the Amiga 1000 was better built than I thought

An Amiga 1000 was the first computer I ever bought with my own money, and I still have it. And I always knew that in some ways it was well built, because that one I bought back in the eighties still runs, whereas the far more expensive and rugged and professional Amiga 3000 that I bought in the nineties died long ago. But now I’ve found that it’s even truer than I thought.

the English accent is stupid

Americans generally respect the English accent. I assume attitudes are similar, if not more so, in Canada, Australia, and so on. (Maybe not so much in Ireland.) People think the English accent sounds classy and refined. But if you look into how the English “Received Pronunciation” accent came to be so different from those of the USA and Canada and Ireland, the reason turns out to be ridiculously lame.

Classy is the important word here. The difference arose precisely because people thought it sounded more classy and refined. Until about the year 1700, most people in England spoke quite similarly to those in Ireland or North America, pronouncing letters such as R and O as they were written instead of with peculiar distortions. But after that, throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as economic opportunity started to become accessible to commoners, those who were financially or socially ambitious did their best to emulate the manners and styles of the classes above their own, as a way to make a better first impression and be taken more seriously. And a very popular way to do so during this period was to attend a class in “elocution”. A whole industry sprang up of teachers and tutors who would train their students in how to talk in a way that sounded upper-class. And some of these teachers knew their job better than others. What they taught was often not so much a copy as an amateurish mockery of how their betters actually talked. But by the end of the eighteenth century these teachings were being incorporated into the standard school curriculum, and by the end of the nineteenth the aristocracy were following along with the changes to the common speech, imitating an imitation of themselves.

(Speaking of class, I once heard an astute observation that when an American is trying to face down a threat, and attempting to sound more intimidating than usual, you can tell what social class they belong to by whether they start talking more black in order to sound street-tough, or start talking more Brit in order to sound privileged. For 90% of us it’s the former, but in loftier social circles the latter is still regularly heard.)

But the silly part is where the accent the elocutionists were copying really came from. The answer to this starts in the reign of Queen Anne. As mentioned in my previous post, Anne was the last of the Stuart dynasty. Anne got pregnant seventeen different times trying to produce an heir, but none of her children lived past age two. Her sister Mary II, who preceded her on the throne (co-ruling with her husband William of Orange), had one miscarriage and no live children. So when it came time to put Anne’s successor on the throne, they had to look a lot farther afield than usual to find the “rightful” next in line. And who they came up with was her second cousin Georg Ludwig, Elector of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg (commonly called Hanover after its capital city).

When King George I took the throne in 1714, he spoke no English. He never did bother to master the language over his thirteen year reign, and spent part of every year back in Hanover. His son George II did speak English, but since he learned it as an adult, he of course had a German accent, as did the twenty-three political staffers and assorted mistresses that his father had brought over, and their families and servants. Only when they got to George III in 1760 did Britain once again have a monarch who grew up speaking English, and he was hardly the best role model for it because of his poor mental health.

The English accent which was spread by professional elocutionists has its origin in courtiers and toadies imitating the German accent of the Hanovers. And it wasn’t entirely just the Hanovers: before their time, William of Orange had spoken with a thick Dutch accent, and afterwards, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married Victoria and brought a supplemental dose of German accent to the royal family, just to remind people how it’s done.

This is why the English accent of today often pronounces the short A as in German, and muffles the letter R as a vowel tone though it’s still used as a consonant. This doesn’t really explain how the long O turned into a diphthong, but I put that down to the errors of amateur mimicry. It’s the sort of thing that’s easy to do when exaggerating someone else’s accent. (Or maybe it came from trying to say Ö.) No positive reason exists for pronouncing English words this way; compared to American or Irish English, the ease and clarity of speech is objectively poorer. Since getting established as a norm the accent has continued to evolve, going in its own direction without any more German input.

If you listen to the various regional accents from around the edges of England, most of them are less affected by this Germanization, which was strongest in the central urban areas. But if you want to hear how English is supposed to sound without the affectations of the eighteenth century’s professional ass-kissers, you need to go at least as far as Ireland, and to hear the most accurate version, the place to go might be Appalachia.

