Quotulatiousness

July 28, 2011

Marking the 4th anniversary of The Guild

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:00

Greg Aronowitz has posted a retrospective of the first four years of The Guild:

I was fortunate enough to come aboard right at what could be argued as the tipping point for the show, with the “bonus feature” music video “Do You Want To Date My Avatar?” The video broke records, and went No.1 on several charts, including iTunes. People who had never played a video game or watched a web series were suddenly aware of The Guild, and the cross-over audience catapulted the show to numbers that previously were reserved for network television.

I had a great time working on the music video, but I had no idea at the time of the opportunities and adventures my association with The Guild would lead to. After reading Felicia’s article, I thought it might be fun to chronicle my involvement with the show on this special day. I went to my iPhoto, opened The Guild folder, and realized that I have over 4,000 photos! So I cancelled my lunch meeting, and put this quick run down memory lane together for you…

Update: The first episode of Season five just got posted:

<a href='http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/season-5-episode-1-road-trip/y02jncib?cpkey=b6705281-0625-41ed-b45d-c38f4ed3c2e2%7C%7C%7C%7C' target='_new' title='Season 5 - Episode 1 - Road Trip!' >Video: Season 5 &#8211; Episode 1 &#8211; Road Trip!</a>

Signalling failure blamed for high speed rail crash

Filed under: China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

This sounds a bit fishy, as this kind of error has been known in railway signal systems for over 100 years: signals that fail to show stop as a default whenever power is lost:

After it was struck by lightning, the signaling device at the Wenzhou South railway station malfunctioned and failed to turn from green to red, An Lusheng, chief of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, told the news agency. He also said workers on duty were inadequately trained and failed to notice the malfunction.

Xinhua’s report, the first official explanation of the cause of the crash, raised further questions about China’s high-speed rail system, one of the world’s largest and most costly public works projects. The accident occurred when one high-speed train rear-ended another that had stalled on the tracks near Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province. High-speed rail has an excellent safety record elsewhere, especially in Japan, which has never had a fatality.

Chinese have flooded microblogging sites with furious complaints about breakneck development without heed to safety. Many also expressed fears of a cover-up, especially after reports that one train car was buried at the site despite the ongoing investigation and only later excavated.

July 27, 2011

If you can persuade 10% that you’re right, you can win the argument

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:53

Ten percent of the population may be the tipping point for mass conversion to a new idea:

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

[. . .]

The researchers are now looking for partners within the social sciences and other fields to compare their computational models to historical examples. They are also looking to study how the percentage might change when input into a model where the society is polarized. Instead of simply holding one traditional view, the society would instead hold two opposing viewpoints. An example of this polarization would be Democrat versus Republican.

July 26, 2011

Oh, Amazon, you temptress

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

I just noticed that the latest L. Neil Smith novel is available, so I clicked the Amazon.com link to find out more about it. While vampire stuff is pretty far out of my normal fiction reading tastes, this one sounds interesting enough to add it to my list: Sweeter Than Wine. The review by Rex F. May captures my normal disdain for the genre rather well:

I don’t like vampire novels. I don’t even like vampire stories. Never did. They lack verisimilitude if vampires have to bite people frequently, and the people they bite turn into vampires, why aren’t we all vampires by now? And what’s the deal with sunlight? And the garlic and the wooden stake? That all sounds like superstition. So to me, vampires belong in the realm of fantasy, not in science fiction at all, and, for the most part, I don’t enjoy fantasy very much. Now, there are some exceptions I like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld vampires, because the story is humorous, like all his stuff. But most vampire stories are dead serious, with all kinds of gothic, fifteen-year-old-girl orientation Twilight is nothing new, just a continuation of the old pattern. Same old same old rape fantasies porn for teeny-boppers.

Since it makes little sense to order a single book from Amazon, due to shipping costs, I clicked the Recommendations list to see what else is new, interesting, or Amazon’s algorithms consider might be appealing to me. Of the fifteen offerings on the first page, twelve of them are by Steven Brust. As I recently started reading his Vlad Taltos series, that kinda makes sense, but 12/15ths?

