The cost of superficial metrics

It’s no wonder that academia has been on the intellectual decline for decades. Publish or perish is a ludicrous way to judge people, especially when there is absolutely no quality control for publishing other than a mutual back-scratching system.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Furthermore, think about what sort of people are perfectly happy to spend their time jumping through stupid, irrelevant hoops in the place of doing anything substantial.  Credentialism and monolithic left-wing bias are not the only problems plaguing the intellectual world today.

On the other hand, Higgs does sound rather like a lazy, nasty old man, so perhaps getting rid of him after he published in 1964 paper wouldn’t have been the worst idea.

An institution begins the slide

I suppose there are many who will lament the first step in the demise of New York magazine. I tend to see it more as reason for good cheer:

This week’s announcement that New York magazine was becoming a biweekly was greeted, in my profession, with the sort of cheer that might herald the announcement of a sewer line backup or a mid-honeymoon appendectomy.

New York magazine is very successful. Its editor is very well regarded, and it wins lots of awards. It gets scads of Web traffic. It publishes magazine features that win the admiration of fellow journalists and has also become practically ubiquitous on social media. And, apparently, it still can’t pay the bills as a weekly publication. Hearing that New York magazine can’t make it as a weekly is, for a professional journalist, rather like being told that your teddy bear has cancer. How is that even possible?

The answer is that the circulation of print magazines is declining, while advertising revenue has taken a suicidal plunge. Companies who wanted to inform people about their firm’s activities used to have basically three choices: print media, television or radio. (OK, four if you count billboards.) These were all media companies, and they used the money corporations gave them to produce news.

What I find remarkable is how many of these institutions will glumly permit themselves to sink into oblivion without ever doing anything to significantly address the core issues. CNN is going to try to compete with every other network showing reality shows rather than make any attempt to appeal to the other half of the ideological spectrum. New York magazine has gone to a biweekly rather than attempt to broaden its appeal beyond liberals who live in New York and liberals who wish they did.

As technology gradually kills the liberal media’s ability to maintain its monopoly, it becomes ever more obvious that media was never first and foremost a business, but rather a giant propaganda machine wherein profit was an incidental bonus rather than its fundamental rationale.

The scouring of The Hobbit

This review of the second part of Peter Jackson’s second trilogy does not sound at all promising:

There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.

The tone is one hundred percent Jackson – a kind of thundering gloominess, cut with the occasional glint of Discworld mischief. Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have decapitated bodies twitching on the ground, and a captured dwarf leering at a female elf: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.” Maybe this really is what a lot of people want to see from a film version of The Hobbit, but let’s at least accept that Tolkien would probably not have been among them….

There is also an extended cameo for Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, with jokes
foreshadowing his Lord of the Rings role, and the creation of a new, female
elf warrior called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whose main purpose is to be
the third leg in an inter-species love triangle. Will she end up with the
dishy elf or the hunky dwarf?

Ye cats. It is becoming abundantly clear that Jackson’s biggest blunder was choosing his co-writers. Seriously, he couldn’t find anyone better than HIS FREAKING WIFE AND HER FRIEND?

This is rapidly approaching Star Wars prequel-levels of absurdity. Permitting Pink SF to invade MIDDLE EARTH is a crime against literature. It’s a crime against HUMANITY. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Pink SF is a cancer. It is an infectious disease that ruins everything it touches. Defiling the literary grave of Tolkien goes well beyond girls doing their usual shitting in the boys’ sandbox, this is the Pink SF equivalent of suicide bombers.

Why not throw in an orc-human romance while he’s at it? Why not lasers and lectures on global warming? Or, even better, an UNDEAD ORC-human-werewarg love triangle!

The irrelevance of SFWA

Well, I think this should suffice to explode any remaining vestiges of the perceived importance of the SFWA concerning one’s prospective career in writing science fiction. Barely one week after the release of QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted, Amazon has ranked me as the ~1* author in Science Fiction. First time that’s ever happened.

It also demonstrates, to a certain extent, the lack of an absolute need to distribute books through bookstores. As it happens, the 96 94 ranking applies to all books; the ebook-only ranking is 77. Conventional print distribution is still desirable, of course, but it isn’t absolutely necessary anymore. And it is going to become even less important when Barnes & Noble finally goes the way of Waldenbooks, Borders, and B. Dalton.

The punchline is that in addition to relative nobodies like me cracking the top 100 Most Popular Books in Science Fiction, the #1 author in the category is someone nearly as well-beloved by the SFWA pinkshirts, Orson Scott Card. And the #3 author in Fantasy? None other than the SFWA-spurning master Monster Hunter himself, Larry Correia. Note that the SF author listed just above me, Aaron Johnston, is playing in Orson Scott Card’s universe.