Though Americans do generally think that today’s standard English accent sounds classy and refined, people conversely also recognize that falsely affecting this accent is often a hallmark of a pretentious classist snob. Little do they realize that this actually applies to the accent as a whole: it only came to exist because pretentious affectation was widespread at a time when classist snobbery was the norm.

eight-bit nostalgia

There’s a lot of nostalgia out there for the era of eight-bit computers — especially the home-oriented ones from the likes of Commodore and Sinclair and Atari.  And I get why: they were tremendously liberating and empowering to those who had never had access to computing before.  And the BASIC interpreters they all came with were likewise quite empowering to those who hadn’t previously realized that they could write their own programs.

But as someone who was already empowered, I couldn’t stand those crappy toy computers.  They’d run out of bits just when you were at the point where a program was starting to get interesting.  I never owned one.  I didn’t start wanting my own computer until the sixteen bit era.  The first personal computer that actually made me want it was the Apple Lisa, which of course was prohibitively expensive.  The first one I wanted enough to pay hard-earned money for it, at a time when I didn’t have much, was the Amiga 1000.

(Last I checked, my Amiga 1000 still runs.  But one of these days the disk drives are going to fail, and any available replacements will be just as old and worn.  Turns out that what a lot of retrocomputing hobbyists do is to use hardware adapters to connect their old disk cables to modern flash-memory drives.  It may be kind of cheating but at least you won’t have range anxiety about how much you dare use it before it breaks.)

To me, the sixteen bit era, and the 32-bit transition following, was the most fun time, when the computers were capable enough to do plenty of cool stuff, but also still innovative and diverse enough to not be all boring and businesslike.

If I were of a mind to recapture any of that fun with modern hardware, it sure doesn’t cost money like it used to: I’d look at, for instance, getting a Pi 3 with Raspbian on it.  You could have a complete Linux system just by velcroing it to the back of a monitor or TV.  But there are even cheaper alternatives: there’s a quite good hacking environment available across all modern platforms, more empowering and ubiquitous than BASIC ever was… in your browser’s javascript.

enduring entertainment franchises

What are the longest-lasting, most prolific, most enduring entertainment franchises? When it comes to movies, there are two big ones which usually get mentioned above all others: Godzilla, and James Bond. If you include the combination of movies and TV, Star Trek is hard to beat. But these are only the well-known internationally popular ones. If you look at more obscure serieses that aren’t well known outside of their countries of origin, there are many which, for sheer quantity, utterly blow away those big names.

Here are some examples:

franchise	origin	years	films	genre
Hopalong Cassidy	USA	1935-1948	66	western
The Durango Kid	USA	1940-1952	64	western
El Santo	Mexico	1958-1982	52	luchador
The Bowery Boys	USA	1946-1958	48	comedy
Tora-san	Japan	1969-1995	48	romantic comedy
Charlie Chan	USA	1926-1949	47	mystery

This list gets plenty longer if you start counting Japanese TV material repackaged as films, in which case Ultraman and Super Sentai are both formidable. Perry Mason and Scooby-Doo are also substantial.

Things get muddier if you look at public-domain characters who have been the subject of different serieses of films made by independent groups. Some characters who have large numbers of films of independent origin include Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Dracula, Frankenstein, and Hercules. Two characters which may be a bit more unified in their origin, and more plausible as having their films constitute a single franchise, include Maciste (Italy) and Wong Fei-hung (China).

But the picture brightens up if you look at franchises which include the longest span of years. Then the mass-produced comedies and westerns centered around particular actors mostly drop away. The most enduring I can find by this measure are:

Godzilla	Japan	monster	62 years and counting
Perry Mason	USA	mystery	61 years including TV movies
James Bond	UK	spy	54 years and counting
Doctor Who	UK	SF	53 years on TV, and counting
Ultraman	Japan	SF/kids	50 years on TV with spinoff films, and counting
Star Trek	USA	SF	50 years on TV, 37 on film, and counting
Zatoichi	Japan	samurai	48 years
Bulldog Drummond	UK/USA	action	44 years
Mil Máscaras	Mexico	luchador	44 years
Looney Tunes	USA	comedy	41 years and counting, without including shorts
Super Sentai	Japan	SF/kids	41 years on TV with spinoff films, and counting
Apartment Wife	Japan	erotica	40 years
Star Wars	USA	SF	39 years and counting
The Cisco Kid	USA	western	36 years, then rebooted in 1994 after 44 years off

But these all dwindle into insignificance if you count the short cartoons of characters like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. I have no doubt that those guys will hit the century mark in due time… though the effects of their early works going into the public domain (if lobbyists ever even allow that to happen) may be difficult to estimate.

the popularity of football

Why is gridiron football so much more popular than other sports to watch on American TV? I think it’s because the sport excels at creating drama. In almost no other sport I can name does a game-changing score typically come about only as a result of many minutes of effort, in which a mishap at any point can mean it was all for nothing. In sports like baseball or soccer or hockey, big scores come with very little warning, and in sports like basketball or tennis or golf or volleyball, there are no really big moments because each individual score is small and only the accumulation of dozens of scoring moments can create a win.

