Bob Cringely says at the end of his 2003 predictions that, to him, the rise of weblogs in inexplicable. Why are weblogs so great?

Dammit, I almost forgot!

Happy Birthday, Sean!

Happy New Year!

And for your perusal, I give you a list of the top 100 Sci-Fi books of all time, from Phobos Entertainment. Not being a big SF fan, I've only read seven of these books (yeah, yeah, heresy and all that) and none of the top 25, so my argumentative skills will be of little use here. But I'm willing to bet that all of the rest of you have read many more than I.

Also a list of the top 50 SF films (I've seen a scant 9. Is Rocky Horror really considered a SF film?)

(original top books link via Brilliant Corners)

This is a mosaic image of the center of our galaxy, with the great black hole at the center lying within the white spot at the middle. The center of our galaxy is one of the top ten space mysteries that are still unresolved.

Meanwhile, the year 2003 is likely to be notable in space exploration for China's first foray into manned spaceflight and for the launch of several Martian probes, including this new roving vehicle.

Not much happening here these days, huh? I know that I have fallen quite a bit behind on Brothers K, but I do plan to reattack it once the New Year has come and gone.

I really don't want to know what the advertising tagline for this is going to be.

In the chapter on Smerdyakov, Dostoevsky likens this character to a painting called "The Contemplator" by Ivan Kramsky (according to my translation). From Dostoevsky's description of this painting, I've found that it is "Meditator" by Ivan Kramskoi, and it can be viewed here. (I'd have posted it here directly, but it's a pretty big image.)

Appropo of Nothing....

I recently downloaded Mozilla and this site looks horrible. John Hardy, is this what you've been using all along and that's why it looks so dark and nasty to you? The comments look fine. I'll figure out what the story is tomorrow.

Via Newsweek: Trent Lott and the GOP's racial troubles.

It was just a quick stop, at a store on a campaign trip through the Northeast more than a dozen years ago. Trent Lott, then a Mississippi congressman about to make his move for the Senate, was visiting a state for a Republican candidate. When Lott walked in, he asked: “Why aren’t there any black people here?” a source who has spent time with him in unguarded moments tells NEWSWEEK. Nervously, someone explained that this was not the most diverse of regions. “Not even behind the counter?” Lott said. Warming to his punch line, Lott added: “We’d be happy to send you up some if you need any”—and then chuckled.

Is anyone else bothered by the current Republican meme of "I'm shocked ! Shocked! to find that gambling is going on here!"?

One of the most interesting things about 'Brothers K' to me is D's expressed intention to write a subsequent book about Alyosha which this book only prepares us for. Here's what I found on Google:

[Dostoyevsky] planned to write a sequel to 'The Brothers Karamazov' in which, twenty years later, his hero Alyosha would leave his monastery cell and become a revolutionary and die for his idealism. He "would have searched for the truth and in his quest would naturally have become a revolutionary," Dostoyevsky said. See Grossmann, p. 587 Joyce Carol Oates in note #8 in an article on 'The Dispossessed'

It is said that Alyosha was to have become involved with revolutionists and to have committed a political crime, - it will be recalled that during Dostoevsky's last years the terrorists were increasingly active and, indeed, his own death antedated by one month the assassination of the czar. The possibilities of such a novel as this projected sequel fairly dazzle the imagination. But there is no need to speak of might-have-beens. The work as it stands is sufficient to engage profoundly the mind and the emotions of the reader, and to leave him shaken by a sense of the large potentialities of the soul. Avrahm Yarmolinsky on the site Jaq recommended (end of the article)

In a russian book on Dostoevsky(printed circa 1960), which I have at home, it states that notes made by Dosty on the ideas that the sequel would include were kept by his wife after Fyodor's death. It was mentioned that the book was to take place in 30 years after the events of the first book and concentrate on the life of the now middle aged Alyosha. He was to change dramatically in those years after a long love with Lise, which was to be full of pain and unhappiness. Alyosha was to leave the church and fully re-enter the society. from this thread which mentions the title as being 'Life of a Great Sinner'

I believe the work you are thinking of is 'Life of a Great Sinner', in it's entirety it was planned to emcompass Alyosha's leaving the monastary, his later debauchery, and finally his conversion back to faith. I believe I read about this in Joseph Frank's brilliant biography...

