Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad waits for the drums to stop beating

Review of Die Räder der Welt — At Phantasick-News, a German site. (Thanks to Marcel Bülles, my German translator.)

The Rejection Generator Project — The Rejection Generator rejects writers before an editor looks at a submission. Inspired by psychological research showing that after people experience pain they are less afraid of it in the future, The Rejection Generator helps writers take the pain out of rejection.

Mark Bourne Clarion West Scholarship Fund — A memorial for our dear friend. Check it out, and contribute if you can.

A View Inside the Sausage Grinder — Scrivener’s Error with more detailed legal neepery on the new ebook pricing lawsuit.

How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze . . . — Weird, weird piece.

Greenland ice sheet may be sliding away due to surface lake melt — Just a hypothesis so far (tip for denialists: what you like to confuse with “theory”), but more evidence of the inherent bias of reality in favor of a reality-based worldview. Weird, huh?

Roger Ailes: Soledad O’Brien Was ‘Named After A Prison’ — Ah, how I love the measured, thoughtful and rational tone of conservative discourse.

“Pro-Life” Community Very Upset More Women Will Not Be Collateral Damage in Their Religious Jihad Against Abortion — If they are so convinced they are right on the issue, why must they LIE about EVERYTHING? I would ask that of conservatives in general, and religious conservatives in particular.

If Romney Loses, the Republican Desire to Win the Presidency Will Trump All Other Considerations in 2016 — If Romney wins, it will be America turning a blind eye to the utter disaster that was the last period of Republican rule.

Mitt Romney thinks his wife lacks “dignity”? — Mitt Romney said this past January that he thinks stay at home moms taking care of small children are lacking in dignity since they’re not working real jobs. But Hilary Rosen!

Romney’s Live Mic Moment — But what stands out to me most is [Romney's] explicit statement of what seems to be his campaign strategy — remaining as vague as possible about what policies he’ll actually pursue. “I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go.” That’s because to get specific will alienate lot of voters. Nobody, not even Republicans, likes conservative policies when applied to them personally. Punishing the “other” is terrific GOP politics, but the reality is that even “real Americans” will get scorched of any of this ever turns out to be true.

Romney’s remarks on limiting tax deductions draw fire — Once again, conservative “ideas” aren’t popular when applied to conservatives personally. Removing the home mortgage interest deduction doesn’t punish liberal sluts or little brown people or the greedy poor, it punishes “real Americans”, and that will never fly with the GOP base. Republican voters like to imagine the cruelties behind which they rally will never apply to them. (See “the only moral abortion is my own” phenomenon for another glaring example of this deep hypocrisy inherent in the Right’s worldview.)

?otd: Got rhythm? Got music?

4/17/2012
Writing time yesterday: n/a (cancer stress)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.5 (fitful)
Weight: 240.0
Currently reading: Somewhere Else by Sally McLennan

Tags: Books, climate, Conventions, ebooks, gender, Language, Links, Mainspring, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, reviews, weird

Posted: 5:35 am Tue April 17 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad looks down upon the smiling faces

10 Epic Steampunk Cats — A funny little project for which I was both the initial inspiration and the writer of the introduction.

About Female Characters (or as I like to call them, Characters) — Adrienne Kress Is Wise. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Writer’s Block — Hahaha. (Via willyumtx.)

In Defense of “Nutty” Commas

What fictional character shares your birthday? — In my case, Forrest Gump and Freddie Krueger. (Snurched from Andrew Wheeler.)

Lots of planets have a north — Language Log on planetology and Dr. Who. Also, the comment section on this post is hilarious and well worth looking through.

Ways to Throw Your Sandwich Away — The Niece is funny. (Thanks to lillypond.)

Getting a sense of the census — A nifty slideshow about the 1940 census.

Cancer Medicine is Stuck in the Past — The chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society calls for a genomics-based approach.

Discovering the Mutants Among Us — Last year, the Sanger Institute boldly announced “We are all mutants” when a study was published showing that healthy individuals carry around 60 new mutations from their parents. I’m not sure why this is a bold announcement. I find it interesting but utterly unsurprising.

