[PHOTO] Pink hibiscus among the flowers, Allan Gardens

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Broadside's Caitlin Kelly blogs about the joys of being a woman alone travelling and exploring.


• Centauri Dreams talks about the importance of Interstellar as inspiration for future scientists.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper looking at the circumstellar habitable zones of pre-main-sequence stars, often surprisingly large if we're talking about red dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales notes Russia's admission that it has a military mission in eastern Ukraine.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis looks for evidence that Islam played much of a role in the recent Indonesian election.


• Joe. My. God. notes that in the United Kingdom, people in civil partnerships can now convert those legal arrangements to marriages.


• Marginal Revoltion wonders about the future of Japanese interest rates.


• More Words, Deeper Hole's James Nicoll points out that, if you're interested in space science at all, you should read The Dragon's Gaze.


• Livejournaler pollotenchegg shares a cartogram mapping Ukrainian population change over the past decade.


• The Russian Demographics Blog maps the outcome of the Ukrainian elections.


• Bruce Sterling notes that Microsoft is now accepting payment in bitcoins.


• Towleroad notes a sit-in at Seoul city hall by gay rights activists.


• Transit Toronto notes that on King Street, to expedite streetcars people will soon be able to enter merely with proof of payment.

[LINK] "What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?"

Via Facebook's Doug, I found a (translated) article at Tor.com written by Chinese science fiction writer Xia Jia about the development of her literary genre in China. As she describes it, science fiction and its writers have been concerned with the question of how China can modernize, catching up to and even leading the rest of the world.

Science fiction’s creative inspirations—massive machinery, new modes of transportation, global travel, space exploration—are the fruits of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, processes with roots in modern capitalism. But when the genre was first introduced via translation to China at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was mostly treated as fantasies and dreams of modernity, material that could be woven into the construction of a “Chinese Dream.”

“Chinese Dream” here refers to the revival of the Chinese nation in the modern era, a prerequisite for realizing which was reconstructing the Chinese people’s dream. In other words, the Chinese had to wake up from their old, 5000-year dream of being an ancient civilization and start to dream of becoming a democratic, independent, prosperous modern nation state. As a result, the first works of science fiction in Chinese were seen, in the words of the famous writer Lu Xun, as literary tools for “improving thinking and assisting culture.” On the one hand, these early works, as myths of science, enlightenment, and development based on imitating “the West”/“the world”/“modernity,” attempted to bridge the gap between reality and dream. But on the other hand, the limitations of their historical context endowed them with deeply Chinese characteristics that only emphasized the depth of the chasm between dream and reality.

One such early work was Lu Shi’e’s “New China” (published in 1910). The protagonist wakes up in the Shanghai of 1950 after a long slumber. He sees around him a progressive, prosperous China, and is told that all this is due to the efforts of a certain Dr. Su Hanmin, who had studied abroad and invented two technologies: “the spiritual medicine” and “the awakening technique.” With these technologies, a population mired in spiritual confusion and the daze of opium awakened in an instant and began an explosive bout of political reform and economic development. The Chinese nation has not only been revived, but is even able to overcome abuses that the West could not overcome on its own. In the author’s view, “European entrepreneurs were purely selfish and cared not one whit for the suffering of others. That was why they had stimulated the growth of the Communist parties.” However, with the invention of Dr. Su’s spiritual medicine, every Chinese has become altruistic and “everyone views everyone else’s welfare as their responsibility; it is practically socialism already, and so of course we’re not plagued by Communists.”

[LINK] "Locked Away for Years, Skeleton's Secrets Rewrite Prehistory of North America"

National Geographic's Simon Worrall interviews Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist whose analysis of the Kennewick Man skeleton has led to some interesting conclusions about the sorts of migration common in ancient pre-Columbian North America (and beyond).

Kennewick Man's bone chemistry tells us that he's not from that area. The drinking water he grew up on is not drinking water of the type you'd get out of the Columbia River. He's not from Oregon or the state of Washington. He comes from much farther north. He's a long-distance traveler and a hunter.

We can also determine what his diet was. You are what you eat. And one thing is very clear, he did not grow up on the types of game you see in the Columbia River Basin, like deer or elk or rabbits. He's a marine mammal hunter. This guy is eating seals. Lots and lots of seals. That's what his bone chemistry tells us. And that just surprised the socks off me.

[. . .]

This is way before there were Inuit. But there are parallels in terms of the diet. In the final chapter of this volume, we look at his origin. He's certainly of Asian origin. His roots are going to be East Asian maritime hunter-gatherers dependent on seals. To get isotope values like you see in him, you at least have to get into coastal central Alaska or even more to the west. His facial features tie him strongly, in terms of the shape of the skull, with East Asian groups like the Ainu of ancient Japan, or Polynesians.

[LINK] "A Test for Oman and Its Sultan"

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Dickinson looks at the situation in Oman, where the country's aging, ailing and modernizing Sultan Qaboos seems to be nearing the end of his life at a time when his country is vulnerable.

