Author: VD

The Feynman Lectures online

For those who are interested in scientody rather than scientistry, the famous Feynman Lectures on physics are now online. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics was based on a two-year introductory physics course that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech from 1961 to 1963; it was published in three volumes during the years 1963 to 1965, and used as the introductory physics textbook at Caltech for nearly two decades.” In reading them, it’s not hard to understand why he is quite rightly revered as a minor secular saint of Science:

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an
approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far
as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of
approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws
as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or,
more likely, to be corrected.
The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following:
The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the
sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of
knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from?
Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it
gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from
these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful,
simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to
experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This
imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in
physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce,
and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are
experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and
guess.
We said that the laws of nature are approximate: that we first find the
“wrong” ones, and then we find the “right” ones. Now, how can an
experiment be “wrong”? First, in a trivial way: if something is wrong
with the apparatus that you did not notice. But these things are easily
fixed, and checked back and forth. So without snatching at such minor
things, how can the results of an experiment be wrong.
Only by
being inaccurate. For example, the mass of an object never seems to
change: a spinning top has the same weight as a still one. So a “law”
was invented: mass is constant, independent of speed. That “law” is
now found to be incorrect. Mass is found to increase with velocity, but
appreciable increases require velocities near that of light. A
true law is: if an object moves with a speed of less than one
hundred miles a second the mass is constant to within one part in a
million. In some such approximate form this is a correct law. So in
practice one might think that the new law makes no significant
difference. Well, yes and no. For ordinary speeds we can certainly
forget it and use the simple constant-mass law as a good approximation.
But for high speeds we are wrong, and the higher the speed, the more
wrong we are.
Finally, and most interesting, philosophically we are completely
wrong with the approximate law. Our entire picture of the world has to
be altered even though the mass changes only by a little bit. This is a
very peculiar thing about the philosophy, or the ideas, behind the laws.
Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our
ideas.

It’s always fascinating to see how far a cult departs from the ideas of its inspirations. I think Richard Feynman would be even more disappointed to see how far today’s science fetishists have drifted from scientody in favor of scientistry that Jesus Christ would be to see the grotesqueries and abominations that are so often justified in his name. Jesus knew Man was hellbound of his own volition; Feynman was usually a bit more of an optimist.

The sham of democracy

The gloves are coming off and faux democratic secularists around the world should expect no quarter or mercy from the next duly elected Muslim government to take power somewhere in the Arab world:


An Egyptian court
on Monday banned the Muslim Brotherhood from carrying out any
activities in the country and ordered the seizure of the group’s funds,
widening a campaign to debilitate the Islamist movement of deposed
President Mohamed Mursi.

“The court bans the activities
of the Muslim Brotherhood organization and its non-governmental
organization and all the activities that it participates in and any
organization derived from it,” said the presiding judge Mohammed
al-Sayed.

The court ordered the government to seize the Brotherhood’s funds and administer its frozen assets. The
army-backed government is waging the toughest crackdown in decades on
the Islamist group, which says it has a million members. Security forces
killed hundreds of its supporters and rounded up thousands more since
Mursi was deposed by the army on July 3 after mass protests against his
rule.

The Brotherhood won parliamentary and presidential elections after veteran autocrat Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in 2011.

So, what Turkey and Egypt have taught the Muslim fundamentalists is that if they play by the rules, win popular support, and get duly elected, the secular elite will utilize the military to overturn the elections, ban them, and deprive them of their accumulated assets.

But at the same time, that same secular elite is going to encourage them to settle all throughout the West. So now we have a large group of people who have learned that there is absolutely no point in being restrained by the laws and have no legal alternative to violence, and are being actively aided in spreading as far and wide as possible.

This should end well.

And it is an object lesson to everyone who asserts that the democratic system is the correct and proper way to manifest societal change. It isn’t.  Beyond a certain point, the will of the people is observably not permitted.  Now, I have no sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, but I have to question the idea that it is wise to make it so abundantly clear to everyone, particularly those who are quite willing to turn to violence, that there is absolutely no benefit to participating in a democratic system.

A Safer Space

Once more, the progressive paragons of the science fiction community show the way towards a better, safer, more civilized society:

I am once again the WisCon concom liaison and organizer for the POC Safer Space. This year I am joined in organizing and fabulousness by Jayme Goh. Huzzah!

