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I got to the point in The Omnivore’s Dilemma last night where Michael Pollan discusses Peter Singer’s arguments for vegetarianism. As Pollan portrays Singer’s argument, there is a frequent comparison of arguments for discrimination based on species and arguments for discrimination based on race. It’s speciesist not to give equal consideration to animals in humans. This is just like racism, we’re led to believe. Except that race is a cultural construct that has no basis in biology. Can the same be said of the species? Funny how Michael Pollan didn’t point that out. As it happens, I’m also reading a book right now called Understanding and Dismantling Racism. I could go on about this a bit more. For now, though, I’ll stop having pointed out the argument that Pollan should have made.

I tried my hand at sewing today for the first time.  If you’ve been keeping track, it’s been about 5 months since we bought the sewing machine and I figured it was past time for me to make good on my commitment to learn how to sew.

I’ve decided that my first project is going to be an apron.  It’s a good first project because it’s one in which function is valued over style.  I can imagine the ways that I would like to use an apron.  I don’t particularly feel the need to look good wearing it.  I got an apron pattern from the fabric store and it’s a pattern in the “For Dummies” series.  Yep, that’s me.

The first thing that I learned is that, before you dive into sewing with a pattern, you’ve got to cut the pattern out first.  It’s slow and not particularly stimulating work.  I also realized that I could use some tips for cutting paper in a straight line.  Susannah tells me this is something that I will get better at with practice.

When I have finished cutting out the pattern, I get the fabric that I’m going to use.  It’s a dark blue fabric that we picked up recently at the thrift store.  The “For Dummies” pattern provides helpful illustrations on how to best lay out the patterns on your fabric.  I have far more fabric than I need, so I need to cut it.  I measure out the length that I need and again I’m faced with the task of cutting in a straight line.  Here what I decide to do is fold the fabric at the length that I need it and cut along the fold.  By some miracle, I actually end up with a section of fabric that seems more or less rectangular.

Next, I lay out the pattern and pin it to the fabric.  I have a picture for this one.

If you know anything about sewing, you may have noticed the scissors at the top of the picture and thought to yourself that they weren’t going to cut it (the fabric that is.)  You would be right.  I realize fairly quickly after I begin cutting why a pair of tailor’s shears might be a good investment.  Still, I persevere and manage to cut the fabric into roughly the shape that I want.

At this point, I’ve used up all of the time I’ve allotted for sewing for the day.  You might have noticed that I haven’t sewed a single stitch.  Indeed, I’ve done nothing that involves a needle and thread, nor have I had a chance to use the sewing machine that inspired this hobby.  Well, you have to leave something for the sequel.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek recently, but I was disappointed earlier this week when I heard that Obama was killing the moon program.  Of course, along with that announcement came news that more money was going to be sent NASA’s way.  Their still going to work on really cool new technologies, including closed-loop life support among other things.  What’s the big deal with not going to the moon?  Certainly the moon is a considerably less interesting place to be than Earth.  There’s no particular reason that we need to go there.  Still, no one has walked on the moon in my lifetime.  And maybe the only reason we need to go is because it’s there.  I worry sometimes that the technical innovation of our goverment is largely focused on military applications.  On a recent edition of “The Geeks Guide to the Galaxy” podcast, P. W. Singer was interviewed about his book Wired for War, which discusses cool robots being built for war.  I want to believe that we can build cool technologies for things other than war… like say, exploration.

In any case, this announcement doesn’t really mean that no one is going to the moon in the near future.  It just means that no American is going to the moon in the near future.  The next person to set foot on the moon might well be Chinese.

I just wrote up some thoughts on a couple of the books I read recently and really enjoyed:

The City and the City by China Miéville

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The City and the City is perhaps my favorite Miéville novel to date. Miéville excels at world building and, frequently, his settings overshadow even the characters living in them and the stories themselves. The City and the City doesn’t break with that pattern. As one might guess from the title, the action of the story takes place in two cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same physical space. This works because the citizens of both cities fastidiously “unsee” or ignore the occupants of the other. Honestly, Miéville had me hooked with the concept. He stretches to absurdity a phenomenon that, I think, actually occurs in every city. In doing so, he begins to point out what each of us “unsees” or ignores in our own daily existences. After I had come to understand this about the novel, I was prepared to like it no matter what happened. Fortunately, everything else supports the novel’s central idea admirably.

