The Golden Compass
I just saw the Golden Compass movie. I agree with PZ when he says that you’re going to be seeing the word “disappointing” in a lot of reviews.
Mild spoilers after the jump.
Bad Pharyngula
In which I get PZ Myers to sign Phil Plait’s book, starting a trend.
Phil Plait and PZ Myers are in town for a Americans United thing, so they organized a meetup tonight. Naturally, I had to go.
As you can tell, I have a ways to go as a photographer. But this picture clearly shows that PZ does not breathe fire. In actuality, he shoots lasers out of his eyes. (Update, Nov. 11: see here for why Phil’s eyes are closed.)
Word O’ the Day
Pomaceous: pertaining to apples. A nice autumnal word.
Another Amusing Linguistic Quirk
I just ran across this comment:
First Amendment notwithstanding, there are such things under the law as harmful speech that can be sanctioned.
“Sanction” has two meanings, which are opposites of each other: it can mean either “official permission” or “penalty” (or, as a verb, either “to give official permission” or “to impose a penalty”). In this case, since the topic is the first amendment, which permits people to say things that have historically been banned, it’s even more confusing.
David at Mental Floss calls such words “contronyms” or “antagonyms”. Take your pick.
Knowing Like A Crossword Puzzle
If you enjoy solving crossword puzzles, you may have found yourself in the same position as I did the other day:
“Thug” is “GOON”, obviously: the O’s fit “OIL” and “NOTONYOURLIFE”. As for the G, well, I know nothing about ballet, so for all I know there’s someone named Twyla T. Garp out there.
I didn’t know what “With feet all askew” could be, but worked on filling in the words that intersected it, until eventually it became obvious that “_IGEONTOEN” couldn’t be right. The problem lay either in “GOON” or in “_IGEONTOEN”, but both were connected to other words: fixing one might unravel a whole section of a puzzle that seemed to fit together quite well. I wasn’t sure about “Zubin of music” → “MEHTA”, but other than that, my answers seemed pretty solid.
Eventually, of course, I figured out that “With feet all askew” was “PIGEONTOED”, and “Thug” was “HOOD” (though the name Twyla Tharp still doesn’t ring any bells).
And this strikes me as a good metaphor for how we understand the world.
A Step Closer to Good Electronic Books
I got to play with a Sony PRS-505 digital reader at a bookstore today. Basically, it’s an electronic device about the size of a slim paperback, with a big screen on which to read electronic books. According to the signs, it allows you to read plain text (it found a README file on the SD card I stuck in it), PDF files, and whatever proprietary DRM-hobbled format Sony’s pushing this year.
I think I could stick it in my back pocket like a paperback, but at $300, I wouldn’t want to accidentally sit on it.
The most impressive thing about it, in my opinion, is the screen. It was hard to judge with uniform neon lights, but as far as I could tell, the screen was reflective, like paper; not light-emitting, like cell phone and PDA screens. If you’ve ever struggled to read a PDA screen in bright sunlight, and like reading at the beach, you’ll appreciate the difference. The screen is also nice and crisp, with good resolution. It’s not quite like reading a book, but it’s up beyond 8-pin-printer and into cheap-ass laser printer quality. In fact, for a moment I was fooled into thinking that instead of a working model, they’d displayed a mock-up with a printed sheet of paper to show what the display would look like.
The device doesn’t have a touch screen, but there’s a row of ten buttons down the side to allow you to quickly select one of ten menu items. There are also buttons in different locations that allow you to turn pages, depending on how you want to hold the book.
Either the controls or the display seemed sluggish, though. This may be a limitation of the technology used for the display.
All in all, it seems a reasonable device that I could see myself using to actually read books. Even if I don’t want to shell out for proprietary-format books, Project Gutenberg still has a ton of good stuff, and there are lots of things on the web that are easily convertible to PDF. To say nothing of possibilities like uploading RSS feeds and whatnot.
Stepping back for a moment, though, this device (and others like it) seems to suffer from the same problem as MP3s: you can take the attitude that what matters in a book is the text, just as what matters in an album is the music. So you don’t need the physical book any more than you need the physical CD and booklet.
But books and albums are still, well, physical objects. Back in the days of LPs, album covers were often intricate works of art. CDs don’t give artists as much room to work with, but there’s still a lot that can be done to make the physical album an interesting object (like the Lego-textured jewel case for Very). Books often have cutouts in the cover, or fold-out pages (like the maps in the back of Lord of the Rings), or bleeds, or textured paper, and other elements that don’t lend translate well to bits. So while I concede that what matters is the content (and boy do I sometimes wish my O’Reilly bookshelf were greppable), sometimes it’s nice to hold a cool object.
