Stromata Blog

Reading Experiences

Jamming these two items into a single post is artificial, but I couldn’t resist juxtaposing electronic publishing with Sanskrit.

1. Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay (“The Ancient and the Ultimate”, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1973) demonstrating that the ideal futuristic book would be a codex printed on paper, i. e., what we have right now. He was right, for reasons that needn’t be reviewed in detail here. For both practical and aesthetic reasons, the book, whether handwritten or printed, has flourished with no important format change for 2,000 years since superseding the scroll.

Nowadays one can, of course, read documents on a computer screen. I spend a lot of time doing that perforce at the office, though I often cheat and make printouts, particularly if I want to formulate comments or expect to page back and forth between sections. For more important reading, the computer is not a mixed, but an incomplete blessing. I can download thousands of public domain books free from Project Gutenberg or conveniently packaged for a nominal fee from B&R Samizdat Express. Electronic versions of volumes in copyright are available from Fictionwise and many other on-line retailers. Thus my computer can hold as large a library as my bookcases. Unfortunately, there are many times and places where one can’t get use it. I should not care to boot up even a small laptop on the El.

The obvious solution is a small footprint, lightweight device stripped of all functions beyond reading e-books. My PalmPilot sort of fits that niche, except that it is a little too small: The screen displays only a handful of words, and my aging eyes grow weary of squinting at the minuscule type. From time to time, handier alternatives came to the periphery of my attention, but only a couple of weeks ago did I purchase one, an eBookwise-1150, offered by an eponymous Fictionwise subsidiary for $129.95.

The eBw-1150 has its kludgey aspects, most notably its elderly software (written for Windows 98 and not greatly updated since). It is not, I’m confident, what I’ll be using five years from now. Indeed, superior products already on the market may have failed to call my attention to themselves. Too bad for them; Emerson was quite wrong about better mousetraps. Nonetheless, despite its occasional flaws, I’ve swiftly grown fond of this gadget. It’s no harder to read while swaying on the El than a trade paperback and supports enough formats (not including PDF, alas) that I can figure out ways to get any electronically formatted text into its memory. All of the books that I’ve purchased from Fictionwise are readily transferable. Others can be downloaded using either a free service that I wasn’t able to make work properly or a $14.95 software add-on.

At the moment, I have in memory the last two issues each of Analog and Asimov’s, an issue of F&SF, seven Hugo Award short fiction nominees that I haven’t yet read and need to finish before the July 8th voting deadline, the first volume of A. H. Bullen’s collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, James Branch Cabell’s Gallantry, and three books that come with the device (A Princess of Mars, The Time Machine and “The Fall of the House of Usher”). That pretty much fills up the available 8MB of memory. More can be added with Smart Media cards (of which I have a collection, since my digital camera uses them), but that isn’t really necessary; it’s easy enough to swap between e-book and computer.

There are plenty of improvements that I’d like to see. It would be nice, for instance, to be able to display pages from two different parts of a volume at the same time (main text and footnotes or pertinent illustrations), and I’m starting to think that the 8 to 10 hour battery life is woefully insufficient. Oh, well, this particular technological application is in its primitive stages. Twenty years from now, I may think that Dr. Asimov was as wrong-headed about the future of the book as he was about daylight saving time (4/7/02).

2. Not modern or high-tech at all, but fascinating and decades overdue is a project, inspired, I suppose, by India’s increasing visibility on the world scene, called the Clay Sanskrit Library. Its aim is to publish new translations of Sanskrit classics in Loeb-type editions, with English and (transliterated) Sanskrit on facing pages. A hundred volumes are projected, including complete modern versions of the Mahabhárata and Ramáyana as well as other famous (Shakúntala and The Birth of Kumára) and lesser known (The Emperor of the Sorcerors and What Ten Young Men Did) classics of Indian literature.

Since Sanskrit was not inscribed on tablets, I presume that “Clay” is the surname of a benefactor who otherwise modestly chooses not to be acknowledged. He may be the “C” in the “JJC Foundation” that is listed as co-publisher with the New York University Press. The only such organization that I can find is the Joliet Junior College Foundation, doubtless a worthy enterprise but probably not the one involved here.

