Well I finished "Hound of the Baskervilles this morning. It's definitely the best of the Arthur Conan Doyle books I've read thus far. If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend it. So far as I can tell, the mystery is perfect. If you like who-done-its, this is a good one. The story was satisfying and all the puzzle pieces seem to fit very well. I strongly recommend it. As far as the graphic novels I mentioned, I've been reading "Batman: Year 1" and volume 1 of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen". Both of those were entertaining and I will recommend them as well. I've also read a large chunk of Volume 1 of the Bloom County Library (1980-1982). But it also includes some of the comics that Berke Breathed created when he was in college, which was precursor to Bloom County. I Always wondered why some of Breathed characters resembled characters from Doonesbury. Breathed actually acknowledges that and says that up until he started drawing Bloom County, that Doonesbury was the ONLY comic strip he ever read. I'm not sure if I believe that totally. But the early strips in particular have a sense of humor similar to Doonesbury's and Doonesbury characters such as B.D., Uncle Duke, Mark Slackmeyer and maybe a few others that I haven't noticed, all seem to infect some of the Bloom County characters, sometimes not just in their appearance, but in their sensibilities. Apparently G.B. Trudeau also noticed this and sent a letter which Breathed apparently does not want to reveal the contents of lol. I'm probably going to try to read Ender's Game again in anticipation of the movie coming out soon. I remember liking it a lot, and yet also being dumbfounded about how much others loved it saying it was the best book they ever read. I remember it being good but very much flawed. His second book, "Speaker for the Dead" -- that was a perfect novel, that SHOULD have been the end of the series because it resolved a lot of the things that bothered me about "Ender's Game' in a really sensitive way. He should have ended the series with that book. Because the two books that came after just totally undercuts everything that Card accomplished in that second book.
The Hound is still one of my absolute favorites, glad you enjoyed it as well! Such a good story with strong imagery. I'm always flamed every time I mention that I did not like Ender's Game at all. I'm an easy-going guy and absolutely never insult anybody who likes anything I don't because hey, opinions are opinions. It just seems that Ender's Game fans are quite rabid about it. I noticed the same thing you did Haldurson: so many people rave and rave about it being the best book ever, their favorite thing, etc. etc. I guess I just didn't see it. The movie, however, I am almost tempted to watch, because I'm a Harrison Ford fan. So maybe that will sway me over.
I've read a few good things by Card. Speaker for the Dead, as I mentioned, was fantastic. But there's also a lesser known novel that I really loved -- Lost Boys. It's a semi-autobiographical novel that Card wrote about a man and his family, who move to a new town. It's kind of a supernatural story, but a very personal one, which was influenced by the death of his son Charles. There's something about that book that really did move me. /edit I meant to mention that Lost Boys should not be confused with the movie "The Lost Boys" -- it has nothing to do with that film at all. The only common element is that both involve the supernatural -- the movie, of course was about vampires, but book is about something else entirely.
Even foghorns deserve to make a living. BTW, I met the guy a couple of times, long before any controversy about his beliefs were known. I will say that, at least when I met him, he was clearly a secular humanist, and actually a pretty friendly guy. I went to a signing that he had at a Worldcon (don't recall which one) and it was scheduled against some other event so there weren't a lot of people there. So he spent time shooting the breeze with my friend and I. People who have differing opinions CAN GET ALONG. I know I've said this to you before, but the best way of dealing with people with differing opinions is not boycotting them, it's engaging with them. Attacking people because of differing opinions does nothing constructive -- it puts them on the defensive and reinforces their beliefs. He doesn't want to kill homosexuals, he doesn't want to put them in jail. He's not evil. He's just wrong. And the way you deal with people who are wrong is you explain to them in a convincing way WHY they are wrong.
He's not evil, no. He just sits on the board of directors for NOM, has called for homosexuals to be locked up "to set an example", has (supposedly) endorsed a violent overthrow of the US government to halt marriage equality, and wrote a novel which equates homosexuality and paedophilia. Nah. He's not an evil person. Edit: Added three sources.
I had to search for the source of it since the link in the article you linked was broken, but some of what is said is taken completely out of context. Instead of the hype, you really ought to look at the source. I don't think he's right, but I'm just saying that he's being taken out of context. If you are going to hang him, at least hang him on his own words, not on the words of some third party who obviously has an axe to grind, who doesn't care that his words were from 23 or so years ago, and were aimed at gay people within the mormon church (and which were interpreted by the Mormon Church as being PRO-GAY, since his argument was that laws that WERE on the books should not be enforced). Here's the original text which has caused all the brouhaha, along with Card's more recent explanation of the context of that text: http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html In any case this has nothing to do with books.
