Read It, Late September 2016
Well, the second half of August went fast. And so did most of September. This one has been sitting on my computer, unfinished, for some time. I’ll try to be more regular, although I am now spending my free time packing my books for a move, which is taking up a great deal of time. The library takes up a lot of boxes, and a lot of storage space! On the positive side, I am attempting to bring the database of every book, video, and compact disc my family owns completely up to date.
On to the books.
In reviewing Authority a short while ago, I wrote:
I have started reading the third part with low expectations. I haven’t finished it yet. Already, it is more engaging than the second one. But I think my final verdict will likely be that readers should read the first book, which I reviewed highly in May, and stop there.
And in short, this is exactly what happened. I finished Acceptance this morning and found it unsatisfying. Like Authority, it suffers in comparison to the first book, Annihilation. It sets up the sensation that there will be revelations and climaxes. We learn a little more and speculate a little more about what is going on in Area X, and there are some interesting and disturbing scenes and moments, but overall the latter two books in the trilogy both lack the sense of sustained build-up, forward movement, and storytelling that keep me happily turning pages.
So I’m going to do what I said I would do, keeping the first volume in my library and giving away the other two, and accept that VanderMeer tried, but somehow wasn’t able to make this work really work as a trilogy; it was a great novel. I think the setting might still be a fertile setting for other stories, but the stories VanderMeer actually managed to tell in Authority and Acceptance just didn’t live up to the uncanny weirdness, beauty, and intensity he achieved in the first volume. Which is a shame, but not exactly a startling revelation, since many, many trilogies follow in those same well-worn tracks.
The Stainless Steel Rat Books
Some time ago I read Harry Harrison’s original novel The Stainless Steel Rat released all the way back in 1961.
In the last couple of weeks I picked up an omnibus paperback containing the first three books and so completed The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World.
Revenge features a storyline about an alien civilization that has expansionist aspirations, and is invading other planets. Harrison’s world is not deep or complex but it is entertaining and fast-moving. His plot points often seem a little bit clichéd and feel like TV dramas, but I think one could make the case that this is, in part, because his novels have influenced several generations of screenwriters.
In Word there is an elaborate time-travel narrative. Time-travel stories were not new in 1972, but some of the tropes weren’t quite as tired. Slippery Jim travels back in time to 1975, and has highly amusing adventures trying to figure out the culture of old Earth.
I’m currently working on The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You. In this volume, Slippery Jim’s twin sons are full-grown and ready to embark on a dubious adventure with Jim and Angelina.
Let’s face it; the Stainless Steel Rat stories are not heavy, or deep. At least, the ones I’ve read so far are not, although amid Slippery Jim’s constant boozing, an admirable personal philosophy does emerge, a philosophy about personal freedom, coercion, and the role of the state and the military.
Harrison is apparently still writing Stainless Steel Rat stories over fifty years later, so maybe the new ones get heavier or deeper. I don’t yet know. But the volumes I’ve read so far are slightly satirical but mostly just amusing adventures in the mold of old-fashioned adventure tales. They do this admirably. Each one consists of about 21 short chapters. There are lots of narrow escapes and cliffhangers. They are, in fact, a nice antidote to some of the much heavier works that I’m reading. Works like…
The Book of the Short Sun
Having finished the New Sun books in audiobook format, I continued right on to the Short Sun books. In the past I have tried to read this series a couple of times. Each time I got hung up, if I recall correctly, about halfway through In Green’s Jungles.
I’ve had another chance to tackle this, the challenging third series of Wolfe’s “solar cycle” books, but by listening to the first two parts as audiobooks. The third part, Return to the Whorl, does not seem to be available on YouTube.
Even with the long hours in the car, available for listening, and large volumes of coffee, to focus my mind, In Green’s Jungles remains a difficult work. The first volume is, for the most part, told as a relatively straightforward story, but out of order, and with some deeply strange elements, some whose significance only becomes clear upon a second or even third reading.
Horn, a character from the Long Sun books, is the narrator. He tells us about accepting a mission to travel across the planet Blue to claim a seat on a “lander,” a spacecraft, which will return to the Whorl, the generation starship that brought humans to this solar system. His mission is to find Silk, the hero of the Long Sun books. He wants to bring Silk to Blue, because civilization on Blue is suffering from a distinct lack of coherent, moral leadership.
Horn has several adventures and misadventures, all told in a complex, interleaved retrospect. He meets a young woman who seems to be human, but who has gills, and she seems to have been transformed by a goddess into a literal siren. He is granted a vision of this goddess, who can take the form of a gigantic woman. She seems much like the Undine in the New Sun books.
Taking the young woman as his companion and lover, Horn violates his marriage. In a disturbing scene, he convinces the young woman, Seawrack, to sing for him. This singing arouses him so much that he brutally rapes her. It seems that both his violent and procreative instincts have been aroused, and he seems to try to hurt her as much as possible in the assault. This is a disturbing and baffling scene. How are we to identify with the narrator afterwards? Was he really unable to control himself because of Seawrack’s magical singing?
Wolfe here is clearly trying to challenge the reader by giving us a narrator who is difficult to empathize with, just as the New Sun books featured a young man who was literally a torturer, and whose job was to execute people by beheading, or perform other acts of punishment; after exile, Severian was appointed the administrator of a horrifying, wretched prison. I’m still disturbed by the way this Horn doesn’t seem to fit with the Horn of the remainder of the trilogy; at the very least, Wolfe is warning the reader that “this isn’t going to be easy.” At worst, it seems almost a George R. R. Martinesque act of sadism.
Horn meets one of the inhumi, a vampire-like alien being who takes on the appearance of a young boy. His difficult relationship with this inhumi, Krait, is set up in relation to his relationship with Seawrack. The cast of characters is rounded out with a hus, an eight-legged creature a bit like a boar, named Babbie. Babbie is not human, but seems to develop greater intelligence and empathy as he spends time with Horn. So does Krait. Seawrack seems to have been human once, but only constant contact with Horn keeps her so. So in addition to the actual storyline of In Blue’s Jungles, Wolfe has set up some complex philosophical questions about personhood, especially how our conception of someone’s personhood can change. But as soon as you have a feeling that you pretty well understand these issues, Horn casually mentions how all these things happened back before he died. And the issue of just who Horn actually is starts to loom large in the reader’s mind.
In the second volume, In Green’s Jungles, we are again learning more of the story out of order. The lander was a trap, and operated by the inhumu, to take humans not to the Whorl but to their planet, Green, to serve as slaves and/or food. Although the title mentions Green, almost none of the story actually takes place on Green, except in recollection of Horn’s earlier sojourn there. Well, sort of. As In Green’s Jungles is opening, Horn, years older than the Horn in the previous book, recounts staying with a man named Inclito. He tells us the story of how he winds up leading Inclito’s troops in an inter-city-state war on Blue. There are other inhumu characters to understand and contend with, some disguised and some not. And then, as Incanto, who is Horn, who may also be in some sense Silk, is left to sleep in the snow with a dying inhumu, he takes a whole contingent of fighting mercenaries to Green, via some kind of astral travel. And then things get so strange and difficult that, I think, this is the point at which I gave up in my previous attempts to complete it, and set the book aside.
I’ve done better this time, but I have to admit that after finishing In Green’s Jungles in audio form, I immediately had to go back and listen to most of it a second time before I felt like I understood it to my own satisfaction, and I don’t feel like listening to it a third time would be out of the question.
In Green’s Jungles is an immensely complex work. It bounces around in time and space such that it really would not be easy to put the chronology of events into a completely rational order. One would have to make a detailed outline and then cut it apart and reorder everything. In fact I get the sense that Wolfe constructed these three books, at least in part, by doing the opposite — tearing a detailed chronology of events to shreds and reassembled it as told by a narrator who is himself deeply damaged and confused, although (I think) not actually deluded or misled as to the true nature of events, as Severian seems often to be.
I wish I had Return to the Whorl in audio form. That book is also complex. I’d like to be able to listen to it in the car as well. Instead, I’ve been reading the printed version again. I have not gotten very far yet. In Return to the Whorl we finally start to learn what happens in between Horn’s “death” and how he fails — sort of — to complete his mission. Because I am not that far into it, I am not really sure whether In Green’s Jungles represents the peak of narrative confusion and complexity in the trilogy, and things start to become more linear in the third book, or whether Wolfe will be twisting things up even more. I’m betting that he is, at least for a while, going to ratchet the degree of difficulty up even higher.
I don’t feel like I’m even at a point yet where I can adequately review this trilogy. I’m a good reader. I once audited a seminar class on James Joyce’s Ulysses and I had a lot to say about that book, and felt as though I got a great deal out of it. I still have my notes. I was an English major and studied big and difficult books, classic works of literature like Moby Dick. Wolfe can, when he wants to, really make things hard, formally, by playing with the fundamentals of storytelling, in a way that Joyce didn’t and Melville didn’t.
