This review says:

"He asked if I had heard about Chavez giving Obama a book. I told him I had, and that I found it outrageous that Obama would accept a book with anti-American notions in it."

Wow. It's not just a branch of the extreme right that says things like this, but there do seem to be some on the extreme right that have this real head-in-the-sand attitude that only doesn't book-burn, if in fact they don't, because book burning has bad press. Dude, you find it outrageous that the president might own a book that disagrees with what he believes, or rather with what you believe he should believe? Heck, just diplomacy alone says that when a foreign leader offers you a book, you smile and take it, even if it's going to light one of the White House's fireplaces.

I was recently running odds in my head for a certain real-life scenario, and came across a 0.10% chance of killing Jeremy in self-defense after he came after me with a knife. I back-tracked; what were the odds that he would be coming after me in a knife in the first place? Oh, about 0.15%. Which means I believe that two thirds of the time I'm being attacked by a knife-wielding person about my size, I would win the fight. I can blame the difficulty humans have estimating low-probability events, or the fact that comparing two probabilities (quasi-)independently developed with error margins in the range of several orders of magnitude is fraught with difficulty, but I think part of the blame is that the only time I have to deal with knife-wielders attacking me in real life is in my day dreams, and I always overcome there. I guess seriously my odds of facing an otherwise equal attacker in combat (i.e. not running away) and winning are in five to ten percent range, though an honestly equal attacker probably has a good chance to stabbing himself.

I was here lost in daydreams, and mentioned that one of the characters in my fantasy world had superhuman calculation abilities, that she could give the log base 3 of pi to the 45th power to ten digits. It struck me that, hey, I could do it to one significant digit—V svtherq vg jnf svsgl, naq vg'f npghnyyl sbhegl-fvk cbvag avar. (That is, yes, I can, but I'm rot13ing the details so you can see if you can figure it out yourself. And if you don't care to bother, you probably don't care about anything that was rot13ed.) That amused me significantly. Back to cataloging my books in LibraryThing; you can debate to yourself whether that's any less geeky.

If you want details of my life, then you're probably my teddy bear and don't read this journal. But I did escape Las Vegas safe and sane, and only moderately burned.

I'm heading off to Las Vegas for a week to spend some time with family, so I shouldn't have much computer time. Due to airplane rules, I have to stuff my clothes in my carry-on bag, but it turns out you can get quite a few more books in a backpack by stuffing them in an Amazon box first. If I strike it rich, the whole character of my blog may change ... but I'd have to be a gambler first. If I liked money more, maybe I could enjoy gambling; and if I didn't know the odds, that would help too.

Any case, that was all. I'll look down at you Oklahomans as I fly over.

Quote from a friend on IM:
* Also, you're like the awesomest fluffy emotional punching pillow ever.
* How could I ever replace that?

I'm leaving the speaker anonymous, but thanks. That's just what I need to know.

I picked up Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and their Inventors at the used bookstore because it was there and it's one of the few books about constructed languages in general. The problem is, it annoys the hell out of me; I'm not sure I can actually read the book. Let's start with the title; is anyone particularly draw to a title about their interests in the form of Lunatic Lovers of Foo: Imaginary Foos and their Inventors? Say a book about RPGs: Lunatic Lovers of Games: Imaginary Games and their Inventors. And no, constructed languages are no more imaginary than RPGs are.

Or let's talk about the section titled "In Defense of Natural Languages". Given that those constructed languages are outnumbered speaker-wise 6,000 to one (and I regard that as a rather conservative estimate) and aren't exactly vibrant contenders, defending natural languages seems pointless, even cruel. Near the end, it says "It should be noted, however, that Zamenhof would have wanted a language that was fixed once and for all." In a narrow sense, this is false; Zamenhof had no problems with the natural growth of the language. In a broader sense, outside often-violent Eastern European politics, who really wants to see their language broken into mutually incomprehensible dialects? Anyone really a fan of Indian English taking a left turn somewhere and becoming a barrier to the communications between Indian and the other English speaking nations? For at least seven hundred years after the last shovelful of earth was laid on Latin's grave, it still was the major language of communication in Europe, because trying to communicate with a dozen major languages and a continuum of unstandardized dialects is a bitch. And what the hell is a section promoting anything doing in a study anyway?

