lundi 15 décembre 2003

When my wish is your command /;-) Whether you refer to it as a "hotlist", your "bookmarks", your "favourites" or even "mes favoris", this entry contains a very important item to go right to the top of the list. I'm going to tell you where to find my 'Amazon Wishlist'. First, here's a reminder that whether you're interested in "applied sciences", "desktop publishing", "human-computer interaction" or "software engineering", among other topics, O'Reilly's Network Safari Bookshelf gets better all the time. What I've not yet done, as best I can without too heavy a picture, is show you what a bookshelf looks like from the inside: It's the most convenient way of reading and learning online I've come across, and has been worth every cent of the 11 euros or so it's been costing me each month. Those cunning devils at O'Reilly have made a new, improved offer almost irresistible. You can now download whole chapters in searchable .pdf format and have 120 books a year on your shelf for an upgrade to the cheapest kind of Max subscription (which, with French VAT, costs me a little more than 22 euros a month - the basic rate is $19.99). Since they've thrown in 30 percent off the price of print books from O'Reilly for people with bookshelves and 35% off those from 10 other publishers, my maths tell me I'll end up spending less every year than I usually do on technical books, which have a nasty habit of being both expensive and regularly overhauled. There's a page explaining "how it works" online. What sold me on the idea is the chapter downloads: it's rare that I really feel the need to keep the whole of a technical book, but having key parts permanently to hand is very useful. Ok, that's enough free publicity for Tim O'Reilly & Co., though they've been extremely helpful when it comes to hacks. The three websites I know that have books of hacks devoted to them are the Google empire, eBay and the vast cyberstore that Amazon has become. The only Amazon hack I've been unsuccessful in persuading to work with Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr is one to change the order of your wishlist to suit the priorities of your greed. That's to say, you can sort a list by criteria such as cost or the date when you added an item, but not by putting the things you crave most at the top. For those with lists in the United States, this can be done with a clever online tool made by Michael Yoon. Amazon, of course, sells 'Amazon Hacks' by Paul Rausch (Sept 2003). The store has enabled me virtually to finish all this year's seasonal gift shopping already, after an afternoon or three of the more energetic kind on the streets, and I appreciate the way Amazon has made increasing partnership efforts particularly with people who have interesting, hard to find second-hand items to sell. For the moment, my list is not where it should logically be, at Amazon France. I go there often enough for French-speaking friends and relations, but most Anglophone items on my own list are not yet available there or more expensive than at Amazon UK. With a drum roll but no further ado, here's NB's wishlist, for the enlightenment of everybody but most especially me. 10:28:44 PM  link   your views? [] An interplanetary ramble on seeing red "The EU Constitution is expressed in 69,196 words and runs to 263 pages (depending on what language you read it in). The original US Constitution, by contrast, is just 4,608 words long on four pages. One has been the product of 26 plenary sessions, 11 working groups and three so-called 'discussion circles'; the other was cooked up by half a dozen remarkable young Americans." This striking comparison comes from the Observer's literary editor Robert McCrum, taken up in an excellent 'blog piece about the unsurprising "Europe flop" (at Davos Newbies) of the weekend. I found myself there by glancing at Adam Curry's views on the failure of the latest bloody round in that conflict absurdly known as "building Europe". Curry would like the politically minded to keep their cool and pay heed to a selfless Dutch politician (that's not quite an oxymoron), Lousewies van der Laan, who has made a fine case for a stronger European parliament. Yes, that's parliament, not Brussels (Van der Laan's proposals are more tidily set out in a 248 KB .pdf file - download). At the rate the mostly blinkered dimwits widely held to be "in charge" of our planet's fortunes are failing to make far-sighted decisions and think of the children, it wouldn't be for another few hundred years that we should even consider a visit to Mars. Not, that is, if we're to take notice of the slender majority of people who commented on last week's announcement by scientists that humans could survive a Mars visit (BBC Science, with some good links). One of them, Igor of Russia, thinks we even "need to evolve into a different species" before making a trip like that. Xibei Tian in the United States foresees a psychological problem, pointing out that he "can NOT survive either being alone or staying with the same people (whom I love/like/neutral/don't like/hate) for three or more years". Myself, with not yet half a century of ever faster technological change behind me, I reckon that provided this planet survives, people will set foot on the red one probably within my own lifetime and almost certainly within the Kid's. Nor would it surprise me -- and, I dare imagine, many other regular sci-fi readers -- if the very way it happens hasn't already been "forecast", to some extent, in Kim Stanley Robinson's already classic Mars Trilogy. Already on my Amazon wish list -- yes, I now have one and will soon tell you all where it is! -- is a book (+CD-ROM, which I hope works on a