kip/bot/blog

Jon Evans’s new book Invisible Armies, has a trailer. (It’s also free for a month, and the author has travel tips and the publisher is running a GPS contest)
Better still, it has a blog-blurb-review-endorsement from Bruce Sterling that works for on an absurd number of levels.

(((That’s a pretty good book, actually. It’s kind of a tough-as-nails technothriller from a leftie Seattle 99er perspective. People who aren’t morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.)))

One of my favorite things about my Kindle (which I’m already quite over the top about) is the idle screen function. When you don’t hit a key for more than five minutes, it gives you these really nifty prints from old books, like so:

It’s like stuff out of bibliodyssey. I’m trying to figure out if Amazon loads new ones onto the unit (I really hope they do), and I will sometimes deliberately sleep the unit to see more pics.

What tickles me most about this, though, is that idling the screen is completely unnecessary. These screens don’t burn, and they don’t draw power by staying on (e-ink technologies don’t require screens to be re-drawn x times per second — once it’s rendered, nothing else happens until a button is pressed.

More pics of the idle screen on my flickr photostream.

One of the fun things to do with the Kindle is NowNow, a question answering service under the “Experimental” menu of Kindle. NowNow is based , I think, on the “mechanical turk“, a group of humans paid in a micro-fashion by Amazon to curate content and, under this program answer questions.

My first question to Nownow, sprang from a conversation with our CTO about gnostic and apocryphal scrolls (a very important part of our business of web marketing) and said that Mary Magdalene was the brother of Lazarus (the resurrectee). I didn’t know that, and while I didn’t doubt it either, I thought it was a good time to test Nownow:

Within 5 minutes, I had gotten three answers with varying shades of personal voice, exploration of nuance to the answer (“No … although it’s hotly debated”), and citations in the form of hyperlinks (you can use the Kindle’s wireless EVDO connection for web browsing).

This morning, while reading a trashy genre novel (I’ll do anything to get back in the fiction groove), the narrator described a character as “a real trouper.” Nice! Trouper! As in, the show must go on or do your part within a troupe/ensemble. I didn’t know that. I’ve usually encountered it as be a real trooper – soldier on, take your orders. Trouper felt right, but I ran it past the folks at Nownow.

My favorite answer comes from a person who I think I would like to have more chats with:

It’s definitely “trouper”, but “trooper” is taking over because so many people misuse/misunderstand the phrase. It seems likely the correct “trouper” will die off because it’s so neglected.

(In the same way “presently” is starting to mean “now” instead of “in the near future”, which is what it ACTUALLY means… just because people have been misusing it so much for so long.)

Anyway, a “trouper” means a member of a theatrical company (usually traveling, in a troupe) and has come to mean someone who keeps plugging away even when things go sour.

While both troupe and troop derive ultimately from the Latin troppus “flock”, one was adopted for military use while the other was applied to performers. However “a reliable, uncomplaining person; a staunch supporter or colleague” is, indeed, a trouper, likening someone to an actor or dancer who goes on despite hardship or impediments. It’s a compliment.

Troupe “group of performers” dates from the early 19th century in English, having come from French, and trouper “a performer belonging to a troupe” dates from the late 19th century. Trouper as in “she’s a real trouper” dates from the 20th century; it was already a cliche as evidenced by this quotation from 1959: “The phrase ‘she’s a trouper’ now has an old-fashioned and faintly derogatory air and is usually bandied about when someone continues to play with a high temperature or a shattering bereavement.”

Troop as in “a body of soldiers” is earlier, dating from at least the 16th century and deriving from Old French trope. A trooper is therefore a member of such a military group (1640), or, by extension, a certain type of law enforcement officer (especially in the U.S., where we have state troopers, who are state police. They’ve been called troopers since the early part of the 20th century). Calling someone a trooper in this way isn’t so much a compliment as a statement of fact: they’re a normal member of a group, nothing special.

This has been misused for a long time, though, and in the USA where the word “troop” is much much more common than “troupes”, it’s completely predictable that people would start using the “wrong” one. If you use the wrong one over and over again, over decades, it becomes acceptable, of course.

English is like that.

I hope this answer is good for you!

