Links for 2010-01-18

  • "The traditional method of sifting slush is in-house - a job usually handed out to a junior because it's time consuming and occasionally injurious to mental well being. Why? Because anyone with a word processor can submit a novel and while many aspiring authors are professional, know how to follow guidelines and are eager to learn, many are just eager.

    And submit as soon as the last word hits the page, sometimes sooner. They're full of hope and convinced they've just penned the bestest of bestsellers.

    Cue Slushpile 2.0 - why not outsource the sifting process to the authors? Let them read and vote on each other's work?

    It sounds good, doesn't it? Del Rey tried it a decade ago with their online workshop. Harper Collins is trying it now with their Authonomy site - slush authors vote for the samples they like and the top five samples each month are read by Harper Collins editors."

  • "Yes, there's some empirical truth to the concept, that how we commonly speak about political and social problems leads to the privileging of certain kinds of actions. The problem with how political elites use Lakoff, however, is that they assume that the association between a frame and the real embedded knowledge of people about their world is arbitrary and infinitely mobile, that all you have to do is find the right key to unlock hearts and minds. It's a way of thinking that had a much more sophisticated double or echo in Stuart Hall's meditations about Gramscian thought back in the Thatcher era. Hall was upbraiding his colleagues on the left for thinking that their major challenge was to mobilize the appropriate social formations, that Thatcher's public rhetoric had no relationship to her political power. Instead, he argued, they needed to take that rhetoric very seriously, because it was an important source of her political success."
  • "It seems like every time I discuss taxation, some libertarian will waltz in and say "it's my money and I don't see why the government should be able to take it."

    So let's run through why, no, it isn't your money. We'll start with two numbers. The income per capita for the US in 2005 was $43,740. The income per capita for Bangladesh was $470.

    Now I want you to ask yourself the following question: are Bengalis genetically inferior to Americans? Since not too many FDLers think white sheets look great at a lynching, I'll assume everyone aswered no.

    Right then, being American is worth $43,270 more than being Bengali and it's not due to Americans being superior human beings. If it isn't because Americans are superior, then what is it?"

  • "I frankly don't know why so many otherwise reasonable people wish to, and often attempt--over and over again--to write novels. It's a little bemusing when there are other formats: short story, novella, screenplay, collaboration, poetry, not to mention the field of nonfiction which can be an artistic endeavor, as Wallace Stegner and Timothy Egan and so many others have shown. If art is what you want. And many people are attempting to write highly commercial novels, so that can't be the point, either."
  • "So we have dinner, take down a couple of plates, wash them, dry them, put them back. Have soup more rarely, take down a couple of bowls--big? small?--put them back.

    And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That's right, the same ones."

  • "In experiments, Dr. Youngblood and his colleagues attached the coatings chemically to the surface of glass. But he is now working on polymer additives for liquids that can be poured into a spray bottle, for example, and then used to clean mirrors and even eyeglasses or goggles.

    Scientists call the coatings self-cleaning because, once they are applied to a surface, they do much of the work of scrubbing away oily residue -- like that from a greasy fingerprint. "The oil beads up and then the water moves under the oil, lifting it up so it floats away," said Kirsten Genson, a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Youngblood's group."

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