Darth Vader

When the King of Saudi Arabia, the ruler of a brutal totalitarian dictatorship, visited England this week, he was greeted with an interesting choice in music by the British.



The news and discussion forum following that is interesting to watch, as well.

Immortality Research

An interesting article in the Washington Post on speculations about ending the aging process.

Halloween quote of the day from Stephen King:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

On Writing

On October 31, 1517 Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. He hadn't intended to start a revolution. He thought he was just going to argue a bit of theology with some academics. His list was written in Latin, after all.

After I got done teaching my theology class tonight, I took a look at Comet Holmes; it was very easy to find. It looks like a small dandilion puff, especially through a telescope (I took a look through a small three and a half inch Meade Maksutov-Cassegrain when I got home, using a 26 mm Ploessl eyepiece). My wife Ruth enjoyed looking at it too.

Sky and Telsecope magazine has sky charts that help locate it. It is easy to see all night long.

Comet Holmes is now a naked eye object, about magnitude 2 or 3. For details, see the article on Space.com.

Science Fiction quote of the day:

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers... What they really hate are lousy programmers.

Oath of Fealty , Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Ray Bradbury, Science Fiction quote of the day:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fahrenheit 451, Coda 1979

Science Fiction quote for the day from Robert A. Heinlein:

The whole principle is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak.

On censorship, in The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949)

Science Fiction quote of the day from Isaac Asimov:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny ...'

The same thing works in theology. I know from my own experience that the parts of the Bible or life that are hardest to understand, or those things that don't seem to quite fit, or that really bother me, will often lead me to the most exciting ideas.

Science Fiction quote of the day from Ray Bradbury:

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.

Today's Science Fiction quote is from Stephen R. Donaldson:

This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.

The Wounded Land (1980)

The Space Shuttle Discovery launched on time and is now safely in orbit. It should dock with the International Space Station on Thursday. Discovery is scheduled to return to Earth in two weeks.

Science Fiction quote of the day from Joe Haldeman:

"Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to 'Write What You Know', which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery."

And then the opening lines from his best known book, The Forever War:

"Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man." The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me. So if he'd ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he'd done it as an infant.

I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open.

Assuming the weather cooperates, the Space Shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch at 8:38 AM on Tuesday morning. Its goal is to deliver another piece to the International Space Station, specifically the Harmony module, which is one of the two connecting nodes. This one will allow the delivery of the Columbus Laboratory, built by the European Space Agency come December.

This mission will also be rearanging the solar arrays. There will be 5 space walks, the most ever on a shuttle mission to the space station.

Science Fiction quote of the day from Robert Heinlein:

One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.

"Doctor Pinero" in Life Line (1939)

On Saturday mornings here in the Antelope Valley, a free newspaper appears on our driveways called the Antelope Valley Press Express; it's mostly advertising, but there are a few articles. I noticed one by Don Mayhew entitled "Making e-mends: Fixing a faux pas when communicating via e-mail." It began with the following story:

Author Bonnie Hearn Hill was exchanging ideas via e-mail this summer with a friend writing a psychological thriller. The story involved a character’s murder.

“I think you need to kill him sooner, right off the bat,” Hill, of Fresno, Calif., wrote. The friend didn’t reply.

She wrote again, supplying details about where and when the murder might take place. No response.

She tried again: “Let’s discuss this murder of yours over coffee.” Still nothing.

Finally, Hill called her friend, who said he hadn’t received any of her e-mails—and by the way, uses his middle initial in his e-mail address. She’d been sending her homicidal messages to a stranger with a similar name.

One of those little occupational hazards that writers need to be careful about.

Science fiction quote of the day from H.G. Wells:

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

Attributed

Science Fictiona author quote of the day from Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, among other works):

For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

Wired 2.02: In the Kindom of Mao Bell

The transcript of a lecture on the origins of anti-Semitism by the German academic, Dr. Matthias Kuentzel at Leeds University:

Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Fascism and of Nazism.

It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 in Egypt, that established Islamism as a mass movement. The significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas or the group around Sidique Khan.

It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against "cultural modernity." Their “liberation struggle”, however, had more in common with the “liberation struggle” of the Nazis than with any kind of progressive movement.
Thus, the Brotherhood advocated the replacement of Parliamentarianism by an “organic” state order based on the Caliphate. It demanded the abolition of interest and profit in favour of a forcibly imposed community of interests between capital and labour.

The whole thing is worth reading.