Another excellent history lesson, this time from Mr. Creosote

CAIN (26,522-90,000 wds)

Best history lesson about imperialism ever

From Sondheim's Pacific Ovetures:



Best history lesson about imperialism ever.

CAIN (24,891-90,000 wds)

File this under wow

According to several sources, Wikipedia has banned a long list of Scientologists from editing pages on the ever-useful e-encyclopedia. Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee, after careful investigation, found that these Scientologists, identifiable by their ISPs, were editing numerous pages to slant favorably toward their belief system, which violates Wikipedia's standards of objectivity.

So:

On the one hand, free speech is being denied. On the other hand, the proprietors of a not-for-profit venture are attempting to control the usage and quality of their product.

On the one hand, this group of scientologists broke the rules and are being justly punished for it. On the other hand, did Wikipedia employ this same punishment to members of Colbert Nation, infamous in recent years for editing pages to include goofy facts and statistics?

And so:

Is free speech guranteed to the thousands of public editors of Wikipedia? Absolutely not, and nor should it be. The scientologists in question obviously had an agenda and this agenda included undermining the website. Imagine if a group did this to the Encylopedia Brittanica. No matter how much of a libertarian you may be, you've got to admit that distorting the facts to serve your own needs is more Orwellian than Jeffersonian (although, as my friend Elizabeth reminded me the other day, Thomas Jefferson, ever aware of his legacy, was famous for re-editing the content of some of his earlier work).

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Have a gift

And today, apropos of nothing*, I present to you a poem by W.H. Auden.

Epitaph on a Tyrant
by W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

*OK, I lied. My motivation for posting this poem comes from a recent viewing of the Frontline two-parter "Bush's War." Mind you, Frontline doesn't paint Bush as a tyrant and neither do I. Their villain of choice is Dick Cheney, with Donald Rumsfeld as his first mate. I think I can agree with them there.

CAIN (22,315-90,000 wds)

Things that make me go grrrrrr

From Reuters:

"Proud non-reader" Kanye West turns author

By Mark Egan

Rapper Kanye West does not read books or respect them but nevertheless he has written one that he would like you to buy and read.

The Grammy Award winner, known for his No. 1 albums and outspoken statements on everything from racism in America to the banality of Twitter, is the co-author of "Thank You And You're Welcome."

His book is 52 pages -- some blank, others with just a few words -- and offers his optimistic philosophy on life. One two-page section reads, "Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react!" Another page reads "I hate the word hate!"

"This is a collection of thoughts and theories," West, 31, said in an interview about his spiral-bound volume, which was written with J. Sakiya Sandifer.

West said he put his thoughts in a book because "I get paraphrased and misquoted all the time." He calls his wisdom "Kanye-isms."

"My favorite one is 'Get used to being used,'" he said.

"I feel like to misuse, overuse or abuse someone is negative. To use is necessary and if you can't be used, then you are useless."

So does he fancy himself a modern-day Confucius?

"I'm trying to end the confusion," he said, laughing and adding, "I'm gonna put that on the next album."

West's derision of books comes despite the fact that his late mother, Donda West, was a university English professor before she retired to manage his music career. She died in 2007 of complications following cosmetic surgery.

"Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed," West said. "I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph.

"I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life," he said.

West, a college dropout, said being a non-reader was helpful when he wrote his book because it gave him "a childlike purity."

West dedicates the book to his late mother.

"My mom taught me to believe in my flyness and conquer my shyness," he said, defining "flyness" as confidence. "She raised me to be the voice to allow people to think for themselves, to find their own way."

Grrrrrrr.

CAIN (20,918-90,000 wds)

Prop 8

So the California Supreme Court today upheld Proposition 8 - but also validated the same-sex marriages that had occurred before its passage.

As odious as this decision is, the state supreme court was really caught in a terrible position here. It is not their job to legislate, and really, any decision they made except for this one would have been overstepping, and would have been overturned on appeal.

