Posts Tagged ‘David Brin’
Saturday Night Links!
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.
- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.
‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’
The only fan fiction I’ve ever recommended, and perhaps even read at all: “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” loosely organized around an alternate universe version of the J.K. Rowling novels in which (among other things) Harry’s adoptive parents were not the repulsive Dursleys but instead an rationalist Oxford scientist. The piece is written in accordance with the author’s self-established principles of fan fiction:
The First Law of Fanfiction states that every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. Or in plainer language: You can’t make Frodo a Jedi without giving Sauron the Death Star. Read any book on writing ever and it will tell you that stories are about conflict; a hero too strong for their conflict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. For example, Dark!Dumbledore and Dark!Harry both permit a Harry strengthened over canon – the first by turning one of Harry’s canon!allies against him, and the second by turning Harry against his canon!allies. The most spectacular application of this principle that I’ve seen is Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time, in which Harry has gained all the knowledge of ancient Atlantis and has been through literally hundreds of Peggy Sue cycles in which he learns every possible twist of fate… and Voldemort, who unfortunately got to Atlantis first, has still won every time. The Mary Sue is not defined by her power, but by her lack of an even more powerful opponent. I mention this (1) so that you know I know it and (2) because the First Law of Fanfiction ought to be in a giant banner on every fanfiction site. The most fatal temptation of fanfiction writing is to think of how much easier some character’s life would be if they were a ninja. We are naturally inclined to think up ways to solve our characters’ problems for them, but must learn instead to make their lives more difficult.
The Rule of Rationalist Fiction states that rationality is not magic; being rational does not require magical potential or royal bloodlines or even amazing gadgets, and the principles of rationality work for understandable reasons.A rationalist!hero should excel by thinking – moreover, thinking in understandable patterns that readers can, in principle, adopt for themselves. As opposed to the hero just being a born “genius” who comes up with amazing gadgets through an opaque discovery process, or who pulls off incredibly complicated gambits that would fail miserably if the reader tried something similar in real life.
I found this strange and slightly wonderful mess (where else?) at TV Tropes, which points out that it’s a self-conscious Author Tract for self-educated AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who seems to take Bayes’s theorem as something like religion.
Of course “HPatMoR” is definitely not for everyone—I can only imagine what Alex will say if he takes the bait and clicks the link—but it displays that precise nerdly obsessiveness I find I just can’t resist. When a fan-fic writers imagines his souped-up Voldemort turning the outbound Pioneer 11 spacecraft into one of his many Horcuxes—well, look, I’m not made of stone.
I should also say this link is roughly the complete opposite of “breaking news”—the ongoing project is nearly a year old.
Friday Night Everything
* The long-awaited (but oddly dissatisfying) Lost epilogue has appeared online, though who knows for how long or with whose permission.
* Decadence watch: municipalities are cutting back on public transit, de-paving roads, cutting back on education and even city lights, and closing public libraries. Naturally, the wars continue apace.
* Elena Kagan post-mortems from Jonathan Chait and Glenn Greenwald.
* Neal Stephenson talks SF at Gresham College. The link has another, shorter talk from David Brin as well. Thanks to Melody for the link.
* Silly games of the night: Epic Coaster and Color Theory.
* Visiting the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
* Power stations of the retrofuture.
* America’s first test-tube baby has turned her back on her heritage.
* You had me at huge Back to the Future trilogy timeline.
* Google says there are 129,864,880 books In existence. I swear, I swear, mine’s coming.
* And neither English nor philosophy makes this list of the ten lowest-paying college majors. Take that, everyone I knew in college!
Wednesday Links
Wednesday links.
* Scandal at UConn! The Plank says the story is peanuts; this sort of corruption is endemic to the NCAA.
* Cover Stories From the Most-Requested Back Issues of The American Prognosticator (1853–1987).
* Duke University professor and civil rights icon John Hope Franklin has died.
* Upright Citizens Brigade parodies Wes Anderson. Bastards!
* A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of the Second World War.
* The first unambiguous case of electronic voting machine fraud in the U.S.?
* Solitary confinement as torture.
* Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. How could the Romans think in terms of centuries but we can’t think past a single business cycle?
* Lots of people are linking to this letter from an AIG bonus recipient. The merits of the contracts aside—I’ve said before they should be enforced unless fraudulent or predicated on fraud—but I don’t think he helps his case much when he puts a number on it. His one-time after-tax “bonus” is more than I would have made in thirty years of adjuncting.
* David Brin wants to “uplift” animals, i.e., make them sentient. This is exactly why people don’t take science fiction seriously; it’s totally crazy, pointless, and cruel and it wouldn’t even work…
Science Fiction in Academia
David Brin talks about the position of science fiction in academia. I have to say that I don’t really agree with him about this at all—in my little corner of academia at least science fiction is the only literature anybody seems to be talking about.
Gerry Canavan 
