Basically, Evolution from Space in a glossy coffee-table format with less text and more pictures.
I'm not quite sure why, but where I found EvolutiBasically, Evolution from Space in a glossy coffee-table format with less text and more pictures.
I'm not quite sure why, but where I found Evolution from Space amusing this one depressed the hell out of me. Perhaps it was the way in which Fred Hoyle, once a great astrophysicist and now a delusional clown, was being manipulated by Dorling Kindersley to make a few quick bucks. All the same, the book is not entirely without value. If you're wondering how seriously you should take recently published pop science from elderly academics generally disparaged by their peers, it's possible that it may suggest some answers....more
After hearing various passages from Mangeclous in my impromptu translation, Not wondered what could have persuaded a Jewish author in 1938 to write a After hearing various passages from Mangeclous in my impromptu translation, Not wondered what could have persuaded a Jewish author in 1938 to write a comic, at first glance vaguely antisemitic novel. Well, as far as I can reconstruct it:
The letters from his editor have become increasingly insistent, he needs to finish. So much to do. He picks up the stack of typescript on his left, selects a page at random, shakes his head. Has he gone too far? Is humour appropriate at a moment like this? But then, is humour ever appropriate? It is humour precisely because it is inappropriate, something his people know very well. He rereads chapter XXXV, the banquet at the Ritz, his comically exaggerated country bumpkin Jews, arrived in cosmopolitan Geneva, hungry for food, money and attention, an object of derision for the Swiss, but still somehow lovable.
Are they lovable or just grotesque? He isn't sure himself, feels ashamed that maybe he is betraying his family by turning them into a circus sideshow. But surely they will understand when they see how he has portrayed the Christians. How he loathes their disgusting hypocrisy, the way they pervert the simple teachings of Jesus, another poor misunderstood Jew, how they talk about the Kingdom of God while they treat their employees like slaves and eagerly invest in companies that manufacture artillery shells and poison gas. He knows what is coming, as do his hapless coreligionists. But they are not yet aware that they know and make pitiful jokes about Hitler and Mussolini, while he is fully conscious of the horror soon to be unleashed on the world.
What to do? Kill himself? Ah, not yet, there will be time later. For now, find another beautiful woman to seduce. It is too easy, they are all dazzled by his looks, his charm, his effortless command of the French language, they do not even put up token resistance. Still, better than the alternative. Tomorrow he will arrange another encounter with his idiot colleague's wife.
Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this presBe it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—
1 Polling days for parliamentary general elections
(1) This section applies for the purposes of the Timetable in rule 1 in Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983 and is subject to section 2.
(2) The polling day for the next parliamentary general election after the passing of this Act is to be 7 May 2015.
(3) The polling day for each subsequent parliamentary general election is to be the first Thursday in May in the fifth calendar year following that in which the polling day for the previous parliamentary general election fell.
(4) But, if the polling day for the previous parliamentary general election— (a) was appointed under section 2(7), and (b) in the calendar year in which it fell, fell before the first Thursday in May,subsection (3) has effect as if for “fifth” there were substituted “fourth”.
(5) The Prime Minister may by order made by statutory instrument provide that the polling day for a parliamentary general election in a specified calendar year is to be later than the day determined under subsection (2) or (3), but not more than two months later.
(6) A statutory instrument containing an order under subsection (5) may not be made unless a draft has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.
(7) The draft laid before Parliament must be accompanied by a statement setting out the Prime Minister’s reasons for proposing the change in the polling day.
2 Early parliamentary general elections
(1) An early parliamentary general election is to take place if— (a) the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (2), and (b) if the motion is passed on a division, the number of members who vote in favour of the motion is a number equal to or greater than two thirds of the number of seats in the House (including vacant seats).
(2) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (1)(a) is— “That there shall be an early parliamentary general election.”
(3) An early parliamentary general election is also to take place if— (a) the House of Commons passes a motion in the form set out in subsection (4), and (b) the period of 14 days after the day on which that motion is passed ends without the House passing a motion in the form set out in subsection (5).
(4) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (3)(a) is— “That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.”
(5) The form of motion for the purposes of subsection (3)(b) is— “That this House has confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.”
(6) Subsection (7) applies for the purposes of the Timetable in rule 1 in Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983.