Miéville departs from his genre a little bit here, giving us a noirish detective story. Miéville begins by trotting out all of the conventions of the detective genre. Inspector Borlu, a hard-boiled cop, must investigate the mysterious murder of a beautiful woman. Borlu is more of an archetype than a character but, as such, he feels familiar very quickly. The murder investigation leads Borlu and the reader into the inner workings of this double city which satisfied me, as a reader, since I wanted further investigation of the premise. As such, I didn’t leave the book wanting stronger characters or a better story but, instead, I felt that the characters and the story worked out the central themes of the novel quite well.

If there’s a flaw with this book, it’s that there’s not enough humor. The absurd premise would lend itself very well to humor and there are glimmers of it throughout the novel. Alas, Miéville doesn’t really do humor well. Still, the book was fabulous–one of the best that I read last year.

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The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sarah Vowell’s telling of the story of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans is entertaining and interesting. What I liked best about this book is the way she traces ideas that began with the Puritans through to the present day. For example, it’s very interesting to see how Ronald Reagan (not to mention John F. Kennedy) used John Winthrop’s image of “a city on a hill.” She does, occasionally, gloss over complex events in ways that aren’t totally satisfying. For example, in a single sentence, she traces a straight line from the Puritan idea of “Come Over and Help” to William McKinley to World Wars 1 and 2 to the Iraq war. Having read Barbara Tuchman’s essay “The End of a Dream” in The Proud Tower, I’m not convinced that the beginnings of American Imperialism under President McKinley was very closely related the Puritans’ notion that they should come to America and help the natives. Further, the United States’ reluctance to enter both World War I and World War II couldn’t seem more different than our involvement in Vietnam and Iraq.

There’s an amusing story early in the book when Vowell is asked by a British Writer who was the most hated British General from the Revolutionary War in the United States. The gag being, of course, that most Americans probably couldn’t name a British General from the Revolutionary War. She then goes on to explain how our generation learned history from TV sitcoms and describes how The Brady Bunch and Happy Days dealt with the topic of the Puritans. So now, many who once learned their history from TV sitcoms, will now learn it from Sarah Vowell. That will, of course, be an improvement, but it’s always best to keep a critical eye with books like this.

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I’ve been thinking about Avatar a lot since I first saw it a couple of weeks ago.  In particular, I’ve been wondering what the moral message might be of arguably the most popular film of the year.  There’s a lot that can be said about Avatar and I’m not going to go into everything in this post.  Specifically, I’m not going to address the problems regarding race and colonialism that others have expressed about the film.  I’m linking to another post here that does address those problems because I think they are important and deserve discussion.  I’m just not going to get into them here.  I’m more interested in looking at three moral choices that Jake Sully, as the hero, makes throughout the course of the film.  The first is his choice to provide military intelligence on the Na’vi.  The second is his choice to fight with the Na’vi against the humans.  His last choice is the one that he makes after the battle is finished.  It’s his most subtle and most important choice and, I believe, that he chooses poorly.

I really like the way that James Cameron sets up the first choice because it’s clear to the audience that Jake is making the choice even though, in the narrative, Jake is not fully aware of the choice he is making.  Jake provides military intelligence that results in the Na’vi home tree being destroyed, but it’s clear that he never intended for this to happen.  If he could have, he would have prevented it from happening.  It’s a good example of how you can do the wrong thing without being aware of it or even while trying to do the right thing.

The second choice that Jake makes, to fight with the Na’vi, is hardly a choice at all and serves mostly to bolster Jake’s status as the hero.  Should Jake turn his back on the people he has come to love and fight those who would destroy them for no other reasons but sadism and greed?  Should Jake give up his status as a bottom-of-the-totem-pole human to become the bad ass or all Na’vi bad asses?  As a moral choice it’s not far off of choosing between your girlfriend and a Miller Lite.  However, seeing Jake make the obvious right choice solidifies him as someone we can cheer for, so we’ll feel that much better when he triumphs.

