Hmmmmmf! No rest for the moderate.

NS, do you ever pause and think, "No, I won't post that disemvowellment-bait -- Teresa has a right to a weekend just like anyone else"?

Obviously not.

Last weekend, which I'd planned to spend getting various urgent tasks done, was instead spent coordinating emergency rescue and salvage work on the Making Light database, after the server on which it was housed died so catastrophically that smoke came out of it. This weekend? All the same urgent stuff, plus everything that didn't get done while we were rescuing Making Light.

So what do you do? You post comments to Takuan you dasn't post to Antinous. Mind, I don't know what Antinous would have said. I just know that saying "Eat Me" to him is an invitation to a verbal mugging.

Just tell me one thing: What, in the name of high holy heaven, did you imagine would happen if you posted that?

I've heard Manly Men go squee.

Heya, Lenny. Laurie and Michael, too. And EFergus3?

Antonio Lopez: there's no overlap in personnel that I know of, but punk and skatepunk fanzines trace back to rock fanzines, which trace back to the SF community. It's an Ur-fandom, possibly the Ur-fandom.

More people than Rog Ebert have been pointing out that early online slang owes a lot to fanspeak. However, IMO, SF fandom's biggest influence has been its characteristic social technologies, such as fanzines/blogs, APAs/bulletin boards, and community-run conventions -- all of which, in their earlier hardcopy versions, are robust and relatively inexpensive pre-internet systems for enabling many-to-many conversations.

These and other material-culture markers have spread to countless other contexts. We know some of the names and approximate dates for this cross-fertilization, like Paul Williams and Greg Shaw in rock journalism, Bill Blackbeard and Dick Lupoff in comics fandom, and Bjo Trimble in Star Trek fandom (insofar as Star Trek fandom is separate, which it isn't entirely). The people who started the SCA (01 May 1966, in Diana Paxson's back yard) were part of the Bay Area SF community. The names of the early fanfic publishers belong in this list, but I'm blanking on their names right now.

There's a long list of barely-separate subfandoms that incubated in the congenial environment of general SF fandom, including gaming, RPGs, LARPs, cosplay, filking, manga and anime fandoms, et cetera. Also: I've never tried to find out who, where, and when, but there's evidently been enough overlap for the BDSM community to pick up some fannish social technologies. I've seen some of their fanzines and read descriptions of how they run conventions, and there's definitely fannish DNA in the mix.

Less a matter of specific forms than of historical connections: It's known for certain that fandom, especially on the West Coast, has old ties with the gay community. In the case of LASFS, in Los Angeles, that's traceable in print clear back into the 1940s, which is uncommon for any subject touching on homosexuality. Unfortunately, the person who knew the most about this, Jerry Jacks, had it all in his head, and he died before he got around to writing about it.

I absolutely believe that I don't know a quarter of the communities and interest groups that have picked up fannish customs.

Getting back to the many-to-many thing:

I remember an article way back in Whole Earth News, Winter 1987, in which Dr. Ann Weiser (whom I knew to have fannish connections) explained how to organize something she characterized as being like a very slow online bulletin board, only it didn't require computers or online connections, which made it more suitable for communities and interest groups whose members weren't into those things. What she then proceeded to describe was unmistakably a standard fannish APA, like the one Brad Reid used to belong to.

(How do I know that Dr. Weiser had fannish connections? Back in the early days of the Carter administration, I was in an APA with her. Some other members: Robert Charles Wilson, Avedon Carol, and a young fan named Patrick Hayden. And many more besides. Sometimes I feel like blogging and professional SF publishing are just a continuation of fanac by other means.)

Michael Bernstein, my theory is that whenever you enable fast, cheap, reliable many-to-many communication, plus the ability to reply to it, you get a virtual community that displays behaviors and emergent properties we'd describe as fannish. However, I don't think all fandoms are created equal, or that their features are inevitable.

For instance, few other fandoms have had our passion for timebinding and community history. That's had some of the same effects you get online from message persistence and open protocols. A good performance goes on being rewarded. People who weren't around for the original conversation can catch up on it, and add to it. I've retroactively been a participant in conversations that got going around the time I was born.

The SF community's wide range of ages and incomes did away with many nonessential features. For instance, the earliest APAs -- Amateur Press Associations -- were for people who owned printing presses. The copies of their contributions they sent in to their APA's central collating-and-mailing person might have been beautiful artifacts in their own right; but you couldn't call what was going on there a conversation.

(Pause for credit where due: the person who was familiar with the first wave of APAs, saw the applicability of the concept, and conveyed it to early SF fandom, was H. P. Lovecraft.)

Fandom's take on fanzine and apazine production values was simpler and far more robust: fast + easy + cheap + legible = good. You can still find the original transfer protocol specs explained in The Enchanted Duplicator.

One feature that's so basic it's easy to overlook: Unlike the letterhack fandom of Merry's Magazine, SF fandom never let itself be tied to a single channel. Instead, it's grabbed new channels as they've become available. The most obvious consequence is that the loss of a single channel doesn't kill it off. It also makes it impossible to define or control fandom's content or personnel. Strong minority interest in a new subject generates a side-channel rather than an argument, and everyone goes on talking.

It wasn't fate that killed off earlier fandoms, and I don't think economic considerations did it either. After all, SF fandom got its start during the latter years of the Great Depression. What enabled that to happen was (1.) the prozines' habit of printing addresses along with letters of comment; and (2.) the availability of cheap secondhand typewriters and mimeographs. But what's kept fandom cranking along after that initial efflorescence has been its historic persistence as a body of communication, and its openness as a system of practice.

(Slightly corrected, 9:38 pm EDT, on a fine point of fan history.)

Antinous, not only have I outed you as an assistant moderator, but you're now mentioned in the moderation guidelines.

Tenn @127: I promise I'll tell you the story if there's time.

WeightedCompanionCube @130:

Teresa - Who are the assistant moderators?

At the moment? Avram Grumer and Antinous.

I ask because, well, I don't think I just speak for myself when I say this:

You've received email?

If someone disagees with me, and makes a good point, I'm inclined to listen.

However, if someone just tells me to "shut up" and doesn't give a reason, I'm going to ignore it.

What this establishes is that you have exactly the same reaction as every other member of your species.

Unless I know it's a moderator. In which case I'll know my opinion is uancceptable and go elsewhere.

You're getting miffed in advance at the mere idea that assistant moderators exist?

Let's look at this logically. Have you ever seen me tell someone to shut up? You have not. That's because I know better. Telling people to shut up doesn't work. If you don't like what they're doing in a thread, you can tell them to knock it off, leaving them the option of doing something else. You can remove or disemvowel their comments. You can argue with them. You can remove the commenter. But you can't tell them to shut up, because it never results in them shutting up.

If I can't make you shut up, why worry about the assistant moderators?

Moving on to your belief that having your behavior curbed necessarily means your opinion is unacceptable: that's completely illogical. How many times now have you seen me intervene solely on the basis of behavior and language? Answer: lots.

Are you under the impression that your behavior, language, and conduct of interactions are so perfect that you will never make a misstep? Do people who know you well frequently tell you that your judgement in such matters is unerring?

If not, what makes you think that a moderator's intervention has to mean your opinions are unwelcome? It's an important question.

And the credit I should have included in my previous comment:

Thanks to James D. Macdonald for help with the research, and for pointing out that "It's Just a Plant" is true in two different ways.

Not again!

Remember the story about the children's book about mommy's plastic surgery? That view-with-alarm story that turned out to have been cooked up by the reporter, because the work in question is a vanity-published book with no brick-and-mortar bookstore distribution?

If you missed it, here's the story on Boing Boing, Making Light, and Writes Like She Talks.

Guess what: This is another story about a self-published book. Worse, the book's been around since 2005!

Don't blame Mark. At this very moment, CNN's pushing this story as though it's brand-new. It isn't. The book's author/publisher, Ricardo Cortes, has been getting free publicity for years by giving copies of the book to right-wingers, who use it as an occasion for their "moral outrage" screeds. The chances that children are ever going to see this thing are only slightly higher than their non-chances of seeing the plastic surgery book.

In short, this was a non-story three years ago.

So here's the real question: Did CNN already know this is a wholly synthetic news story, and run with it anyway?

Alternately, does CNN do so little fact-checking that they missed indications that should have been the equivalent of loud sirens and flashing red warning lights?

Agent 86, it's a very kind offer; but since I'd have the memory of all the time you've clocked as a perfectly reasonable commenter/participant, it wouldn't be the polarity-reversing violent illumination I sometimes fantasize about.

I got that once out of a student I was dealing with over the phone, back in my days as a financial aid counselor. He'd had some problems in his life as well as some mishaps in his financial aid application, and was inclined to be a little stiff and suspicious and pessimistic. I didn't take that personally; it's how a lot of students react when they first have to deal with slow-to-budge problems that aren't their fault.