We will once again be in the Solitaire Room since it affords us an out of the way space with no Gawkers. Last year we had the hotel push the conference room up against the wall which made the space a lot more inviting. I will also ask if more comfy chairs can find a way in there. If any locals are willing to donate comfy chairs, please let me know.

Last year we pre-scheduled some break out sessions and alternate panels in the room, but what seemed to work better was spontaneous stuff.I encourage any POC attending WisCon to come to that space if they need to discuss something that went down on a panel, continue a discussion that started at a panel, or if they just need a space to vent and calm down. I actually had some of the most enlightening conversations in that room during after-panel venting and I’m sure that will happen again,

However, if anyone wants to pre-schedule something please feel free. I just suspect mostly it will be spontaneous stuff.

The one thing I would like to schedule is a post Opening Ceremonies trip to the space so that people know where it is and how it will be set up and how they can use the space. This will come on the heels of the POC dinner earlier that evening. And then, of course, it’s party time.

Huzzah indeed!  It is readily apparent that the federal government should follow the inspired lead of the brilliant K. Tempest Bradford and the fabulous Jayme Goh and provide a Safer Space for Vibrant America.  In fact, several Safer Spaces are probably in order.

We could call them “Detroit” and “Chicago” and “Atlanta” and “Washington DC” and “Liberia” and limit all access to those spaces by the insufficiently vibrant. Naturally, no one would want the newly ensafened vibrant population of those Safer Spaces to be subject to any risks that might endanger either their precious feelings or their even more valuable persons, so it will of course be necessary to strictly control egress as well as ingress.

Nothing is more important than the safety of America’s vibrant population, therefore it is vital to provide these Safer Spaces at the earliest opportunity to protect them from the quotidian trauma of being exposed on a daily basis to the evil, racist, white population of the United States.

It’s just too easy

Golf Pro, aka Tad, mocks the idea that Minnesotans have anything to worry about from the Somali jihadists in Minnesota:

I’m positive that comparing Minneapolis to Kenya is a bad idea. They
aren’t really the same place, same culture, same institutions, same
history. Really, there is no similarity. The good folks in Minneapolis
have nothing to worry about.

It’s ‘kinda like the members at
Augusta National Golf Course worrying that they may have to play in the
same conditions as west Texas. Not the same place.

But carry that gun!

Meanwhile, the jihadist organization that has both claimed responsibility for the attack and been identified as the responsible party by the government of Kenya reports there are several “Minnesotans” among the jihadists who slaughtered more than 60 mallgoers in Kenya.

Al-Shabaab is claiming that there are American gunmen among those
still holed up in the Westgate mall in a standoff with Kenyan and
Israeli special forces. The Somali al-Qaeda affiliate tweeted a series of names on its latest
account before Twitter against suspended the group. Al-Shabaab has been
creating new accounts each time they get shut down but a movement of
pro-Kenyan tweeters has been tracking down the new accounts and
complaining to Twitter.

“We received permission to disclose the names of our mujahideen inside #Westgate,” their latest account tweeted.  They proceeded to tweet the names one by one, including Ahmed Mohamed
Isse, 22, “native” of St. Paul, Minn., Abdifatah Osman Keenadiid, 24,
of Minneapolis, and Gen Mustafe Noorudiin, 27, of Kansas City, Mo.


Al-Shabaab recently released a PR video targeted at Somali-Americans in Minnesota, trying to lure them to jihad as more than two dozen have already done so through the state’s “terror pipeline.” Three Americans — Abdisalan Hussein Ali, Farah Mohamed Beledi and Shirwa Ahmed — from Minnesota have been suicide bombers for Al-Shabaab in a series of attacks in Mogadishu over the past few years.

Notice that this sort of less-intelligent critic bases their arguments on absolutely nothing. Not on the observable facts, not on the easily confirmed reality, just snark and empty posturing.  Which, of course, is why it is so easy to expose them as inept and their positions as incorrect.

Beyond Beezle

We’ve seen some differently sane anklebiters with a reasonably broad IQ spectrum throughout the years. Hunt, Pawn Takes Queen, Modernguy, Bearded Spock, G. Tingey, Tad the Syphilis-Addled Homosexual, The Greatest Pensman in All Carantanilla, Phoenician, and now Poxy.  But I doubt anyone is ever going to be able to claim the lunatic crown of John Galt, who after posting his long series of boasts, curses, and nonsensical challenges here was discovered to have also produced this masterpiece on Facebook.

