hradzka has the best words on the day.

Does there exist a fanvid of Miss Piggy singing "It's Raining Frogs! Hallelujah!" ?

During a boss fight drwex warned of an attack with a "vicious frontal cone."

celticdragonfly: "That'd be a great band name."

fordprfct: "A Madonna cover band."

I understand you're upset when people's words don't match their actions. But "hippocracy" means "government by horses" which is a completely different problem.

Order of the Stick is not a very serious comic. It's done in stick figure art, it's a parody of D&D, and it goes for low comedy. It's very funny, I love it. But at the same time Rich can introduce a minor character, have most appearances be pure comic relief, and still totally yank my heartstrings with said character.

He's good.

Some time back archangelbeth mentioned the myth of Persephone in a post.

I haven't set foot in the company cafeteria since.

Clay Shirky discusses how much brain-time has been used up watching television and how some of it is now being turned to creative work.

Hat tip to nancylebov

Joss is asking fans to join the strike.

Oh, boy. The writers' strike is one of the many, many things I've classed as "not important/immediate enough to need to make a decision on." Some of the discussion has been interesting, but I soaked that up in a couch-potatoey way instead of thinking that I might actually get, you know, involved.

But Joss has figured out how to trigger actions from his fans. He's talking about strike activities away from Hollywood, in the cities where we live. Like little cons with signs, bringing out the girls in pretty costumes and boys arguing obscure details of the shows. How can I resist?

Well, first I have to decide if I actually support the strike. And after thinking it over I do. But not for the reasons Joss is asking me to. See, Joss wants to fix the system. He's spent his life in the Hollywood system, he's done great work within it, and he's invested a lot in learning how to work it. All he wants is to tweak it so the writers get a better share.

Now me . . . I don't like the Hollywood system. It's Procrustes. Stories get chopped or stretched to fit the arbitrary time slots they've been assigned. More often they're discarded unseen because they might not pull in enough advertiser-manipulatable eyeballs to justify the huge overhead of the studios.

But it doesn't have to be that way. New companies, owned by the creators, can form and send their art directly to the people who want it. Internet torrents, direct to DVD sales, Itunes, and there's probably more ways to deliver it that haven't even been invented yet. All that's stopping them is the trampling feet of the Hollywood dinosaur herd. Which, right now, makes them awfully damn stoppable.

The strike can change that. If the dinosaurs starve long enough they'll die, and the mammals can grow and spread. So hell, yes, I support the writers' strike. I support keeping the strike going until every writer on the line no longer has a job to go back to. I support keeping the strike going until writers leave it by the half-dozen to form their own companies. I support keeping the strike going until it's a tourist attraction, the last stop at Universal Studios, which has become a pure theme park.

And to have something to do while walking the picket line, I offer a song to sing. This is a filk of a Leslie Fish song. To no one's surprise it needed very little change to become a strike song.

Bring the Studios Down by Karl and Laura Gallagher
A filk of Bring It Down by Leslie Fish

We don't like the shows you've made. Bring it down, bring it down.
We'd take D T V in trade. Bring it down, bring it down.
Let the shows go on wi-fi,
And give up the smallest slice of pie
Just so long as the studios die! Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.

We don't like the work we do. Bring it down, bring it down.
Nothing useful, safe, or true. Bring it down, bring it down.
Faceless bureaucrats in the hills
Drive us down at the pace that kills.
They get dividends, we get bills! Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.

We don't like stale TV. Bring it down, bring it down.
Let us work creatively. Bring it down, bring it down.
Writer’s dream has fallen far.
A million rules have dimmed its star.
We don't like the way we are! Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.

Ads and ratings hem us in. Bring it down, bring it down.
Let us write our best again. Bring it down, bring it down.
Slowly growing deepset rage
Breaks the bars of a paper cage,
Put pure passion on the page! Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.