Like it or not (and I obviously don't), the majority in California believe that same-sex marriage should be illegal. It is not in the purview of the judicial branch - or any branch of government, really - to overrule the majority. This is how our democratic republic works, for better or worse.

This time: worse.

So what needs to happen now? Exactly what has happened in states like New Hampshire and New York. Legislation needs to be introduced at the state level. Not some complicated proposition but an actual bill to be turned into an actual law allowing gay and lesbian Californians the same rights as everyone else. Governor Schwarzenegger, I'm talking to you. You're not going to run in 2010. You are a social liberal. Make this part of your legacy.

CAIN (19,679-90,000 wds)

Happy Memorial Day

That is all.

CAIN (17,715-90,000 wds)

Beam me up, Scotty

From Science Daily:

Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits: First Between Atoms 1 Meter Apart

ScienceDaily (Jan. 23, 2009) — For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart – a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.

---

Teleportation may be nature's most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been achieved between photons over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third. None of those, however, provides a feasible means of holding and managing quantum information over long distances.

Now a team from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) at the University of Maryland (UMD) and the University of Michigan has succeeded in teleporting a quantum state directly from one atom to another over a substantial distance. That capability is necessary for workable quantum information systems because they will require memory storage at both the sending and receiving ends of the transmission.

In the Jan. 23 issue of the journal Science, the scientists report that, by using their protocol, atom-to-atom teleported information can be recovered with perfect accuracy about 90% of the time – and that figure can be improved.

"Our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale 'quantum repeater' that can network quantum memories over vast distances," says group leader Christopher Monroe of JQI and UMD. "Moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation." A quantum computer could perform certain tasks, such as encryption-related calculations and searches of giant databases, considerably faster than conventional machines. The effort to devise a working model is a matter of intense interest worldwide.

Teleportation works because of a remarkable quantum phenomenon, called "entanglement," which only occurs on the atomic and subatomic scale. Once two objects are put in an entangled state, their properties are inextricably entwined. Although those properties are inherently unknowable until a measurement is made, measuring either one of the objects instantly determines the characteristics of the other, no matter how far apart they are.

The JQI team set out to entangle the quantum states of two individual ytterbium ions so that information embodied in the condition of one could be teleported to the other. Each ion was isolated in a separate high-vacuum trap, suspended in an invisible cage of electromagnetic fields and surrounded by metal electrodes. [See illustrations.] The researchers identified two readily discernible ground (lowest energy) states of the ions that would serve as the alternative "bit" values of an atomic quantum bit, or qubit.

Conventional electronic bits (short for binary digits), such as those in a personal computer, are always in one of two states: off or on, 0 or 1, high or low voltage, etc. Quantum bits, however, can be in some combination, called a "superposition," of both states at the same time, like a coin that is simultaneously heads and tails – until a measurement is made. It is this phenomenon that gives quantum computation its extraordinary power.

At the start of the experimental process, each ion (designated A and B) is initialized in a given ground state. Then ion A is irradiated with a specially tailored microwave burst from one of its cage electrodes, placing the ion in some desired superposition of the two qubit states – in effect writing into memory the information to be teleported.

Immediately thereafter, both ions are excited by a picosecond (one trillionth of a second) laser pulse. The pulse duration is so short that each ion emits only a single photon as it sheds the energy gained from the laser pulse and falls back to one or the other of the two qubit ground states. Depending on which one it falls into, each ion emits a photon whose color (designated red and blue) is perfectly correlated with the two atomic qubit states. It is this entanglement between each atomic qubit and its photon that will eventually allow the atoms themselves to become entangled.

The emitted photons are captured by lenses, routed to separate strands of fiber-optic cable, and carried into opposite sides of a 50-50 beamsplitter where it is equally probable for either photon to pass straight through the splitter or to be reflected. On either side of the beamsplitter output are detectors that can record the arrival of a single photon.