Yeah, strange as it seems for me to advocate this, but we should discuss books in the books thread, and not socio-political arguments. And just for the record, I support equality. No need to explain how I mean that. Either you understand the word or you do not and will not. (Althea/Loerwyn and Haldurson already know this. So the note is for others who do not.) On the actual subject, I just cannot find a book to read that keeps my interest. I read Physics books, but they either explain nothing or they delve into higher mathematics that is way above my comprehension. Of the two extremes, I always prefer something I can understand rather than mathematics. (Even if I learn basically nothing from it.)
Have you tried reading any of the Feynman Lectures on Physics? When Richard Feynman was a professor at Caltech, he regularly taught undergraduate classes in Physics, including Freshman and Sophomore classes (I missed having him as a Professor by one year -- he taught Sophomore Physics when I was a Freshman, and vice versa). Anyway, a lot of people swear that those books got them interested in Physics. They are a lot less mathematical and more qualitative than the average textbook on the same subject. We used them more as companion books to the Berkeley series than as actual textbooks. I'm not trying to disparage them by saying this, but one thing I remember is that just about everyone agreed that reading Feynman didn't really help much with the homework (because of its less mathematical explanations). I was never great at physics, but I will say that the mathematical explanations are useful for applying the theory, but gave you the illusion of understanding, whereas Feynman gave you understanding but didn't tell you how to apply it .
Yeah, I have read quite a bit of scattered Feynman stuff. Most of it was not in the form of actual books. It was quotes either from lectures or from books. (And often was unsourced.) I also enjoyed the works of Brian Green in his books and lectures. The greatest thing about enthusiastic physics people is that you can find a whole bunch of their work in the public domain to see if you care to bother with their books. My knowledge is certainly incomplete, but I never recall any of them objecting to being quoted in context. (Even extensively quoted to such an extent that you could argue that it may have damaged sales of their books.)
He's still on NOM, a homophobic hate group, so I don't really think we need to specify beyond that. Anyway, books. Terry Pratchett's Making Money. Not far into it, so no real opinion... yet.
It's the nature of science to share knowledge -- without that, science couldn't progress as much as it has. I do know that the U.S. (as compared with Britain) has fairly liberal copyright laws. It's my understanding that in Britain, there's no 'fair use' concept under the law. Furthermore, you have to distinguish between words which are totally original, and those which come from discoveries of the nature of reality. If Feynman were writing about his views on Nuclear proliferation, or his philosophy about the importance of science in society. then it would make sense that it would be covered by copyright. However, when he writes about light or electromagnetism or elementary particles and so on, which which are properties of the universe, and not inventions of his, then I'm betting that copyright laws would be more... relaxed. There's only so many ways you can say . I'm not a lawyer, but if copyright laws applied to scientific principles, that would be kind of dumb. I'm all for giving credit where its due, but science is about describing the universe, which is something that all living things share.
Slightly off-topic, but I know that there was a legal case where a company tried to patent a sequence of DNA that they had gotten from a person, and they lost the case. The courts do make mistakes, but not in this case. Any attempt to patent something which can occur as part of nature takes a lot of chutzpah.
Except that GMOs are arguably natural, and they are able to be owned entirely. Imagine that your family has grown Wheat for generations, and now a neighbor grows GMO wheat and it cross pollinates with yours. Now your entire crop and livelyhood belongs to the company that "owns" that strain of wheat. Let us quickly abandon that discussion in favor of the original topic without political junk...
Many GMOs nowadays can't pollinate while on the fields at all. Additional profits for the companies and all that.
Wait a few years. We will see if they can pollinate or not. I believe their claims about as much as I believe I can fly. Nature finds a way. Anyone know some good books on GMOs?
