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Good notes about transaction volumes v risk strategies in online markets.
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
You may have seen some of the new posters the police are putting up, which has generated some pretty good remixes at Boing Boing.
Well here are my own slightly lazy contributions:
Using something from George Orwell's 1984
And then a Godwin:
A Godwin
So, now I’ve Godwinned it, can we stop?
I was disappointed by this - Stross has the capability to produce something much better. This book has a twist (look ma, no humans!) and some of the ideas are pretty interesting - but frankly I think he’s writing too much and too hard. This could have done with maturing for a lot longer.
The main character is very reminiscent of the lead from Friday by Robert A. Heinlein which is apparently intentional. As with Friday the lead is a robot made for erotic purposes. For what it’s worth, the supposedly erotic parts of this book are pretty flat, and as an hommage I don’t think it’s that great.
Still, it’s reasonably well paced and trots along pretty well, so won’t be a complete disappointment. This is up for the 2009 Hugo, but if it wins I’ll eat my hat (in fact if anything other than Anathem wins I’ll eat my hat!).
This is real quality. It is also unfortunately extremely difficult to describe.
The blurb on the back claims it is a “high octane retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo” which is correct as far as it goes - the basic elements of the story are there. However, the baroque setting, the dreamlike quality of the narrative and the fantastic nature of the characters makes this quite a different proposition.
Highly recommended.
A very well executed piece set in the near future. At the end of her life a woman looks back on her life as a musician, having lived through many of the defining moments of the 21st century. Although this is SF it has strong literary leanings and the characterisation is excellent, rich, sympathetic and three-dimensional.
In many ways this needn’t be set in the future, and as such is not really science fiction, except for the one issue it deals with sparingly but clearly throughout the book, that of uploading. As the lead character reflects on her life, the book reflects on the meaning of identity, and how this could meaningfully be transferred to a different reality.
This book deserves a much wider reading than I suspect it will receive.
Stephen Baxter is a prolific author, and it shows in a number of his works - they are very Clarkeian, taking an interesting idea (in this case a vast planet drowning flood) and following it to it’s conclusion.
As with many of his books the typical cast of scientists are generally unreflective and fail to present a plausible inner life in response to what is going on around them.
Undoubtedly, as with Clarke, this is because Baxter is more interested in pursuing his idea to it’s conclusion, rather than the the inner life of his characters. This is not atypical of SF in general, but it’s particularly marked in Baxter’s work because often, as in this book, the central theme is a terrifying extinction event where we once again see the last few humans struggling to survive. This makes their general lack of reflection seem even more psychopathic than in less extreme works.
Aside from these flaws it’s reasonably compelling and has a sort of gruesome inevitability about it which is quite satisfying.
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bizarrely published by Tor, the SF publisher, this isn’t SF at all. Instead it is an alternate history novel reminiscent of Fatherland. Beautifully written with rich, complex characters, the book is set in a country house after an alternate World War II where the US did not join the war, and the UK signed a “peace with honour” with the third reich.
The setting carefully presents a juxtaposition of an Agatha Christie-esque Edwardian setting with simmering antisemitism and class obsession, providing a really memorable story.
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Really good description of why most worms are for Windows and not for the Mac (or indeed Linux).
The government’s recent flirtation with setting a minimum price for alcohol has exposed some of the problems government’s have with drug policy generally. Since the US declared a “Global War on Drugs” (GWoD) at the start of the last century, government’s throughout the world have struggled with finding a social policy on intoxicants that has successfully fulfilled some of their basic aims.
This hasn’t been helped by the lack of clarity about what their basic aims actually are. The original intentions of the GWoD were twofold, both core forces in US politics: racism and religious puritanism. Since the original social forces were so unpalatable, it’s not entirely surprising that their achievements have been so destructive.
Racism has always been a key component of laws on intoxicants. It’s an obvious but sometimes overlooked fact that every cultural group has it’s own preferred intoxicants. The preferred intoxicant amongst the vast majority of Europeans has always been alcohol, which is why it has generally been very lightly regulated.
However, if you belong to a less powerful cultural group, your access to your preferred intoxicants will have been severely limited since around 1900. Cannabis, for example, was first made illegal in California. This wasn’t because the drug itself is harmful (it basically is not), but because it was the preferred intoxicant of Mexicans, who at the time were moving to California in great numbers. By targeting Cannabis, the authorities could legitimately abuse any Mexicans they saw.
Since then of course, intoxicants legislation has been variously targeted at blacks, hippies, flappers, ravers, hells angels and pretty much anyone else who is out of favour.
Gordon Brown was explicit about their aims in the climbdown on their alcohol price legislation. He said the aims of the legislation was in response to “the excesses of a small minority”, but that he didn’t want to punish the “sensible majority”.
In essence what he said is that it isn’t alcohol he has a problem with, it’s a specific group of people, and that they were attempting to discriminate against them specifically with a law on the use of alcohol. Unfortunately for them, they are unable to target this group sufficiently, because of the use of alcohol in the general population.
You can be certain that if the people he didn’t like had chosen an intoxicant that wasn’t in general use amongst his own constituency, he would have happily promoted harsh penalties for it’s use, even if it was completely harmless.
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Lots of good stuff about optimising very busy services.
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