My wife, my friend Matt, and I all went to the concert last night, and it was amazing. I love U2’s music so I’m into it to begin with, but they really made the stadium feel like an arena. The crazy high tech audio/visual/quadruped space ship really did the job and more important the human showmanship was there too. I got to hear all the songs I really wanted to hear and now when I listen to some U2 songs they just feel a bit live even though I’ve heard them dozens of times before.
Muse did a good job, although they focused much more on playing as many songs as possible and less on showmanship. I do agree with Mat that I wish they’d had more time. Not sure what happened there, they started later than expected and there was a reasonable time gap between when they finished and U2 started. I did get to hear all the songs I was really hyped to hear, Muse leads off with some of their best known ones, notably Knights of Cydonia, so that wasn’t particularly surprising. I think they did a good job, that said, this was more a U2 crowd than a Muse one, so doing a little more warm-up blather and one less song might have gotten the audience a lot more into the performance. That said, my friend Guy thinks DC concert goers are basically worthless and weak when it comes to getting into shows. I’ve been part of some good crowds, notably at the 9:30 club, but I think he had a point here.
I'm back for the long-awaited final Ireland trip entry. Let me assure you that it's not Greg who's amiss in his blog-writing duties, and that this really was supposed to be written sooner. Like a month ago sooner. At least in the interim Greg got a chance to finish up and write a quick review of The Demon's Lexicon, which is very relevant to this post!
When I travel, I like to get a couple of books. Not only does it give me something to read, but they make nice - yet practical - souvenirs. Going to bookstores in Dublin and Belfast was fun since I got to compare UK and US covers for various books, plus pick up the last entry in a series that was never released in the US. While I was meandering through the YA section in one of the stores in Dublin, I noticed The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan, which a friend had recommended in her blog. I'd considered picking it up at a bookstore back home, but decided to wait for the paperback edition. Well, the UK edition was a paperback, so I decided to go for it. I spent a good deal of the train travel from Belfast to Dublin and Dublin to Cork reading it, and finished up thereafter in Cork. (I read quite fast.)
I'd also been reading the author's blog and discovered that she'd be doing a signing in Dublin on the last night we'd be there. Hm, I thought. This seems really too good to pass up. So Greg and I did some planning and figured that yes, we could run all over Dublin to visit the places we'd missed, make the signing, and then catch dinner afterwards. With the battle plan set, that evening we headed for the Eason on O'Connell street.
The event, a joint signing and reading with Cassandra Clare (author of the Mortal Instruments series) was on the lower floor of the bookstore. Most of the audience was in their late teens, but I wasn't the only obviously-older-than-college-and-most-definitely-older-than-high-school-age person there. Both authors read chapters from their upcoming books and then there was a question and answer session. Fun fact - they're both big fans of the magician Howl, from Diana Wynne Jones' books. Then came the signing. After a small bit of line confusion, I was able to meet Sarah Rees Brennan, tell her a quick version of how I ended up there (which I hope was at least amusing), and get my book signed.
Afterwards Greg and I headed to Gallagher's Boxty House for dinner. We tried some of the boxty, which are potato pancakes with various fillings, along with lamb stew and some coddle (sausage and bacon with potatoes and herbs). It was tasty and hearty. We then spent the rest of the evening meandering around Temple Bar one last time.
The next morning we got up and took the bus back to the airport. The noteworthy thing is the huge departure/arrival board near the checkin counters, which you can see in the last of the photos.
That concludes our Ireland entries. We hope you enjoyed them! It's been fun looking back at the trip and especially all the photos. Greg will likely be making a subset of them into a slide show and posting a link here, like he did for his China trip. As for me, I'm looking forward to lots of future travels together, and hope to return to Ireland someday.
I may pop in from time to time for more guest posting. Thanks for reading!
My favorite comic writer, John Ostrander, sadly is presently all too aware of the downsides of the individual health insurance market. That’s not an uncommon state for freelancers. Comicbookresources has the summary:
Veteran comic book writer John Ostrander has legions of fans. And from his own creation for First Comics, “Grimjack,” to his landmark run on “Suicide Squad” (where he famously re-introduced former Batgirl Barbara Gordon to the DC Universe as Oracle), the 60-year old Chicago native has also proved to be a major influence for dozens, if not hundreds, of new writers breaking into the industry over the years.
