John Scalzi emails to tell me that his Hugo-nominated book, _Old Man’s War_ and Robert Charles Wilson’s _Spin_ are both available to potential Hugo voters. The catch is that you have to confirm that you’re an attendee at LAcon IV, and thus able to vote for Hugos. The upside is the books aren’t crippleware; they’re being made available in .rtf format on the honour system. Charles Stross’ _Accelerando_ is also part of the package, but it’s been available under Creative Commons in a variety of formats since it was first published.
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Henry
Chris Mooney’s book, “The Republican War on Science” seems to me a very American book. It’s not that Europe is bereft of “sound science” hacks trying to influence the process by which regulations are made, or even of our own brand of home-grown irrationalists of one kind or another. However, America does seem to have a hell of a lot of them, and they seem to pick battlegrounds (like creation science, to take the clearest example) which suggest that the purpose of a lot of the Republican War on Science is not so much to push an alternative pseudo-scientific agenda for political and economic gain, but rather to knock scientists off their pedestal for the sake of doing so.
I’ve already reviewed Chris’s book at length, and talked there about why I liked it. What I want to do in this contribution is to develop on what I argued back then was missing from the book. Short version: Chris presents latterday Republican science policy as the product of an unholy alliance between big business and the religious right. He laments the powerlessness of traditional moderate Republicans who believed that science and scientific truth was good and important. This allows him to get at an awful lot of what is wrong about the Republican party’s current approach to science. But it misses out on something important. There’s a strand of Republican thinking – represented most prominently by Newt Gingrich and by various Republican-affiliated techno-libertarians – that has a much more complicated attitude to science. Chris more or less admits in the book that he doesn’t get Newt, who on the one hand helped gut OTA (or at the very least stood passively to one side as it was gutted) but on the other hand has been a proponent of more funding for many areas of the sciences. I want to argue that getting Newt _is_ important.
Avram Grumer on power law extrapolations and the Gillette Singularity.
(Via Making Light)
Something which I hadn’t ever thought of before jumped out when I read this piece in the _New York Times_ on problems with the new version of Windows.
bq. Skeptics like Mr. Cusumano say that fixing the Windows problem will take a more radical approach, a willingness to walk away from its legacy. One instructive example, they say, is what happened at Apple. … The approach was somewhat ungainly, but it allowed Apple to move to a new technology, a more stable, elegantly designed operating system. The one sacrifice was that OS X would not be compatible with old Macintosh programs, a step Microsoft has always refused to take with Windows. “Microsoft feels it can’t get away with breaking compatibility,” said Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford University computer scientist. “All of their applications must continue to run, and from an architectural point of view that’s a very painful thing.”
Presumably Microsoft doesn’t want to break compatibility because by so doing it might undermine its enduring monopoly – if the mutual lock-in between Microsoft’s operating system and office productivity software is weakened, people might quite possibly move away from both. Apple, not being a monopoly (but having high customer loyalty) was much better placed to make the jump. While in contrast, Microsoft customers can look forward to a piece of bloatware that will be extraordinarily obese even by its previous standards. I suspect I’ll be switching to Mac meself next time I have the chance.
Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden I see that the Hugo nominees have been announced. They’re
Learning the World, Ken MacLeod (Orbit; Tor)
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Voyager; Bantam Spectra)
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (Tor)
Accelerando, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
For once, I’ve read all of them, and liked each of them quite a bit – it’s a very good field this year. That said, if I had to pick, it would either be McLeod’s _Learning the World_ or Wilson’s _Spin_. Both of these books see their authors reaching a new level of achievement. The McLeod book combines the political edge of his earlier work with a real degree of human warmth; it’s a little reminiscent of Vinge’s _Deepness in the Sky_ in its setup, but more subtle in how its plot plays out. _Spin_ strikes me as even more subtle, albeit chillier – using a gonzo science-fictional conceit and a slightly unreliable narrator to explore how we construct fantasies about an uncaring universe. As for the others, _Accelerando_ is very impressive, but I couldn’t entirely warm to it – I found that I was reading it more for the infodumps than the plot development. I prefer his “Merchant Princes” series which has less bells and whistles, but does a better job in my opinion of combining plotline with sociological speculation. More on this series later. That said, _Accelerando_ has some very nice sardonic touches. Most libertarian Singularities see the geeks inheriting the earth, but Stross’s version of the Singularity is dominated by feral intelligent financial instruments; hedge funds with stratospheric IQs run amok. _A Feast for Crows_ is a not-entirely-wonderful installment in a mostly wonderful series of books – the next should be better (it’ll have Tyrion). _Old Man’s War_ is great entertainment – I suspect Scalzi is getting a little tired of being compared to a modern Heinlein but there’s good reason for the comparison; he resurrects the feeling of golden age SF, but somehow manages to make it feel fresh. All good books in my opinion – feel free to agree/disagree in comments.
