Thursday, March 25, 2004
SITE: I'm playing around with the CSS files that build the look of the site so if you see anything funny or broken, hopefully it'll go away soon. :) As always, I build and read the site in Mozilla so if you're using IE, things might be strange until I get around to testing and fixing the CSS to fit IE's broken CSS support.
Monday, March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW: Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood
This is one of those books that shows a lot about your beliefs in your reaction to it. The main ideabase of the book comes from the future of genetic engineering. It starts out with small things like "racunks" or racoons crossed with skunks, minus the smell. It ends with, well I won't spoil it, but needless to say some people will find the Crakers an improvement and some won't. You'll have to read the book to see what I mean. I have the feeling that a lot of the stuff that Atwood found horrifying about genetic engineering (the "chickie-nobs") I have completely the opposite reaction to. That's what I mean about your reaction to the book saying something about your beliefs, especially in the "playing God" discussion. The creation of the world after the perfection of genetic splicing and engineering is very well done and very compelling and I comend Margaret Atwood on her achievement. The other thing that I hope gets people's attention in the book is the power of the corporation aspect of the book. I trust corporations to create profit maximizing things like the chickie-nobs but I will never trust a corporation to make decisions about the future path of humanity, like they do in this book. If people don't pay attention though, that's what's going to happen. Genetic engineering is a very powerful technology and despite some technophobes best efforts it's going to come soon. The power to muck with humanity on a large scale is something that requires transparency of operation to be used safely. We have to pay attention, even if we don't like the technology.
As much as I liked the world and the science, the book does have more than it's share of problems. The characters could use a little more life to them for instance. Jimmy/Snowman is a fine character, I have no problem with him. Oryx and her story take up too much of the book and frankly, she's interesting but not terribly well fleshed out. Crake is, as many science-fiction characters are, exactly what he needs to be for the plot. Not to say he isn't consistent, he definately is. But he's also more than a little unrealistic. He's one of those "perfect at everything" characters who is smarter than everyone, cooler than everyone, etc. Crake is the genius of genetic tinkering but he also happens to be a genius computer hacker to boot. The hacker part is a little much. Would it have killed Atwood to make Jimmy the hacker and give him at least a little something over Crake? I don't think so and it would have added some much needed depth to the character in the form of at least one thing he's not perfect at. There is a lot of unneeded stuff in here, like pretty much all of Oryx's backstory. I also found the final ending of Snowman's story to be completely unsatisfying. It felt like Atwood knew she had finsihed the "real" story of what happened to the world and then couldn't figure out a good way to end the actual book.
Overall I liked the book, despite its flaws. As I said, the vision of the future is very compelling and thought-provoking. If you have any interest in what a possible future for the world post-genetic engineering could look like, I would recommend this book to you. The audiobook, read by actor Campbell Scott, is great. Scott has a mastery of different voices that I would have never expected based on his movie roles. I don't think the world will end up anything like the one portrayed in Oryx & Crake but something like it is coming and I think Margaret Atwood's vision is going to be thought of as very prescient in the years to come.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
POLITICS: I haven't used this weblog for politics in the past, for various reasons, but with the election coming up I can't help myself. Today's entry isn't going to be specifically about the election but it is about the ever present political topic of the war in Iraq. I was prompted by this entry on Sean Collins' weblog about a speech that Tony Blair gave about England's involvement in the war as well as various comments being made recently about Bush and his involvement that I'm sure everyone's aware of.
One of the things I'm sure the Bush administration will be pushing in the coming months, besides hiding behind 9/11 I mean, is that we were right to go into Iraq and free the citizens of that embattled country. Unlike a lot of self-proclaimed liberals I agree with that statement, but not with Bush. We should have gone into Iraq and should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, that I agree with. We should have also done it 10 years ago under Bush Sr. but he reneged on our commitments there, causing the deaths of many of our so-called friends in Iraq with our absence. So yes, I believe getting rid of Saddam was the Right Thing to do but what I cannot forgive is the way we went about it. Bush and his administration lied, there is very little dispute about that. They hid information, believed and distributed only selectively what they had to to bolster their case, and much else. Beyond the lying, even beyond the inexcusable behavior of using the deaths of 9/11 to get an excuse to do something you've been planning for years, the worst thing about the way the war was conducted was that the Bush Administration deprived the people of the US the opportunity to have a discussion about our place in the world of the 21st century.
If Bush had been honest about Iraq, we could have had a very valuable discussion about our role in the world. Coming out and telling people he had decided that we were going to go into Iraq and get rid of Saddam because it was the right thing to do and because Hussein had proved himself a monster over and over again with his own people would have made us face the dilemma of being the biggest kid on the playground. Are we going to use our size and strength to protect the other kids or not? It's an important question, one that needs to be looked at. People might not have agreed with him as wholeheartedly as they did when they wrapped the Terrorism label around it but it would have been a lot more honest. Instead, they used the War On Terror as an excuse, made up evidence of harm that could possibly come to US citizens and effectively said they don't care what was done to Iraqi citizens in the past, all that was important was possible danger to us. The message that when all Saddam was doing was gassing and maiming his own people he was fine, but as soon as we thought he might look our we had to step in is not the way to coexist in the world.
We are a superpower in a century that will probably become defined by micropowers, small groups with power conferred on them by technology and money. Either we can use our powers to help build a new world of safety for all or we can blunder around trying only to protect our own interests. We need to have this discussion or when it comes down to it, we will have no input into the world we're living in. It's clear we cannot count on Bush and his administration to have the vision needed in this new time in history.
Monday, March 08, 2004
LIFE: If you're one of the 3 fans of this site who aren't my immediate family, you may have noticed that I haven't exactly been Mr. Weblog recently. This is due to the fact that I have a new job, as a Quality Assurance / Test Engineer for Leader Technologies, a company that makes those 'Please Register Your Products' applications and webpages you see when you buy hardware and software. It's a very cool job and a neat company to work for. I've done what I think is a pretty good job so far, finding a few things that would have been bad had they gone out the door. I'm working a lot more during my workday (and getting home later too, unfortunately) than I was for the past few months at the previous job so that means less blogging. I'm resolving to be better about it though, much to my surprise people actually like and read this site so I want to keep it going as best as I can. I'll have some posts on the upcoming wedding soon both here and on the wedding blog as well as posts about what I've been reading recently. Unfortunately for my readers who come here from comics related websites, the list of reading material doesn't include many comics for various reasons, my lack of interest in the comics community recently not being the least of them.
So here's to my new job and hopefully to a renewed Matt O' Rama once I get more into a groove here at Leader.