Emperor Penguins Counted From Space—A First — Um, wow…

The Wrong Stuff: North Korea’s Failure

The Messerschmitt Me 323 Gigant — A photo of one of my favorite WWII aircraft.

This Is, In Fact, Your Grandfather’s Safe Sex PSA — Whoo! (Thanks to danjite.)

The Wonderful, Unpredictable Life of the Occupy Movement — (Thanks to tillyjane.)

Breath-taking climate denial nonsense, this time aimed at NASA — [O]f the 49 signatories on that letter, not one is an actual working climate scientist. That should give you pause. The overwhelming majority of scientists who study the actual data and work with the actual climate models concur on climate change. (Much the same as with evolution.) Denialism only comes from those with ideological or personal axes to grind. Which, to a denialist, is a valorizing endorsement of their position as a courageous outsider battling the conspiracy. To the rest of us, that’s a strong clue about where reality actually can be found.

How Washington Forgot Where The ‘Buffett Rule’ Came From — Parrots for everyone! No, wait, wrong Buffett.

Catholic group criticizes Paul Ryan — Obviously, Catholic leaders who disagree with the Republican stance on any issue are Communists and secret Muslims.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Breaks Into Building, Abducts Woman Inside — A hilarious spoof of what the conservative talking points would be on Cory Booker. This comes perilously close to violating Poe’s Law.

On taxes, Republicans repudiate Ronald Reagan — More of that justly famed conservative intellectual consistency. Conservatives are about Reagan the way Evangelicals are about the Bible: the icon means whatever they want it to mean, despite the actual words and deeds. Inviolably so, until the next time they change their minds.

Do Republicans realize they’ve just called for the repeal of welfare reform? — Slacktivist Fred Clark on the logical consequences Republican party’s brand new discovery that motherhood is hard work. Not that conservatives are ever responsible for the logical consequences of their positions.

Hilary Rosen was right: Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life. — Yes, the party that demonized and vilified Hillary Clinton with a tissue of lies is shocked when someone accurately challenges a candidate’s wife. Mmm, conservative principles in action.

Obama: Spouses should be left alone — Nice sentiment, and one I happen to agree with, but you are talking to the same conservative politicians and punditocracy who’ve spent the last two decades shredding Hillary Clinton. They certainly don’t agree with Obama, unless, of course, the spouse in question is a Republican spouse. In that case, basic fairness insists that no GOP candidate’s spouse ever be treated the way Democratic candidates’ spouses routinely are.

?otd: Did you polarize the pumpkin-eaters, static-humming panel-beaters, freshly day-glow’d factory cheaters?

4/14/2012
Writing time yesterday: n/a
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 9.25 (solid)
Weight: 242.2 (!)
Currently reading: Somewhere Else by Sally McLennan

Tags: Antarctica, Books, Cancer, climate, Cool, Culture, Funny, gender, healthcare, Language, Links, media, Niece, occupy, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, Publishing, Religion, Science, sex, television, weird, Writing

Posted: 6:32 am Sat April 14 2012 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad on hump day

A reader reacts to Endurance — Decidedly mixed but thoughtful review.

Jay Lake – Die Räder der Welt — A somewhat mixed review of the German edition of Mainspring.

Fanfare for the Comma Man

D’oh! Groening Reveals The Location Of ‘Real’ Springfield — Right here in Oregon.

New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

How Dark Matter Interacts with the Human Body — Dark matter must collide with human tissue, and physicists have now calculated how often. The answer? More often than you might expect.

The Amazing Trajectories of Life-Bearing Meteorites From Earth — The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs must have ejected billions of tonnes of life-bearing rock into space. Now physicists have calculated what must have happened to it

How the Greatest Prankster in Political History Messed With Richard Nixon — Ah, politics. (Via danjite.)