No reform will save the day. Bring it down, bring it down.
Sweep this system all away. Bring it down, bring it down.
Mindless pap and cliches grating
Grow the worse, with longer waiting.
To save our writing, smash the ratings! Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.
Bring it down, bring it down.

The French Revolution. Overthrow of the wealthy nobility. Forced egalitarianism. Addressing each other as "citizen." So what is a modern collector offered to remember it by?

( Symbol of the Revolution )

A discussion on Transterrestrial Musings wandered on the subject of people who've had successful careers without ever getting degrees. Someone suggested forming an association to explore how common that is. Jay Manifold commented:

the anthropology of such a group would presumably be a hilarious inversion of the usual credentialism, where the college dropouts are ranked above the graduates, the people who never went to college at all are higher up, the ones with GEDs are still higher, and so on until some guy suckled by wolves is running the thing.

The original discussion, on recent graduates surprised to find out that NGOs promoting political activism in the third world don't offer lots of well-paying jobs, is also worth reading.

The "who is better, Pirate or Ninja?" argument will probably continue for all time.

But Robot vs. Pirate may be settled very soon.

Kent Sepkowitz is a doctor I like. He's actually willing to admit more people have been saved from disease by ditchdiggers than by doctors.. What he's worried about is deaths from bacterial contamination of food, and I agree that trying to make the food supply utterly safe is impractical. Well, at least impractical for most people. The "pick two" for food seems to be "cheap, safe, tasty" and there's not many people willing to subsist totally on MREs or blow half their income on food. So Sepkowitz advocates dosing people with just enough pathogens to train their immune systems to deal with the inevitable contamination they'll have to deal with.

Rather than frantically throwing money at new ways to eradicate the pathogens that reside in shit, we should fund the boring scientists who focus on untangling the intricacies of the gut's immune system. Labs, answer this: How much shit can we safely eat and, as importantly, how much must we eat to remain healthy?

What I love about this is that a doctor is looking at the vaccination question from the other side, trying to establish minimum and maximum total amounts for the immune system insults. It's a wonderful change from the folks who insist that vaccines are good, therefore more vaccines are better. A good next step would be performing their studies on statistically valid sample sizes. After that they can analyze the distribution of the reactions to see what fraction of the population would handle this badly and how to recognize them, instead of calculating a mean optimum dose and prescribing it for everyone.

We had readings of Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech and the full Declaration, then watched "1776". Maggie's starting to follow the story more. In a few years we may have her doing one of the readings.

Walter Jon William's The Rift made me curious about the Mound Builders, a North American Indian civilization around 1100 AD. So when I saw 1491 by Charles Mann I snapped it up. It covers all the pre-Columbian societies of the Americas. It's full of fascinating stuff. The overwhelming impact of European diseases made it extremely difficult to estimate the original population size. The Medieval Climate Optimum was trashing Andean cities while improving European crops. And Squanto's story is much more of an adventure than the Pilgrims'.

Unfortunately, mixed in with all these wonderful new facts were occasional references to stuff I already knew. Lots of those references were wrong.

When describing the Spanish conquest of the Incas Mann mentioned that conquistador cavalry could have been beaten by Inca spearmen. Totally true. I've got enough books describing how pre-gunpowder infantry can defeat cavalry to fill a shelf of their own. But Mann's example to prove this is the Battle of Marathon. No way. Not only was the Persian army only 2-5% cavalry but it was the absence of the cavalry that triggered the Athenian attack.

Mann also talked up the fiber technology of the Incas by pointing out that some conquistadors laid aside their steel breastplates for native cloth armor. He implies the cloth would protect better against enemy attacks. Hardly. After winning against a force dozens of times their size without losing a single man the Spaniards likely thought the Incan chipped-stone weapons were less of a danger than heatstroke, or at least a mild enough danger to let comfort overrule security.

Another error was the description of carbon-14 dating. That was very odd considering the previous paragraph described it correctly. A typo? Or cutting and pasting an explanation without understanding it? At the very least it's evidence of carelessness.

