{"id":1116,"date":"2008-02-14T00:39:16","date_gmt":"2008-02-14T04:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/14\/linkblogging-in-a-storm\/"},"modified":"2008-03-31T23:23:56","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T03:23:56","slug":"linkblogging-in-a-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/14\/linkblogging-in-a-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"Linkblogging in a storm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Might as well linkblog&#8211;can&#8217;t dance.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I don&#8217;t know whether to be amused or disheartened about the whole &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/afp\/20080204\/od_afp\/britainpeoplehistoryoffbeat;_ylt=AiqDw24SYmNotvEIjVFPsWCs0NUE\">25% of Brits think Winston Churchill is fictional<\/a>&#8221; thing. On the one hand, it&#8217;s pretty funny. On the other hand, what does it say about the education system that this result is even possible. On still a third hand, it&#8217;s not like North America can do any better&#8211;what is it, 80% of people believe in the literal existence of angels? And there&#8217;s still around a hundred million people who think Bush is doing a good job?<\/li>\n<li>I have often maintained that part of the reason I like Minneapolis is because when you take a city that size, and isolate it in the middle of an (at least) 800 mile circle of no other decent-sized town, the people get a little&#8230; well&#8230; off. I&#8217;m willing to chalk <a href=\"http:\/\/articles.citypages.com\/2008-01-16\/feature\/superheroes-in-real-life\/full\/\">Geist<\/a> up to that. I&#8217;m not sure how to explain the other 200 &#8220;reals&#8221; though. <\/li>\n<li>It is funny because <a href=\"http:\/\/www.osnews.com\/images\/comics\/wtfm.jpg\">it is true<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>While we&#8217;re talking about computers, let me just say that I write <a href=\"http:\/\/thecodist.com\/fiche\/thecodist\/article\/writing-multithreaded-code-is-like-juggling-chainsaws\">complex multi-threaded enterprise applications<\/a>. That&#8217;s what I do. I work with these things EVERY DAMN DAY. I have servers doing complex processing for thousands of client simultaneously, where handling each client might involve processing thousands of things, while interacting with large databases and directories. Large here meaning &#8220;routinely with more than a million things in them.&#8221; And then I cluster them. I dream in growable connection pools, write-preference read-write locks, and message-driven asynchronous processing. There is no other point to this bullet except deep nerd chest-beating.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s not possible that I could be less interested in any argument than I am in the &#8220;how do we define science fiction&#8221; one. But, on the other hand (again), I am fascinated by <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ontology_%28information_science%29\">ontologies<\/a>. So <a href=\"http:\/\/notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com\/2008\/02\/of-genres-and-sub-genres.html\">Hal Duncan&#8217;s recent post on a possible hierarchy for classifying weird fiction<\/a> was a good read for me. I&#8217;m not interested in finding ways of saying whether or not something is or isn&#8217;t genre X, but a framework for saying &#8220;this piece of writing fits into categories A, B, and C because&#8230;&#8221; is a whole different thing.<\/li>\n<li>You know Kevin Burton Smith is right. <a href=\"http:\/\/therapsheet.blogspot.com\/2008\/02\/toronto-noir-world-class-my-ass-maybe.html\">Toronto just isn&#8217;t a noir city<\/a>. Now Halifax, Halifax could support noir.<\/li>\n<li>OK, seriously, we&#8217;re going to use &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2008\/02\/08\/AR2008020801607_pf.html\">has had sex in the last year<\/a>&#8221; as a measure of being sexually active inside a marriage? Seriously?<\/li>\n<li>You could learn some history, and see some Canadian in-jokes, by just reading <a href=\"http:\/\/beatonna.livejournal.com\/23574.html\">these 20 comics<\/a>. Me, I particularly like <a href=\"http:\/\/i237.photobucket.com\/albums\/ff28\/beatonna\/15trudeau.