confusionIn other news…
It’s a nice piece of speculative work, but it is speculation
Matt Visser, quoted in Stellar Wormholes May Exist [seeker.com] on Seeker
… is scientist speak for “that’s bullshit, what’s this guy smoking?”
Of course hindsight is 20/20.
Also, if memory serves, that’s a key plot element of The Algebraist [wikipedia.org].
It’s my Facebook and I’ll do that if I want to!
Actually, I have no idea what prompted this error… found it on the screen this morning. So sometime between last Friday at lunch and this morning I did something Facebook does not want me to do. I kinda wish I knew what it was so I could do it again… Fuck you Facebook, fuck you right in the ear!
If a U.S. president could speak honestly about Libya, he would say something like this:
“Look, I have been alternately horrified by the behavior of the Libyan regime over the past few days and inspired by the courage of the Libyan people. But if you’re asking me what we the United States is going to do about the situation, the answer is very little. Most Libyans reject the idea of external intervention by western powers, and we’re just fine with that since we have few interests in Libya. You can’t expect the United States to take an active role in responding to every humanitarian crisis or regional conflict worldwide unless you take a ridiculously broad conception of our interests, and Americans are increasingly unwilling to fund a military and aid program that could respond to each and every flare-up around the world. You cannot, in other words, have a steak-and-lobster foreign policy on a budget more suitable for McDonalds. But if I’m wrong and you guys want to cut social security and Medicaid to increase funding for USAID, the Department of Defense and the State Department, let me know. As for the rising price of oil? Look, folks, it’s a global market. I can ask our Saudi friends to increase their output, but honestly, we Americans enjoy relatively cheap gasoline since we hardly tax the stuff at all compared with our industrial partners and competitors. I know that comes as little solace to a suburban mom dealing with national infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine, but that’s not going to change anytime soon, and I can hardly tax Americans less, so we’re stuck. You’re just going to have to adjust your consumption as best as possible and save elsewhere.”
Abu Muqawama, in If a U.S. president could speak honestly about Libya… [cnas.org]
I’d vote for the Pres if he said it that way. Too bad politics get in the way. I quoted almost all of Muqawama’s post but check his out for a bit more and some links to what the Obama actually said.
Haven’t said much here about the politics in a while, but on the Jasmine revolution and the unrest in Arab dictatorships; best thing for America to do is stop all financial (military and non-military) aid that was being paid to any of the these governments immediately and funnel the money to NGO and UN aid organizations to help deal with the people. You know; the people not the dictators or their associates
It’s been a while since my post on going digital [confusion.cc], in which I bemoaned the fact that I could not get a Kindle that worked in Singapore. I wanted the Kindle only for periodicals. I didn’t then and I still don’t really want to read novels in digital form. I suppose someone out there will call me a Luddite, and I accept that digital books are inevitable but I prefer long reads to be in the physical form. Magazines on the other hand? Digital all the way baby!
I never did get a Kindle, but I got the Kindle app for my iPhone, iPad and I have it on my work laptop and home iMac. I like the ecosystem approach, where I can read my content on multiple devices at my convenience. I do now consume the Economist (the rag which prompted my previous post) almost exclusively on the iPad (I still have a physical subscription but will not renew — I’ll go all digital next billing cycle due to the timing of the app being ready). I absolutely love reading the Economist on the iPad and it’s even OK on the iPhone. But… I don’t use the Kindle for the Economist (I might need to give that a try when I do go 100% digital), I use the dedicated Economist app on my iPad and iPhone. So what am I using the Kindle apps for? Non-fiction books mostly, and for sample chapters from books I might want to buy.
I did give the Kindle apps a chance however. I read The Lord of The Rings (a yearly read), The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales all in the Kindle app on the iPad over the fall. Not a bad experience over all, I still prefer the physical read, but the benefit of traveling while I was reading these is a plus.
Now for one criticism I have to make: Who is proof reading these books?
I suspect no one is. I imagine that for most books, at least the ones that are not new, they are being converted by a machine — OCR. But shouldn’t someone review them? Isn’t this what editors and publishers do? And; are books still ‘typeset’ or is a digital text file use to make the master plates that are then used for printing? Shouldn’t that be used for the Kindle copy rather than OCRing a physical book?
I thought maybe the errors in the Tolkien books I read might be specific to the heavy use of hyphens, diaeresis and accents in the fictional names in the books. But I see a lot of comments on Kindle books pages from other users bitching about the proofreading (or complete lack thereof.)
Here is a sample of the issues I found in Unfinished Tales:
This is only a small list, I made almost 100 notes in Unfinished Tales and similar amount in both The Lord of The Rings and The Silmarillion.
While somewhat forgivable on Amazon’s part, these errors are annoying and should be fixed. One additional note that makes the mistakes, at least in The Lord of the Rings, ironic and perhaps a bit embarrassing for the publisher is this passage from the Note of the 50th Anniversary Edition by Wayne G Hammond and Christina Scull:
In this edition of The Lord of the Rings, prepared for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, between three and four hundred emendations have been made following an exhaustive review of past editions and printings. The present text is based on the setting of the HarperCollins three-volume hardcover edition of 2002, which in turn was a revision of the HarperCollins reset edition of 1994. As Douglas A. Anderson comments in the preceding ‘Note on the Text’, each of those editions was itself corrected, and each also introduced new errors. At the sametime, other errors survived undetected, among them some five dozen which entered as long ago as 1954, in the resetting of The Fellowship of the Ring published as its ‘second impression’.
So maybe they should fix the Kindle edition.
Maybe Amazon should leverage the masses here—include a ‘highlight for review’ or ‘flag proofreading’ option in the Kindle apps for people to identify where things are wrong so they can be fixed. The good thing about digital is you can update the users copy later when the problems are addressed.
As a final thought, Apple’s recent move against Sony [nytimes.com] should earn Apple a bitch slap from consumers. Maybe Amazon and Sony should have ‘in app’ purchase, but with a note that all in app purchases include a 30% ‘service charge’ for the “convenience”, and consumers can always make their purchased via the online store for a 30% discount.
“Revolutions are conducted by people, not electrons…”
Robert X. Cringely, from Mitternich and Mubarak