Having procured a couple of volumes, I have dipped into What Ten Young Men Did (Daśakumāracarita by Dandin), a seventh century novel recounting the wanderings of an exiled prince and nine loyal followers in tales that combine fantasy, eroticism, political satire and coming-of-age angst. It’s very different from what Europeans were writing in the same time frame. If we must be multicultural, works like this are a better starting point than anti-colonialist screeds.

Further reading: Bjørn Stærk, “In Reluctant Defense of E-Books”

A New Frontier in Spam

The SF site BowieTreks has discovered a new and apparently burgeoning form of spam.

I just checked the most recent list of Recently Updated Blogs on Typepad, and found eight of the ten entries to be what I think of as bogus blogs, such as [link to bogus blog omitted]. These blogs consist of a list of links which lead to a list of ads for the topic in the blog title. All eight of these blogs were created today, none have any About information, so there is no way to tell who is creating them. They all look exactly alike, as if they were created by a software program from a form. These bogus blogs are proliferating like rabbits and clogging the Updated blogs list. They use bandwidth and other resources that could be used for legitimate blogs, and use our time when we click on them, thinking they might be a legitimate, interesting blog. Does this bother anyone else???

*sigh* Typepad has begun automating defenses against comment spam; about two-thirds of the on-line casino promotions that try to sneak into my comments sections now don’t make it through the gateway, saving me the trouble of deleting them manually. It was inevitable, I suppose, that the spammers would just invent a new tactic. */sigh*

The WordPerfect Insurgency

Any proposition that Randy Barnett, Glenn Reynolds, Res Ipsa Loquitur and I all agree on must be true. As the Knoxville Blogfather says, “I'll give up WordPerfect when they pry it from my cold, dead hard drive.”

Counselor Barnett expatiates on the evils of that other word processing program:

Word reformats paragraphs and everything else as it wishes and it is sometimes next to impossible to trick it into keeping it to the format you prefer. I assume that someone somewhere knows how to make all this work, but I have been word processing since I paid $4500 for an NBI standalone word processor in 1981, and word processing programs are simply not supposed to be that hard to figure out and control.

In contrast, WordPerfect is an amazingly elegant and transparent way to write.

That it is, particularly because it’s possible to look at the formatting codes and change them as easily as one rewrites texts. The latest version of Word, for the first time ever, lets you view the codes but makes it no simpler than before to alter them (that is, not simple at all, unless you think exactly like Bill Gates).

Mr. Barnett does concede that Word is superior at tracking changes, a useful feature when several writers work on the same document. I rarely use it and recall that it used to be a WordPerfect weakness, but it seems to work just fine in WordPerfect 12. In fact, it tops Word by allowing selective incorporation of a reviewer’s suggestions. In Word, they are part of the document and can only be undone by deleting them and typing the original words back in.

Being owned by a Canadian company, WordPerfect has, I suppose, no chance of overtaking a Microsoft product, no matter how great it qualitative superiority. Besides, every secretary administrative assistant in the universe has been trained on Word, and trying to switch them over would cause a huge temporary drop in paperwork throughput, perhaps leading to – hmm, maybe that’s another reason to raise high the WordPerfect banner.

Pelosi Who?

Little Green Footballs and Rightmarch.com are indignant at what looks like an open-and-shut case of political bias at Google Ads. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has an ad on Google that reads –

The Truth about Tom DeLay
Learn about DeLay’s many scandals
and help us clean up the House!

RightMarch, a conservative group that I had never heard of before (and hence do not necessarily endorse), wanted to give the other side, so it submitted –

The Truth about Nancy Pelosi
Learn about Pelosi’s many scandals
and help us clean up the House!

Google refused to run that text, on the ground that, “Google policy does not permit ad text that advocates against an individual, group or organization.”

