Doctor Science

Will you stay or will you go?

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by Doctor Science This is your Brexit watch/results thread. I have had only a vague, distant impression about what’s driving Brexit, and only within the past week or so did I realize how close the vote was going to be. For US votes, I follow Sam Wang and 538 for their data-driven, boring approach. The … Read more

If Trump has no money, will his supporters abandon him?

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by Doctor Science Ever since it became clear that Donald Trump would have enough delegates for the Republican Presidential nomination, various desperate Republicans have been talking about the possibility of a “coup” at the convention, where the cooler heads of party stalwarts might install someone more generally-acceptable as the nominee. I’ve been laughing at these … Read more

Making History

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by Doctor Science The night Barack Obama was elected President I was super-tired (I’d been poll-working all day on the busiest day I’ve ever seen), but when he got up to speak I cried for joy. And I kept crying at random times for the next week, because I was so happy. I thought that … Read more

Wednesday Books: Good Stuff

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by Doctor Science This week: novels by Ada Palmer, Adam Rakunas, and Frances Hardinge; novella by Seanan McGuire. Dinner was delayed slightly because I was reading the last few pages of Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning while snapping beans. I love the style, how much everyone talks and thinks, the layers of world-building and … Read more

The John Donne Test

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by Doctor Science I mentioned my John Donne Test on File770 yesterday, and want to put it down coherently in one place for reference and discussion. I used to read a lot of mystery stories. A *lot*. One of my favorite Christmas presents while I was growing up was The Annotated Sherlock Holmes; I read … Read more

Wednesday Book Round-up

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by Doctor Science This week’s reading: In The Labyrinth of Drakes by Marie Brennan: another satisfying installment in the saga of Lady Trent and dragons. In this volume Isabella & Co. are in meta-Egypt, and the similarities to the Amelia Peabody series are obvious and amusing. The one thing that isn’t at all amusing is … Read more

Garden planning

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by Doctor Science

The garden at our new house needs a lot of work. I’m planning on doing it in stages. First, I went to the Native Plant sale yesterday, and got:

BHWPpurchases-05-15-16

Clockwise from pink flowers:

  • pink Creeping Phlox (Phlox stolonifera)
  • Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) — they’ve already bloomed, I’m hoping for seeds
  • Eastern Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)
  • two Green-and-Gold (Chrysogonum virginianum)
  • Golden Ragwort (Packera aurea) — this is a new one for me
  • two ‘Larinem Park’ Wild Stonecrop (Sedum ternatum)
  • Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)
  • two Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia)

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As you may know, there’s a cultural divide (heh) among gardeners, between “gardeners who use Latin names” and “gardeners who use English names”. I’m mostly a Latin-namer while my mother is an English-namer, which can be confusing for everybody.

Cutting here for multiple images.

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Wednesday Books: A symphony of the unfinished

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by Doctor Science I started a lot of books this week, but finished only a couple. Coincidentally, both are fantasies set in the 1920’s. Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge succeeds admirably as creepy-fantasy, less as historical fiction. The past tense of “weave” was “wove”, dammit, not “weaved”. By which I mean that, in general, it … Read more

Facebook and conservative news

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by Doctor Science

Gizmodo reports:

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

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Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.What the widespread outrage about this (up to and including demands for a Senate investigation) overlooks is whether Facebook’s young Trending curators were trying to weed out stories that are deceptive, false or even dangerous.

Below the cut: includes an image of artistic nudity in the Western tradition, which may be NSFW.

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May the Fourth Be With You Book List

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by Doctor Science — a day late. Many of my friends on livejournal/dreamwidth are in the habit of posting “what I’ve been reading” book lists on Wednesdays. Meanwhile, one of the nicer online things that has happened to me in the past year or so has been becoming part of the community at File770, where … Read more

Maytime

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by Doctor Science This is the nest of an American Phoebe, on the back wall of our single-story house outside the master bedroom: There are at least 4 nestlings — it’s possible there’s another one behind the ivy leaf. I took this picture May 1; they’re still there this evening, May 2, but I expect … Read more

Lifestyle changes

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by Doctor Science Wednesday of the week before last, Mister Doctor Science started to have chest pains while he was at fencing. He was wondering if it was just acid reflux (again), but one of the other fencers insisted on driving him to the ER. That friend is currently my favorite person in the whole … Read more

Hilzoy on how the Republicans got Donald Trump

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by Doctor Science Hilzoy, formerly of this establishment, has moved on from political blogging, but she’s active on twitter. The other day she wrote a tweetstorm that’s been storified as How the Republicans got Donald Trump. Excerpts: @hilzoy GOP has for a long time been destroying trust in press, experts, basically everyone ppl don't know … Read more

Gun safety

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by Doctor Science Unless you were blessedly offline yesterday, you probably saw Jeb! Bush’s tweet: Image of tweet in context from Betty Cracker of Balloon Juice which became an instant meme. As someone who has never held a gun, I have some questions for those of you with actual knowledge. Via commenters at Balloon Juice, … Read more

Money can’t buy love, but why doesn’t it buy competence?

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by Doctor Science The most startling revelation of the past week in the US Presidential race was in Buzzfeed, where McKay Coppins wrote: But to those who have known him longest, Rubio’s flustered performance Saturday night fit perfectly with an all-too-familiar strain of his personality, one that his handlers and image-makers have labored for years … Read more

Reading the Past

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by Doctor Science

The largest project we have to do, to become actually moved in, is to unpack and then cull our book collection. Yesterday I opened a box containing a set of old hardcover books, the Complete Stories of O. Henry, stamped as having belonged to Mr. Dr. Science’s grandfather. “I wonder if these are worth anything,” I said to myself, and opened up a random volume to find publishing details to put into abebooks.

