And still the Earth moves

Navy Chaplain George Ridgeway had an article in the Washington DC Naval District newsletter, the waterline, in which he discussed the importance of Anthony Flew's "conversion".

I sent him an email, somewhat snarky, informing him that his reading of Flew's "conversion" was mostly a hoax, based on a single statement Flew made, which in turn Flew attributed to being "mistaught" by a popular physicist who's angling for the Templeton Prize (a prize given each year to the scientist the Templeton comittee feels did the most work towards reconciling science and religion). I sent Chaplain Ridgeway links to letters in which Flew said, in effect, "Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm still an atheist."

He actually sent me a letter apologizing for using only second-hand sources and not seeking out the original material. Whether he corrects his comments in print is another matter.

Entertaining 43Things.com

So, someone asked me what my beef is with 43 Things. I originally suspected that the site was a rip-off of 43 Folders, a website much beloved of the geek community, which needs as many tools as it can to get things done. I was challenged about their registry dates. 43Things' registry was created on Apr 6, 2004, but 43Folders was created on August 27, 2004. But then I dig deeper and discover that 43Folders was actually created in June, 2003, but changed registries, so the dates aren't necessarily accurate.

Aside from the question of "from what orifice did 43 Things pull that peculiar random number?" there is the "Who's paying for 43 Things?" question. The CEO has been amazingly evasive about who the money players are. When pressed on how much Amazon has invested in 43 Things, the CEO said, "Nobody's supposed to know that yet." Amazon, on the other hand, admits, "We're Robot Co-Op's only investor." (Drew Herdener, Amazon PR Manager for Technology)

But aside from the niggling questions about riffing on other people's work or whether or not 43Things is collecting individuals' aspirations and feeding them to the web's biggest retailer, there is, for me, the big question: how effective is 43 Things at what it purports to be?

The answer is: not very. 43 Things has no soul.

If you look at the websites that geeks love, that we get impassioned about, that make a difference in the way we live and work, you'll see websites with soul. Someone-- perhaps more than one someone, but someone puts a face and imprints personality on the site that inspires other people. Merlin at 43 Folders, the staff at Livejournal, the crew at Google Labs, the guys at Slashdot, all care. Sure, the Slashdot crew has off-days, but they seem to give a damn about the people they're serving. They sit at the intersection of the subjects they love and the people who love those subjects with them; they thrive in that intersection. Del.icio.us only seems faceless but it, too, has that instant quality of putting you in a place where you feel surrounded with the wisdom of the crowd.

43 Things is missing something that cannot be bought anyway: personality. Soul. Je ne sais quoi. It doesn't know what it wants to be, and what it ends up being is a place where people can brag about what they've accomplished to complete strangers, and that's it.

It doesn't help you organize your life to make that accomplishment happen, point you to resources that can guide you, allow you to access chats, critiques, or foundries where your efforts can receive helpful insight, or engage those whose lives you would touch with your work. All it can do is give you a chest-thumping broadsheet for each milestone, along with a list of recommended purchases that might help you in reaching the next. It is not a community tool.

What it does do, it doesn't provide easy tools with which to do it. As impassioned as a bunch of "geeks with their powerbooks" may be, the website comes off as polished as a Britney Spears in Las Vegas concert, and about as deep.

[Writing] Robin Hobb vs Trudi Canavan: The Gold Coins of fiction

I've been reading two books parallell recently (along with my studies and my research for the new novel): Trudi Canavan's The Magician's Guild and Robin Hobb's Ship of Magic. And as I read through them I come away with a curious sensation: Robin Hobb is a better writer than Trudi Canavan, but I'm much more likely to buy one of Ms. Canavan's books than I am one of Ms. Hobb's.

One of the conversations we've been having on rec.arts.sf.composition recently is about "Your least favorite prescription." Well, one that I hadn't heard before but makes a lot of sense for me is "Leave gold coins in your reader's path once in a while." The easiest thing a reader can do with a book is put it down and forget about it; the only way to keep the reader reading all the way through until the end is to ocassionally drop in a scene, a line, an emotional moment-- whether up or down doesn't really matter-- that's compelling enough to reward the reader to keep reading. To want the next golden moment.

It's clear to me that Trudi Canavan does this far more readily and easily than Robin Hobb. There are more moments of pyrotechnics, of revelation, of characters being put through well-illustrated wringers, however brief, in The Magician's Guild than there are in Ship of Magic.

Both books are told with a light touch on the omni-third point of view, changing POV among characters between scenes, and Hobb is trying to make us sympathetic to all of her characters, but I get from her books a sense of contrivance that doesn't seem to be a part of Canavan's work. Hobb and Canavan have a similarity to Clute and Gibson: one writer is very obviously *working* at being good to the story, the other achieves a sense of naturalness and effortlessness that helps the reader along.

I don't know yet how to do this consciously, to lay the groundwork for rewarding moments that keep the reader convinced that the whole of the story is worth his effort to read. That I feel the need to plan for it consciously makes me feel that I'm more in the Hobb/Clute spectrum of writers than the Canavan/Gibson, and I'm not sure I'm happy with the revelation that that may be where I belong.

Yamaarashi-chan's eyes

Well, for those of you who have met Yamaarashi-chan you may have noticed that her left eye has a tendency to wander. I've described in the past her surgery to have the muscle overgrowth corrected and for the past year she's been getting therapy, both eye-patch and daily vision exercises.

It was my turn to take her up to her doctor's appointment. I had risen at six, showered and driven over there to pick her up by 7:15. That gave us 75 minutes to get there which is probably a safe bet, since I would have to fight may through both Seattle and Microsoft morning rush traffic. Listening to the traffic reports, I plotted a course through the industrial section, then across the bigger floating bridge, and up to Redmond. I made it with a half-hour to spare, so we stopped at Starbucks where she had a donut and I had a coffee. Mmmm, coffee. Not my brand, but xanthine is xanthine. We also stopped at the Great Harvest bread company next door and picked up a loaf of honey wheat. Yum.

Her eye doctor had moved into new digs in the same building, and her doctor wasn't there that day. We were seeing someone else instead. I've seen Yamaarashi-chan take eye drops before, but for some reason when the nurse came to give her the dilation drops she just freaked out. Wouldn't let the nurse do it. It took a lot of coaxing to convince her but she eventually did let the nurse put the drops into her eyes. She then curled up in my lap and we waited for the doctor.

We waited for an hour. The nurse had left Shreck playing on the video screen they use for testing so we could watch it. We'd gotten just up to the point where Shreck and Donkey are arguing over Fiona when the movie suddenly jumped back to the end of the rescue scene. I was annoyed; weren't we going to get to see the ending? Yamaarashi-chan spent the time cuddled in my lap, but even she noticed when the audio changed.

Finally, the doctor came. She ran Yamaarashi-chan through her tests and the results were good. Her eye-turn is much less, and she can be dropped down to an hour a day of patching plus the usual exercises. She recommended against atropine therapy at this point because it's hard to craft an atropine dose that's for less than four hours at a time, but at least I asked.

She gave Yamaarashi-chan a coupon good for a cookie back at Great Harvest and sunglasses. When we got to the car, her sunglasses didn't fit, but the light was too bright. I gave her a pair I had in my glove box, leftovers from a sales conference we had at work entitled, gag, "The Future's So Bright...", and they fit her. Even looked good on her.

We drove back to Seattle and I dropped her off at school, then headed over to work, putting my Japanese lesson #64 on the Jukebox.