Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Considerations on the description of Odontochelys semitestacea, Li C, Wu X-C, Rieppel O, Wang L-T, Zhao L-J (2008)
Two more beasts in Noah's Ark.
Science marches, ever upward.
Comment threads are rife with snark.
What'll they say at AiG?
What'll we hear from the ICR?
What'er it is, we know it will be
some fleer to show how miffed they are.
'An artifact of preservation.'
'Not on the "ancestral" line.'
'That's only your interpretation!'
'It's still the same created kind.'
To certain wonders of creation
an eye of certain faith is blind.
But we can raise a generation
that wonders at the shuttered mind.
Science marches, ever upward.
Comment threads are rife with snark.
Two more gaps in the fossil record.
Two more beasts in Noah's Ark.
[Last four verses added later.]
Why Do They Slander Airstrip One?
Oceania, and all its constituent republics including Airstrip One, are strong and free. This undeniable fact is admitted by all progressive and objectively-thinking mankind.
A recent work by the homosexual-linked, 'public'-schooled, former colonial-police-agent emigre Blair published in the provisional capital of
In Mr. Blair's pornographic depiction, from the contamination of whose foul and depraved fantasies the Ministry of Truth has quite rightly protected the citizens of Oceania, the ludicrous impression is given that freedom of speech does not exist in our country! In Airstrip One - the land of Milton, of Shakespeare,
Of particular depravity is 'our' 'free-thinking' author's insinuation that the Ministry of Truth endorses and even practices heinous forms of torture. This allegation, as is well known, directly echoes the propaganda of the
Finally, the objective reader cannot fail to note the revolting racially divisive intent of 'our' author's naming of his dubious 'hero': Winston Smith. As is well known, people whose ancestry can be traced to the former slave populations of the former colonial territories of the now-liberated and fully-integrated 'West Indies' enjoy complete and unrestricted equality in rights and privileges with all other citizens of Airstrip One.
Hitler finds his name on BNP membership list, chews rug
Worlds of Yesterday's Tomorrow
Altogether elsewhere, but not unconnected: the architecture of occupied Kabul.
Worlds of Tomorrow
Some weeks ago Katherine Mangu-Ward, associate editor of Reason, the mainstream-user-friendly libertarian magazine, spoke to me on the phone about libertarianism in SF. She has quoted me and many others in her now-published article, which is about that great analytical engine of subversion, my US publisher Tor Books. In the Reason blog discussion someone refers to me as 'crazy old socialist Ken MacLeod'. It's an honour just to be nominated.
Labels: coming attractions, libertarian, self-promotion
Friday cat blogging takes on a whole new meaning
Darpa funds cognitive computing project:
IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do.I for one welcome ... nah. We're doomed, I tell you. Doomed!
The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.
A message from SFcrowsnest.com
If you are a FaceBook user, please note, the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group has been hijacked. As of yesterday, any messages sent by it are NOT from SFcrowsnest.com staff or myself and should be treated as hostile – e.g. potentially containing or leading to scams, malware, compromised web pages and the like.
Please post news of this on your FaceBook profile and let all of your own FaceBook friends know as a matter of urgency.
Secondly, if you run a blog or zine, please spread news that the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked by hostiles and refer them to this warning which is now prominently linked from our own home page and can be found at http://www.SFcrowsnest.com/facebookhijack.php – I will keep this page updated with developments and any explanation/apology from FaceBook as and when (or if) I get it.
So far only the SFcrowsnest.com Magazine FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21093694832 has been hijacked, but seeing it was myself that was singled out by FaceBook hackers, I would suggest also treating any messages from my Rule Jackelia FaceBook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34257537930 and my personal Stephen Hunt FaceBook account at http://www.facebook.com/people/Stephen_Hunt/1321736585 as being fatally compromised, as I’m certainly not in control of these two accounts either anymore.
Dawn, stars, and frost
Coming attraction (local)
Traumatised, divided nation takes cautious step to the left
Thousands of free copies of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World will be distributed through libraries, schools and supporting partner organisations, together with a ‘quick read’ edition and a paperback comic biography on the life of Charles Darwin.
Meanwhile, Edinburgh publisher Canongate had already acquired the rights to two books by an American politician, and expects them to sell well.
Obama
From over here it looks scarily close. I don't believe the polls for a second. There's the Bradley effect thing. There's the Nader-under-the-radar thing. There's the far-left anyone-but-Obama thing. (There must be some college students who are swayed by that.) There's the whole voter suppression and Diebold machines thing.
And then of course there's all the people who said they'd vote for Obama, see the polls showing him in the lead, and figure they don't need to vote. Young voters? I'd rely on young voters to hit the snooze button.
Most of all, though, there's the paradox that while nearly all the Americans I know personally are Obama supporters, and the sort of America Obama projects is very much the America I've seen when I've visited, I know that's only a fraction of America, and that the America I know from the outside is reflected perfectly in McCain-Palin. I can't help feeling it's out there, lurking. It's true that a reverse between opinion polls and actual votes on this scale would be unprecedented, but this is an unprecedented election.
Still, I'm not going to obsess about it. It's no skin off my nose. I don't live in the US, and I'm a science-fiction writer. If McCain-Palin win, I can look forward to a good decade or more of easy money from cheap gloom and cheap laughs. The rise of Nehemiah Scudder in a skirt and the devolution of the US into Gilead or some other dystopia would score me a fair few mainstream press pieces ('Can you do us 800 words on how you, as a science fiction writer, see ..?' Kaa-ching!) Sure, I have family in America, but by the same token they have family over here. We can put them up if necessary. Really, we can.
But if you live there and you want Obama to win, it might be a good idea to vote for him. That's all I'm saying.