Atomic Razor

Great Minds Think Alike

In this case my mind. See this and this. At least I am consistent (perhaps a little too consistent!), but I find it slightly disturbing that I have absolutely no memory of making the earlier post. Only slightly disturbing. There is only so much memory one can assign to remembering replies to blog posts. John Gribbin mentioned the block universe on the generally actually not that bad (for Radio 4 6:30 comedy slot values of "generally actually not that bad") The Museum of Curiosity on Wednesday night. (Why does John Lloyd refer to himself as Professor of Ignorance at the University of Buckingham? The audience treat the University of Buckingham part as a joke. But Buckingham isn't intrinsically funny in the way that, say, Hull is and these days there is a university of practically anywhere. But, of course, there has been a University of Buckingham since 1976. Is Lloyd is making some sly dig at the U of B as a degree mill/retirement home for superannuated Libertarians and antediluvian hangers-and-floggers? Or am I missing something?) Of course, time and space are pretty much muddled together in an Einsteinian universe and ever since I read Gregory Benford's Timescape in 1987 I've been aware that last year is a point in space. Perhaps the fact that there are (in some sense - perhaps) me's out there forever responding to ReadySteadyBlog posts of reading rates will save me from having to remember that I have already posted the same thought twice. Humh... Perhaps we are dangerously close to Sue Blackmore territory here...

Cringely's Law

I read Robert Cringely's latest column and I have to admit to being less than impressed with it for a number of reasons:  I, Cringely . The Pulpit . War of the Worlds | PBS his thesis is that while Moore's law etc... might double every 2 years, the rate of "adoption" of new technologies is a generation - i.e. 25-30 years.

An example from his article brings up why I think he is demonstrably wrong: "Each new technology is difficult for the older generation and easy for the younger, which explains why I am a PC master but a texting idiot. I'm just too damned old."

In an old British word: Bollocks.

Ok, so Robert is somewhat older than me, 15 years in fact (more than I thought actually), but I know quite a lot of people who have no problem with text messaging.  The issue is not the age of the users but the way in which the adoption happens.

I don't see my 77 year old mother struggling too much with her new digital camera and, in fact, in the last 30 years she's had lots of film cameras which she has struggled with a lot more.  Likewise she has had problems converting from an electric typewriter to a Word Processor, but she's managed.  Taking the digital camera as an example, we have a great technology which has, in about a decade pretty much displaced the previous technology completely.  Cassette tape?  I was at Brunch yesterday where a woman in her mid-40s said she was going home to make a CD for a friend.  This is radical adoption of new technologies which were pretty much unheard of a 15 years ago, let alone 30.  I was trying to work with multimedia on PCs 15 years ago and it was something of a non-starter, the memory and performance requirements alone made it impractical.

Tivo's and similar technologies are radically changing the nature of TV and how we watch it and that's happened in the last 5-10 years.

Consider this.  In the last 30 years, the default system for listening to music has gone from Vinyl, to Cassette, to MiniDisk to CD to MP3.  That's 30 years of change after 60 years of Vinyl.

Scary huh?

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The Mystery of Ms T

If things weren't going badly enough, what with my persistent virus-like symptoms (and we all know what that means) and the collapse of the global economy, Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y is on the Orange Prize longlist: Eve's Alexandria: The Orange Prize, 2008

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Not Even Wrong

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe

How I chortled! I was turned on to anti-stringism by Cosma, who pointed at Peter Woit's legendary blog. OK, anti-stringism is not the equivalent of denying climate change or promoting Intelligent Design, but is it in the same class as such orthodox heterodoxies as Mike Disney's cosmological scepticism, Hoyle's steady state theory, Chip Arp's non-cosmological redshifts or Woolfson's 'Capture Theory'? It certainly has something in common with Disney's objections to cosmology (that cosmological observations are very difficult to make and that we are overinterpreting the few we have). It can be argued that it is not anti-stringism that has to provide any evidence about the robustness of string theory. Even if string theory were the only theory in towwn (which it isn't), it's lack of an empirical basis would still be grounds for deep scepticism. Of course, the niggling feeling at the back of my mind is that the fear that I am missing the point. There is no reason to suppose that the universe will be kind eniogh to offer up a theory of everything that is empirically verifiable. String theory might be as good as we can get, but I personally am hardly in a position to say one way or the other.