It's been decades, but I think the problem was that one of his parents had absentmindedly claimed him as a dependent for tax purposes and messed up his eligibility. I was explaining that the situation might be salvageable if his parent filed an amended tax return right now. I think I also offered to meet him at a nearby student coffee shop to go over his forms, since he couldn't get to our office before it closed.

In the midst of all that, he suddenly said, "Hey, I've just realized something. You guys are there to help us."

Yes!

FTW!

Terry, not your fault.

My fault, in part, for not giving Antinous an official tin badge: he's an assistant moderator. Also my fault for not paying enough attention to this thread. It doesn't help that you know what I've been coping with; the fact remains that I haven't been here.

Apologies.

Hi, Terry.

Greg London, may I introduce Takuan, Antinous, Tenn, Agent 86, Sister Y, and Skullhunter?

Guys, this is Greg London. He's got a major personal commitment to Lawful Good, but sometimes his wordcounts increase exponentially when he feels like he isn't getting something across.

I believe you'll already have met Terry Karney, whom I hold in high regard.

Greg, slow down. Breathe. These aren't bad guys, and believe me, they aren't dumb. Increasing the amount of explanation isn't going to help. This is one of those situations where we have to go back and figure out where the earlier explanations stopped working. No way should this argument have wound up in a waterless wilderness.

Also, getting into a fight with Takuan and Antinous on Boing Boing is like getting into a fight with Heresiarch, Abi, and Xopher back at Making Light. This group you're arguing with is the local branch of the Citizens' Committee for Public Intelligence and Reasonably Decent Behavior. You should like them more. They should like you more. And so far, nobody's gotten much of a chance to do that.

Be wary of anything posted here in future, too.

Dan: okay, so you're a feminist, go you. This sort of thing is not exactly useful.

markmarkmark @73:

will the majority of boingboing readers react with such vitrol at something that should have been pretty obvious exageration and satire.

When a writer uses one of the ironic tropes and it doesn't work for his or her readers, the writer is always the one in the wrong.

(That's assuming readers of reasonable intelligence who are reading in good faith: not a high bar.)

Hobnob @52:

Allowing for the vagaries of geolocation, "your property" appears to be ... in Kensington.

Nowhere near.

Really? How interesting. Someday you must tell me how that works.

I notice you don't mention what this intruder was doing. How big was he? How old? Was he doing anything more threatening than trespassing inside the wall around your yard?

I'm not inclined to converse with intruders other that telling them what to do, and what not to dare do.

If this is such a frequent occurrence for you that you have a standing policy for dealing with it, I wonder that you've gotten yourself into such a lather about this single instance.

It seems especially odd when your standing policy precludes talking to the intruders you capture. Surely this must be an extremely familiar event to you, if you're this certain that there's nothing useful or relevant your captives could say to you.

This will be my last post in this discussion as it is *completely* off-topic now. Apologies.

But it wasn't off-topic before? I somehow fail to see the distinction.

...

I should stop sticking pins in you. You're neither big enough nor bad enough to make it worthwhile. I think what really happened was this guy scared the bejesus out of you, and that's why you're so blustering and angry about the government and the police force.

Those of you who want Cory to stop posting about Little Brother can give up right now, because it's not going to happen. Cory's written a book that really is getting major attention from kids, teachers, librarians, booksellers, civil libertarians, etc., which in turn is focusing a whole lot of attention on a set of issues that are dear to Cory's heart. Promoting the book isn't just ego. It's part of the fight.

...

Doctor Pickles, I thank you for being mindful of the moderators, but that particular decision isn't all that hard.

Junior Mad Scientist, I love the image of old ladies attending their fourth Ramones concert.

...

About the stops on Cory's book tour: Tor Marketing and Publicity made those decisions, not Cory.

This afternoon I phoned Dot Lin, a very excellent Tor publicist, intending to find out why Tor chose some book tour locations and not others. And in fact Dot did tell me; but while I understand enough about trade fiction marketing and publicity that I could follow her explanation, I can't summarize it well enough to not be inadvertently miseading. I'm a fluent speaker of editorial and production, but I only have a listening knowledge of marketing and publicity.

Full disclosure: I'm acquainted with Jason Weisberger. He's a straight shooter. He may growl, or even kvetch, but he does not whine.

...

Syntax Error, @15 and subsequent: Your ear isn't nearly as good as you think it is.

Cpt. Tim @17: Spot on.

Nobody Special @75:

Avram asked me "what are you trying to accomplish by posting here?" Uhhh, a POST, I suppose? A little communication? Like as I have to issue a white paper detailing my intentions by posting here. THAT'S what I mean by snobbery.

It's a little odd to be accused of snobbery by someone who (1.) thinks he has nothing to learn from anyone in the thread, and recognizes no obligation to listen as well as speak; (2.) from the start, uses language, assumptions, and tone that could never be mistaken for polite or non-confrontational; (3.) bristles when asked one mild-mannered question by Avram, when he himself has asked a good many questions, and done so far less courteously; and (4.) is offended to discover that people here have gotten to know each other in advance of him putting in an appearance.

NS, you could probably have a pretty good time here if you would just gave others the same kind of respect you want to receive.

Arkizzle, it's true that coming back and being nicer is frequently sufficient; and if doing it under a different name makes it easier, that's fine by me. Nevertheless, I cherish a fantasy: that someday, someone will reply, "You mean, all I have to do is stop being a jerk?"

Our hearts would melt. We would all shout "YES!" in unison. It would make up for dozens of times when someone has concluded (on less than no evidence) that they're obviously not allowed to make any negative comments.

Bowhowdy @6:

I wonder how many people out there would be willing to sell their integrity for $75? Bet it's more than we'd like to think.

Since we have Cassandra's report @68 that an Amazon vendor was confident that $5.00 would be enough, and since SyntaxError still doesn't understand why Jason was offended by the vendor making it an explicit quid pro quo, I'd expect the offer would get a lot of potential takers out there.

I think Jason's right. "Let us give you this refund because we have fallen short of our normal standards of service" is one thing. "We'll pay you to take down that review because we don't want anyone to know what our standards of service are" is quite another.

DCulberson @50: If someone tosses a breakable object loose into a mailing container interior space that's half again as big as it is, you have to assume they don't care whether it arrives in one piece. If they let someone who doesn't know what they're doing toss a $5,000 breakable object into said container, same assumption. RossinDetroit @18 is right: you can tell a lot about how much someone cares by the way they pack stuff for shipment.

The only thing my husband and I have ever sold via eBay was a Fender Performer six-string guitar. I built the packaging for it according to my usual assumption: the package will fall out of the back of a moving truck and be run over by the vehicle following it during a heavy rainstorm that will destroy the address labels.

The shipping case I built was made of two-by-fours, heavy plywood, and high-density styrofoam, with metal reinforcements at the inside and outside of every corner. All the joints were glued and screwed, and the lid was held down with thirty-odd screws. The addresses and shipping instructions were written out in full on both sides of the case, directly onto the wood, in poster-size lettering using heavy black indelible ink. I figure that if you're selling a near-mint Fender Performer six-string, you're obliged to use packaging that has a reasonable expectation of getting the guitar to the purchaser in the advertised condition.

Note: Building it and shipping it cost less than $75.00.

@84: WhoIs isn't much use these days, but geolocation still works. I keep wondering whether anyone's built an application that will let you feed in your users' IP addresses, then generate a map showing zoomable map showing where they're located. Having more than one troublesome user posting from the same latitude and longitude isn't proof of sockpuppetry, but it would certainly indicate that the possibility is worth checking out.

Arkizzle @91, one quibble: All of the Boingers can disemvowel posts. When we get assistant moderator accounts set up, the asst. mods. will be able to do it too. Still, I am the probable culprit when vowels go away.

I'm not happy with my response times of late. The last ten days or so have been a personal worst for computer-related problems: one broken laptop, two rounds of software hell, and an episode this weekend I'm not even going to try to describe. It's one of the reasons I've put the quest for assistant moderator accounts on the front burner.

Nobody Special, I take it this is all our fault, and has nothing to do with your own behavior. Would that be a fair summary of your position?

Gregor Kiwi, cultivate EMTs. They know where it happens.

Anonymous: Never give up, never surrender. We'll get the registration problems licked if it kills me.

In the meantime, please click on the eyeball and send me a report of what happened. I'll pass it on to tech support.

Kieran @34, Noen usually does a lot better than that -- not that that's enough to save the vowels in that particular comment.

minTphresh @43: Honest, the descendants of the Merovingians aren't shapechanging reptiles. Trust me on this one -- I used to work for the Illuminati.

Hobnob @17:

Two nights ago, I arrested an intruder on my property.

Allowing for the vagaries of geolocation, "your property" appears to be a house with a small amount of yard in Kensington, a thickly settled and very desirable old suburb known for its parks, private schools, upscale shopping, landscaping, and fashionable little restaurants.

