[Review] Cory Doctorow's i, robot</a

Cory Doctorow clearly has his own intellectual mill where all sorts of wonderful things wind up on the loading docks. A response to Bradbury's objection to Michael Moore's appropriation of "Farenheit...", a little Orwell, a bit more Asimov, and a lot of courage, Doctorow assaults the underpinnings of Asimov's universe and shows us what was wrong with the Three Laws from the very beginning.

What's most remarkable about this short story is the way he captures, quite successfully, his idea in a very personalized story about a father trying to protect his daughter from the Big Bad World, without his really understanding either the world or his kid. And when he does come to understand, it's with a touch of sadness, a sense of loss, an awareness that she's going to grow up more than he can even want to understand. As someone who likes writing very personal stories that just happen to be set on starships, I found that very endearing.

What I also found interesting is that Cory's story shows the ongoing convergence of transhumanist vocabulary; "instance" is more popular than the technical "dividual", and the essentials of a subtle robomorality as opposed to the blunt thought axes of Asimov's era, are now getting airplay in popular media.

A well-written story with elements that only now are becoming popularly widespread, i, robot deserves to be read.

Know Thy Enemy

I've held onto this web page all day, debating whether I should post about it. When that happens, usually the answer is in the affirmative. Citizens for Class Standards in Schools is a group dedicated to dictating what books teachers may assign to students in schools. They have a limited charter right now, you can bet that boards like this will be popping up nationwide soon. With the reflective and amplificative properties of the Internet, you can also bet that groups like this will assemble enormous arsenals of material in the name of their cause. That's the nature of the Internet: instead of isolated islands each creating their own petitions, we're now allowed a natural selection process by which the ineffective petitions get weeded out to be replaced with effective mutants from the district next door.

Read their material carefully: one of their objectives is to get books "rated" the way movies and video games are rated. The Honor Harrington and Vorkosigan series will get a T (teens) for violence and suggestive content, and will not be available to children under the age of 13; much of Heinlein would be T, with later stuff being M (Mature) or AO (Adults Only). Right now our music, video games, television, and movies are rated this way; do you really want the next novel you buy to have a "recommended for all ages" sticker on it?

[Wine] McCrea Syrah 2001

Sometimes, it's good to have a comparison. Tonight's comparison was McCrea Syrah 2001 (the last time, it was a Sirocco) and a Rosemont Syrach/Grenache blend. At first, neither I nor my fellow diners were particularly impressed with the McCrea Syrah when comparing it to the McCrea Sirocco we'd enjoyed a few weeks earlier. It seemed uninteresting.

And then we compared it to the Rosemont, and discovered the difference. When you hold the Syrah in your mouth, it has a texture and activity. As one diner put it, "it has a conversation that the Rosemont doesn't."

It's a pretty good wine, rich, flavor-bombed, but it's quiet with less aftertaste, good or otherwise, compared to the Sirocco. I'd recommend the Sirocco if you're going have you choice. And pause before you swallow; that's where it really speaks.

I can understand why wine tasters use such a complicated language that seems so opaque. Flavor is hard to describe. We don't have a useful vocabulary for it. Describing wine as "oaky," "smooth," or "conversational" is just a desperate attempt to bridge the divide between subjective experience and objective recommendation with analogy.

Bumper Sticker idea

I'm thinking about this for a bumpersticker:

My other body is a
Hecatonchires

Whaddya think?

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Edit: Here's what it looks like:I could probably put it up on drizzle as a Postscript or PDF document, too, if anyone else wants one. The paper's a bit pricey for the magstrip stuff from Xerox, but it seems to have come out okay. When I get the card driver on my camera working again, I'll put a pic up of what it looks like on the car.