In September 11, 2001, al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger jets. They flew three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The fourth was retaken by the passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. These things we know. Since then, much has transpired. For example:

• The US invaded Afghanistan, the nation that had harbored the terrorists and their mastermind, Osama bin Laden. The war has not been uniformly well managed and attempts to install a stable self-government have so far failed. Many experts argue that our efforts there have been woefully counterproductive. Full story »

At my daughter’s graduation, the president of Claremont said, “Some of you will go on to rewarding and productive careers in government and academia. And some of you will go into business.”  Since the school still hits me up for a donation every year, I can only assume that she believed the business-types in the audience were simply too upid-stay o-tay et-gay at-thay ey-thay ad-hay ust-jay een-bay issed-day.

But I’ve subsequently had any number of conversations with college kids and found many feel the same way. They view graduating and working in the business world as a death sentence, sort of Gulag with a dental plan.  When I press them to find out which jobs they consider cool, they say things like working for a not-for-profit.  Are you kidding me? A not-for-profit?  Spend the rest of your life broke, pestering your friends for money for your charity, and being bossed around by some rich dilettante who “gives back” by dropping in for board meetings? Really? Full story »

The results are now out for the 2010 Hugo awards, at the World Science Fiction convention in Australia this year. Congratulations are in order for all the winners in every category, but we happily note China Miéville’s award for best novel for The City and the City. As we said in our review last month, Miéville has a huge fan base, and that seemed to be sufficient for him this year. The book is pretty good, too, although I still think The Windup Girl would have been the most deserving winner this year. This is one of those awards where you have to assume the voting was based as much on past work as the current novel under consideration, and Miéville certainly does have an impressive back catalog. So congratulations all around.

We’ll start some reviews for what we think will be the 2011 best novel candidates in the next few weeks. If you want to get a head start, Ian MacDonald’s The Dervish House seems like a likely candidate–it’s terrific. Maybe this will finally be MacDonald’s year. Although new novels by Iain M. Banks and William Gibson hit the stores this week, so it’s already shaping up to be a pretty good year.

Update–Well, this is embarrassing. The list I initially consulted only had the Miéville showing as being the winner of the best novel. This is wrong–it turns out that the Best Novel award was a tie between Miéville and Paolo Bacigalupi, for The Windup Girl. My bad. The link above has been corrected to reflect that.

“… We’re destroying words – scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. In the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words…”

George Orwell, 1984

Probability is very clever. Finding sense, logic and predictable behaviours out of seeming chaos. But there is a difference between seeing a pattern and prompting an expected pattern into place. Google Instant is very clever. But, in guiding our hand as we type, it reduces our thoughts and steers them into fixed ruts. Google can claim, over time, to be becoming more accurate when, in fact, they’re simply evaporating the variety of human thought.

More importantly they have reduced the pattern of 26 ordinary letters into the most valuable and sought-after real-estate on the planet. The words that appear in response to your first letter choice are now a biddable property.

Join me now as we sing Google’s new Alphabet Song and you can be introduced to your new masters. Full story »

Several people have written to ask about the out of control fire in Four Mile Canyon outside Boulder. Seven current and former S&R staffers live or once lived in the Denver/Boulder area, and Wendy used to live very close to the fire. As far as I know, everyone is fine (that’s all of us and all of our neighbors), but at least 63 structures have been destroyed and that number is expected to climb.

Here’s some footage that Stuart O’Steen shot last night.

Full story »

In the photo, she stands with her hands crossed at her waist. She wears a bracelet on her right forearm and a thin gold watch whose faces flares like a tiny sun as it catches the flash from the camera. The slated-glass window of the door behind her left shoulder also catches the flash, reflecting back as a perfect white circle. It looks like an intense Cyclopean eye staring in through the window from the dark outside.

But it’s her smile in the picture that catches me. It’s relaxed, friendly, earnest. She wants me to have a nice picture of her. 

In the photo, it’s June, 1985. I have just moved from Milford, Maine, to Eldred, Pennsylvania, from my father’s farm along the Penobscot to my mother’s parents’ house near the Allegheny. Laurie promised she write to me, and she’s as good as her word, sending me a letter in her big, loopy handwriting. She’s enclosed a picture she’s had taken especially for the occasion. Full story »

Christmas is less than four months away. Damn. I’m up to my neck in toys from last Christmas, and all I want from Santa is some kind of guarantee that no one in my family is going to be a hoarder. I had to use a snow shovel this morning to clear a path to the refrigerator, and along the way I saw a football, basketball, baseball and bat, a pirate ship, a pirate cave, a helicopter, a bottom of the sea explorer ship, a dozen stuffed cats, a truck, some books, some trains, some games, and four fully equipped, 12-inch tall Marines. I’m not quite sure where the marines came from, but they‘re here now and I have to find a place for them. Oh, and my son, Joey, got a few toys, too. Full story »

The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday about the unpleasant prospect facing the Obama administration on housing. The specific problem is that the administration is pretty much out of policy options on housing, which continues to drag. Well, “drag” is perhaps an understatement—July new home sales were 26% below those of July 2009, and, as Bloomberg points out, pending home sales in July were down 19% over the same period. The same Bloomberg article points out that, on average, median home prices are down 26% from July 2006. The market isn’t picking up, and it’s not clear what else the Obama administration can do about it. Given that two-thirds of Americans own homes, and that homes represent some 80% of Americans’ wealth, this remains a pretty big deal as the economy continues to sputter along as the stimulus efforts fade, and as unemployment hovers around 10%, in part from the horrible state of the homebuilding industry.