(I would note that Dickinson makes no reference of the rumours that the unmarried sultan is homosexual. Such have been circulating for at least the past decade in the English-speaking world, and likely longer in the Middle East proper. Has anyone else heard anything about this?)

Among the leaders of the Middle East today, there is perhaps no one more enigmatic or more adored than Sultan Qaboos. During his forty-four years of rule, he has used his absolute authority and the wealth from 5.5 billion barrels of oil reserves to transform Oman from a territory with just ten kilometres of roads and a roaring civil war into a middle-income country whose people have never lived so long in peace.

Yet, over the past decade, Qaboos has retreated into solitude, cultivating an image that is benevolent but aloof. Few have had access to his royal audiences, and he has rarely spoken publicly. He doesn’t attend regional summits, preferring to send an array of envoys as stand-ins. Roads bear his name, but, unlike other regional leaders, he hasn’t made his likeness ubiquitous in the capital.

So the country stood still when Qaboos sat down in front of a camera on November 18th, his seventy-fourth birthday, to confirm what many suspected. He spoke of an unnamed illness—he is believed to have terminal cancer—that would “require us to proceed with the medical program in the forthcoming period,” he said. Qaboos was presently in Germany. For the first time, he would miss the National Day celebrations, to be held the following week.

“This is a very testing time for us, because we are realizing that we need to take a leap of faith,” says Khalid Al-Haribi, a social entrepreneur and the former head of Oman’s first independent think tank, Tawasul. “There is a proverb: that one only grows up when he or she is no longer dependent on the parents.”

[LINK] "WKRP In Perpetuity"

Michaelangelo Matos' post at NPR's The Record blog about the prescience and the importance of WKRP in Cincinnati, a classic TV comedy recently re-released with its original music soundtrack intact, gets the show's importance.

Nobody expected high realism from a network sitcom, but producer Hugh Wilson had sold advertising on an Atlanta Top 40 station before moving into television, and beyond basing several plots on true stories from his time in the trenches (most famously "Turkeys Away," from season one, in which the station foolishly drops live turkeys on a parking-lot crowd from a helicopter), he insisted on a surprising amount of truthfulness about the way the radio biz worked.

By the second season, Travis is testily insisting that Fever "play the hits," a refrain that lasted the rest of the series' run. In season four's "The Consultant," a slick programming expert scoffs at Fever's unreconstructed freeform DJ style, telling Travis, "He's stuck in 1962 ... Your format is all over the road ... Nobody is programming their own music anymore." Even Travis's moldy speech at the end of season one's "Hoodlum Rock," about a fictional British band, Scum (played by the real group Detective, featuring Michael Des Barres), who are allegedly punk but sounds like Foreigner, complete with cornball saxophone break, features Travis musing, "Whatever happened to groups like Crosby, Stills & Nash, or Chicago?" in precisely the way a rock-radio lifer of the time would have done. On multiple episodes, the station's staff fights to get their hands on the Arbitron book.

"Johnny Comes Back," another first-season episode, tackles payola — a new WKRP DJ is found out after taking a cocaine payoff from a label rep. (Fever, who figures it out, tells the station's well-meaning dumbbell boss, Arthur Carlson — Gordon Jump — that it's "foot powder"; naturally, Carlson uses it for just that. "I've lost all feeling in my foot," he yelps. "I've got a monkey on my foot.") "In Concert," from season two, handles a real-life incident — The Who's Riverfront Stadium concert on December 3, 1979, in which the crowd, most of which had general-admission, "festival seating" tickets, rushed in the doors, with 11 fans dying in the crush — with real gravity; it's one of the series' finest episodes.

While WKRP in Cincinnati's breakout star was Loni Anderson, as station receptionist Jennifer Marlowe, a blonde bombshell who's also the smartest person in the room, Dr. Johnny Fever is the show's most resonant character, particularly at a remove of 35 years. Hesseman's walrus mustache, motorcycle shades, and is-he-or-isn't-he-stoned? demeanor made him prime time's first full-on Sixties burnout. (Meathead was a grad student.) Moreover, Fever's hippie-era idealism is seldom the butt of the joke. In "Pills," from season four, the station takes, then refuses advertising from a sleazy seller of diet pills — over-the-counter amphetamines, as Fever gleans from the wording of his spot — with Fever noting, "I thought since the Republicans took office everyone just took downers."

[LINK] "Why NASA’s Orion Spacecraft Flew Old, Slow Computers Into Orbit"

Universe Today's Elizabeth Howell explains why new spacecraft like NASA's Orion use older computers. Their failure modes are well-known, it turns out, and combine capability with durability generally.

It’s funny to think that your smartphone might be faster than a new spaceship, but that’s what one report is saying about the Orion spacecraft. The computers are less-than-cutting-edge, the processors are 12 years old, and the speed at which it “thinks” is … slow, at least compared to a typical laptop today.

But according to NASA, there’s good reasoning behind using older equipment. In fact, it’s common for the agency to use this philosophy when designing missions — even one such as Orion, which saw the spacecraft soar 3,600 miles (roughly 5,800 kilometers) above Earth in an uncrewed test last week and make the speediest re-entry for a human spacecraft since the Apollo years.

