Links for 2010-01-23

"So, I asked for recommendations for neglected books and authors and had an overwhelming response. I'm going to make the results into a useful reading list, in alphabetical order, with links, and usefully divided. The world is a very big place with a lot of stuff in it, and a lot of books are published and pretty much vanish. They say word-of-mouth is the best way to find books, and these are all books with someone to advocate for them. "

"This is what the ADF is for -- both in the sense that this is what the group favors and advocates and in the sense that this is the group's purpose. As long as Christians -- real, true Christians -- constitute the majority, the religious right has no interest in the competing claims of minority rights. It's more or less the pre-Vatican II, pre-John Courtney Murray position of the Roman Catholic Church, which advocated state-sponsored religion in Catholic-majority countries and secular pluralism in nations where Catholics were in the minority.

In the particular case in California, the ADF is vehemently arguing that the Constitution doesn't mind that the heterosexual majority has voted to restrict the rights of the non-heterosexual minority. Contrary to what Mr. Nimocks might like to think, that is not "the democratic process." The technical term for a majority voting to give itself rights while denying those same rights to the minority is "mob rule." Which is different."

"I have long observed that the common American speculative fiction writer (Scriptor americanus s.f.) goes through a number of stages during larval development, prior to emerging from their paper chrysalis as a full-fledged author. Drawing largely from my own experiences, as well as keen observation of the flocks and herds of writers who routinely migrate through Nuevo Rancho Lake, I hereby propose an initial atlas of these stages, with modest comments."

"I've seen many sf/f stories that take non-human behavior and essentially say "these creatures act differently because their physiology or their dimension or their physics work in a way unlike ours." I'd like to argue that this is rarely necessary.

I don't mean that alien physiology shouldn't be taken into account when you're figuring out how an alien group acts. Of course metabolism (as in my earlier post) and body structure will have an influence over the kinds of infrastructure built by this group of people. Of course different behaviors might grow out of that.

The problem, for me, arises when culture gets omitted. A direct link is drawn between the physiology and the behavior. "Well, members of this group must behave this way because otherwise they'll burn up." It creates a rule that isn't really a rule, but a law of nature - and leaves out the people's ability to create rules for themselves. "

"Laserfest is a yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the laser, which was first demonstrated in 1960, and is a collaboration between the American Physical Society, the Optical Society, SPIE and IEEE Photonics Society. From DVD players to eye surgery, the laser is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century--one that has revolutionized the way we live."

"It is difficult to simulate quantum systems on classical computers, while quantum computers have been proved to be able to efficiently perform such kinds of simulations. We report an NMR implementation simulating the hydrogen molecule (H2) in a minimal basis to obtain its ground-state energy. Using an iterative NMR interferometer to measure the phase shift, we achieve a 45-bit estimation of the energy value. The efficiency of the adiabatic state preparation is also experimentally tested with various configurations of the same molecule."

Insert your own joke about obese American schoolchildren.