Iain M. Banks reacts to the symposium on his book, The Hydrogen Sonata.
The Hydrogen Sonata Forum: Iain M. Banks Replies
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Year: 2012
Wednesday Morning Linkage Riffing
I stayed up too late  last night drinking cheap Scotch and playing Borderlands 2. Then I accidentally snagged the wife's computer -- she's somewhere that has a high of -40° today -- but, thanks to...
Silicon wafers: Why we need to move religion online
As one of the two great still-extant medieval institutions, the church confronts the digital age with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Hope, because congregations and ministers with online...
10 Steps to Finishing a PhD Thesis (or book) in 6 Months
Most academics will admit to themselves and students that the majority of dissertations and books are written in a 6 month block of time (the remainder of the post focuses on a PhD process, but it...
More Year: 2012 Posts
Joss Whedon on Romney and Zombies
What?? It was too good to resist...
Should College Costs Reflect Benefits to Society?
Florida Governor Rick Scott is considering changing the cost of different college majors at Florida's public colleges to influence students' choices. The reasoning is standard rightist dirigisme: STEM degrees would cost less, and artsy ones would cost more, because STEM = jerbs and, presumably, English = liberals. Debate over the proposal has broken down along the usual lines. Unsurprisingly, Marginal Revolution co-blogger Alex Tabarrok offers two cheers in favor of the scheme, dissenting only on the implementation (that instead of targeting STEM in particular the subsidies for selected...
A Note on Newspaper Endorsements
Last year Nate Silver posted numbers going back to 1972. Bottom line: for Obama and Romney to be running roughly even at this point tracks with 2004--and represents an improvement for the Democrat over most pre-2004 cycles. Obama picked up a number of normally Republican-endorsing pages in 2008, which tracks with the general revulsion against the Bush era that swept the country that year. The fact that many of those pages are switching back looks more like a "reversion to the mean" than anything else. This also tracks with an important point about the "mainstream media": owners and editorial...
Monday Morning Linkage
Follow Mitt Romney's storm tips on twitter. Remember that Sandy has already killed over 60 people in the Caribbean, and that many of those deaths are tied (in one way or another) to the unequal distribution of global wealth. Star Wars pork, or how to alienate the Jedi voting bloc? Over at The Disorder of Things, Pablo K. weighs in on the Human Security Report and engages with Megan's critique here at the Duck. Natural-resource policy for Burma. Daniel Little discusses "character" as an analytic category. And: I am amazed by the number of newspaper endorsements of Romney that (1) blame Obama...
Trans-Partisan Challenge
My daughter is very anxious that Mitt Romney might win the election. Before that she was worried about the European monetary crisis and what might happen if Greece defaults. This suggest that the problem is less one of our partisanship than of growing up the kid of international-affairs specialists who listen to the news during the morning commute. Regardless, her anxiety suggested it was time for "the talk." We'd already had the "Republicans are good people" talk. It went something like this: "your grandfather is a Republican, and he's a wonderful human being. We just disagree on what's...
Nativism FTW
I'm pretty sure I'm the only Duck to (a) have lived at a state fair, (b) know the 4-H pledge by heart, and (c) have been quoted by the Watertown, S.D., newspaper on ... well, on any subject, actually. And although I had the misfortune to be born in Washington, D.C., I quickly decamped for America's Heartland, where I learned Real American Values, which include RC Cola, moon pies, and a fondness for country music not sung by the Dixie Chicks. So I feel pretty good in asserting my credentials as a Native USAmerican in these parts, even if my current status as a Ph.D. student living in Barry...
3rd Presidential Debate, Foreigner Version: If you’re not an American, you’re Mentally Ill or something
Did anyone else find the third presidential debate just appallingly narcissistic and self-congratulatory? Good lord. Good thing America is around to show you bubble-headed foreigners the way to freedom. I could run through all the offensive, ‘America-is-tasked-with-upholding-the-mantle-of-liberty’ patronizing condescension, but why bother? (Nexon does a nice job here.) I told my students to watch it, and in retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have. It was so embarrassing, and in class this week I kept trying to explain why we talk down to the rest of the world like this while my students rolled...
Saturday Afternoon Video
I refuse, on principle, to post "Rock you like a Hurricane" or some such. So instead, here's Japandroids, "The House that Heaven Built." This is the kludge, folks.