Jake’s final choice is barely noticeable at the end of the film.  It’s the choice that he makes at the end of the movie when he decides to send the surviving humans back to Earth and be permanently uploaded into his Na’vi body.  The thing that is easy to miss here, amid the euphoria of victory, is that the situation between the Na’vi and the humans is worse at the end of the movie than it is at the beginning.  The battle was won by the Na’vi, but no peace was reached at the end of it.  It was only the first battle in what will surely be a long and bloody war.  What we see here is what is sometimes called “the myth of redemptive violence.”  The Na’vi come out on top because of their superior military might.  We cringe when Colonel Quaritch tells his men that they are going to “fight terror with terror,” but Jake says essentially the same thing to the Na’vi.  At the end of the film, the violence of the Na’vi has saved them from annihilation, to be sure, but their relationship with humans is just as broken as it ever was.  This is why Jake chooses poorly when he chooses to become one of the Na’vi.  The humans actually need Jake more than the Na’vi need him.  At the end of the film, Jake ought to turn down his shiny new Na’vi body and stay in his wheel chair.  He ought to go from being the bad ass of all bad asses back to being at the bottom of the totem pole.  What Jake needs to do most is convince his people that they need to make peace with the Na’vi and, if necessary, follow the Prime Directive and leave them and their planet alone.  It’s actually a fairly complex moral choice because, in this case, Jake has a lot to lose personally, but it’s the only way that healing can really begin between humans and Na’vi.

Well, you learn something new every day.  And this is what I learned today.  I originally posted this on the ifPeople blog.

Fixing cross-browser errors are always a pain for web developers.  Most of the time, this means fixing something that shows up incorrectly in Internet Explorer, but perfectly fine in Firefox.  I hit a bug today where the text for a link was disappearing randomly in Internet Explorer and then reappearing when you would mouse over it.  What made this issue truly frustrating was that using the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar proved completely useless.  The bug would go away as soon as I turned it on and then come back as soon as I turned it off.

The internet was able to save me, however, and I found this document on the IE7 disappearing content bug.  This bug is related to a mysterious Internet Explorer attribute know as “hasLayout.”  Evidently, content can disappear if it is inside a container for which a background is set but which does not “have layout.”  This seemed really weird to me at first, but the document explaining the bug also linked to this other document called: On Having Layout.  It turns out that my problem was very easy to fix and the documents linked here helped me find the solution.

Late yesterday evening, I passed the 50,000 word mark on my novel.  This is the second time I’ve completed NaNoWriMo.  Apparently, odd years are good for me and novel writing.  I’d like to thank all of those who filled out my survey and helped me to come up with the premise for this novel.  I was able to get 50,000 words out of this and, right now, that kind of amazes me.  I’m not sure that I remember everything that happened in the novel.

I think I came up with some good ideas that I will most likely work on again later.  There are many points in the novel where I contradicted myself just sentences apart.  There are other points where words were going on the page without the support of coherent thoughts behind him.  It was only as I was typing the final words that I finally figured out the arcs that I wanted for a couple of the major characters.  Still, there are lots of bits in there that I like.  There are characters here that I would like to spend more time with.  And, perhaps most importantly, I appear to have developed a habit of writing every day.

Some have asked me if they can read the novel when I’m done.  I have no problem with that, but don’t feel like you have to read it for my sake.  It is a really rough draft but, if you do read it, I promise to spell check it first.

So what comes next?  Next comes a few short stories and a rewrite of Windchaser that’s been needing to happen for two years now.  I’m going to try to use my momentum a bit but, if I manage 20,000 words in a month, I will be more than happy.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I Picked up The Affinity Bridge by George Mann because I was looking for a fun steampunk adventure, and that’s exactly what it is. The novel follows the adventures of Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes. The novel begins in medias res. Newbury is helping his friend, Sir Charles Bainbridge Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, investigate a series of murders that seem to have been committed by a ghostly policeman. He’s also getting adjusted to working with his new assistant, Hobbes, who just started work a few weeks earlier. At this point, the novel takes us through a checklist of steampunk themes. Zombies? Check. Airships? Check. Artificially intelligent clockwork automata? Check. It takes a while for the novel to settle down a bit and let us get to know the characters.

Newbury is James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, and Indiana Jones all rolled into one. By day, he works as an anthropologist in a museum but, in reality, he is a secret agent reporting directly to Queen Victoria herself. A leading expert on the occult, Newbury tends to get called in to investigate cases with paranormal elements. Mann seems a little less sure what to do with Hobbes. We’re told that she’s a woman with modern ideas, but she remains a bit of a blank and a satellite in Newbury’s universe for most of the novel. Mann does well though not to cast Hobbes as the damsel in distress and, while she may not be equal partner to Newbury, she can definitely hold her own.

It’s a relatively short novel and the action proceeds at a breakneck pace throughout. Without giving away any spoilers, I will say that the seemingly disparate threads of the novel come together in a satisfying way at the end. Interestingly, the novel’s best twist comes in the Epilogue and it sheds a different light on a lot of the events in the novel. It’s a teaser for more Newbury and Hobbes investigations that are coming soon.

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