Page two of the recommendations were also heavily weighted to match a recent purchase, but this time the recommendations included The Iliad, The Odessey, Plato’s Republic, and works by Saint Augustine, Aristophanes, Euripides, Aeschylus, and Epictetus. The seed book for that seems to have been Peloponnesian War by Thucidides.

Page three appears to be an attempt to patch between the first two pages — Xenophon and several SF books by David Weber, John Ringo, George R.R. Martin, David Drake, and Tom Kratman.

Chinese government announces safety review after high speed rail crash

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

In the wake of the deadly collision between two high speed trains, China announced a safety review of the high speed railway system:

Mr Sheng said railway officials would be deployed at frontline rail operations across the country to overhaul maintenance standards and checks on power connections to pre-empt outages.

All local railway bureaux were to draw lessons from the accident, a statement on the railways department website said.

Public fury and scepticism have been expressed in China’s blogosphere, both about the death toll of 39 people — suggesting it is too low — and the safety of China’s rail network.

State newspapers have also expressed concern. The Global Times ran a headline: Anger mounts at lack of answers.

“As the world is experiencing globalisation and integration, why can’t China provide the same safety to its people?” an editorial read.

July 25, 2011

Mark Steyn responds to accusations that he “inspired” the attack in Oslo

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 20:30

Mark Steyn is quoted in Norwegian terrorist Breivik’s “manifesto”, and this is being used to paint him and others as “inspiration” for the attacks. He responds:

I have been away from the Internet for the weekend, and return to find myself being fitted out for a supporting role in Friday’s evil slaughter in Norway. The mass murderer Breivik published a 1,500-page “manifesto.” It quotes me, as well as several friends of NR — Theodore Dalrymple, Daniel Pipes, Roger Scruton, Melanie Phillips, Daniel Hannan (plus various pieces from NR by Rod Dreher and others) — and many other people, including Churchill, Gandhi, Orwell, Jefferson, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, not to mention the U.S. Declaration of Independence.* Those new “hate speech” codes the Left is already clamoring for might find it easier just to list the authors Europeans will still be allowed to read.

It is unclear how seriously this “manifesto” should be taken. Parts of it simply cut and paste chunks of the last big killer “manifesto” by Ted Kaczynski, with the occasional [insert-your-cause-here] word substitute replacing the Unabomber’s obsessions with Breivik’s. This would seem an odd technique to use for a sincerely meant political statement. The entire document is strangely anglocentric — in among the citations of NR and The Washington Times, there’s not a lot about Norway.

[. . .]

Any of us who write are obliged to weigh our words, and accept the consequences of them. But, when a Norwegian man is citing Locke and Burke as a prelude to gunning down dozens of Norwegian teenagers, he is lost in his own psychoses. Free societies can survive the occasional Breivik. If Norway responds to this as the Left appears to wish, by shriveling even further the bounds of public discourse, freedom will have a tougher time.

More on that Chinese rail crash

Filed under: China, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:49

The official story has changed a few times since the accident, and at least some Chinese feel they are entitled to the truth about the accident:

Internet users attacked the government’s response to the disaster after authorities muzzled media coverage and urged reporters to focus on rescue efforts. “We have the right to know the truth!” wrote one microblogger called kangfu xiaodingdang. “That’s our basic right!”

Leaked propaganda directives ordered journalists not to investigate the causes and footage emerged of bulldozers shovelling dirt over carriages.

Wang, the railways spokesman, said no one could or would bury the story. He said a colleague told him the wreckage was needed to fill in a muddy ditch to make rescue efforts easier.

But Hong Kong University’s China Media Project said propaganda authorities have ordered media not to send reporters to the scene, not to report too frequently and not to link the story to high-speed rail development. “There must be no seeking after the causes [of the accident], rather, statements from authoritative departments must be followed,” said one directive. Another ordered: “No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation, and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!”

