[Links]
[links] Link salad arrives at Monday somewhat confused
Penguin and Random House owners agree joint venture — Publisher Pearson says it has agreed a deal with German media group Bertelsmann to combine their Penguin and Random House businesses. My prediction is that this will be good for almost no one, except a few executive bonus plans.
“English is a little bit like a child” — In which ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1){kind=small}
james-nicoll
Chemo on the Rocks — Food and chemo. (Via willyumtx
Wind power surpasses hydro for the first time ever in Northwest region — Go, us!
Physics PhD students make a zombie movie at the Large Hadron Collider facility — (Via David Goldman.)
Real-life tractor beam developed at NYU — Beam emits from a single source; only moves microscopic particles now.
IBM makes carbon nanotube computer chip breakthrough
What Is Climate Silence Costing Us? — Ultimately everything. Their bizarre, counterfactual, myopic approach to climate change is quite possibly going to be the ultimate, fatal legacy of the intellectuallyy barren and reactionary American conservative movement.
Master, The Tempest Is Raging — Feminist Mormon Housewives on conservative “humor” about natural disasters. Where were the jokes when God was disrupting the Republican National Convention?
Joss Whedon on Mitt Romney — Hahahah.
US more racist now than before Obama, poll shows — Not so surprisingly, four years of racist hate from the Tea Party and mainstream Republicans has come with a price: a new poll shows that racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008. […] They’re against change, they’re terrified of the future, they detest science, and are as closed minded as the Taliban. Besides being generally ignorant, and not very bright, they control almost 50% of the politicians in Washington. How embarrassing for our country. In other words, they’re everything people like me said they were from minute one: a GOP astroturf vehicle for their own base. A lot of my independent libertarian and moderate friends criticized me for being so hard on the Tea Party up front. Kind of like how some of my feminist friends criticized me for being so hard on Palin when McCain first announced her as his VP pick. Thing is, all you had to do was be paying attention beforehand.
Conservative Southern Values Revived: How a Brutal Strain of American Aristocrats Have Come to Rule America — America didn’t used to be run like an old Southern slave plantation, but we’re headed that way now. How did that happen? I really couldn’t say how accurate this article is, but wow does this hit a lot of my confirmation biases. As I say this as a sixth-generation Texan. (Via supersniffles
Expecting Fiscal Responsibility from a Republican Administration: The Triumph of Hope Over Experience — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on “facts” and “data” about Republican governance which the entire American electorate and media have conveniently forgotten. Bush who? (Hint: What was the state of the budget and the deficit when Bush took office? What was the state of the budget and deficit when he left office? I’ll bet good money 90% of Republicans cannot answer this question accurately.)
What Happens If Romney Loses? — Larison again, on the relatively lack of political consequences within the GOP of a probably Romney loss. [T]e Romney campaign has been vague enough that every faction will have things it can use to justify its own position and things it can use to blame its intra-party rivals.
?otD: Do you have it all figured out today?
10/29/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (chemo)
Body movement: 0.5 hour stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 8.0 hours (seven hours fitful overnight plus napping)
Weight: 227.2
Currently reading: Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
Related Posts
Posted: 5:23 am Mon October 29 2012 |
Where am I?
You are reading the blog of Jay Lake, speculative fiction writer and author of hundreds of short stories, many novels, and winner of the John W. Campbell Award.
Learn more here.
Comments
« [cancer] Chemo series three, session three, day three | [photos] Your Monday moment of zen »
Regarding the “English as a child” link, there is no such thing as a “pure” language, no matter what certain language purity crusaders may think. English isn’t even all that unusual in that area nor is it a language that excessively borrows from other languages (but for some reason, many English speakers always insist that their language is exceptional in some way, even though it’s really not). All languages borrow from other languages all the time. The only “pure” language is a dead language.
Good news on the increased use of windpower in the Pacific Northwest. Of course, the figure is still comparatively small – all German wind turbines combined generate about ten times as much energy – but it’s a good start.
Oh, English is about as bastard a language as they come. A creole of Germanic and Romance languages with a rock and roll vocabulary. (I am moderately familiar with the differing word corpus sizes in IE languages.) I find English purity peevers hilarious. One of my favorite things in English is all the parallel vocabularies we got out of the Norman Conquest. You know, pork/pig, beef/cow, poultry/chicken, etc.
As for wind power, yeah, the US is badly missing the boat, mostly thanks to countefactual conservative political fixations. Which are, frankly, the driver behind a lot of our biggest current failings here in USAnia.