October 24, 2002
The unction of wolf and salamander
The introduction to the Ace edition of Fritz Leiber's Swords Against Deviltry notes that
[t]his is Book One of the Saga of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the two greatest swordsmen ever to be in this or any other universe of fact or fiction, more skillful masters of the blade even than Cyrano de Bergerac, Scar Gordon, Conan, John Carter, D'Artagnan, Brandoch Daha, and Anra Devadoris.
Most of those names are familiar; we don't need to know the ex-classics to recognize that D'Artagnan was the fourth musketeer, that Cyrano had a big nose, or that John Carter knew some green men. Anra Devadoris is one of Leiber's own creations, a master swordsman defeated by the Mouser. Scar Gordon is from Robert Heinlein's Glory Road. But who on earth is Brandoch Daha?
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October 17, 2002
Napoleons of crime
There are fewer truly great criminal masterminds than there might be. The average bank robbery nets less than $5000, and the would-be Willie Sutton should remember that most bank robbers are caught. Kidnapping tends to turn into murder all too frequently, and, like blackmail, depends on the victim playing along; when dealing with a hard nut like John Paul Getty, who negotiated his grandson's ransom down $15 million, this is a tenuous proposition at best. In a world where corporate malfesance can lead to billion-dollar frauds, what can the everyday street criminal do to measure up? Even the crimes of Adam Worth, the criminal mastermind upon whom Professor Moriarty was reportedly based, seem picayune in comparison. Where are the criminals who think big? Oscar Hartzell (thanks to Defective Yeti for bringing ths book to my attention), the swindler who bilked Depression-era Americans out of millions by claiming that he was going to win an immense proportion of England's national wealth in a lawsuit stemming from the disputed estate of Sir Francis Drake. When Hartzell was dying in prison, he apparently believed that his lies were true, that the Drake fortune was real, and that he was the rightful ruler of much of the free world. What if some Napoleon of Crime tried to take over the world or, if conquering the world was too difficult, a nation?
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October 15, 2002
Beyond petroleum
The company once known as British Petroleum now wishes to be called BP; in a rebranding effort that's been a long time coming (at a temp job in 2000, Redfox helped put together an identity guideline kit for their helios logo). They've been running some commercials touting themselves as "Beyond Petroleum", and Slate's Daniel Gross is unimpressed. He feels their move "inspires no small amount of cognitive dissonance"; the subhead of his critique claims their ad campaign "makes no sense." Gross is almost certainly correct that cynical, possibly hypocritical, self-promotion is behind the rebranding effort; that is admittedly quite often the basis of ad campaigns. John Browne, BP's chairman, comes off as one smart cookie; if a veneer of social responsibility provides benefits to BP, Browne seems like he'll pick up on that fact. Further, while I have some issues with it as a design movement, I find something very reassuring in science fiction writer's Bruce Sterling's Viridian capitalist thought experiments. America hasn't shown any desire for a Manhattan Project-style undertaking to ween ourselves off fossil fuels, so I'm all in favor of Sterling's notion of market-driven environmentalism: driving environmental policy through the creation of gadgetry that consumers want, thanks to pricing, novel features, or desperate hipness (or potentially all three -- link via Boing Boing) which also advances the state of the art in environmentally efficient disposable consumer culture. Sterling loves BP; a major player in the world petroleum market actively trying to make a buck on renewable resources is a good thing, assuming they're better at staying in business than some folks. Gross is right that solar power isn't going to be more than a blip on BP's earnings for years, if not decades, but I don't think they're in it for their health. I think BP thinks it can grow to be a leader in the solar and hydrogen (via its immense natural gas extraction capabilities) markets of the future, but if they can't, they can at least get their money's worth in good publicity.
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October 04, 2002
Light and heat
What were the most beautiful experiments in physics (link via Making Light, among others)? The concept of beauty (or "elegance", as mathematicians tend to put it) in science is not any better defined than it is in art or literature; it's a subjective quality that's been the subject of arguments for milennia and probably since humanity first put burnt stick to cave wall or arranged some shells. Physicist Chad Orzel mused about the list and wondered why the Michelson-Morley experiment (which disproved the existance of luminous aether which had long been assumed to exist) didn't make the cut. His guess is that experimental complexity (or its close analog, the degree to which a physics professor can demonstrate the experiment during a lecture) had something to do with it. But the Michelson-Morley experiment seems elegant to me; its results were surprising and important, it was conceptually (if not in practice) a simple experiment, and it involved proving that something didn't exist.
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