It certainly looks like a left-leaning double standard is at work here, but let’s remember not to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by cluelessness. The policy cited by Google presumably doesn’t apply to political ads. If it did, the company would be sacrificing a lot of potential revenue. That is why the anti-DeLay ad was accepted. It seems likely to me that the Google clerk who received RightMarch’s ad simply had no idea that Nancy Pelosi is a political figure. He probably reckoned that this was a personal vendetta; e. g., Nancy’s ex-boyfriend, furious at her infidelities and slovenly housekeeping, wanted to denounce her to the world. The name “Pelosi” simply rang no bells.

As, in a rational world, it shouldn’t.

Not So Good in Redmond

Now and then my faith in Microsoft, never robust, takes a downward swing. Seldom, though, have I been so disheartened as I am by a series of e-mails republished by Bjørn Stærk (currently on semi-hiatus from his blog and definitely missed). Bjørn works as a computer programmer in Norway. The story begins with one of those incidents that never ought to occur:

A few days ago I tried to download a file from microsoft.com. Nothing important, just a code example that might be useful to a possibility I was exploring at work. So when my company’s firewall refused to let me download the file because it contained a virus, I wasn’t horribly disappointed. But, being a good internet citizen, I decided to let Microsoft know that they were offering an infected file for download. This is something they want to know about, I thought. And how hard can it be? Just send off an e-mail to the abuse department, and some smart person will forward it the right way.

Well, he found out how hard it could be, receiving a succession of increasingly clue-free responses, each from a different exotically named denizen of the Microsoft Help Desk. There is no sign that anybody in Redmond or its overseas adjuncts picked up on the fact that, according to reliable anti-virus software, Microsoft was distributing a virus. If the alert was accurate, that is a word-shakingly serious problem. If it wasn’t, it is still a problem, because it’s unlikely that Bjørn’s employer is the only one whose firewall will give the same response.

Presumably the problem, whichever it is, is soluble – unless no one at Microsoft is equipped to recognize its existence.

A Scanner in Your Pocket

New Scientist reports that Japanese researchers have developed a “scanner built into a piece of flexible plastic little bigger than a credit card”. Place it on a surface, connect to a power source and memory storage unit – the prototype uses a cell phone for those functions – and it captures the image beneath. Should the surface be irregular, just bend the scanner to fit.

The lightweight device, unveiled last week at an electronics conference in San Francisco, is the latest development in the field of flexible organic electronics, which exploits the electronic properties of conducting plastics. . . .

The new device, developed in Japan by electrical engineer Takao Someya and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, comprises a polymer matrix in which thousands of light-sensitive plastic photodiodes have been deposited 700 micrometres apart beneath a grid of plastic transistors. . . .

The plastic is transparent, so ambient light can pass through it to reach the object being scanned. Because the transistors sit on top of the diodes, shielding them from ambient light, only the light that reflects off bright areas strikes the photodiodes, which generate a current proportional to the greyscale light intensity.

The resulting charges are stored in the array of transistors and are then read out to construct an image.

The inventor thinks that the gadget is about three years away from commercial production but that it will cost practically nothing – ten dollars, he guesses, for a 2¾-inch square. What would be most useful for research is a larger size, big enough to cover half a page or so of a book but able to be folded up and carried in one’s pocket. Maybe that will cost fifty or sixty bucks.

I don’t do a lot of note taking in obscure archives but will happily buy one just to facilitate cataloguing my books and games. The tedium of typing thousands of titles keeps me from beginning the task. If I could walk about my apartment scanning them instead, the project would still be daunting, but it becomes almost imaginable.

Odds’n’Ends

■ If people read the transcript of Secretary Rumsfeld’s now famous Q&A about armored Humvees rather than the “Press Pile-On”, the incident would be utterly noncontroversial. New vehicles, fully protected, and upgrade kits for old ones are being produced and moved to the theater as rapidly as possible, and the Secretary clearly regards the matter as urgent.