‘A Recipe for Losing Touch With One’s Own Editorial Faculties’ — Ta-Nehisi Coates on Noah Millman on John Derbyshire. And I have to confess that firing Derbyshire for being racist was as puzzling to me as firing Buchanan. Why, after all these years of letting them be leading conservative voices with exactly the same message, does it matter now?

Karl Rove and company are losing the argument over inequality — Since, as usual for conservatives, they can’t win this one on the merits of the position, the dirty pool campaigning will start.

Republicans Try To Erase The Contraception Wars — “And there was the perception that somehow Republicans are opposed to contraceptives,” Romney told Newsmax last week. That perception would be because Republicans are opposed to contraceptives, on the plain face of their own rhetoric and legislation introduced. There’s no “somehow” about it, fool. The backlash on contraception is just another example of how people of all political stripes tend to intensely dislike conservative doctrine when actually applied to them personally. Conservatism is all about punishing the “other”, not the conservative himself.

?otd: Is your car marked ‘Do Not Hump’?

4/11/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (3,100 words on Their Currents Turn Awry)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.25 (solid)
Weight: 242.2 (!)
Currently reading: The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Tags: Books, Cool, Endurance, gender, Language, Links, Mainspring, Oregon, Personal, Politics, race, reviews, Science, weird

Posted: 5:36 am Wed April 11 2012 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad rises up earlie in the morning

Finding an Agent — Lucienne Diver.

Reference to humans with this and that — This kind of language neepery fascinates me.

NASA’s 1966 plan for a mission to Mars

A Closer Look at the Titan Airplane

Parasite Insights: Using Lice To Map Socialization — This is both interestingly cool and rather hilarious.

Wisconsin Equal Pay Law Repealed Because “Money Is More Important For Men” — Yeah, conservative ethics. (Thanks to danjite.)

Gingrich says it’s not yet time to end campaign — Hahaha.

Why Rick Santorum won’t stop — Hahaha.

The Right Flames the Volt — “There are so many legitimate things to criticize Obama about. It is inexplicable that the right would feel the need to tell lies about the Volt to attack the president.” (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Republicans Are Still the Party of Insolvency and Imperialism — Anyone voting Republican in the forthcoming presidential election is flatly ignoring the bald facts of what happened the last time we had Republican rule in this country in favor of bizarre, fetishistic fantasies about Obama’s alleged beliefs and actions.

?otd: What do you do with a drunken sailor, anyway?

4/9/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.25 hours (2,600 words on Their Currents Turn Awry)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.75 (solid)
Weight: 239.8
Currently reading: The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Tags: cars, Cool, Funny, gender, Language, Links, Mars, Personal, Politics, Process, Publishing, Science

Posted: 5:32 am Mon April 09 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad enjoys the best soy latte that it ever had

My story “The Woman Who Shattered the Moon” will be appearing When the Villain Comes Home — Quite pleased about this.

A trailer for a 1936 version of Logan’s Run — Hahahaha.

Meat industry says ‘butt cancer’ billboard near Marlins Park hits below belt — Butt cancer, yeah. That’s what I got. (Thanks to danjite.)

The Science of Van Gogh — The Dutch artist’s sunflower paintings have attracted the attention of doctors and geneticists.

George Dyson on the Origins of the Digital Universe

Robot history: The rise of the drone — (Via a mailing list I’m on.)

Supreme Court Arguments on the ACA — A Clash of Two World Views — The New England Journal of Medicine speaks.

The Literalville paradox — Language Log is funny about Rush Limbaugh’s use of words. Underneath is a more serious point about refusing to “do nuance”, that eternal conservative fantasy that every complex issue can be boiled down to simplistic moral certitude.

Romney’s Foreign Policy Doesn’t Recognize That The World Isn’t Simply Split Into “Friends” and “Foes” — Speaking of the problem of the congenital inability of conservatives to recognize nuance.

?otd: Tell me, did you sail across the sun?

4/6/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hours (3,500 words on Their Currents Turn Awry)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 7.0 (interrupted)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Tags: Art, Books, Cancer, Cool, Food, Funny, healthcare, Language, Links, media, Personal, Politics, Publishing, stories, Tech, Videos

Posted: 8:28 am Fri April 06 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad is quicker than they thought

dumb all over. a little ugly on the side. — matociquala is wise about how one treats oneself.