So when news broke Ostrander was facing some major medical bills while undergoing surgery to reduce damage done to his eyes fromglaucoma, the comic book industry and its fans rallied. Spearheaded by fan favorite writer Gail Simone and with a launch at Chicago Comic-Con earlier this month, the Comix4Sight art auction has already raised more than $30,000 for Ostrander. Those who couldn’t attend the convention have a chance at purchasing their own piece of comics history as an auction to sell all remaining pieces of art has moved online, and the first lot goes on sale today at www.comix4sight.com.
All monies raised above Ostrander’s medical expenses goes directly toThe Hero Initiative, a not-for-profit organization that assists comics creators in need of assistance.
It’s been going on for a bit now but there’s still a stream of items. I just bid on a signed scripted and also a signed Monty Python DVD. In related news, I need to catch on Secret Six:
Ostrander also made news recently when it was announced he would be writing “Secret Six” #15, a fill-in issue of Gail Simone’s critically acclaimed DC Comics series. The issue will focus on Deadshot, a character Ostrander energized during his run on “Suicide Squad” in the 1980s. Ostrander's latest Grimjack story, "The Manx Cat," is also on sale now from IDW Publishing.
I’ve been picking up the TPBs of Secret Six but I may grab the individual issues, or maybe I’ll pick up a few more back TPBs of Simone/Ostrander series first. My collection of even the better known stuff isn’t yet complete.
Took me about a month to figure out the topline and get the breakouts verified. I’ll save the details for something at work, but I figure I can give the blog an occasional scoop.
For the record, note that the total spent on private security companies, such as DynCorp, is even higher because they do more than just security. Further note that if you include sub-contracting the number rises more. Even so, at most it would hit about 10% of our total contract spend in the field.
There’s actually a pretty cheap easily available item to let you quickly exit dungeons, so complaint retracted. The cost isn’t trivial near the start, but at that point the amount of time it takes to leave or get to the end is lower. Also, since you can start at the top floor you’ve been too, the time investment to start up again is minor.
Which is good, as it means I won’t have to leave the PS2 on for a few days again in the near future.
Back in Silver Spring, my commute was consistent car-free. It’s trickier in Howard. That said, I did manage to bike to the commuter bus and ride that in the morning. Would have done it in the evening too, but I need some night riding equipment for my bike and in any event I was coming up from a game night in Silver Spring and commuting transit options are highly limited by 10:20 pm if you can’t just use the Metro.
The commuter bus, the 995, I can bike to doesn’t seem like that practical of an option for getting to work, at least not if the half hour delay was at all standard. That said, good to know I have the option available as a backup and don’t have to ask my wife to get up early if I’m carless.
Unless I’m missing a setting somewhere, I’m a bit put off at the distance between saves. Basically there’s one at the start and final room of each dungeon, but not so much in between. I can only really game in 30 minute increments these days, so it’s a bit non-ideal. You can run by foes as you leave, so it isn’t that bad, but it’s still annoying.
I am willing to just leave on the console and walk away as a bootleg suspend mode, but I’d really prefer not to. I can understand the desire to raise threat by separating saves, but not offering a suspend mode is silly.
Modern urban fantasy book with an interesting variant on an old staple that I won’t reveal in this review. There will be an upcoming blog post describing how we got the book signed, but I’ll save that for my wife.
Basic universe setup: there’s a parallel demon universe and people with magical aptitude need to make deals with them if they want real power. The deals involve sacrificing people to let the demons experience our world, which means the mages are pretty uniformly evil.
Points of note: it’s a fairly dark book, not so much because of the fair number of evil magicians, but because the protagonists were willing to take fairly extreme measures. Some of them I wasn’t comfortable with, but I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to be.
The magical sub-world was fairly well defined and made a good amount of sense, although the integration with the larger world wasn’t particularly covered. That said, the failure to work out real world implications of magic tends to be a given in urban fantasy, so I’ll accept that. One oddity though, possession was fairly big in the book and caused rapid deterioration in the subject; however, the fairly logical albeit evil solution of chain possession to save the original victim was never discussed. Maybe in the sequel.
Made my first curry today and also used lentils for the first time. The potluck at Matt’s proved to be a lentil bonanza as two other people also brought lentil dishes. May have been a result of vegetarian/vegan side dish being listed as one of the sign up options.