(7) If a parliamentary general election is to take place as provided for by subsection (1) or (3), the polling day for the election is to be the day appointed by Her Majesty by proclamation on the recommendation of the Prime Minister (and, accordingly, the appointed day replaces the day which would otherwise have been the polling day for the next election determined under section 1).
(8) Notwithstanding the provisions of (1)(b) above, an early parliamentary general election is to take place if— (a) The Leader of the Opposition is a big girl's blouse, or (b) A girly swot, or (c) Frit....more
Not wants it to be known that she had nothing to do with this and opposed it at every turn: but for the benefit of people who prefer dirty Amazon-flavNot wants it to be known that she had nothing to do with this and opposed it at every turn: but for the benefit of people who prefer dirty Amazon-flavored bytes to good honest paper, I reluctantly inform the world that The New Adventures of Socrates is now also available in Kindle format.
I'm sorry. I'm aware that I shouldn't be using all this high-pressure salesmanship on you, but sometimes I just can't stop myself. ...more
"So who is this Manny Rayner then? He’s Praise for The New Adventures of Socrates
"Oh god. Not again." - Warwick
"Leibnitz vomits, Kant faints." - Roy L
"So who is this Manny Rayner then? He’s the new Plato? I bet he couldn’t philosophise his way out of a paper bag if it was open at both ends." - Paul B
"Does The New Adventures of Socrates teach you ... Utilitarianism ... or ... Epicureanism ... or ... Stoicism ... ? Nope." - Manuel
"... false and bad and useless ..." - Matt
"Having read Manny’s ... book ... I feel ... no ... interest in Plato or Socrates." - MJ
"... flounders from beginning to end and admits ... he doesn’t really have a clue about the subjects covered." - Glenn R
"I can honestly say this book was worth every one of the zero pence I spent on it." - Cecily
"... shouldn't be taken seriously ..." - Fionnuala
"... prompted this ... reader ... to ... doze off for a few hours." - Zoheb
"Enough to cause a person to give up thinking" - Alfred H
"Stick with the originals ... you will learn far more." - John W
"Burn the darned book!" - Nandakishore
"Perverted, sick, and disgusting." - AutoRayner
"No vampires, no sex." - Sookie
"Ugggh." - notgettingenough
"Trump is never once mentioned." - Carol _________________________
I submitted the manuscript for The New Adventures of Socrates to a prominent academic publisher; a couple of weeks later I received a curt note from the relevant editor, a moderately well-known philosopher, saying that the book was in all respects entirely unsuitable for publication. On the other hand, several Goodreaders, possessed, no doubt, of the deplorable lack of taste that so characterises this site, told me that some of the extracts I'd posted had made them laugh hysterically. It was hard to weigh up these competing factors, but after mature consideration - since the age of twelve, I have considered that maturity is one of my best features - I decided what the hell, I would publish it anyway.
The result, dear friends, you see before you. In the interests of full disclosure, I reluctantly admit that the philosophy editor was right. Rather than buying this travesty, you should read Plato's actual dialogues, if at all possible in the original Greek. But if you're too lazy to do that, or you just want a few cheap metaphysical thrills, then I suppose it's better than nothing. There. You can't say you weren't warned....more
I'm just going to have to spell this out: the author is a pedophile. There's no reasonable doubt about it.
Charmides, an early volume in the very populI'm just going to have to spell this out: the author is a pedophile. There's no reasonable doubt about it.
Charmides, an early volume in the very popular Socrates series, is a particularly clear case. There's a kind of vague plot, but basically it's not much more a step-by-step manual in the art of seducing young boys with smooth talk about epistemology, the relationship between philosophy and science, and the nature of virtue. The fact that Socrates is a role model to many overimpressionable men only makes it worse.
No doubt Goodreads will delete my review. But someone had to say it. ...more
2015 wasn't a very good reading year (too much software development), but I did finally manage to achieve one of my long-term goals and do something a2015 wasn't a very good reading year (too much software development), but I did finally manage to achieve one of my long-term goals and do something about improving my German. It's still pretty basic, but I've now reached the point of being able to appreciate books for younger teens. Hopefully I'll progress to grown-up literature during 2016! But even at the level I'm at now, I found things to read which were worth all the trouble. Krabat, Das doppelte Lottchen and Momo were all fantastic novels that I'd barely even heard of before, and I discovered to my delight that Swedish children's books are nearly as good in German; I particularly loved Madita and Karlsson vom Dach. A huge thank you to all my German Goodreads friends, particularly Matt, for being so kind and patient about explaining things to someone who a few months ago was still thinking of their language as an odd dialect of Swedish!
