Minor Thoughts from me to you

One of my favorite apps is about to get a big upgrade. Day One has been my journaling app of choice for several years now and it's about to get even better.

Over the past two years we’ve been working towards a major new version of Day One, using the somewhat awkward-sounding “Day One 2” as its name.

To support Day One 2’s new features, we ultimately rebuilt the app from the ground up, all the while staying true to Day One’s original simplicity. Rebuilding an app as seasoned as Day One is no small task. What I’d hoped would be a year-long effort has taken twice that… but we feel it’s been worth the wait.

Day One 2 will be a new app on Mac and iOS with two headlining features: multiple journals and multiple photos per entry. It will remain a paid app and be priced at $9.99 for iOS and $39.99 for Mac. We will provide a 50% discount during the first week of its debut.

I'm so glad they're making it a paid upgrade. I've been beta testing version 2. I can tell you that they really have worked hard on the new version and it's worth the price.

∞

Alberto Burneko offers some genuine words of wisdom, especially as snow visits regions of the country that it normally doesn't visit.

Which brings me to the first thing you need to know in order to drive the hell home in the snow: You are not actually required to lose your goddamn mind just because snow is falling. It is not the apocalypse. Neither physics nor society have been cancelled by it. It is not sulfuric ash. There are no abominable snowpeople stalking through it. It will not dissolve your body if it touches you. It is frozen water. You can drive in it, you can walk in it, you can stand in it long enough to help a fellow motorist get the fuck out of your way, you can ball it up and throw it at people who treat it like it's the end of the goddamn world. It is snow.

Accordingly, driving a car home in the snow is still driving a car. This probably seems like snarky, unhelpful advice, but actually it's not! Many drivers seem genuinely to believe that, when the road has snow on it, using an automobile to get from one place to another becomes a fundamentally different activity, with weird obscure properties that you don't know, and so you creep along at two miles-per-hour with the brake pedal halfway depressed the entire time and, like, your goddamn hazard lights on, gripping the wheel in white-knuckled terror, as though at any minute, for no reason whatsoever, your car might decide to hang a 90-degree left turn and plunge into a ravine.

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Politico, in the person of Jake Sherman, talked to former Speaker of the House, John Boehner. In the course of the interview, Boehner lamented the tactics of the radical Republicans that constantly battled him.

... Many of his GOP colleagues are perfectionists in a system of government that doesn’t allow for perfection, Boehner said.

“Nothing was good enough,” Boehner said, in a kind of reflective comment he never would’ve made as speaker. “When we protected 99 percent of the American people from an increase in taxes, most of my Republicans colleagues voted no. When we did the big money-saving bill, $2 trillion in 2011, half of my Republican colleagues voted no. Even when we passed these changes to Medicare earlier this year and solved the payment system for how we pay doctors for Medicare patients, which has been a problem for 15 years, and no one could solve it, [Nancy] Pelosi and I got it solved, and paid for it from these long-term changes to Medicare.

​I'm not a John Boehner fan. I think he had a distinct tendency towards going along with whatever the Democrats wanted and that the radical Republicans played a necessary role in putting some steel in his spine.

But I agree with him that "nothing was good enough" for the discontented. Republicans could have had more wins than they did, had the backbenchers blown up a few fewer bills.

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Jonathan M. Gitlin, writing for Ars Technica, criticized the President's dramatic call for a large program to end cancer.

So what's wrong with this idea, and why am I coming off like a cranky old man shouting at the clouds? For one thing, history has shown us that giving science a large slug of cash in a very short amount of time has horrible—some might say disastrous—consequences. This was plain to see after the NIH budget got doubled between 1998 and 2003 (something I and my colleagues wrote about extensively here at Ars). It was even more obvious once the two-year bolus of money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009-2011) was spent.

Think about the way a sudden influx of nutrients causes algae to bloom and then die off in rivers and oceans, leaving dead zones behind. Rapid injections of cash into the research enterprise create intense periods where there's lots of money available for lots of new scientists to get hired. But once those initial grants run out, there is no more funding to support them.

As a result of the past booms in funding, you will find empty lab after empty lab in research institutes and universities all over the land. We've trained far more scientists than we have money to sustainably support.

​Instead of massive projects based around nebulous goals, he wants to see a sustained commitment to ongoing research.

Which brings me back to my initial point. The way to improve the health of our nation isn't another moonshot where we're not quite sure what we even mean by "Moon." Just find a way to deliver predictable, sustainable funding.

I promise you, the scientists will do the rest.

Predictable budget growth would allow scientists to build labs, do research over a long period of time, and provide opportunities for new scientists to enter the field and contribute their own research. It's an argument that seems sound to me. ​

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Jay Caspian Kang, in the New York Times Magazine, wrote a good overview of what daily fantasy sports are and how they're currently rigged against casual players.

I initially intended to write an article about the bro culture that had sprouted up around D.F.S., which, from a distance, reminded me of the sweaty, sardonic camaraderie you typically see at high-stakes poker events. At the time, the crusade against D.F.S. felt a few degrees too hot — DraftKings and FanDuel struck me as obviously gambling sites, but the game itself felt sort of like homework. You research players. You build a spreadsheet. You project data and enter a team. You watch the team either fulfill or fall short of your projections. The next day, you start over again. The ruinous thrill of other forms of gambling — sports betting, blackjack, poker — just wasn’t there.

Instead, I came across a different sort of problem: a rapacious ecosystem in which high-volume gamblers, often aided by computer scripts and optimization software that allow players to submit hundreds or even thousands of lineups at a time, repeatedly take advantage of new players, who, after watching an ad, deposit some money on DraftKings and FanDuel and start betting.

​The biggest problem is that expert players relentlessly hunt for, and take advantage of, inexperienced players.