Cancer diagnosis raises risk of heart attack and suicide, study says — Within the first week of being diagnosed with cancer, patients were 12.6 times more likely to commit suicide and 5.6 times more likely to die of a heart attack.

Just One More Game … — Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ Once reason I gave up computer and console gaming back around 1998 is that I am very susceptible to game addiction. I didn’t want to spend my life staring at a screen. (Says the guy who writes obsessively…)

Celebrating Oregon’s beloved elephant: 50 years of Packy (Photo Essay)

Woolly mammoth carcass may have been cut into by humans

Shake It Off: Earth’s Wobble May Have Ended Ice Age — Which suggests a certain grandiose technique for dealing with the current climate change crisis we’re having over here in reality-land, does it not?

Press Freedom Index 2011/2012 — The U.S. is number 47. Whoo! (Via danjite.)

Opinion: The Risk of Forgoing Vaccines — Herd immunity, or the protection of individuals who are not vaccinated due to generally high vaccination rates within a population, does not currently exist in many pockets of the US. Yes, anti-science idiocy isn’t confined to conservative America. It is, however, considerably less privileged outside of conservative America. (i.e., Democrats don’t troll for votes by valorizing the idiocies of the left, unlike Republicans and the idiocies of the Right.)

Acknowledging Climate Change Doesn’t Make You A Liberal — A Message From A Republican Meteorologist On Climate Change. No, it just means you live in the real world. (Snurched from @gregvaneekhout.)

Looking Ahead, Republicans Examine Options in Health Care Fight — What do you know? The GOP never had a plan, except “kill Kenyan Muslim socialism!”

Romney Accuses Obama of Hiding Agenda — Why? Because the accusation plays well with anti-reality conservatives. Kenyan Muslim socialism is subtle, y’all.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Mormonism off limits — Right, because Obama is that anti-religious Kenyan Muslim atheist who, um. No, I got nothing.

Republican Judge Flips Out at Obama — Suppose George W. Bush had managed to pass his plan to privatize Social Security, and liberals ginned up a legal challenge that everybody dismissed but gradually made its way to the Supreme Court and got a respectful hearing from a Supreme Court controlled by five Democratic-appointed justices. I suspect conservatives would be a tad upset. The mistake is assuming intellectual consistency on the part of conservatives.

Calling Radicalism by Its Name — President Obama’s fruitless three-year search for compromise with the Republicans ended in a thunderclap of a speech on Tuesday, as he denounced the party and its presidential candidates for cruelty and extremism. As I’ve said a number of times, the conservative worldview is a failure of both empathy and imagination. Obama said it better.

Words that blow your legs off — On language and political discourse. This is why you mostly don’t see me jumping all over politicians for slips of the tongue or even open mic errors. Statements in writing, or contextualized in prepared speeches, are certainly fair game.

Why Conservative GOP Voters Aren’t Giving Up on Rick Santorum — The more the Republican establishment pushes Mitt Romney, the more alienated the religious right becomes. Why the party’s hard-core base isn’t coming around. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of small minded, anti-reality bigots.

Does The Romney-Santorum Contest Matter? — Conservative commentator Daniel Larison on the last men standing the GOP field. I loved this line: The most meaningful difference between them is that one is an ideologue and the other is a liar. More Republicans seem to prefer the liar.

?otd: Did you just turn your back and walk?

4/5/2012
Writing time yesterday: 2.25 hours (5,400 words on Their Currents Turn Awry)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.0 (solid)
Weight: 239.4
Currently reading: The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Tags: Cancer, climate, Cool, healthcare, Language, Links, nature, Personal, Photos, Politics, Religion, Tech

Posted: 4:57 am Thu April 05 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is going to drive its daddy to drinking

Friday the 13th’s Unlucky Spotlight: Bobby Leach — I’m not sure “incompetent” might not be a better descriptor than “unlucky”. (Via danjite.)