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Sanctuary

Amazon.co.uk: Anathem: Neal Stephenson: Books
Here is another brilliantly original novel from the cult author of "Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon".Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.

From SOED

secular /0ˈsɛkjʊlə/ adjective & noun. ME.
[ORIGIN In branch I from Old French seculer (mod. séculier) from Latin saecularis, from saeculum generation, age, in Christian Latin the world (esp. as opp. to the Church); in branch II immed. from Latin saecularis: see -ar¹.]

We cannot, of course, necessarily take any of this at face value. This could all well be a Stephensonian  jest.  We might be in a Wolfean post-apocalyptic world. The 3,400 year-old monastery (so perhaps founded ~1400 BCE; this doesn't seem to obviously fit with a Biblical timeline: it could related to a dating of the Exodus, but the novel might be set in the future) could be the redoubt of the Societas Eruditorum. More likely, we are in (some version of) the Metaverse and time and space are not quite what they might seem at first.

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The Economics of Publishing I

In The Year of Henry James, David Lodge states that he was advanced £75 for his first novel, The Picturegoers in 1960 and contrasts with a claimed average advance for a first novel in the early 2000s of £5000 and the greater pressures of expectation from publisher that such a large advance brings with it.

£75 corresponds to £1,192.77 using the retail price index or £2,767.75 using average earnings. But are we comparing like with like? Lodge's advance was for the hardback. £2700 with a 10% royalty on £18 a copy corresponds to 1500 copies, which doesn't sound too far off the number of copies of a first novel that might be printed. But today it is unusual to issue a first novel in hardback. The £5000 would be for a paperback and quite possibly for a two book deal. A 10% royalty on £7 a copy corresponds to 7000 copies, which also seems about right (and it might be half that number of copies in actuality) - books are an elastic commodity.

I seem to recall a period when the price of books went up much more rapidly than inflation. But then it stopped and then haven't gone up much since. This must in part be because of commercial pressures (Amazon, 3-for-2s), but I also wonder how much of it is because it is cheaper to produce books in the 2000s than it was in the 1960s. Books were very expensive in the Edwardian period and writers could make very good livings by selling tiny numbers of copies. But by 1960, the relative price of books had fallen. The interesting question is when were books at their relative cheapest? My guess is that they are relatively much cheaper in 2008 than in 1988, but how does this compare to 1958? And how do the economic factors affect the decisions of publishers to take the risk of publishing unknown writers taking into account the fact that publishing in the 1960s was still (to a certain extent) a gentleman's club?

An Honest Crust

Andrew Crumey Interview « Asylum

Money quote: "Apart from the 3-year award I’ve been living on, I earn an honest crust through book reviewing and teaching creative writing."

I make no comment.

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Don't Give Up the Day Job

To the Soho Theatre on Wednesday night for the Comedy Project. Well, it was a change and it was priced to sell. The two pieces turned out to be the performance of a sitcom, Dawlish Road, by James Pearson followed by a dramatised reading of a radio script, XS Baggage, by Teresa Jennings.

Probably the best that can be said about Dawlish Road is that the acting was worse than the script. To be fair, that might be because the actors only had limited rehearsal time. A well-acted version of the script on video with proper sets and slick cuts would have worked much better. But the writer made a number of schoolboy errors

• house share sitcoms have been done to death - find a more interesting sit
• there were too many characters - three or four main characters is plenty (and keep walk-ons to a minimum)
• if you're a bloke, it's probably not a good idea to have four female main characters
• too many of the characters are cliches
• Janet Street-Porter
• sex line worker
• slacker
• landlord who is always just popping round
• swearing itself isn't funny and constant repetition doesn't make it funny
• have a plot that makes sense (why didn't Hannah turn up for her birthday party?)
• have a climax that is (a) a climax; (b) funny (I suspect that there are at least five more episodes of Dawlish Road in Mr Pearson's drawer).