I notice you don't mention what this intruder was doing. How big was he? How old? Was he doing anything more threatening than trespassing inside the wall around your yard?

Fortunately for me I was armed...as I always am (for when stuff like this happens), and I was able to subdue him by threat of force alone.

A good thing, considering how close your neighbors' houses are to your own.

I shouted to my wife to call the police. A visitor to my home also phoned the national emergency number (10111). Both of them spent more than 10 minutes just trying to get the persons who answered to GET THE STREETNAME RIGHT. Their huge station is 1.38 km from my house.

That would be the Kensington Station, up at the intersection of Derby and Queen?

Meanwhile my neighbour shows up, and we bind the suspect. Niegbour's wife phones the police station (1,380 meters away). After an unsuccessful attempt at getting help, she got into her car and DROVE THERE. On arrival, she had to first "fill in a form" before a vehicle would be dispatched to my house 1.38 km away.

You're saying the police had no sense of urgency. That seems appropriate. An unarmed person trespassed on your property. Unless you're leaving something out, that's a misdemeanor. You responded by pulling a gun on the guy, then getting your neighbor to come over and help you tie him up. It sounds to me like you had the situation well in hand. And since Johannesburg does have a relatively high crime rate, it's possible the police were busy.

What did you do with the fellow, by the way -- just keep him around until the police showed up to claim him?

The following day I phoned them to ask them what's up. They had no recollection, no record, no knowledge of the incident.

It was a misdemeanor trespass. The guy shouldn't have been in your yard, but he was removed from your yard, and I doubt he'll be back. What else were you looking to have happen?

Kieran, what do I do? I have two young daughters in my house. I live in my "middle class white neighbourhood" because I have nowhere else to go. I am a middle class white.

You live in a nice neighborhood.

Kieran's statistics look pretty solid, and what they say is that the crime rate is still high, but it's been going down. If you never had to worry about crime before the ANC took power, then the crime rate must have been dreadful in neighborhoods that didn't have the advantages yours did.

You share your country and city with a lot of very poor, very desperate people. Many of them show no inclination to die quietly and so decrease the surplus population. Many of them can read a map well enough to find your neighborhood.

There are four ways to deal with the problem: (1.) You can murder them. (2.) You can ignore them, and hope the problem will go away. (3.) You can throw all your resources into keeping them out of your territory. (You already tried that. It didn't work.) (4.) You can support social programs that reduce the number of poor, desperate people in your vicinity.

I recommend the fourth option. What should you do about it? Vote more money for education. You've got a large body of citizens who not that long ago were systematically oppressed and denied. Problems like that take a while to fix. A better educational system is a good place to start.

Vote money for more civil order and public safety for everyone. This will help reduce the number of desperate nogoods committing crimes against people of all sorts, yourself included.

Vote more money to treat AIDS, and for public health in general. You're living in the middle of a slow-motion pandemic. That's destabilizing and a hardship for any government in any country.

Support your government while doing everything you can to improve and reform it.

Alternately, you can vote to stick with a two-tier economy and an adversarial attitude. Just bear in mind that if the government fails and there's another revolution, the next one's going to be much, much nastier.

Man On Pink Corner @21:

I'm guessing you have no sound statistical basis for any of those assertions. Correct?

I think a lot of people here have been making assertions, and that nobody's been backing them up with statistics, sound or otherwise. Do you have some? If so, produce them. Until then, MarkMarkMark's footing is no worse than anyone else's.

Skipper @16:

I seriously think there would be far fewer sexual assaults if prostitution were legal. ... if done properly it could be a real (pardon the phrase) release of unhealthy social pressures.

Skipper, you're saying that people who balk at illegally purchasing the services of a prostitute -- a relatively minor crime, not much prosecuted -- use violent sexual assault as a substitute?

That makes no sense at all. First, if they're deterred by not wanting to break the laws against prostitution, they should be deterred even more by the far greater illegality of sexual assault.

Second, they're not the same experiences, except from a purely theoretical topological viewpoint. If either one is what you want, the other is not a substitute.

Third, it's unpleasantly reminiscent of the old line about how we have to have bad girls in order to keep the good girls pure. That is: men are entitled to sexual favors from women; so the only way some women can be allowed to not have sex is if other women take up the slack.

All kinds of unpleasant implications shake out of that one.

I'm still ticked about not getting the hovercar.

My hairdresser was telling me about visiting her mother in Atlanta before the collapse started, and seeing ads that said you could buy a house with a $1.00 down payment. Someone who can only afford a $1.00 down payment can't afford to own a house.

I heard another story from a guy at Eschacon who'd been working for a firm that processed the mortgage paperwork these lenders were generating. He said the people in his company kept noticing the same homebuyers' names going past on multiple applications. The loan officers would submit applications for mortgages, and if any of them bounced they'd rejigger the numbers on it (reclassifying certain kinds of income, altering previous estimates, etc.) and resubmit it. That's grossly irresponsible.

There were greedy people on both sides, but there were also hapless people who wanted to own their own home and start accumulating equity. That's a basic American ambition. They got sold mortgages they couldn't handle. They didn't know they couldn't do it. That's not necessarily their fault either. A lot of people just don't understand interest, the same way a lot of people just don't understand statistics. It's one of those common mathematical blind spots.

The people who made a profit selling them those mortgages knew better. That's the class that's uniformly guilty of shortsighted greed, not the homebuyers who've run themselves ragged trying to hold on to homes they're bound to lose.

Xenu: to quote an intermittently brilliant thinker, all ideas start out as gnosis and end up as wallpaper.

A@27, snarf!

License Farm, you know too much.

This entry wasn't an invitation to go Muslim-bashing. Furthermore, the Muslims in question are a long way from the Middle East.

You know what happens when you refuse to recognize the reasonable people in a population that isn't in a position to ignore you? You eventually wind up being forced to deal with their hostile and unreasonable members instead. Therefore, you should always give recognition to the people who are doing what you wish everyone else in their population would do. In the case of most Muslims, that would involve recognizing that they aren't terrorists who'd be willing to see their children blown to shreds. Give them credit for it.

Cowicide, you read the Drudge Report? Eeeeeeuw.

Tom, every Quaker and U.U. that's got a Bible has a holy book with passages in it that are more than a match for the ones you've quoted. I own several Bibles, and at least one Koran. Does that mean you can explain everything I do in terms of their most objectionable passages?

GhostofLordBeaverbrook has a point. Is this worse than circumcision? It's certainly better than some of the stories coming out of that raid on the FLDS compound in Texas. Shall we check and see what percentage of the kids in Solapur show evidence of fractured bones?

Look at our overall infant mortality rate. We could be doing a lot better than we are now, and we know it, but we just don't do it. That doesn't leave us a lot of room to play holier-than-thou.

As for this business of dropping kids off a tower and catching them in a sheet: you're talking about a lot of people holding the sheet by its edges, under tension, and catching the kid in the middle. That's not the equivalent of a 40 mph collision. The sheet's taking up a lot of the shock. The kids are small and light enough to fall straight, and they still have relatively elastic bones. I'd wonder about diffuse axonal injury myself; but one shock of that apparent intensity will do less damage than repeated shaking or hitting. Also, it looks to me like the kids coming off that sheet are moving and breathing pretty normally.

Are there any reasons we might trust that community to be telling the truth about injuries? I can think of a few. One is that they're dropping boys as well as girls. Another is that if you botch a fifteen-meter baby drop, you're going to get the kind of injuries that can't be hidden or disguised. People would have noticed. Third, they may not be a religious minority in their immediate area, but they are in their country overall. There's a limit to how much they can get away with in the name of religion.

Don't worry, Crax. Now it's just like it never happened.

I need someone to figure the odds for me. If thirty-six people have posted comments in a thread, what are the odds of three of them having a condition that affects one person in ten thousand?

NixyChick, ThatOtherGirl: I've done it too. The pins and needles afterward are something awful. I did most of my on-campus sleeping in an area of the student union called the Quiet Room, which had good soundproofing, a thick plush carpet with padding underneath it, a lot of big soft squooshy chairs, and a "no noise" policy. Around finals time it looked like the study hall in Sleeping Beauty's castle.

I think the real question here is whether Gil Duff has ever been thoroughly tested for narcolepsy or other sleep disorders. If he's not homeless but he's repeatedly falling asleep in public places, I'd say it's indicated.

Randy, Velocity Girl: is that a good enough reason for you?

"All this great moderation" just got back from the ophthalmologist, and is peering fuzzily at the laptop screen through still-dilated pupils. Last night, all this great moderation self-indulgently left the office well after seven p.m., went home, ate dinner, and got some sleep. It's a scandal, I tell you.

I hadn't anticipated there'd be quite this many spammers waiting to pounce on comment threads that mention Hendrix, sex, and tape. Otherwise, I'm with Antinous. I've been hearing about this tape for ages, but this is the first time I've seen a reliable link to it. That thing's harder to get hold of than the famous footage of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert eating a slice of pizza together.