Bumhunting” is a word that comes from the poker world. It means seeking out an inexperienced player and mercilessly exploiting him for all he’s worth. Bumhunters are pariahs because they turn what can be a cerebral, competitive game into its most cynical iteration, and, in the process, discourage that new player from ever coming back. But poker has built-in safeguards against rampant bumhunting — new players tend to play at lower limits, which make it harder for bumhunters to take in huge profits. The bumhunter’s dream is to play thousands of games of poker a day against a never-ending line of fresh, inexperienced newbies. He falls short of that lofty goal because he has to actually bet, raise or fold his hands – he can play multiple tables at once, but he cannot fully automate his bumhunting.

In the game lobbies of DraftKings and FanDuel, however, sharks are free to flood the marketplace with thousands of entries every day, luring inexperienced, bad players into games in which they are at a sizable disadvantage. The imbalanced winnings in D.F.S. have been an open secret since this past September, when Bloomberg Businessweek published an exposé on the habits of high-volume players. The numbers are damning. According to DraftKings data obtained by the New York State attorney general’s office, between 2013 and 2014, 89.3 percent of players had a negative return on investment. A recent McKinsey study showed that in the first half of the 2015 Major League Baseball season, 91 percent of the prize money was won by a mere 1.3 percent of the players.

​It's nearly impossible to avoid being matched against someone who vastly exceeds your own skill level.

For the 17 weeks I played D.F.S., whether at a $5 entry fee or for $100, I routinely was matched up against top players. But unless I examined win rates and researched the strengths and weaknesses of my opponents, I would never have known that I was being repeatedly bumhunted by high-volume players.

On Dec. 16, for example, I entered three $20 N.B.A. head-to-head contests on DraftKings. My opponents were gunz4hire, Dinkpiece and Nadia4Fashion. Gunz4hire was then ranked 47th on the Rotogrinders players ranking and is generally considered one of the better players in the world. Dinkpiece, who was 20th on that same list, is the alias for Drew Dinkmeyer, a former stock trader whose winnings in D.F.S. have been so well publicized that he has his own Wall Street Journal stipple drawing.

On Christmas, the biggest day in the N.B.A.’s regular season, I entered 17 head-to-head contests on DraftKings for prices between $1 and $20. Once again, I was matched up against Dinkpiece and gunz4hire, along with a handful of other professionals.

The next day, I entered three more $20 N.B.A. contests. I was able to avoid Dinkpiece and gunz4hire, but found myself in a $20 head-to-head against Birdwings, the 2nd-ranked player in the Rotogrinders rankings.

In three days, I played three of the best D.F.S. players in the world.

​Kang ends with a hope for the future. I was glad to see that he didn't call for a large, regulatory framework or an entire shutdown of the daily fantasy sports industry. Instead, he points out that simple transparency could eliminate much of the problem.

There is, in theory, a version of D.F.S. that could work. All that’s required is a transparent marketplace in which a player can reasonably expect to enter a head-to-head or 50-50 or even one of the big-money tournaments without going up against hundreds of lineups generated by professional gamblers who have been lying in wait for him.

​

For 2016, I want to shift my reading focus a little bit. I find and read a lot of longer articles on the web, but I'm often conflicted between spending lots of time reading in-depth reporting and opinions vs reading enough books to meet my reading goals.

I'm going to drastically lower my Goodreads reading goal: from 70 books down to 40 books. It's easy to hit a high reading goal when I'm reading mostly science fiction and fantasy. It's harder to do when I'm reading more literary novels and non-fiction. This lower reading goal will give me the space to read more on the web, read longer books, and read slower books than I ordinarily would.

Here are my 2016 goals (and the corresponding reading list).

More Literary Fiction

I enjoyed the experiences I had with literary fiction last year. I'll do more of it this year. The key seems to be finding books that are long on the human experience and short on American middle-class angst. I'll keep an eye out and add them to my reading ideas list as I find them.

Non-Fiction

Since I completely failed at this last year, I'm going to take another run at it this year. My list of potential books was good, it was just my execution that stunk. I'll copy over everything from last year's list to this year's list.

Fix the Oops

Last year, I listed Jack Vance on my goals list. I had been wanting to read Jack McDevitt too, although I hadn't listed him in my goals. Unfortunately, I went to my reading list and added a bunch of books by Jack McDevitt and none by Jack Vance. Oops. This year, I'll actually read some books by Jack Vance.

Enjoy Comics

Adam's been feeding me a list of recommended comics and graphic novels. I've also run across a few on my own. I'll actually read some of them this year.

Hard Science Fiction

I'm still having a hard time consistently finding good hard science fiction novels. I'm going to continue to look for them and read them as I find them.

Finish the 2014 and 2015 Goals

In 2014, I wanted to read the Culture novels and the Wheel of Time series. I made good progress, but didn't finish either series. I'll continue to work through them again in 2016. I also plan to finish reading the Alex Benedict series from the 2015 reading ideas list.

I also still want to re-read some of my favorite books.

Interesting Hooks

I know I'm going to come across interesting sounding books as I go through the year. I might as well make it a goal to read some of them.

Over this past year, I read 69 books, a total of 31,138 pages. I had set a reading goal of 70 books and just barely missed it. By comparison, I read 3 fewer books than in 2014, but 154 more pages.

Overall, 2015 was a mixed bag for book reading. I had a hard time hitting my Goodreads goal. I'm happy with the literary fiction that I read, but disappointed that I didn't read more non-fiction. I read more hard science fiction (good), but didn't re-read any old favorites (bad). My reading goals were supposed to give me a focus, but I wasn't disciplined enough to actually read everything that I wanted to.

Here's how I did in each specific goal.

Reading Specific Authors

I had picked out several different authors that I wanted to explore this year. I did fairly well on this goal. I was:

• Brent Weeks: all 3 books
• Guy Gavriel Kay: 4 of 6 novels, including both of the duologies that I really wanted to read
• Robert Silverberg: 3 short story collections, out of 11 book ideas
• Jack McDevitt: 5 out of 14 novels, 2 in the Academy series and 3 in the Alex Benedict series
• William Gibson: nothing

I didn't read nearly as much of Silverberg as I'd originally intended to and I seemed to have skipped William Gibson entirely. I'm pretty happy with everything else though.

