So we riffle through the car insurance and I'm not listed as a driver. Whoops. Which means we have to get that done before I can schedule my drive test. :-p Oh well, it looks like a good day for practicing parallel parking, since I'm not seeing the 70 mph winds (plus tumbleweed) attested earlier this week (including a street blocked off because it was literally filled with tumbleweed).

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Norwescon: They moved the round-robin back an hour! I can still be on the panel on Pitfalls of Language Creation with McKillip and Gregory Gadow! W00t!...hiding under the bed now. Wait, we don't have a bed. Whoops.

Also? Saltines with cream cheese and honey? Mmm.

It would be depressing to think about how I wrote 2,000 words of essay last night but couldn't manage the same for fiction if I weren't so pleased with having done the essay. To be fair, there's a decent amount of quoted text (which probably needs to be trimmed yet further).

In theory, you're supposed to outline stuff before writing. In practice, I hate outlines. I mean, I've done them. One of the useful pieces of advice I got during 20th Century History IBS was that if you're running out of time, you should at least sketch out an outline of your essay-response and its major points so they can see where you were going. (The joys of partial credit?)

I like writing essays, overall; there have been times when I had assignments that suck, but the process of taking thoughts and textual evidence and putting them into a framework that makes sense...it's deeply soothing. (Maybe "soothing" isn't quite the correct word.) Unless I'm really wrestling with an idea, I usually start with my thesis and a general idea of my arguments--an outline in my head, you might say--and write the thing on the fly, shuffling paragraphs and adding/dropping transitions as necessary. Often, though not always, the thesis will shift somewhat during the course of writing, as I re-engage with the source material, and that's fine. The final product needs to hang together; the reader doesn't care what the mutable rough/partial drafts looked like. (Ditto math. I cling to the belief that the concept of "rough draft" is extremely useful for unconfident math students. Probably some confident ones, too.) Chunking is useful for longer papers/essays with multiple sources.

The Perilous Gard essay came together in a matter of days in terms of the actual writing. I don't know if it's really fair to say that, though. First, I had a pretty clear idea of the themes I was going to explore; second, the book itself has an extremely coherent framework in this regard. (Digging out the nuances was illuminating for myself, if no one else, so it's a win-win situation. Yes, I'll probably try to see if some webzine or other wants it, but if not, no big deal; I've gotten the important thing out of it. Mind you, a little pocket money is always welcome.)

Third, this is a book I've read at least a half-dozen times starting from 3rd or 4th grade. I imprinted on it; for a while I was writing weird little rip-offs of this mashed together with Victorian fairytales (e.g. "The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde") and spork knows what else. There are certainly people who hang around this corner of LJ-land who are more intimately familiar with the book, but that being said, it's one of the (fiction) books with which I'm most intimately familiar. This, and the fact that the book is relatively short :-p, makes it relatively easy to write about. Pieces of the essay just dropped into place. A book with which I was less familiar would have required more here-and-now "work" in lieu of, I dunno, those past instances of pleasure-reading, uncovering more details in each reading. (I believe I completely missed the framework of a certain attempted vengeance at the end.)

This is why I also sometimes think about writing an exegesis of symbolism/myth/etc. in Geraldine Harris' SEVEN CITADELS, as I also have that level of familiarity with the quartet. It is, however, out of print, and also it's a series, so it'd be a larger undertaking, so I haven't bothered. (Man oh man, now I want to reread it, except I don't get to reread books until after I have way more backlog cleared out.)
What books are y'all bone-deep familiar with?

Hey, it occurs to me that I can add The Perilous Gard to the books-read/finished this month list. I mean, the reading was very detailed in some parts and skimmish in others, but it averages out, right?