I can't say I laughed and the audience barely managed to raise a titter, which, given the fact that the attendance for the second piece was significantly less than that for the first half suggests that the space was papered with the chums of the actor and writer, is slightly concerning. But there were, if not exactly jokes, at least comic ideas that could be worked on.

Nothing is wasted on a writer. British Grove is about a man trying to write a sitcom, so at least after last night I've got another chapter sorted.

I was tempted to dash for the hills, but I wanted to get my money's worth and, fortified by a large glass of red, stayed for the second half. This was much better. Better script (once I had grasped the conceit), better acted, better directed (by Kirstie Bennett). I suppose there are some consolations of maturity.

Next Wednesday features I Hate My Sister by Susan Earl (who was there - I wouldn't have said she was 5'8"), currently of the Aero hot chocolate advert, lately of Hardware. She at least has a proven track record. What is not clear to me is how the Comedy Project pieces are chosen. There was some suggestion that the producers of the pieces might pay. That makes sense. Theatre and film are, by their nature, expensive and it is thus often necessary for the upfront financial risk to be shared. The consequence of that is that theatre and film more often has a "vanity" aspect to it than publishing. But that is the nature of the beast and not something over which we should necessarily criticise the producers.         

Third Foundation

The new issue of Foundation arrived the other day, Foundation 101, the first issue to edited by the estimable Graham Sleight. Foundation has had the same cover design since issue 38 (Winter 1986-87).  Before that the cover design had remained pretty much unchanged since the first issue. I like the sense of historical continuity one gets from the design of journals remaining unchanged for decades. I recall being in St Anne's College library and looking at the sets of the Journal of Roman Studies and the Journal of Hellenic Studies. The nature and quality of the internal typography might oscillate, driven by the continually changing vagaries of typesetting technology (not that there has been any excuse for that since TeX became widely available in the mid-80s), but the external cover - what one sees elegantly arraigned on one's bookshelf - has remained a beacon of constancy in a chaotic world.

No more for Foundation. The journal has begun a new century with a new look. Unfortunately it is a look straight out of the decade that taste forgot. The cover looks like it comes from roundabout the time of WordPerfect 5.1. The problem is that have changed the design, we are stuck with it now for the best part of a decade. It would look even worse on the shelves if it were changed too soon.

The interior design isn't too bad. Can't say the same about the article on Moonbase 3, which read like a lower second class undergraduate essay and managed to say almost nothing of interest (certainly less than the Wikipedia article). I haven't seen Moonbase 3 since 1973 (when I was 5), but it would seem to me that at least  the programme could be profitably compared with 2001: a Space Odyssey, a film that a very long shadow into the 1970s as well as UFO and Space: 1999, both of which feature moonbases and both of which had production designs very heavily influenced by 2001, Doomwatch, Nigel Calder's 1978 documentary series Spaceships of the Mind and, of course, Star Cops, a hard sf series set on a moonbase. To be fair, the author does mention most of these programmes, but it's a question of saying something interesting about the connections. Which might be, for  instance, that 1960s technophilia took a long time to be killed off by the oil crisis (heck, for some of us it has never quite died) and that Moonbase 3 with Space:1999 production values would have been very interesting (if impossible!).

 

Transterrestrial Musings - In Wrong Again Shocker

The Real Space Race - Transterrestrial Musings

One of the quotes that had me actually giggling:  "In a true competition for transporting astronauts to low earth orbit, NASA would be beaten hands-down by SpaceX at this stage in the game."

Yeah, so a company who have yet to successfully orbit anything, let alone people and bring them back, is ahead of an organisation which has, more or less, been doing this for over 45 years...

I run a really amazingly successful phone software company - we're beating everybody with our concept.  We just haven't launched or finished it yet.

Seesh.

And Rand Simberg wonders why people don't take him seriously...

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