Reread Old Favorites

I failed at this goal. Theoretically, I gave myself permission to go back and re-read old favorites. In practice, I never actually did it. I did end up rereading Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, but I wouldn't have even done that much had I not been reading them along with my wife.

Literary Fiction

I had pulled together a list of 6 literary novels that caught my eye. I surprised myself by actually reading 4 of them: Cloud Atlas, The Shadow of the Wind, The Orphan Master's Son, and The Book of Strange New Things. I consider The Orphan Master's Son and Cloud Atlas to be two of the best books that I read this year.

Hard Science Fiction

I've been wanting to read science fiction that's heavy on the science. I picked out 8 books and read 4 of them: The Martian, Dragon's Egg, Time, and Yesterday's Kin. I'd recommend both The Martian and Dragon's Egg to anyone else looking to read some science fiction.

Non-Fiction

I picked out 21 interesting books for my reading ideas list. I read none of them. This was an abject failure.

Interesting Hooks

I picked out 23 different books (or series) for my reading ideas list. I ended up reading 10 of them, which is great for a list that was basically a pile of anything that sounded interesting. Highlights include The Just City, The Three-Body Problem, and A Night of Blacker Darkness.

This isn't an actual review of the movie. Rather, it's a summation of the thoughts that went through my mind as I watched the movie for the first time. There will be spoilers, so you probably don't want to read it until after you've seen the movie.

I'll start by saying that I quite liked it. It felt like a Star Wars movie should. I took my two oldest daughters (ages 8 and 7) with me to see the movie, yesterday. We spent the last week watching the original trilogy (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi). This movie felt very similar in tone and atmosphere. After the debacle of the prequels, it was great to see real Star Wars back on the big screen.

The movie was well written, but not necessarily well plotted. I say this because it had too many elements of the original trilogy in it. It felt like good fan fiction in both the best of ways (gave you the same feeling that you had watching the original) and the worst of ways (gave you plot points that were similar to the original).

The beginning of the movie felt like A New Hope. A crucial secret is entrusted to a cute droid who immediately draw's the audience's sympathy. The droid, and it's unsuspecting keepers, are hunted by stormtroopers. Our initially naive hero lives on a desert world (Tatooine vs Jakku) and knows of the broader conflict but has never experienced it.

The end of the movie felt like Return of the Jedi. There was a mission to destroy a super weapon. A small team needed to infiltrate a facility to lower the shields protecting the super weapon. A larger group of pilots waited for the shield to drop and then proceeded with attack runs against the vulnerability. Even the command center sets were similar to the ones used at the end of A New Hope.

Everything about the movie was great, except for the fact that the plot was a rehash of things we've already seen. I was hoping for something new and got something familiar instead. It's not a fatal flaw and I'll still buy it and enjoy watching it. But it was disappointing.

There was at least one death of a main character. Someone's been to the George R. R. Martin / Joss Whedon school of main character death.

BB8 is a great addition to the cast of droids. He's super emotive and sympathetic. I'm already looking forward to seeing more of him in future movies.

I'm left with one overarching question: who is Rey? She's strong in the Force and the movies have conditioned us believe that the force is strong in the Skywalker line. But she was abandoned (kidnapped and sold?) on Jakku at a very young age and has no idea who her family is. No one gives any indication that she's related to Luke or Leia in any way. So who is she, how did she get left on Jakku, and who did she inherit her Force sensitivity from?

Disney made it very clear that the Expanded Universe (stories from the novels, graphic novels, games, etc) wasn't going to be canon. Still, I feel like this story drew from the Expanded Universe in very good ways. Here's a couple of examples.

1. Han and Leia were married.
2. They had a force sensitive son.
3. In the EU, their children were Jaicen, Jaina, and Anakin. Ben, in the movie, is obviously named after a prior main character (Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi). The name is in the same vein as the EU and was well picked.
4. The massive super weapon uses the entire power of a star to destroy worlds. In the EU, there's a ship call the Sun Crusher that also uses the power of an entire star to destroy worlds.
5. Luke Skywalker opened a Jedi academy.
6. Luke had at least one student turn to the Dark Side, forcing Luke into hiding both for survival and to reexamine his qualifications as a Jedi Master and teacher.
7. In the EU, one of the Solo kids (Jaicen, I believe) turns to the Dark Side. In The Force Awakens, Han and Leia's son turns to the Dark Side.
8. In the EU, one of the lost students was Kyp Durron, who stole the Sun Crusher and used it for evil. In The Force Awakens, the lost student is Ben (Kylo Ren), who's partially responsible for using the super weapon for evil.

When I saw Poe Dameron's squad of crack shooting X-Wing pilots, I wanted to hear someone say "Rogue Squadron" just once.

Harrison Ford was Han Solo. He hasn't lost a bit of the role. He was older, slightly less cocky, more experienced and had seen more pain. But he was every bit the Han Solo that we remember and love.

It was good to see C3PO again, but his role was pure cameo. Unfortunately, it wasn't critical to the plot in any way.

First Order? Republic? Resistance? I have no idea what the political order of this story is. The prequels went way overboard in political exposition. The new movie could have used a smidge more explanation. By the end of the movie, I was pretty sure that the galaxy had split into the New Republic and the First Order. The New Republic was officially leaving the First Order alone but was unofficially supporting The Resistance as they resisted the First Order's rule in their own backyard. This is pure supposition though, as the movie made no effort to explain what had happened after the Battle of Endor.

Luke was training other Jedi? Uh, what happened to them? Did Kylo Ren kill them all? The movie might have made an offhand reference to that. If not, where are they?