I wonder what would have happened if, back before 9/11, the Bush Administration had submitted a Defense budget asking that all new Humvees be armored and the existing pool retrofitted. Wouldn’t there have been a chorus of complaint about the unwarranted expense? Critics would have pointed out, quite accurately, that there are many Humvee missions that don’t risk attacks by anti-armor ordnance and where additional weight would be a hindrance to maneuverability. Moreover, in the latest big U.S. deployment, in the Balkans, land mines were far more numerous than hostile RPG’s. Shouldn’t greater attention be paid to that threat, which requires quite different countermeasures? We would have wound up with (i) unarmored vehicles, just as happened in real life, or (ii) a smaller number of expensive pseudo-AFV’s designed to counter the menace of land mines, trivial in Iraq. Getting exactly what turned out to be needed would have been miraculous.

The moral is that half of all military spending is wasted. Unfortunately, until war breaks out, we don’t know which half.

■ I don’t wish to make light of the appalling news that laboratory tests have confirmed suspicions that Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned during the campaign, but there is one reassuring sidelight.

“There is no doubt about the fact that Mr. Yushchenko’s disease has been caused by a case of poisoning by dioxin,” said Dr. Michael Zimpfer, director of Vienna’s private Rudolfinerhaus clinic.

Zimpfer said Yushchenko’s blood and tissue registered concentrations of dioxin – one of the most toxic chemicals – that were 1,000 times above normal levels. [emphasis added].

For years and years plantiffs’ lawyers have been telling juries that dioxin is such a danger to human health that modest concentrations demand exemplary damages against polluters. Yet Mr. Yushchenko survived a larger dose than chemical processes ever emit. The facial disfigurement that he suffered is horrifying but not life threatening.

Perhaps the would-be assassins had read scare tracts about dioxin and concluded that it was as lethal as a gunshot, in which case the candidate may owe his life to environmentalist propaganda.

■ As a public service announcement (I own no stock in the company) for men who fear that “Laptop Computers May Affect Male Fertility”, there is a preventive: the Lapinator. No, it doesn’t make your lap cybernetic. It’s a thin cushion that conducts almost no heat, on which the laptop can safely rest. It seems to have been put onto the market only a week or two before the scare stories began to appear, so the inventors are either very fortunate or blessed with a devilishly clever PR guy. The introductory price is $24.95 (plus shipping, and sales tax for Illinois residents).

Wi-Fi Socialism: Spreading the Word

The idea that there is something amiss with government subsidies for wireless Internet access is catching on. I was pleased – almost as much as I was surprised – to learn from my most devoted reader that my imprecation against “Wi-Fi Socialism” was quoted favorably in today’s Rocky Mountain News.

Wi-Fi Socialism

Today’s on-line Wall Street Journal poll asks, “Should cities offer wireless Internet access to their residents, or leave it to companies?” The question keys off an article [link for on-line subscribers only] that illustrates how far the mentalité of the Journal’s news pages is from its editorial stance. Under the headline “Telecom Giants Oppose Cities on Web Access”, we read:

Dozens of cities and towns across the country are rushing to provide low- or no-cost wireless Internet access to their residents, but the large phone and cable companies, fearful of losing a lucrative market, are fighting back by pushing states to pass legislation that could make it illegal for municipalities to offer the service.

Over the past few months, several big cities – including Philadelphia and San Francisco – have announced plans to cover every square block with wireless Internet access via the popular technology known as Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity. Cities say these plans will spur economic development and help bridge the digital divide, making Web access nearly ubiquitous.

But that's bad news for the large Bell telephone companies and cable operators, who are looking to their digital-subscriber-line (DSL) and cable-modem businesses for growth. . . .

Philadelphia announced during the summer that it would hook up the entire city with Wi-Fi. Its current Wi-Fi service is free, but it hasn’t decided whether that would continue with wider deployment; it may charge a small fee. “There are some very specific goals that the city has that are not met by the private sector: affordable, universal access and the digital divide,” says Dianah Neff, the city’s chief information officer. She says that less than 60% of the city's neighborhoods have broadband access.

However, last week, after intensive lobbying by Verizon Communications Inc., the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a bill with a deeply buried provision that would make it illegal for any “political subdivision” to provide to the public “for any compensation any telecommunications services, including advanced and broadband services within the service territory of a local exchange telecommunications company operating under a network-modernization plan.” Verizon is the local exchange telecommunications company for most of Pennsylvania, and it is planning to modernize the region using high-speed fiber-optic cable. The bill has 10 days for the governor to sign it or veto it.