If you still haven't got round to reading Houellebecq's Soumission, it's a lot of fun. And, last but definitely not least, Pettersson's Ut og stjæle hester is an extraordinary novel which somehow hasn't had time to become famous yet. Trust me, it will.
This recent book has annoyed a good number of people; I started off feeling that way, but by the end I was simply bemused. Curtis White, a 60-somethinThis recent book has annoyed a good number of people; I started off feeling that way, but by the end I was simply bemused. Curtis White, a 60-something professor of English, decides to write a critique of modern science despite knowing absolutely nothing about it. He reads a few pop science bestsellers, then wades right in and spends a couple of hundred pages telling the scientists how they've got everything wrong; his main targets are the New Atheists (Dawkins's The God Delusion, Hitchen's God is Not Great, Krauss's A Universe from Nothing) and some popular writers on neuroscience, of whom the most visible is the disgraced Jonah Lehrer. He has numerous complaints, but the one he keeps coming back to is that modern science, to its great loss, has ignored the tradition of post-Kantian German philosophy, which he claims has been destroyed by analytical philosophy.
Well, I hardly know where to start, but here are a couple of the more obvious points that occurred to me. First of all, White seems like an intelligent and cultured man, so why on Earth does he think he can gain even a superficial understanding of what science is about from this absurd reading-list? A scientist might just as well write a critique of literature after having completed Harry Potter, Twilight and the first half of Macbeth. Two of the authors that White takes most to task (Hitchens and Lehrer) aren't even scientists.
Second, if White ever does get around to reading some real science, he will find that the central discoveries of 20th century physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, were made by Germans who were very familiar with the philosophical tradition he keeps referring to and integrally based their work on it. A book that might be helpful to consult in this context is Weyl's Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science; another more recent one is Philosophie de la science contemporaine, by Omnès.
It would be easy to go on, but why bother? Professor White, you can do better than this. C- ...more
The author of this book is a serial liar and fantasist, who made a great deal of money out of her fabrications but is having her butt sued off in courThe author of this book is a serial liar and fantasist, who made a great deal of money out of her fabrications but is having her butt sued off in court. For recent details, check e.g. this page....more
Available in hyperlinked PDF form from this Lulu page for $0.99. The Creative Commons license means you're legally allowed to make copies and [image]
Available in hyperlinked PDF form from this Lulu page for $0.99. The Creative Commons license means you're legally allowed to make copies and share it with your friends.
For old-fashioned people who like real books, I hear rather specific rumors that a print version will soon be available. ________________________________
A few things that keep coming up:
- You can now get free copies from several places. The book's home page gives you one link; if that doesn't work for some reason, just look at the other reviews and you'll soon find something.
- Some people say it doesn't display well on a Kindle. If it helps, Acrobat, Chrome and Firefox all seem to work fine.
- If you could let me know about any typos you might have found, I promise to pass them on to G.R. Reader. She's trying to clean up the manuscript as much as possible before releasing the print edition. ________________________________
Someone is carrying out a downvoting campaign against Off-Topic. If you look at the one-star reviews, you'll see that most of them come from obvious sockpuppets; we've now got at least 60 of them. There is a discussion about it here. The books on the sockpuppets' shelves appear to suggest that the people behind them are linked to STGRB, but it's also possible that someone is trying to frame them.
Just for the hell of it, I tried adding some of my own sockpuppets to fight on the other side. You may want to check out the complicated lives of pro-off-topic-sockpuppet1 and his friends. ________________________________
Goodreads have shown class by deleting the sockpuppets used in the downvoting campaign. Prooftopicsockpuppets 1-5 have responded by removing their ratings, but still remain. (Prooftopicsockpuppet1, in particular, is very proud of his review of 100 Sexy Women and hopes that more people will read it). 6-15 have quietly committed suicide. ________________________________
For people wondering why the book is no longer available on Lulu, G.R, Reader tells me that she received the following message yesterday from them:
Dear Account Holder: We are in receipt of a claim that statements made in your book 14204524 and 14196616 "Off-Topic: The Story of an Internet Revolt" may infringe someone's privacy rights and/or be defamatory. We are not making a judgment as to the merits of this claim, but since a dispute exists, we must remove the book from availability through Lulu and its distribution channels. For more information on the terms and conditions of publishing through Lulu.com please review our Membership Agreement at http://www.lulu.com/about/legal. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance. Regards, Questionable Content Team Lulu.com
Since no further details were provided, she was rather curious to know who had so taken exception to her book. She was consequently grateful to get a mail from a Goodreads friend this morning pointing her to this page.