(I think part of her discussion of Esperanto's dialects is based off the list in the appendix of a couple dozen spinoff languages; while interesting and possibly even useful, many of them were minor changes--any fluent Esperantist could read reformed Esperanto without help--and many of the others can't claim even one person who speak it fluently.)

To add injury to insult, flipping through the book isn't showing me valuable stuff. She rambles about Marr, a Stalinist linguist who seems to have the same sort of useful, viable ideas as Lysenko did in biology, and also a section about speaking in tongues. There's lots about searches for the language of Adam and Eve, but when it comes down to it, there's precious little about invented languages--you remember the whole word "inventors" in the title? There's about sixty pages in an appendix of primary materials; that list of Esperanto's descendants, a number of vocabulary comparisons, quotes from various philosophical language texts or fiction, etc. Biased towards the random weird stuff she writes about in the body, but still interesting. Of course, she manages to throw in eye-rolling stuff here, too; a list of words from Volapük, Esperanto, Ido and IALA Interlingua, labeled the development from Volapük to Interlingua via Esperanto and Ido. Except that there's little evidence that Esperanto took anything from Volapük except a warning about what not to do, and Interlingua is a regularized Latin with the vocabulary chosen by algorithm, again developed with a best a glance at its predecessors. There's three different strains here; for the computer programmers in my audience, think of something comparing Fortran to Python, via C and C++.

Ugh; on one hand, I feel it's a vital part of my book collection, and on the other I want to throw it out the window and watch it get run over a couple times.

I ran across Simeon II of Bulgaria on Wikipedia, and thought he was deserving of more mention. "Simeon is one of the last living heads of state from the World War II-era, the only living person who bears the Slavonic title 'Tsar', and the only monarch in history to have become the head of government through democratic elections." Wow. I don't know enough about him (and Bulgarian politics) to know if he's admirable, but that's certainly impressive. Especially the last of the Tsars.

I've always felt that in some sense, we had no right to behave towards the South as we did in the Civil War; that in a democracy, if they wanted to secede, they had every right to. It struck me today that it would have been entirely advantageous for us to let them to, too, had we handled it right. We let them construct a cute little government, and following long-held precedent (that does in fact date back into the early 19th century, though not nearly as strongly as in the 20th) when that government does something that is in the slightest bit harmful to American business interests, we attack them and put a puppet dictator on the throne. Repeat every 20 years as that dictator gets uppity, but we get all the advantages of the Southern economic power without the nasty effects of letting them have political power. Victory for all! (Well, except the South. No big loss.)

(I am entirely serious about the first line, but don't actually approve of the political behavior discussed in the second half. Except maybe if we had applied it to the South...)

I'm playing GNOME Hearts. For a lark, I decided to start every hand thinking I'm going to shoot the moon. I wussed out a couple times; if you have no cards higher than a ten, there's not much point. But it turns out, in general, this is a winning strategy for the game. Humans, if you were playing them, and tried this strategy, they would stop passing you the ace of hearts and stuff. But even on the hand-by-hand level, if someone has taken the king of hearts and follows it up by playing the ace of hearts, and no one else has taken points, don't throw the ten and jack of hearts on it if you have an option. Then, to follow that, when I played the three of hearts, they play the queen of spades on it, even though they have other cards in their hand and it should be blatantly obvious I'm trying to run it.

Ah, sometimes for some good mad-scientist wetware plugged into my computer.

I'd like to remind everyone that tomorrow, October 11th, is Take Your Teddy Bear to Work or School Day. This is your responsibility to your teddy bear, so don't think you can shirk it.

Current projections for the course of Hurricane Hanna have it coming my way; the early-morning National Weather Center maps had the dot for Sun 2 AM right over Lowell. (It's changed a bit since then, but I'm still well within the projected course. Of course, so is Buffalo, New York.) But I just realized something; that's Sunday. I have Sunday off. Even if a hurricane hits my home (okay, it'll be a tropical storm then), I still won't get an inclement weather day off work. That sucks.

There's just one thing to say. I like Ike.

Reuters has an article on a guy who dressed up in a Winnie-the-Pooh costume with two friends, a mouse and a panther, and they beat up and robbed people who stared at them. The police say "the group had apparently donned the unusual garb because they had run out of clean clothes." Yay! Finally, we can stop worrying that people think that furries are sane and normal.