The Book of the New Sun is so fascinating in part because it can be read in a very satisfactory way as a fantasy/adventure novel set in the milieu of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories. It is perfectly respectable to read and enjoy Severian’s adventure as a big travelogue, exploring his world and winding his way to his ascent of the throne. But the story is not quite what it appears. The fantasy world turns out to be a science fiction world. Many things that initially seem magical have a technological explanation. The lacunae and oddities and inconsistencies in Severian’s story reveal that he is not what he seems.
The second series, The Book of the Long Sun, seems right off the bat to give us an unreliable narrator — a young priest who has, in the first book’s first scene, a vision, or perhaps a mild stroke. He sets off on a great mission, believing that he has been granted enlightenment by the mysterious God, the Outsider. The story is actually quite straightforward, although through various details we come to understand that this story is connected to the Long Sun books because the gods of the Whorl, the generation starship, are the uploaded children of Pas, who is himself the uploaded Typhon, the two-headed ruler of Urth who Severian meets in both the four-volume novel and the “coda” The Urth of the New Sun. And Silk, it turns out, is not unreliable at all, although he may be divinely inspired, by a real God, not one of the fradulent technologically-enhanced human “gods” of the Whorl.
The Book of the Long Sun is not complex in the sense that The Book of the New Sun is complex. The plot is relatively straightforward. The challenge to the reader stems from the way the storytelling across the four volumes is so intense, complex, and focused. Events take place in an extremely compressed time scale. Dialogue is packed with meaning. There are dozens of characters to meet. Small details mentioned in passing become significant later, and there is a lot of detail to absorb.
The Book of the Short Sun takes yet another approach to narrative, in that we don’t necessarily have an unreliable narrator, but a scrambled narrative. In reading Severian’s account, at least for a second or third time, Severian’s identity becomes somewhat complex as we realize that his timeline has been manipulated and his whole existence across timelines interfered with. Horn has not, I think, had any such external manipulation done to him. But he has been badly damaged, his identity itself altered, and the narrative that he unspools reflects this chronological confusion; it’s a tangled ball of yarn.
The Book of the Short Sun is definitely the more difficult of the three Solar Cycle series. I think that The Book of the New Sun endures because of the way the reader can enjoy it on multiple levels, and it richly rewards re-reading. Too, I’ve started listening to The Book of the Long Sun, which I’ve read twice already. Unlike The Book of the New Sun, the story of Silk does not become more confusing on re-reading, but richer and more beautiful. I am listening with admiration as I see just how brilliantly Wolfe sets up the story from the very first sentence, making the onrushing events that overtake Silk seem inevitable. It’s a bit like an incredibly detailed short story.
Unlike these other two series, though, The Book of the Short Sun seems to require re-reading in order to understand the most fundamental aspects of the book, such as:
“Who is telling the story?”
“What happens in the story?”
“Who are the other characters in the story?”
“Which of these characters are people and should be accorded the rights of people?”
And as I have not even completed all three Short Sun books once, I still feel like I’m not quite ready to answer these questions. And I’m not really prepared to advocate for this trilogy like I have advocated for the other two, because I really have come to believe that this trilogy just isn’t written for everyone. It’s really written for a reader who wants at the outset to take on a multi-dimensional chess game with Gene Wolfe. And I’m not entirely sure, yet, whether it’s even for me.
There isn’t a lot of analysis out there on the Short Sun books, probably because they are so complex. Even though the trilogy is fifteen years old, I suspect that not very many readers have actually completed it, and of those readers, even fewer came away feeling that they understood it. I did find one interesting and, I think, correct interpretive note in the form of some incomplete notes on the Wolfe Wiki, which today seems to be off-line; I don’t even know who to credit these thoughts to, but they start off like so:
I believe we can take the old pen case as a metaphor for the old body Horn has brought back from the whorl. “At present it holds two quills, for I have taken the third one out. Two were in it when I found it in the ashes of our shop. The third, with which I am writing, was dropped by Oreb not so long ago.” To push the analogy, the three pens are three spirits: Silk, Pas, and Horn. The third, with which he begins to write this book, will be “dropped” before the end.
See http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=TheBookOfTheShortSun.TheOldPenCase (although as it exists in the form of a Wiki, that page may well have changed by the time you go to look at it).
I’d like to be able to sum up and render some useful final judgement on The Book of the Short Sun, but I simply can’t — at least not yet. Maybe I’ll be able to do so soon. For now, it’s just too big. For the moment let’s just say that if The Book of the New Sun is Wolfe’s Ulysses, I hope that The Book of the Short Sun is not his Finnegan’s Wake.
Next time I will to include some notes about Robert Borski’s book Solary Labyrinth. This is a book of short essays about The Book of the New Sun and the mysteries in that text, particularly the mysteries surrounding the identities and relationships of some of the characters. I re-read this work while re-reading The Book of the New Sun, to refresh my memory. Borski’s book is interesting, but in some ways, to me at least, not fully convincing. More on that next time!
Completed since last time:
The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge by Harry Harrison
The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World by Harry Harrison
The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You by Harry Harrison
On Blue’s Waters by Gene Wolfe (audiobook)
In Green’s Jungles by Gene Wolfe (audiobook)
Solar Labyrinth by Robert Borski
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling (bedtime reading for the kids)
In progress:
Return to the Whorl by Gene Wolfe
Nightside the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe (audiobook)
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (bedtime reading)
A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett (bedtime reading)
Posted by Paul R. Potts at 11:56 PM No comments:
Labels: Read It
Two Interesting Games: Little Inferno and Human Resource Machine
As a guy who remembers a world before Pac-Man, I admit to having gone through phases in which I played a lot of video games. As a child my family had a game console for a time; not an Atari, but a Sears “Tele-Games Electronic Games Motocross Sports Center IV,” which had Pong-style games out the wazoo, and a deeply dumb motorcycle jump game. Back then you had to use a lot of imagination to translate the low-resolution, barely-animated game representation into something more vivid, but I had fun with it. It wasn’t like there were a lot of great video game alternatives. During the home computer years I was a big fan of Infocom text adventures, completing many of them and dabbling in programming my own text adventures (fortunately all lost). Graphics games were in their infancy by I played them. Graphics games on the TRS–80, in black and white with a resolution of 48 pixels by 128 pixels, were notably crude; remember that bit about having to use a lot of imagination?
Over the years I mostly was not a big gamer, although I went through some phases when I played a lot of games. In the early nineties, I played Doom. I had a brief infatuation with the PC-based Ultima games and played the hell out of several of them, including the two Ultima Underworld games. A few years later, I was a fan of some Nintendo 64 titles and I’ll never forget conquering the tough boss “Mad Jack,” an evil jack-in-the box, in Donkey Kong 64. I gradually migrated away from first-person shooter games towards racing and puzzle games, enjoying Mario Kart and beating Paper Mario and the sequel, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door as well as The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
When I moved to Saginaw and was living alone for a while I bought a few games from Steam, including Half-Life 2. It was Half-Life 2, particularly the “We Don’t Go to Ravenholm” episode, that put me off first-person shooter games, probably forever, but I enjoyed (and completed) World of Goo.
I’m sure I’m glossing over many games that were significant to me over the years, but the point of this introduction is to show that I’ve gravitated more towards puzzle games and physics games. I have never gotten into MMPORGs and modern, realistic first-person shooter games leave me cold. That makes me what hard-core gamers might call a “casual gamer.” I welcome the idea that the term is vaguely insulting — because to me the alternative is “someone who wastes far too much time playing games.” I don’t believe time spent playing games is entirely wasted — for example, I think the second game I’ll discuss below actually can hone some useful skills — but the returns diminish pretty quickly.
Since purchasing an iPad I never really found iPad games I thought were worth playing; adaptations of other games didn’t always work well on the iPad touch-screen hardware. But recently I was browsing the App Store out of boredom and found two games that I really like.
The first is an oddball game called Little Inferno. The setting and plot is bizarrely simple (and simply bizarre). You’ve just received a brick fireplace, called a “Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace,” made by the Tomorrow Corporation (which is the name of the actual company that made the game, by the way). You don’t have anything to burn in it, but you can order things from the company. They include a starter catalog. Everything is delivered right to you. The catalog is a mishmash of weird parody objects: broken toys, expired and discontinued food items, weird junk-shop finds, and the occasional amusingly explosive, infested, or toxic item. It’s first-person, and for most of the game you sit in front of the fireplace and burn stuff up, and order new stuff. Stuff is delivered in just a few seconds, with bigger-ticket items taking tens of seconds or minutes, but the game allows you to spend your bonus points on rush delivery. So you can indulge your impatience, and you quickly find that indulging your impatience makes you even less patient. That’s about it for the basic gameplay.