Chewbecca's suit was too new. It made him look younger, rather than looking older like everyone else.

Kylo Ren's turn to the dark side is exactly what Annakin's could have been, in a different, better, universe. There was emotional pain and angst, but it was so much better done. Ben looked like a hurting individual who had turned to the Dark Side as a source of strength. Prequel Anakin just looked like a whiny, creeper teenager.

Kylo Ren asked the spirit of his grandfather, Darth Vader, for help. Annakin turned back to the Light Side of the force at the end of Jedi. Was Kylo Ren asking a real spirit for help or just speaking as people speak at a grave side? Is the spirit of Darth Vader really out there? I assume he was just "praying" for strength, but Luke got guidance from Obi-Wan and Yoda often enough to make it just a little bit possible that Kylo Ren really had been hearing from Darth Vader.

Who was the old guy in the village, at the beginning? It seems like there was a back story there or he was a person of some importance. After being hustled off aboard Kylo Ren's shuttle, he completely disappeared from the movie.

The Star Destroyers, Tie Fighters, and shuttles looked bigger and badder in a believable way. Not that they were pumped up but that they were a truer representation of the platonic forms. In a way, they're what would have been in the original trilogy, had the filmmaking tech been better.

Everything looked lived in again. The ships, planets, and costumes in the prequels were way too bright and shiny. The best part about rewatching A New Hope was seeing just how scratched, dented, and worn everything in the universe was.

They found an actor for Kylo Ren that looks like he could actually be the son of Han and Leia. That's awesome. True, his hair came straight from the Hayden Christensen school of angsty Jedi teens, but he was trying to emulate his grandfather so it all works out.

I wonder what Mark Hamill's reaction was when he got his part?

• "So, part of my script is missing."
• "Hey, R2D2 has more of a role than me!"
• "Does this appearance come with an actual paycheck or just the hint of one?"

That planetary super weapon can shoot how far? And you can see three other planets blow up from wherever that temple / bar was? I'm all about suspending disbelief during a Star Wars movie. I expect the physics to be wrong. But the physics of that weapon are so off the charts wrong as to shatter my suspension of disbelief.

Can we please have a movie that doesn't involve a massive, spherical weapon that needs to be destroyed? There could be plenty of plot and excitement in "just" fleet vs fleet action. The Expanded Universe had tons of great stories that didn't involve super weapons. They've already shown that they can use elements of the EU in the new movies. Let's take it a bit further and borrow some ideas of what other kinds of conflicts people can have.

A desert planet that's not Tatooine? I don't see the point. Just put it on Tatooine and be done with it. You know you wanted to. Jakku brings nothing to the story that Tatooine didn't already have. Except for saying "See? We don't put Tatooine in every movie". But that loses its impact when Jakku and Tatooine are basically identical.

Clearly, this was the right franchise for J. J. Abrams. Too bad he couldn't have done it five years ago, in time to save New Trek from him.

John Williams still has it. Good score.

$12.99 on Kindle

Seth Dickinson explained the conceit of his novel, on Scalzi's blog. I'm a sucker for subverting expectations this way.

“My master plan would’ve changed the course of history! I put my life into this — I leveraged politicians, I conjured up shell corporations, I put puppets on every throne and agents in every council. I built something! I had a vision!

And they call you a hero. What did you do? You stumbled in at the last moment and broke everything.

If heroism means standing up for the status quo, then I’ll have no part of it. The world’s full of suffering. Someone must act.”

“The Traitor Baru Cormorant is the story of a young woman trying to tear down a colonial empire, avenge her fathers, and liberate her home. The Masquerade wants to rule the world, so that they can fix it. Baru can’t beat them from the outside, killing them one by one with a sword the way Luke Skywalker or Aragorn might — unlike most evil empires, they’re smart people who take sensible precautions. Baru wouldn’t stand a chance against a single Masquerade marine.

Being surpassingly clever and excitingly ruthless, Baru decides to destroy the Masquerade from the inside. She’ll join their civil service, prove herself as a really awesome operative, and secure enough power to get what she wants. (She thinks Luke should do the same thing.)

Baru will, in short, become an evil overlord: a brilliant superspy plotting triple-cross operations right under the noses of her masters, conspiring to topple nations with banking schemes, daring heists, ornamental men, secret alliances, private armies, napalm, pirates, and the occasional sword duel, when absolutely necessary. An evil overlord working for good!”

I, myself, am often reminded of life's little ironies.

The story begins in the early 1990s, around the time Selig led a coup against Vincent, whom the owners deemed insufficiently devoted to their interests. Selig used the popular and gregarious Bush—the public face of the Texas Rangers, though he was just a minority owner—to whip the requisite votes in favor of removing the incumbent commissioner. The two small-market owners had a quiet understanding between them: Upon ousting Vincent, Selig would serve as interim commissioner, then, once the battlefield dust cleared, yield the throne to Bush.

Though Bush was a friend and longtime supporter of Vincent, he agreed to rally the troops to support the vote of "no confidence" in the commissioner, based largely on the promise that Selig "would support his dream to become baseball's next Commissioner." It didn't work out that way. Selig would spend the next 22 years in Bush's dream job. He would preside over a players' strike that culminated in the only cancelled World Series in baseball history—something the Great Depression and two world wars couldn't accomplish—but then help engineer a renaissance, thanks to the boom in attendance at new retro-designed family-friendly ballparks (which replaced many cold and ugly '60s and '70s mixed-use behemoths), a surge in colorful international talent from places like Japan and the Dominican Republic, and, yes, the steroid-infused home run craze of the late '90s and early '00s. Selig was the proud steward of baseball's rebirth, but once the steroid jig was up, he would become the flustered face of indignation.

The commissioner's old ally in Texas, stuck with nothing else to do after Selig left him twisting in the wind for more than a year, never officially telling him that he had no intentions of abdicating, would be pushed by Karl Rove into running for governor. Bush unseated the incumbent in 1994, he launched a bid for the White House five years after that, and the rest is history.

