Matt Meshulam's Brain Dump

As I mentioned previously, I’m reading Rama II by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee. I enjoyed its prequel, Rendezvous With Rama, which is probably the most hardcore science fiction I’ve read. There’s pretty much no character development, just page after glorious page of describing a mysterious giant alien spacecraft that found its way into our solar system. Which explains why I was a bit shocked when Rama II turned out to be much more of a space opera, complete with love triangles, secret poisonings, and robots that quote Shakespeare. But I hung in there, savoring the bits of true sci-fi that were few and far between.

But now it’s gone too far. I can no longer take this novel seriously. Rama II has jumped the shark. I know what you’re thinking, “Matt, you’re just being dramatic.” But I’m not.

Background information: Rama is a massive space vessel from an alien civilization, a cylinder kilometers in each dimension.

The scene in question: Two members of the human crew sent to explore it get stuck for days on an island in a sea inside Rama. They finally formulate a plan to escape the island by harnessing birdlike aliens that they discover. Sirs Clarke, Lee, care to take it from here?

Nicole sat in her harness, her hands holding on to two of the three lines, her feet dangling below her about eight meters from the tops of the waves.

The middle of the sea was quite calm. About halfway across Nicole saw two great, dark figures swimming beneath her, parallel to her course. She was certain they were shark biots. [emphasis added]

They literally jumped the sharks! And they were robotic sharks, no less! When a series so blatantly jumps the shark, I just lose all respect for it. I certainly will not be reading The Garden of Rama or Rama Revealed.

A few months ago I was lucky enough to stumble upon Washington University’s engineering course catalogs from as far back as 1980. Needless to say, there were tons of priceless photos of people using computers. I compiled the best of these photos and they can all be found at this link. My hope is that captioned photos like the one above will become as popular as LOLcats. Post your own in the comments! You can use the LOLbuilder provided by ICanHazCheezburger.com if you lack photoshop skillz. Remember, when LOLputers become the next big thing, you heard it here first.

After helping Leah work on her site last night, I decided that I’ve sort of neglected the very important design aspect of my own weblog. I decided I needed a catchy tagline, and I’m pretty happy with the resulting header.

According to the Guardian, every major economic recession in England has occurred around the time of an AC/DC album release. The correlation is staggering:

1973: AC/DC form in Sydney, Australia.
Economy: Start of the oil crisis, which saw the price quadruple

1980: AC/DC release breakthrough album Back In Black
Economy: Inflation in UK reaches 20% and unemployment nears 2 million

1990: AC/DC score comeback with The Razor’s Edge
Economy: Recession in UK imminent

2008: AC/DC top UK album charts
Economy: Biggest world recession in decades looms

This is the most important discovery in correlation science since it was found that pirates prevent global warming:

I’ve been reading Arthur Clarke’s Rama II, the sequel to the awesomely dry Rendezvous With Rama. I just remembered a passage near the beginning that had some notable parallels to our current economic downturn. Quoting:

Dire warnings of impending economic doom started being heard above the euphoric shouts of the millions who had recently vaulted into the middle and upper classes. Suggestions to balance budgets and limit credit at all levels of the economy were ignored. Instead, creative effort was expended to come up with one way after another of putting more spending power in the hands of a populace that had forgotten how to say wait, much less no, to itself.

…

On May 1, 2134, three of the largest international banks announced that they were insolvent because of bad loans. Within two days a panic had spread around the world.

The full excerpt can be read on Google Books.

Of course, there are likely hundreds of published fiction stories where a global economic collapse is triggered by a prolonged period of loose credit. I was just interested how the quoted passage describes so closely what happened recently. Also interestingly, the narrative then diverges to tell how the collapse perpetuated itself because the computers running the stock markets could not keep up with the volume of transactions pouring in from people dumping their stocks. Arthur C. Clarke may have been the first to propose the notion of geosynchronous orbits, but I think he also slightly miscalculates the computing power that will be available over a century from now.

I suppose, in science fiction, you can’t hit a home run every time.

I’m a big fan of the TED conference and am grateful that they post their videos online. I just watched the TED talk of John Hodgeman, expert on everything. It’s very funny.

TED Talk: John Hodgeman’s brief digression

So this is what I’m supposed to do when I can’t think of something to write, right? Just link to a video? Okay, cool.

On Saturday, Broken Social Scene came to the Gargoyle for our second show of the semester. If you’ve never been to the Gargoyle, just picture a basement cafeteria with big speakers and filled with sweaty indie kids. We are proud to be the leading shithole concert venue in the St. Louis metro area. Which explains why I was so amused to come across this posting on Craigslist:

To the woman wildly swinging her purse at Broken Social Scene – m4w – 26 (The Gargoyle)

You snaked your way through the ass-to-ankles crowd so that you could stand directly next to my friends and me. You were alone, a fact about which you must have been quite bitter and decided to take out on us. You clung to a 100% Naugahyde purse. It was the biggest fucking purse I’ve ever seen. And I know what you had in there: baby skulls.

And it gets better from there. I nominated it for Best-of-Craigslist, and I hope you’ll do the same.

Hat tip to St. Louis music blog A to Z

I’ve had this hobby recently of visiting the Drudge Report and Huffington Post, just to see how the two beacons of partisan media are spinning the day’s news. Let’s observe:

The significance of Drudge’s cover story is mostly in the fact that they are reporting with a tone like this. My first thought was, “Stage 5: acceptance.” There had been suspicion during the primaries that Matt Drudge had a soft spot for Obama, but I didn’t really see that carry through to the general campaign.  Maybe those speculations had been correct, or maybe Drudge–like so many other conservative and right-wing analysts–have simply started considering an Obama presidency as a likely possibility.  Given the polls at the moment (I do love my polls) they probably should be rolling this idea around in their minds sooner rather than later. Remember the anger and bitterness after 2000? Think of that, but if the angry people have more guns. I want them to be as stable as possible before the 4th. (Also of note: the red mini-headline above my screenshot is about an AP poll where McCain and Obama are neck-and-neck nationally. So maybe there’s still a bit of cognitive dissonance going on)

As for Huffington Post, apparently they have grown tired of reporting all the good news about Barack Obama and have decided to exercise their luxury of latching onto a trivial bit of information that supposedly makes the Republicans look bad. There is a bit of a double-standard with the way men and women are expected to dress, and this just seems like that fact taken to the extreme. Besides, I don’t think the the McCain/Palin campaign managers really wanted her campaigining around in her traditional attire of moose hide coats with baby seal eye buttons.

A few days ago, I discovered a great new way to talk to my friends called “text-messaging.” No sooner do I thumb out my first “text,” or “txt” for short, when I hear of an even more hep way to communicate. And so I find myself here.

More accurately, I’ve decided to start a blog, as you can probably tell. Not sure what will be contained within, but I imagine it to be a general sort of brain dump, as the title indicates. And so, the great experiment begins!