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\" title=\"Hark! A Vagrant: Margaret Trudeau\">the one about Margaret Trudeau<\/a>. (If that one confuses you, check out <a href=\"http:\/\/archives.cbc.ca\/IDC-1-68-832-4892\/arts_entertainment\/rolling_stones\/clip5 \">this<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Margaret_Trudeau\">this<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/images.encarta.msn.com\/xrefmedia\/sharemed\/targets\/images\/pho\/t791\/T791030A.jpg\">this<\/a>.)<\/li>\n<li>If you can tell who <a href=\"http:\/\/nosmokingintheskullcave.blogspot.com\/2008\/02\/seven-old-men-of-science-fiction.html\">these seven guys are<\/a>, then you&#8217;re a science fiction geek. If you spend some serious time doing a &#8220;one of these things is not like the others&#8221; analysis over the inclusion of one of them<footnote>Actually, I though the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Philip_K._Dick\">PKD<\/a> pic looked a lot like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.locusmag.com\/2001\/News\/nebulapics\/P4280094.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\" title=\"Walter Jon Williams\">WJW<\/a>. That would have really been a generational gap.<\/footnote>, then you&#8217;re a hopeless science fiction geek.<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usmm.net\/posters.html\">World War I and II posters<\/a> at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usmm.net\/\">American Merchant Marine At War<\/a> site are pure gold. I especially like the nearly 40 &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usmm.net\/postertalk2a.html\">loose lips sink ships<\/a>&#8221; examples. One particular favourite of mine is this &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.usmm.net\/p\/jewelry.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\" title=\"Jewelry\">can&#8217;t trust those women<\/a>&#8221; themed one. I am also quite tempted to print up a couple of hundred of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.usmm.net\/p2\/think.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox\" title=\"Still topical, don't you think?\">these<\/a> and post them at gas stations the next time I&#8217;m traveling through the U.S.<\/li>\n<li>McLarens are often vulgar or crass, but in a very honest way. It&#8217;s a rare McLaren that can manage <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sevenoaksmag.com\/commentary\/parisofthenorth.html\">to be tacky<\/a> in the most tiresome way. I am happy to learn the word <em>SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene<\/em> though, and I will endeavour to use it where appropriate in my discussions. I can&#8217;t wait until the next time someone brings up Dan Brown.<\/li>\n<li>While I&#8217;m glad to hear that the amount of paper we use per-person in the first world <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/02\/10\/business\/10metrics.html?ei=5090&#038;en=ff8f22ae8c0384e4&#038;ex=1360386000&#038;partner=rssuserland&#038;emc=rss&#038;pagewanted=all\">is finally declining<\/a>, I am SHOCKED to find out that it&#8217;s currently over 500 pounds per person per year. Yarg&#8211;we can do a lot more declining, that&#8217;s for sure.<\/li>\n<li>I am prepared to declare <a href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/news\/article\/3943\/harvard-faculty-adopts-open-access-requirement\">Harvard&#8217;s new policy<\/a> the thin end of the wedge that will break the current <a href=\"http:\/\/www.badscience.net\/?p=360\">academic journal cabal<\/a>. Peer review and the ongoing cross-pollination that science requires go with the open source ideology like peanut butter with raspberry jam.<\/li>\n<li>There are <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Category:Mysterious_people\">some pages in Wikipedia<\/a> I should never look at. I could get lost in there for days.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">Might as well linkblog&#8211;can&#8217;t dance. I don&#8217;t know whether to be amused or disheartened about the whole &#8220;25% of Brits think Winston Churchill is fictional&#8221; thing. On the one hand, it&#8217;s pretty funny. On the other hand, what does it say about the education system that this result is even possible. On still a third hand, it&#8217;s not like North&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/14\/linkblogging-in-a-storm\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[92,236,72,173,158],"class_list":["post-1116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linkapalooza","tag-academic-papers","tag-characters","tag-free","tag-superheroic","tag-the-masses","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-i0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}