You can just tell this person enjoyed writing the answer, was glad for an excuse to dig into the mutual latin roots of both possibilities, and is sadly resigned to the way common usage overrides the richer, deeper original meaning.

I would, of course, be devastated to find out that this is a turing test and this was software generated:

if (question == usageOfWords) then

print “English is like that.”

endif

Techcrunch providing compelling reasons for the Kindle.  Or rather Citi investment analysts are.  They estimate that Amazon will generate between $400 million and $750 million in revenue from the Kindle by 2010, or 1% – 3% of Amazon’s total revenue.  There’s a nice side-by-side comparison that opened my eyes:

The most important, and most interesting, one is that book selection.  I was under the impression, from where I can’t remember, that both were at about 90,000.  My regular tests of Amazon and the Sony store didn’t seem to unearth any differences — attempts to find test books on either store yielded identical results.  Weird perceptual thing on my part?  Bogus data?

Most important, though, is Jennifer Aniston’s endorsement, also in Techcrunch:

People who don’t read fiction sometimes annoy me.  They can be so smug about how frivolous it is to read stories that aren’t factual.  While I can hardly argue that my genre binges are improving books, they’ll extend this argument to the good stuff even.

Most of them are fun and charming, though, and defending fiction is a source of fun with them.  So, as I started reading Germinal yesterday, I sent one such friend a tail to a note about some work-related stuff:

hope all is well.  you’ll love this:  I’m reading Germinal by Zola — 19th century fiction! You’d be amazed at the relevance my oh-so-intelligent friend.

To which, he replied:

19th century fiction? C’mon Kip…. with only time to consume just over 2000 books over an average life span you can certainly find some non-fiction to help prevent the brain rot.

That was depressing.  I’ve always been keenly aware that I will never read more than a fraction of the books I may want to.  That’s the reason I embrace the rule of “if I don’t love a book after 50 pages, I’m dumping it” (and I may just dump Germinal, which will be really weird — like turning my back on my labor past).

But only 2000 books???   That’s a bummer, especially when I think of all the books I’ve re-read four or five times or more.  Makes me wonder if I should stop with the books and just read magazines.

After lunch with a politically like-minded friend, I decided to read Germinal, one of those books I’ve felt guilty for not having read for many years now — and which he had recently read and was raving about. Check out the elegant advisory that there are spoilers below . . . as if there were any other reasons for students (or tired middle-aged readers) to read it).

David Brooks doesn’t usually inspire me, or inspire me to even read him with the chance of getting inspired, but a piece that he did yesterday, describing the modern depletion of imagination, was terrific and made me want more, but now I’m adrift and have much too much work to do to get it.

The article centered on a piece about C S Lewis:

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.”

Lewis tried to recapture that medieval mind-set, Ward writes. He did it not because he wanted to renounce the Copernican revolution and modern science, but because he found something valuable in that different way of seeing our surroundings.

The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.” When we say that a star is a huge flaming ball of gas, he wrote, we are merely describing what it is made of. We are not describing what it is. Lewis also wanted to include the mythologies, symbols and stories that have been told about the heavenly actors, and which were so real to those who looked up into the sky hundreds of years ago. He wanted to strengthen the imaginative faculty that comes naturally to those who see the heavens as fundamentally spiritual and alive.

I’ve been trying to work through Bullfinch’s Mythology recently, in an effort at self-erudition. One of the disturbing things about reading the book is its rationale:

If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which enlarges our possessions or to raise our station in society, then mythology has no that appellation. But if that which tends to make us happier and better can be called useful then we claim that epithet for our subject. For mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.

Without a knowledge of mythology, much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

This is the constant sell of Bullfinch, that if you read the book, you can understand references in poems and decode their meaning. Not to unlock their magic, feel what it’s like for absurd but wonderful images to mean something deep and emotional, or tap into stories that tap into obscured parts of our psyche — but to understand poems and literature which are almost as removed from us as the mythic stories they reference.

On the rare occasions when I read Shakespeare, I am always struck by how alive the 16th century was with magically powered plants. References to properties of plants abound in Shakespeare, and I think how cool it would be to walk in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and to see flowers which are pretty, smell nice, and have medical/magical/(al)chemical properties. How much more alive and rich the place would be. But that’s gone to us.