In any event, it took some time to make but seems to scale well and is easily reheatable. I think this may become one of my staples. Next time I’ll try it without the optional butter (and without the extra oil for the jasmine rice. We’ll see how much of that is necessary to get the taste right. Think I’ll also work a bit more on experimenting with spices.
It was pretty popular, although we made enough that there’s still some left for lunch this week.
Who wins in a fight: a Raptorex or a Velociraptor?
I’m tentatively going to go with the Raptorex in a 1 on 1 fight. Mostly because I learned recently at a Baltimore science center visit that the Velociraptor is a lot smaller than was made out in Jurassic Park. Meanwhile the Raptorex might still have useless forearms, but it is about twice as big.
Image from wikipedia used under a creative commons license.
I’ve been playing Persona 4 during my exercise routines (and after). I really love that game, although it is a bit hard for my tastes. Might be because I’m new to the series, but it’s taken some dying to really start to master the rules and I’m still no good at judging what level I need to be to take on bosses.
Tonight though, I’ve come to praise the way it handles personal attributes: eloquence, courage, diligence, knowledge, and understanding in this case. Various dialogue choices and ways of spending your time will boost one of these attributes. With time, the trade-offs are obvious, study in the library to increase your knowledge or do a part time job to increase your diligence. With dialog the choices can be less obvious although I suspect there are times where one option might boost courage and another eloquence or the like. There are also times where you’ll be told about jobs or dialog choices or the like that are unavailable at your current level. This does a good job of showing the benefits of various approaches even if you don’t take them.
I don’t think the five attributes chosen here are particular important, but I do think the number, matters. Games with good-evil (or synonym) alignment systems or even games like Mass Effect with intimidate and charm don’t really pull off interesting choices. I suspect three is the minimum number of personality aspects to actually allow for more than an incentive to go goody-goody or jerk. In persona’s case the various attributes aren’t actually tied to combat stats, I think you do want some level of disconnect, otherwise the temptation is too strong to pick a character’s personality based on combat optimization, but I don’t think a complete disconnect is necessary either.
I am told that you can maximize everything in at least some of the Persona games. That’s can work in some settings although I think in many cases forcing some trade-offs is the way to go. That said, designers do tend to like rewarding people going to extremes, in this case I think you’d normally want to encourage some strength in half of the traits offered. That said, total specialists could work, so long as prioritizing two or three aspects of a character was just as viable.
But it would be folly for news organizations to ignore this story out of pettiness or snobbery. Though everyone involved in producing the ACORN expose had ideological ends, they used journalistic means to achieve them—in fact, hyperpartisan impulses that produce muckraking scoops are the rare variety that should be celebrated. Who cares whether a reporter or an activist happened to do the reporting? Everyone benefits when indefensible deeds are accurately exposed and the perpetrators made accountable…
He added, "But I also know how my journalist friends are going to react. And so my advice to James is this: You can put this thing out your way, but you should also offer the full audio and full transcript so that people can hear and see them in their entirety – sans edits. So they can judge for themselves."
A wise approach—I'm writing this column only after having read the full transcripts. (ACORN has said that the videos were “doctored, edited and in no way the result of the fabricated story being portrayed by conservative activist ‘filmmaker’ James O’Keefe and his partner in crime”—and threatened to sue.)
I’ll reserve judgment until the full audio is out there. I do assume that there were also a good number of cases where Acorn offices properly rebuffed the guy. Also, the whole scandal during the election was BS, there were Acorn employees who made money by fabrication registrations but that was registration fraud to rip off Acorn and not election fraud. On the whole though, the organization does seem to have a genuine problem with people, admittedly often volunteers, acting in an official capacity at their office. If accurate this is a legit scandal, firing the workers is a good first step but it is a reasonable expectation that an org using federal funds wouldn’t have brought them on in the first place.
Even official capacity isn’t that limiting and frankly sometimes negotiations should be private or diplomatic/legislative agreements would never happen. I am actively considering being a public servant some day and while taping interactions with public seems reasonable, bugging my house, cell phone, or laptop would not be. Also, national security and spying aside, without such limits it would be rather tempting to bug people for information about how to win a contract or the other side’s political strategy. The limitation to journalists really doesn’t deal with this problem as that term isn’t necessarily that meaningful limiting in an era of blogs.