There’s a story arc that starts to emerge; you get mail, and you get weather reports. Apparently your community is suffering from terrible winter storms and they’ve been going on for some time. In fact, you never seem to actually leave your home, or eat or drink anything. To me, it’s a wonderfully weird satire of Amazon Prime. You earn money by burning things in your fireplace, which you can use to buy more things. When you burn “combos,” weird groupings of items with some symbolic or metaphorical relationship, you get bonus points. You can use the bonus points to order more and more things, and they arrive ever-faster. As you level up you get more catalogs, with more and more expensive items in them. The items burn in entertaining, and sometimes horrible, ways. For example, there’s a stuffed cat called Kitty Kitty Poo Poo. When you ignite it, it poops. A lot. It seems to be filled entirely with poop, which burns.
However demented and gross the game’s sense of humor, it was never quite as dark as I expected. For example, one of the required combos is called “Sorority Party.” I thought it involved the “Low Self-Esteem Action Doll” and the chainsaw, but that may be a remnant of watching one too many low-budget horror movies back in the eighties. It actually involves balloons, not chainsaws.
Eventually you level up enough to bring the game to a satisfying and surreal conclusion. I won’t spoil it for you. This game isn’t for everyone but it doesn’t take all that long to complete it, and I had fun.
I discovered that the same developers have released another game, Human Resource Machine. Human Resource Machine is a bit difficult to describe if you aren’t already familiar with very low-level computer programming. If you’ve ever taken a data structure class, or an algorithms class, or especially an assembly language programming class, it will be familiar. You are an office drone, starting out in the mail room. You work your way through a series of rooms. In each room, your supervisor gives you an assigment involving sorting or filing or rearranging boxes, moving them from an incoming conveyer belt to an outgoing conveyor belt. But you don’t move the boxes yourself in real time; you don’t have direct control of your avatar. You can’t drag him around or make him pick up a box. Instead, you write a program, in a very simple assembly language, to control your avatar. Then you run the program. When you run it your avatar zooms around, executing the instructions. You can make your avatar run the program step-by-step, even stepping backwards, and change the speed.
The assembly language you are learning starts out very simply. Initially you have only two commands, one to take an item from the inbox, and one to put the item in the outbox. As the challenges get more difficult you get addition and subtraction, and jump operations, and conditional jump operations, and then load and store operations, and then indexed load and store operations, and then indirect indexed load and store operations. If you make it through the whole game you will have mastered the basics of assembly language programming. The Human Resource Machine instruction set is not a real instruction set architecture, but at their heart, instruction set architectures are very similar. So once you’ve mastered this one, you could presumably learn any real instruction set architecture, just as after I mastered the Z–80 (the microprocessor inside the Radio Shack TRS–80), it was relatively easy to master the 6502 (the microprocessor inside the Apple II). In fact the Human Resource Machine architecture is a bit like that of the 6502. It is a little more irregular than I think it should be. Some instructions leave objects in your hands, and some don’t (your “hands” represent a sort of accumulator, or common register used to do most operations including math operations). But real instruction set architectures all have their quirks.
If this game had existed when I was teaching the System Software course I taught at Saginaw Valley State University, and I could have arranged for the students to have access to it, I would have assigned it. It is pretty much the best attempt at “gamification” of programming I’ve ever seen. I especially like the way it teaches a very low-level language. Most programming environments you see online teach Python, or Lua, or JavaScript, or other high-level languages. It’s refreshing to see one that really gets to the bottom of how computer programs do their work.
Most of the basic problems are simple, but they get progressively harder. You have to invent some techniques to map high-level concepts to low-level instructions. For example, you don’t have an instruction to determine if two numbers are equal. But you have a subtraction instruction, and you can compare a value to zero. So you have to come up with the idea that you can check to see if two numbers are equal by subtracting one from the other. If the result is zero, they were equal. This is just one of many such techniques you have to work out.
To get to the end, you have to implement a sorting algorithm in assembly language. This would be a trivial library call in Java but in assembly language it is a fairly challenging program. I chose a maximally-inefficient version of a sorting algorithm known as “bubble sort.” It contains a lot of redundant operations, which made my little avatar go berserk for five minutes when I ran it. Some easy optimizations are possible, but the first challenge is just to get a program working.
When I completed all the required challenges, I started doing the side challenges, a parallel series of graded exercises. You can also try to maximize your points for each challenge. To get the maximum possible points, you must not only solve the problem correctly, but meet two optimization challenges: you must meet or beat a target for the minimum program length, and a target for the fastest execution. In some simple cases one solution will meet both objectives. But in many of them, the size-optimized program looks very different than the speed-optimized program. Perhaps not surprisingly, an enterprising person has set up a Github repository with optimized solutions. See https://github.com/atesgoral/hrm-solutions.
I’ve been programming computers since 1977 and although I met the requirements to complete the game, I still have not managed to beat all these assembly language optimization challenges. As the game says, some of them are quite difficult. But I did start make my own little implementation of the virtual machine and instruction set, written in C, which runs on an ATtiny 441 microcontroller. If you want to play with it, the code is here: https://github.com/paulrpotts/TinyHRM.
I had the idea, originally, that you might communicate with the tiny microcontroller running the code via the serial port, uploading the program and letting it run. But I’m not sure I will ever get around to that, since I am getting paid to write other programs, but at least I had some fun with it.
The game has cut scenes, and a concluding scene. Again, I won’t spoil it for you, but as a programmer about to celebrate my 49th birthday, I found the concluding scene slightly unnerving. It’s a great game and I highly recommend it, and I am looking forward to more releases from Tomorrow Corporation.
Two Interesting Games: Little Inferno and Human Re...


Now that’s what I call history
I first heard about Big History around a year ago and it really caught my imagination. Big History is a new way of looking at the subject, which attempts to examine history on a large scale across long time frames through a multi-disciplinary approach. The starting point is the origins of the Universe some 13.5 billion years ago. And it continues with the creation of stars, planets, including our own Earth. Finally it charts the evolution of life on Earth and the appearance of humans, which is nearly halfway through the course. In fact really humans should appear much later in the course but it would probably be too much of a blow to our egos.
I really like the multi-disciplinary approach. It draws on such fields as anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology, climatology, cosmology, geology natural history. You may find this too broad but I really enjoy this big sweep. Too often we compartmentalise things and we fail to see the interconnectedness of events. To limit history to the written word is a mistake; Big History makes use of all possible time scales – not just those used in traditional history. The biological, geological and cosmological time frames give us a much deeper understanding our place within the Universe and enable us to see the underlying unity of modern knowledge
As an academic discipline Big History began in the late 1980s. One of the pioneers was David Christian, who started an experimental course with help from scientific colleagues. He rather frivolously coined the term Big History but it stuck. Christian now teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The discipline was helped by some important breakthroughs that enabled scientists to date the origins of the universe. By using Radiometric dating techniques, scientists can construct a coherent and rigorous scientific explanation going right back to the Big Bang.
In order to explain Professor Christian uses eight thresholds, events which were real turning points:
Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology
Threshold 2—The First Stars and Galaxies
Threshold 3—Making Chemical Elements
Threshold 4—The Earth and the Solar System
Threshold 5—Life
Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?
Threshold 7—Agriculture
Threshold 8—The Modern Revolution
This gives you a good idea of the vast time scale of the course – events like The French Revolution hardly get a look in. Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything touches on many of the themes in Big History. If you want to a more academic approach into the subject, Professor David Christian has a book called Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. There is a problem with this material – it can overwhelm you. I have big problems getting a handle on quantum mechanics or superstring theory; I was one of those people who hated science at school. But like the aforementioned Bryson I have now developed a keen interest in science. I know it’s not always possible to understand everything but you can still get some appreciation of the forces that brought us here.
1 Comment	| Articles, History, Science	| Permalink
Put-pocketing and other new words
Here is a selection of new words I found on the Wordspy website:
put-pocketing
Putting an object into a person’s pocket without that person knowing it. Also: putpocketing.
An independent film genre characterized by low-budget production values, unknown actors, and a constant stream of low-key, semi-improvised dialogue.
A person who uses technology, particularly wireless networking, to work without requiring an office or other fixed address.
YIMBY
A person who favours a project that would add a dangerous or unpleasant feature to his or her neighbourhood. [Acronym from the phrase yes in my back yard.]
SPF creep
The gradual increase in sun protection factor (SPF) numbers in sunscreens and some cosmetic products. In the US they now have SPF 100. Is this advanced protection…or advanced hype?
frequency illusion
The tendency to notice instances of a particular phenomenon once one starts to look for it, and to therefore believe erroneously that the phenomenon occurs frequently.
