The Invisible Library

After traveling the world, fighting monsters, saving damsels, drinking rough men under the table, defying the very Gods themselves (and gaining a Masters Degree in Library Science in the process), I have returned home at last.

I’ll probably write more about Grad School when I have sufficient distance between it and me but for now, I’ll say simply that I learned much, forgot some and have become a better and more knowledgeable person because of the experience. And I’m never leaving my wife for this long, again.

I’m on the road to Georgia. Be back Thursday.

Is Wikipedia the real Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Paul Boutin at Slate seems to think so:

The parallels between The Hitchhiker’s Guide (as found in Adams’ original BBC radio series and novels) and Wikipedia are so striking, it’s a wonder that the author’s rabid fans don’t think he invented time travel. Since its editor was perennially out to lunch, the Guide was amended “by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.” This anonymous group effort ends up outselling Encyclopedia Galactica even though “it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.”

It’s a humorous idea, I admit. It’s also wildly inacurate. I’ve just recently finished a comprehensive case study of Wikipedia and while it’s not perfect and does have some holes, I can’t really get behind a criticism made by an author who doesn’t even know how big Wikipedia really is. Boutin says, “Wikipedia, with more than 1 million entries in at least 10 languages, is the mother of all wikis…” That sounds sort of impressive. However, Wikipedia actually contains 1.5 million articles (over 540,000 in English) and is available in 195 languages, 92 of which are actively edited. I know these well guarded secrets because I spent two minutes looking for them. But Boutin’s criticism doesn’t end with just inaccurate facts that even hasty research could correct. He follows these up with gross generalizations of Wikipedia’s collaborators:

Don’t expect Wikipedia to change your life, though, unless you’ve secretly longed to be an encyclopedia editor. Just because you give everyone read and write permissions doesn’t mean everyone will use them. Wiki lovers argue that they are collaborative, self-correcting, living documents that evolve to hold the sum of all the knowledge of their users. But, like blogging, editing the Net’s encyclopedia appeals to a small, enthusiastic demographic.

There are over 6000 active Wikipedians, all over the world. They are computer programmers, yes. Nerds, of course. But they are also librarians, painters, writers, and teachers. And while 6000 is small compared to the the population of the Internet, they far outnumber the dozen or so specialists who compile the Encyclopedia Britanica. But these are professional nerds, rather than merely enthusiastic amateurs, so we must respect their slow, and highly specialized knowledge base, which does not begin to take in the breadth or depth of human knowledge. Otherwise, we all might contribute to our own information gathering and learn how to do research ourselves. And where would that get us?

As Steve Eley said on a recent thread over at Making light: “If the Internet had cars and motorcycles a la Snow Crash, mine might have a bumper sticker which reads “IT TAKES EXACTLY AS LONG TO EDIT WIKIPEDIA AS IT DOES TO COMPLAIN ABOUT IT ELSEWHERE.”

Or you could get paid by Microsoft to piss on it because it isn’t up to your rigourously inaccurate standards. Your choice.

The end of Grad School is in sight. My work is done and now, all I have to do is pack up for the drive home to Savannah. When I came to Baltimore, I had three suitcases, a small filing cabinet and a box of books. I’m going home with at least three times that many books and who knows what else. Packing should be fun.

So, posting may be intermittent but when is it not? Once I’m home and settled a bit, I should have the first chapter of my novel ready to post, plus one or two changes around the blog. And oh yeah, the job search continues… Ain’t being a grown up fun?

I’m running a bit behind on my goal of reading 50 books in a year. It’s already May and I’m just now hitting #10. (#9 was The Princess Bride, which I wrote about here).

#10 is Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a whole novel strait through in a day. Hell, it’s been a long time since I could devote so much time for such a hedonistic task. But I’m glad I managed to spare the hours because it was well worth it.