How thoughtful of Mr. Carufel to tell the whole Internet about what he'd done! ________________________________
Further update. Someone who knows more about publishing and trademark law than I do commented that they were very surprised by this story. As they point out:
Carufel's name is not a registered trademark (yes, I checked). Even if it was, you could refer to it. Otherwise, the media would never mention trademarked company names, like Coca Cola and Google. He can't copyright his name. How silly! I'm shocked he calls himself an author yet doesn't appear to understand trademarks or copyrights. I'm equally shocked that Lulu rips books down without at least doing an initial, brief investigation.
Curioser and curioser. Is it really the case that Lulu will pull any book in response to any complaint, no matter how obviously frivolous? One can see this leading to various kinds of problems for them. Or is there more to it? G.R. Reader has still not received any response to the query she sent Lulu, asking for clarification. ________________________________
Off-Topic is now listed on Google Books! Though I was evidently not as quick as Mr. Carufel to discover this. It's nice to see that he's taking such an interest. ________________________________
The print edition is now out. G.R. Reader has uploaded the PDF version to Goodreads, where it's available for free download from the book's homepage. The uploaded PDF is exactly the same as the print edition, except that the hyperlinks are live. ________________________________
I just did a Google search on the title of this book and got a startling 104,000 hits. More famous than I'd expected!
[image] ________________________________
My friend Geraldine R. Reader reminds me that the first anniversary of the publication of this book is coming up soon, and suggests that November 2 be henceforth celebrated as Off-Topic Day. I applaud this initiative, and am helping her prepare her off-topic review. We hope other people will join us. ________________________________
[June 19, 2015]
Geraldine asks me to post the following mail, which she received earlier today:
Every weekday we pick one Creative Commons or free licensed ebook to promote. "Off Topic: The Story Of An Internet Revolt" is our selection for the today.
Unglue.it is a website dedicated to the development of sustainable funding and distribution for Creative Commons and other freely licensed books. We are compiling a comprehensive catalog of these books while offering authors and publishers new ways to make their efforts sustainable. We recently launched "Thanks for Ungluing" which lets creators ask readers for support for free works on our download link pages and from inside the books.
Over the last few days, there have been extensive protests concerning the new Goodreads policy, which is widely interWhy I Refuse to Read David Irving
Over the last few days, there have been extensive protests concerning the new Goodreads policy, which is widely interpreted to mean that people who post reviews criticizing authors are liable to have them deleted. The most visible of these protests is Mike's review of Mein Kampf, where Mike calls Adolf Hitler a dick and says he refuses to read his book. The review has already attracted more than 300 votes and 150 comments.
We all know that Hitler was a monster and that Mein Kampf is one of the most hateful and dangerous books ever written. Mike's warning is funny because it is so obviously superfluous. But there are other cases where the truth is not quite as generally known, and this is one of them. David Irving was famously found guilty of being a Holocaust denier in a high-profile trial which bankrupted him. He was later sentenced to three years in prison by an Austrian court on charges of "trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust". If you look at the Wikipedia article on Irving, you will find the following quote from Christopher Browning, a historian who is an expert on the Holocaust:
Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject. All of them are completely worthless as history, because Irving cannot be trusted anywhere, in any of them, to give a reliable account of what he is talking or writing about. ... if we mean by historian someone who is concerned to discover the truth about the past, and to give as accurate a representation of it as possible, then Irving is not a historian.