The Pennsylvania bill follows similar legislative efforts earlier this year by telephone companies in Utah, Louisiana and Florida to prevent municipalities from offering telecommunications services, which could include fiber and Wi-Fi.

Critics denounce this legislative tactic, arguing that the U.S. lags behind other countries in broadband Internet access because the phone and cable companies have been slow to roll out the service in some areas.

“We should be encouraging our municipalities to take a major role in broadband, the way other countries are doing,” says James Baller, an attorney in Washington, D.C., who represents local governments on telecommunications issues.

The article continues in this vein, freely quoting supporters of municipal wi-fi and never suggesting any reason, other than a desire to protect corporate profits, why anyone could oppose so clearly benign a measure. So far as my own self-interest is concerned, I ought to applaud Mr. Baller. If Chicago had free or cheap wireless access everywhere, I could save the $40 a month that I pay Earthlink. What that means, though, is that the city’s taxpayers, almost all of whom have lower incomes than mine, would be subsidizing my Web browsing. The majority of Chicagoans don’t even own computers and have little practical use for the Internet. At this point in time, wi-fi is a luxury good, and paying for it with tax dollars is a bald exercise in redistribution from the poor to the rich.

The day may come when the World Wide Web really is part and parcel of every American’s daily life, like the automobile and the telephone. If so, it will be only after a vast amount of progress beyond the current Stanley Steamer level of broadband technology, progress that won’t occur if wi-fi socialism acts as a prophylactic against profit. If cities had preempted telephone service c. 1900, we would still be dialing numbers on rotary phones, talking to operators and paying a day’s wages to call the next state. I won’t speculate on what city-subsidized cars would be like. If the “digital divide” is truly a great social ill, freezing the status quo is the prescription for making it eternal.

Liberals’ enthusiasm for tax-funded Internet access is just another symptom of the Left’s penchant for good intentions over good sense – and also of its indulgence in fashionable superstitions. Whether or not Al Gore invented it, the Internet is a communications medium, not a panacea for the ills of mankind. Philadelphia will be better off if it spends that $10 million slated for its wi-fi project on police, firemen and garbage collectors while Verizon takes care of getting on-line.

The Perils of Quoting in French

I’ve noticed that spammers once in a while pick up a word or two from my Web site to insert into their subject lines:“Kerry Islamofascism, buy viagra on-line”, etc. My latest experience hints at further spambot evolution, though it conceivably may be a coincidence.

A few days ago, I animadverted to a silly left-wing claim that the U.S. government made up the moniker “al-Qa’eda” in 2001. As evidence to the contrary, I quoted a book written in 1999, which stated that Osama bin Laden had founded the an organization of that name in 1988. To add weight to that refutation, I quoted my source in its original language, French. (Luckily, the couple of sentences were simple enough that I could translate them.) That was the first French to appear on Stromata Blog beyond the occasional brief phrase.

Today, I received an e-mail of a familiar type, but the subject line was not “BUSINESS PARTNER NEEDED” or “IN STRICTEST CONFIDENCE”, but “A Votre Attention”, and it began –

Cher Ami,

Recevez mes salutations. Mon nom est Abdulati al-Abaidi. Je suis depuis fort longtemps le le secrétaire personnel et confidentiel de l'ingénieur Saif Al Islam Muammar al Gaddafi le fils ainé du colonel Muammar Gaddafi de la Libye. Les informations que je m'en vais vous divulguer sont des secrets d'Etats, et devrais par conséquent être gardés dans le plus grand secret et la plus haute confidentialité. Etant donné mes compétences, j'étais important dans l'industrie secrète de pétrole. Secrète parcequ'avant que la décision et l'annonce de l'arret de nos programmes nucléaires ne soit prise en décembre dernier 2003 par notre leader absolu, la vente et l'achat du pétrole Libyen était sous embargo.