Noen, note the comment from Anonymous at #24. There's no help for it; you're just going to have to remove your toolbar links to Fox News.

The evil spammers (who, through the miracle of geolocation, are now revealed to have only been one or two spammers) have all been banned, deleted, and reported as spam, and may they never darken our towels again. I'm sorry about the thread getting renumbered. Reporting a comment as spam automatically removes it from the sequence, which automatically renumbers the remaining comments.

It's sort of logical. If Movable Type assigned every incoming comment a permanent ordinal number, we'd have gap after gap in the sequence where our spam filters detected and removed baddies.

Anyway, if you see any more of 'em, give me a buzz.

MKultra, I don't know Neal Stephenson, but Bill Gibson is a laid-back and peaceable guy. He's also a head taller than anyone but Bill Brazell.

"For some time I have wondered what it would take to get Scalzi, Charlie Stross, Doctorow, Robert Charles Wilson, Connie Willis and Neal Stephenson locked in the same room at the same time, and then film the interactions."

It depends. Is this a comfortable room with lots of chairs, and an adjoining bathroom? Is there food and drink, plus modest quantities of wine and beer? If so, and if you're willing to subtract Neal Stephenson, I can tell you what would happen: they'd talk a lot, very fast, and have a good time doing it.

Calmly, Padster. It's a simple error.

iHamadryad, he does have a point. It was Jeff you were responding to.

Jeff, London really does get blown up a lot more often than we do, and political bombings have been going on there a lot longer. You know how some U.S. stores make you check your tote bag/backpack/other baggage when you enter? Not in London. They don't want to give anyone a legitimate excuse to set down a parcel and walk away from it. That was already established practice when I first visited there in 1984.

Check out K97's comment, which currently is #62.

Cavalaxis, I know there are states where you're not required to show ID if you aren't driving. I'd like to know what the NY laws are. (See also SeppTB @68.)

Lanval, there are Briticisms that confuse Americans (f.i., "twee"), but I've never thought "daft" was one of them.

Foobar @8, "Free assembly does not grant you the right to intentionally and continually make yourself a hazard to navigation" describes about a third of the drivers waiting to enter the Holland Tunnel from the NJ Turnpike every weekday morning.

Cupcake Faerie, is NASCAR so obviously objectionable that you don't have to explain the comparison?

Logruszed @45, who needs agents provocateurs when you're around?

...

I don't see what's so confusing about Critical Mass's message. They're saying the streets belong to bicyclists every bit as much as they belong to drivers. You may disagree with the way they make it, but is there a NYC cyclist here who thinks that point doesn't need to be made? Who hasn't repeatedly had to swerve out into traffic to avoid cars parked in bike lanes, or had drivers try to crowd you out of your lane because they don't understand that we're vehicular traffic too?

A few Manhattan streets and intersections get snarled by an overconcentration of bicycle traffic for about an hour every month. Traffic in practically every street in Manhattan and in large areas of the outer boroughs gets snarled and jammed for hours every weekday morning and again in the evening. Do they have to be there? No. Do they have a parade permit? No. Do some of them flagrantly disregard the traffic laws, and drive like complete jerks? You betcha they do.

See also Otter's comment, @56.

DKH, I've been a pedestrian on the ground during lots of Critical Mass rides, and they never alarmed me. Bicyclists pay a lot more attention than cars do.

...

"Radical chic"? That is sooooo 60s. Early 70s at the very latest -- and that's if you learned it from the paperback edition of Tom Wolfe's collected essays.

You know, OM, that was a really vile comment, but I'm still so relieved that you didn't up and die on me that it's hard to yell at you.

I'll work on it.

By the way, have you ever taken a long look at the geography of Iran? Only conquered twice in history, neither time really took, Persia is still Persia, and you can still see its boundaries from space. There aren't many countries you can say that about that aren't islands.

Also, when you consider that we can't even hold Baghdad, much less Iraq -- small, flat, has freshwater rivers running through it -- what makes you think it's a good idea to mix it up with Iran? For one thing, you get a whole different range of potential terrorists hating us. For another, it's a much bigger country with a much bigger military. For a third, the place is just un-invadable. It's the crumple zone that formed when the African Plate slammed into the Asia. There's a perfect spot for an ambush every 500 yards. If you bring in enough troops to deal with a potential ambush every 500 yards, there are too many of them for the carrying capacity of the available roads and water supplies. In between the parts where there's water, which are mostly narrow, winding mountain valleys (see: ambush, every 500 yards), you get deserts so godawful that from space they look like abstract art. The place has salt glaciers.

May I suggest another proverb to go with the one about never getting into a land war in Asia? Be nice to Iran, because nothing else is worth the price.

Everyone else gets the cool relatives. Mine are only good for pulling rank on racists who start yapping about how long ago their family's been in the country.

This thread made me laugh out loud all the way through. It did it to Patrick, too.

Woolie, the Boingers don't make it up. It's funny to find myself nostalgic for an older internet where most of the liars were amateurs.

Amuderick, there's no line below which additional radiation is "safe". All incremental increase causes incremental damage.

Could you contrive to sound a little less practiced at that rant? I know you've been here a while and posted in lots of threads, but it worries me just a tad.

Urban Naturalist: Good. It's tedious having to remove them.

Tenn, thanks for being helpful.

And hey, when did I get nicknamed "Mom"? Cheez. I'm only slightly older than dirt.

Pipenta: maybe because there's a lot of them?

Idle Tuesday: it's just a way for the moderator to deprecate text without removing it. The term for it is "disemvowelling". There's more about it in the moderation guidelines, which are linked from the front page.

I've sometimes wondered whether the way we enshrine the violence of the American Revolution has had some negative effects on us. We came to independence with "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Canada's equivalent is "Peace, land, and good government."

Whoops, nearly forgot --

Antinous @81 is correct. The community is the first line of defense.

Cefeida, whiny self-pity is unlikely to get you disemvowelled on its own, but that doesn't mean shouldn't correct your tendency to fall into that tone. It occasions a much more serious and far-reaching problem, which is that it's guaranteed to lose you much of the respect, appreciation, and sympathy you might otherwise receive from your readers. This is true no matter where you hang out.

Whining and self-pity produce a far worse impression in prose than they do in face-to-face conversation. One of the things I teach my fiction-writing students is that if they need to kill off a character without upsetting the reader, all they need to do is attach [," (s/he) whined.] to that character's dialogue in one or two places.

I have to assume you've been hanging out in forums where the effects of good and bad manners aren't much discussed, since you early on defended Clockwork on the grounds that "He wasn't even rude, he was just frank." Clockwork was being rude. He may have also been frank, but that's a separate characteristic, and no defense. Rudeness, whether frank or insincere, is still rudeness.

I do have hope for you, since you mention knowing that you should leave off some topic of converseation when you see your friends' eyes glaze over. You may want to give some thought to the problem of not being able to see your readers' eyes when they read your comments. What you perceive as unkindness or repression on their part may be nothing more than their attempt to send a similar message.

I notice you also said "It's still my opinion that criticism is useful and should be welcome regardless of whether the blog is free or not." You're quite wrong about that. The world is full of useless criticism, not to mention boring, repetitive, badly phrased, ill-considered, self-serving, hackneyed, and downright dim criticism. I see no reason to suspend all other judgement just because a comment happens to be critical.

I confess to being mildly irritated when you say things like "Am I posting on a blog where no criticism is allowed?" You must surely be aware that criticism is allowed; you've seen it done. It's the manner of the criticism that may or may not be a problem. If you're unclear on the particulars, please read the moderation guidelines, which you will find linked from the front page.

I don't think you're a troll. I will nevertheless tell you the defining characteristic of trolls, so you can recognize and avoid them. A true hardcore troll is someone who cannot be brought to understand that their social difficulties stem from their behavior, rather than their opinions. I don't know whether it's a learned or innate blindness. I only know that none of them can make that distinction, or understand it when others make it for them.

Avi, trying to get a literal view of creation introduced into the public school system doesn't count?

I don't know why your picture doesn't upload. Mine won't either. (Actually, I was trying to upload a photo of Hiro Frumentius; but the principle is the same.)

Yog! I'm sorry, I didn't spot your comment when I was here earlier, O elder ghod of chaos and evil. Thank you for the clarification, and please don't eat us today,

The Roundworld is full of Narrativium, but most of it is privately held.

Antinous: The panel went very well, the conference was interesting (what I saw of it), and I had a good long talk with Boing Boing's new business manager.

The Instructables people did something very cool to my phone, but I'm going to see whether I can get a decent photo of it before I tell the story.

Evidence @241:

Teresa/Moderator

You asked questions about the fiber content of my clothes, If I trim my beard, and my Pizza preferences.