Illusion, to use the term coined by linguist A
intexticated
Preoccupied by reading or sending text messages, particularly while driving a car.
Wikipedia kid
A student who has poor research skills and lacks the ability to think critically.
carrotmob
An event where people support an environmentally-friendly store by gathering en masse to purchase the store’s products. Also: carrot mob.
1 Comment	| Language	| Permalink
Salon.com has a piece, Is the Internet melting our brains?, about moral panics created over new communication technologies. It is an interview with Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois and author of A Better Pencil. Here is an extract:
We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won’t have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there’s no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant — it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of “this is going to revolutionize everything” versus “this is going to destroy everything.”
The Bottom Line came back on BBC Radio 4 this week. The business discussion programme dealt with managing expectations and why the dreaded business meeting is still very much on the agenda.
John Kay has written this piece: The Reform of Banking Regulation. He sets out his vision for the future.
The Onion features this article: Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.
John Crace’s digested read dealt with the new Dan Brown bestseller The Lost Symbol.
About a year ago I did a post called Some Thoughts on Books. In it I mentioned The Kindle, Amazon’s electronic book. I expressed some scepticism about this kind of device. However I now have availed myself of an electronic reading device – but not the Kindle. I plumped instead for the Sony PRS 505, which cost me £159 at WH Smith I’ve had it for just over a month now and so far I have read nine books and the experience is very satisfactory.
My one is silver. It weighs around 260 grams and its size is a very convenient 175mm by 122mm by 8mm. The great thing is that it is compatible with a lot of different formats, which is not typical for the Japanese multinational. The internal memory of 200MB holds around 160 e-books, although this depends on the size of the book and also the format. PDF files can take up a lot of space. For example, a 250-page book on PDF could use up a lot more space than War and Peace. SD and Memory Stick slots can be used to expand the memory but surely 100 books is enough? I prefer to keep the rest of the books on my computer. The e-book comes with a CD featuring 100 classic works – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde to name but a few authors. It’s incredibly easy to use – its navigation very intuitive. The page turning does take a split second to refresh the page. Some people find this slow but when you are reading a normal book, it also takes a time to turn a page. This page turning is what uses up the battery. You can do some 7,500 turns before you need to recharge the battery, which for me is about two weeks. The recharging can be done with the USB port of the PC. It is compatible with a lot of different formats, which is not typical for the Japanese multinational.
What are the pros and cons? For me the biggest advantage is space. My house is already overflowing with books. I love being able to have my books stored on my computer just like with music. There is so much stuff available for free on the Internet. The reading experience is also excellent; e-ink is nothing to like reading on a computer screen – it’s very easy on the eyes. With the option of three font sizes, it is actually more comfortable for me.
For me the con is still the price. In the future I hope there will be a models costing under 100. What I would like is a simple model without too many bells and whistles. The Kindle has a lot of gee-whiz technology; you can order a book and have it on the device in one minute. You don’t even need a computer. This is all great but I feel that the cost of e-books doesn’t reflect the savings in materials and transport. As a person who would always wait for the paperback, $9.99 is a bit steep for a book.
What is the future of these machines. I really don’t know because these gadgets are constantly changing. They say that dedicated devices are on the way out and we will have multipurpose machines are the future. I have noticed that when I show it to people they don’t say I must buy that. I also never see commuters on the underground reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on an e-book . Maybe it is just going to be a niche market. What I don’t know is how I’m going to find time to do my blog with the thousands of books I have to read.
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Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences
This week Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol came out and the Telegraph celebrated with a piece about Brown’s 20 worst sentences. The critics do not share the public’s enthusiasm. The article quotes Edinburgh professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum says “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.” I’m sure the author won’t be too bothered and I have to confess I shall be one of those reading it. Anyway, here is the Telegraph’s top 20 with comments:
20. Angels and Demons, chapter 1: Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete. They say the first rule of fiction is “show, don’t tell”. This fails that rule.
19. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 83: “The Knights Templar were warriors,” Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space. “Remind” is a transitive verb – you need to remind someone of something. You can’t just remind. And if the crutches echo, we know the space is reverberant.
18. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: He could taste the familiar tang of museum air – an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon – the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors. Ah, that familiar tang of deionised essence.
17. Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes. It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.
16. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: A voice spoke, chillingly close. “Do not move.” On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly. Only fifteen feet away, outside the sealed gate, the mountainous silhouette of his attacker stared through the iron bars. He was broad and tall, with ghost-pale skin and thinning white hair. His irises were pink with dark red pupils. A silhouette with white hair and pink irises stood chillingly close but 15 feet away. What’s wrong with this picture?
15. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: As a boy, Langdon had fallen down an abandoned well shaft and almost died treading water in the narrow space for hours before being rescued. Since then, he’d suffered a haunting phobia of enclosed spaces – elevators, subways, squash courts. Other enclosed spaces include toilet cubicles, phone boxes and dog kennels.
14. Angels and Demons, chapter 100: Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers glorified the four major rivers of the Old World – The Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio Plata. The Rio de la Plata. Between Argentina and Paraguay. One of the major rivers of the Old World. Apparently.
The Da Vinci Code, chapter 5: Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué. A keen eye indeed.
13 and 12. The Lost Symbol, chapter 1: He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 17: Yanking his Manurhin MR-93 revolver from his shoulder holster, the captain dashed out of the office. Oh – the Falcon 2000EX with the Pratt & Whitneys? And the Manurhin MR-93? Not the MR-92? You’re sure? Thanks.
11. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow’s peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters. Do angry oxen carry throw their shoulders back and tuck their chins into their chest? What precisely is a fiery clarity and how does it forecast anything? Once again, it is not clear whether Brown knows what ‘forecast’ means.
10. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: Five months ago, the kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow. Did they hit him with the kaleidoscope?
9. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 32: The vehicle was easily the smallest car Langdon had ever seen. “SmartCar,” she said. “A hundred kilometers to the liter.” Pro tip: when fleeing from the police, take a moment to boast about your getaway vehicle’s fuel efficiency. And get it wrong by a factor of five. SmartCars do about 20km (12 miles) to the litre.
8. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 3: My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good.
And they say the schools are dumbing down.
7 and 6. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 33: Pulling back the sleeve of his jacket, he checked his watch – a vintage, collector’s-edition Mickey Mouse wristwatch that had been a gift from his parents on his tenth birthday.
The Da Vinci Code, chapter 6: His last correspondence from Vittoria had been in December – a postcard saying she was headed to the Java Sea to continue her research in entanglement physics… something about using satellites to track manta ray migrations. In the words of Professor Pullum: “It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance to what is being narrated.”
5. Angels and Demons, chapter 4: learning the ropes in the trenches. Learning the ropes (of a naval ship) while in the trenches (with the army in the First World War). It’s a military education, certainly.
4, 3, and 2. The Da Vinci Code, opening sentence: Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.
Angels and Demons, opening sentence: Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own.
Deception Point, opening sentences: Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him. Professor Pullum: “Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence”.
1. The Da Vinci Code: Title. The Da Vinci Code. Leonardo’s surname was not Da Vinci. He was from Vinci, or of Vinci. As many critics have pointed out, calling it The Da Vinci Code is like saying Mr Of Arabia or asking What Would Of Nazareth Do?
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QI: A selection #4
Here is another selection of trivia that I have picked from the QI column in the Telegraph:
French fries were invented in 17th-century Belgium as a substitute for, rather than accompaniment to, fish. When the rivers froze and fish couldn’t be caught, potatoes were cut into fishy shapes and fried instead. The Dutch call chips Vlaamse frieten (Flemish fries). The first recorded chip shop, Max et Fritz, was established in Antwerp in 1862. The Belgian’s often claim the term “French fry” came from British and US troops exposed to their national delicacy during the First World War, but the expression “French fried potatoes” had been in use in America long before the Great War.
In 2005 the British Cheese Board organised a study involving 200 volunteers in an attempt to nail the old wives’ tale that eating cheese before sleep gives you nightmares. The results revealed a different story: more than three quarters of the participants, who ate 20 grams of cheese before going to bed, reported undisturbed sleep, although the majority of them were able to recall their dreams. More surprisingly, the different varieties of cheese seemed to produce different kinds of dream. Cheddar induced a higher proportion of dreams about celebrities; Red Leicester summoned childhood memories; Lancashire generated dreams about work; while Cheshire inspired no dreams at all. The overall conclusion was that cheese was a perfectly safe late-night snack which, because of its high levels of the serotonin-producing amino acid tryptophan, was far more likely to induce sleep and reduce stress.
