It's link day!

isidore-of-seville.com A great web directory full of interesting things, by the creator of LibraryThing.

Medieval Hebrew Poetry (spotted at The Man Who Is Thursday)

LexicOrient

Encyclopaedia Iranica

Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier

The banality of dawn

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

(Samuel Beckett: Murphy)

Gilford Gadberry had a contempt for dawns badly done. He knew how blatant and stylized the outdoor world can be in its pristine moments: the contrived shagginess of grass, the stupidity of trees, the falsity of flowers, the oafishness of the birds and their inept melody.

(R. A. Lafferty: Seven Story Dream)

Fuego de San Telmo

E acabada la oración andando en la tormenta pareció una lumbre de candela en la gavia del mástil de la carraca, y otra lumbre en el madero que llaman bauprés, que está en el castil de vante, e otra lumbre como candela en una vara de espinelo que está en la popa, e estas lubres vieron cuantos estaban en la carraca, que fueron llamados que las viniessen a ver, e duraron una pieça desí dessaparecieron e no cessava en todo esto la tormenta

(Ruy González de Clavijo: Embajada a Tamorlán)

El fuego de San Telmo o Santelmo es un meteoro ígneo consistente en una descarga corona electroluminiscente provocada por la ionización del aire dentro del fuerte campo eléctrico que originan las tormentas eléctricas. Aunque se le llama «fuego», es en realidad un plasma de baja densidad y relativamente baja temperatura provocado por una enorme diferencia de potencial eléctrico atmosférica que sobrepasa el valor de ruptura dieléctrica del aire, en torno a 3 MV/m

Este fenómeno toma su nombre de San Telmo, patrón de los marineros, quienes habían observado el fenómeno desde la antigüedad y creían que su aparición era propicia.

(Fuego de San Telmo en Wikipedia)

E estas lumbres que así vieron dezían que era fray Pero Gonçález de Tuy, que se avían encomendado a él, e otro día amanecieron cerca destas dichas islas e a ojo de la isla de Sicilia con buen tiempo seguro.

(Ruy González de Clavijo: Embajada a Tamorlán)

Pedro González Telmo (Frómista, Palencia, ca. 1180/1190 – Santiago de Compostela, 15 de abril de 1246) fue un sacerdote católico español [...] Es patrono de la ciudad de Tuy y de la diócesis de Tuy-Vigo, donde se celebra su fiesta el lunes de la segunda semana de pascua.

(Pedro González Telmo en Wikipedia)

En la advocación popular se lo confundió con San Erasmo o Elmo, también venerado por los navegantes, y recibió por ello el nombre de Telmo. En la iconografía se lo representa vestido con el hábito negro de la orden dominica, llevando en la mano un cirio azul que representa al fuego de San Telmo, o directamente una llama azul; a veces se lo representa alimentando a los pescadores.

(íbid.)

A guy who speaks chinese

Searle's response to the Systems Reply is simple: in principle, the man can internalize the entire system, memorizing all the instructions, doing all the calculations in his head. He could then leave the room and wander outdoors, perhaps even conversing in Chinese. But he still would have no way to attach "any meaning to the formal symbols". The man would now be the entire system, yet he still would not understand Chinese. For example, he would not know the meaning of the Chinese word for hamburger.

(The Chinese Room Argument on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Platform virtualization is performed on a given hardware platform by "host" software (a control program), which creates a simulated computer environment (a virtual machine) for its "guest" software. The "guest" software, which is often itself a complete operating system, runs just as if it were installed on a stand-alone hardware platform. [...] For the "guest" system to function, the simulation must be robust enough to support all the guest system's external interfaces, which (depending on the type of virtualization) may include hardware drivers.

(Wikipedia entry for Virtualization)

The "external interfaces" for the guy who speaks chinese would be his sensory organs (input) and his mouth and extremities (output). It would be nice if there were upgradeable drivers for our central nervous system; I'm a clumsy person with poor reflexes.

Cole (1991) offers an additional argument that the mind doing the understanding is neither the mind of the room operator nor the system consisting of the operator and the program: running a suitably structured computer program might produce answers submitted in Chinese and also answers to questions submitted in Korean. Yet the Chinese answers might apparently display completely different knowledge and memories, beliefs and desires than the answers to the Korean questions — along with a denial that the Chinese answerer knows any Korean, and vice versa. Thus the evidence would be that there were two non-identical minds (one understanding Chinese only, and one understanding Korean only).

(The Chinese Room Argument on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Typically, many such virtual machines are simulated on a given physical machine.