Sure, the pinkshirts have still got George R.R. Martin to top the fantasy list and Tor will continue dutifully trying to push its dreadful Pink SF on everyone, but how long will that last? While it is still easier to make obeisance to the pinkshirts and their ever-changing PC standards, the point is that their approval is no longer necessary and will eventually become undesirable. By way of example, look at how rapidly and completely McRapey changed his tune with regards to self-publishers. Were we not all creators last year too? Now that the gatekeepers are crumbling and people are given a broader range from which they can choose what sort of science fiction and fantasy they prefer, I expect Blue SF to absolutely foxnews the hell out of Pink SF.

And setting aside new distribution models, just wait until the effects from the new shared revenue translation model begin to come into play. There are already no less than 10 translations in the works from Latin to Bahasa Indonesia; here is a short selection from one of them:

Vuonna 2810 ensimmäisen kerran asutettu ja terraformoitu Rhysalan kehittyi nopeasti tärkeäksi planeetaksi Kantillonin alasektorissa Terran Laajemman Keskusvallan reunamilla. Strategisen sijaintinsa vuoksi planeetta oli kiivaan sotilaallisen toiminnan kohteena ja vaihtoi haltijaa useita kertoja ennen kuin lopulta vakiinnutti asemansa itsenäisenä planeettana vuonna 2935 Keskusvallan 21. laivueen amiraalin Beze Davenantin, ensimmäisen Rhysalan Herttuan, alaisuudessa.
— Thucidean Marc, ”Rhysalan Herttuoiden historia”

It was certainly a fascinating discussion trying to determine whether ‘valtapiiri’, ‘valtakunta’, ‘imperiumi’ or ‘keskuvallan’ was the best way to translate ‘Ascendancy’. As you can see, we went with the latter. Also, if you’re ever being chased by a Finn, just tell him he’s got an extra umlaut in a word and be sure not to tell him which one. It’s like scattering salt in front of a leprechaun. If the Russians had only known this trick back in the days of the Talvisota, they would have captured Helsinki in a week.

As one translator wrote: “I’m interested in being an active part in the Blue SF Revolution”. There are no shortage of languages still unaddressed, so if you’re a native speaker of one of them and you want to take an active part too, get in touch.

*For varying quantities of ~. To be more specific, No. 94.

A surreal presidency

While the Obama presidency has proven to be an even more amusing comedy of errors than I expected it to be, it’s starting to get a little weird. Mr. Obama has fallen from being the Lightbringer capable of commanding the oceans to lying about crashing at his uncle’s pad in college. And now, we’re informed that he is beyond criticism because movie.

With “12 Years a Slave” petering out at the box office after a decent
but unspectacular run (currently $34 million and losing screens),
liberals are increasingly angry that the well-filmed, erratically-acted, and poorly-scripted biopic remake has failed to shut down criticism of President Obama. 

Pity George W. Bush never thought of that. How can you criticize me?  Did you not see “Lord of the Rings’? The problem most people have with Obama isn’t that he’s an uppity Negro. They simply dislike that he’s a narcissistic fraud of modest intelligence.

~1 on Amazon

McRapey simply never stops self-promoting:

If you’re a non-traditionally pubbed author, today’s the day to tell my ~50k daily readers about your book.

It strikes me that if scientists could simply figure out how to harness the little man’s internal self-promotion engine, we wouldn’t need green energy or nuclear reactors.

In related news, I’m very pleased to announce that Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted is now the ~1-selling science fiction book on Amazon! To celebrate that, I’m posting the corrected high-resolution version of JartStar’s Quantum Mortis: Gravity Kills wallpaper here for download. Just click on the image to see the whole thing; right click and Save As to save it. Because it is pretty.

As for ~50k DAILY READERS… why not just go straight to ~ONE MILLION DAILY READERS? Believe it or not, that’s a closer multiple to 50,000 than 50,000 is to his current number of average daily readers.

In any event, thanks to a little help from the Master Monster Hunter, it turns out that I am also the ~1 author in Science Fiction today.  Hey, this self-promotion stuff is easy!