Via David Glenn, this wonderful chart showing the political affiliations of Italian football team support groups. Lazio’s supporters, not surprisingly, vary from the right to the extreme right. A friend’s sister briefly dated a Lazio supporter; it sounds to have been an interesting experience. The links between soccer and politics are especially strong in Italy; Berlusconi’s “Forza Italia” is the only political party I know of that takes its name from a football chant.
Changing the subject a bit, it looks as though Berlusconi is going to go down in flames when Italians head to the polls next month. He’s had no success in lowering the opposition’s 5% lead in the polls, and the stench of desperation from him and his supporters reeks so strongly as to be nearly tangible. Public attacks on Confindustria, the most important Italian business organization (and usually a reliable water-carrier for the right), claims that the left is organizing riots to create a situation of democratic emergency, and most bizarre of all, a public plea for pity from the press.
bq. I’m carrying all the paperwork for the cabinet meeting, which is very hefty as you can see. I stayed up and worked on this until five this morning, as I have done throughout these five years. I say this with little hope of it being reported … I’m sorry if I’ve been long-winded, but I am at peace with my conscience … Let’s hope that some good soul in the media world, out of pity, will write news of this.
What the Italians would call a ‘brutta figura’ (bad show). It sounds as if Berlusconi himself believes that he’s lost the election.
Update – Thanks to Scott McLemeee for the photo below – the Brigate Autonome Livornesi are clearly fans of Uncle Joe.
!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/stalin.jpg!
So it looks as though John Micklethwait, currently US editor, is probably going to be the new editor at the _Economist_; the final decision is due to be announced tomorrow. It’s down to a two man race between him and Ed Carr, and not that many people are betting on Carr ( in contrast to a few days ago, but that’s a different story ). To the surprise of many, Clive Crook didn’t make it to the final two, which is unfortunate in my books – Crook is somewhat conservative for my taste, but also a good journalist who would have made a very decent editor. Ed Carr, from all I’ve heard, would be a fine editor too, but things don’t sound good for him.
I have to say that my first reaction is to wonder whether it’s too late to cancel the recent renewal of my _Economist_ subscription. I expect the _Economist_ to be vehemently pro-market, but by reading certain kinds of stories with a skeptical eye, and by skipping past certain others, you can find a lot of value in its pages. It has a clear ideological bias, but it isn’t usually actively dishonest. But Micklethwait, together with his scrofulous sidekick Adrian Wooldridge, was responsible for _The Right Nation_ which is one of the lazier and more dishonest books on American politics that I’ve had the misfortune of reading in the last few years, and for the _Lexington_ column which has shown a pretty reliable track record as a purveyor of Republican talking points. There are still a lot of very good people working for the magazine – but I worry that it’s about to undergo a quite substantial deterioration in intellectual quality.
Update: It’s Micklethwait as expected.
Via Atrios, this Chris Bowers post, which I want to take issue with.
It looks as though a lot of CT readers decided to join the EFF as a result of our post a couple of months ago; the EFF is now listing us as one of the ten blogs that brought in the most donations. They’re doing very good work – thanks to all of you for supporting it.
The current issue of _PS: Political Science and Politics_ has a symposium on inequality and American democracy, collecting together various responses to the report and book issued on the topic by the American Political Science Association’s taskforce. There’s a lot of valuable commentary and empirical data in there; also well worth reading are the accompanying critical papers on inequality and American governance and inequality and public policy. A lot of meat in there, including the below graph drawn from Larry Bartels’ paper . It shows income growth by income level under Democratic and Republican administrations from 1948 to 2001. The solid line shows how families at the 20th percentile (lowest), the 40th percentile etc have done under Democratic adminstrations, the dotted line how they’ve done under Republicans. The difference is startlingly obvious. Under Democratic administrations, growth has been fairly egalitarian, ranging from 2.6% average growth for the poor at the 20th percentile to 2.1% for the rich at the 95th percentile. Under Republican administrations, the rich have done about as well as under Democratic administrations, but the poor at the 20th percentile have only seen .6% income growth. As Bartels says:
bq. Are partisan differences in the economic fortunes of American families really this stark? The arithmetic calculations from the Census Bureau data are straightforward. Their political significance can only be gainsaid by supposing that the apparent pattern is the result of a massive historical coincidence. Elsewhere, I have provided extensive checks on the robustness of the partisan disparity evident in Figure 2, including comparisons based on alternative economic units, time periods, and income definitions, statistical controls for historical trends, nonparametric tests, and the like ( Bartels 2004 ). It seems hard to escape the conclusion that, over the past half-century, Republican presidents have been consistently bad for the economic health of middle-class and poor people.
!http://www.henryfarrell.net/bartels.jpg!