(Wikipedia entry for Virtualization)

Multiple Operating Systems running in a single machine as a (useful!) form of Dissociative Identity Disorder.

Choose your name

They all had tough names except Ceran. Manbreaker Crag, Heave Huckle, Blast Berg, George Blood, Move Manion (when Move says "Move," you move), Trouble Trent. They were supposed to be tough, and they had taken tough names at the naming. Only Ceran kept his own—to the disgust of his commander, Manbreaker.

"Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!" Manbreaker would thunder. "Why don't you take Storm Shannon? That's good. Or Gutboy Barrelhouse or Slash Slagle or Nevel Knife? You barely glanced at the suggested list."

(R. A. Lafferty: Nine Hundred Grandmothers)

Mur took the paper into the cottage, and puzzled out the sense of the characters, with occasional help from Eathre. His face grew longer and longer as he read: "Bougozonie, the Seven-Spasm Ecclesiarch. Narth Homank, who ate but one nut and one berry each day. Higajou, who reorganized Pure Boy training. Faman Cocile, who allowed himself to be gelded by Shimrod Forest bandits rather than alter his creed of non-violence and peace. Borgad Polveitch who denounced the Ambisexual Heresy..." At last Mur put aside the paper.

"What is your selection?" asked Eathre.

"I can't make up my mind."

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Neuromancer movie in the works

Looks like William Gibson's Neuromancer is finally coming to the big screen. It's going to be directed by Joseph Kahn, the guy who did Torque (check out this expressive review of the movie on CHUD).

As I have noted before, Neuromancer is so utterly Eighties that the only way it could work is as a retrofuturistic nostalgia piece. Nothing wrong with that; in fact I would absolutely love to see the movie done that way.

Gibson's Matrix was a powerful metaphor for the information age, but in a world full of World of Warcraft addicts, perhaps the idea, although prophetic and visionary in its time, isn't as new and exciting as it once was. Only unrealized visions are able to maintain their lustre.

The abstract, neon-lit empyrean envisioned by Gibson was an escape from the flesh. MMORPG users want to escape from their own flesh, too, but into the idealized body forms provided by their avatars. I guess Cronenberg was more prescient in that aspect.

Don't forget to check Paul Brians' study guide for the novel.

What is best in life?

Some of the Mongol tribes were literate, so we have written collections of the history and traditions of the Mongols, as well as accounts by Persian and Chinese chroniclers. One of the most telling is Genghis Khan's purported value statement. During a respite from his campaigns, he once asked some friends what the greatest pleasure was. After they variously answered hunting, falconry, or archery, Genghis is reputed to have said:

"The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms"

Or to paraphrase it in the bluntest possible modern terms: "To kill people, take their property, see and enjoy the pain you have caused their families, and rape their women as a final gesture of power."

From here. (And from here, too...)

At a party with fellow Bolsheviks in their Siberian exile shortly before the revolution, everyone present was asked to name their favourite pleasures. Several mentioned the seduction of women, others chose more politically correct activities in the service of the proletariat. Stalin, who had just seduced and impregnated a 13-year-old girl in the village, chose what was for him a more intense satisfaction: "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." His comrades did not take him seriously, which was to be their misfortune, to say nothing of the whole country's.

From here.

Empires of the land, the sea, and the air

Fuelled by grass, the Mongol empire could be described as solar-powered; it was an empire of the land. Later empires, such as the British, moved by ship and were wind-powered, empires of the sea. The American empire, if it is an empire, runs on oil and is an empire of the air. On the world’s largest landmass, Iraq is a main crossroads; most aspirants to empire eventually pass through there.

(from this New Yorker article by Ian Frazier)

I'm currently reading a spanish translation of The Travels of Ibn Battuta. Battuta was a muslim traveller form the fourteenth century, roughly a contemporary of Marco Polo. The book paints a pretty depressing and desolate picture of Baghdad, reduced by the mongol invasion to a shadow of its former glory under the abbasids.

Here is a nice collection of links to material about Ibn Battuta on the web. And here is the Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Baghdad (1258).

John Dolan wrote an interesting piece on the Mongols, avaliable here.

I have a copy of The Empire of the Steppes I found really cheap on Abebooks, but I still haven't got around to reading it. This other book also looks very interesting.

Let's finish by quoting this post from The Toynbee Convector:

But now we come to the great revolution: a technological revolution by which the West made its fortune, got the better of all the other living civilizations, and forcibly united them into a single society of literally world-wide range. The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the Ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world-communication. This use of the Ocean, first by sailing ships and then by steamships, enabled the West to unify the whole inhabited and habitable world [...] The steppe-ports were put out of action when the ocean-going sailing-ship superseded the camel and the horse; and now that, under our eyes, the ocean-going steamship is being superseded by the aeroplane we may ask ourselves whether the centre of the world is not likely to jump again – and this time as sensationally as in the sixteenth century – under the impetus of a technological revolution that is at least as radical as the sixteenth-century substitution of da Gama’s caravel for Babur’s tipuchaq.