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Edwin Emerson, Jr.'s A History of the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1. Hallelujah! I'm done! This volume covers 1800 (with a few notes on prior developments) to 1815. (Battle of Waterloo too hard to resist as a stopping-year, I suppose.) This is a vexatious book, copyright 1902, with the expected attendant, shall we say, viewpoints. For example, a passage from p.504 that makes me frankly queasy:

Thus ended the troublesome war with the Creeks. Its cost to the United States had been nearly 20,000 men and $5,000,m000 in money. Thereafter the British ceased to be formidable in the Northwest. Tecumseh's confederation of Indian tribes was broken up.

Gee, troublesome. *nausea*

There are also occasional weirdly humorous anecdotes, as with this from p.592:

For English children the dread name of "Bony" was still a nursery bogie. Thackeray has reported how, when as a boy he was returning home from India, and his ship stopped at St. Helena, the black steward showed him a short, stout man walking in a garden: "That is he," said the negro servant in an awed whisper; "that is Bony. He eats three live sheep every day and all the little children he can lay hold of."

(My favourite remains the lemonade-seller, from the Peninsular War.)

This is a highly Western-centric account, and the rapid changes in scene from Europe to the US, etc. are sometimes almost whiplash-inducing. Very occasionally the Caribbean or the Ottomans might be mentioned, but for the most part, the rest of the world might as well not exist.

Emerson's account is very much an account of Great Men and Great Battles, with interludes into High Society (the arts, literature) and the occasional economic footnote. Leaders and generals are made much of; sociological notes are scant. Battles are recounted with a stultifying attentiveness to figures (362 guns captured here, 120 men killed there, etc.). Periodically Emerson spices things up with quoted passages of poetry, some of which are pretty dreadful (and some of which are even meant to be). Despite the occasional (sometimes unintentional) saving grace of humor, this is a history of the type that turns people off the field forever.

Why did I sit through all 600 pages of this? Because I'm a masochist completist. Also because there is material of historical interest. I would not recommend this generally; it's illuminating in certain regards (I find myself possessed of a morbid desire to acquire vol. 3--which can be had fairly inexpensively from various booksellers on ABEbooks last I checked--to see what Emerson thought the "new" century would bring. It probably wasn't the Great War....) but frankly, you have to be pretty hard-core to read this. I'm so glad this book is out of my life...

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minnow1212 on Wen Spencer's Tinker. jdr23 recommended this to me as light reading, I think, although with my backlog...*cringe*

Tinker is resourceful and practical, and her intellect is well-portrayed--you can see her delight in finding new things to play with when she comes across a problem. She's an attractive heroine. (One of the blurbs on the book said that Buffy fans should like this book, and I can see some similarities in that both characters are determined and use what weapons come to hand. It reminded me personally less of Buffy and more of the heroine of Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series, who, though older and more experienced, had some of the same mixture of grit, curiosity, responsibility, and unapologetic sexual interest.)

That said, I did find the book flawed in some ways: the noble whom Tinker saves, Windwolf, stays a cipher for me. I never got a handle on his personality. Also, he does something at one point that made me really quite dislike him, and I never got over that. Also, I felt that the first half of the book was more absorbing than the second half. Certain of the characters from the first half whom I liked a lot virtually disappeared from the second half of the book. (There were also some other, more minor, quibbles related to the characters of Nathan and Sparrow, but explaining them would probably spoil things, so I won't.) On balance, though, if there is a sequel (the book stands alone but has enough room that I wouldn't be surprised if we get a sequel at somepoint), I'll read it.

slithytove shares a wonderful word of the day. Remember, I think "defenestration" is one of the best words ever.

Aieee! I have to decide what to send in for the WisCon Writers' Workshop. Novel chapter or short story? Novel chapter or short story? *thud*

Lost and found: tsunami reveals a town's ancient ruins [CNN]:

MAHABALIPURAM, India (AP) -- For a few minutes, after the water had receded far from the shore and before it came raging back as a tsunami, the fishermen stood along the beach and stared at the reality of generations of legends.

Or so they say. Spread across nearly a mile, the site was encrusted with barnacles and covered in mud. But the fishermen insist they saw the remains of ancient temples and hundreds of refrigerator-sized blocks, all briefly exposed before the sea swallowed them up again.