There are certain sports which are very popular despite being poor at drama in this sense. Auto racing has even more fans than football, and winning at that involves very little drama — it’s an extremely incremental process to work one’s way forward through the field. To win at bicycle racing is much more dramatic than in any motorsport, because the athletes have to make bursts of intense effort at strategic moments. But on the other hand, losing at auto racing can be very dramatic indeed. Maybe it’s true that many fans watch it just for the crashes. (There may be a long wait between dramatic moments, but then, football also has a lot of delay between bits of action. Sports fans need to have a lot of patience and attention span.)

Soccer is the real puzzle. Why is it the most popular sport in Europe, South America, and Africa? It’s fun to play but I don’t see how it’s fun to watch. Scores can be very rare, and you may have to watch an hour or more of nothing before seeing a big moment, and that moment comes with little warning. Then if they go to penalty kicks, it’s an anticlimax that makes the entire game pointless. (They should widen the goals and make the game higher scoring.)

Actually, I can think of one other athletic endeavor which can offer the same kind of drama that gridiron football does: the fighting sports. Boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, judo, MMA… no wonder the UFC has grown so rapidly. Except sumo wrestling, which is usually over in seconds. That’s another one which is a bit inexplicable in its popularity.

One sport that might be kind of good at drama is cricket — it sure ought to be better than baseball, from what I understand of the rules. Unfortunately a cricket test is really really long.

Star Trek: 1966–2005

Star Trek has now been an important and inspiring part of our culture over a span of fifty years.  But it’s done.  It is now time to let the shambling corpse have its rest.

Erdős-Bacon number

The Erdős-Bacon number is defined as the sum of the number of onscreen filmmaking collaborations it takes to connect a person to actor Kevin Bacon, and the number of academic publishing collaborations it takes to reach mathematician Paul Erdős.  The number has no value except for the small set of people who are both academics and film performers.  Natalie Portman has a Erdős-Bacon number of seven, as does Colin Firth, and Danica McKellar’s number is six.  The actor with the lowest number is apparently Albert M. Chan, who appeared with Bacon in Patriots Day.  His number is four.  Coming from the other direction, Carl Sagan’s number was four.  Stephen Hawking’s is seven.  The lowest number that anyone is known to have is three, held by Professor Daniel Kleitman of MIT, who was a math advisor for Good Will Hunting (which is two steps from Kevin Bacon via Minnie Driver’s appearance in Sleepers) and appeared in the film as an extra.

Can this number be beaten?  Lots of mathematicians are still alive who have collaborated with Erdős, and if any of them ever appears in a Kevin Bacon film, they will achieve a value of two.  The other way this could be achieved is if Mr. Bacon himself goes into academia and collaborates with one of this group.  Since Paul Erdős left us twenty years ago, a value of one is not achievable.

For an even more exclusive club, there are people who have an Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number, in which the third component is the number of musical collaborations which separate the subject from the members of Black Sabbath.  Some famous people for whom low Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath numbers have been claimed include Lisa Kudrow (15), Adam Savage (13), Albert Einstein (11), Richard Feynman (10), Mayim Bialik (10), Tom Lehrer (9), Terry Pratchett (9), Ray Kurzweil (8), and Brian May (8).  I don’t think any values lower than eight are known.

Some of these collaborations are a stretch — it’s easy to question whether they count.  Among those mentioned earlier, Natalie Portman has a pretty solid 10 via a joke rap track she recorded with some people from Saturday Night Live, Danica McKellar has a dubious 10 by singing in an ad jingle, and Carl Sagan has an even more dubious 10 by being sampled in an autotuned remix of bits of narration from Cosmos.  Mayim Bialik’s case might be the poorest of all: Michael Jackson put his celebrity friends into a crowd scene in a music video, and I don’t think she even sings in it.  In Brian May’s case, it’s the Erdős side which is slightly dubious, because though he did recently return to school and complete a doctorate in astrophysics, the path which yields that low a number is via some book called Bang! The Complete History of the Universe, which does not exactly seem to be a peer-reviewed publication.  For Kurzweil, it’s the Bacon number which is shaky, as they’re counting an appearance on a nonfiction TV show.  But some are much more legitimate: for instance, by singing in Mamma Mia!, Colin Firth has given himself a value of 11 which should be beyond dispute.

solar panels on electric cars?