I’ll have it known now, I officially want to live in the Bitchun Society. No work, except the kind that I find gratifying (writing, both fiction and this Blog), a cure for death and the ability to be transhuman and travel the stars… that’s the sort of thing I’ve always wanted to do. I think I’ve got enough Whuffie saved up to at least afford a slimmer waistline. Combined with my wife’s, we could spend the next thousand years, travelling the world and out er space, and just living. Maybe we’d even get down to Disney World and check out the Haunted Mansion.

It’s fascinating how caught up you can get in the intrigues and politics surrounding ad-hoc groups of devoted Disneyphiles who live in the Magic Kingdom and lie, kill and scheme to see who can make the better amusement park ride. Mr. Doctorow, of Boing Boing fame, has written a fine little meditation on the nature of identity, culture and the role of fun in the grand scheme of things. It’s Speculative Fiction at its best, taking big ideas and playing them out in inventive, what-if scenarios that poke fun at our human weaknesses while also showing us what a future might be like without war, famine, death or scarcity, where the only pursuits worth chasing are the ones that improve everyone else’s lot in life, thereby improving your own.

It also answers a nagging question I’ve had concerning Utopian future worlds: If nothing is scarce, and there’s no need for money, what do they use as an economic system? Star Trek is probably the worst offender in this realm, skipping over just how an economy based solely on credit would work. What sort of incentives would one have for putting forth the effort and labor required to build a faster than light spaceship? Who decides who gets to decide these things? Cory Doctorow offers us an idea of how a post-scarcity economy would work: on reputation. It’s simplicity is really the genius part of it. You win Whuffie by doing things others like: writing symphonies, making art, or maintaining the happiest Place on Earth. You loos it by pissing off people and since everyone is networked and can ping your Whuffie rating, everyone knows whether you’re a schmuck or a superstar. No more politicians or laws or coercion to do distasteful things for reasons no one understands. You do things that are nice for your friends and don’t hurt others. A society based solely on the Golden Rule. If only…

Frank Perretti has a new book about that most evil and satanic of monsters, Sasquatch:

“My goal is to make them think about evolution,” he said. “Evolution as a philosophy makes monsters out of all us. It removes all that makes us human - morals, virtue, love, honor, self-sacrifice. All those become illusory. I’m trying to raise some questions. Who is the real monster here?

That would be you, Frank. You and all the other ant-evolutionist writers out there who think that, “…morals, virtue, love, honor, self-sacrifice” and all the rest of our human traits are only valid if we all believe they were handed down to us, chiseled in stone from Mount Sinai.

It’s not that these traits are illusory. It’s that they are social conventions that have evolved as a means of expressing our innate emotional and intelectual traits. That’s the problem Mr. Peretti and all the other anti-evolution “thinkers” don’t want to address, that our most human traits evolve and change as our society changes. But, instead of writing a speculative novel addressing the fear of evolution, we get a potboiler about a satanic monster who evolved instead of falling face first out of the Garden of Eden. Does he get converted and saved at the end dor do the righteous and peace loving followers of Christ lynch his monkey ass? I’ll never know, because frankly, I don’t care. Christian fiction is anti-literature, as far as I’m concerned. Wooden characters, slaphappy dialogue and poorly constructed plots that, instead of exploring the uncertainty of modern life, try to explain away the complexity and shoehorn the wide open world into a 3000 year old book of shepherd poetry. It’s reductionist to the point of absurdity. (But oh so fun to pick apart. Fred over at Slacktivist has been doing a bang up job disecting Left Behind).

I’d much rather read a story about an evangelical who starts to evolve into something more than human and has to grasp the ineffable and frightening new world he is privy too, with the creeping fear that perhaps an ancient book of fairy tales doesn’t explain everything there is to know about the world we live in.

(Via)

Greetings to all my Communist Comrades!

Secret handshakes to my Anarchist buddies!

For all you Socialist Workers out there, keep up the good work!

I hope all you Witches had a lovely Walpurgis Night and many happy turns around the May Pole! Think of me whilst you frolic.

It’s a joy to see hundreds of little Catholic School Children twirling around a fertility symbol, all in honor of the Virgin. Wink.

Happy Birthday Ma Sanchez!