I have something I probably should tell everybody. Most of my friends from before I started school already know this and I’ve been putting off discussing it for a long time to see if I could be comfortable without it, so I haven’t really made a point of telling anyone. So…I’m supposed to be a girl and I’m probably going to start dressing like a girl and taking hormones at some point in the future. I was already planning on doing this when I was younger (I actually used to go to work dressed as a girl), but I needed to see if I could be comfortable as a guy. But going back to school and being around people again has made it abundantly clear that I am most certainly not comfortable trying to be a guy. So hopefully that explains my personality a little better.

Actually, it tends to explain a lot. I’m not sure why this blog tends to attract crazy, emotionally incontinent, left-wing trolls; my operating theory is that they are the only leftists without sufficient sense or self-awareness to realize that they don’t have much chance of walking out of here with any shreds of intellectual dignity to cloak their exposed arguments.

As for this Gallus, perhaps he’ll feel begin to feel more comfortable with himself after spending the next Day of Blood in auto-flagellation.

VPFL Week 2

68 Greenfield Grizzlies (2-0)
55 Bane Sidhe (0-2)

63 Fromundah Cheezheads (2-0)
43 Boot Hill Hangman (1-1)

88 Mounds View Meerkats (1-1)
72 RR Redbeards (1-1)

76 Suburban Churchians (1-1)
72 Bailout Banksters (0-2)

72 Bradford Gamma Rays (1-1)
51 ’63 Mercury Marauders (1-1)

Balance was restored to the universe, as the Piranha of the Serengeti had little trouble tearing apart the Redbeards despite my leaving the Seattle defense’s 22 points on the bench.  But it’s nice to see that my backup defense, Kansas City, is capable of stepping in for the bye week as well as on the occasion where there is a favorable matchup.

I’m a little concerned about the Banksters, my opponent this week, and the 14 points they got out of the Kansas City kicker. But I like Aaron Rodgers against the Cincy defense and the Seattle DEF against what passes for the Jacksonville offense.  So, we’ll see.

On the NFL side, I’m thinking that this would be Christian Ponder’s last game as the Vikings starter for the season if it weren’t for the fact that they are playing the Browns sans Trent Richardson. And with the Steelers and Panthers coming up next, he could easily make it to Week 11 before Leslie Frazier finally gives up on him. Despite the easy schedule, I doubt he’ll be starting against Green Bay in Week 12 unless the Vikes decide to tank the season.

Matt Cassel was admittedly mediocre the last two years in Kansas City, but look at the coaches and offensive coordinator he had.  He still has 82 TD and 57 INT with a 6.1 yards per attempt for his career. Ponder has 33 TD and 29 INT with 5.5 yards per attempt. Who is going to give Adrian Peterson more room to operate? I’m not saying Cassel is an All-Pro or anything, but he does appear to be a low-level starter as opposed to a career backup QB like Ponder.

So Facebook is child rape

Just when you thought “near-rape” and “regret rape” were as silly as it was going to get; now a woman desperate to escape the consequences of her actions is attempting to elevate “posting legal pictures online” to the status of rape:

When Holly Jacobs sent nude photographs of herself to a long-distance
boyfriend she loved and trusted, the 23-year-old woman never imagined
the horror that would befall her. In August 2009, less than a year after the pair mutually ended their
three-year relationship, Jacobs did a Google search of her name and
discovered the naked photos on a so-called “revenge porn” website.

“I just went completely into shock,” said Jacobs, who hired a lawyer
and eventually changed her birth name from “Holli Thometz” to Holly
Jacobs.

“This is cyber-rape,” Jacobs, now 30, told FoxNews.com. “It’s all
about the guy having control over the woman and exploiting her in a
sexual way — the same way real-life rape does that. It violates you
over and over again.”

What came next was perhaps more shocking to Jacobs. Police in Miami,
where she lived at the time, took no action. They told her that “because
you are over 18 and you consented, technically they are his property
and he can do whatever he wants with them,” she recalled.

It is sadly unsurprising that a woman would find centuries-old laws concerning private property to be shocking. Apparently we are in the process of entering the time of juris sensus, in which the way a woman feels about something, anything, is the primary legally determinative factor.