I Think I’m Fisked in Japanese, I Really Think So
I ran across this article about my FABNAQ about Intelligent Design. Unfortunately, it’s in Japanese, which I don’t speak, and the Babelfish and Google translations are bad enough that I can’t even tell whether I’m being fisked or praised.
Are there any nipponophones in the audience who can take a look and give me a sense of what’s going on?
Lowest Common Denominator
I was just thinking of the phrase “lowest common denominator” in the sense of something lowbrow that appeals to the unwashed masses, rather than something refined. And it occurred to me that in math, the lowest common denominator of a group of (natural) numbers is always going to be 1. What’s more interesting is the largest common denominator: it’s more interesting to know that 12 and 20 are both divisible by 4, than that they’re both divisible by 1.
Admittedly, I didn’t learn this part of arithmetic in the US (or even in English), so it’s possible that the phrase “lowest common denominator” is commonly understood to mean 1/n. In the example above, 1/4 is < 1/1, so 1/4 could be viewed as the lowest common denominator of 12 and 20.
But another possibility is that the phrase “lowest common denominator”, as applied to marketing and popular tastes, was originally ironic: a filmmaker might want to make a movie that appeals to the largest common denominator, i.e., one that’s as highbrow as possible, while still appealing to everyone. A critic who said that a movie appealed to the lowest common denominator would be saying that the movie appealed to the public’s basest tastes and wasn’t even trying to be good.
I haven’t found an etymological reference to confirm or disprove this, but I think it’s at least possible that the phrase started out ironic, but that over time people forgot this.
This Article Is About Self-Reference and Complexity (but This Title Isn’t)
I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop, and there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me.
In Chapter 4, he discusses his fascination with self-reference and feedback loops of all kinds. He talks about the operation of a toilet, in which water enters the tank, which raises the floater, which in turn cuts off the intake valve. The toilet can be said to “want” to be full. He then asks,
Why does this move to a goal-oriented — that is, teleological — shorthand seem appealing to us for a system endowed with feedback, but not so appealing for a less structured system?
(italics in the original.)
He seems to be saying that feedback ⇔ teleology (or intentionality, which is what I think Dennett and other philosophers might call it). In this, I think he’s wrong, though in an interesting way. Read More
Has Hovind Actually Learned Something?
Kent Hovind says on his weblog:
At lunch last week, one of the inmates said, “If I could, I would bomb the Christian Coalition. They are the reason we are here.” I was shocked by his statement! I love the Christian Coalition, but I understand the man’s point. For years, Christians have pushed judges and legislators to be “tough on crime.” Most are thinking about violent crimes when pushing for this type legislation. However, only about three percent of those incarcerated in the United States are incarcerated for violent crimes. The unreasonable sentences people are given have come from judges who have never spent even one day locked up and who brag that they will give out sentences totaling “a million years” during their time on the bench.
Having been here for nearly six months, I will forever be an advocate of closing most jails and prisons. What this type of punishment does to families and society is terrible.
(emphasis added.)
Well, duh. There’s a saying that “a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged”. Perhaps we can add another saying, that a liberal is a conservative who’s been screwed by the system.
Glad he’s finally figured out what some people have been saying for years. That maybe throwing people in prison willy-nilly isn’t as good as actually doing something about the root problem, that the cost of incarceration (both monetary and its effects on others) may exceed its beneficial effects, and generally that while “getting tough on crime” may be a good slogan, it’s not necessarily the best approach in the real world. (In fact, it may make things worse: apparently the number of murders shot up when Florida passed a law making armed robbery a capital crime: people holding up 7-Elevens would kill the clerk so he couldn’t be a witness; they figured since they were committing a capital crime anyway, then adding murder to that wasn’t going to make things any worse for them).
Minimum-sentencing laws bother me because they take away the judge’s ability to impose a light or suspended sentence if he or she deems it appropriate, even though it’s the judge’s job to learn the facts of the case and determine how justice can best be served. It’s like passing a law that anyone with attention-deficit disorder must take Ritalin: it may be a good idea in most cases, but not all. And why should the legislature, rather than one’s doctor, make that decision?
Anway, just to show that he’s still the same old Kent Hovind, he adds this bit of paranoid nut-jobbery:
I believe that we as Christians are unwittingly funding and encouraging the very prisons that will house the Christians as the New World Order approaches!
In other news, Hovind is apparently now in solitary.