You'll remember that President Bush's Cabinet included Condoleeza Rice, who wants to be the NFL's commissioner. It'd be an interesting turn of events if those two ever end up in their true dream jobs.

∞

Andrew Pollack wrote a shocking expose of corporate greed, revealing that Turing Pharmaceuticals jacked the price of Daraprim from $13.50 a tablet to $750 a tablet. This is a 62-year old drug.

Pollack spent 21 paragraphs writing about the importance of this drug and the shockingly unapologetic greed demonstrated by Turing Pharmaceuticals. I spent 21 paragraphs wondering how a company could increase the price of an unpatented drug by 5,500% without being undercut by a competitor.

In paragraph #22, Pollack finally decided to toss off a few sentences about that.

With the price now high, other companies could conceivably make generic copies, since patents have long expired. One factor that could discourage that option is that Daraprim’s distribution is now tightly controlled, making it harder for generic companies to get the samples they need for the required testing.

Oh-ho. It's government regulation. Manufacturers of generics need to compare their own prototype pills to Daraprim, before they can get government permission to market and sell a generic. Prescription laws make it hard to obtain Daraprim without a prescription and Turing's control over its own supply chain ensures that nothing leaks out. In essence, government restrictions on trade are giving Turing a monopoly on a patent free drug. Turing's price hike would be impossible without this government protection.

The New York Times article frames this as an issue of greed. But greed is a universal constant. It's always with us. Greed is never an explanation for unpleasant behavior. The real question is why nothing is acting as a check on greed. In this case, the government is blocking that market based check. I can see two solutions.

1. Stop restricting access to pharmaceuticals. If the FDA didn't tightly control drug distribution, generic manufacturers could easily obtain their own supply of Daraprim and start cranking out much cheaper copies. Turing would be forced to lower their prices to match and greed would be kept in check.
2. If you are going to restrict access to pharmaceuticals, there should be an exception in the law that allows generic manufacturers to easily obtain access to the main drug, for the purposes of cloning it. I see no good reason to give Turing Pharmaceuticals a government enforced monopoly on the drug's distribution and supply once the patent protections have expired.

Once again, the New York Times has made the free market into the villain of the piece. I think the real villain is the government restrictions that give Turing Pharmaceuticals power it doesn't need and shouldn't have.

California recently tried to reform its civil asset forfeiture laws, something supported by over three-quarters of all Californians. The bill was watered down to nothing and then killed off entirely, after intense lobbying by the police unions and police leadership.

In other words, state and federal law-enforcement officials stopped this state bill that would protect people from oftentimes unfair takings of their property because they depend on the money and it's too much of a hassle for police to make sure a targeted person has been convicted of a crime.

And this is the reason I don't respect the police. I'm not impressed that you "put your life on the line", if you also think that there's nothing wrong with seizing someone's property without ever convicting them of a crime.

∞

Starship: Mutiny
by Mike Resnick

My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Read From: 27 August 2015 - 30 August 2015
Goal: Flotsam & Jetsam

This piece of space opera stars Wilson Cole, a space navy officer who never met an order he liked and who makes a habit of being demoted for cause. He's assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt for his insubordination. Once there, he proceeds to violate orders multiple times before finally mutinying and taking over the ship.

This is all supposed to be in the service of a grand adventure, starring a supremely competent officer. It fails because Cole is a jerk who's constantly explaining his own superior understanding of what everyone else should be doing. Worse, he's a loose cannon who acts on his own initiative, always impressed by his own abilities. If you developed a plan no failed to tell him the entire thing, he's exactly the type of officer that would screw it up, by taking the part of it he did know and deciding to "improve" it.

All of the other characters are wafer thin and seemingly only exist to either admire Cole's brilliance or make Cole look more brilliant by playing the part of the idiotic foil. There's the weapons tech who worships Cole, just because he disciplined the tech for being high on duty. There's the alien best friend, who will support him no matter what. And there's the beautiful security chief who will tell him everything, subverting ship,security to do so, , and who (of course) ends up in his bed.

Having been blinded by the light shining from Cole's halo, I have no interest in reading any further in this series.

Worldcon presented the Hugo Awards last night. The Hugo's are science fiction's oldest and most prestigious awards, given by the science fiction fans of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). These were the results in the categories I cared about and voted in.

• Best Novel went to The Three Body Problem, by Cixin Liu, Ken Liu translator.
• Best Novelette went to “The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator.
• Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form went to Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman.
• Best Novella, no award given.
• Best Novelette, no award given.
• Best Short Story, no award given.

Worldcon gave the Best Novel award to the right book and I'm thrilled how that turned out. Aside from that, I'm disappointed in these results. They show me that the Worldcon membership has become political and is no longer interested in science fiction.

This was the year that the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies both published slates of suggested works for Hugo nominations. The Sad Puppies are led by a man who's Hispanic, former gun shop owner, and NRA member (Larry Correia); alongside a man who's a naval chaplain married to a black woman (Brad R. Torgersen). The Rabid Puppies are led by Vox Day (Theodore Beale), a performance artist (one hopes), who loves to provoke with inflammatory rhetoric that openly flirts with racism and misogyny.

Larry and Brad have both long felt that science fiction has become a boring wasteland of message fiction, more concerned with political correctness than with entertaining stories. The stories they dislike tend to be written by racial, sexual, or religious minorities. Naturally, Larry and Brad were attacked as racist homophobes, who wanted to keep science fiction pure for white, male authors. (Wired published a fairly even-handed overview of the whole Puppies saga.)

I'm disappointed that the Worldcon membership had such a political reaction to the Puppies. Many of them vowed to give no award, rather than give an award to a work that the Puppies had nominated. Now that the results are out, we can see that many voters did just that: no award was given in five different categories. This was overtly political voting. It wasn't based on the quality of the stories. The "trufans" voted according to whether or not they liked the fans of a given story. I'm disappointed that a fan base that supports tolerance and diversity would judge a work not on its own merits but on the merits of its supporters.