Not books but lots of good webposts -- http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/once-more-bad-science-in-the-service-of-anti-gmo-activism/ http://depletedcranium.com/anti-gmo-activists-take-on-golden-rice/ http://depletedcranium.com/could-the-tide-be-turning-on-anti-gmo-groups/ Old but still good: You have to be careful when reading older GMO articles. The problem is that while there's been a whole lot of speculation about dangers of GMO foods, they've pretty much all been debunked thus far. To date, no one has ever been poisoned, or suffered ill effects as a result of eating GMO foods. On the other hand, it's been estimated that over a billion lives have been saved by GMO foods -- more than can be said about any other invention of the past century. The irony of GMO is that almost ALL foods today, at least ones from farms, have been genetically modified, and that's the way it's been for over a thousand years. The main difference between genetically modified foods now and way back when, is that previously the genetic modifications were done in a haphazard fashion with grafting, selective breeding, and so on. Now that we have better knowledge of genetics, we can do it more safely. That's the irony. But health food industry has better spokesmen, and companies like Monsanto don't do GMOs any favors with their shenanigans. You can tell that there's a problem with the anti-GMO movement because they can't name specifics, they spout old outdated and debunked speculation. If there were an actual danger, and these people knew what they were talking about, they'd know which food, which genetic strain, what the harm was, and they'd name victims who have been treated by doctors. But no one ever has. Because at this point it's all paranoia.
Yeah. I doubt the GMOs are dangerous. At least not any more dangerous than eating "natural" stuff. But the danger, like my above post suggests is that no-one actually owns "natural" wheat. But once it is modified in a laboratory, it is wholly owned and giving the seeds away to farmers only leads to an eventual monopoly. And a company with loads of money and a legal team the size of a small army can get whatever they want in time. There are quite a few books on selective breeding with regards to farming. I think saying that a farmer who lets bees cross-pollinate between crops is not "genetically modifying" his crops. One who makes his crops in a test tube however is. Some in this world would rather not eat pinto beans. That is their choice. Some have no aversion to pinto beans, but only if they are natural. Why should this not also be their choice? But as Loerwyn says, this is not book talk. So how about books on the evolution of farming? Anyone know of some good ones offhand? *Edit* For the record, I do sometimes buy expensive "Organic" vegetables. I do not buy them because I dislike other vegetables though. I buy them because often they look better than non organic. (Organic or not, I buy what looks best to my eyes. If I am buying potatoes, I buy "Red" potatoes that are large and relatively free of defects and bruises. Tomatoes have to be mostly ripe and must have some evidence that they naturally ripened. I.E. no brown spots along the vine where they were put under a heat lamp to force them to look ripe despite not actually being ripe. I could go on for ages...)
The book sounds interesting. I can't find it though on Amazon or in Wikipedia. Maybe it hasn't been translated into English, or the title in the U.S. is different? I just finished reading "Ender's Game". It's a very good book, definitely one that deserved to win the Hugo Award back when it did. I'm glad that I reread it, because my memory of it had greatly faded. I know that the movie will not be completely faithful, which is why I decided to read it now, before it is released. There are a couple of scenes in the book that are shocking, but they are meant to be. I think that they may not hold precisely the same impact in the movie, because they've aged Ender a great deal. In the book, Ender is 6 years old at the start, and 12 (I think???) by the end. See, how bad my memory is, I'm already starting to lose details. In the movie, he's being portrayed by Asa Butterfield, who's 16, probably 15 while it was being filmed. That changes a whole lot about the context of the story. But I'm not going to review here a movie that I haven't seen yet. The general premise is that the human race has been at war with an alien race which has been nicknamed the Buggers. There have been two long and drawn out wars to invade the earth, the first was turned back by shear luck (though few real details are given in the book), the second by a pilot named Maser Rackham (which I've always thought was a horrible name) who turned out to be a genius, but the details of how have been kept secret from everyone. It's now years after that second invasion and the humans are expecting a third. They don't want to rely on another miracle like Maser Rackham, so a plan is created to find young suitable geniuses and try to mold them into future pilots and leaders to stop the Buggers from invading ever again. At 6, it appears that Andrew Wiggin is selected for training/molding. I'm not sure what I'm going to read next, but It may be "Ender's Shadow" or "Speaker for the Dead" or "The Valley of Fear" (the next Sherlock Holmes novel, by Sir Arthur, Conan Doyle). Of those, I've previously read "Speaker for the Dead". My impression of the book when I read it was that it was a truly great book. But I may instead read "Ender's Shadow", since the movie will be also be covering incidents from it. IT's supposed to be a paralel novel to "Ender's Game", one told from the point of view of Bean, a younger student at the teaching facility who Ender trains. The movie is actually based on two books, both "Ender's Game" and "Ender's Shadow". Just to be clear, I have no intention of reading "Xenocide" or "Children of the Mind", books 3 and 4 of the main Ender series. I remember when I read them that I didn't care for "Xenocide" and felt that "Children of the Mind" was simply awful. In any case, let's at least try to keep this focused on books. I promise that I'm going to try as well, since I'm just as guilty.