In 1868, Leo Tolstoy had finished his epic novel, War and Peace. Readers and critics loved the book. Dostoevsky, inspired and perhaps also envious, began to consider writing an epic of his own. He wanted to write a grand book, even longer than Tolstoy's, that would give him room to express his philosophies regarding the spiritual dilemmas of the modern Russian man. This epic - first titled Atheism and later The Great Sinner - was to be "the story of a Russian skeptic who, after many years of moving back and forth among all sorts of theologies and popular sects, in the end finds the Russian Orthodox religion and the Russian soul" (quoted from Grossman's biography). The Great Sinner was originally designed to contain five volumes, connected by one hero. The five books would eventually be distilled down to one: Brothers Karamazov. again, from the Dartmouth site. (This article goes on to chronicle how D's plan's changed, inspired by an ideological murder, from which he wrote 'Demons'.

I am very sorry that we didn't get the chance to read what might have come.

Russian Icon: the Virgin Odigitria.

In keeping with The Brothers K, I did a little searching for Russian icons, since I noticed that Dostoevsky tells us several times about the elder Zosima bowing to the icon, and the like. I have to confess a bit of ignorance here: is an Icon a religious picture, held in Orthodox tradition to be spiritually significant?

I found a good site on Brothers K here.

My take on Brothers K: I give it a six. It's got a good beat, and I can dance to it!

But seriously, I'm enjoying the book quite a bit, although it's proving to be very slow going for me. My approach to Brothers K is rather like the tortoise's approach to beating the hare. (When my mother spied my copy of the book on my desk, she snorted and said, "You're going to be reading that thing forever!") I do have to keep reminding myself that it takes place in Tsarist Russia, but it's interesting to see some derisive remarks made about "atheistic socialists" in a book written years before the Marxist Revolution.

Thus far in the book (I'm just starting Book Three, "The Sensualists"), a major theme seems to be crime and what sort of state is best equipped to deal with criminals. We are told that an ecclesiastical state, in which the Church has become the State, is best, because in such a state men would know that by committing crimes they are not merely committing crimes against their fellow men or against their State, but against Christ himself; thus, excommunication becomes the most horrible of punishments. This seems to ignore problems of doctrinal differences that inevitably arise whenever two Christians inhabit a room, much less millions of them inhabiting a nation, and unless I missed it, nothing is said of how such a state would react to unbelievers, if they even admit that unbelief is even possible. So, what do we think of Dostoevsky's ecclesiastical state?

And for an interesting "compare-and-contrast" exercise, check out Den Beste's take on the foundations of law, posted just this week.

[I'm assuming that we should keep front-page posts about Brothers K to a single topic, and if we have something else we want to bring up, we should do so in a new post? Otherwise, the comment sections might get hard to follow.]

Glossy and Greedy: Real Page-Turners

Peter Carlson of the Washington Post writes "a magazine review about two magazine stories about magazines. If that's too ridiculously meta for you, quit reading now. My only defense is that these stories help explain why so many of America's big corporate publishers put out such lame mags."

Magazines do seem to have become ridiculously lame over the past few years. Do you all subscibe to any? Is there a remedy? Anyone else remember the foul-mouthed hard-ass Rosie O'Donnell that used to host a stand up comedy show?

For reference, here is a listing of the magazines that AOL-Time-Warner owns under Time, Inc. (scroll down).

I came late to the tax discussion below, but added a comment anyway.

Brothers K

So how is everyone doing on the book? Enjoying? Flustered? Not reading it? Where is everyone? Are we all at a point where we can begin discussion?