Darwin talk at OHSU, April 4th — An interesting looking lecture forthcoming at the hospital where I get my cancer treatments. (Thanks to threeoutside.)

Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy: Inside Dartmouth’s Hazing Abuses — A Dartmouth degree is a ticket to the top – but first you may have to get puked on by your drunken friends and wallow in human filth. When I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1982, I barely knew what a fraternity was. I took me about two weeks to realize I never, ever wanted to have anything to do with that bunch of highly entitled, legally bulletproof, abusive drunken assholes. I have no idea if the fraternity system at UT has ever been reformed, but this story sure reminds me of it.

Kill to be Killed in 18th Century Denmark — Suicide murder was a widespread phenomenon in 18th century Denmark. Instead of taking their own life, suicide candidates would kill a child or some other random person, in the hope that they would receive a death penalty. More moral leadership from the religious, 18th century style. (From e_bourne.)

Anna Brown: 29-year-old Black Woman Dies in Jail After Being Dragged By Police Out of Hospital — Nothing wrong with our healthcare system. Nope.

The bizarre calculus of emergency room charges — Nope. No healthcare reform needed here. ObamaCare, that bizarre socialist plot hatched by the Heritage Foundation, is ruining everything. No, wait…

How to kill an abortion bill — “One of the things that happened in Idaho was that the legislators assumed people weren’t going to pay very much attention.” That’s the only way you can govern from the Right. Once people realize what the conservative agenda means for them personally, they tend to get pretty upset.

When Women Used Lysol as Birth Control — A look back at shocking ads for the popular, dangerous, and ineffective antiseptic douche. Speaking of things people get upset about when applied to them personally, this is what conservative America wants to return us to. This and far worse. (Thanks to my aunt.)

Polish PM Reveals that US Tortured at Black Sites in his Country — Nothing to see here, citizen. Just a great nation maintaining its moral leadership. Move along, move along.

A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney

Romney Thrived at Harvard as He Mocks Obama Tie to School — Conservative America: valuing intellectual consistency since, um, never.

A meme in hibernation — [T]he false idea that Barack Obama uses first-person singular pronouns unusually, even unprecedentedly, often — seems to have slithered back into the swamp grass and gone dormant. [...] The problem with the business about Obama’s pronoun usage is that the pundits who have carried on about it hardly ever actually count anything, and make no relevant comparisons in the few cases where they do. Instead, they make unsupported assertions that turn out to be trivially false as a matter of mere fact. Wow. Conservatives making unsupported assertions which turn out to be false? Inconceivable. (Except on a daily basis, of course.)

Why liberals need conservatives, and vice versa — As tipster ericjamesstone says, “Conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives.” Hmmm. Not the result I would have expected from the people who brought us the Permanent Majority and promised to keep one surviving liberal on each college campus to parade about in shame.

?otd: Will you stop driving that hot rod Lincoln?

4/1/2012
Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (took the day off)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 9.0 (solid)
Weight: 241.4
Currently reading: The Bone Doll’s Twin by Lynn Flewelling

Tags: cool. weird, Culture, Funny, healthcare, Iraq, Language, Links, Personal, Politics, Religion, Science

Posted: 7:14 am Sun April 01 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad wakes up on Central time

On Storytelling — Some wisdom from Three Panel Soul.

Let’s Send John Away! — Electric Velocipede is running a promotion. Check it out.

Things we say today which we owe to Shakespeare

A Picture of Language — The art and science of sentence diagramming. (Via David Goldman.)

The Brain on Love

Cat Scientists of the 1960s — Hahahah. (Via threeoutside.)

Moon Rock Analysis Casts Doubt on Lunar Origins

Skylab-Salyut Space Laboratory (1972) — Some cool space history.

A Brief Window: The Bussard Ramjet in the 1960s

Not Worth the Paper It’s Built On — A billion Euro house built of shredded bills. (Thanks to Dad.)

Hey wait. I liked that movie. Why does it suck again? — Urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts on John Carter [ imdb ].