Continuing with the expected promise of 25 percent of $30,000,000. (Haven’t these guys ever heard of euros, or Swiss francs?)

I must watch my tongue more carefully.

The Ultimate Who’s Who

The Oxford University Press rounded off the last millennium by producing, at a cost of £22½ million (four-fifths from private sources), a new, expanded edition of that quintessential reference work, The Dictionary of National Biography. The old DNB, which began publication in 1885 and continued to be supplemented through 1996, aimed to summarize concisely the life of every dead Englishman worth remembering. In the words of the first editor, Sir Leslie Stephen,

It is not upon the lives of the great men that the value of the book really depends. It is the second-rate people – the people whose lives have to be reconstructed from obituary notices or references in memoirs or collections of letters. . . .

The 63 original DNB volumes (published 1885-1900) contained 29,120 biographies. Nearly ten thousand more appeared in supplements. The Oxford edition is vaster yet: lives of 49,295 men and 5,627 women, born in or significantly connected with the British Isles (not all of them real – there are entries for Piltdown Man, King Arthur and Martin Marprelate), recounted in 62½ million words by some 10,000 authors. The price is correspondingly impressive: £7,500, though there is a £1,000 discount through the end of November. In the U.S. Amazon charges only $11,000, which at current exchange rates makes the volumes cheaper for Americans than for Brits (and buyers get free shipping, too!).

Perhaps Bill Gates and Teresa Heinz Kerry will purchase sets to grace their studies, but the rest of us can hope to see the new DNB only in libraries, and not in many of those. That is, that is all that we would be able to hope for, were it not for the wonders of the Internet. Quite astonishingly, the complete text (with the original DNB thrown in) has been put on-line and is accessible individual subscribers for $295 a year (£195 plus VAT in the U.K., so Americans are favored here, too). That is an absurdly cheap rental compared to the cost of acquisition. What’s more, the computer version is easier to use than the printed one. It is possible, for example, to cull all the biographies of figures who were active during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603), a total of 4,425 individuals, who can be arranged alphabetically or in order of birth or death. That is, incidentally, a formidable assemblage of about five million words on Elizabethan history. To give an idea of the breadth of coverage, here is one page of results picked from the middle of the period:

Elphinstone, James, first Lord Balmerino (1557-1612), administrator and judge
Airay, Henry (1558x60-1616), college head
Armin, Robert (1563-1615), actor and comic writer
Bland, Tobias (c.1563-1605), Church of England clergyman
Caesar [formerly Adelmare], Sir Julius (bap. 1558, d. 1636), civil lawyer
Warner, William (1558/9-1609), poet and lawyer
Walpole, Henry [St Henry Walpole] (bap. 1558, d. 1595), Jesuit and martyr
Spenser, John (1558/9-1614), college head
Singer, John (fl. 1583-1603), actor
Shaw, John (1558/9-1625), Church of England clergyman and religious writer
Radcliffe, Egremont (d. 1578), rebel and alleged assassin
Mosse, Miles (1558-1615), Church of England clergyman
Meredith, Richard (1558/9-1621), dean of Wells
Lodge, Thomas (1558-1625), author and physician
Lindsay, Alexander, first Lord Spynie (c.1563-1607), landowner and courtier
Kyd, Thomas (bap. 1558, d. 1594), playwright and translator
Kemp, William (fl. 1585-1602), actor
Hunnis, William (d. 1597), musician and conspirator
Hume, David, of Godscroft (1558-1629x31), political theorist and poet
Hay, Francis, ninth earl of Erroll (bap. 1564, d. 1631), rebel

Other selections are possible, e. g.,, everyone connected with “Armed forces or intelligence services” (5,076 people) or all Orthodox Christians (49) or Welsh-language poets (59).

In those tens of thousands of names, Veals are not, I fear, prominent, though two of my known ancestors, Colonel Thomas Veal (“(c.1591-1663/4), royalist army officer and conspirator”) and Dame Katherine Berkeley (“(d. 1385), benefactor”), are listed.

All in all, if there were nothing else to say in favor of computers, this project would vindicate their existence.