First I am a Christian and not Jewish. The laws you are questioning me about were addressed to the nation Israel for a particular time and place

Where in the Bible does it specify that? I'll take an answer from the Old Testament or the New Testament. Either's fine. All I ask is that the passage you cite say that as flatly and literally as you read Genesis.

I know you've claimed you read the Bible "plainly" rather than "literally". You're not fooling anyone. The term for that style of reading is "literal".

So, I don't want any of that "what this passage means metaphorically" business, or "what this meant in the context of the times," or any of those other non-simple reading protocols you reject in your interpretation of Genesis.

And if you insist that you must be allowed to read some parts of the Bible literally (or "plainly"; I can nail you either way), and give other parts a more complex and interpretive reading, I'm going to have to ask you where the Bible says you're allowed to do that, and where it spells out which books do and do not have to be given a literal reading.

If the Bible doesn't specify that, then the decision to read some books via one set of reading protocols, and other books via another, was made by humans.

but in essence I do hold to them,

Hold it right there. "But in essence" isn't good enough. You don't allow anyone else to say what Genesis means "in essence"; you insist on a literal (or "plain": same thing) interpretation of it. That hardly leaves you on solid ground when you invoke an "in essence" interpretation of any other portion of the Bible.

I don't wear a Slipknot or Marilyn Manson T-shirts. The mixing of fabrics was something people in their day did as acts of worship to pagan gods.

Tch! Where in the Bible does it say any of that? By my recollection it's a fairly clear and direct command: thou shalt not mix fibers, period, not "thou shalt not mix fibers until the Amorites and Elamites and Canaanites and Hurrians and Assyrians and Phoenicians and what-not cease to be an issue."

For that matter, where does it say that you're allowed to set aside any prohibitory commandments on the grounds that the thing prohibited was a common practice among the neighbors of the ancient Israelites?

I'll save you a hunt through your concordance: the Bible doesn't say that. The doctrine you're citing is the product of a complex and not entirely literal tradition of Biblical interpretation. Worse, some of the scholarship you're invoking is scientific, not exegetic. You haven't allowed science to have a legitimate place in the interpretation of Genesis. Why is it then legitimate to use it as an excuse to get out of obeying one of God's clearer commands?

Same with the beard deal and mixing their foods. God wanted them to be set apart a peculiar people, same for me today.

Nope. All it says is that Jews are to be a peculiar people. If we read the Bible using the same protocols you insist on using in your reading of Genesis, there is exactly zero scriptural basis for your belief that you're supposed to be different in a different way.

I purposely said I read the Bible plainly not literally.

I purposely reply that I was not born yesterday, and am not in the habit of taking wooden nickels.

If the Bible plainly is poetry, descriptive or uses modes of speech (Sun setting-raining cats and dog etc.) I take it for what the author intended.

Hogwash. That is precisely what you aren't doing. If you want to argue that some books in the Old Testament are meant to be read literally and others are not, you might be able to argue for reading (say) Chronicles literally; but Genesis emphatically does not belong in that bin. I'm not talking about its content. I'm talking about its style -- the same thing you claim you're taking your cues from.

Every culture has much-retold traditional tales. They're sonorous and simplified and can pack a real wallop. The form is so recognizable that the moment we first hear a Joss Whedon character intone, "Into each generation a slayer is born -- one girl in the world with the power to stop the forces of evil," we know that we're listening to something old and important and much-retold.

It's every bit as obvious that Genesis is one of those traditional tales as it is that the Song of Solomon is poetry. It should thus be read like a traditional tale: slowly, respectfully, with our feelers set to pick up its implications; but not literally.

Like ballads, much-retold traditional stories achieve their compression by leaving stuff out. We give them our trust that what was left out wasn't essential to the story, and by implication acknowledge that stuff has been left out: it's a tale, not a roadmap or a blueprint.

In the case of Genesis, it's two traditional tales, not one. It doesn't take a genius to notice that the first two chapters or Genesis don't match up. I spotted that myself when I was a little kid stuck in long church services, with nothing to read but scripture and hymnal: Genesis 1, animals are created before man. Genesis 2, man is created before the animals.

So how did the author intend for that to be taken? Not literally; that much is clear. Rather, we're to understand, as we do with all traditional tales, that it's the story that's important. The same is evident in Genesis 4:16-17, where we go straight from Cain, Abel, and the first murder, to Cain's wife in his exile in the land of Nod giving birth to his son Enoch, and Cain building a city.

Does this apparent impossibility "disprove" Genesis? It does not. What it says is that if you're reading Genesis so literally that the sudden appearance of Cain's wife seems impossible, then you're reading the story wrong.

Which you are, O Evidence. Your own points of doctrine come from readings of the Bible that are far less simple than the reading protocols you insist on applying to Genesis. You and yours are putting all your effort into exactly those parts of the tale that the original teller deprecated. What do you want -- a No-Prize from the Almighty?

Never claim that that misreading has anything to do with God's will. The decision to hold to a dead-literal interpretation of Genesis was an arbitrary one, made by human beings. I don't mean to impute motives, but arguing about Creation has always been a good way for an ambitious preacher to get attention from the press. It's also a fine intake device for gathering in people who care more about knowing the Right Answer to any question than they care about whether yon Right Answer is actually true.

I'm sorry your faith doesn't extend far enough to encompass the full magnitude of a God that could create a universe that contains the Burgess Shale, the nine orders of trilobytes, the spectacular Pleistocene megafauna (whose remains are even now popping out of the melting permafrost), or just a nice hunk of agatized stromatolite to use as a paperweight.

I don't understand it myself. If you're going to put this much effort into believing strange things, why not concentrate instead on believing that God is omnipotent, does not lie, and is far larger and stranger than could ever fit into a brief tribal legend misread as an instruction manual?

Like John Cage's silence, it's been done before (one, two), but it's never the same.

Evidence: Of course you were forcing religion. You've been utterly obnoxious and self-centered about it, too. I doubt you've convinced a single skeptic, but I'm certain that thousands of readers now have a poorer opinion of Christianity as a result of witnessing your performance here.

Jake the Snake (and other scientists): I don't think the Creationism argument can go much further. If you'd like, I can give this thread another hour or two then start deleting everything that isn't sober science.

Evidence, I see you've ignored my question. Until now, you've been the one who's wanted to force discussions of religion on this thread. Now that you have someone else talking about it, you draw back.

Could it be that you don't actually care about Creationism, ID, or Biblical literalism? Are you just another troll who's discovered a subject he can use to coerce an amount of attention he could never attract on his own?

Ill Lich @231, I suppose I ought to disemvowel Iva Biggrudge's comments, but they're such perfect examples of that style of bad rhetoric and bad thinking that I'm tempted to keep them.

Maybe we could donate them to the Stupidity Project?

This is kind of embarrassing.

I've been going through my mail, and it appears that not everyone has been reading Iva Biggrudge's comments as intentional comedy.

Have I miscalled that? Is it possible that he really is that stupid, and what we're hearing is his natural discourse?

I'm taking opinions.

I wonder if that's what's intermittently been eating Antinous's comments?

Thanks.

Discovery: it's not always a wonderful thing.

Cefeida, do you remember what it was like before I started dropping cartoon anvils on the heads of people who were doing the "I am just too cool, and this is just too boring" routine? Remember how we'd get entire threads full of me-too types competing to see who could lay claim to the biggest crock of ennui?

Bleh!

Takuan, some school administrators are good people. I've met 'em. But when school administrators get together, there sure are a lot of unmatched front ends of horses wandering around loose.

Wasn't kidding last time; wasn't kidding the time before that.

On Making Light, the term for Mr. Evidence there would be "pinata": an amusing centerpiece you take turns beating on with a stick to make interesting objects fall out.

...

Evidence, some questions: How much attention do you pay to the fiber content of your clothing? Do you trim your beard? Ever eat pizza with sausage and pepperoni on it?

If these aren't issues in your life, why have you picked out one small section of the Pentateuch to read hyper-literally, and given short shrift to the rest?

I wondered what the connection was. Good to be reminded of the full breadth of the history of the time.

FlamingPhoneBook (8, 16), are you just arguing to hear yourself type?

CSLoser @24:

Presumably these parking lots are private property and it's perfectly legitimate to make rules about photography on private property.

If you're saying it's a simple rule, I'll disagree and say it's nowhere near that simple. If you weren't saying that, never mind.

JLBraun, I regret the necessity. I truly didn't expect you'd ignore what I said. But if this is the consequence I laid out, then I'm stuck with it, no matter how much I dislike having to disemvowel that many well-written comments.

SweetCraspy, RoseThornn, you don't know the background.

Who's the prosecutor responsible for this? Does he have to stand for re-election? How about his boss? Same thing? You can go after these guys.

Who's got the scoop on that? Anyone? Be good to know. Because Steve Kurtz hasn't "beaten them." He's gone through four years of completely unnecessary hell that started the night his wife died. The kind of prosecutor who could do something like that just to puff up his own reputation is not someone who ought to be holding office in this country.