To Kill a Mockingjay — Scrivener’s Error with some interesting observations on The Hunger Games film.

Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed — Wow. I am beyond boggled. WTF is wrong with people? (Via danjite.)

Rodriguez: Vandalized by speech — A public square awash in racial invective is sure to alienate many Americans and weaken democracy. Hate speech, especially on a mass, organized basis, is almost entirely a conservative phenomenon. I know that many of my Christian friends feel themselves subject to hate speech, but most of what they encounter is simply a kind of public disagreement and challenge that was unthinkable in our culture until quite recently — having your privilege criticized isn’t hate speech, friends. Christians in this country have never encountered a fraction of what every person of color and every gay person has to hear almost every day.

Cyanide and Happiness on a similar note

Iraqi Immigrant Beaten to Death in California — But all these right wing voices, on the radio, on television, in syndicated columns and high-trafficked blogs have made Shaima Alawadi the enemy, for the accident of her birth, her faith. They fill the ears and the empty brains of angry, disaffected people looking to blame anyone for their own crappy lives and they robbed five children of their mother. Mission accomplished, wingnuts. Welcome to the hell your hate has wrought.

Lobbyists, Guns and Money — Paul Krugman on ALEC. I am always fascinated by hard right organizations that claim to be fair and balanced, or nonpartisan. It’s all part of that very successful strategy the GOP has been pursuing since Reagan of redefining the political center far to the Right. The Obama of today, accused by conservatives of being a socialist, would have been conservative twenty years ago. C.f. the much despised “Obamacare”, which began life as a Heritage Foundation proposal in the 1990s, and first saw enactment as a Republican proposal in Massachusetts under Romney. Yet now it’s screaming leftism.

For his own good, Rick Santorum should be bound and gagged in public — A British view of Senator Frothy Mix.

Bush Senior Also Promised Moscow more Flexibility after Election — You know, in case you’re outraged at something Obama said recently. Conservative commentator Daniel Larison with more on this.

?otd: Spring ahead or fall back?

3/27/2012
Writing time yesterday: 3.75 hours (0.75 hours on Little Dog, 0.5 hours on Going to Extremes, 2.0 hours on Sunspin, 0.5 hours on WRPA)
Body movement: 60 minute suburban walk
Hours slept: 6.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: Culture, Funny, Iraq, Language, Links, Movies, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, Publishing, race, Religion, reviews, Science, Tech, weird, Writing

Posted: 4:57 am Tue March 27 2012 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad is off to the cornfields of the Midwest

Tested by a Picturesque Dystopia — The New York Times reviews The Hunger Games movie.

Expelled for a tweeted syntactic observation

Avalanches of Words, Sifted and Sorted — (Via my Dad.)

Living in the Margins — Medieval annotations. (Via danjite.)

Why black (or blue, or red) plants might be the key to finding life beyond Earth

Praying to be skinny and straight — An expert explains what evangelical weight-loss and ex-gay movements say about America — and us. Oh, I could say a thing or two.

Christian Sex Toy Store Offers Smut-Free Dildo Shopping Online — Heh. Good for them. (Via danjite.)

Rethinking His Religion — [The clinic protestor] needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled. She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

Basic Facts on Clothing and Murder for American Bigots

An Even Warmer Future Ahead — A new model finds that the world could be up to 5.5 degrees warmer in 2050 than it was in the 1990′s.

GOP Slams Dems For Medicare Cuts Republicans Support — Because being a conservative means never having to bow to basic logic or intellectual consistency.

?otd: Sarpy County or Douglas County?

3/26/2012
Writing time yesterday: 3.5 hours (2.75 hours on Little Dog, 0.75 hours of WRPA)
Body movement: n/a (airport walking to come)
Hours slept: 5.25 (solid)
Weight: n/a (forgot to weigh in)
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: Books, climate, gay, gender, healthcare, Language, Links, Movies, Personal, Politics, Publishing, Religion, reviews, Science, sex

Posted: 3:52 am Mon March 26 2012 | Comments(0) |

[links] Link salad is working for the weekend

DIALOGUE: Between the Lines — Podcast of yesterday’s radio interview of me with Susan Wingate and Joshua Graham.