Reaction to the attacks in Norway

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Brendan O’Neill looks at the media reaction to the Oslo and Utoya terror attacks:

When it was reported on Friday that there had been an explosion and an horrific mass shooting in Norway, many observers assumed that al-Qaeda or some other radical Islamist group had struck at the heart of peaceful Scandinavia. ‘Norway’s 9/11’, said the front page of the Sun on Saturday, with the subheading: ‘“Al-Qaeda” massacre.’ Yet when it was revealed that the alleged bomber and shooter is a Norway-born, blonde-haired, farm-owning Aryan, observers quickly bought into the idea that we were faced with something very different from an al-Qaeda attack. This wasn’t ‘Norway’s 9/11’ after all, but something more akin to Columbine-on-steroids, a right-wing madman letting off steam in a most barbaric fashion. As one Norwegian police official put it: this was ‘probably more Norway’s Oklahoma than its World Trade Centre’.

Yet this simplistic categorisation of contemporary terror assaults — where violent outbursts get slotted into files marked ‘Radical Islamist Fury’ or ‘Right-Wing Anger’ — makes too fine a distinction between acts that are actually very similar. Just because something like 7/7 in London was executed by men with dark hair and brown skin who claimed to be fighting on behalf of the Muslim ummah, while the bombing of Oslo and massacre on Utoya were carried out by a white guy who claimed to be protecting European Christian culture, that doesn’t mean these are diametrically different actions. What they have in common is far more important than what separates them. And, stripped of their pseudo-political garb, what unites today’s various terror tantrums, what makes these kind of people possible in the first place, is a very powerful culture of estrangement in modern society.

In much of the media, particularly amongst the respectable broadsheet press, there was a palpable sense of relief when it was revealed that the alleged killer is white with far-right tendencies. This means he is the kind of person we can unambiguously hate. Where Islamist terror attacks, from 9/11 to 7/7, induce in some liberal observers torn and tortured feelings, where they want to condemn the violence but also feel the need to explain it as a natural reaction to evil Western foreign policy, Anders Behring Breivik is someone they can despise in an uncomplicated way. This means that while the attacks may not be ‘Norway’s 9/11’, they could well be the cultural elite’s 9/11 — in the sense that this is an act which the influential liberal classes may seek to politicise in an opportunistic fashion, to make moral mileage out of, in the same way that the right did after 11 September 2001.

July 22, 2011

Has Twitter entered the political sphere?

Filed under: Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

There has to be more to the story, but Erick Erickson is quite concerned:

Today, Twitter not only shut down the Empower Texans twitter feed, but it also shut down the twitter feeds of every individual who works for Empower Texans.

Twitter is a private organization. It can do what it wants. But I am very troubled that it did so without explanation and without anyone for Empower Texans to contact.

If this was an orchestrated effort on the part of others to flag Empower Texans as a spam account such that Twitter’s computer system would automatically can it, Twitter has a serious security problem.

It was a man made decision, Twitter has even bigger problems.

Mark Lynas goes from green activist to “denier”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Ben Pile reviews Mark Lynas’s new book:

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

[. . .]

As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species. Most importantly, Lynas makes a clean break from deep ecology — the idea that ‘nature’ has intrinsic moral value and a ‘right’ to be protected from our ambitions. He rebukes the environmentalism that imagines a return to a pristine nature, and that shows contempt for development as an attempt to ‘play god’ over nature. We should ‘play god’, he says, for the planet’s sake as well as our own comfort. There is a convincing criticism of green demands for austerity and environmentalists’ unrealistic expectations that people should make do with ‘happiness’ rather than material progress. These are the conceits of well-off, middle-class and self-indulgent whingers, Lynas explains. Some of us have been making similar arguments for a very long time.

In spite of some of his accurate criticisms, Lynas fails to get to the substance of environmentalism. We do not find out what takes environmentalists to their bleak view of the world and their low view of humanity. This is a shame, because Lynas is in a unique position to reflect on it, having once thrust a custard pie into Bjorn Lomborg’s face, with the words: ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit. That’s for lying about climate change. That’s what you deserve for being smug about everything to do with the environment.’