I don't know what kind of shape Kurtz is in, mentally and emotionally, but I know what his finances have to look like.

http://caedefensefund.org/

Boba @45, disemvowelled text is easier to read than you'd imagine. Also, G. Park quoted the gist of it in his own message.

G. Park @46: I disagree, in principle and in practice. Besides, the text is still there.

Does anyone here have the URL for that re-vowelling thing?

FifthE1ement is just spewing Koolaid. You could replace him with a small handheld recording and playback device, or the online text equivalent thereof.

You can recognize the rhetoric: "The other guys do it worse." "The other guys would as soon kill you as look at you." "The other guys have no civilization and no respect for law." "The other guys are animals. Beasts. Not human." It's the usual sequence. Its endpoint is that they can make any claims they want to about the other guys, because they've been transformed into supernatural monsters. That way, we don't stop and say "Hold it. Human beings don't do that."

Torture doesn't save lives. It doesn't get useful or worthwhile intelligence. This has been explained over and over again. Hell, it's been thrashed out at length in the comment threads of my own weblog -- and by the way, more than one of the participants there are fully trained military interrogators.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005106.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007974.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008007.html

If you torture people, they'll immediately become geniuses at figuring out what you want to hear and telling it to you. You'll spend all your resources chasing down bad intel. Real interrogators use completely different techniques.

Anybody who says otherwise is not a tough guy, and is not facing facts.

You know where the "ticking bomb" pro-torture scenario comes from? Movies. It's a very movie thing: you get an intense plot-twisting interaction that has both the protagonist and the villain in the same shot. Also, it doesn't take very long. That's the problem with real interrogation techniques: they take a while. They aren't dramatic. All they do is work.

So, when you see people talking about the need to torture, or how lives can be saved if we use torture, remember: they're talking about how it works in the movies.

FifthE1ement, you are a wuss. You want to go back to living in your pre-9/11 movie in which being an American means you're always right, you're always safe, and you always get to win. It wasn't true back then, either.

AnnoyedCapitalist, the Bushies have been spreading disinformation for years now about how waterboarding isn't really torture. (It's torture. The guys who administer it certainly know it is.) Having to watch it is nasty, but for a lot of viewers it may be a necessary corrective.

WeightedCompanionCube, governments that torture are either ignoring the advice of their own interrogation experts, or they're torturing for some other reason. It is not a valid information-gathering option.

Cowicide @11, Xopher knows all that.

Boba Fett Diop, no apologies. It was a fine rant.

Blog Mosaic, what Takuan said. We don't do that here. Put your URL in your personal profile.

I've removed your URL from your comments in other threads, too.

ElysianArtist, the point is not that the policewoman is overweight -- and you have no idea how fast she can move. The point is that she parked directly in front of a fire hydrant, and gave the guy the cold shoulder when he asked her about it. That would have been wrong no matter how much she weighed.

Subsidiary point, the retired policewoman claiming that you can't photograph or film anyone who works for the NYPD "Because of the terrorism." Very wrong. Also? She's retired. Not a police officer. No authority.

Just in case anyone's interested, I am seriously not happy over having to disemvowel JLBraun's posts.

JLBraun @47:@antinous

I have been participating on other BB topics, sir.

But that wasn't the deal, and you know it.

The deal was, you're not allowed to comment about guns on Boing Boing until you've posted a number of comments on other topics equal to the number of comments you had at that point posted about guns.

Also, that "talking about ammo" = "talking about guns".

It's not hard for me to call up all the comment you've ever posted here and see the tiny number of comments on other topics before you reverted solidly to guns. What's going to be tedious is disemvowelling every last one of them.

Takuan: And thank goodness for that.

Falcon, Orinos, go read the moderation guidelines. They're linked from the front page.

Skarbreeze @23, the moderator has no problem with links that have a strong relevance to the entry and subsequent discussion.

The recent chewing-out in another thread was because that user always put links in his comments, and they always led to something vaguely related on his own website. Stuff like that is the reason for answer #3 to the first question in the moderation guidelines: "Because Boing Boing gets enough traffic to attract non-automated scams."

I trust I can tell the difference between your extremely useful links, and that scammer I yelled at last week.

Doggo @82, that's a terrible idea. Don't do it. Sure, accosting you is wrong; but kicking anyone's ass is assault, and puts you thoroughly in the wrong. Trying to kick a police officer's ass will just land you in a world of trouble.

You should look up that Bible verse so you can read it in its proper context.

I want to point out something about Mammal: he came back and responded. He also talks like a human being, which is not something you get with astroturfers and garden-variety sloganeers. I think he was initially irate because he isn't familiar with what you can do with a zoom lens, and so misread the story.

Yes, he was wrong about photography being forbidden on private property. But we've had threads here where a dozen different commenters were insisting, loudly, that if it's private property the owners or tenants can do anything they want, including assaulting or falsely imprisoning innocent customers whom they'd invited to enter.

That is: it's not an unheard-of error.

Save your anger for the Middlesbrough police, mall security guards, and bargain-hunting wanna-bes.

Everyone, I'm on a new crusade: please tighten up the vertical space your message consumes. The more back-and-forth conversation the reader can see at one time, the better his or her understanding of it. It doesn't take a lot of extra line returns to push the next comment onto the next screen. Especially be careful of stacking up pointless extra line returns at the ends of comments.

Brian Carnell @19, first, the case was never properly heard. That doesn't mean you're free to decide who would have been held to be at fault, and to assign the penalties. It certainly doesn't mean that our society works the way you propose. And since it doesn't, I don't see how you can fault Obama for not following your invented rules of your invented society that he's never heard of.

Unless that's the point of the exercise? I did start wondering about that over the course of reading this thread. I've read a lot of your comments on Boing Boing, and this is the first time I recall hearing about this very important principle. I also fail to remember you scrupulously keeping track of who you do and don't consider banned from society on account of some participation in or praise of violent action in the past. That would make you the bull goose nonviolence advocate on Boing Boing, and I just don't have you pegged that way.

So: are you sure about that?

Bill Ayers has has a long and complicated life, and almost all of it has been virtuous. People who know him and have worked with him don't hesitate to say that about him. How is that you know so much more about him than they do?

Brian (again) @48:

James Loewen has some interesting points, but ultimately he's just arguing for replacing one politically slanted version of history with another politically slanted version of history (namely, one that is closer to his personal politics).

No. That is a fill-in-the-blank argument. You could say exactly the same thing about anyone you wanted to denigrate. The only information in it is the assertion that the person thus named is presenting a slanted view; and you didn't follow it up with any examples or other substantiating arguments.

Moon, you have behaved very badly, especially in comment #96. When you implicitly demand that other people provide proof of their views, you can't just refuse to provide it for your own views.

IdleTuesday @63, I have been lowering the tolerance hereabouts on threats of violence. I expect you've suffered at the hands of a drunk driver, and I sympathize. But if you're going to threaten violence, please make it something that's physically implausible.

Historyisaweapon @95, you're allowed one instance per six months of announcing in a comment that you haven't read the preceding thread. Please keep track so you don't overdraw your account. Thank you.

Noen @101, I think it's possible that this represents the very best that Moon can do.

Polomoche @103:

The WU was following a very tired formula that originated in Czarist Russia and migrated to the U.S. with the Anarchist/Comintern movement in the 20's, all stemming from the most regrettable and contradictory component of Marxist ideology: namely, that an historical inevitability should be "sped up" by revolutionary action via a violent overthrow of the bourgeois.

But Polomoche, that isn't peculiar to Czarist Russia or the Anarchist/Comintern movement. Why, when I was a child I was explicitly taught in school and elsewhere (Arizona, Goldwater years) that Communism in the U.S.S.R. must eventually collapse due to its own internal contradictions; and yet the same ideological tendency that preached that was also in favor of speeding up this inevitable overturn.

Takuan @104, I swear that when I saw that, all I could think was that they had to be a special team used when playing 43-man Squamish.

Ah, so you did keep count.

Insurgent paradigms are more interesting. Dominant paradigms have more money. I have no problem with the latter paying to support the former.

The first time I ever hitchhiked, when my ride had flaked out on me and I had to get to class (I was a freshman in college), I was picked up by what proved to be a bunch of scofflaw illegal immigrants who were drinking while driving. They gave me a ride to class, and were very nice about it. I gave them better instructions on how to get where they were going than the previous person had, which was why they were driving around my neighborhood in the first place.

Pocket Hell, please knock off the "this makes me sick / that thing's disgusting" routine. You can make the same arguments without it.

So much for my great idea for a DIY art book: Paint Your Own Modernist Masterpiece. It's too bad. Somewhere I still have stashed a list of tips and tricks for it, like: You can get away with anything if you look like you really mean it, so work big. Or: if you don't like your finished picture, divide it into n pieces of identical size, and hang them at a precise distance from each other. Or: take an image, blow it way up, put light behind it and a translucent sheet of paper over it, and re-render the image in heavy lines and strong colors. Or: don't try to do Motherwell unless you have a really big wall to put it on. Or: that Jackson Pollock paint drips thing is harder than it looks.