Mac) called 'On to Mars: Colonizing a New World,' by Robert Zubrin and Frank Crossman (Apogee Books, Aug 2002). This is a well-reviewed collection of essays compiled partly by the academic who got the lively Mars Society up and running five years ago. The Zubrin-Crossman link goes to the Amazon US page, for once, because there's an interesting, if understandably biased, account of the book there by Bryan Erickson. Bryan is both a contributor to the book and one of the better phenomena Amazon has bestowed on us: an admirably broad-minded, competent, intriguing and entertaining reviewer (his page). Why do I think people could be on Mars long before we've managed to achieve any utopian ideals on Terra? Simply because I can call to mind not a single period in recorded history when what some describe as the "march of progress" ever stopped in its tracks the whole world over, despite the barbaric episodes or dark ages into which other parts of the globe might have been cast. Indeed, several of the most uncivilised events humankind has visited upon itself and other species, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction, have evidently been both the fruit and the seed of scientific research and development. Meanwhile, so long as we have nation-states, we'll have people pointing out that some of them, like the high-heeled Italian foot and the perhaps unfortunate resemblance spotted on this two-euro coin, look remarkably like parts of a very human body-politic. I daren't tell you where I found that picture. A direct link might take tender and susceptible minds to a deeply depraved and occasionally amusing part of the blogosphere only a dangerous click or two away from something else at Adam Curry's place. It was already more than enough, yesterday, to take a long look at the latest in the Kid's art file (now a folder become a work of art in its own right). This particular extract from it earned her a reasonable mark from teacher, along, she assures me, with the comment: "You've become quite the young psychopath, haven't you?" Speaking of crime, a good weekend Wired, tale, 'A Whodunit for the Digital Age' concerns "an e-mail sent to the wrong man. Or was it? The misdirected message triggers romance with a stranger. Tension ensues -- then murder. Perusing the log of messages, a casual reader becomes an unintentional P.I., unraveling the events and solving the mystery through the victim's e-mails and instant-message conversations with her possible killer." One drawback for Mac users. The first DEN (What is a?) is only for the PC community. I like the recommendation on that page: "'I thought it would be annoying to read, but I couldn't stop. I loved it.' E. Croarkin, Citigroup Corporate." It makes you wonder what Citigroup Corporate employees might get up to when they're not working... 7:11:23 PM  link   your views? [] Of current affairs, distant menace & perennial folly After a tour of the blogosphere established that the weekend's big story has triggered every imaginable kind of response, on top of a couple of e-mails asking what I make of it, it was a relief to find that many are still busy with something completely different. On Saddam Hussein's capture, I have nothing particular to say. The fellow who edits Blogcritics, Eric Olsen, pleaded "cynics, give it a rest today." In a "Reddest Letter Day" entry equally devoted to the return from hospital of his wife Dawn and newborn son Alex -- congrats to all three of you! -- he also employed a colourful insult I've never seen before: "Baathist fuckplugs." Eric's politics are sometimes a far cry from my own, but he's been sifting the many views on the tale from Tikrit and the Blogcritics 'Et Cetera' columns are as good a way into the blogosphere's many angles on it right now as any. As for the fellow held to be in charge of the captors' country, a comedy video extract from 'The Daily Show' on "Bush vs. Bush" (at Albino Blacksheep -- it's a RealPlayer clip requiring a fairly fast Net connection) had me chuckling. Thanks go to Bryan Bell for that one. Other threats to our wellbeing are less immediate: "Scientists have learned that 10% of the earth's magnetic field strength has been reduced over the last 150 years. This weakening, measured since 1845, could be indicative of a future where the magnetic field collapses and reverses itself, flipping the planet's poles for the first time in one million years." At 'Things that ... make you go hmm, TDavid also got to 'The Core' (reviewed here back in April). Now for some never ephemeral stuff about the human condition. We learn from the net baron of Brazil, Rainer B. (via a string of others) of the sad, sad findings of that eminent scholar, Carlo M. Cipolla: "It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity. Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour (...) One may hope to outmanoeuvre the stupid and, up to a point, one may actually do so. But because of the erratic behaviour of the stupid, one cannot foresee all the stupid's actions and reactions and before long one will be pulverized by the unpredictable moves of the stupid partner. This is clearly summarized in the Fourth Basic Law which states that: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake." If ever you've observed the truth of this, as most of us have, then you'll be delighted to learn that economics Professor Cipolla has given the world 'The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity'. To reconsider history in the light of his findings is an entertaining and enlightening exercise. As Rainer points out, there's plenty more where that came from, at True Stupidity. Have a happy new week! 11:57:44 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.