A decade on, Lynas now emphasises science and pragmatism rather than… erm… pies. It’s worth remembering that Lomborg started out on mission similar to Lynas’s: as an environmentalist, keen to establish the sensible limits of our interaction with the natural world. Before writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg aimed to debunk the works of the economist, Julian Simon, but ended up sympathetic to many of his arguments. Lynas, too, now finds himself sympathetic to many of the ideas from the economic right (he calls for the privatisation of all publicly owned water companies, for instance). And like Lynas, Lomborg never ended up ‘denying’ climate change, but instead sought to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and to put it into context with other problems in the world. That is all it takes to find oneself called a ‘denier’: merely seeking a sense of proportion about environmental problems will put you in the lowest moral category, as Lynas, the ‘Chernobyl death denier’, has now discovered.

“I never, ever, ever want to get involved in anything this complicated again”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Just in case you don’t already have multiple versions of the Lord of the Rings movies, there’s now the extended Blu-ray version, and Steve May thinks it’s worth getting:

The set is beautifully packaged. Three fat Blu-ray cases sit within a substantial, faux gold-leaf book. Within are elongated versions of each movie. Previously available as DVD special editions, these plump out the trilogy with cutting-room floor detritus. In Fellowship multiple small scene edits and additions increase its running length by around 30 minutes.

The Two Towers is even more substantially altered. With more than 40 minutes of additional footage cut into proceedings, plus some reframing and tweaks, it’s a significantly different beast from the original theatrical release. There’s also a smidgeon more action inserted into the Helm’s Deep battle, which contrary to popular opinion I believe can only be a good thing.

Return of the King tops Towers with nigh-on 50 minutes of extra material. Once again the movie has been substantially re-cut to accommodate the multiple changes and insertions. This engorged version would never play theatrically because of its length, but on disc, where you can watch and take a break at will, it’s a marvellous indulgence. For those that want to spend as much time in Middle Earth as possible, these extended versions are a gift. For the less enthusiastic, they’re more like a marathon.

As I joked when the first extended version of Return of the King came out, they’ve added another half-dozen endings!

On the Silver Anniversary of the publication of the Vorkosigan saga

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

The members of the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list were delighted to present a special present to Lois on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first book in the series:

A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign (PDF)

As John Lennard, co-editor of ARCACC wrote:

Ladies, Gentlemen, and all other persons, cats, dogs, squirrels, elephants, and butterbugs.

Yestermonth the Vorkosigan Saga turned 25 glorious years old. Yes, despite their own convictions on these matters, and relative fictional aliveness or otherwise, Aral, Cordelia, Konstantin Bothari, Barrayar itself, and even Miles (dating from a twinkle in Lois’s and Cordelia’s eyes) have hit their quarter-century. It also means that Lois has been putting up with our readerly burbles and spats for longer than seems possible.

[Fanfare. Extraordinary and prolonged fireworks spelling out an enormous THANK YOU, LOIS draw admiring oohs and aahs from all present.]

And by way of a less ephemeral thank-you to Lois for thus entertaining, challenging, amusing, delighting, instructing, and generally vivifying us all, I the Birthday Tixie hereby present to her on behalf of everyone who has been, is, or will be a member of this List, A Reader’s Companion to A Civil Campaign. This work of scholarly erudition and critical acumen has been compiled by many members, that they and the hordes of future Bujold readers may better understand the art, craft, wisdom, allusion, quotation, generic engineering, neologisms, and incomparable one-liners that make a Vorkosiverse novel an endless delight ; and it is presented with warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude laced with admiration, awe, and a beverage of choice now held high in approbation.

Lois, legentes te salutant!

July 21, 2011

Ontario Finance Minister lashes out after “backroom work-over” by “bare-knuckle bruiser(s)”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Terence Corcoran admits to roughing up poor Dwight Duncan along with his fellow thugs in the National Post dungeon editorial board meeting last week:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Mr. Duncan said the Post, along with other Ontario newspapers, are part of what he described as an intellectually dishonest, right-wing, Rupert Murdoch, conservative cabal.