Clouds are classified according to their height and appearance. The 10 basic categories were first agreed by the Cloud Committee of the International Meteorological Conference in 1896 and published as the International Cloud Atlas. Their classifications were based on the pioneering work of Luke Howard (1772-1864), an English Quaker and pharmacist, who published his Essay on the Modification of Clouds in 1802. In it he gives Latin names to the four main cloud types: cirrus, “curl”; stratus, “layer”; cumulus, “heap”; and nimbus, “rain cloud”. The early theorist of evolution, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) had suggested an earlier system in French but it didn’t catch on – his names included “hazy clouds” (en forme de voile), “massed clouds” (attroupes), “broom-like clouds” (en balayeurs). Before Howard and Lamarck, clouds were simply named after their appearance: white, black, mare’s tail or mackerel. In Iran clouds are good omens. To indicate someone is blessed they say: dayem semakum ghaim, which translates as “your sky is always filled with clouds”.
The largest bank note in England is the one hundred million pound note, nicknamed a Titan. It is only used internally at the Bank of England, and there are only 40 in existence.
The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) actually lasted 116 years and didn’t acquire its popular name until 1874. It was a series of skirmishes fought between two French families, one of whom claimed the French throne (Valois), while the other claimed both France and England (Plantagenet). The eventual victory of the Valois came at a high price – France’s population was reduced by two-thirds over the period and England was left isolated from the rest of Europe, speaking English rather than French.
Giant Sequoia trees are the heaviest living things to have existed on Earth: they can weigh more than 6,000 tons, reach 311 feet in height and 40 feet in diameter. Their bark is up to four feet thick, but the seeds are tiny, weighing 1/3000th of an ounce each, approximately one billionth the weight of the fully grown tree. Also known as Wellingtonia trees, Giant Sequoias are native to California but have been planted worldwide. They are also the fastest growing trees in the world. Paradoxically, forest fires are essential for their survival. Because of their thick bark, sequoias survive fires which completely destroy all other trees, leaving the forest clear of undergrowth, which enables the sequoia’s absurdly tiny seeds to survive. The trees also rely on the heat of the fires to open their tough seed cones and to expose the bare soil. Because of this the US Forest Service now regularly sets fire to their sequoia groves on purpose.
Iceland is a bigger land mass than most of us realise. At 39,000 sq m (101010 sq km) it is the same size as Cuba, 25 per cent bigger than Ireland and 50 per cent bigger than Sri Lanka. Despite this its population is slightly smaller than that of Croydon: 310,000. This means that, per head of population, Icelanders read more books, eat more sugar, keep more shotguns, drive more four-wheel drives, produce more poets and have more Nobel Prize winners (just the one) than any other nation. In 2007, Iceland was ranked the most developed country in the world by the United Nations. In 2003 three Icelandic banks – Landsbanki, Kaupthing and Glitnir – began buying foreign assets, building up a joint portfolio of $140 billion (£92 bn). By 2006, the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003, but the prosperity ended abruptly in October 2008, when the three banks failed. Iceland now faces an economy saddled with debts running at 850 per cent of GDP, or £224,000 owed for every man, woman and child in the country. The UK deposited more than £30 bn into Iceland. Educational institutions have been particularly affected –Oxford University alone has lost £50 million.
The most plausible biological explanation for kissing is that it allows prospective mates to sample one another’s pheromones and test them for biological compatibility (although experiments have so far been unable to establish if human sex pheromones really exist). It takes a lot of muscular co-ordination to kiss properly – 34 facial muscles and 112 postural muscles are involved.
The early uses for chocolate were medicinal and in recent years bold claims have been made for its therapeutic benefits. Chocolate contains serotonin, phenylethylamine (the so-called ”love chemical’’) and endorphins which, it is claimed, can relieve pain, reduce stress and reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer. Unfortunately, the beneficial chemicals come wrapped in a thick coating of sugar and (often) dairy fat, the negative effects of which more than outweigh the chemical upside. Interestingly, in blind tests where chocolate lovers were given cacao capsules (containing the same balance of chemicals) they didn’t report any of the same psychological benefits they had experienced when allowed to eat a bar of their favourite chocolate. This suggests that the positive effects come from having satisfied a craving; like other sweet and fatty foods, chocolate is habit forming. And yet, so powerful are the pleasure centres in our brain, that sucking on a piece can make your heart beat faster and for longer than a passionate kiss.
The astronomical name for our Sun is Sol. Everything about Sol is big: it makes up 99 per cent of the mass of the solar system (all the planets and asteroids added together only account for 1 per cent). It burns 700 million tons of hydrogen a second yet it takes a million years for the energy created in its core to filter out to the surface, which is 3,000 times cooler than the centre (16.7 million C). Every second, Sol produces energy equivalent to 35 million times the annual electricity consumption of North America. Sol is 1.3 million times bigger than Earth and at 93 million miles distance, its rays take just eight minutes and 19 seconds to reach us. Despite these figures, Sol is an average to small star, known as a white dwarf, halfway through its life. Close neighbour Betelgeuse (one of the constellation Orion’s ”shoulders’’) is 700 times bigger and 14,000 times brighter. Sol is only one of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, which is itself just one of an estimated 125 million galaxies in the observable universe.
Leave a Comment »	| Trivia	| Permalink
We have all heard of Christian funamentalism but this week The New Humanist has a feature about Harun Yahy, a Muslim creationist who wants to demonstrate the superiority of “Koranic science” over “the evolution lie”. Sex, flies and videotape: the secret lives of Harun Yahya.
NPR has a feature about Google and its digitalisation of all the world’s books. Here is the introduction:
Before Gutenberg, books were precious commodities, literacy was equally rare, and the flow of ideas scarcely amounted to a trickle. Movable type made printing easy and cheap. All kinds of books became available to a much wider audience, and the world changed. We may be at such a moment right now. Millions of books are being scanned into digital libraries that should make enormous volumes of material available to anybody. And this time, the agent of change isn’t Gutenberg but Google. How all this will happen is important and the subject of argument among writers’ groups, publishers, libraries and privacy advocates, but that it will happen seems beyond dispute.
Who Should Control The Virtual Library? This audio comes with a transcript.
The Independent has a piece about the French attempt to aprovide an alternative to GDP: Sarkozy’s happiness index is worth taking seriously.
You are currently browsing the Molivam42's Weblog blog archives for September, 2009.


Fun Facts + history about the Pasadena Rose Parade (& a special parade ice cream)
It’s nearly 2020! And what better way to welcome the New Year than with the crowd-pleasing 131st Tournament of Roses Parade?
Over one-million people attend the Rose Parade annually. One-million! With One Colorado’s parade-perfect location on Colorado Boulevard in the heart of historic Old Pasadena, we were inspired to dig up little-known facts and historic tidbits about the Pasadena Rose Parade. And there happens to be a lot of parade history right here at One Colorado!
The first Rose Parade was held in 1890 on South Wilson Avenue where the Caltech athletic building stands today. At its inception, the parade was a much smaller production consisting of a parade of flowers on horse-drawn chariots and competitions such as races, jousting and tug-of-war. The first-ever Rose Parade Game took place in 1902 with Michigan against Stanford, with Michigan winning 49-0. The game became permanently instated in the parade’s traditions in 1916.
Hallie Woods was selected as the first Rose Queen by her classmates in 1905. “One Tree Hill” star Sophia Bush was the 82nd Rose Queen in 2000. Today, the royal court is selected based on “poise, personality, public speaking ability, scholastic achievement” and leadership skills. For this year’s parade, Camille Kennedy was crowned the 102nd Rose Queen. You can see her during the parade donning a Mikimoto crown featuring over 600 pearls and six carats of diamonds. Learn more about the history of the Rose Queen here.
The William Wrigley, Jr. family (yes, as in the chewing gum) donated their Orange Grove Boulevard mansion and gardens to the city of Pasadena in 1959 to use as the official headquarters of the Tournament of Roses parade for the “staff and 935 volunteers who work year-round” organizing the parade and game. Having enjoyed watching the parade from its front yard (the favorite of the six of the estates owned by the Wrigleys), it was only natural to make their home the home to the Rose Parade. (You can tour the three-story mansion at no cost.) On New Year’s Eve, floats line up in front of Wrigley’s mansion where you can view them up-close and personal for free. (This is sort of a local secret, so be choosy about with who you share!)
There are actually many historic links to the Rose Parade at One Colorado. At the turn of the century, when the streets had to be widened to accommodate the motorized, large floats that we see today, many buildings on Colorado Boulevard had to remove 15 feet from their fronts to make room for the expansion. The building Sephora calls home was able to maintain its original facade, while the buildings where Vince and J.Crew are located had to reconstruct entirely new fronts. The Vince building was redone in a Spanish Colonial style and J.Crew, originally occupied by Owl Drug Store, was remodeled in the Art Deco tradition (see photo above). You can still see the original front door tile work of Owl Drug Store!