Before reaching the beamsplitter, each photon is in a superposition of states. After encountering the beamsplitter, four color combinations are possible: blue-blue, red-red, blue-red and red-blue. In nearly all of those variations, the photons cancel each other out on one side and both end up in the same detector on the other side. But there is one – and only one – combination in which both detectors will record a photon at exactly the same time.

In that case, however, it is physically impossible to tell which ion produced which photon because it cannot be known whether the photon arriving at a detector passed through the beamsplitter or was reflected by it.

Thanks to the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics, that inherent uncertainty projects the ions into an entangled state. That is, each ion is in a correlated superposition of the two possible qubit states. The simultaneous detection of photons at the detectors does not occur often, so the laser stimulus and photon emission process has to be repeated many thousands of times per second. But when a photon appears in each detector, it is an unambiguous signature of entanglement between the ions.

When an entangled condition is identified, the scientists immediately take a measurement of ion A. The act of measurement forces it out of superposition and into a definite condition: one of the two qubit states. But because ion A's state is irreversibly tied to ion B's, the measurement of A also forces B into a complementary state. Depending on which state ion A is found in, the researchers now know precisely what kind of microwave pulse to apply to ion B in order to recover the exact information that had originally been stored in ion A. Doing so results in the accurate teleportation of the information.

What distinguishes this outcome as teleportation, rather than any other form of communication, is that no information pertaining to the original memory actually passes between ion A and ion B. Instead, the information disappears when ion A is measured and reappears when the microwave pulse is applied to ion B.

"One particularly attractive aspect of our method is that it combines the unique advantages of both photons and atoms," says Monroe. "Photons are ideal for transferring information fast over long distances, whereas atoms offer a valuable medium for long-lived quantum memory. The combination represents an attractive architecture for a 'quantum repeater,' that would allow quantum information to be communicated over much larger distances than can be done with just photons. Also, the teleportation of quantum information in this way could form the basis of a new type of quantum internet that could outperform any conventional type of classical network for certain tasks."

The Joint Quantum Institute is a partnership effort between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and UMD, with additional support from the Laboratory for Physical Science. The work reported in Science was supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity program under U.S. Army Research Office contract, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Physics at the Information Frontier Program, and the NSF Physics Frontier Center at JQI.

CAIN (15,487-90,000 wds)

Antichrist

Right now, this movie is the big buzz at Cannes:





Thoughts?

CAIN (14,407-90,000 wds)

The Scariest Music Videos Ever Made

And so we end our week of horror with this video, which gave me so many nightmares...



...when I was 7.


But seriously, the following three videos still give me goosebumps:







CAIN (13,323-90,000 wds)

3 Great Horror Movies You've Never Seen That Are Not Named PEEPING TOM

1. The Descent (2005), directed by Neil Marshall. This Australian frightfest concerns a group of female friends who decide to go spelunking. It's pretty much that simple, and the best ideas usually are. Once they're in the dark, on their own...they slowly come to realize they're not alone after all. What raises this film even higher is the way each character is fully realized and multi-dimensional. We as an audience have a stake in almost all of them, and we are actively rooting for them to survive. This film also employs two cheats, but it enacts them so skillfully that not only are the filmmakers readily forgiven, they're to be applauded.

2. May (2002), directed by Lucky McKee. From the ensemble horror of The Descent, let's now delve into May, which features a pitch-perfect lead performance by Angela Bettis as the title character. Ms. Bettis is in nearly every scene and her character is both unique and unforgettable. She plays a young woman with some, um, social issues. The movie becomes not only a riff on Frankenstein but a mature comment on love and longing. Oh yes, and there's the ick. Gobs and gobs of wonderful ick. And speaking of ick...

3. Cabin Fever (2002), directed by Eli Roth. This is the grossest good film I've ever seen. Heck, it may be the grossest film I've seen, period, and that includes Herschell Gordon Lewis and Dario Argento. Seriously, do not watch this movie while eating. But the pleasures to be had in Cabin Fever are many. The first half is an homage to the teen sexploitation films of the early 80s. Horny teenagers go off to a cabin, etc., etc. It has the ribald jokes and the thumbnail stereotypes we would expect. And then it tosses those cliches into holy hell and we're left watching - with a queasy stomach - what happens. Bonus kudos to Eli Roth for providing one of the film's best moments of ick not with a visual but with a sound. A very wrong sound.