The volume was Roads of Destiny, and this is the frontispiece, the first thing I saw:

Cut for racial epithets that were, apparently, quality humor in 1917.

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Tom Stoppard’s “The Hard Problem”

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by Doctor Science

The American premiere of Tom Stoppard’s latest play, “The Hard Problem”, is at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. We went last Saturday, and after we got back I looked up some reviews of the world premiere run in London. Most of them seem to have found it “slight”, “lesser Stoppard”, and to not have felt connected to the characters, or moved by them.

It’s like we’re not talking about the same play. I connected with (and recognized) the characters: insofar as they’re two-dimensional, it’s that of cubes seen head-on. Their depths are unexplored, left for fanfic writers, but I felt as though the depths were *there*. I don’t know how much of the difference is due to the production, and how much is due to me seeing things the London reviewers overlooked, but it’s very disconcerting.

Cutting here for a spoiler-laden review.

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How special effects eat characterization

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by Doctor Science In the Star Wars thread, Ugh commented: Overall, I thought the movie would have been better with an additional 5-10 minutes of emotion/reactions/character development. cleek replied: i think so, too. but it was already over two hours. and i assume they probably cut out a lot of non-explodey stuff in order to … Read more

Day care and language change

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by Doctor Science This is a re-blog of something I submitted to Language Log back in early November, about some historical references to new languages forming in groups of children. I happened to be reading (parts of) Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers, 1844) and I came across his discussion of language change … Read more

Your Star Wars spoilers thread

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by Doctor Science

The idea behind Jews going to the movies and Chinese food on Christmas Day was that these things were both open, yet mostly empty because the Christmas-celebrators were busy elsewhere. This concept has been breaking down in the past few years, and now we find that the movies are packed and we could only get a table at the good Chinese restaurant because we came at 4:00 — every table was booked and overbooked for the evening. mmmmm, Peking duck.

Like a significant subset of Everybody In The World, we’ve now seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I had been avoiding social media for the previous week (for fear of spoilers), but I went in knowing that my e-friends were divided into a large group of ¡Yays!, and a smaller group of Nays. The Nays all say the same thing: “The Force Awakens is too derivative in both plot and characterization.”

Spoilers within!

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Out with the old, in with the new

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by Doctor Science xkcd provides a 2016 conversation guide, for those pesky “Is this the future?” discussions. For me personally, 2015 has brought the usual mixed bag, but leaning more good than bad: house purchase house renovation getting back into science fiction & fantasy fandom both parents still alive and in generally excellent health (ages … Read more

Adventures in Moving

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by Doctor Science For many years the motto of the UHaul company, painted in large letters on all their vehicles, was “Adventures in Moving”. I don’t know whose idea this was, because it’s got to be one of the worst mottoes in the history of advertising. “Adventures” is precisely what I *don’t* want when I’m … Read more

I may not live to see our glory

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— but at least I’m packing to good music. (by Doctor Science) I haven’t posted or commented much recently because our house renovation is at the “Run in Circles Scream and Shout” stage. Theoretically we start moving in on December 19. Theoretically. Also theoretically, my parents and brother will be with us for Yule beginning … Read more

Mis-reading “Ivanhoe”

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by Doctor Science

Back in September, I wondered who is supposed to be the heroine of Ivanhoe, but I hadn’t read yet the book itself. Now, thanks to Project Gutenberg, Mister Doctor Science and I have both read it, and we’re struck by how different it is from what we expected.

Ivanhoe was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century, with an enormous influence on the literary landscape and on culture in general. Some of that influence persists to this day: reading Ivanhoe, we could see the roots of epic fantasy literature, of the Society for Creative Anachronism, of Renfaires and Medieval Times.

But what we couldn’t see is the Ivanhoe many other people claim to have read. From 19th-century fans to 21st-century scholars, the majority of readers seem to have latched onto a few elements in Ivanhoe, but not to have absorbed the actual text as a whole. It’s as though all they know is a “Good Parts Version” — and it’s one that edits out a lot of *our* favorite parts.

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Canadian Election Open Thread

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by Doctor Science Canada is going to the polls today, and from down here it looks like a real nail-biter. Éric Grenier, Canada’s version of Nate Silver, projects the Liberals to get a plurality of seats, but then have to form a coalition government: This comes after the polite, Canadian version of a roller-coaster election … Read more

Comics and other unprofessional professions

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by Doctor Science I hope that one of the big topics of discussion for the comics industry, as they gather for NY Comic-Con this week, will be Janelle Asselin’s public exposé of Scott Allie’s history of assault. Scott Allie was Editor-in-Chief of Dark Horse Comics, the fifth-largest comics company in the US, until a few … Read more

The heroine of “Ivanhoe”

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by Doctor Science

In Rebecca, Rowena, Puppies, Fanfic, Foz Meadows writes about reading Ivanhoe:

I was struck by the difference in characterisation between Rowena and Rebecca, and what that particular contrast still says about the way we write women in fiction. Rowena, as Ivanhoe’s beloved, is meant to be the personification of all the feminine virtues of Scott’s period — beautiful and pure and obedient and yearning — while Rebecca, reading between the very broad lines, is someone we’re meant to root for despite her Jewishness without ever liking her best.

Except that, for precisely this reason, we do; but even though he wrote her that way, Scott doesn’t seem to realise it. …. Rowena, passive and set on a pedestal, is what he thought women should be, while Rebecca, active and human, is what he grudgingly acknowledged women were; or could be, at the very least, if they actively tried to overcome the handicap of their gender.Like Foz, I’ve always assumed that readers are *supposed* to think Rowena is better than Rebecca, but I’ve never actually met anyone who did.[1]

I’ve been thinking about this for the past few days, and have turned up some interesting stuff about how authors write women, and also about how much control authors (don’t) have over what readers actually think they’ve written.

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