If you head towards Fair Oaks between Colorado Boulevard and Union Street, notice the curbs. Made from granite, they were made taller than standard curbs in order to accommodate horse-drawn carriages dropping off the parade’s Grand Marshall and other float riders. If you walk further down Union Street past Smith Alley, you’ll notice a dipped driveway with zig-zag ridges. This was where horse-drawn carriages would be repaired and the ridges kept horses from slipping as they entered.
Side note: When the original City Hall (built in 1903 where Container Store is today) burned down, it temporarily relocated to the second floor of Patagonia’s building on Fair Oaks and Union. When you visit Patagonia, notice the sealed, historic underground elevator on the sidewalk next to the shop. While the elevator near Patagonia is no longer functioning, there is another one that still runs behind Mi Piace. If you stick around, you’ll hear the elevator bell ring!
One Colorado’s long-time security Officer Issac has personally been involved in the Rose Parade for over 40 years! His duty? Driving the floats! Issac was recently honored with an award to celebrate this milestone from the President of the Rose Parade. Issac drew our attention to the thin red line that runs in the street on Colorado (something we hadn’t noticed before), and told us it’s used by the the float drivers so they can keep the floats driving in a straight line. Issac also gave us the inside scoop on the parade’s mantra: “The Show Must Go On!” If a float has technical issues, drivers have about 15 seconds to get it back up and running or risk having the float towed for the remainder of the event.
The next time you wander One Colorado spotting these historic spots and their connection to the Rose Parade, make sure to visit Salt & Straw! From December 27th – January 1st, they will be serving up a special flavor n celebration of the Tournament of Roses: Chocolate Rose Petal ice cream!
Heading to the Rose Parade in 2020? View Annual Spectator Guide.
View 2020 Visitor Hotline Reference Booklet.


Barrington Pheloung (1954-2019) - composer for film, TV and Theatre
Barrington Pheloung is an Australian born composer who studied in and moved to the UK. Here he has created music for the concert hall and the theatre (including a number of ballets), done some work for radio and commercials, and a considerable amount for British television including series and one-off programmes. More recently he has composed for film, notably the film "Hilary and Jackie" based on the life of the cellist Jaqueline du Pre, and her relationship with her sister Hilary. (Jackie was a leading cellist, had a celebrity marriage to pianist Daniel Barenboim, and died tragically from multiple sclerosis.) Coincidentally, one of the TV movies Pheloung worked on also featured music played on a cello. This was the highly regarded "Truly, Madly, Deeply" featuring a duet for Cello and Piano where one of the players is a ghost.
Pheloung can clearly get his inspiration from surprising places, like wordplay for example. The theme for the TV series "Inspector Morse" about a police inspector has an accompaniment which is not only a rhythmic morse code figure on a single note but also spells out the letters M.O.R.S.E in morse code. (Another composer who has used morse code in film music is John Williams when ET was "phoning home".) Pheloung has created all the music for the morse series, recording his own compositions and classical works used within the programme. Among the wealth of classical music included in the series, you will find Debussy's Arabesque No.1 for piano and Mozart's Clarinet Concerto. The London Metropolitan Orchestra was formed in 1994 from the group of musicians put together to record "Inspector Morse" and "Truly, Madly, Deeply".
For the stage production of "The Graduate" starring Jerry Hall, Pheloung contributed additional songs and music to the familiar melodies of Simon and Garfunkel. The show has been a hit in the West End and on Broadway and is touring in various parts of the world. Phelong has also said that he intends to release the music from "Truly, Madly, Deeply" at some point. Pheloung's contribution to Video Game music has included several titles in the "Broken Sword" series. Sadly the composer died in 2019 at the age of 65.
Films by Barrington Pheloung:
Nostradamus (1994) - contains some medieval music
Hilary and Jackie - about the famous cellist Jacqueline du Pre and her sister Hilary, this also features classical music for cello including the Elgar Cello Concerto for which Jackie was famous for her interpretation
Twin Dragons (Shuang long hui) - with another Jackie, Jackie Chan
Touching Wild Horses
Shopgirl - with a moving love theme for the opening sequence
And When Did You Last See Your Father?
Blown Apart
Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1983 - the third TV movie of this Series
Incendiary
My Feral Heart
TV themes by Barrington Pheloung:
Boon - Pheloung first met Anthony Minghella on the show and the pair went on to collaborate on Truly, Madly, Deeply
The Legends of Treasure Island
Dalziel and Pascoe
The Politician's Wife
Inspector Morse - with its Morse Code accompaniment
Truly, Madly, Deeply - with its love-death duet
Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1983 - TV Movie
Lewis - spinoff series from Inspector Morse, and perhaps set to be as long-running as its parent series
Endeavour - the prequel series with a young Morse
Barrington Pheloung recommendations:
There is sheet music for Pheloung's "Inspector Morse" theme, and his music can be found on one or two CDs. Pheloung's own website is at www.pheloung.co.uk and many sources will provide more information about the cellist Jacqueline du Pre. The following recordings give a good representation of Pheloung's best-known music as well as some classical works:
Inspector Morse - volume 3 can be found at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Hilary and Jackie - available from Amazon.com


Facebook Privacy Investigation Leads to Massive App Suspension Initiative
Facebook Privacy Investigation Leads to Massive App Suspension Initiative by Nicole Lindsey
Nicole Lindsey· September 30, 2019
As part of its ongoing privacy investigation into the way third-party app developers use data, Facebook announced in a blog post that it has suspended “tens of thousands” of apps. Such a wide-scale app suspension initiative, of course, is entirely unprecedented. Just 12 months earlier, Facebook said that the app suspension initiative, which was launched in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, had only impacted 400 apps. So what led to this massive app suspension by Facebook over the past year?
Facebook privacy investigation highlights “tens of thousands” apps
One major factor, of course, has to be the intense scrutiny that Facebook is now receiving from regulators, legislators, privacy experts and consumer advocates. In July 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a $5 billion fine related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. As part of this settlement, Facebook agreed to take much greater oversight over how third-party developers use data on the Facebook platform. Facebook also agreed that its third-party developers would now have to certify annually that they were following Facebook policies and procedures. Add in the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice is mulling over a massive antitrust case against Facebook, as are state attorneys general from around the nation, and you can get a good idea of why Facebook has decided to step up its app suspension program.
At one time, Facebook might have been content simply to suspend the most egregious examples of data privacy abuse. Now, however, the app suspension initiative extends to just about any app that refuses to answer questions from Facebook as to how user data is utilized, shared and monetized. That might help to explain why the number of apps suspended now is measured in the “tens of thousands.” As they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
However, as Facebook was quick to point out in a blog post by the company’s VP of Product Partnerships, any app suspension as a result of the company’s privacy investigation does not necessarily imply wrongdoing or any sort of privacy violation. And, as Facebook further noted, it’s also the case that the app suspension initiative sometimes involved apps that were not yet “live” on the platform, and were still in beta testing. Finally, Facebook notes that, despite the massive number of apps impacted by the app suspension program, most of the problems can be traced back to about 400 developers. As a rough approximation, then, each of these 400 developers was responsible for creating about 25 apps that got caught up in the app suspension program.
Details of the app suspension program
Facebook says it assembled a team of more than 100 individuals – including software engineers, data scientists, attorneys and privacy experts – in order to root out the “bad actors” in the Facebook developer ecosystem. Given the millions of apps for Facebook, the company first started with the apps with greatest number of users and the apps with the access to the greatest amount of data. From there, the company worked down the list of apps, coming up with various clues, insights and patterns – what Facebook refers to as “signals” – to isolate smaller apps that might not be following Facebook’s revamped developer guidelines.
In the course of the ongoing privacy investigation, Facebook came across a few egregious examples of data abuse. In those cases, Facebook banned the apps outright from operating on the Facebook platform. Presumably, these apps would have functioned much along the lines of the infamous personality quiz app used by Cambridge Analytica to gain access to personal data for more than 87 million individuals. And, in the very worst cases, Facebook took legal action against the app developers. In the blog post about the privacy investigation, Facebook specifically called out several bad actors – including Rankwave, a South Korean data analytics company, an app called MyPersonality, two companies (LionMobi and JediMobi) that used Facebook apps to infect user phones with malware that could then be used to scrape personal data, and two developers in Ukraine who were using quiz apps to scrape user data on the social network.