Update: Acorn has a press-release stating that in at least one of the videos the Acorn employee was basically satirizing the obviously implausible journalist. The specifics sound likely to me. I'd say that approach was likely a mistake, better to toss them out, but not a scandal by any means. (Hat tip, The American Scene commenter.)
Eight years and a day ago the U.S. was attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists located in the U.S. but with a headquarters back in Afghanistan. Our subsequent invasion of Afghanistan routed the harboring regime, the Taliban, but was under resourced and failed to capture key leadership. The resources are coming now, but Al Qaeda appears to be based out of Northwest Pakistan at the moment where we appear to be successfully crippling them via good intel and predator strikes.
At present, I do not see anything in Afghanistan that makes the Nato presence strategically necessary. Preventing a Taliban take over is a worthy goal, but the Taliban was originally driven from power by cavalry backed by air power and special forces. That said, even if Afghanistan were taken over I do not believe the Taliban would be a threat to Pakistan any more than they were a threat when lasted they ruled, the Pakistanis certainly don’t seem to think so. The greater risk is Afghanistan becoming more of a failed state, but it is hardly the only failed state in the world with Al Qaeda sympathizers and trying to fix them all through occupation would be madness.
Secondarily, there is the humanitarian case. The last polling I’ve seen still had majority support among the Afghan people for the U.S. presence, albeit still depicting us as part of the problem, making this case a much more reasonable one than the humanitarian case for staying in Iraq. However, the trend was sufficiently negative that I’d be surprised if that was still the case, particularly after a fraud-filled election. It’s also worth noting that the war in Afghanistan is an incredibly inefficient means of pursuing humanitarian ends. Heather Hubert over at Democracy Arsenal gives an example of what efficient aid does, saving 10,000 children a day versus the mortality rate in 1990. Meanwhile in Afghanistan the bulk of the money goes to DoD and even under counter insurgency doctrine the DoD is not primarily an aid agency. As for efforts under US AID, in Iraq the Special Inspector General found that in 7 of 11 capacity-building contracts analyzed, 24% to 53% of the funding was spent on security subcontracts (I’d prefer SIG Afghanistan data, but that office was only recently stood up and only has five audits).
So do we abandon Afghanistan? I don’t think that’s necessary or appropriate. I think agree with Spencer Ackerman that it makes sense to work some aid through the provincial level but he’s also right that there are limits to the extent we can bypass the national government. I also tend to buy into some of Michael Cohen’s critiques but I rather doubt that the problem is the population-centric COIN model mission creep and that there’s a way to focus on the enemy. Focusing on the enemy is what the military naturally wants to do, I find it difficult to believe that the problem was that we were just under-resourcing an enemy-centric approach. Yes we did botch Tora Bora, but we’ve had thirty thousand troops there for years not even counting allied support.
I think Ackerman and Cohen’s ideas should be incorporated into a drawdown, one we should work out in cooperation with our allies and the Afghan government (though perhaps not just the national level thereof). As part of such a drawdown we could work out ways to provide some mix of aid (probably mostly financial and not necessarily through the central government), and air support. Such an arrangement didn’t work in South Vietnam in no small part because Congress was rightly concerned that we would be sucked back in. I think we would have far more credibility to maintain a lower level relationship if we worked out terms for departure began before the American and Afghan public demanded that we go.
I don’t object to more resources being poured in over the next eighteen months or so as part of this departure. However, I don’t think there’s patience in America or Afghanistan for an occupation beyond that point nor do I think that even a great strategy will be so radically successful as to change that. If I’m wrong and there is an up swell of public support in both countries due to effective counter-insurgency strategy, than both governments could certainly then renegotiate a deeper longer-term relationship.
Science fiction seems to have chronically over-estimated our progress into space even when it’s gotten other forms of technology (aside from AI, flying cars are doable but highly impractical) about right or even been overly conservative. Cost is a huge factor here, the price of transistors, genetic mapping, and the like have dropped precipitously while it’s still heinously expensive to get into orbit or beyond.