The reason, according to a Computer World report, is to design the spacecraft for reliability and being rugged. Orion — which soared into the radiation-laden Van Allen belts above Earth — needs to withstand that environment and protect humans on board. The computer is therefore based on a well-tested Honeywell system used in 787 jetliners. And Orion in fact carries three computers to provide redundancy if radiation causes a reset.

“The one thing we really like about this computer is that it doesn’t get destroyed by radiation,” said Matt Lemke, NASA’s deputy manager for Orion’s avionics, power and software team, in the report. “It can be upset, but it won’t fail. We’ve done a lot of testing on the different parts of the computer. When it sees radiation, it might have to reset, but it will come back up and work again.”

[LINK] "Big Data and the Hyper-Reserve Army"

At the New APPS Blog, Gordon Hull writes from a Marxist perspective about one big problem with Big Data, particularly when connected to low-paid and low-status employment but not only. It makes it possible for people to be on call quite irregularly, getting hours dispersed so broadly that all other planning becomes impossible.

[T]his of course causes real, quantifiable increases in the levels of stress these workers face, since it makes it nearly impossible for them to juggle their (poorly remunerated) jobs, child care and other obligations. Such workers never had it easy, of course; on a slow day at the grocery store, you could always be sent home early (and without pay for the time you were scheduled but didn’t work). But this is something considerably more intense, I think, because it furthers the processes of real subsumption, where capital extends outside the factory walls and into all aspects of life. In the old way you could say with certainty whether you were at work, or not. Capital extended into the home removes this certainty.

One of the most discussed of such extensions is the direct extension of work into the home, as in the well-worn images of dads spending their entire time on the Blackberry, even during family dinners. At some point in that process, there is a further intensification: you find yourself not just doing one job all the time, but indefinitely many jobs in-between; the job morphs into what Ian Bogost calls hyperemployment (see also here and here). So for one segment of workers, it is impossible to stop working.

Scheduling-by-analytics shows the version of this process for lower socioeconomic strata. Marx had shown how capital depends on creating a “surplus population,” that then could serve as an industrial reserve army of contingent labor. Those workers would be called into the factory when there was extra work to do, and left unemployed and near starvation otherwise. Here we see the transformation of the industrial reserve army into something fitting the needs of post-industrial, service sector capital, abetted by analytics. Big data is very good at segmenting and regrouping formerly opaque-looking blocks of things – time, populations, etc. – and here we see it being used to precisely that effect, segmenting and reconfiguring the time of the working day to align that time as precisely as possible with the needs of employers.

In the factory system described by Marx, it is the steam engine that dictates time. In the contemporary service sector, it is predictions about customer traffic, and producing very granular predictions is the service the new scheduling software provides. The result is both an extension of work into the home that is almost the mirror image of the Blackberry dad, and also an intensification of the production of surplus population. The old Marxist surplus population had an excess of time away from the factory; the beleaguered service-sector employee can’t escape into her house or otherwise be away from work, not because she is working, but because she is not. In other words, the low-level service sector worker cannot escape work, even if she isn’t actually working, and even if she won’t actually be called into work, because the boss might decide at the last second that her services are required (temp workers have had to put up with this for a while, of course; the disturbing part here is these are workers who have “regular” jobs).

[META] On how Livejournal is just not working for me now

In May and then again in September and finally in November, I blogged about Livejournal’s efforts to become something like Medium, a blogging platform for long-format journalism and writing.

This hasn’t happened. Livejournal has not evolved into a more flexible and suitable blogging platform. There has been, so far as I can tell, no renaissance. What I have noted is that twice in the past two weeks, my Livejournal has been suspended for day-long periods. After I reported this suspension the first time, I got my LJ cleared and unsuspended on the 29th of November, receiving this E-mail.

Thank you for your inquiry. Your journal was placed in readonly mode by an automatic anti-spam system that LiveJournal uses. However, this action was incorrect, caused by a malfunction in the script. I have now removed the readonly status and I'm sorry for any frustration this situation caused you.

Regards,
LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team

This morning, after my Livejournal went dark yesterday, I got this one at 9 o'clock in the morning my time.

Thank you for your inquiry. Your account was suspended when one of our anti-spam systems flagged it as a potential spam account. However, a review of your journal shows this was incorrect. I have now unsuspended your journal and adjusted a background flag for your account to prevent this from happening again. I apologize for any inconvenience this situation caused you.

Regards,
LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team

I could perhaps take these suspension to be a sign that I need to generate more original content. I may take this lesson in any event. I am also taking away from this a sense that Livejournal is just not working. Had things gone differently, it might have preempted Facebook. Instead, it's succumbing to DDoS attacks and misfiring bots.

I'm starting to wonder if maintaining a Livejournal separate from my Wordpress blog is worth it. Should I just avoid the hassle, provide a redirect to the places I actively maintain content, and just use this one for reading and commenting?

My readers, I leave it to you.