I'm not worried about the Chinese undercutting me in the contemporary abstract market. The Indians have already got that covered.

Badkitty @90: Complete agreement here.

No one knows how much talent they have for a particular medium until they put the necessary work into learning its techniques. However, some people who put the work in will get a lot better, get better a lot faster, and hit a much higher level of overall quality, than other people who do just as much work. That's talent at work.

Talent plus originality plus the right turn of mind for a medium can substitute for a lot of training. For instance, there are a lot of writers who could learn to write passable science fiction, or genre fantasy. There are far fewer who would be trying to invent it on their own if they'd never seen an example and didn't know that the form exists. Artists like that tend to have much more satisfactory creative lives if they do run into the body of established practice, so that they don't spend so much time reinventing the wheel.

If you don't have the talent or turn of mind or whateve you want to call it for creative work in a particular medium, you can probably learn to do passable work in it, but you'll never be great. You may not even be good. Also, you'll work very hard for every inch of improvement.

I've spent many years working professionally with artists. I know the difference between talent and technique. Both are necessary if you're going to be seriously good at something.

I could, with a great deal of work, manage to compose music. My husband can roll it out like yard goods, improvisationally, at the same time that he's reading a book or magazine. I can laboriously put together rhymed verse, but I'm not in the same universe as Mike Ford or Abigail Sutherland. I'm good at fixing and analyzing plots but not at making them, the way Jim Macdonald is. My brother Matthew has a talent for visual art that was obvious when he was so young that he should have still been at the "scribble with a crayon" stage. I'm not half bad at building and fixing and miscellaneous mechanical stuff, but I know people who have real talent for it -- enough so that I'd classify it as an art form.

That's fine with me. I'm good at what I'm good at.

Meanwhile:

AlmedaRed @50, all artists are self-taught. It helps if they're also taught by others; but what others can teach you is not enough.

ArtistVictoriaC @88: Oh yeah? Name names. Who do you know who's so prominent and popular that Chinese reproduction artists bother stealing their stuff? I've been looking at their sites for years. They're big on Van Gogh, Alma-Tadema, Klimt, Bouguereau, Fragonard, Botticelli, Cassatt, and the Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites.

Pocket Hell, I have absolutely no use for someone who holds the conversation in contempt.

Okay, Joemo. Kevitivity's account should be working again.

Joemo @6: Drat! Kevitivity is still locked out? Let me try that again.

Ill Lich @8: And don't think you weren't missed.

Takuan @9, and everyone else: if you see the Scientology ad, please send us a screenshot. It's not supposed to be here, ever.

Jeff @18, it's nobody's fault; more a matter of outgrowing the previous set of arrangements.

EncarnacionFlor, saving is always good. I do it myself when I've invested a lot of time in a message.

Benschomatic @39:

Moderator: You missed #33.

Nope. That was on purpose.

If you're going to censor, please be thorough.

That wasn't censorship. You might want to check out the moderation guidelines.

I work for a printing company and I can say that giclées can be of really great quality in the hands of the right people using good equipment and the right paper.

You're not going to see a particle of disagreement out of me on that one.

They are sprayed and not ink to plate to paper offset printed,

Yes.

but I think people would be hardpressed to come up with anything comparable on any typical consumer inkjet regardless of cost. A real good Iris machine runs a good 5 or 6 figures.

Technology just keeps moving. I remember when the equivalent of PhotoShop required a dedicated machine that cost as much as the mortgage on a McMansion.

Go ahead and critique the printing on Coop's latest, if that's what you're leading up to. Just be civil about it, and remember that he and his wife are in the audience.

Takuan @82: The source of the nihil?

Happy to play, but I don't know this game.

Antinous @32: Have you really met an Ascended Master Archangel Communicator? Woof! Best I've done in that ine is be friends with someone whose sister claims to channel major members of the angelic hierarchy, see enclosed rate sheet. I balked when I realized she'd listed Lucifer as one of the available participants: why, for all the world, would anyone want to have a conversation with him?

RJ: There's a Blogger Liberation Front? Rue the day, Nick Denton!

Takuan, Eustace, Proto:

Oooh, you had paper tape, now! We'd have given an intern to have paper tape! We had to crouch over a wee readout -- no WYSIWYG for us -- keyboardin' via mylar strip-fonts directly onto photographick paper, wi' the set type hangin' off a clothesline overhead ta dry, hot wax cookin' for the pasteup, an' nary an extinguisher in the place. What we had was a bottle o' NoDoz up on t' shelf. Never saw a printshop wi'out two things: picture o' yon shmoo-fellows laughin'emselves sick, sayin' YOU WANT IT WHEN?, an' bottle of NoDoz.

We'd be settin' type from mimeographed press releases, all the while breathin' in fumes from they photodeveloper on table next to head, an' mind you're not woozy when pass yon great evil cast-iron address-label-makin' behemoth from dawn of time -- snatch your hand off! Did all that for five buck an hour, an' we felt privileged!

Gameplayers, shall I ask the Boingers if they'd be willing to have an occasional open thread where you can play? Or would you rather hang out in the hospitable tail-ends of comment threads?

Anonymous Ruth @36: Thanks for the amplified explanation. The giclée/inkjet thing comes up way too often when one of the Boingers blogs a giclée print. I'm thinking of instituting a policy that goes, "If you care that much about printmaking, how come you don't know that giclée prints are a different process?"

I'll happily take guff from anyone who knows more about printing than I do.

Benschomatic, Igor no like permanently contrarian commenters. Easy gig, takes no judgement.

This is the greatest text deprecation device since alt.warlord's glider cannons.

Also, those things you're fraudulently calling lithographs? They're really just printed on paper.

Oh look, it's the giclée vs. inkjet argument again.

Here's the answer (again):

Granted, "giclée" is sometimes wrongly used (with or without intent to deceive) to describe plain old inkjet prints. However, that doesn't mean that "giclée" and "ink jet print" mean the same thing, or that the printing processes are the same.

In Coop's case, they really are giclée prints.

Mark Frauenfelder @15: "Optic" has posted two comments to Boing Boing. The previous one, posted last December in the comment thread of an entry about one of Coop's prints, says "Hw mch ds bngbng dvrtrl cst? s thr rtcrd?"

I don't know whether his his beef is with you, Coop, or giclée prints. I suspect it's all of the above, since he only appears when the three elements are in conjunction. Aside from that, he's not our problem.

Perfect.

Why shoot at helicopters? Rig something that'll throw a lot of fibers into the air, and wait for the propeller shaft to clog.

If you want to keep full-size helicopters from landing on your roof, or a roof near you, set out open-topped containers full of small pieces of styrofoam. Packing peanuts will do. When the helicopter approaches, the turbulence will blow the styrofoam up into the air, where some of it will get sucked into the chopper's air intakes and gum up the works.

Or so I'm told, at any rate.

An answer, from mighty tech guy Jonathan Schreiber:

I believe that we have fixed the root cause for this. BUT users could still see this problem if they have an old cookie that was set pre-fix (the fix went in yesterday around noon). So my suggestion for all BB commenters is to logout (via the logout link, upper right), then log back in again.

After doing a logout/login, the cookies and session will match and they won't have an issue with the system "thinking" they're logged out any more (i.e. no more "text was entered wrong" error messages). Is it worth updating the post with the login/logout suggestion for anyone who may still get the bug?I'd say it's very much worth it.

Ratzo @62:

All it takes if you want to cure the world's fanatical religiosity is to rid the world of fear.

Simple. The more anxiety people have, the more they will express superstitious beliefs. In this way, religion is very much like obsessive-compulsive disorder (or whatever they're calling it now).

Well, aren't you smart. After all these millennia of thought and study and striving; all the bodies of law and philosophy and mysticism that have tried to make sense of the breadth and variety of human experience; all the liturgies and disciplines and devotions held to by millions upon millions of people: you, lucky you! are the very first person to have figured out that it's all dead simple -- just a big ol' anxiety management system that doesn't work the way it should. And to think that all this time, the answer was right there in front of us, if only we'd had your insight.

Hail, O pinnacle of the ages.

Of course, your formulation there doesn't come anywhere near explaining the religious impulse, the complexities of religious life, or the motivations of believers, much less the myriad ways religion has functioned in society.

I don't think you know much about religion. Be opposed to it if you want; but for god's sake, have some idea what you're opposing.

If you read the sparse academic work of Leo Strauss (and more importantly, the work of his acolytes, such as PNAC) you see that their plan was to shake the ground underneath the population by creating one calamity after another, then quickly offer them religion and nationalism as a balm. In this way, you create an unquestioning source of cannon fodder for the wars that would then cement these groups' power and enrich them.

