Still not dying any quicker than usual

Went back to the doctor today after revealing that I wasn't getting any better on a daily dose of 40mg omeprazole. My supposed "allocated physician," whom I've never actually met ever since Molly moved to Oregon, wasn't there so I met yet another physician. I liked her a lot. She had damn good rapport. "Yup," she said, "your throats inflamed and irritated. Might be ENT. Might be GI. I'm sending you to the GI for consultation and maybe an endoscopy first, because you're reporting an acid taste."

I renewed my subscription for Viagra, since I was down to my last tablet. "But you got ten tablets in May of 2006. Are you just not doing it that often, or don't need it?" I said it was mostly that I rarely needed it, and besides, I only used a quarter tab at a time. The most I ever took was two quarter tabs about four hours apart, and that was for a rather lovely little marathon session. She asked me if I ever got headaches. "Actually, no. And since I have a neurologically-based blue-green colorblindness, I never get the color shifts either. The worst I ever get is the face flush." She regaled me with a tale of a patient who went through a ten-pill bottle in four days. He'd gone down to Mexico with a young, er, "paid lady." Woah.

Anyway, they did a blood draw to scan for the bacteria that causes excessive acid production and ulcers, just in case, and all the other stuff.

Sigh. The eyes, the knee, the guts, the dick. I remember Molly telling me that one of the reasons she was thinking of changing her practice was that most of her patients were moving into that age range where life was nothing but a series of complaints. I now know what she meant. Dammit, I even still have my ADHD, but it's not helping the way it should.

Wednesday's Brain Is Bigger: Who's Posthuman Now?

One in five scientists uses cognition enhancing drugs

Nature did a survey of 1,400 scientists and discovered that about 20% of them used Ritalin, Modafinil, and anti-anxiety medications to boost cognition and concentration in their work. It will not be long until The World Anti-Brain Doping Authority gets called in to vet Nobel Prize winners.

The Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over Your mind

Speaking of which, it's nice to know that we're at least talking about our own cognitive rights nowadays. Just wait until we start arguing about it in the context of robot rights.

I and My Brother Against My Cousin

Stanley Kurtz does a good job of arguing that tribalism and a Hobbsian identity drive more of the problems in the Middle East than any other distinction we might come up with, including Islam.

Pomospeak In Daily Life

So, this afternoon, I was signing up for a work-sponsored 20-minute course related to our new insurance policies. We have to go through this silly sign-in screen that our HR director (an ex-Softie) apparently cooked up as a way of tracking who had taken what courses.

As I'm signing up for it, I'm filling out an absurd number of fields. I ought to be able to give it my email address and it ought to be able to look up everything else: manager's name, email address, phone number, the works. They're all right there in the company directory; the fact that it can't is just... auuugh.

Anyway, as I'm filling it out, I notice at the bottom there's a field with no instructions as to how to fill it out, labeled Modality. I've seen that word a number of times, and always wondered what it meant. I went and looked it up:

Modality, n., a particular way in which the information is to be encoded for presentation to humans.

As opposed to what, exactly? Nematodes? Butterflies? Ponies?

WTF?

What do you see in Dick Cheney's eyes?

Review: Greg Egan, "Glory"

Greg Egan used to be one of my favorite writers. I say "used to be" because Egan opened my eyes to the wonderfully evocative power of truly hard science fiction, only to eventually have him throw it all away with his own ham-handed politics and pecadillos. For a while, since the publication of Schild's Ladder, Egan hasn't written much, but now he's back with a new series, the Amalgam stories, the first of which was "Riding the Crocodile" (link leads to full text of story), and which is the setting for his next novel, Incandescence.

A new Amalgam story, "Glory" (link leads to PDF of full story), appears in the anthology The New Space Opera, and has been published for free at Eos books' website.

"Glory" is an awful story.

My reaction to "Riding the Crocodile" was that it was Greg Egan pandering to the bulk of his audience: those of us too lazy to actually follow the physics of Schild's Ladder, but willing to be thrilled at a certain level of mastery of physics and willing to buy a certain amount of handwavery as long as it seemed plausible. "Riding the Crocodile" is also pandering in that it proposes a posthuman, "AI's are people too" universe in which people flit about from starsystem to starsystem via fast-as-light radio transmissions, switching from arbitrary digital existence to biological instantiation without a second thought.

"Glory" takes this pandering one step further. His opening scene wants to be one of those masterpieces of physics handwaving, in which he shows his Amalgam civilization throwing a one kilogram weight almost up to lightspeed fast enough that it will go all the way through its target star, in the process setting up shock waves so that the star, in its wake, is briefly turned into a nanomachine factory that creates primitive devices for listening for radio waves and converting nearby matter into useful tools, which the Amalgam can then operate by remote control. I don't buy it; neither space nor the insides of stars is that predictable. His description of the matter/antimatter engine is amazing; his attempt to convince you that it'll all work in the end pure nonsense.

What follows from that is, well, it's not really a Greg Egan story. Instead, it's more like a Greg Egan fanfic. All of the elements of Egan's own hangups are there. There's absolutely no possibility of intimate relationships; Egan has written a species with a reproductive urge so limited and incapable just so he won't have to write about it or think about it. (At this point, I have to admit that I kinda miss the manipulative, teenage Greg Egan of such passionate works as "Mind Vampires" and "The Demon's Passage.") The only thing that matters is mathematics; anyone obsessed with anything else, like art or politics, is either a fool, a knave, or a villain.

( Spoiler. And the point to this review. )

I call bullshit. This story completely failed to move me, either in a sensawunda depiction of a technological application of known physics (one of Egan's true strong suits), or in his story, which is a phoned-in Heinleinesque "the right man in the right place to make the right decision," only in this case Egan's characters are more shallow than usual, their convinctions contrived, and the ending a pale shadow that imparts no meaning or message.

(My thanks to fallenpegasus for also reading the story and giving me his reactions to it, which mirrored my own in many places.)