Quotulatiousness

April 4, 2011

No wonder India does not want this Gandhi biography to be published

Filed under: Books, History, India, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Based on this Wall Street Journal review, it’s far from being another hagiography:

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist — one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals.

The strongest objection raised in the Indian debate appears to have been the suggestion that Gandhi was bisexual:

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” he wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” Gandhi nicknamed himself “Upper House” and Kallenbach “Lower House,” and he made Lower House promise not to “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two then pledged “more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”

Totally underground band loses millions to illegal downloads…or do they?

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

An interesting article looks at a claim by an obscure band that their debut CD had been pirated over 100,000 times:

Late last week, TorrentFreak was contacted by a guy called Wayne Borean who alerted to us to a somewhat heated debate he’d been participating in on the ‘Balanced Copyright For Canada’ Facebook page.

“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum — because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.

Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.

“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads — ILLEGAL downloads — has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.

That’s really terrible, isn’t it? An obscure band, hoping to make it big by selling their CD have an illegal audience more than 300 times their number of Facebook fans? How did all these illegal downloaders even find out about the band? Well, perhaps they didn’t:

At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.

[. . .]

As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion [. . .]

We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.

I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.

Update, 5 April: Apparently you have two choices in a situation like this. 1) Own up to being mistaken and apologize for making a stink about a non-issue. 2) Double-down on stupid:

A day after One Soul Thrust’s manager had the entire Internet explain to him that his band’s music wasn’t being downloaded 100,000 times on BitTorrent sites, he’s still in deep denial. Today’s post is all about how the pirates attacked him “[b]ecause a debut album by an independent Canadian band is listed on torrent sites around the world and we had the audacity to point that out.” Um, no it’s not. It’s not listed on any torrent sites. As far as anyone can tell, not one human being on this planet has torrented this band’s CD. Dude, you made a mistake, you freaked out, you looked a little naive. Now you’re looking like an ass. Quit while you’re ahead, maybe?

Creative comments to that last post include 1) someone, somewhere actually upload the album to a torrent site, just so the band doesn’t look quite as pathetic, and 2) replace each track with varying length versions of a certain Rick Astley tune.

April 3, 2011

Richard Glover: “the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Mr. Glover, a professional broadcaster and columnist, has determined that the collapse of civilization will come from internet trolling denialists:

It’s increasingly apparent that the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation, beating out previous contenders such as nuclear holocaust and the election of George W. Bush.

The agents of this planetary death will be the climate-change deniers who, it’s now clear, owe much of their existence to the internet. Would the climate-change deniers be this sure of themselves without the internet?

Somehow I doubt it. They are so damn confident.

They don’t just bury their heads in the sand, they fiercely drive their own heads energetically into the nearest beachfront, their bums defiantly aquiver as they fart their toxic message to the world. How can they be so confident, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary?

It’s the internet, of course, and the way it has given climate-change deniers the perfect forum — one in which groups of quite dim people can swap spurious information, reassuring each other there’s no evidence on the other side, right up to the point they’ve derailed all efforts to save the planet. Call it ”mutually reassured destruction”.

April 2, 2011

Cultural bias and bad reporting

Filed under: Japan, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:01

Jon sent me this link, which discusses the media coverage of the Fukushima workers:

We hear of Fukushima workers “fleeing” the plant, when what happened is they left for a few hours.

We hear about the appearance of tiny amounts of radioactive iodine in Tokyo tap water — but nothing the next day, when it returns to safe levels.

We hear a thousand commentators mention one measurement that was ten million times normal — but nothing when that turns out to have been a measurement error, made by someone who had little sleep and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

We hear people spinning tales of “worst case scenarios” ten thousand times worse than anything that could plausibly happen — and almost nothing about the fact that the Fukushima reactors endured an earthquake 32 times as forceful as they had been designed for, followed by a tsunami twice as high, and still largely survived.

We hear about “plutonium in the soil” — but not that it’s an amount so tiny that pound for pound, bananas in the grocery store are five thousand times more radioactive.