It is manifestly obvious that having naked pictures online does a woman no material harm at all. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of women, actually profit from it. Hundreds of thousands more knowingly and intentionally post pictures of themselves for nothing more than the ego gratification. This whole campaign tends to strike me more as humblebrag than horror.

Moreover, it would be absolutely insane to try to make a law against this sort of thing. As usual, the woman desperate to erase the evidence of her past behavior and her white knights of both sexes aren’t even beginning to consider the consequences.  Think about it: we already have a problem with parents occasionally falling afoul of child pornography laws due to posting cute or funny pictures of bathtime on Facebook.

Now recall that children can’t consent. So, if posting pictures taken with consent is rape, how much worse is it to post pictures taken without consent? Of underage children! In one fell swoop, one woman with poor judgment in men is attempting to turn hundreds of thousands of American mothers into child rapists.

Always fight back

Badger considers two means of addressing bullies:

I was in elementary school when the educational ministers began
preaching that fighting back against bullies was not to be tolerated. It
was insisted that responsive violence only begat more violence and that
the way to stop bullying was to “not respond” and to “demand the bully
respect you,” or some horseshit like this. This went along with a bunch
of programming about creating an “inclusive environment” and a bunch of
other malarkey that imagined if we could all listen to “Free To Be You And Me” together nobody would get picked on when we went out for recess.

To this day, I want to know what they were smoking. These folks spent
their entire adult careers allegedly studying the social behavior of
young children and yet never realized that “Lord of the Flies” was a lot
more than a fictional fantasy novella. They went about fighting
bullying in exactly the wrong way – by criminalizing the physical
aspects rather than disincentivizing the psychological aspects of
bullying, they ensured the “negotiating” between bully and victim took
place in the psychosocial realm where the bully had already secured an
advantage, and imposed a moral equivalence that shamed victim for daring
to fight back. The establishment seems to want to think of bullies as
the fat stupid kid who has no other way than his fists to express
himself (a la Moe from Calvin & Hobbes), however the bullies I dealt
with had great social savvy and were able to bamboozle the teachers
into believing they were the victim instead of me. Thus, any one-on-one
verbal discussions that were supposed to “resolve conflict” were simply
an extension of the bullying process – just as, for example, a
negotiation with a corrupt businessman is itself structurally corrupted….

The frame I’ve come to believe in with regard to bullying is that,
yes, a bully is trying to exploit a power differential, and that the
faster you demonstrate strength to close the differential, the more
quickly the bully will leave you alone and find someone else to
victimize (if the demonstration of strength wasn’t enough to humiliate
them entirely). Generally speaking, that means you’re going to have to
get physical at the middle or high school level. Once you’ve shown
you’re not going to be fucked with, the spell of dominance is broken and
the bully no longer sees you as someone to victimize.

As the smallest and smartest kid in my grade most years, I had to put up with a fair amount of bullying from first through eighth grade. My first pair of glasses were broken on the playground by getting punched off my face; I got in a shot or two but was whipped pretty conclusively by a kid nearly twice my size. I was a good athlete, so as I reached junior high age, I was protected to a certain extent by my teammates, but I still had to deal with the occasional hallway attack as well as the incessant shoving and verbal threats. The other thing that helped was my ready willingness to stand up for myself; in both seventh and eighth grade I accepted challenges from bigger guys more than capable of beating me up and “went outside”; on both occasions, the other boy decided it wasn’t worth the risk of losing once we were out there with the usual circle of boys and girls around us.

But the low-grade stuff didn’t stop until I broke one boy’s ribs after he shoved me into a locker, and smashed another boy’s face into the floor when he tried to tackle me.  After that, only one kid, a persistent troublemaker, was ever a problem, and he gave up after he saw me go through the open window of a moving bus to break the nose of a kid from another school who tried to spit at me. After that, he wouldn’t even try to pick on other kids in front of me since I made it clear that I was more than ready to pay him back for cracking one of my ribs after soccer practice one year.

Ender has had to deal with some attempted tormentors over the years, but no one even tries to mess with him anymore, not since he put down the star of the soccer club and the kid’s best friend at the same time when they tried to play dominance games with him. Of course, he’s been doing judo for years and he plays outside defender with a controlled fury that his coach and all the other dads appreciate, so even the biggest kids are openly respectful despite him being the weird smart kid.