Mammals feed off yeast pathway
Conserved amino acid-sensing mechanism affects eating behavior in rats [The Scientist :: Daily News]

In yeast, a deficiency of a particular amino acid causes an accumulation of that amino acid's corresponding transfer RNA. This free tRNA—called "uncharged" because it is not attached to an amino acid—activates the kinase GC nonderepressing 2 (GCN2), which then phosphorylates eukaryotic initiation factor 2 alpha (eIF-2alpha). This signal decreases the yeast's global protein synthesis and increases transcription of genes that synthesize deficient amino acids.

Gietzen, postdoc Shuzhen Hao, and their colleagues wanted to see if uncharged tRNA was responsible for the rat behavior that seems like a sort of behavioral homolog of this pathway. Rats will normally spend 30-45 minutes eating, if they haven't eaten for a while before that. Beginning at about 20 minutes, researchers have shown that rats eating food deficient in essential amino acids will eat less than those eating normal food, Gietzen explained.

Photo in the News: Lab Creates "Black Hole"
A physicist believes a fireball he created in a Long Island, New York, particle accelerator may have been a black hole. [National Geographic News]
Dude! (Shades of David Brin's Earth? That book was so cool.)

The collisions were powerful enough to break the nuclei into gluons and quarks, the most basic building blocks of matter. The particles created a plasma fireball 300 million times hotter than the surface of the sun. In a paper published on Cornell University's arxiv.org Web site, Nastase wrote that, based on his calculations, the fireball behaved like a black hole, absorbing streams of particles and radiating them as heat.

For now, any fears of the collider creating a civilization-destroying supergravity vortex are misplaced. The forces involved in the experiment were simply too weak, and the theoretical black hole was very short-lived. How brief? Divide a second by 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Yo, this is the kind of thing we invented scientific notation for. Just sayin'.

Hey, here's one for your amusement, gclinton17:
Winning the wine war
Could DNA help the fight to keep bottle labels honest? [news@nature.com]

In the arms race between the adulterators and the regulators, detection systems have become ever more sophisticated, as have the cheaters. But at least one common ruse - claiming that the wine is one variety, when it is actually entirely or partly another - may come to a sudden stop if DNA can be successfully extracted from wine on the shelf.

Norbert Christoph of the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority works on one of today's typical wine authentication programmes: he uses stable isotope analysis. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms all occasionally show up in versions with slightly different mass. The amounts of such isotopes vary from region to region, so when they are incorporated into grapes, they tell a tale about where the wine was made.

The snag is that they also vary with local weather conditions, so samples of wine from each region have to be taken each year for comparison and entered in the European Wine Data Bank. For example, says Christoph, "2003 wines were collected before the late rains, so there were values for oxygen that were more like Southern Italy."

Sometimes I wonder if I should've taken Intro to Wines. Probably not, given my lack of tolerance. And the frightening complexity of the subject.

sargentjr has an evil plan:

realized that my plan to rent myself out to single men is limiting my customer base and as any economist will tell you that is silly unless you are a dot com in which case here have a suitcase of cash. anyway i should be renting myself out to single women as well. imagine that there is this creepy guy at work who hits on you and will not take no for an answer, you rent me and we go to work and you swing me around and play with me next to his office or cube or whatever. he will think you have a kid and will run away from you. if he is too persistent and asks something like 'i did not know you have a kid' you can say 'oh no this is not my kid but i love kids and cannot wait to have three or four of them with the man of my dreams, of course he will stay home with them, here do you want to hold him, his name is eli' and you will hand me to him and i will smile and then spit up on him.

if that does not work i will also give him cold germs.

*chokes*

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Mystery House Possessed:
"No one knows of any enemies that Doctor Green had?" asks the nothing. But no one has any ideas to suggest. The faint whiff of jealous anger hangs in the air; you can't pinpoint its source easily.