SpaceX, an 800-employee firm founded by Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk, has a rocket in development called the Falcon 9 and a capsule named Dragon that could be used for human spaceflight, according to the company…
Such a move would be a historic step toward privatizing human spaceflight. It could be a huge boost for relatively new, modest-sized companies such as SpaceX, which already has an agreement with NASA to deliver cargo -- but not people -- to the space station…
"The difference here is one where NASA is not designing the system, is not describing the path, but they are stating the destination," Musk said. He compared it to car shopping. "You don't go to the car company and say 'here's how I'd like you to design my car.' "…
Going commercial might save the government money, but it would mean an increase in risk, said Scott N. Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. Private companies have yet to demonstrate that they can safely put a human being in orbit, he said. The cost of building a spaceship is likely to be higher than $2.5 billion, he added.
The whole article is worth reading and not that long. I’m with Augustine on this one. The big non-scientific goal in space exploration shouldn’t be the moon, it shouldn’t even be getting to Mars, it should be figuring out the basic infrastructure problem. (I’m not really qualified to say what the big scientific goals should be, I expect they tend to be a range of smaller projects typically not done via human space exploration). The Deep Space mission to asteroids is probably a more practical mid-term human space flight goal, but I think even that is secondary unless there’s a rare minerals economic case or the like.
Bringing the cost down in this sort of situation is the type of task commercialization is well suited too. I don’t doubt that Scott Pace is right that it will end up costing more than $2.5B, he’s probably also right that there’s safety risks but that was also true of the Apollo program and frankly the shuttle mission. However, I think he’s wrong in saying that the Augustine commission has a burden of proof they aren’t meeting. Exploration is worthwhile in its own right, but does anyone really have a solid idea as to why a moon colony, or a trip to Mars, or the much easier trip to Mars’ moon Phobos, should be our next priority?
I do think there’s a fair amount of boosterism in the recent Piers Bizony Outlook piece describing a range of private rockets and praising their more dynamic culture, but on the balance I think he’s right. Let NASA focus more on what we want to do in space and let crazy billionaires run down their fortunes trying to work out cheaper ways to get there. I would strongly recommend against investing in these efforts if your primary concern is making money. Someone will make a mint eventually, but it’s hard to predict who before hand and from what I’ve read the technical problems tend to be understated. But on the whole, I think providing some funding to encourage a diverse and competitive commercial launch sector is a better use of money than trying to find the best single rocket solution or prioritizing human space ventures in the solar system. I’d give basic science priority over that, but if we bring the cost of launch down, science benefits too.
I regularly use Google Reader and on the whole am fairly satisfied with it, but there are a few interface features that aggravate me.
Unread count maxes out at 1,000. When I’m over 1k and trying to catch up, it’d be nice to know how much progress I’m making.
Tag bloat. In an early incarnation I tried doing a fair number of different tags to classify my archives. Unfortunately tags are intermixed with folders and this makes it difficult to organize things into folders because I’ve got a list 100+ choices.
Consolidating tags is hard. I’m willing to limit myself to a small number of tags, but mass renames have to be done manually. Also tags with no items still need to be deleted manually and the delete screen doesn’t tell you what has only one item.
Reading items when offline doesn’t appear to properly sync up when you get back online. Obviously you still gain any relevant knowledge, but this makes backlog clearing harder.
I’m hoping once I deal with these bloody tags I’ll be able to create a reading and organizing system that actually helps me skim through my feeds and avoid a big backlog. I’ve created a skim folder and that helps some, but in and of itself it doesn’t appear to do the job. I think I should probably also create a must-read folder and by default err towards only reading headlines with all other folders.
With Afghanistan in the news because of the elections and the latest policy debates back home, I’ve been pondering why nation-building is so hard even though failed states are the exception and not the rule.
Part of the problem is often arbitrary colonial borders, but I think there’s a deeper issue. Generally speaking, we are trying to build modern nations. Absent ethnic or sectarian cleansing, this requires a state that can cross racial and religious lines. When not going for a pluralistic empire, nationalism is the way to cross such lines.
However, at the same time, nationalism is a very effective anti-occupation force. Identifying with one countries naturally sets one in opposition to other countries to some extent and to any occupiers to a much greater extent. This force, in combination with guerrilla warfare, historically is most known for helping to bring about the end of colonialism, but it does act as a natural enemy to even more humanitarian occupations.
On the whole, I think this will make occupations extremely difficult in all but a few cases. There are other forms of military intervention, for example peace keeping missions, that seem to be more capable of avoiding this problem. I think I may need to do some reading up on nationalism, if I’m right about its dual-edged nature, there may be patterns in its appearance in opposition to actions by superpowers even when direct occupation or colonialism isn’t an issue.
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