It has also become clear to me that the Worldcon membership is less interested in science fiction than it is in literary merit and stories of the fantastic. This is most clear in two of this year's winners: “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” and Guardians of the Galaxy.

The Hugo Voter's Pack included a copy of “The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, alongside an interview with the author, Thomas Olde Heuvelt. Heuvelt said:

The whole turning upside down was a metaphor to begin with, so I think this is more a love story, or a humorous-grief story, or a fantasy than a real SF.

Having read the story, I wholeheartedly agree. Heuvelt constructed the story around the grief that Toby (the narrator) feels after breaking up with his girlfriend, Sophie. This breakup turned Toby's emotional world upside down, even as gravity reverses all over the globe and the real world literally turns upside down.

It's an interesting concept, but it has everything to do with emotional upheaval and nothing to do with science. It's a good story (although not to my personal taste), but I don't think it should be a candidate for (let alone a winner of) science fiction's foremost award.

It was up against three stories featuring various elements of science. All were well written and would have made deserving winners. The Worldcon membership chose instead to give the award to a literary tale that didn't include any science fiction.

Guardians of the Galaxy was a fantastic film. It was brilliant, fun, and funny. I've watched it three times and even bought a copy. But it's a movie based on a comic book. True, it happens in space and features ray guns, space ships, and a world destroying energy source. But there's no science involved anywhere in the story. It's a story of the fantastic, not a story involving science.

The Hugo membership chose Guardians of the Galaxy over Interstellar, a movie that involved true science fiction in its best elements. Interstellar showed a world ravaged by blight and the scientists and explorers that risked everything to build a ship and fly through a wormhole, to find a new home for humanity. The story involved real science, was well written, well acted, and entertaining. In my opinion, it was everything that a Hugo winning movie should be. But it lost to a truly entertaining comic book movie.

Based on this year's nominations, reactions to who nominated works, and which works won awards, I think it's clear that the Worldcon membership is no longer interested in the science part of science fiction. Instead, they're interested in fantasy, stories of the fantastic, and literary stories. I enjoy those, but I want to find a group of fans who still appreciates, and honors, the fiction of science, stories that can both entertain and teach you about the laws of the natural universe.

$9.99 on Kindle

How much do you know about the notorious Scopes trial? Glenn Reynolds says that whatever it is, it's probably wrong.

TODAY IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SCOPES TRIAL. Let me just note that what you think you know about it is probably wrong — especially if what you think you know about it comes from watching Inherit The Wind. I highly recommend Ed Larson’s excellent treatment, A Summer For The Gods.

What's the book about?

If you haven't seen the film version of Inherit the Wind, you might have read it in high school. And even people who have never heard of either the movie or the play probably know something about the events that inspired them: The 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," during which Darwin's theory of evolution was essentially put on trial before the nation. Inherit the Wind paints a romantic picture of John Scopes as a principled biology teacher driven to present scientific theory to his students, even in the teeth of a Tennessee state law prohibiting the teaching of anything other than creationism. The truth, it turns out, was something quite different.

In his fascinating history of the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, Edward J. Larson makes it abundantly clear that Truth and the Purity of Science had very little to do with the Scopes case. Tennessee had passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution, and the American Civil Liberties Union responded by advertising statewide for a high-school teacher willing to defy the law. Communities all across Tennessee saw an opportunity to put themselves on the map by hosting such a controversial trial, but it was the town of Dayton that came up with a sacrificial victim: John Scopes, a man who knew little about evolution and wasn't even the class's regular teacher. Chosen by the city fathers, Scopes obligingly broke the law and was carted off to jail to await trial.

What happened next was a bizarre mix of theatrics and law, enacted by William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense. Though Darrow lost the trial, he made his point--and his career--by calling Bryan, a noted Bible expert, as a witness for the defense. Summer for the Gods is a remarkable retelling of the trial and the events leading up to it, proof positive that truth is stranger than science.

For the past two days, I've been listening to Dan Carlin's conversation with Sam Harris. This morning, I heard an exchange around the Confederate Flag that caught my attention. First, Dan floated the thought of a redesigned Confederate flag, to show regional pride without showing racism.

I would love to interview these folks, because whenever someone writes me a letter about this, they always say "It's not about the slaves and it's not about the racial situation, it's about the right to seceede, to protect your life, it's a right to do all ...", in other words, take every reason for the civil war besides the slavery aspect and they will say it's about that because nobody's, or very few people I've ever spoken to, say "Yeah, I fly the flag because black people are inferior and blah, blah, blah." I would love to see a notation then to the flag, you know there's a lot of flags from other countries where something will happen and a new regime will take over or something will change and they'll alter the flag slightly, you know we'll always put another star on our flag when a new state came in. Seems to me you could put something like a chain being snapped or something in the center of the flag or something that indicated that this flag isn't in favor of slavery or this is the post-slavery Confederacy or "Welcome back black people to the New South", whatever. Something that just sort of said, "You know the little chain on the flag being freed, yeah, that shows that this flag does not represent something that said that the slavery was the part that we would like to see returned."

A few minutes later, Dan came back to that thought and expanded on it a bit more.

In the emails that I'll get about this people will talk about "It's just a pride in your heritage sort of thing". I think the pity then is that there isn't an alternative symbol that if you wanted to say "I'm a Southerner and I'm proud of it" that you could show that didn't have the same overtones, that didn't appear to some people that you're not just saying "Yes, I'm proud of the South but I'm proud of things the South did before the Civil War". I mean the United States for example has a whole bunch of other flags that we've flown at one time or another, the Gadsen Flag, all those kinds of things, which different people can appropriate to show different aspects or different ideas. Seems to me, if you're into Southern pride—and I don't think there's anything wrong with having pride in your heritage, or your grandfathers, or anything like that. It's a pity that the symbol you could use to show that has all sorts of other overtones that are not just deeply offensive but that make people who are valued members of your community feel, not just like second class citizens, but maybe even a little afraid. Who would want to show that in a way that took other Southerners and, instead of making them feel proud, would make them feel the opposite of proud?

