Celebrate Geek Pride Day Belatedly!

Yesterday, May 25, was Geek Pride Day, and I confess with shame that I was remiss in alerting us to the need to celebrate. The manifesto is as follows (via the Wikipedia entry linked above):

Rights:

1. The right to be even nerdier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not have a significant other and to be a virgin.
4. The right to not like football or any other sport.
5. The right to associate with other nerds.
6. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
7. The right to have all the nerdy friends that you want.
8. The right to not be “in-style.”
9. The right to be overweight and have poor eyesight.
10. The right to show off your nerdiness.
11. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

1. Be a nerd, no matter what.
2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something nerdy, you must give your opinion.
4. Save any and all nerdy things you have.
5. Do everything you can to show off your nerdy stuff as though it were a “museum of nerdiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized nerd. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every nerdy book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to nerddom.
10. Befriend any person or persons bearing any physical similarities to comic book or sci-fi figures.
11. Try to take over the world!

No. 1 Ladies Detective to be No. 1 TV Star?

When Mma Ramotswe hit the literary scene as the No. 1 Ladies Detective, she made quite a splash and it wasn’t just her “traditional build”. Alexander McCall Smith, a native of what is now Zimbabwe, has managed to create a credible African female character – not an easy task. McCall Smith clearly knows his subject matter well and takes great care to create an Africa that most of his readers don’t know exists: peaceful, charming, modern, traditional and most of all personal.

As someone who lives in the part of the world that McCall Smith writes about, it’s the balance of the modern and the traditional that is so hard to get right in contemporary Africa. Where else in the world could you drive past a mud hut with a pickup in the driveway and a satellite tv dish on the roof?

It’s this delicate balance that McCall seems to hit so squarely on the head.

In a similarly subtle vein, the mysteries that arrive on the doorstep of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency are gentle and nonviolent, caught somewhere between where Africa has been and where she’s going, but also cutting to the heart of what makes us all human: love, jealously, lust, greed and compassion.

What the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency doesn’t have much of is action.

Not entirely unlike Africa herself, McCall Smith’s storyline are more talk than action, with characters focusing on reviewing their interactions with one another far more than solving the mysteries at hand. In fact, it is usually this pondering of life and humanity that leads our heroine, Mma Ramotswe, to her mystery’s solution. In turn, McCall Smith’s serial mysteries have a somewhat formulaic pattern, not entirely unlike the way most of us would think of everyday life.

As Mma Ramotswe moves from our imaginations to HBO, it will be a challenge to break away from McCall Smith’s redundant tendencies and continue to capture a viewer who wants to see something different each week.

If there’s one thing the series should keep coming back to, it’s the stunning visual of Botswana’s clear open sky and endless veld.

-posted by bodyinmotion

The little law that would make liberals love sales taxes

I don’t know about you, but the unequal distribution of wealth doesn’t actually bother me at all. What bothers me is the unequal distribution of consumption.

In other words, I don’t care about your paycheck. If you’re just going to put it in the bank, knock yourself out; I hear they need the money. I sure know my own employer could use a decent loan right now.

No, the inequality I care about is practical: unequal distribution of yachts, yoga classes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs concert tickets.

That’s why I support revenue-neutral sales tax reform to include the taxation of services. It’d be the first step towards a fairer, more efficient tax system that penalizes what we don’t need — stuff — instead of what we do need — work.

Star TrekWarsThulhu

Zachary Quinto's Spock turns on the geek sex appeal.

If you haven’t yet seen the new Star Trek movie, then you obviously weren’t contributing to its staggering $148 million box-office weekend worldwide. Reaching out to old fans and new recruits alike, the film offers not only a fascinating insight into how one resumes control over a powerful franchise on the big screen, but also how saturated with dedicated generic references such franchise films have become. Star Trek (2009) is, according to a close friend of mine who runs a comic book shop, unabashed “geek porn:” an astonishing array of references, insinuations, cool gadgets and eye candy made specifically for geeks to feel, well, awesomely sexy. I am more of the opinion that it’s “geek foreplay” – here’s why:

****SPOILERS ALERT!! SEE THE MOVIE OR BE… UM, SPOILED?***

Blogroll Addition: Jetson Green

I admit it, I have a bit of a… thing… for the modern green architecture movement. I spent the beginning of this week at home sick, unable to do anything but lie on the couch, and as a result I ended up watching a lot of HGTV. Perhaps too much. But they have some fascinating shows about building green! I’ve become fascinated with the show “Extreme Living,” which features truly gorgeous green homes that very, very lucky people actually get to live in.

Anyway, all that TV-watching had me primed for yesterday, when I spotted a press release about the Clayton Homes pre-fab i-house. The press release only had one picture, though, and I wanted more, so off to Google I went, which led me to this article at Jetson Green,* which indeed has much better pictures. It also has very distracting links to other articles… and that is how I lost an entire day to browsing their archive and all the attendant links therefrom. An entire, very enjoyable day. An excellent way to get addicted to their offerings is their compiled list of 40 Innovative Green Homes of 2008.

So there you go. I figured it was only my duty to pass on this excellent source of distraction to all of you, so I will now add Jetson Green to the blogroll, and you may visit it as often as you wish.

*Having now revisited the site, I have also discovered that the Clayton Homes virtual tour of the i-house is back up. It appeared to have collapsed yesterday under the weight of all the attention various news sources turned on it.

