For those of you who know about the book: it made it into the top 100, but Labyrinth of Night didn’t make the cut to the final three.
Ah well. Back to looking for an agent the old-fashioned way.
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Tale #1: A Visit to Borders I visited Borders over the weekend to buy a gift certificate. The first thing I noticed when I entered the store (having not been to this particular location in perhaps six months) was the vast expanse of empty racks in the middle of the place where CDs used to be displayed. According to the counter clerk, they were in the process of phasing out most of their CD products — all but new releases — due to the rising popularity of iTunes and other internet-based digital music sources. “Nobody is buying CDs anymore,” she explained. Apparently, nobody is buying books at Borders anymore, either. Something about the book racks also struck me as odd while I was standing in line, and as I was leaving I figured out what it was: the racks had been cut back to half their length. That is, the racks perpendicular to the walls used to be made up of two oak shelving units, but the units on the end had been removed. Now, they may plan to simply reshuffle their existing book inventory into the space vacated by CDs, but this particular change didn’t look recent – and why would they remove a good portion of the existing inventory from the floor, rather than waiting until the new area had been prepared? Given the company’s financial situation, it may be that I was witnessing one small step in the slow demise of the Borders chain:
Tale #2: A Visit to the Dentist Two years ago, I was glad to finally have an excuse to get rid of my last unsightly amalgam filling. Unfortunately, there was some sort of material flaw in the porcelain crown that replaced it, and today I had it replaced gratis. Only, they didn’t replace it with quite the same thing. Or in quite the same way. Rather than the two-visit process I had to go through the last time, with those gag-inducing trays filled with molding putty and seemingly-endless custom fitting of the crown made from the resulting molds, I was in and out in about three hours, of which maybe ten minutes involved fitting and polishing. Best part: no molds. The new process involved inserting a small scanning device into my mouth before and after the old crown was removed, to create 3D images of the perfectly-fitting existing crown and the cleared-out bonding surface along with the surrounding molars. Immediately after the second scan, a 3D image of the tooth as-it-was appeared on the screen next to my chair, the dentist made a few adjustments to add some material at certain adjustment points and then fired it off to a milling machine in the next room — just as if she were printing a document. About fifteen minutes later, she returned with the new but uncured crown to make a few adjustments to the fit. After about five minutes of grinding and test-fitting, it was into the curing oven for about 40 minutes. Then it was bonded in, and after another five minutes of fitting, it was done and I headed back to work. That’s a pretty neat bit of medical technology, I think. This is the same dentist with whom I first experienced digital X-rays a number of years ago, and who (with improved resolution on the X-ray interface) determined at my last exam that I have extra roots on all of my teeth, and not just the molars…something the new technology is showing to be surprisingly common. Even better – she’s bringing in a 3D digital X-ray system soon, which should provide images at even higher resolution. While I figured out the bricks-and-mortar bookstores’ days were numbered the first time I ordered something from Amazon back in 1996, the rapid evolution of medical technology is pretty surprising. This article on Parametric Technology’s connections to allegedly corrupt lobbying firm PMA Group explains a lot. Wow.
One reads this and wonders whatever happened to Chuck Grassley’s probe into NASA’s flawed awarding of a software contract to PTC back in 2005. Welcome to the ‘aristocracy of pull’. I guess if you can’t compete in the open market, you can always call in favors. Sweet. The Wired article this comes from also contains more information about Scaled Composites’ recent test-flight teething pains with White Knight 2. Sounds like the test problems were routine. Complete Colorado points to an article in the Daily Camera on Xcel’s efforts to install “smart grid” technology in (where else?) Boulder. I definitely don’t like the idea of the power company (or envirokook do-gooders in the local government) having the authority to turn down my air conditioning or water heater whenever they find it “necessary”, but there are elements to the “smart grid” technology that I do find interesting, and possibly appealing.
That makes a lot of sense, in principle at least. (More info on the smart meters here.) If the new meters could actually provide realtime usage and pricing information via household display, it’s easy to see how one can save a few bucks simply by choosing to delay certain energy-hungry activities for a short while. And if the meters could show real-time price trends over several days or several weeks, consumers could establish new money-saving (and, yes, energy-conserving) habits based on this information. Note that this sort of demand scheduling is not new – the company I worked for in college scheduled the startup of its heavy machinery for early in the morning, before the daily power demand picked up, in order to qualify for reduced rates from the power company. What’s new is the ability to plan such things on the fly, based on real-time information. But of course, this being Boulder, someone has to drag class envy into it. Giving consumers more information on which to base voluntary money-saving choices isn’t good enough: poor consumers need to be given money to adopt the glamorous, expensive, and dubiously-effective green-preening luxuries energy technologies that the wascally wealthy can buy with their pocket change:
That’s our Boulder. Here’s a golden oldie, from back in the day when industry associations stood up for capitalism and the positive social by-products of productive enterprises, instead of apologizing for their existence and bending over backwards to appease environmentalist bullies, corrupt incumbents, and union thugs. While it veers into the de rigeur hip-deep patriotic cheese near the end (around 9:50, when Gramps Robinson stands up), the rest of the film is surprisingly good and refreshingly accurate. As I’m in the middle of reading Atlas Shrugged, I was struck by how the town in question is the mirror image of Starnesville: a place where the “motive power” of local industry was recognized, respected, and celebrated. Another interesting element of this film is how toned-down the utilitarian justifications for capitalism are. Sure enough, capitalism is defended to some degree on the basis of its public benefits, but the public benefits are more overtly presented as the natural, emergent effects of the spontaneous organization sparked by Mr. Manson’s initial investment. Gramps Robinson even gets in a dig at the now all-too-familiar “Progressive” mindset which evades the real sources of prosperity, thinking it can tear down industry and still have the prosperity of which productive enterprise is the root. Pretty sophisticated for an educational film aimed at young teenagers. [cross-posted at People’s Press Collective] More here: “We needed Mr. Brown’s weenies! That’s the incentive that makes capitalism work!” Eye candy. Or planet pr()n. Behold the products of yet another new-to-me Colorado weather phenomenon: the thunderblizzard.
I was downstairs when the lighting struck, but I heard and felt the amazingly loud thunder and wondered if there had been an avalanche from one of the surrounding cliffs or an overloaded tree had fallen against the house. A neighbor who had been snowblowing at the time described it as a brilliant yellow flash that lit up the whole area brighter than a sunny day and then faded away slowly. Likewise, friends down in Denver said there had been thunder and lightning with the snow in their neighborhood as well. And to think I was going to get a building permit for a new deck today. Rand links to this interesting post at Cato Unbound on colonizing space and the “future of freedom”:
But then there’s this downer on one of the companies that might eventually get us past the “rocket problem”:
Yes, these things take time to perfect – and in this case, a lot more time than those involved expected. The problem is, as the Thiel article suggests, we don’t have a whole lot of time to waste. |
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