Let's apply a little basic science: does this procedure work? It does not. Multiple devastating calamities followed by the offer of religion and nationalism may numb a man, or numb some men, but they don't produce unthinking cannon fodder. If they did, the Vandals would have fallen into orderly ranks and marched off contentedly under the Roman eagles.

For first-rate cannon fodder, you start with a lifetime of hard work, curtailed rations, and a firm and unchanging set of social patterns. When the young come of age, pick out the ones you want and train them until they could go through the moves with their heads shot off. Dress them identically, keep them away from civilians, and see to it that they eat, sleep, work, pray, and fight as part of the group.

Result? They'll be vastly more obedient than the equivalent number of undisciplined civilians, but they still won't be mindless automatons. I offer as evidence my many-times-great-grandfather the Hessian deserter, who should have been cannon fodder but obviously had other ideas.

If you break people catastrophically enough, especially when they're young, you can remake them; but no matter what ideology you try to teach them, what they're going to do is re-bond to each other. It's going to be a deeply dysfunctional bond, but under the circumstances that's hardly surprising. And if you ever decide to stop fighting, it will be difficult to assimilate them back into civil society.

Now let's consider statistical probability. Rulers and armies have existed for a very long time. If the formula for creating mindlessly loyal fighting drones were that simple, don't you think some of our very clever ancestors would have figured it out, and made themselves the permanent God-Emperors of their part of the world? And yet, where we see semi-permanent dynasties of God-Emperors, what we see under them are not people being constantly thrashed to ribbons by successive catastrophes. We see order.

It was much the same plan that the Muslim Brotherhood had when they put together the precursors to Al Qaeda, and it has exceeded the expectations of both outfits.

Oh, so that's why you're proposing schemes of social control that have never worked before. You're not actually trying to explain how things happen. You're trying to present the Arab world as Other, as alien, and their motivations and thought processes as being unimaginably different from our own.

Why are you swallowing this crap propaganda? It has no real underpinnings. It's just an updated version of that hokey, racist old stereotype, the Despotic East, where unnumbered generations have toiled in hopeless oppression, enslaved by cruel rulers and mind-destroying mystical religions.

You can see this appallingly self-satisfied notion of ours illustrated in beautiful allegorical detail "The Four Continents" by Daniel Chester French, which are the four 19th C. statuary groups in front of the old U.S. Customs House just off Bowling Green in Manhattan. The one you want is Asia, though for full effect you should compare it with the other three. "Asia" has everything your model requires: mindless submission to authority, indifference to human suffering and death, and inscrutably alien religious traditions that somehow demand all these things.

Lowell Thomas would be embarrassed to be peddling this bunkum. I don't know where you picked it up, but if I were you, I'd take it back there and put it down again.

The dystopia that is our world is the result.

The problems of the modern world are Al Qaeda's fault? There's only one possible reply: "Black Death in Europe, 1347; fall of Constantinople, 1453; Newtonian synthesis, 1687; Franklin, not until 1790. And which timeline are you from?"

Sister Y @65: It's no fault of yours. The U.S. school system has (had?) a bizarre policy of excluding religion whenever possible from the topics taught in American History. I'm all for keeping prayer out of schools, and that goes double for keeping religion out of science; but when you take religious movements out of U.S. history, you leave some gaping holes. When I was growing up, you could graduate from high school without ever hearing about the Great Awakening or Second Great Awakening.

As for books about it, there may be an obvious choice, but I don't know what it is. There are a lot of books and even more scholarly articles on the subject. Fawn M. Brodie's No Man Knows My History is the best study of Joseph Smith, and includes some (I don't know how much) material on the Burnt-Over District itself.

Capn Barcode @68, you can't just decide to believe, and theists can't just decide to not believe. Meanwhile, what Antinous says is true: you can discover that belief has snuck up on you.

GunterK @70, try the Society for Ethical Culture.

GuidoDavid @73, not all atheists are dogmatic; but some atheists are so dogmatic that if I weren't able to make out the specific words they were saying, I'd take them for blue light Baptists.

Takuan: You know, I get along just fine with P.Z. Myers.

Jeff, there are federally funded sites that have pictures; for instance, the Library of Congress has one. It's admirable in many ways. However, it's nowhere near as convenient, familiar, easy to use, and linked in all directions as Flickr is for the sort of users who'll want those photos.

Flickr may make some money by providing this service to the public. I can't see what's inappropriate about that. They're not exactly a rapacious bunch.

Don't worry. If it were imminently dangerous, Bill Higgins would tell us about it.

(Bill gave me a rock that came out of the excavations deep under CERN. It's very cool.)

What have you got against suppuration?

ScottFree @4, I've always wondered about them naming that thing "Mother Box."

Holtt @9, will you please not quote from standard online ad copy when you're posting a link? Three different people reported you as a spammer.

And as long as we're somewhere near the subject -- this is a general comment -- could y'all please use a tinyURL or a proper link when you're posting a URL that's over a cubit in length?

ScottFree @26, I'm sure plenty of girls were prepared to like you for being into comics, but unfortunately they went into comic shops looking for you, and met some of the other guys who hung out there.

Joaquin, send me a screenshot if you see them again.

BinaryLoop @4, "brainwashed Catholic" is not all one word. Many people just use the second half of the formulation, and find it works just fine.

Doug117 @18:

"Drug experiences can NEVER get you God or enlightment or wisdom. Just more and more bondage."

No kidding? You mean the Divine is present everywhere and in everything, except for drugs?

How do you explain that?

And while you're at it, how can you have an illusion within an illusion? An illusion is a divergence from reality. A further illusion is still a divergence from reality, so it comes to the same thing, only more colorful and with less plot consistency.

But when you say something is an illusion within an illusion, do you mean it diverges from what is already a divergence from reality? In that case, is it not possible that the direction of its divergence is in the direction of reality?

Alternately, if by "an illusion within an illusion" you mean an illusion that diverges even more from reality than its parent illusion does, should it not be possible, by observing the nature and direction of their differences, to infer the nature of reality by working backward along that line?

All experiences are equally real. It's just that some of them lack manifestation outside your head.

Camilo, what Kyle Armbruster is doing is staking out the rationalist/materialist position. You can look it up on Wikipedia.

I'm in favor of letting kids know about plastic surgery, though not for the usual reasons. I want them to understand (1.) what a tiny difference there is between conventionally pretty and conventionally plain; and that (2.) rich people don't just look good because they're somehow naturally better than the rest of us.

(If you've seen Dangerous Liaisons, think of the scene where Glenn Close is getting dressed in the morning, assisted by half-a-dozen well-trained servants. Moral: Some looks require a staff.)

There's a limit to how much you can compensate for deficiencies in childhood nutrition and health care, and maternal health and nutrition is even more intractable. But when you're talking about a few centimeters' difference between a fashionable and unfashionable nose, or a weak vs. a "normal" chin, kids might as well know it can be bought.

Knowing that doesn't mean they're going to move heaven and earth to get their faces reshaped. I think there's significant value in knowing that there's nothing magical, nothing fated, about having a fashionable face. It's just a thing some people have by luck of the draw, and some other people want and can afford to have done.

I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember when home haircoloring kits got good enough to produce realistic results. My recollection is that that was when the hex started to come off admitting that you colored your hair. It was also when hair-color-based personality assignments began to subside. You'll still hear blonde jokes, or remarks about "the traditional redheaded temperament"; but not nearly as much as you used to.

When something you used to have to be born with becomes a product you can buy, it loses a lot of its magic. I expect the same thing will happen if we ever come up with easy ways to alter skin color, or tendency to gain weight.

So, I'm all in favor of telling kids about plastic surgery, professional stylists, personal shoppers, and all the rest of that technology. I would also -- and here I think Dorothy Parker, author of "The Standard of Living," would agree with me -- give them the price lists that go with it.

Radicalize 'em early, sez I.

Thanks, Ross. I wasn't as surprised by this development as I should have been. Nobody I know reads Newsweek any more.

Come on. Somebody say "Gosh, did you research that yourself? Is this the first place anyone's reported that story?"

Phas3d, when you post things like that, it makes the Baby Jesus cry, and the bad people at Newsweek laugh.

Cowicide @3:

"I vote this most souless, evil corporate spawn of a book.... this year."

Don't waste your vote. This book has nothing to do with corporate publishing, or any other kind of standard publishing operation. My Beautiful Mommy is a purely self-published book. Without the Newsweek puff-piece, it would have no more significance, and get no more notice, than a xeroxed handout from your local GP.

Big Tent (the book's publisher) is a vanity and fulfillment operation. Only a few of their books are even listed at Amazon (badly -- most of the normal publisher-furnished information is missing), and their titles that are there are barely selling.

My Beautiful Mommy is not on Amazon. It has no ISBN that I can detect -- and this close to its publication date, I should be able to detect one. It's not going to show up on