The London Daily Mail reports that the workers “expect to die,” but not that the worst radiation exposure among all the workers amounts to about as much as 15 CT scans, a dose that not only isn’t fatal, but that has no observable health effects.

A lot of bad reporting seems to come from mere scientific illiteracy.

Not only scientific illiteracy, but willful illiteracy. Combine the need to file a story — the more sensational, the better — with the anti-scientific bias that’s been “baked in” to journalism students for two generations, and this is what you get.

Some of it may be simply that fear sells papers, and a headline that says “Catastrophe imminent” sells more papers than “Catastrophe averted.”

But a lot of it appears to be purposeful — it’s no coincidence that the people spinning the wildest tales of catastrophe have also turned out to be associated with vehemently anti-nuclear think tanks and political pressure groups.

Whether it’s because of ignorance or on purpose, the effect of this misreporting it to keep people afraid.

April 1, 2011

Tor Books announces John Scalzi’s next book series

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:33

For those of you not interested in fantasy, how can you possibly resist this:

Tor Books is proud to announce the launch of John Scalzi’s new fantasy trilogy The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, which kicks off with book one: The Dead City.

Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.

With the night came a storm, the likes of which the eldest among the Skalandarharians would proclaim they had seen only once before, although none of them could agree which on which one time that was; some said it was like the fabled Scouring of Skalandarharia, in which the needle-sharp ice-rain flayed the skin from the unjust of the city, provided they were outside at the time, while sparing the just who had stayed indoors; others said it was very similar to the unforgettable Pounding of Skalandarharia, in which hailstones the size of melons destroyed the city’s melon harvest; still others compared it to the oft-commented-upon Moistening of Skalandarharia, in which the persistent humidity made everyone unbearably sticky for several weeks; at which point they were informed that this storm was really nothing like that at all, to which they replied perhaps not, but you had to admit that was a pretty damn miserable time.

Which is to say: It was a dark and stormy night.

Chinese Tiger Mom meets Irish Setter Dad

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:38

P.J. O’Rourke on Amy Chua’s recent book:

What’s all this bother about Chinese Tiger Moms? Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has America’s female parents in a swivet. You’d have to take Sarah Palin to a NOW convention to see so many ladies mad at a fellow woman. Practically a third of the Atlantic’s April issue is taken up with Caitlin Flanagan and Sandra Tsing Loh giving Amy Chua the dickens in terms strong enough for Hillary Clinton’s private thoughts on Monica Lewinsky. My wife put it more succinctly: “This person is factory farming her kids.”

I gather Ms. Chua is a total bitch with her children, making them finish homework before it’s assigned, practice violin and piano 25 hours a day, maintain a grade point average higher than Obama budget numbers, and forbidding them from doing anything they might enjoy, such as exhale.

But being a male parent with a typical dad-like involvement in my children’s lives — ​I know all of their names​ — ​I thought Battle Hymn was great. That is, I thought it made me look great. Not that I read the dreadful book, but I did buy each of my children a copy and inscribed it, “So you think you’ve got it bad?”

Erasing your (digital) past

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google said: “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable, and recorded by everyone all the time.” Privacy is dying, if not already clinically dead, in the online world. If you really want (or need) to airbrush yourself out of the picture, here are some suggestions on how to go about doing it.

The Internet has made our world a lot smaller. It has also made our histories a lot better-catalogued and more-searchable, and those developments — coupled with the weird phenomenon that people’s common sense tends to fly out the window when it comes to posting information and pictures — aren’t always beneficial to us.

[. . .]

Instead of popping you into a Witness Protection program — or changing your name — let us show you five steps on how to disappear from the Internet.

Step 1: Know Thine Enemy

Before you take any action, you need to know what you’re trying to get rid of. So first, do a search for your name — don’t just search Google, though, search online people search aggregation sites such as ZabaSearch, Intelius, Pipl, and Spokeo.

Here’s how to run an online background check (on yourself) for free.