So . . . When I see a passage about how night skies used to be magical and once inspired wonder, I want more. Brooks goes on to tantalize even further:

The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time. As many historians have written, Europeans in the Middle Ages lived with an almost childlike emotional intensity.

(Tantalize comes from the story of Tantalus, who as a punishment for stealing ambrosia, was put in a pool of water beneath the branches of a fruit tree. Whenever he bent to drink the water would recede away from him, whenever he reached up for fruit, the tree branches would move just out of his grasp. I knew that without looking it up, but I also know it because I learned a bunch of Greek myths in High School so I could be clever and witty in Extemporaneous Speaking.  I’m not sure if that’s good or not.)

At the beginning of Foucault’s Pendulum, the narrator tells of a couple who suffers from this post-medieval condition:

A moment later, the couple went off — he, trained on some textbook that had blunted his capacity for wonder, she inert and insensitive to the thrill of the infinite

Yeah, so I want more out of this Brooks column and there’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t provide a link for the Ward essay, which seems selfish for one who is lamenting the closing of our imaginations, “many historians” gives me nothing, and oh, how I wish there were some implicitly titled “If you like this or care about the night skies, you should check out…”

The internet’s best contribution to this dilettante’s life is “More…” and I have none.

Fun, spot-on, surprisingly techno-friendly take on the Kindle from a columnist at The Nation.

The Kindle displays only the text of publications, and I missed the pictures as well as the ability to read a whole article without clicking the next page bar every ten seconds. I realized I was accustomed to seeing headlines for articles on a variety of subjects all at once and then choosing which article to read first, something the Kindle makes difficult. I also missed the comforting rustle of the newspaper’s pages. As for books, even I am not inclined to pack more than one for something like a subway ride, so the difference in weight is negligible, and again, there’s a lot more text on one page of a paper book than one Kindle page-view. Like many people, the other place I tend to read is in bed. Bringing the Kindle there seemed, in all honesty, like a violation. No matter its pleasures, ultimately, unlike a paper book–especially a loved one battered and cherished over time–the Kindle is a piece of cold electronic circuitry that seems alien to intimate environments. It’s beautifully designed but unchanging, and thus represents nothing more than itself. By contrast, when I stand and look at my bookshelves, I see books I’ve had since I was a child mixed in with titles from high school, college and after, all of them nestled alongside my husband’s books.

In addition to being a charming discussion of books and electronic reading, her note about scanning text highlighted a design challenge we haven’t faced yet:  discoverability.  Scanning a newspaper to see what I want to read is a behavior that we don’t have a vocabulary for or have as goals in design yet.  We’re still caught in task completion and occasionally drift into findability (though we still don’t have enough people adopting that important phrase).  Supporting serendipitous discovery, allowing people to step outside of their checked boxes, providing the big scan of a front of a newspaper to see what’s there, what I need, what I’m glad to know in miniature.  We don’t do that yet.

My goodreads email has become my only must-read email from a social network site. I am always curious to see what people are reading, adding to their shelves, and eager for the moment when someone writes a comment. This morning, I got this:

Fun on so many levels. This seems to be the book to enjoy reading, at least among my little circle of reading friends, and finally someone who didn’t dig it. It also validates, the dirty little reading secret and rule that you shouldn’t kill yourself trying to finish a book that just isn’t working for you.

Hilarious NYT article about how people use the bookshelves of others as gauges of: their intelligence, sex-worthiness, compatiability as friend or boy/girl-friend. Lots of really funny lines.  Initially dug the article because it contained a funny cut-up of Ayn Rand fans and a link to an Ayn Rand dating site (I wonder what the binaries.pictures-style fora have in them), but the whole article is a gas:

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,�? said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.�? (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged�? and “The Fountainhead,�? might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,�? beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,�? Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences�? are a “tedious conversational topic at best.�?

Great lines throughout: a woman who pretty much knows she’s not getting naked with a guy who reads life lessons from dog books, a “you knew what you were getting into” blow-off to an Alice Munro fun who dates a Da Vinci Code reader, the asymmetry of male and female reading habits, and, my favorite, the guy who fell for a woman who had Unbearable Lightness of Being on her nightstand — not because he loves Kundera, but because he had vague synaptic connections between the book, bowler hats, Lena Olin, and nudity. Fun read.