I decided to take that idea and run with. What if I took the Confederate flag and changed the colors? I decided to keep the basic elements, to represent some continuity of Southern culture, but change the colors to signify that this is a New South that doesn't embed the racism and hate of the past.

Original Flag

I think the defining features of the original flag are the bold, red field that dominates the flag and the two blue bars that crisscross the field. That's what I need to change, to make this feel like an updated, more modern, version of the flag.

Redesign 1

For my first attempt, I wanted to deemphasize the red. I moved the blue from the bars to the field and moved the red from the field to the stars and the outline of the bars.

Redesign 2

I didn't like how bright (eye searing?) the red and white bars were. I decided to make the field white and match blue bars with white stars. I deemphasized the red even more, relegating it to the outline of the bars.

Redesign 3

The second attempt was better than the first, but I didn't like the bright expanse of white, now that the entire field was white. I made the field blue again and decided to get rid of the red entirely, replacing it with green. Now the stars are green and the outline of the bars is green.

I'll say that the green is there because it can represent the rebirth of the South into the new South.

Redesign 4

This is nearly identical to the third redesign. In this one, I removed the outline of the bars, to make for a starker contrast against the blue field and a further distancing from the Old South design.

What do you think? Can you imagine seeing one of these flags as a common symbol of the New South, one not associated with racism and hate?

River of Stars
by Guy Gavriel Kay

My rating: ★★★★★
Read From: 18 June 2015–29 June 2015
Goal: Specific Authors

This is another novel of Kitai, Guy Gavriel Kay's analog to historical China. This book takes place in a time roughly equivalent to the early 12th century. Kay described his own setting, in the book's "Acknowledgement" section, along with his reason for working in historical fantasy, rather than historical fiction.

River of Stars is a work shaped by themes, characters, and events associated with China’s Northern Song Dynasty before and after the fall of Kaifeng.

... I am significantly more at home shaping thoughts and desires for Lin Shan and Ren Daiyan, or developing the characters of my two Lu brothers, than I would be imposing needs and reflections (and relationships) on their inspirations: Li Qingzhao, the best-known female poet in China’s history, General Yue Fei, or the magnificent Su Shi and his gifted younger brother. Not to mention other figures at the court (including Emperor Huizong himself) in the time leading up to and through the dynasty’s fall.

But what is the river of stars? In Kitai legends, it is that which lies between mortal men and their dreams. It is what must be crossed over, after death, to reach the afterlife. That's an appropriate title because the major theme of the book is what is remembered of a life, after that life is over. River of Stars focuses largely the life of the main character, Ren Daiyan and explores what he did and how he was remembered.

Kay is fascinated by the ways in which the decisions and events that seem almost trivial at the time become something that reverberates throughout time. He's also fascinated by the opposite side of that: the things that could have been momentous, but sink with barely a ripple because of what was happening elsewhere or because of the way in which a life was cut short.

All of that leads, inexorably I think, to a meditation on the way in which we construct narratives to explain the world around us. I think the result musings were frequently poignant.

He died too young in a war in which too many died.

We cannot know, being trapped in time, how events might have been altered if the dead had not died. We cannot know tomorrow, let alone a distant future. A shaman might claim to see ahead in mist but most of them (most of them) cannot truly do this: they go into the spirit world to find answers for today. Why is this person sick? Where will we find water for the herds? What spirit is angry with our tribe?

But sometimes storytellers want to inhabit certainty. They assume more than mortals ought. A tale-spinner by a hearth fire or gathering a crowd in a market square or putting brush to paper in a quiet room, deep into his story, the lives he’s chronicling, will deceive himself into believing he has the otherworldly knowledge of a fox spirit, a river spirit, a ghost, a god.

He will say or write such things as, “The boy killed in the Altai attack on the Jeni encampment was likely to have become a great leader of his people, one who could have changed the north.”

Or, “Lu Mah, the poet’s son, was one whose personal desire would have kept him living quietly, but his sense of duty and his great and growing wisdom would have drawn him to the court. He was lost to Kitai, and that made a difference.”

However boldly someone says this, or writes it, it remains a thought, a wish, desire, longing spun of sorrow. We cannot know.

We can say Mah’s was a death too soon, as with O-Yan of the Jeni, their kaghan’s little brother, slain in the first attack of a grassland rising. And we can think about ripples and currents, and wonder at the strangeness of patterns found—or made. A first death in the north and the death farthest south in the Altai invasion, in the years of the Twelfth Dynasty when the maps were redrawn.

But then, maps are always being redrawn. The Long Wall had once been the forbidding, fiercely guarded border of a great empire. We look back and we look ahead, but we live in the time we are allowed.

A related theme is the way in which we, of the present, look back at the past and try to draw lessons from it. But that too is a construct. Life happens and is often incomprehensible in the happening. It's only much later that someone can see a pattern or a lesson.

He died on that last thought, not the one about fearing a sword. That had come a moment before, while the man who ended his short span of days (Pu’la of the Altai was seventeen years old, his father’s only son) had been levelling a bow.

It was a similar death—on guard at night, an arrow—to that of another young rider two summers before. O-Yan of the Jeni, fourteen years of age, had been killed by an arrow loosed by Pu’la’s own skilled and deadly father on the night the Altai attacked the Jeni camp, beginning their assertion of themselves upon the world.

There might have been a lesson, a meaning, in this, or not. Most likely not, for who was there to learn of it, and what would the teaching be?