March 31, 2011

Manga translator convicted under Swedish child-porn law

Filed under: Europe, Japan, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

It’s a telling result that someone who is paid to translate Japanese manga can fall afoul of child porn laws:

Last year, Lundström was convicted of possession of pornographic material after 50-odd Manga images stored on his hard drive were classified as child porn. The Swedish court of appeal later agreed that 39 of the illustrated images, none of which has been banned in Japan and none of which shows real people, fitted the definition of child porn. Lundström was fined 5,000 Swedish Crowns (£500). Meanwhile, his main employer, publisher Bonnier Carlsen, has stopped giving him translating commissions, and Lundström has been burdened with a reputation of traversing the biggest taboo of our time: getting off on kids. The case has now been appealed to the Supreme Court.

Cultural commentator Ulrika Knutson did not exaggerate when, earlier this week, she described the case as a ‘Swedish censorship scandal, perhaps the worst one in modern times’. As she points out, it should not simply be left to ‘other young cartoon nerds and Manga fans’ to defend Lundström against the legal and moral trials he has been subjected to since a note informing him that he was suspected of child pornography crimes was slipped through his home mailbox last summer. Instead, anyone who values freedom of speech must also defend the renowned Manga expert.

Whether you like or dislike Manga, it’s one of Japan’s biggest cultural exports. It may not be mainstream entertainment, but there are lots of fans in all western countries. If Sweden and other countries are going to retroactively decide that they are considered child porn, the courts are going to be very, very busy:

In other words, Swedes are not allowed to own or intentionally look at drawn images of non-real characters that a court could determine might to some people resemble child-like figures in situations that for some could be sexually arousing.

It’s an absurd situation: judges deliberating over the artistic merits of images, trying to determine what stage of puberty illustrated characters might be at and speculating over what kind of thoughts they might stimulate among adults. As for Lundström’s images, apparently the judges who convicted him felt that Manga comics, which are read and loved by millions around the world, violate children.

Men At Work lose copyright appeal

Filed under: Australia, Law, Media, Pacific — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:03

As reported last year, Australian band Men At Work launched an appeal against a judgement requiring them to pay 5% of the royalties on their song “Down Under”. The appeal was dismissed:

Australia’s Federal Court upheld the decision which stated part of the song’s melody came from the tune Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

Record label EMI argued the writers did not plagiarise because the inclusion of two bars from the tune was a tribute.

The music company has also been ordered to pay costs.

The latest decision clears the way for Larrikin Music, the copyright owners for Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, to claim millions of dollars in unpaid royalties from Down Under writers Colin Hay and Ron Strykert.

The original judgement was clearly insane: it assessed the damages at up to 60% of the profits earned by the band on that song (for two bars of a three-minute song). The revised judgement was much more proportional: 5%.

Real world influence of bad science reporting

Filed under: Health, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

If I seem to be linking to wormme’s blog a lot lately, it’s because he is a great source of practical information . . . and he hates sensationalist media reports even more than I do. Normally, the effect of junk science sensationalism is pretty small: people worry a bit more about stupid things, but generally get on with their lives.

Sensational — and badly mistaken — reporting on radiation is a big exception to that:

Hundreds of people evacuated from towns and villages close to the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant are being turned away by medical institutions and emergency shelters as fears of radioactive contagion catch on.

Medical personnel turning them away.

Hospitals and temporary refuges are demanding that evacuees provide them with certificates confirming that they have not been exposed to radiation before they are admitted.

Do you readers see the error here? If not, this blog is failing you.

When trained, professional medical staff are confusing radiation with contamination, things are really, really bad.

The article goes on to quote some medical experts — i.e., non-insane people.

“If someone has been contaminated externally, such as on their shoes or clothes, then precautions can be taken, such as by removing those garments to stop the contamination from getting into a hospital,”

But what if it’s on the person?!

In my trade, we have a secret special decontamination technique. I’m violating all kinds of unwritten laws by sharing it, but this is an emergency, right? When a person needs general decontamination we always do this first, and it almost always works. Are you ready?