More changes still needed for the Facebook ecosystem
As Facebook notes in its explanation of the privacy investigation, this is an “ongoing investigation,” and the company is still expanding its efforts to root out, purge, suspend or ban apps that take advantage of Facebook users by collecting large amounts of their personal data. Facebook, for example, is cutting down on the number of APIs available to app developers in the Facebook ecosystem. Facebook is also expanding the overall size of privacy investigation team, in order to make sure that it successfully investigates and enforces all potential privacy violations.
But does this go far enough? The fact that “tens of thousands” of apps were targeted for app suspension suggests that the level of rot and corruption in the Facebook developer ecosystem extends very far. At the same time, Facebook hasn’t exactly been open and transparent about all the apps suspected of improper data use. How is it possible that, back in May 2018, only 200 apps were targeted for app suspension? And that, even after the long difficult summer of 2018, when Facebook was looking to contain the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, only 400 apps were targeted for app suspension?
400 developers are responsible for creating most of the apps impacted by #Facebook app suspension program. #privacy #respectdata Click to Tweet
Clearly, Facebook is trying to put a positive spin on things. Most notably, the blog post announcing the app suspension initiative and the privacy investigation only used the word “privacy” one time. Instead of referring to this as a “data investigation” or a “privacy investigation” – as all the major media outlets did, Facebook preferred to use the term “app developer investigation.” Facebook also did nothing to suggest that users should be alarmed at all by the app suspension program. Just business as usual at Facebook, one is left to think. The $5 billion FTC fine clearly served up as a wakeup call for Silicon Valley. Let’s hope that CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to crack down on data and privacy abuses within the Facebook developer ecosystem.
FacebookSoftware DevelopmentThird Parties
Nicole Lindsey
Senior Correspondent at CPO Magazine
Nicole Lindsey is a journalist and writer for more than 10 years, focusing on the intersection of technology, innovation and privacy. She has a background in information technology and has worked with various software companies and tech startups on their public relations and communications initiatives.
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Reading: Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale
State of the Art Review
Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale
Jeffrey I. Mechanick ,
Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY
About Jeffrey I.
Derek Leroith
MD, PhD
Diabetes afflicts 382 million people worldwide, with increasing prevalence rates and adverse effects on health, well-being, and society in general. There are many drivers for the complex presentation of diabetes, including environmental and genetic/epigenetic factors.
The aim was to synthesize a core set of recommendations from information from 14 countries that can be used to optimize diabetes care on a global scale.
Information from 14 papers in this special issue of Annals of Global Health was reviewed, analyzed, and sorted to synthesize recommendations. PubMed was searched for relevant studies on diabetes and global health.
Key findings are as follows: (1) Population-based transitions distinguish region-specific diabetes care; (2) biological drivers for diabetes differ among various populations and need to be clarified scientifically; (3) principal resource availability determines quality-of-care metrics; and (4) governmental involvement, independent of economic barriers, improves the contextualization of diabetes care. Core recommendations are as follows: (1) Each nation should assess region-specific epidemiology, the scientific evidence base, and population-based transitions to establish risk-stratified guidelines for diagnosis and therapeutic interventions; (2) each nation should establish a public health imperative to provide tools and funding to successfully implement these guidelines; and (3) each nation should commit to education and research to optimize recommendations for a durable effect.
Systematic acquisition of information about diabetes care can be analyzed, extrapolated, and then used to provide a core set of actionable recommendations that may be further studied and implemented to improve diabetes care on a global scale.
Keywords: diabetes, recommendations, global, diabetes care, type 2 diabetes, type 1 diabetes, public policy
How to Cite: Mechanick, J.I. and Leroith, D., 2016. Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale. Annals of Global Health, 81(6), pp.874–883. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Published on 22 Apr 2016.
Mechanick, J.I. and Leroith, D., 2016. Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale. Annals of Global Health, 81(6), pp.874–883. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Mechanick JI, Leroith D. Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale. Annals of Global Health. 2016;81(6):874–83. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Mechanick, J. I., & Leroith, D. (2016). Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale. Annals of Global Health, 81(6), 874–883. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Mechanick JI and Leroith D, ‘Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale’ (2016) 81 Annals of Global Health 874 DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Mechanick, Jeffrey I., and Derek Leroith. 2016. “Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale”. Annals of Global Health 81 (6): 874–83. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Mechanick, Jeffrey I., and Derek Leroith. “Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale”. Annals of Global Health 81, no. 6 (2016): 874–83. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008
Mechanick, J. I.and D. Leroith. “Synthesis: Deriving a Core Set of Recommendations to Optimize Diabetes Care on a Global Scale”. Annals of Global Health, vol. 81, no. 6, 2016, pp. 874–83. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.aogh.2016.02.008


Tuesday wrap
Obama: Alinsky 24/7, war-monger fail, transparency fail, hearts Pelosi, hearts Hugo-Ayers-Dohrn, Sotomayor fail.
Mismanagement: ACORN ratted-out, Dems duck @ SEIU, throw the bums out, SEIU attacks GOP, boycott Whole Foods, union goons heart LatAm thugs, Teamsters strike.
International: Hugo advances New Prog agenda.
ACORN rat turns against corrupt bigs ... The attorney general’s office turned up the heat Monday on a national organization at the heart of a voter registration fraud investigation. Christopher Edwards, 33, the former Las Vegas field director for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, pleaded guilty to two gross misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensation for registration of voters. As part of a plea agreement, Edwards will testify against the other two defendants in the case — ACORN and its former regional director, Amy Busefink. The anti-poverty organization has local chapters in 100 cities across the country and national offices in New Orleans, New York and Washington. State investigators consider Edwards the mastermind of an illegal incentive program at the local ACORN office that, with the approval of Busefink and national ACORN officials, encouraged the collection of fraudulent voter registration forms during the 2008 campaign season. (lasvegassun.com)
Dems take refuge inside union HQs ... Democrat Tim Bishop found sanctuary from New York town hall protesters at his local SEIU office. Democrat Alan Grayson of Florida followed suit — he’s holding his town hall at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 606 Union Hall at 820 Virginia Drive. Union members will man the microphones. (michellemalkin.com)
"There Is Only the Fight" ... The first person to catch the virus was Sarah Palin, whose family also was infected, including, unforgivably, her children. Then it was Joe the Plumber, for asking a question. Next were the Mormons. Then it was Rush Limbaugh - who hit back. Next, tax-day "tea party" attendees were "tea bagged." Then there was a beauty contestant. And a Cambridge cop, too. And now we have town-hall "mobs." Smile ... you've been "community organized." When put on the media stage, these individuals and groups have been isolated for destruction for standing in the way of a resurgent modern progressive movement and for challenging its charismatic once-in-a-lifetime standard-bearer, Barack Obama. This is their time, we've been told. And no one is going to stand in the way. The origins of manufactured "politics of personal destruction" is Saul Alinsky, the mentor of a young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis on the late Chicago-based "progressive" street agitator titled, "There Is Only the Fight." Mr. Obama and his Fighting Illini, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have perfected Mr. Alinsky's techniques as laid out in his guidebook to political warfare, "Rules for Radicals." In plain language, we see how normal, decent and even private citizens become nationally vilified symbols overnight - all in the pursuit of progressive political victory. (online.wsj.com)
Obama's Prog War-Mongering Fail ... President Obama urged more than 5,000 veterans gathered here to brace for a daunting and perhaps bloody period ahead in Afghanistan, but told them he believes this war is "fundamental to the defense of our people." "As I said when I announced this strategy, there will be more difficult days ahead," the president said at the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "The insurgency in Afghanistan didn't just happen overnight, and we won't defeat it overnight. This will not be quick. This will not be easy." (washingtontimes.com)
Treat politicians the right way ... "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P. J. O'Rourke • Here is the antidote to Nationalized Health Care. It's our government and we should be able to do what is best for us. I propose that we throw the whole Congress and Senate out of office. Institute six (6) year term limits retroactively in the house and twelve (12) years in the Senate, and refuse to allow them to become bureaucrats by playing musical chairs ... no skipped second term. Take away their ability to vote themselves raises and retroactively take away their lifetime pensions, tie their raises to the cost of living. (rightsidenews.com)