So if you had an electric car, would it be worthwhile to put a solar panel on the roof?

At first blush, it wouldn’t seem so.  A decent electric car ought to have something like 100 kilowatt-hours in its battery pack, and it sure would be nice if it could hold 200 or more.  (The total energy in a moderately sized tank of gasoline is about 500 kwh, but at least two thirds of that just goes into waste heat.)  The biggest solar panel area you could fit on top of a car, disregarding all competing design criteria, would be about two square meters, and a more typical car would probably make room for about one square meter.  Over a whole day in blazing sun, that’s only going to produce about one kwh, and in most circumstances you’ll get quite a bit less.  So it’ll probably only extend your daily driving range by three miles at most, and if you park it under a roof you’ll never get even one mile out of it.

But range extension isn’t the only benefit of having a bit of free power available when not driving.  You’d never have to worry about running things down with the fan or the stereo or mobile-device chargers.  On a hot day you could even use the air conditioner.  The car could even cool itself automatically while left in a parking lot, with no fear that this would affect your ability to get home.  Cars left unattended for months might still be fully ready to drive away in.  And if you run out of juice in a lonely desert, the next day you might be able to drive a couple of crucial miles to get to a spot where help is reachable.

I think this is starting to sound like a good idea even on gasoline cars.  Or on hybrids, at the very least.

a suggestion I intend to send to my legislators

Senator Lois Wolk, Assemblymember Bill Dodd, Senate candidate Mariko Yamada, Assembly candidate Dan Wolk, and Assembly candidate Don Saylor,

Are you tired of dealing with pennies? I sure am. They take time and effort out of one’s day even if all you want to do is get rid of them. I don’t think any other economy keeps such a worthless coin in circulation — in Mexico, for instance, you never see anything smaller than a half peso. The US Treasury has been considering eliminating the penny from our coinage for twenty years, but hasn’t been able to move forward due to pointless obstructionism from assorted directions.

But fortunately, we don’t have to wait for the federal government to act. We can solve the problem right here in California. We can make it so people can use pennies if they want to, but nobody will need to. How can we do this? With a minor adjustment of the sales tax code.

All we have to do is make a rule that when buying retail at a location which accepts cash, the tax amount is rounded up or down by a cent or two, so that the total purchase price including tax is always a multiple of five cents. Note that this applies to noncash purchases as well, as long as they’re made at cash registers, so the amount remains consistent. But it would not apply to mail order purchases as they don’t offer a cash option. This means that we would not burden merchants in other states with adjusting to any new complexity.

The result would be that nobody who pays cash would need to either bring pennies, or receive them as change. People would become accustomed to nickel prices and before long, merchants might get into the habit of advertising nickel prices also. The other states would envy our penniless lifestyle and start copying us, and eventually the Treasury will stop minting pennies. And California will once again be seen as taking a leadership role.

But before that, we need someone to lead this idea in Sacramento. I’m hoping that among you, the legislators and candidates to represent me in Napa County, are the ones to do so.

I hope that this change can be accomplished by simple legislation, without requiring a ballot measure. If one is needed, I am confident that would pass, without requiring any substantial campaign effort.

Thank you for your attention, and I hope this idea appeals to you.

top science fiction writers

Who would be my picks for the top ten or so science fiction writers of all time?  Let’s take an initial stab:

(the inarguable immortals)
H.G. Wells
Olaf Stapledon
Philip K. Dick
Ursula K. LeGuin

(maybes)
Arthur C. Clarke
Frederik Pohl
Alfred Bester
Cordwainer Smith
Kurt Vonnegut
Frank Herbert
John Brunner
Roger Zelazny
Greg Bear
Octavia Butler
Vernor Vinge
Kim Stanley Robinson

(tempting, but probably not justifiable)
R.A. Lafferty
Greg Egan

(ought to read more before rejecting)
Bruce Sterling
Doris Lessing

Names I will definitely not be listing include Asimov and Heinlein… and also Sturgeon and Bradbury.