CAIN (12,371-90,000 wds)

What is the opposite of horror?

This is:













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3 Great Horror TV Shows Not Named THE TWILIGHT ZONE

1. American Gothic. This short-lived seriocomic ensemble gem written by Shaun Cassidy featured Gary Cole as the sheriff of the small Southern town of Trinity. He loves his town and protects his town and just happens to also probably be the devil. And he has a son (played perfectly by Lucas Black). Although this show firmly had its tongue planted in its cheek, it was still able to reach levels of shake-in-your-boots terror. In fact, I'd say that it was able to achieve this because of its comic moments. Counterpoint is underrated. So was American Gothic.

2. Medium. NBC just cancelled (and CBS just picked up) this marvelously creepy showcase for Patricia Arquette, a unique and unusual actress. She played Allison Dubois, a housewife plagued with second sight, who works for the district attorney. Her dreams push the boundaries of gory surrealism. One recent episode featured images of mutilated women, their eyes graphically gouged out. A fantastic cast of actors, including American Gothic alum Jake Weber, played her family. In fact, one area in which Medium really excelled were the quiet family moments between Allison, her scientist-husband, and her trio of daughters, all of whom have inheritied Allison's gift/curse.

2. Friday the 13th: The Series. Am I kidding you? No, I am not kidding you. Despite some cheesy special effects, this show more often than not delivered the goods, and more. The premise here: two cousins inherit an antique store from their evil uncle, who cursed all of the antiques he sold. Now the cousins have to retrive the cursed antiques before they ruin the lives of their owners by tempting them to commit horrible acts. It's a solid engine for a series and the way the antiques preyed upon their owners' insecurities added a nice dimensionality to the horror. Ah-ha, but what did the series have to do with Camp Crystal Lake, Jason Vorhees, and horny coeds being impaled? Absolutely nothing.

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3 Great Haunted House Novels Not Named THE SHINING

1. Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco. Bestseller in the early 70s, all but forgotten today (except for its cheesy film adaptation). Husband, wife, and son become the seasonal caretakers of a large house. One of them becomes possessed. Sound familiar? In his nonfiction opus Danse Macabre, Stephen King readily acknowledges his debt to Marasco's novel. As to Burnt Offerings itself, it's short (under 300 pages), has some terrific dialogue, a collection of sympathically realistic characters, and a slow burn to a climax that will ruin your sleep.

2. Hell House by Richard Matheson. Again overshadowed by its cheesy film adaptation, Matheson's novel almost vibrates with dread. The premise: psychics are hired by a dying tycoon to camp out in a haunted house and provide evidence to him that there is life after death (because all ghost stories, inherently, prove this to be true). What happens: the psychics slowly start to go insane. Matheson, like Richard Laymon, was an expert at combining fear and desire into one toxic combination, and Hell House is (IMHO) his most potent mixture.

3. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Not the first haunted house novel, of course (the genre dates back to the gothic page-turners of the late 18th century) but the easily first modern haunted house novel, and simply one of the best horror stories ever written. As in Hell House, which was directly inspired by Jackson's book, several intrepid folks spend some time in a reputed haunted house to prove the existence of ghosts. By where Matheson is graphic, Jackson is subtle. This is a novel of bone-chilling atmosphere, and a must-read for anyone who even claims to be a horror fan.

CAIN (7,050/90,000 wds)

Unsatisfied

From XKCD:

I'm not dead yet!

You know what the best thing about having a stomach bug is?

Not having the stomach bug anymore.

CAIN (5,381/90,000 wds)

My review of the new Star Trek movie

'nuff said.