I mentioned a few days ago that Paddy Power had opened a book on the race to succeed Bill Emmott as editor of the _Economist_, and suggested that depending on liquidity, there was a fair amount of scope for manipulating the results. I’m sorry to report that my speculations were bang on the mark.
bq. Paddy Power, the bookmaker, has been offering odds on the new editor, to replace the departing Bill Emmott. Several punters this week started to put large sums ranging up to £500 on Ed Carr, the business and financial editor, at 6-1. The bookie yesterday suspended all bets, after even more tried to open accounts. Any of them e-mails with “theeconomist” somewhere in the address? “We haven’t seen anything quite that unsubtle. They’re more intelligent at The Economist. Mind you, when we ran a book on the editor of The [Daily] Mirror . . .”
The Economist‘s journalists have always been quite keen on the predictive power of betting markets. Nice to see a few of them put their money where their mouth is. In other news on the race for the prize, I hear that Clive Crook is now a hot contender, and Chris Anderson is climbing up that long tail. Not that you’re able to bet on either of them now, but still.
As Jim Henley has noted, there’s a lot of ressentiment on the right these days. And not only in the US.
bq. Two years after the Madrid train bombings, Spain’s main political parties cannot agree on who was responsible for the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack. … The Popular party, which lost power in a general election three days after the train bombings, accuses the Socialist government, the police and the judiciary of taking part in a massive conspiracy to cover up alleged links between Islamic radicals and Eta, the violent Basque separatist group. … The Popular party’s conspiracy theory has been taken up by rightwing talk- show hosts, some of whom have even accused unamed Socialists of financing the terrorist attacks to oust the Popular party from power. …
bq. After a two-year investigation spanning nine countries, Juan del Olmo, an investigating magistrate, says he will lay formal charges against dozens of suspects within the next three weeks. … The Popular party refuses to endorse Mr del Olmo’s conclusions, perhaps because José María Aznar, the former prime minister, retains a powerful influence over his party. Mr Aznar blamed Eta for the Madrid train bombings and continued to insist on a Basque connection long after evidence began to point to Islamist extremists.
Reading this, and drawing the obvious comparison with Cheney’s bogus claims about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and Wolfowitz’s fantasies, about who ordered the original World Trade Center bombing makes it seem pretty strange to me that the meme of lefties as conspiracy theorists has stuck. Not that there aren’t some strange conspiracy theories out there on the left – but they’re weak beer in comparison to some of the deeply weird shit that our Right Wing Overlords in the US administration, and our former and would-be future Overlords in Madrid, take as gospel truth.
“Pamela” of _Atlas Shrugs_ has a very funny and over the top encomium to Charles Johnson at the Blogometer today.
bq. Who is your favorite political blogger? Favorite non-political blogger?
bq. Little Green Footballs. Hands down. When the history books are written, Charles Johnson will surely go down as a great American that made a critical difference between victory and defeat. His role has been largely ignored but so what? Most of the greats are ignored in their time. Van Gogh was ignored in his time too, although I don’t think Charles can draw… but you get my meaning. The media wants Charles and the blogs for that matter to just go away. But just the opposite is happening, the blogs are dictating the national dialog. What’s on the blogs today, is in the news 3,4 sometimes a week later.
Now, while you could certainly draw an interesting comparison between Charles Johnson and Vincent van Gogh, it wouldn’t be in terms of Johnson’s unrecognized genius. More generally, Pamela’s claim reminds me of this passage on palmistry from John Sladek’s 1974 book, _The New Apocrypha_.
bq. Palmists are of course in no doubt as to who was right. As with all cranks, they feel they haven’t been given a fair hearing and that orthodoxy is ganging up on them. [quoting palmistry author Noel Jaquin] “The reward of the pioneer is so often the ridicule of his fellow-men. We are not very much more just today. Of recent years men of genius have been deprived of their living and literally hounded to death by the ridicule of their more ignorant brethren.” How true, how true. They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Darwin, they laughed at Edison … and they laughed at Punch and Judy.
Paddy Power is apparently running a book on who is going to succeed Bill Emmott as editor of the _Economist_, although I can’t find it online. Current odds are:
John Micklethwait 5 – 4 favourite
Emma Duncan 2 – 1
Matthew Bishop 6 – 1
Ed Carr 7 – 1
Gideon Rachman 8 – 1
Christopher Lockwood 10 – 1
Clive Crook 25 – 1
Boris Johnson 100 – 1
Michael Moore 250 – 1
At those odds, my mate Matthew Bishop looks well worth a flutter. The growth market for the _Economist_ these days is North America, and the only contenders with real US experience are him, the favourite (who’s priced out of the market in my opinion), and Michael Moore. It would be interesting to know how liquid the betting pool is (the UK has seen a fair amount of manipulation of betting markets on succession races in the last few weeks), but obviously Paddy Power, unlike say Tradesports, isn’t likely to provide much in the way of useful information.