Tuesday, September 23, 2003

Bedtime - And I Didn't Finish The Book Yet. By the way, I'm over a third of the way through Quicksilver - it seems that it just wound up one storyline and jumped to a new one. I decided that'd be a good stopping point for the night. Great, great stuff so far - I'm not entirely sure where the plot's going, but the characters are engaging and the information...I think Stephenson's greatest gift may be as the master of the information dump - I learned more about Sumerian mythology from Snow Crash, number theory from Cryptonomicon, etc...he's still very much a teacher. Oh, and an interesting article about Quicksilver and what it means that Stephenson's not writing about the Internet is over at Slate. One last thing - remember how I ran across a Winston Churchill in the book? Turns out he was real, too - info about his son, John, here.

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How To Work Google In Your Favor Take a look at a Google search for Howard Dean - and look at the fourth ad down on the right.
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Do Law Schools Have Fraternities? I ask this because The West Wing made me wonder - there was a bit on a rerun that was on Bravo today that got my attention. It made reference to a guest character having been in an all-white fraternity - but the problem is, they'd also said that the character had gone to Oberlin College and Duke Law School. Do Duke Law School students join frats? 'cos otherwise, I've got to be nit-picky and point out that Oberlin doesn't actually HAVE frats. =)

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Further into Quicksilver, still rather dazed... I'm 175 pages in (I'm finding 65 pages to be a good range to break on - there's just about exactly 14 chunks of 65 pages in the full 916 pages of the book) and now there's a Winston Churchill. In 1670 or so. Time to see if that's real or made up...
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More on Quicksilver - just a brief bit ...I could be wrong, but I think that Stephenson has inserted Captain Hook into Quicksilver somehow...
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...got distracted from the book for a while there - I'm only up to page 130 now. I'm deeply embarassed. =) That said - still quite good. Nothing really spoiler-ific at this point, except that I feel a consistent need to Google the names of characters in here - Robert Hooke, for example...damn. I'm learning way too much for this to be fiction... =)
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Musings on the Security Council UN Security Council.. Does India belong on the UN security council? A fascinating analysis of UN politics from a developing country's perspective. [MetaFilter] Good read. I've long felt that India, Germany, and Japan should be permanent members of the Security Council - maybe add Brazil to get back to an odd number, or toss France out...they're nowhere near the importance of the other four current permanent members, or India/Germany/Japan. But I think I like the idea of Brazil - it gives every continent but Africa at least one representative. And given a decade or so, I think South Africa should be in line for a permanent seat as well...

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"But The Military Hates Him! Really!" Uh, No, They Don't. Hack Tracks Back. by RonK, Seattle Present company will recognize lavishly decorated combat verteran Col. David Hackworth's 1999 "perfumed prince" critique of Gen.... [Daily Kos] The right has been using that phrase as much as they can, in an attempt to take away Clark's legitimacy as a military leader. Now their means of attack are taken away. Nice.

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Just a note that might be interesting to a couple of you -- I am writing this (And the rest of the Quicksilver blog review) using Microsoft Office 2003's voice recognition system... It's pretty nice. Not perfect, but good enough for note taking... Which is all I'm really going for right now anyway...
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Quicksilver Live-blog Review, Pt 1 Well, the Quicksilver review blogging has been thrown a little off course. When I got back from the bookstore, I found the power was out. So I got in a good hour or so reading, but was unable to blog along with it...but here I am now, an hour of reading in. I've gotten through only about 65 pages - this is, unsurprisingly, dense reading. But I'm also so blown away so far that I don't feel comfortable with reading it through at high-speed, missing too many details...so I probably won't finish today. But I will get at least half-way through. Anyway - here's my initial thoughts. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this...let me know if this is a good enough spoiler shield - select the table below with your mouse to see what I'm saying... So far, it's been both fanciful and extremely grounded in history. Knowledge of the English Civil War, the Restoration, and (probably, though I haven't gotten that far yet) the Glorious Revolution would be handy, though I don't think it's strictly needed. Historical characters are showing up like you wouldn't even believe - Ben Franklin and Mother Goose hav cameos in the future Cambridge, MA (site of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts), Issac Newton is a major, major character, and the entire plot seems to somehow revolve around Newton's conflict with Leibnitz, though I'm not 100% yet - like I said, I'm only 65 pages in. As it happens, I've been reading Norman Davies' kickass History of the Isles while waiting for Quicksilver. While I've been familiar with the history of this time period previously, it's definitely handy that last night, I just got to the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty - which plays a role in the story somehow, as well. Anyway - more to come as I get further. Definitely digging it so far.

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