Secret

I love XKCD, even when I have to Google the punchline.

Reader

Is there anyone who reads me and doesn't read Jo Walton's excellent Tor.com series on the Hugos? If so, head on over there; 1964 is a good place to start. As you know, Bob, Jo writes the stuff herself, and very well indeed, and she loves reading and discussing it. One thing the Hugo series makes clear is that she dislikes most of the books that made me love science fiction (Stranger in a Strange Land, early Vonnegut, PKD), but that's OK. In fact, this is a marvelous example of how I can disagree with someone on esthetic matters, and neither of us is Wrong.

Pot, kettle

Judith Miller gets on WikiLeaks' case for "not verifying sources" and The American Conservative notices how grotesque that is.

Thanx to Unqualified Offerings

Dangerous radical

A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune.

--( Read more... )

Thanx to Mercury Rising.

Non sequitur

Locus is bringing back its Roundtable, which is a Good Thing. We have a discussion of sf aesthetics, which starts with

The physicist Paul Dirac suggested that for an equation to be true, it must be beautiful. In Dirac’s thinking beauty was a way of discerning the truth, as much a part of the scientific process as observation. If science fiction is a way of reaching for the truth, then shouldn’t it also be beautiful? Can a work of science fiction really have anything true to say, if it fails by the standards of fiction?

But what makes fiction beautiful? For me, the great strength of prose fiction is its ability to step inside the human experience. To explore the internal world that exists inside us all. When science fiction is beautiful it is most often because, however strange the external world it explores, its first concern is with the internal experience of that world.

But of course the area Dirac was talking about, where beauty is truth, and truth beauty and that's all that's on the final is mathematical physics, which is precisely where human experience is irrelevant. Bring in human experience, and the two diverge.

Resolute

Corporate resolutions

Thanx to andrewducker