Badger is right. Negotiation and seeking to understand bullies is irrelevant or even counterproductive. There is only one answer: hit back and hit back harder.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t turn the other cheek, I’m saying you can’t choose to turn the other cheek if violence is not even an option. I forgo retaliation on the soccer field on a regular basis. But it’s my choice to do so, it’s not a necessary consequence of either cowardice or an inability to respond.

It’s only a matter of time

I expect it won’t be long until something this happens in an American shopping mall.  And considering the active link between the jihadists in Somalia and the Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happens at the Mall of America.

At least 22 people are reported to be dead and more than 50 injured as a gun fight continues between police and armed men at a shopping centre in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. One witness claimed gunmen told Muslims to stand up and leave and that only non-Muslims would be targeted when they opened fire at the upmarket mall of the Westlands district around midday today.

At least two dozen people, wounded and dead, were wheeled out on stretchers and in shopping trolleys by security guards, while others were seen walking out of the building, clutching bloodied clothing around their injuries. Locals and tourists who were out shopping on the sunny Saturday in Kenya ran screaming from the building and cars were left abandoned as attackers threw grenades and fired AK47s.

It’s just one more reason to carry, in the unlikely event that you are a reader here who doesn’t carry already.

Falling prices, failing publishers

As I demonstrated previously, falling ebook prices means additional pressure on mainstream publisher profits:

The average price of a best-selling ebook hit a new low last week but ticked up this week for the first time in a month. This week, the average price of a best-selling ebook is $5.81, up $0.40 from last week’s all-time low of $5.41. For the past four weeks, the average price of a best-selling ebook has been below $6.50.

A confluence of factors have been driving ebook prices down: Discounting by retailers; success of lower-priced self-published titles; and experimentation by publishers.

This is really remarkable.  Back in July, I noted the probable result of Apple being found guilty of collusion concerning ebook prices: “The good news is that ebook prices should continue to fall to more
economically sensible levels.  And the power of the gatekeepers is going
to continue to dwindle as their revenues and profit margins continue to
fall in response to the greater competition they are facing from
independent publishers and self-publishers.”

But I never imagined that prices would fall so far, so fast. Not only have prices fallen below the $9.99 point that the colluding publishers were attempting to raise to $14.99, but only one of the top 50-sellers has a price in the $8.00 to $9.99 range.  And since October 1, 2012, the average price of an ebook bestseller has been cut nearly in half, falling from $11.37 to $5.81.

You may recall that the clueless president of the SFWA was very excited about the idea that publishers should pay the same $4.20 in ebook royalties to the author that they were paying on hardcover royalties.  How, one wonders, are they going to do that when at an average price of $5.61, (taking the average of the two most recent prices), they are dealing with a gross revenue per ebook of $3.93 after Amazon takes its 30 percent cut.

Assuming the conventional 25 percent ebook royalty, this means the author is going to make $1.40 per ebook and the publisher is going to make $2.53.  So, just to tread water, a mainstream publisher has to sell 2.24 ebooks to make the same $5.67 profit per book it was making previously. This is why the publishers fought so hard, and were even willing to break federal antitrust law, to get the price up to 12.99; at that price, they were making $6.82 per ebook, which was an actual improvement on hardcovers.(1)

Very few businesses can survive their profit-per-unit being cut in half. Don’t be surprised to see layoffs at the major publishers, contracts being cancelled, and imprints being closed. If you’re an independent, this is great news as the gatekeepers are dying and you’ll be able to compete on increasingly even ground.  But if you’re still hoping to break into conventional publishing, forget it. It’s all rapidly going the way of Random Houses’s Hydra, which is nothing more than an imitation of all the independent publishers, with zero advances and 50-50 royalty splits.

The guy responsible for it is my old editor at Pocket, who gave me my break into the business and was one of the first to recognize the potential in video-game tie-in novels. He’s a smart guy who is always ahead of the curve, and the fact that Random House is moving to this model means that all the other major publishers will soon be following suit. And I very much doubt he’s doing it because he wants to do so, but because it is the only way they can expect to stay in business.

(1) There is a trivial omission in this calculation which I left in for the sake of simplicity and means that the situation isn’t quite as bad as these numbers make it appear. But the consequences of it are fairly minor and don’t change my point in the slightest. Bragging rights to the first person to correctly identify it.