Sometimes it strikes me that I've studied too much mathematics in my lifetime. I was tagging books on LibraryThing, and was tagging anthologies defined by time period. I paused to think that all anthologies are naturally limited by time period...and instinctively thought about it in terms of all finite sets being bounded. Geek to the core, I guess.

In other news, I'd like to prune my library a bit. Unfortunately, everytime I look upon a single book, I can't find it in me to prune it. A history of Dresden, Germany, written in Germany (beautifully illustrated, I admit)? Can't get rid of that. I could get a couple books by selling Chicago Arcology, which I just bought from the game store, back to the game store, and it's really a lousy book. (Who needs a 200 page book on a 24,000 person arcology? Especially a boring civilized corporately controlled one? Why on Earth do we need to know what every store in the mall sells?) That one might go...maybe. The 3rd Edition of the Norton's Anthology of World Literature (V1), when I have the 7th? Maybe...after I've scanned the table of contents, just so I know for sure what's different. Maybe I need to scan the different material, too. (No, I don't.) Arggh.

My internet reading took me to a blog post about how a librarian responded to someone who wanted a book about gay marriage. From there I followed to one commenter's blog response. His responses to comments are hilarious. Did you know that there's no heterosexual sex at truckstops? (Etrucker.com's article on lot lizards is probably just a liberal ruse, then.) The concept that the Bible and Christian literature is as much propaganda as the book that depicts gay marriage is "absurd and not worthy of a response." How about these wonderful statements and responses?

Person A: MANY heterosexuals visit swingers clubs looking for anonymous sex.

Lou: False. I have never seen nor talked to anybody who has visited a "swingers clubs".

or

Person B: I've know and loved people who were terribly, sexually abused by church-going, straight parents

Lou: I doubt it.

(He proceeds to ignore links to cases where, e.g., a Baptist preacher abuses his daughter for 16 years at a level that I hate to call child abuse, because that would imply that a guy who beats his kid to death in a drunk rage is as evil as this preacher was.)

It's not the cases he's making: I was a debater, I could make every one of them. It's not his particular sect of religious beliefs that I find funny. It's his majestic ability to live in a world different from the rest of ours where his facts somehow fit his belief system perfectly.

I'm reading Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books, and it has some interesting facts, and a few rather amusing ones.

Robert Browning was so Victorian that he once complained afterwards when a wife held her husbands hand and laid her head on his shoulder at a dinner party: "and I did not stay for the little more that could well happen, and which probably did". But in 1841, in Pippa Passes ("God's in His heaven / All's right with the world.") he wrote

Then, owls and bats
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Forty years later, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary wrote to him, and asked him in what sense he was using the word twat in that poem. He replied that he had read a poem written in 1659 called "Vanity of Vanities", and it said:

They talk't of his having a Cardinall's Hat;
They'd send him as soon an Old Nun's Twat.

So obviously an Old Nun's Twat was headgear analogous to a Cardinall's Hat, and that was the sense in which he was using it.

On hurricanes, I'd like to point out that Tropical Storm Cristobal has part of Massachusetts in its Potential 1-3 Day Track Area, as given out by the National Hurricane Service. Well, Nantucket Island, but that counts. Bertha missed me; she took a stop at Bermuda and then decided to head towards Iceland.

I just discovered that Orson Scott Card says that "Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society." Ugh, ugh, ugh. I knew of his attitude towards homosexual behavior, so that didn't surprise me, but the concept that we should have laws on the books to be selectively enforced is hideous. Police officers are supposed to enforce the law, not be judges of when someone needs to be brought down. It's a lovely way to help enrich the pockets of blackmailers, often unfortunately to include those in the hierarchy of police, and create a group of people who live in fear of the police who criminals can feed of off, and in general helps the underlayer of corruption in society grow. You can drive stuff out of the light without using the force of the law, and if anything may be more successful that way.

Hurricane Bertha is now a class 3 hurricane, headed straight for me via Bermuda. (As for right at me, well, it's a couple thousand miles away, the five-day projection has it in the area of Bermuda on Saturday, and if it curves as much as they think it will, it will be heading straight north around Bermuda, far east of the US. But hurricane watching is a lot more engaging than tornado watching; it's like a multi-season series versus one half-hour show. It may go a lot slower, but there's a lot more meat to it.)