I gained two things from this novel. The first is a continuation of my desire to learn more about Chinese history and culture. Kay has convinced me that that history is rich and deep and worth studying. Second, is a humility about looking back at that history. The events of the past are the sum of the hopes, dreams, fears, and actions of the people of the past. Their stories are what's worth focusing on, more than the supposed lessons of the past.

$10.99 on Kindle

Here's the hook: apprentice librarians, practically living in a magical library, learning lots and of powerful magic. How would that change you? Here's how author Scott Hawkins describes his novel.

Along those same lines, what if the guy you room with has, through diligent study of his corner of the magic library, become the most dangerous person alive? He’s invulnerable-ish. Maybe he’s not quite at the Superman level, but he’s more than a match for, say, a battalion of infantry with artillery and air support. Your roommate is the absolute pinnacle of the Earthly food chain, and he just drank your last beer. Again.

Maybe when you first moved in together he was nice enough—or not. But over time, the knowledge that he’s completely immune to any sort of discipline has had an impact on his manners. He never vacuums. There are dishes in the sink. The last time he stole your beer you left him a polite note. He broke your arm. Your buddy who resurrects people fixed it—you got her a pint of Haagen-Dazs the last time you bought groceries, so she didn’t even keep you waiting for long–but it still smarted like a sonofagun.

Do you leave another note? Or just suck it up and go to bed?

…What if you decided you wanted out?

How would that even be possible? Even if you did escape after a lifetime in that environment, what would normal people seem like to you?

What would you seem like to them?

…Still, even with their access strictly controlled, these librarians learn some interesting stuff. One guy talks to animals. Another spends weekends commuting to the twenty-third millennium to go clubbing with friends. There’s a woman who keeps a spy army of ghost children, invisible to anyone but her.

Unless you’ve got the soul of a Peter Parker, just living in the vicinity of that kind of power would affect your personality.

The hook and description caught my interest. The editorial reviews solidified it.

“A spellbinding story of world-altering power and revenge…Hawkins has created a fascinating, unusual world in which ordinary people can learn to wield breathtaking power—and he's also written a compelling story about love and revenge that never loses sight of the human emotions at its heart. A wholly original, engrossing, disturbing, and beautiful book.”
—Kirkus (starred)

“An extravagant, beautifully imagined fantasy about a universe that is both familiar and unfamiliar…Hawkins makes nary a misstep in this award-worthy effort of imagination. You won't be able to put it down.”
—Booklist (starred)

"A bizarre yet utterly compelling debut...might remind readers of Robert Jackson Bennett's or Neil Gaiman's horror/fantasies.”
—Library Journal (starred)

“A first-rate novel… a sprawling, epic contemporary fantasy about cruelty and the end of the world, compulsively readable, with the deep, resonant magic of a world where reality is up for grabs. Unputdownable.”
—Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother and Makers

"The most genuinely original fantasy I’ve ever read. Hawkins plays with really, really big ideas and does it with superb invention, deeply affecting characters, and a smashing climax I did not see coming."
—Nancy Kress, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of Beggars in Spain

“A pyrotechnic debut...The most terrifyingly psychopathic depiction of a family of gods and their abusive father since Genesis.”
—Charles Stross, Hugo and Locus Award-winning author of Accelerando and The Apocalypse Codex

$4.99 on Kindle

Josh Vogt pitches his fantasy novel, over at Scalzi's site.

In Enter the Janitor, the Big Idea was that magic is actually hiding in plain sight. It’s evolved alongside humanity and taken on quite a different role than it used to hold. Rather than a religious function or mystic mumbo-jumbo, magic could be connected to our history of sanitation and hygiene. Think about how many little health rituals we practice every day; at the same time, keeping things clean is often done on auto-pilot, meaning we may miss very obvious clues that something supernatural might be in the works. How many commercials and ads treat cleaning tools and chemicals as literally magical implements? Animated soap bubbles…talking sponges…even the genie-like Mr. Clean.

Magic also could have become more of a corporate affair, staffed with janitors, plumbers, maids, and more who dedicate their lives to the craft, much like ancient wizards and mages and witches would’ve. Rather than saving the world from eldritch towers, they began to do so in plain sight, one clean window and one mopped floor at a time. They swapped out wands and staffs for squeegees and mops and spray bottles.

…The more I thought about this, the more I realized I needed to revel in exploring this ridiculous version of reality. And that’s when both the characters and the world they inhabited came fully to life in my mind. Janitor closets could be mystic portals. Garbage dumps could be repositories of power. Sewers could be…well…still sewers, but with stranger creatures slithering through them.

I think that's a very clever concept. I'm always suspicious of self-published works. (Was there something wrong with it, that a traditional publisher wouldn't grab it?) But this one has an interesting enough concept that I may give it a chance.

It's fashionable to decry the horrid pollution of gas guzzling, emission belching, fossil fuel cars. But how do they compare to life in late nineteenth century urban America? (I'll re-use this quote from my last reading idea.)

Even the wastes of horses were commodified.  The collection of urban manure had old, even ancient roots.  Again, the process is most easily documented in New York City.  Before 1878, individuals roamed the street and picked up manure.  In that year the Common Council supposedly sold an exclusive license to a William Hitchcock, who sold the street sweepings to farmers for fertilizer.  Street sweepings varied in quality and were worth more if from an asphalt street than if from a gravel street or a dirty alley.  They were always worth less than stable manure, a purer product.  The older pattern of individuals collecting street manure for urban gardens never fully went away, and as late as the first half of the twentieth century neighborhood children in the Italian American neighborhood of East Harlem did a thriving business collecting horse manure from the streets for backyard gardens in the area.

Say what you will about my Toyota Sienna minivan, but no one will ever have to step in, smell, or sweep up any poop from it. Modern life is far cleaner, healthier, and more hygienic thanks to the widespread adoption of the internal combustion engine. It's not the sexiest technology, but I'm very happy to have it.