CAIN (3,892-90,000 wds)

Fun facts about sleep

My Circadian rhythms are all askew due to my late night writing splurges, so that seemed like as good a reason as any for a brief lecture about sleep:

• Sleep was invented by the ancient Greeks as a way to avoid going to war. It's believed that a young Athenian named Sandmanikos, upon being drafted into the conflict with Sparta, promptly fainted for an unprecedented eight hours. Other Greeks began to emulate young Sandmankos, and even their pets took on the habit, although the dogs in particular had a tendency to fabricate untruths whilst napping.
• The art of dreaming reached its height during the Renaissance. Among the most accomplished dream-artists were Morpheus, a shaggy-haired Goth, and his close-knit, albeit unusual, family. They tended toward the British Isles and their artistry oftentimes contained elements of power fantasies, preludes, and nocturnes.
• The reason some people snore is, actually, a defense mechanism to ward off those who might take advantage of them in their time of slumber. Other sleep-related defense mechanisms include bed-wetting and somnabulism, but snoring is by far the most popular, and in fact was employed by the wide-awake army of the French during the Battle of Waterloo in an attempt to frighten off the opposing side. This proved unsuccessful.

CAIN (3,551/90,000 words)

CAIN

So I've started to write my sequel to Galileo. In keeping with the Famous Dead Guys theme, I'm calling it...well, look above.

What's Cain about?

I think you can guess from the title. This is not going to be the feel-good novel of the year.

CAIN (2,638/90,000 wds)

Happy Mother's Day!

PG Porn

James Gunn's PG Porn | | SPIKE.com

Thank you to Jordan for this nugget of hilarity.

So fair, so balanced

I love finals week!

That, my friends, is sarcasm.

The future, apparently, was two weeks ago

This, from London's Guardian:

It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signalling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

"This could change bookselling fundamentally," said Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings. "It's giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that's pretty compelling."

From academics keen to purchase reproductions of rare manuscripts to wannabe novelists after a copy of their self-published novels, Blackwell believes the Espresso – a Time magazine "invention of the year" – can cater to a wide range of needs, and will be monitoring customer usage closely over the next few months as it looks to pin down pricing (likely to be around the level of traditional books) and demand. It then hopes to roll it out across its 60-store network, with its flagship Oxford branch likely to be an early recipient as well as a host of smaller, campus-based shops.

The brainchild of American publisher Jason Epstein, the Espresso was a star attraction at the London Book Fair this week, where it was on display to interested publishers. Hordes were present to watch it click and whirr into action, printing over 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article. The quality of the paperback was beyond dispute: the text clear, unsmudged and justified, the paper thick, the jacket smart, if initially a little tacky to the touch.

Described as an "ATM for books" by its US proprietor On Demand Books, Espresso machines have already been established in the US, Canada and Australia, and in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, but the Charing Cross Road machine is the first to be set up in a UK bookstore. It cost Blackwell some $175,000, but the bookseller believes it will make this back in a year. "I do think this is going to change the book business," said Phill Jamieson, Blackwell head of marketing. "It has the potential to be the biggest change since Gutenberg and we certainly hope it will be. And it's not just for us – it gives the ability to small independent bookshops to compete with anybody."

Because there's no such thing as TOO cute

And the outfit he's wearing? Totally a gift from his favorite uncle.

More happy news!

Congratulations of the most hearty variety to:

• Amber Hutchison, for securing the one and only admission spot in her specific Ph.D program at Texas A&M!
• Jordan White for launching one of the most brilliant comic book characters in recent years: Galacta!
• Rebecca Cantrell, for garnering some of the best early reviews I've ever read!
• Beth Fehlbaum, for finally acquiring the freedom she so richly deserved!
• My dad, for landing a job in the worst economy since Bing Crosby sang "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime"!

BIG NEWS!

Booklist has named Nuclear Winter Wonderland one of their top ten debut crime novels of 2009!!!

This came as a complete shock. Whee!!!

2009 for Booklist is apparently the period running from May 1, 2008-April 15, 2009.

I guess if your book comes out between April 15 and May 1st, you're screwed.

Here is the complete list.