was meant to buy us time to think about more significant uses of color. The floor of my study is made up of white marble tiles with patches of gray and pink in it. I would never have chosen anything like it, but it is marble and it is already there. Why not live with it until winning the lottery makes money no object?

Until then, we are trying out some smaller changes, to see what effects they produce. And so with some Flor tiles en route, I just requested a tile sample from the American Cork Products Company: Iris Mocha.

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19
Dec 11

Comet Survives the Sun

The comet Lovejoy flew through the sun’s atmosphere a few days ago and survived. The event was captured by a whole fleet of Terran spacecraft: the comet’s survival was an open question. The NASA story has all the details, as well as Lovejoy’s history.

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16
Dec 11

Wish your LED Christmas lights didn’t flicker? So do a lot of other people.

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15
Dec 11

A Little Bit of Magic

For those who love magic/illusions, the profile of Teller, of Penn and Teller, in the Las Vegas Weekly is a lovingly observed piece.

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14
Dec 11

Window Farm

I think Lily and I should build one, or more, of these. Link.

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6
Dec 11

“Zero is a door.”

Lily was counting down by one hundred this morning on the way to school and, without me realizing it, she continued by zero to count into the negative numbers. When I realized what she was up to, I started asking her about negative numbers: what happens when you add to them? When you subtract from them? After a initial stumble or two, she quickly got hold of how things worked. I asked her how she figured it out so quickly, and she responded, “Zero is a door, daddy.”

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4
Dec 11

I’m always looking for printing options for photographs, especially around the holiday season. There’s a great review of the various on-line services on an Ars Technica forum thread and someone else has recommended Photos Printed on Canvas for, well, photos printed on canvas.

∴ Logbookan on-line notebook for John Laudun