Soap and warm water.

I’ll probably be drummed out of the National Registry of Radiological Protection Technicians for revealing that.

“Free neutrons don’t beam, homie”

Filed under: Japan, Media, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:33

The ever-informative wormme has another good post up, this one is about misunderestimating neutrons:

We can’t say for sure TEPCO was monitoring for neutrons there — they’ve made some pretty big mistakes so far — but they’d be hard to miss. All those emergency responders sprawled lifelessly on the ground would have been a clue. From that absolute godawfully unimaginable flux of ground-zero neutrons, doncha know. Because despite “reporting” like this:

…observed a neutron beam…(snip snip)…when a beam of neutrons…

Free neutrons don’t beam, homie. (emphasis added, obviously) Apart from neutrinos and anti-neutrinos, nothing’s harder to beam than neutrons. They like to spread, not bunch. (Okay, Leopold, maybe muons and the like are worse.)

A neutron walks into a bar and says, “how much for a drink?”. Bartender says, “for you…no charge.” The neutron beamed…

March 30, 2011

At least they got his name right, maybe

Filed under: Britain, Media, Railways — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:00

A very detailed apology from Britain’s The Sun newspaper:

IN an article published on The Sun website on January 27 under the headline ‘Gollum joker killed in live rail horror’ we incorrectly stated that Julian Brooker, 23, of Brighton, was blown 15ft into the air after accidentally touching a live railway line.

His parents have asked us to make clear he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23 and didn’t go drinking on that date every month.

Julian’s mother did not say, during or after the inquest, her son often got on all fours creeping around their house pretending to be Gollum.

Also, quotes from a witness should have been attributed to Gemma Costin not Eva Natasha. We apologise for the distress this has caused Julian’s family and friends.

Bold in the original post.

The author’s guide to dealing with criticism

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:59

In short, watch how author Jacqueline Howett responds to a review with (pretty mild) critical comments, then don’t do this:

Jacqueline Howett said…

You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review. My Amazon readers/reviewers give it 5 stars and 4 stars and they say they really enjoyed The Greek Seaman and thought it was well written. Maybe its just my style and being English is what you don’t get. Sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I will stick to my five star and four star reviews thanks.

She then reposts three Amazon reviews in the comment thread.

BooksAndPals said…

In response to the many comments from Ms Howett:

I received the email on 2/7 asking that I download the a new copy of the book, which I did. I verified in my library software (Calibre) that this was the version I had and read. However her note above as well as the email mentioned formatting. At least when I talk about formatting I’m referring to issues of conversion from the source (a Word .doc file or whatever) into an eBook so the text flows correctly on the Kindle and so on. I say no issues I would attribute to formatting.

I have doubts that Ms. Howett being English is the reason for my reaction to her writing although I can’t discount it entirely. I can say that in the last year I’ve read and in many cases reviewed on this blog books by natives of England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and multiple European countries where English is not the primary language. Some have been full of country specific slang. In none of these cases has this been an issue for me. I do mention these things in the FYI section of my reviews because it is an issue for some people.

I’ll also point out that in the first two chapters alone I found in excess of twenty errors that ideally would have been caught in editing and proofing. Some were minor, but all have the potential of disrupting an enjoyable reading experience, depending on the specific reader and their sensitivity to such things.

Here are a couple sample sentences from the first two chapters that gave me pause and are representative of what I found difficult while reading.

“She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs.”

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

I understand what both are probably saying. I do question the sentence construction.

However, I should point out that the review does say the story, which is the most important part of a book, is good. The effort of extracting the story through the errors and, at least to me, sometimes convoluted sounding language, made doing so much too difficult, IMO.

I would encourage anyone who thinks the story sounds interesting to sample the book. Read the first few chapters and decide for yourself.

Jacqueline Howett said…

My writing is just fine!

You did not download the fresh copy…. you did not. No way!