Obama Transparency Fail ... It should hardly come as a surprise that once in office elected politicians forget about, abandon, or fudge on promises made to get elected. President Barack Obama’s record on transparency and openness, however, is more disappointing than most such instances. During the campaign, candidate Obama promised an unprecedented degree of openness and transparency, in contrast to the notoriously secretive Bush White House. Regarding health care, he said: “We’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN so the people can see who is making argument on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” Once in office, however, the administration quietly cut a deal with Big Pharma not to allow Medicare to grind drug companies for lower drug prices, in exchange for a promise to voluntarily reduce prescription prices by some $80 billion over 10 years. The news has trickled out and there’s some question whether the deal will be honored, but it wasn’t exactly shown on C-SPAN, nor was the White House the first to tell us. (cnjonline.com)
Obama-Pelosi Dems lied, health reform died ... To hear it from President Obama, the choice is simple: his plan or the status quo. He is wrong on both counts: he has no plan, and the Republicans do. In fact, Republicans have introduced meaningful health care reform for years. In the 1990s, Republicans tried to change Medicare into a defined-contribution model, more along the lines of the plan that federal employees enjoy. The Republican-controlled Congress passed such legislation in 1995, but President Clinton vetoed it. Seeing the future impacts of Medicare costs, President Clinton set up a bipartisan Medicare Commission headed by John Breaux (D-LA). The Breaux Commission came up with a similar plan in 1999. Democrats killed that too. (americanthinker.com)
Why Barack hearts Hugo: Ayers-Dohrn ... So it appears that Ayers' trip to celebrate Chávez's "Socialism of the 21st Century" was financed by someone or something other than the taxpayers who pay Ayers' $126,000 annual salary at a public university. Did Chávez pick up the tab? The complete results of several Freedom of Information Act requests to the University of Illinois about Ayers will be discussed at an August 20 conference in Washington, D.C. that I am convening. We are told that Ayers, a political associate of Barack Obama, has abandoned his activities as a communist terrorist, and that he and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, another former leader of the Weather Underground, are now "respectable" academics. Ayers is formally known as a "Distinguished Professor" of Education and "University Scholar," while Dohrn, a one-time booster of mass murderer Charles Manson, teaches law and discusses "human rights" issues at Northwestern University. But the Chávez regime that they are aiding and abetting is backed by terrorist Iran and directly implicated in the activities of the communist narco-terrorists in Colombia. Perhaps their continuing influence over Obama helps explain why the President has been so accommodating toward Chávez. (postchronicle.com)
Gitmo for U.S. health care patients? ... Democrats' health care legislation in the House of Representatives includes several provisions that deny patients the ability to challenge access and treatment decisions in federal court. As a result, space is being cleared at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility -- which critics called a "legal black hole" -- to accommodate American health care patients. (optoons.blogspot.com)
Anti-Prog Dem calls for limits on pols' power ... I am a Democrat and I am for healthcare reform. I am also against the legislation as it stands. A 1,000-page bill that only specialists can interpret is absurd. Posting it online, then "hiding" pages that require special software to read is being sleazy. Calling citizens who disagree with the legislation vile names shows the arrogance and disdain of the Democratic Party toward the general populace. I want reform. I want term limits and I want them now. Two terms and out. Change the health benefits of all members of Congress to Medicare. We the people no longer trust Congress. You gave billions of our dollars to companies that helped to cause this depression, then allowed them to pass out millions in bonuses. And now we are supposed to trust this legislation? (delmarvanow.com)
SEIU goons amp up hyper-partisanship ... The battle over health care reform led protesters to the headquarters of the Massachusetts Republican Party today. The group called on the GOP to stop supporting giant insurance companies over working families. Dozens of members of the service employees international union marched outside the Massachusetts Republican Party headquarters calling on the GOP to end its orchestrated campaign to stand in the way of health care reform. Harris Gruman/SEIU: “Republican activists are showing up at town hall meetings and being told 'be as disruptive as possible’.” (necn.com)
Boycott oppressive Whole Foods ... Here are the newest developments: 1) a demonstration at Whole Foods headquarters in Austin today. A couple dozen sign-carrying demostrators came out to agitate for the cause, bringing the boycott right to corporate headquaters. Some local media coverage will likely result. The other new development concerns the boycott Facebook page which is nearing 10,000 members. (openleft.com)
U.S. union goons aid LatAm socialist thugs ... Anti-democratic forces working to de-stabilize the new government in Honduras have attracted U.S. labor unions as allies in their cause. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), UNITE HERE, and the United Steelworkers (USW) have lined up behind Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega to express their support for Manuel Zelaya, the former president of Honduras (washingtonexaminer.com)
P2P Dirt: Shame on union political front-group ... Manhattan DA candidate Richard Aborn's campaign recently paid out $55,000 to the for-profit arm of the Working Families Party -- two months after he got its coveted endorsement, according to campaign-finance records. The news comes as good-government groups called for more scrutiny of Data & Field Services, which was founded two years ago to give the liberal party's preferred candidates the ability to buy its operation's political services. (nypost.com)
Militant Teamsters strikers plague Nevada ... Members of Teamsters Local 533 picketed across Northern Nevada on Monday after contract negotiations between Granite Construction Co. and a group of truck drivers broke down last week. Strikers were at Granite’s Nevada headquarters, 1900 Glendale Ave. in Sparks, and various Granite projects, including at Reno-Tahoe International Airport and along Interstate 80 at Floriston, Calif. (rgj.com)
Sotomayor backs murderer ... Justice Sonia Sotomayor is getting into the swing of being a member of the Supreme Court. Sotomayor made what appears to be her first public decision as a justice on Monday, voting unsuccessfully to delay the execution of an Ohio death row inmate. She voted along with the court's liberal bloc — Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — to stop the execution of Jason Getsy, whose execution is Tuesday. Getsy had asked the nation's high court Monday to allow him to challenge Ohio's lethal injection system as cruel and unusual punishment. The court's other five justices voted to deny the stay. Getsy, 33, was sentenced to die for shooting 66-year-old Ann Serafino in 1995 in Hubbard, Ohio, near Youngstown. (washingtonexaminer.com)
Global New Progs dis property rights ... Since last December when the sit-down at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago drew international attention, workers around the world have been employing that same militant tactic. In early August, police forcibly ended job occupations in three different countries. (workers.org)
Chávez advances Lat Am Progressive agenda ... Venezuelans erupted into protest this weekend in response to a new law that seeks to indoctrinate the nation's students in the "21st Century Socialism" of Hugo Chávez and eliminate religious instruction from the nation's schools. The law will also reportedly establish censorship of the press, prohibiting communications that "produce terror in children, incite to hatred, and offend the healthy values of the Venezuelan people and the mental and physical health of the population." Students peacefully protesting the new law were met with tear gas and water sprayed by the police, as well as rocks and sticks thrown by Chávez supporters, according to multiple media accounts. A group of reporters from opposition newspapers, also in a protest against the law, were assaulted and injured by pro-Chávez forces, sparking protests and demands for prosecution of the culprits. Chávez denounced the attack and says he is investigating. However, Venezuela's increasingly dictatorial president was unapologetic and defiant in his defense of the new Education Law. "We have to dismantle the system of capitalist bourgeois education. Now, the law is obligatory, university authorities that do not arise from a legitimate process may not be recognized. Enough with the dictatorship in the universities!" At the signing of the law on Saturday, Chávez said that it was necessary for "the profound revolution, the creation of new men and women, the socialist revolution," and added that "true democracy can only exist in socialism." (lifesitenews.com)


Isaiah Washington vs T.R. Knight
Filed By Bil Browning | January 20, 2007 6:19 PM | comments
Tags: coming out of the closet, entertainment news, Grey's Anatomy, homophobic behavior, Isaiah Washington, scandal, T.R. Knight, television
By now, you've heard about the dust up on the set of Grey's Anatomy. If not, here's the quick run-down: Isaiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey - two of the television show's main actors - had a fight on the set. During the fight Washington referred to T.R. Knight, another actor on the show, as a "faggot." Minor mayhem ensued. Knight ended up coming out of the closet and life went on.
Then came the Golden Globes. Speaking to the press, Washington denied that he had ever said the slur with "No, I did not call T.R. a faggot. Never happened, never happened." Since the cast of the show was in attendance (They won an award for Best Drama.), Washington's lie was quickly called, er, to the carpet. Co-star Katherine Heigl was visibly disturbed and spoke to Access Hollywood about the incident. She confirmed that it had gone down as reported and how upset she was that Washington had used "faggot" again to try to deny the original incident.
A couple days later, T.R. Knight turned up on Ellen where he also confirmed that Washington had used the slur. He gave an eloquent and moving interview about coming out and how the slur had made him feel. (You can see the interview after the jump to the main entry.)
Now a petition is going around the net asking ABC to fire Washington for - wait for it - lying about saying "faggot" while saying "faggot" again. Maybe I'm missing something here...
I don't deny that getting called a "faggot" is hurtful. It is. But perhaps this brouhaha should have erupted when the incident first happened. It seems to me that Washington's second mistake was lying. I could care less about him saying the F word the second time - he was just referencing his first "non"-statement. The second incident isn't what links him to Mel Gibson and Michael Richards' recent outbursts - it was his first one.
Maybe they should have just fired him the first time when he said in anger - not out of a need to cover his ass.