mjd

I think you are letting your self-interest cloud your view of the situation here, since it is very simple. It is not Greg Egan's job to chase after every person who distributes his work online and ask them to take it down. It is your job, as the would-be publisher, to contact him and obtain permission beforehand.

This is not just what the law requires, it is what ethics and good manners call for. I believe you understand this.

Published without permission and without even identifying the author.

(It was written by Greg Egan.)

Is this published with Greg Egan's permission? It doesn't say, and I presume he would at least want to be credited by name.

Update: Egan confirms that this site is distributing his story without permission.

The wheel and axle is an often cited example. It was a big surprise when a bacterium was discovered with a wheel-like connection to its flagellum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_locomotion_in_living_...

I suppose it won't help to point out to you that it's fiction, none of it actually happened, no person was ever hurt, and this is nowhere close to ”free speech absolutism”.

Yes, but a democracy isn't stuck with the moron until he dies.

“Work out which three decisions are most urgent” sounds like it is inviting horribly embarrassing mistakes. What will you do if, in three months, it transpires that Claude overlooked an obviously urgent decision, and you didn't notice because you didn't actually analyze or even look at the data?

“laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap” really sounds to me like something that could and should be fixed by the market.

I agree with the GP comment, but your framing of this as “convenience” mininizes the possible gains.

Malaria still kills 600,000 people a year. A person who loses their child to malaria is not “inconvenienced”.

The end reminds me strongly of Ted Chiang's remark that Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off.

Let that be a warning to the rest of you.

What is the source of your knowledge of French FOI law? Are you already familiar with this topic?

The project was begun in 2017 and the suit was filed in 2019.

For those not familiar with it already, the writing and art style are a well-executed pastiche of Arnold Lobel's ”Frog and Toad” books.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad

But their record of failing to protect data is rock-solid!

One fun thing about Decameron is that because it's 100 short stories, you can pretty much pick it up anywhere, read a couple, then put it down again. It doesn't require a giant time commitment.

Each day's stories have a theme, so pick a theme that sounds interesting. Except the tenth story on each day is not on the theme, it's told by Dioneo, and it's usually more or less dirty.

There are definitely a couple of those stories that are adapted in The Little Hours. For example, the one about the guy who gets work in the nuns' garden by pretending to be deaf and dumb, and the nuns quickly see the advantages of having a guy around who can't tell tales.

I guess this was written in the early 2000s, while OBL was hiding in Afghanistan?

Short answer: no.

Interesting nevertheless.

You don't think it would be parting the Red Sea?

The comment said that Jaynes's theory was that consciousness historically arose after writing, not that writing or literacy is necessary for individual consciousness.

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.

You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.

I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.

Incidentally, Ibn Battutah was on the at-my-elbow shelf for quite a while. The elbow shelf is not a static collection. Things move on, then they move off again, as Roget 8th edition did recently.

You've got me thinking that it might be nice to get a translation of _Līlāvatī_ by Bhaskara II to put there. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C4%ABl%C4%81vat%C4%AB

Since you asked, I took a survey around the office. I have the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the one edited by Wallis Budge. I have a Chinese translating dictionary, a Chinese etymological dictionary, and a Hawai'ian dictionary. I have the Yasmine Seale translation of the Thousand and One Nights. I have the Travels of Ibn Battutah. I have Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography. I have a book by Ichisada Miyazaki about the history of the infamous civil service examinations in China. There's a book of poetry by Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah and Weinberger's little book comparing 19 translations of the same poem by Wang Wei. I have "Erotic Art of the East" by Rawson, an illustrated edition of the Rubaiyat, and a history of Iran by someone named Axworthy. I have a couple of books about pedagogy by A. Ya. Khinchin, who was Soviet Russian; I don't know whether you'd consider that "Western".

Of those, only the Thousand and One Nights and the Book of the Dead are anything like canonical. But of the seven I talked about in the article, only the Bible and the Decameron are canonical. I wouldn't have mentioned the dictionaries, except that one of the books in the original article was a thesaurus.

But most of the books I keep in the office are technical (lots of mathematics) or are more or less contemporary Western fiction.

I think some people might see my reading habits as those of a dilettante with a lack of serious focus, and I don't think I would care to dispute that. As I said, my brain is full of stuff, and and what's in it doesn't always make sense or go together with the other stuff.

Thanks! I'm a big fan of David Macaulay's other books, but I've never liked _The Way Things Work_.

_Castle_ and _Umderground_, though I love.

One really nice thing about Pseudodoxia Epidemica is that you don't have to read it cover to cover. You can pick it up, read the bit about whether “a Diamond is made soft, or broke by the blood of a Goate”, or what he has to say about Pope Joan (a woman who supposedly tricked the college of cardinals into electing her pope) and put it down gain ten minutes later. It's great bathroom reading.

I do own more than these seven books.

The Netflix series is an "inspired by", not an adaptation. It does not have much in common with the original book other than the setting and the names of some of the characters.

I enjoyed it, and I absolutely loved Tanya Reynolds, who is hilarious. But Bocaccio's Decameron it is not.

The one in TFA is Harper and Row, and the later 8th Edition, published by Harper Collins, is also organized the correct way. I think you'll be safe if you can get a Harper version.

The current front-runner is “The Crazy Ape” by Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering ascorbic acid.

It's about how war is perpetrated by the old against the young. I've carried it next to my heart since I was fourteen.

Also, it's quite short and will definitely fit in the space.

A bit more about it: https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/116411220100252049