The same article contains interesting material about this book, The Destruction of Dresden, which was written before Irving's views on the Holocaust became widely known and became a bestseller. Again, I quote:
In the first edition, Irving's estimates for deaths in Dresden were between 100,000 and 250,000 -- notably higher than most previously published figures. These figures became authoritative and widely accepted in many standard reference works. In later editions of the book over the next three decades, he gradually adjusted the figure downwards to 50,000-100,000. According to the evidence introduced by Richard J. Evans at the libel trial of Deborah Lipstadt in 2000, Irving based his estimates of the dead of Dresden on the word of one individual who provided no supporting documentation, used forged documents, and described one witness who was a urologist as Dresden's Deputy Chief Medical Officer. The doctor has since complained about being misidentified by Irving, and further, was only reporting rumours about the death toll. Today, casualties at Dresden are estimated as 22,700-25,000 dead.
Yet looking at the five reviews here on Goodreads, I see that four of them uncritically accept Irving's account and praise the book.
If I were willing to spend several months or years of my life on the task, I could do my own digging around and try to come to an independent conclusion. I am unlikely to do this; it seems to me, just on the basis of the few articles I have read, that the facts are pretty clear. Irving has been repeatedly unmasked as a Nazi sympathizer and a serial liar. He has tried to defend himself against these charges in court, and he has failed miserably. Yet, somehow, people are not as aware of his true nature as they should be.
I do not see anything unethical about posting this negative review of Irving, and it may conceivably have some value in making unsuspecting people more critical of his book. I am concerned about Goodreads policies which may lead to reviews of this kind being deleted without warning. They strike me as utterly wrong, and moreover as yet another example of how modern technology distances us from the consequences of our actions. If people wrote their reviews on paper and put them into a real, physical library, I am sure that the Goodreads administrators would be very reluctant to pull them down from shelves and burn them. When you can get rid of a piece of writing just by clicking on a few links, there's a temptation to believe that it's less serious. But it isn't. It's just less clear what you've done.
I am absolutely against book-burning in all its forms. I do not want David Irving's books burned, or even Mein Kampf. But I do want people to know that the authors of these books are racist liars, and I, at least, refuse to read them. _____________________________________
I would appreciate it if AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE flagged this review, which is a crystal-clear violation of the Terms of Use. More background here.
More or less on impulse, we went on a short trip today to see the Musée Suisse du Jeu in La Tour-de-Peilz. The setting is extraordinarily charming: itMore or less on impulse, we went on a short trip today to see the Musée Suisse du Jeu in La Tour-de-Peilz. The setting is extraordinarily charming: it's an old castle on the shore of Lake Léman, not far from Montreux.
[image]
Our excuse for visiting was a simultaneous Go exhibition being given by a German 3 Dan player. I hadn't played for a couple of years, so I asked for a three stone handicap and after many vicissitudes finally managed to win the game. The German guy was a good sport about it, considering that my position had been close to lost at one stage, and we spent a while chatting about Go-related trivia after the game.
He had a bunch of interesting anecdotes, the best of which related to the infamous Little Red Book. I already knew that Mao had been a keen Go player in his time. What I hadn't heard was that he apparently used Go metaphors and comparisons quite frequently. The translators had however all decided that a Western audience wasn't going to understand any of that stuff, so they chose to render them as chess terms instead. Since Go and chess are fundamentally different games, and many Go concepts have no chess counterpart, the result is often utterly nonsensical.
This seemed almost too good to be true, and I was amazed I'd never heard the story before... but he seemed very sure of his sources, and among other things claimed to speak decent Chinese. Can anyone confirm or deny it? ...more
I don't actually intend to read this book, just to share the following passage from Volume 4 of Kasparov's My Great Predecessors. Bobby Fischer and SaI don't actually intend to read this book, just to share the following passage from Volume 4 of Kasparov's My Great Predecessors. Bobby Fischer and Samuel Reshevsky at the 1970 Interzonal in Palma de Mallorca:
During the tournament they could sometimes be seen, leisurely walking along, peacefully chatting, little Sammy and tall Fischer. An idyllic picture: an orthodox Jew and an extremist who praised Mein Kampf. Later Reshevsky explained: 'He has his views, I have my views. It didn't bother me. I tried to make him see the light. I didn't succeed, but I tried.'
One of the most extraordinary things about Fischer was that almost all his colleagues in the chess world genuinely liked and respected him. He was a unique person. ...more
My favorite fantasy novel written by a serial rapist and child-abuser. Now that I think about it, I'm interested to remember that the person who recomMy favorite fantasy novel written by a serial rapist and child-abuser. Now that I think about it, I'm interested to remember that the person who recommended it to me was also a big fan of Nietzsche....more
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