Then there was the discussion of the Norte Chico civilization. Mann presented it as a rival of Sumer, making the Andes a co-equal cradle of civilization with Mesopotamia. But in 3000 BC Sumer had cities up to 24,000 people in size, while Caral had only 3000. It's not a counterpart of Sumer but of Catal Huyuk, which had 5-10,000 people in 7500 BC.

Mann also claimed the Norte Chico cities were unfortified. Let's look at one of their structures:

If you're leading a band of spearmen on a raid on there, which option would you pick?
1. Lead them 2 by 2 up the ramp while the defenders line the edge to shoot at you.
2. Climb up the side while the defenders drop rocks on you.
3. Say "heck with it" and go raid a little peasant village.

In fairness to Mann, "unfortified" could be the mistaken assessment of the archaeologists rather than the author. I've seen the same description of Catal Huyuk, which would be murder on a storming party.

What makes the errors bother me even more is the author's statement in the afterword about fixing errors from the first edition. If this stuff got through how bad was it before? It's normal for an author to inflate the importance of his topic but inflating the facts is bad. I don't mind Mann being a booster, and this book fills a major gap. The question is whether he goes too far for his facts to be trusted.

He certainly goes pretty far in his opinions. When discussing Aztec human sacrifice he equates it to the executions of criminals in Europe. Personally I find a huge moral difference between harshly punishing convicted criminals and hunting down innocents for the sole purpose of killing them horribly. Mann mourns the loss of the Aztec philosophers. These guys wrote about their existential angst over the impending end of the world and consequent nothingness. After all, someday they'd run out of neighbors to sacrifice and the gods would pull the plug. Somehow we've managed to produce goth and emo poets without those guys to build on, so I don't feel the loss. Crushing the Aztecs was the best thing the conquistadors ever did.

Mann wraps up the book by claiming the American tradition of liberty is derived from the Iroquois. In his telling every European colonist seems to be a devoted adherent of the feudal order. The Indians they meet did as they wished, led by chiefs who carefully avoided pissing off enough of the tribe to be overthrown. This was not new to Europe--it's how the Germanic tribes who overthrew the Roman Empire lived, and how the Celts conquered by the Romans lived.

In all these cases--Iroquois, German, and Celt--the tradition of liberty only existed in a low-population density society. It didn't survive as the tribe grew larger. From the Mississippians to Charlemagne free and easy chieftainships grew into monarchies and theocracies.

The United States managed to create sustainable personal liberty by drawing on the republican traditions of Athens, Roman, and Renaissance Italy. Mann tries to hand-wave that away. I have to wonder how much other hand-waving he's doing to inflate the historical importance of the Native American societies.

I want to like this book. It's full of fascinating information about people only mentioned in passing in my other books. But I can't trust it. So it can't be part of the home-schooling library.

EDIT: See comments for the author's response.

Quiet family day together. Late in the afternoon we sat down Maggie and Jamie and gave them a speech about soldiers, how they keep us safe and free, and why we need to remember and thank them. I read out the Gettysburg Address--that'll be Maggie's duty when she's old enough--and then we watched The Devil's Brigade. That or Gettysburg are part of our tradition for the holiday.

I described James Lileks in the meme last week. If you want to give him a try, his description of a family trip to Walt Disney world is a great place to start.

Uncrate is offering bookcase doors to create hidden rooms. This is cool. Not that I want to hide any rooms in our house. I just think we're going to need places to put more bookcases.

Just saw 300 tonight. I came away with a vision of how the first showing must've gone over in Hell:

Shade of Spartan NCO-type: "That was frigging ridiculous! Where was the rest of the army? The Persians looked nothing like that, we all had decent breastplates, and we never broke formation like that!"

Shade of Leonidas: "Shut up and get me more popcorn! That was frigging fantastic! When's the next showing? I gotta see this again!"

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Did you wear green on St. Patrick's Day?