Mr. Duncan, whose Liberal party faces what looks like a tough election this fall, had just been asked questions about Ontario’s alleged decline into “have-not” status. For some reason not explained, this line of questioning triggered a bizarre critique of Ontario’s newspapers and media: “The intellectual dishonesty, particularly of the right wing in this country, and the right-wing media, is they don’t tell the truth. It’s kinda like Rupert Murdoch.”

[. . .]

Not that the Post has been all that harsh of late. That editorial board meeting last Wednesday was a mild affair, a friendly exchange followed by polite banter, which Mr. Duncan said he enjoyed.

The next day the Post‘s editorial board produced an editorial of such modest criticisms and waffling ambiguity that the McGuinty Liberals could use excerpts as an endorsement.

This is why the British media is wall-to-wall Murdochmania

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Andrew Orlowski explains how the show trial of Rupert Murdoch has sucked the oxygen out of every other story in the British media:

For the past fortnight, TV and newspaper editors in the UK have pushed aside stories of famine and the European financial crisis — which is greater now than the credit crunch three years ago — in favour of saturation coverage of the troubles of a rival media company.

This rival has real troubles, to be sure, which I will not attempt to diminish. But the volume and intensity of coverage is defined by the real size and reach of News Corporation. And this is not reality, but a myth. Just as children want a Santa, so too do editors and Prime Ministers want a “Murdoch” that resembles the omniscient movie villain/myth Keyser Soze. They’ve defined themselves by this myth.

“Never again should we let a media group get too powerful,” PM David Cameron said today, tuning in to the editors’ mood music. But like so many politicians before him, and specifically the past two Prime Ministers, he has done everything he could to bolster the Murdoch Myth himself. For most of the past two decades, politicians have tugged their forelocks at the Aussie-born tycoon, increasing his perceived influence with each pull.

Haven’t they got the memo about Old Media being dead? Why are they so worried?

July 20, 2011

Heinlein’s influence on the evolution of the libertarian movement

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:14

In a post to correct an assertion by SF author David Brin, Eric S. Raymond shows just how influential the writings of Robert Heinlein were to the early libertarian movement:

Robert Heinlein was a complex man whose views evolved greatly over time. The Heinlein of 1942, who put into the mouth of one of his characters the line “Naturally food is free! What kind of people do you take us for?” was only five years on from having been enchanted by social credit theory, which underpins his “lost” novel For Us, The Living; in later years he was so embarrassed by this enthusiasm that he allowed that manuscript to molder in a drawer somewhere, and it was only published after his death.

Between 1942 and 1966 Heinlein’s politics evolved from New Deal left-liberalism towards what after 1971 would come to be called libertarianism. But that way of putting it is actually misleading, because Heinlein did not merely approach libertarianism, he played a significant part in defining it. His 1966 novel The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was formative of the movement, with the “rational anarchist” Bernardo de la Paz becoming a role model for later libertarians. By 1978, we have direct evidence (from an interview in Samuel Edward Konkin’s New Libertarian magazine, among other sources) that Heinlein self-identified as a libertarian and regretted his earlier statism.

But if Heinlein’s overall politics changed considerably and wandered down some odd byways during his lifetime, his uncompromising support of civilian firearms rights was a constant on display throughout his life. Brin observes that was already true in 1942, but attempts to attribute this position to John W. Campbell. Multiple lines of evidence refute this claim.

[. . .]

(When time has given us perspective to write really good cultural histories of the 20th century, Heinlein is going to look implausibly gigantic. His achievements didn’t stop with co-inventing science fiction and all its consequences, framing post-1960s libertarianism, energizing the firearms-rights movement, or even merely inspiring me to become the kind of person who not only could write The Cathedral and the Bazaar but had to. No. Heinlein also invented much of the zeitgeist of the 1960s counterculture through his novel Stranger In A Strange Land; it has been aptly noted that he was the only human being ever to become a culture hero both to the hippies of Woodstock and the U.S. Marine Corps. I am told that to this day most Marine noncoms carry a well-thumbed copy of Starship Troopers in their rucksacks.)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress