Oh, What To Write?

     It's Friday, and that's good.

     I spent yesterday working with some speech-to-text software that had...problems.  It was supposed to ingest a specialized lexicon from a particular source.  The process was...buggy.  It ingested, all right -- taking in misspellings, abbreviations, phonetically-spelled dialog and a whole lot of other things it wasn't supposed to.  Then it gave them preference over common English words and correct spelling.  Calling the end result "horrendous" is too mild.   The manufacturer swooped in late in the day and did some updates that cleared it up, but oh, my.

     Made me feel good about my various typos and bad keyboard habits.

Why Won't These Puppies Stay In The Box?

     Slate manages to misunderstand both science fiction and how stories work.

     It is, I suppose, impressive: swinging wildly, Slate's man-on-the-scene manages to tease out the "Hero's Journey" at the heart of many cyberpunk stories -- not to mention each and every one of John D. MacDonald's "Travis McGee" detective novels* -- and deems it a rut, a weakness:
     "Indeed, even when they reject it, these new subgenres often repeat the same gestures as cyberpunk, discover the same facts about the world, and tell the same story. Our hacker hero (or his magic-wielding counterpart) faces a huge system of power, overcomes long odds, and finally makes the world marginally better...."

     There aren't very many plots in the world.  "Hero's Journey" is one of the oldest and one of the strongest.

     Nevertheless, Slate thinks we got stuck at "punk."

     While cyberpunk has spawned a host of semi-sorta-subgenres ending in "punk," that's no more than a handy tag for kind of gadgety fun that SF has offered readers since before Gernsback; 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (Verne, 1870) is essentially steampunk -- or perhaps electropunk -- and the first modern steampunk novels (for instance, K. W. Jeter's Morlock Night or Thomas F. Montelone's The Secret Sea, both published in 1979†) precede the invention of the term "cyberpunk" (1983).

     No, the last time I checked -- yesterday -- Science Fiction had kept on moving.  Not in any one direction, and much as Slate's sources may like to be moan "... publishers always want to find evermore-narrowly-sliced microgenres, hoping to squeeze every aesthetic niche dry," publishers don't write this stuff and most books are not written to some puppetmaster's prescription. Books stem from the writer's imagination and succeed or fail based on how well readers connect with them.

     Science fiction writers and readers have always been the literary world's punks,  scruffy and not given much respect.  Is it any surprise that they have held onto the term once it came their way?
______________________________
* Or the first Star Wars film, the Hunger Games series, and on and on.
† They have something else in common, as well, which I will leave as a surprise for the reader.

Silver Lining?

     The impeachment trial lumbers onward, and let us thank due process for making dull what could have been far more acrimonious.

     There's a gemstone amid the dross, though -- I have never heard or seen so much mention in mainstream media of the Constitution, the men who drafted it and The Federalist Papers.

     The last item on this list (along with and often published with The Anti-Federalist Papers) constitutes a remarkable record of what the Framers (and their critics) thought about the meaning and intent of the Constitution at the time it was devised.

     If even a tiny fraction of the people reading or hearing of it are motivated to go look it up, the country will benefit.

     This country's Federal government has an operating manual and a considerable body of expert commentary from the men who dreamed it up.  It is readily available; it's not a secret, or couched in obscure language.  It's out there.  So are the counter-arguments.

Junk Food For Thought

     Apparently -- and who would have guessed?  -- a lie can still make it halfway around the world before the truth has even got its pants on:

     Researchers at MIT ran a study showing what most people already suspected: fake news -- of any stripe --  outweighs real news in the fast-moving, sociologically "hot" environments of social media.  Just like your Middle School days, exciting rumor and glittering half-truth is way more engaging than dull stuff like history, social studies or science.  (And as for spelling, well...  Most of our Facebook and Twitter posts would come back covered in red ink.)

     Forewarned is forearmed: if it confirms your brightest hopes or deepest fears, if it's remarkably novel, you'd better check it out before you pass it along.  Better see if you can independently verify it.

     The truth has to walk a long, long road before it can catch up to lies, let alone give them the beating they deserve.

Flatpacked

So I open up the box of my new IKEA silk scarf, and there it all is:

-A mulberry sapling
-A dozen caterpillars
-Two itty-bitty knitting needles
-And 482 pages of utterly incomprehensible pictographic drawings.

SKÖRF

     ...Rattling around in the bottom of the box, a little metric Allen wrench that doesn't fit anything.

Busy Day

    Late to post.  This morning, I looked around and realized the kitchen was approaching -- if not past -- the Quentin Crisp limit.

     No, that does not mean it really, really liked other kitchens.  Crisp was infamously averse to housework, and notably remarked, "After the first four years, it doesn't get any worse."

     There were corners of the kitchen that were fixing to prove him wrong.  It had to be set right.  I had chamomile tea from 2015 at the bottom of the stack!

     Still a lot to do, but matters are much improved.

Saturday At Last

     After a week of never getting enough sleep (and other stress -- the new General Manager visited North Campus, which is A: my responsibility and B: not getting as much of my time and attention as it should; but I'm told he came away with a positive impression), the weekend is here!

     And with weekend, a front coming through, which has triggered a remarkable headache.  It's snowing pretty steadily outside.  The temperature is flirting with freezing and the snow is sticking, half-melting, and then sticking.  Trees have snow on the upper parts of the limbs -- and water droplets along the underside.  This would be minor or very messy, depending on the temperature going up or down. 

     As for the headache, it could go either way, too.  I've taken my usual, one acetaminophen and two aspirins, and it's a little slow to take effect but I think it's helping. 

     Rannie the cat seems to be feeling better.  She has been eating more, and not sneezing and wheezing as much. So of course, Huck has decided it's happy playtime!  He tries to get her to mock-fight, by the simple expedient of attacking.  She loathes it, and cries.  I've been squirting him with the water bottle, which breaks it up, but he can't quite grasp why anything to happy and fun could possibly be bad.  They're napping now; I hope they spend the midday as cats should, half-asleep.

     There's a load of laundry running.  As soon as the washer is finished and I've loaded the dryer, I'll start the dishwasher and then make breakfast.  Picked up the makings for Swedish pancakes on the way home from work last night and I'm looking forward to them.

Another Week

     And plenty of rain.  We've been fortunate this winter; had it been cold enough for our spells of rain to have been snow instead, it would have been pretty deep by now.  There have been a few bad winters in my life, and I'm not a fan.

*  *  *

     I wasn't a fan of the can of blackeyed peas I opened up last night, either.  They were....dry.  Something had gone wrong.  When I discovered this, I was a half-dozen green onions, half a bell pepper, half of a leftover cooked pork roast and a can of diced tomatoes into cooking a dish of Hoppin' John.  This made it a little vexing, and I may have uttered a few words one really should not say.

     At Roseholme Cottage, we keep canned beans on the shelf as part of the rotating stock of staples and while I would have preferred blackeyed peas (possibly my favorite bean), black beans made a fine dish, served over rice with some hot sauce, just thing for a rainy, chilly evening.  The dish is flexible, though Wikipedia tells me that using black beans makes it "Hoppin Juan!"  Good by whatever name; like oxtail stew or colcannon, this is another of those combinations that shows up all over, under different names, and everyone claims it for their own.  They're all probably right.

Not How That Works, Part Whatever

     I was cooking breakfast and half listening to the morning news on TV when a story caught my ear: There was a new report out that ranked traffic safety in each state.

     Wondering how Indiana had placed, I paid attention, and what do you know: we're about in the middle of the pack.

     But the rating isn't for the death rate, or the accident rate -- it's for the number and kind of driving safety laws each state has!

     Show of hands, class -- who can explain why this metric is risible?  All of you?  Very good!

     But just in case, let's go over it: counting "safety" by looking at the rules intended to promote safe behaviors tells us nothing about how well those rules work.  It tells us nothing about how faithfully those rules are obeyed.  It doesn't even tell us how well those rules are enforced!

     It's still an interesting report.  You can read it here.

     For data at how safe it is to drive in the various states, you can look here, and get the fatality rate per 100k population and per hundred million miles traveled.  At a glance, Indiana's about in the middle there, too.

     What I'm not finding in a quick search is any kind of correlation study, not even an informal comparison of death or accident rates versus laws aimed to make drivers safer. You'd think that would be a key piece of information for planning, and yet--  Nothing.

     More laws does not necessarily mean better laws; if you were thinking that logical fallacy only showed up in the hotly-contested debate about gun laws, guess again.  Driving safety is a far less divisive issue, with statistics that are much easier to find, and yet here we are.

     Quantity is a wonderfully useful metric for ball-bearings or new home construction and all manner of mass-produced goods.  Intent, too, is a fine metric: you certainly ought to know what you're setting out to accomplish.  For laws, however, it might be useful to look more closely at quality and results, preferably in as impartial a manner as possible.

     Just a suggestion.

And There Was No Violence

     Monday's Lobby Day at Virginia's state capitol came and went without anything more untoward than one attendee who managed to get herself arrested for wearing a mask.  Upwards of twenty thousand people showed up, people of every hue and a wide assortment of political beliefs, and a lot of the people outside the official no-gun perimeter were visibly armed with big ol' evil-looking rifles, and nobody fired a shot.  Nobody so much as got into a fistfight.

     It would have taken just one malign fool -- and nobody wanted to be That Guy bad enough, while many people had already decided they weren't going to let anyone be That Guy.  It worked.  The Press seemed a little let down.

     Did the effort help?  Maybe.  Some.  If you live in Virginia and gun rights matter to you, vote carefully and keep writing your elected officials.  It's going to take a lot of convincing.

*  *  *

     Tuesday's Post-Impeachment Senate Trial in our nation's Capitol got underway without anything more untoward than some Senators struggling to stay awake and a rare opportunity for members of the House and Senate to snipe at one another.  They are inherently at odds -- the senior body slow, deliberative and resistant to change while the junior one is scrappy, (relatively) quick to act and responsive to the electorate.  The spectacle of the House lecturing the Senate, and the Senate getting its back up over it, is rare indeed.  Mr. McConnell and Mr. Schiff were bowed up like tomcats.

     High points included a network news analyst quoting another pundit, "Never underestimate the amount of hard work the U. S. Senate won't do," and the delicious realization that the trial was proceeding under rules from the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial: the Senators (and everyone else) are "commanded to keep silent, on pain of imprisonment."  For a modern touch, no personal electronic devices were allowed in.  The entire Senate had to sit down, shut up, and at least pretend to pay attention.

     Low points?  I'm not too keen on this rule where they start in the afternoon and run for at least twelve hours.  It was criticized by Senate Democrats and they've got a point; it makes for long days and may tend to keep any real dramatic points a little less visible in live coverage.  The flip side is, we can't have the circus in town for a month or more.  The Senate does have other things to do.  Another downer: this isn't as neat and tidy as the courtroom scenes in an episode of Perry Mason.  It's a real trial, run by people with law degrees or at least a keen personal interest in rules and procedure.  A lot of the trial will be as dull as ditchwater.

     Politics is what we do instead of fighting in the streets, and if takes some dull stretches to keep it that way, I'm in favor of of them.  The underlying fight is no less intense for all that it is cloaked in high-sounding language and procedures first formulated in the late 18th Century.  Don't kid yourself -- Madison and the other Framers knew this day would come.  You don't add a utility to the firmware if you don't think it will ever be needed.

Impeachment Trial-Watching

     This afternoon, the U. S. Senate will do something they rarely do: put the President on trial.  The process is written in out Constitution, in broad brush-strokes that assume much about the common sense and good will of the participants -- possibly more than most of us might credit some or all of the participants with possessing.  But they've done it before and they'll get  through it this time, too.

     Don't watch in anger.  Everyone involved is going to play up the drama. They all want your emotions involved.  We're in an election year and nothing gets people into voting booths like strong feelings!

     They're not wrong.  But this is history on the hoof and how you feel about it as it is happening will not change the outcome.  That's in the hands of the United States Senate.

     This is an uncommon event and none of the players are in their usual, comfortable roles.  How they behave can be revealing.

     You can watch and learn or you can watch and fume -- fume about the President, fume about the Senate and its leadership, fume about partisanship or grandstanding, and before it's all over, you may even find a reason to be annoyed at the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Watch angry and when it's over, you'll be working on an ulcer while all or nearly all of the participants in the Senate Trial will get their nice, fat paychecks, same as every payday. 

     Most of us will be working, at least for the first few innings; but I plan to watch what I can as coldly as a hawk.  It's a rare opportunity and I don't want to waste it.

Oh, Come On

     Apparently, a pretty thorough debunking of a far-Left historian has recently been published.    Good stuff, hey?  Demolishing invidiousness with truth, right?

     Well--

     Increasingly, pundits are trying to counter prejudice and jingoism, slanted takes on history, by pushing just as hard in the other direction.

     It works in physics, right?

     The problem is, history in all its forms, from today's TV news to the morning paper all the way to weighty multi-volume, small-print works, does not work that way.  Handedness doesn't count for much.  The real divide is different: you've got material that is true and real -- source documents, eyewitness accounts, good-faith objective writing and frankly-labeled subjective analysis -- on one side, and on the other, there's nothing but varying flavors of specious BS.  The vectors of slanted reporting don't cancel and no matter how hard you try to titrate the acid of one political leaning with the powerful alkali of the other, the result isn't salt water, it's just more BS.

     So when you read this stuff, do so with a skeptical eye; do so with a search engine handy, and check the claims.

     What I have read so far (yes, I have named neither the book nor the historian it debunks) is not what I had hoped.  There are no pages of footnotes listing authoritative sources or serious refutations of his allegations.  There's quite a lot of talk about other bad-faith historians, and about the man's own politics and habit of lifting material from other, often slanted, writers instead of going closer to the source.

     But there's no direct refutation.

     It's useful to point out propaganda, to hang a sign on bad information.  It's more useful to supply accurate information.  And yes, lies and misleading claims often have a delicious candy coating that is much more difficult to apply to the truth.  That doesn't mean it is not worth the effort to try.

     I'm going to do some more reading before I decide about buying the book, but it's not looking good.  Dammit, we're drowning in horsecrap.  It can't be remedied by adding to the pile.