As to annoymous

Al was given the option of a free copy from smashwords the following day to download in any format he preffered.

Look AL, I’m not in the mood for playing snake with you, what I read above has no flaws. My writing is fine. You were told to download a new copy for format problems the very next day while they were free at Smashwords, so you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected. Simply remove this review as it is in error with you not downloading the fresh copy i insisted. Why review my book after being told to do this, and more annoying why have you never ever responded to any of my e-mails?

And please follow up now from e-mail.

This is not only discusting and unprofessional on your part, but you really don’t fool me AL.

Who are you any way? Really who are you?

What do we know about you?

You never downloaded another copy you liar!

You never ever returned to me an e-mail

Besides if you want to throw crap at authors you should first ask their permission if they want it stuck up on the internet via e-mail. That debate is high among authors.

Your the target not me!

Now get this review off here!

And it gets much, much worse . . .

Stock photography for all occasions

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:33

Well, I’m not sure how many occasions these photos could be used for.


March 29, 2011

The evolution of news to sensational entertainment is complete

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:27

Andrew Orlowski gives the media a damn good whacking over their deliberate panic-mongering:

Sensationalism has always been part of the popular media — but Fukushima is a telling and troubling sign of how much the media has changed in fifty years: from an era of scientific optimism to one where it inhabits a world of fantasy — creating a real-time Hollywood disaster movie with a moralising, chivvying message.

Not so long ago, the professionals showed all the deferential, forelock-tugging paternalism of the dept of “Keep Calm And Carry On”. That era lasted into the 1960s. Now the driving force is the notion that “We’re all DOOMED — and it’s ALL OUR FAULT” that marks almost every news bulletin. Health and environment correspondents will rarely be found debunking the claims they receive in press releases from lobby groups — the drama of catastrophe is too alluring. Fukushima has been the big one.

The Fukushima situation has yet to cause any measurable radiological health effects, and workers at the site were far less hard hit by the quake, tsunami and related events than just about anyone in the disaster zone, but nonetheless the nuclear story rapidly eclipsed the tens of thousands killed directly by the quake. TV’s reaction to the crisis shows how at odds it is with a more rational audience, those who know something about radiation, its consequences, and the human body’s capacity to absorb it and recover from it. The crisis for the media is that thanks to the internet, we can now all bypass these conduits for superstition and stupidity.

Thousands of people died in the earthquake and tsunami (28,000 at last report), yet the media coverage has been unrelentingly focused on Fukushima (where there have been no radiation-linked deaths so far). Surely things like this are scary enough to get equal coverage:

H/T to wormme for the link.

Update: Brendan O’Neill finds a perfect example of journalism:

In a post on the Channel 4 News website, Jon Snow, newsreader, Twitterer, cyclist and “pinko liberal” (his words), unwittingly captures the narcissism and ignorance that are fuelling Western fears over the Fukushima nuclear plant. Never mind the 20,000 who have died and the 200,000 who have been made homeless as a result of the tsunami — what Snow wants to know is what will become of the “dumping of radioactive material in sea water off Japan”.

“When will it pitch up off Cornwall?,” he asks. “Never? Do we know? Will it cause cancers? Will it kill eventually?” Perhaps he has a holiday home in Cornwall, in which case he might possibly be forgiven for thinking that the burning issue of Japan’s monumental tragedy is what impact it will have in St Ives.

Snow’s attempt to justify his navel-gazing obsession with the troubles at Fukushima (apparently he can’t get it out of his mind) is telling. Media coverage of the damaged nuclear plant has understandably “overwhelmed the continuing awfulness of the consequences of the natural disaster itself”, he says, because the natural disaster is “somehow more determinable than the unseen, unknown quantity of danger residing in the reactors, or outside them, in Fukushima”. In short, the natural disaster is too much of a done deal, a proven fact, whereas something far more tantalising lurks within Fukushima: dark, mysterious dangers, uncertainties, swirling unknowns that could unleash their fury at any moment against the unsuspecting Japanese and even us Brits.

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