The Times article discusses one possible, but thus far pretty unwelcome, policy option—just let home prices collapse further. Get it over with. Full story »

by Gareth Porter

In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.

The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi’a insurgents.

In reality, of course, that’s not what happened at all. It’s time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted. Full story »

This is the future – people, translated as data. – Bryce, Network 23

The future has always interested me, even when it scares me to death. I wrote a doctoral dissertation that spent a good deal of time examining our culture’s ideologies of technology and development, for instance (and built some discussion of William Gibson and cyberpunk into the mix). I once taught a two-semester sequence at the University of Colorado in Humanities and the Electronic Media, where I introduced the concept of the “Posthumanities” to my students. A few years back I talked about the future of retail and described the smartest shopping cart that ever lived. Full story »

Got an iPad? iPhone? Blackberry? Any mobile device? Content, formerly known as news, is coming to you at lightspeed. McPaper wants to lead the way — or at least catch up to others.

The migration of content from print to online is hardly news. Neither is the intent of content conglomerates, formerly known as newspaper companies, to send content directly to mobile devices. Got an iPad? Gannett’s corporate site trumpets the 800,000 — and climbing — downloads of the free USA Today app.

Other content providers, formerly known as newspapers and cable news sites, are already parked on your Blackberry, iPhone, Droid, and iPad and have been for a while: I routinely read The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.com on my Blackberry. Get my weather on it, too.

There’s a corporate rush to get content, presumably reported and written by content providers (formerly known as journalists), to you wherever you are right now — and have it return to corporations the revenue that their newspapers, now known as content vehicles, have been losing by the bucket loads for a decade. They want that money back. And in the course of dumbing us down, they’re going to get it.
Full story »

Nuking the English language

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) will use its nuclear arsenal if attacked by the United States and South Korea, DPRK ambassador to Cuba Kwon Sung Chol said Friday,” reported the Chinese news site Xinhua on August 27. Kwon added, “If Washington and Seoul try to create a conflict on the Korean Peninsula, we will respond with a holy war on the basis of our nuclear deterrent forces.”

What’s unusual about this warning? Perhaps you find the invocation of holy war incongruous since, at best, the North Korean government only tolerates certain religious groups. (Its idea of religion, you’ll recall, is a decidedly unholy admixture of the cult of the Kim dynasty’s personality and juche, a secular doctrine that combines will with self-reliance.) Full story »

“I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn’t allowed him to do or encouraged him to do.” Who said it? Full story »

Apparently Ellen DeGeneres has this feature where people send her horrid photos of themselves – it’s called Bad Paid-For Photos. Great idea and laugh-so-hard-you-cry-on-your-keyboard-while-people-in-surrounding-cubicles-wonder-what’s-going-on funny.

Surely we can squeeze a little mileage out of this compilation of trainwrecks. So we’ll show you a photo, and in the comment box below you provide us with a backstory.

On your mark, get set…. Full story »

I despise Sarah Palin.  I have a bumper sticker on my fridge with her picture that reads “WTF?’  When I see her on the cover of the magazine in the supermarket line, my lip automatically curls into a sneer and I give a patronizing shake of the head. And my voice rises ten decibels whenever she enters any conversation.

This puzzles me. I am not really a hater. Sure, I am loud and opinionated, but I don’t really mean much of it. And anyway, when you hlate anything or anyone as much as I hate Sarah, it must say something not just about the hatee, but the hater.

Of course, she is a self-serving hypocrite with odious politics, airond based on her Tweets to Dr. Laura, a low-grade racist.  But as self-serving odious right wing hypocrites go, she’s not particularly stinky. Full story »

Like much of the world, the UK has been undergoing a summer of drought—not as bad as Russia and some other spots, but pretty noticeable nonetheless. Parts of the Northwest show rivers and lakes at their lowest level since the 1960s. We’ve had a bit of rain recently, but, still, the first half of 2010 was the second driest in nearly a century. But there’s an upside. It’s great for archeologists. The ground is so dry that contours that would normally go unnoticed are now pretty visible. As Reuters comments,

From Roman forts to Neolithic settlements and military remains dating to World War Two, English Heritage has been busily photographing the exciting discoveries from the air. Full story »

Finally… Full story »

Tony Blair’s political autobiography, A Journey, went on sale in the UK and the US today, and has prompted, if not a firestorm, a huge amount of media and political shouting over a number of points raised in the book—particularly Blair’s ongoing feud with Gordon Brown, and Blair’s continuing justification for the invasion of Iraq. (For the record, and to get it out of the way, Blair calls Brown “a disaster” and claims Brown tried to blackmail him, among other charges.) This is all great fun, and will be going on for weeks. Both The Guardian and The Independent (and the rest of the British press) have extensive articles summarizing the current state of play. This will of course evolve as people get around to actually reading the book, in which, among other things, he apparently has kind words not only for George Bush, but also Dick Cheney. Andrew Sparrow over at The Guardian is live-blogging both his reading of the book and what people are saying about it. Read the book if you want. I’m not bothering. Nor am I buying a copy, even though Waterstone’s is selling it for half price, and Amazon has marked it down further than that, and even though Blair made a big thing of donating the advance for the book (and profits, if any) to the Royal British Legion (for which Blair will receive a substantial tax break).
Full story »

Let’s try something a bit more moving…and loud.