The Secret in the Old Attic–Another Nancy Drew Case of the Changing Editions

Hello and welcome to another chapter-by-chapter analysis of the dueling editions. In the past, I have done this with The Bungalow Mystery and The Clue of the Leaning Chimney.

Today we are examining the differences between the original 1944 edition of Nancy Drew: The Secret in the Old Attic and the 1970 rewrite. Excitingly, there are big differences between the two! Many differences occur because of the passage in time. In 1970, it’s a bit of stretch for an elderly, but still active, gentleman to be so old that he fought in WWI. Not so in 1944. Also, a soldier who recently died in 1944 probably died in WWII. You also see things like rayon getting switched to poly and more phones in the 1970 edition.

Another thing that changed is race. In 1944, the house with the old attic has “old slave quarters” and Bess utters a horrible line idealizing happy slaves. All this is cut in the new edition. Additionally, the maid, Effie, speaks in a poor, lower class dialect in 1944. In 1970, she speaks “normally.” Effie’s race is never mentioned though.

Overall, 1970 is just much tighter. 1944 tends to have a lot of cliff-hanger scary chapter endings that are explained away as really being nothing in the first few sentences of the next chapter. The 1970 version cuts most of this out. Thankfully.

The biggest change is that 1944 contains a mini-mystery of a romantic subplot with Nancy and Ned. (Ned didn’t ask her to the dance! And some icky guy is really putting the pressure on Nancy to go to the dance with him instead.) This entire subplot is cut from the current edition, which is sad. It was my favorite part of the story and it was rather refreshing to see Nancy have some doubts, even though you knew it would all work out in the end. For a deeper comparison, check out the chapter-by-chapter play-by-play below the jump!

The problems of the Kindle

Ah Kindle, how the literati hate you, or sing your praises. Two years ago, when the first version was released, Dana posted about them and I made my feelings clear in the comments section. Well, it’s been a few year and we now have Kindle 2.0. My feelings haven softened, but not really changed.

I do not really want a Kindle at the moment for a few reason:

1. They are expensive. Do you know how many books I can buy with that money?

2. There’s not (yet) a mechanism yet for sharing Kindle books. If I buy a Kindle book, I can’t loan it to my friends and I can’t check out a Kindle book from the library. (I can check out other e-books from the library–can I read these on my Kindle? I don’t know. Do you?)

3. I fear reading a Kindle in the bathtub, which is the best place to read books ever.

4. Books smell good. And they’re pretty as objects.

5. Do they have an optional back light yet? While I do like that there isn’t one there by default, it would nice to have one so you can read in the dark.

6. Seriously dude, expensive.

I think some of these objections will fall away with later versions– price will fall, I’m sure we’ll figure lending out…

BUT! Over at Marginal Revolution today, another problem presents itself that I never thought of–

We can’t see what you’re reading, and you can’t signal things with what you’re reading.

Sacred Harmonizing with the Subway

This morning on my way to work, I caught a story on NPR about the Tibetan Gyuto monks: Gyuto Monks: Ancient Practice, Modern Sound. The excuse for the story was that there is a new CD being released of their chants that more accurately reproduces the sound of what a full choir would have been like. Really, though, most of the story was about how these monks and their overtone (or throat) singing came to the attention of the outside world. The part I particularly liked was near the end, when they interviewed another monk who has already become famous as a singer in the US:

One of the first Tibetan monks to make his name in the West as a musician was Nawang Khechog, who was nominated for a Grammy in 2001. He says these chants are among the most secret and sacred of Tibetan Buddhism — that’s why they’re so heavily layered and deliberately hard to understand.

“Very secret practice,” Khechog says. “Secret as well as sacred … So, therefore, to hide the words, in the general public, it’s disguised in that kind of multitonic sound.”

[...] Khechog says that when he used to live in New York, he would get funny looks when he tried to harmonize with the subway trains.

“I start the chant, and then suddenly the train’s gone,” Khechog says, “and I’m still chanting that, and suddenly, few people standing there, and they think, ‘What’s going on,’ you know?”

I think it would be awesome to run across someone trying to harmonize with a subway train. Too bad there really isn’t any public transportation where I live.

Anyway, if you want to hear some of the singing, there’s a bit in the audio version of the NPR story, and also some longer pieces in the sidebar links on the article page, one of which I’m listening to right now. So there you go, my cool thing of the day.

-posted by Dana

National Grammar Day

Not to have the blog taken over by short announcements of amusing geek holidays, but again, this one was too good to pass up. Today, March 4, is National Grammar Day! Here are some suggestions from the organizers on how to celebrate:

Speak well! Write well! And on March 4, march forth and spread the word. We want people to think about language and how it can be used best.

Some of our members are planning Good-Grammar Potlucks at their offices. What do you serve at good-grammar potlucks? High-fiber foods, of course. They’re good for the colon. Afterward, at happy hour, we recommend the Grammartini. (Recipes are here.)

Visit their website for good grammar tips and the bad grammar hall of fame.

Feel free to leave a comment with any particularly heinous examples of bad grammar you notice today!

Square Root Day

For any of our readers who haven’t looked too closely at their calendars today, I feel it is my duty to point out that today is a very important Geek Holiday: Square Root Day.

This is, of course, a rare and precious holiday. The last one was 5 years ago, and the next one will not be for another 7 years. Feel free to share in the comments how you celebrated/plan to celebrate.