Jack Vance interview on YouTube

Vance was interviewed in November 12th, 1976 for the radio program "Hour 25".

I have uploaded the interview to YouTube. Here is a link to the first part (out of twelve).

Today I heard two people...

...talking about web services on the street.

True story.

I also heard one elderly person telling another (in Spanish): "You don't know how time flies... Yes, time does fly."

True story.

La insuficiencia del psicoanálisis

A mi juicio, uno de los fracasos de la teoría freudiana es no haber atribuido suficiente importancia en el desarollo de la personalidad masculina a la humillación infantil de quedar el último cuando se eligen los equipos de fútbol en el patio del colegio. Experiencia traumática e inconfesable que sospecho está en la raíz de innumerables neurosis. Vamos, que el Complejo de Edipo es una nimiedad a su lado. (Todavía no he decidido qué nombre daré a mi neurosis balompédica.)

Quizás, estimado lector, consideres que las idea que acabo de exponer es absurda. Algo comprensible, ya que posiblemente tú mismo hayas sufrido la experiencia sin haber conseguido asimilarla, lo que se manifiesta como una reticencia inconsciente e irracional a aceptar mi teoría. Como ves, tu misma crítica termina reforzándola.

Yesterday's Futures

Paleo-future is an interesting blog about past conceptions of the future.

Tales of Future Past is a site with a similar theme, also very interesting.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Retrofuturism.

Terminal City is an enjoyable retrofuturistic comic.

And here is the inevitable link to William Gibson's short story The Gernsback Continuum.

Casting lots for divination

In Jack Vance's novel The Chasch, part of his Planet of Adventure series, the magicians of the emblem tribe practice divination by casting lots:

The Chief Magician departed, to return with a box carved from a single huge bone. He turned to Jad Piluna. "To which moon do you call for justice?" [..] The Chief Magician reached into the box, brought forth a disk, on one side pink, on the other blue. "Stand clear, all!" He spun the disk into the air. It tilted, wobbled, seemed to float and glide, and landed with the pink side on top. "Az, moon of virtue, has decided innocence!" called the magician. "Braz has seen no cause to act."

This is a good example of how Vance's imagined societies aren't as implausible as they seem at first sight. The casting of lots for divination occurs in a few places of the Hebrew Bible; in fact the Urim and Thummim may have served for that purpose.

Another reality-inspired (and not at all exotic, judging from current events) bit in Vance's work is the custom of awaile, depicted in The Wannek.

In this post of his blog, John Crowley calls for sf/fantasy authors to imagine societies at least as strange as actually existing ones:

One of my contentions about fantasy novels, and science-fantasy and future-world novels too, is that the society of the distant future, or an alien species, or another planet, or an alternate universe, ought to be at least as complex and unlikely-seeming (to Western European/American-culture-based writers in English) as the societies, mentalities and cultures that humans have in fact produced.

This advice is all to often ignored. Although Vance, as we have seen, can't be accused of doing so.

The Milleriad

Here is a less than ethusiastic evaluation of the work of Frank Miller (link spotted at John C. Wright's blog).

Here is a non-appreciative review of 300 by the War Nerd (which agrees with the first essay on Victor Davis Hanson's current state of whoredom).

Finally, here is Lucius Shepard's review of the movie Sin City (registration required; use BugMeNot).

28 pitufisemanas después

Ya casi no me acordaba de este estremecedor episodio de Los Pitufos... empieza normalmente, pero a partir de 2:15 se transforma en una versión pitufa de 28 Semanas Después y su predecesora 28 Días Después. Los pitufos infectados exiben todas las características de los "zombies rápidos" imaginados por Danny Boyle: extrema agresividad, un aumento de su fuerza física... cierto que les falta vomitar pitufisangre, pero quizás fue censurado para emisión. Tendremos que esperar a la edición especial en DVD con el director's cut.

Los Pitufos: una serie adelantada a su tiempo. Ahora supongo que debería comenzar con las típicas bromas sobre Pitufina, y el carácter totalitario de la sociedad pitufa. Pero te las ahorraré, estimado lector. Tienes cosas más importantes que hacer con tu tiempo. (Ojalá la un tanto sobrevalorada Donnie Darko hubiese tenido la misma delicadeza.)