Excellence in police marksmanship

Mike Williamson observes that the collateral damage produced by the sharpshooters in the NYPD make Graven Tower look downright solicitous by comparison:

As long as you ignore the fact that the shooting victims were innocent bystanders, hitting two people with three shots represents unusual excellence in marksmanship for the NYPD, matching another recent incident in which skilled NYPD officers were able to hit their target and nine bystanders with only 16 bullets. Overall the NYPD usually requires about 331 rounds to hit 54 targets, of which 14 will be innocent bystanders, 24 will be dogs, and 16 will be people the NYPD was actually aiming at. Statistically, if you aren’t a dog, it is slightly more dangerous to be the person the NYPD was shooting at than a bystander (16 people out of 331 shots for intended targets for a 4.8% hit rate vs. 14 people out of 331 shots for bystanders, a 4.2% hit rate.) NYPD has a better success rate for other weapons, and certain factors, like shooting unarmed people in the back, tend to increase hit rates.

When NYPD officers fire 331 shots, and hit 16 targeted people, 24 dogs, but also 14 bystanders, there is a problem.

If the gun control advocates were truly serious about wanting to reduce the amount of unnecessary harm caused by firearms, they’d be campaigning to disarm the police, not the American people.

I suppose we can be grateful that the NYPD doesn’t have rocket-armed aerovars or missile-armed drones at their disposal… uh, oh, wait a minute.

Absolute summary

The New American Aristocracy
Perhaps as a result of the Italian and German experiences, dictatorships
have been the great fear of democracies for the last six decades.
Aristocracy sounds like something out of the 18th century; a legally
privileged class of people sounds positively medieval to the modern ear.
And yet, increasingly, that is exactly what we are seeing develop in
21st century America.

 The Scientists Who Cried Wolf
It’s freezing outside. Hundreds of historic low temperatures have been
set in recent weeks around the country. Every single computer model
that predicted the globe would be warmer over the last decade has been
shown to be wrong. And now this.

“Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second
straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice
is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world. On Saturday, the
ice extent reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to data
posted on the National Snow and Ice Data Center Web site. That number
bested record high levels set earlier this month and in 2012 (of 19.48
million square kilometers). Records date back to October 1978.”

At this rate, instead of mourning the drowning polar bears, we’re
going to find ourselves fleeing for our lives from rampaging packs of
them.

Lies, Damned Lies, and the Left
 If you happen to notice a no-guns sticker at a place of business, be
sure to ask if it is actually the policy of the business or not before
assuming it is there legitimately. Because it is entirely possible that
the business’s owner didn’t put it there.

Racism in a Post-Racial Society
One of the interesting things about living in Europe is the vast gulf
between the way Europeans actually behave and the way most Americans
believe they do. As a general rule, Americans tend to think of Europe as a little more than a continental socialist camp, which either inspires their admiration or their
pity depending upon whether they are liberal or conservative. Liberals,
in particular, seem to regard Europe as some sort of New York City on
steroids where all the things for which they labor so passionately, like
gun control, abortion, racial equality and gay marriage, are embraced
as a matter of course.

These assumptions tend to be vastly amusing to anyone who has actually spent time living among Europeans.

And now it gets interesting

Nelson Mandela is dead at 95. It should be interesting to see how long his vision of a post-racial South Africa will survive him or if the Kill-the-Boer crowd will consider itself unleashed.

We are not fooled

Larry Correia totally feigns putting on a supportive face while pretending to play down the fact that Steve and I actually managed to OUTGUN the master Monster Hunter. But we are not fooled. We all know this has lit a fire burning deep within the man, the green-hot flames of fury fed by envy, disbelief, and outrage:

I know the author online. I’ve participated in many email chains with
him, Sarah, Mike, and Tom. I’ve got a copy, but I’ve not had a chance to
read it yet. I wanted to read the review copy, but I’ve got a deadline
and I’ve been slammed. I’ve heard good things about it though…. I offend people on the internet for being an unabashed right winger. Vox sends them into hyperbolic rage spirals. He is their devil. They hate him more than Scott Card or George Bush, so that is saying something. Anybody who has caused that many panty twists is deserving of royalties just for the entertainment value of watching the literati have come aparts. 

Needless to say, I’ll be watching my six with extra caution given the likelihood that Larry will be sending magic kanji-enhanced Shadow Guard after us. Now, where did I put that Benelli-Mossberg Area Suppression Expediter-5K? One of those city block-sweepers could come in handy right about now.

In truth, it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to describe Quantum Mortis as Alien Hunters Intergalactic in Space. We had a nice little SF murder mystery going, but after reading MHI and the Grimnoire Chronicles, I realized that it had two major flaws.

  1. Too few bodies.
  2. Too small guns.

That is how Graven Tower received a transfer from the Trans Paradis Police Department to the Military Crimes Investigative Division. My reasoning was that the police can only get away with so much collateral damage before the public refuses to put up with it. But the military, well, all they have to do is cry “planetary security” and they can get away with damn near anything.