Satisfactory Sub-plots, Now With Pictures — Howard Tayler blogs at Inkpunks.

Science Finds Fiction Is Good for Us — Nancy Jane Moore is interesting over at Book View Cafe.

GAMA Announces 38th Annual Origins Awards Nominees — This is cool. A Wizards of the Coast anthology that I have a novelette in has been nominated.

Supercomputer Watson takes on cancer care with Memorial Sloan-Kettering

What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT? —

In Texas Tradition, Museums That Enshrine the Quirky — (Thanks to my Dad.)

Twitter Data Scientist Takes on McDonald’s Entire Menu, Survives — Mining thousands of calories of food isn’t so different from parsing terabytes of tweets.

Is It Time to Embrace Pink Slime?

The White Savior Industrial Complex — (Via danjite.)

Starbucks’ Gay Marriage Support Endorsed By HRC Despite National Organization For Marriage Protest — To quote Shanna Germain: “We will not tolerate an international company attempting to force its misguided values on citizens. The majority of Americans and virtually every consumer in some countries in which Starbucks operates believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. They will not be pleased to learn that their money is being used to advance gay marriage in society.” ~NOM President Brian Brown — I love how he makes it sound like Starbucks is going to go into foreign countries and try to convert people to a specific belief system. Because, you know, what kind of assholes do that?

Mischief follows in partisan Bible translations — American politics had changed between 1977 and 1995. It had polarized and radicalized millions of American Protestants, rallying them around a single issue and thus, as intended, rallying them behind a single political party. In 1977, the sort of American Protestants who purchased most Bibles couldn’t be summed up in a single word. But by 1995, they could be: “abortion.” And for anti-abortion American evangelicals, Exodus 21:12-27 was unacceptable. It suggested that striking and killing an unborn fetus was in a separate category from striking and killing a “person.” Strike and kill a free person, you get the death penalty. Strike and kill an unborn fetus, you get a fine. And so in 1995, like those earlier translators who invented and inserted “Junias,” the translators of the NASB reshaped this passage. Yep, the infallible and inerrant word of God.

Tennessee legislature boldly sets the science clocks back 150 years — I also wonder how the Tennessee lawmakers would feel if, say, teachers used this potential law to teach about Islam, or astrology, or Wiccan beliefs. I do not understand why conservatives hate America so much that they’re intent on destroying the education of everyone’s children.

The Republican Base Exposed — Charles Johnson at LGF once again dives into the comments at FoxNews.com so the rest of us don’t have to. This time it’s about the murder of Trayvon Martin, and we get to see the real driving animus behind the politics of Fox News viewers. To my conservative friends still wonder why the rest of America thinks your party is utterly nuts: this disgusting evil is a core portion of your Republican voting base, validated and cultivated carefully by years of your party’s political and media strategy.

Komen foundation continues to see fallout from Planned Parenthood controversy — It’s so rare to see any meaningful consequences for typical conservative dishonesty and shenanigans.

The Utter Incompetence Of Romney’s Rivals

Barack Obama and the oddballs — An Australian view of the US presidential race. Conservatives claim they are not hobbled by doctrine and ideology. Wow is that a bizarre statement. Conservatives will demonstrably choose doctrine and ideology over facts on the ground every single time. The political history of the last 20 years has proven this ad nauseam.

?otd: Tomato or tomahto?

3/23/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.25 hours (WRPA (Norwescon workshop critique))
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bicycle ride
Hours slept: 8.75 (solid)
Weight: 238.4
Currently reading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

Tags: audio, Awards, Books, Cancer, Culture, education, Food, Funny, gay, gender, healthcare, interviews, Language, Links, media, Personal, podcasts, Politics, Process, Religion, sex, stories, Texas, weird, Writing

Posted: 7:56 am Fri March 23 2012 | Comments(0) |