Exasperated Calculator

The Hugo Award nominations for 2007 were just announced this week. I’m going to be reading all of them over the next few weeks, starting with Temeraire by Naomi Novik.

The novel is set in 1795, and Captain William Laurence has just captured a French frigate carrying precious cargo - a dragons egg, about to hatch. Weeks out to sea, someone has to harness the freshly hatched dragon and begin a new life.

This is obviously not a novel for everyone. It’s solidly aimed at that valuable crossover Napoleonic War/Dragon market. Which I think, at last count, had about 12 people in it. I know a lot of people prefer fantasy to be nicely ahistorical. Actually, tone-wise I thought that this book was actually a lot closer to steampunk than most modern fantasy.

Naomi Novik is a first time author (and also nominated for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer), and this is a very impressive book. The writing is strong, the characterisation good, and the plot fast moving. It’s a very enjoyable read, but I did come away with a slight feeling of a little bit of shallowness overall. There’s also just a little bit too much of the cliches of period English drama - the aloof father, the gruff but kind commander, the strong woman in a man’s world, and so on.

I think this is a good book, very enjoyable. But I’ll be surprised (not having read the other books yet) if it does win the Hugo this year - there’s just not enough to it to win.

Well, thank goodness that we went to all that trouble for David Hicks…

Trailer for When Harry Met Sally remixed as a horror film. (Via, which has a few more good links)

Watch movement cuffliinks.

Make your own Trebuchet. Fun!

I’ve always thought those beds with the TV built into the foot were not very well thought out (imagine the neck strain you’d get watching them…). Here’s a better way to do the same thing.

Scientists have created a sheep that is 15% human. (Via)

I’ve just finished Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read, a history of Copernicus‘ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

De revolutionibus is a very important book, but it was once labeled “The Book Nobody Read”, due to its extremely technical fashion. The book gives the Copernican heliocentric theory, but also included a lot of technical details.

Gingerich’s book has a couple of elements - firstly, he discusses the history of the book, and how it was, in fact, widely read and influential at the time. But the really fascinating part comes as he discusses his obsessive quest to document every existing copy of the first and second editions of the book. The first bit is interesting (although dry), but the second bit is fascinating. I always love reading about the obsessions of other people (having so many of my own), and the book draws a vivid picture of the fairly laid back obsessive way that he approached the task.

One of the most interesting elements is the discussion of the marginal annotations found in very many of the existing copies of De revolutionibus. The old days where you read not only the book, but the comments left by previous readers, have a kind of romance that we miss now with every purchase being a new book. I remember back in the days of the borrowing cards in the back of books always enjoying the history of the book, something that electronic systems these days miss out on.

It’s an excellent book, well worth reading.

From a San Francisco Chronicle story about a local political scandal:

That seemed to be the buzz on the streets of San Francisco, too. Tarri Chandler, who said she was homeless and was carrying a cardboard cup that read “Cold, very hungry, please help,” said she didn’t think it was much of a story.

Bizarre! (Via)

Great story about the benefits of “crowd-sourcing” in places where you wouldn’t expect. (Via)

By golly, these speakers made of water look so very pretty… Also expensive, I suspect.

Should groundhogs be taken into account when predicting global warming?.

Weight: 110.9kg

According to animal rights activists in Germany, it is a violation of a polar cubs’ rights to painstakingly care for it and raise it by hand after being rejected by its mother, but it is not a violation of its rights to let it die.

Dean Baker makes an excellent point about a lot of rhetoric in free trade discussions:

It is positively bizarre how discussions of trade liberalization always ignore the possibility of liberalizing trade in highly paid professional services.

I agree with this strongly - but the problem in this area is so severe that even thinking about free trade is a long way away. We don’t even have free markets in this area. Many professions (doctors and lawyers most famously) have very strict rules that prevent anyone who is not licensed from practicing. Now this probably seems like a very good idea - who would really let an unlicensed doctor treat them?

Well, the answer seems to be lots of people: alternative medicine practitioners (whatever opinion I might have of how well those treatments work) are very popular. But they are hamstrung by the rules on medical practice in many ways. I can make a good argument that these rules help people by saving them from themselves. But that kind of argument always makes the economic rationalist part of me pretty uncomfortable.

But even worse than restricting the right to practice, the licensing in many of these professions is actually in the hands of some professional association, rather than the government. Even if you can get the economic rationalists to agree that licensing might be a good idea, it’d be hard to convince any economist that letting the professional association manage things with only light government oversight is a good idea. As Adam Smith said in 1776:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

The professions is an area where a lot of reform is possible. It’s also extremely unlikely to ever happen, for obvious political reasons.

(By the way, I’d just like to endorse Dean Baker’s oft made point about the strange way media groups always call trade agreements ‘free trade agreements’, even if there’s nothing free about them)

Wil Wheaton reviews some of the great graphic novels. (I personally love Transmetropolitan dearly, 60 issues doesn’t seem anything like enough). (Warning: link is safe for work, but the overall website is decidedly not. Click at your own risk).

A detailed explanation filling in all the plot holes in Star Wars episodes I-III. (Via)

From TV Squad:

On a video interview on his Web site ShatnerVision, Shatner mentioned he was trying to sell a recording of himself narrating the Book of Exodus backed by a full symphony and three-hundred and fifty singers.

Some thoughts from space historian Jim Olberg. (Via)

A review by Manhattan’s self proclaimed expert (and publisher of Beautiful Spot, a magazine about parking). (Via)