< /survey>

I'm finished with the first two books, and hope to be done with Book 3 by Friday-ish. I didn't read a single page over Thanksgiving though, so that kind of impeded my progress. What about you three?

steven den beste is the captain of the starship uss clueless
steven den beste is on again about the landmine treaty
steven den beste is catching up
steven den beste is a mind reader and faster typer
steven den beste is correct about the "netscape engineers are weenies" phrase
steven den beste is back
steven den beste is right when he says that yasser arafat is now in a no win situation and arafat will be lucky if he survives to see 2003
steven den beste is once again writing some of the best stuff about the world in general
steven den beste is suspicious of people who post under pseudonyms
steven den beste is in top form with his essay on the tactics of delay over an iraqi invasion
steven den beste is a man of few words today
steven den beste is quite wrong to describe american liberal democracy as the greatest rival to what he calls "transnational progressivism"
steven den beste is back and has a lot to say about the kyoto protocols
steven den beste is actually a real name? i could look
steven den beste is often political
steven den beste is agreeing with me
steven den beste is not the only blogger unafraid to kick the apple herd of sacred cows
steven den beste is spot on in this analysis of why we were attacked
steven den beste is a prolific
steven den beste is going to "channel the shade of diogenes"
steven den beste is very seldom "clueless"
steven den beste is one of the internet's most popular "bloggers"
steven den beste is in favor of war
steven den beste is actually discussing something else
steven den beste is shutting down his forum
steven den beste is incorrigibly brilliant as always
steven den beste is wonderful
steven den beste is just plain wrong
steven den beste is a retired software engineer who now spends his time writing for his web site
steven den beste is arguing that the culture produces murderous thugs
steven den beste is prepared to argue in favor of string bikini as feminist icon
steven den beste is back from holiday
steven den beste is linked everywhere and people always take his pronouncements on the middle east as wise and informed
steven den beste is one of the brightest bloggers out there
steven den beste is linked everywhere
steven den beste is gone
steven den beste is back from vacation
steven den beste is not any more thrilled with this than i am
steven den beste is an infinitely more intelligent guy than pejman "i am manufactured consent" yousefdeh
steven den beste is one of the few
steven den beste is a software engineer
steven den beste is out of the board business
steven den beste is gloating because the un weapons inspectors are adhering to kofi annan's
steven den beste is one of the internet’s most popular “bloggers”
steven den beste is on a roll
steven den beste is one of those who find it lacking

So how about you?

Update: In the name of Radical Honesty, I thought I'd better own up to something. I originally posted this and then immediately thought it was a little too frivolous. So I deleted it again. The problem was that I didn't realise that I had already published it and, by the time I did, people had already left comments about it.

So I've gone and posted it again and here are your original comments.

Sorry for the balls up.

Radical Honesty is a kind of communication that is direct, complete, open and expressive. Radical Honesty means you tell the people in your life what you've done or plan to do, what you think, and what you feel. It's the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy.

I came across this book at Borders and it really interested me.

Be sure to read the FAQ for some concrete examples.

What would happen if we told the whole truth all the time?

Caption this photo!



Source: Chicago Tribune, November 14, 2002

It used to be "pistols at dawn", but now we've got "tax plans at dawn".

Two blogs I follow have posted their thoughts on how to fix the US tax system in the last couple of days. First up is William Burton's tax plan, from a liberal perspective. He wants to keep the estate tax firmly in place, close up the corporate loopholes, restore the progressive brackets to something more like they used to be, and stop differentiating between payroll income and capital-gains income. Then we have Jane Galt's tax plan, from the libertarian perspective (at least, that's what I think her perspective is -- I read her blog sporadically, but her alias suggests a libertarian view). She wants to eliminate the corporate income tax, eliminate the estate tax, and end all deductions. The two agree that capital gains should not be treated any differently from other forms of income, they both agree that their respective views have zero chance of ever being enacted in the current political climate, and both concede that to tax Warren Buffett at twenty-five percent would not have nearly the same effect on his standard-of-living as the same percentage taxation would on, say, a family of three with a total income of $30,000 a year. (There are other points the authors discuss, but they are on tax details that I don't know anything about. I also don't get the impression, though I may be wrong, that the authors are aware of each others' proposals.)

So, what constitutes fairness in a tax system? And to what degree is "fairness" even desirable in a tax system, in the first place?