“Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.”
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
A strange Victorian Steampunk novel that I enjoyed, despite its length and rather confusing cast of villains. Celeste Temple is a young English woman raised in the West Indies and residing in London awaiting a future wedding to her fiancé, Roger Bascombe. When he sends her a curt note breaking their engagement, she decides to find out why – following him to a mysterious party in an English country manor. After infiltrating the gathering, Miss Temple witnesses a bizarre set of “scientific” experiments and narrowly escapes capture after killing one of her homicidal pursuers.
Her escape to London is short-lived, as the alchemical experimenters begin searching the city for her. She is soon joined by some unlikely allies – military doctor Abelard Svenson looks after his addle-pated foreign prince who is caught up with the sinister cabal pursing Miss Temple, and Cardinal Chang, a paid assassin who’s true love has been indoctrinated into the strange cult.
The trio soon find themselves in grave danger as they investigate the strange blue glass books produced by the villains, and try to unravel their sinister plot of world domination.
The book runs 700+ pages, and the cast of villains is huge, and difficult to follow. Some of them seem little more than cardboard cutouts, especially many of the minions and hangers-on to the cabal. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of exposition near the end, also, as the villains are forced to explain their dastardly plot – but it’s handled rather well and doesn’t seem overly heavy handed.
But there is a mysterious house with bizarre secret passageways and hidden rooms, and the final battle takes place on a zeppelin, so there’s plenty of fun involved.
The Big Over EasyA new series by the author of the bestselling “Tuesday Next” novels. A thoroughly enjoyable read; I polished it off in a weekend. Fforde’s novels are funny and full of literary cleverness. Jack Spratt is a like-able and entertaining protagonist and I look forward to reading the entire series.
From the Publisher’s Weekly review: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and, well, you know the rest. But was Humpty’s fall an accident, or was it murder? It’s up to giant killer Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division to get to the bottom of it. Humpty was quite a ladies’ man, but a few people thought him a bad egg. Jack has a number of suspects, a new partner to break in and gloryhound/antagonist Detective Inspector Chimes to deal with.”
The president of a prominent Southern Baptist seminary says he would support medical treatment, if it were available, to change the sexual orientation of a fetus inside its mother’s womb from homosexual to heterosexual.
The idea of a hormonal patch for pregnant women was discussed by the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., on his blog, www.almohler.com, on March 2.
“If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin,” Mohler wrote in advice for Christians.
I’ve waited a few days before writing about this, because I was so pissed off when I read it that I couldn’t quite deal with it. Mohler officially wins the Joseph Mengele award for horrific dystopian ideas. You really don’t need me to explain why this is wrong, do you?
But you do see how extreme homophobes are in their bent psychosis, right?
I suppose it would be inappropriate for me to counter by suggesting that we start treating all people who believe in religion for psycho-paranoid delusions, wouldn’t it?
After the last round of “Getting to know me” emails, I added some new questions to my Ultimate Survey. Proceed at your own risk.
(I also ran the whole thing through the spell-checker. Boy, did that need it.)
Hypermiler -a person who drives in an obsessive fashion in order to increase his vehicle’s fuel efficiency. He’s refined his driving technique to wring 59 MPG out of a Honda Accord and clocked over 180 MPG with a hybrid Honda Insight.
A little boy makes an awesome video of him lip syncing to Beyonce, and nut-job homophobes comment on it, saying evil things. This is why so many gay kids kill themselves.
House Joint Resolution 15 (HJR-15), the legislation formerly known as SJR-7 and the marriage discrimination amendment, has been assigned to committee in the house. It’s been placed in the House Rule and Legislative Procedures Committee.
Please contact the members of this committee (information below) to oppose this legislation – for Democrats, remind them that putting this on the ballot in 2008 will kill the Democratic lead in the statehouse, among other things, and that the second line of the amendment will affect all unmarried Hoosiers. Ask them to change the ambiguous and broad wording.
Chair: Representative Scott Pelath (D)
http://www.in.gov/legislative/house_democrats/repsites/r09/contact.html
