Happy Cephalapodmas to all our readers!

I shall find it difficult to get online for the next fortnight so here’s an early Season’s Greetings to all Talking Squid readers.

This is my daughter’s picture of Rudolph. Gotta love the eyelashes. It was the cover to a series of letters she stapled together addressed to each of Santa’s reindeer detailing how wonderful she thinks they are. (”Dear Rudolph, did you know there’s a song about you…?”)

Merry Solstice, one and all.

While Garth Nix has been working on his new novel, A Confusion of Princes, he has also been developing the background as a massively multiplayer online game (MMORG) called Imperial Galaxy using Facebook as its running platform. The novel is due out in 2009, but you can explore Nix’s universe now. Imperial Galaxy is open for beta testing to all willing Galactic Imperialists. All you need is a free Facebook account and the Imperial Galaxy application (free download here).

 Amazon has, as many of you know, launched an e-book reader and associated e-book sales service, called Kindle. I’ve seen the ebook debate go around a few times. But this has sparked it off to the extent that I was inspired to produce the following verbose missive on the general subject, and the Amazon Kindle ebook reader specifically.

There are a lot arguments for and against ebooks readers.The first thing to realise is that most of the arguments miss the point — they assume that ebook readers must replace books, and of course ebook readers only need to catch on to the extent that they are sustainable as a category in themselves. An ebook reader market that was, for example, 10% of the size of the book market would still be very healthy. So ebook readers do not need to replace books, only supplement them, to be successful. But inevitably, comparisons to books are going to be a decisive factor in determining whether ebook readers are going to be seen as a good idea.

One argument is that e-books will never replace real books because you can’t curl up with them in bed, you can’t stick them in your bag to read on the train, you can’t throw them at the cat or prop up wonky tables with them. OK, half of this is nonsense, throwing and propping tables have nothing to do with reading, and are irrelevant, but I mention it so you can get the usual creaky luddite flavour of this sort of argument (and people — prominent SF fans, who you might expect to be somewhat technophilic, even — have actually made these arguments to me in all seriousness). But the rest of them are worth considering, and thats why I agree you need a dedicated e-book reader type device, generally with something like the relatively high resolution (167dpi) electronic-paper display in the Kindle reader (maybe we will yet have a display technology that is perfect for all uses, but we don’t now), and it needs to be a bookish size, before the ebook market becomes reasonable.Here is a not entirely serious example of this rather silly argument, that to replace books for reading, a future device must duplicate ALL possible uses of a book, including all those that have nothing to do with reading. Its like arguing that no one would ever want the convenience of watching DVDs at home because it would deprive them of the chance to eat movie theatre popcorn. Books will still be right there for those that really want to read in the bath without risking an expensive device, or for those for whom a books potential as missile or construction material is at least as important as the act of reading. But for ebook readers to succeed they only need to be purchased by enough people, not by all book readers.

A variant of this argument acknowledges that the physical form of books isn’t important, but insists that every aspect of our interaction with the printing on its pages, even those that are by-products of its physical form, are essential, and because of their lack e-books are mere ‘documents’ not true books. In essence, its much the same argument as ‘the books must be usable to prop tables’ argument, simply shorn of its obviously sillier parts. The aspects that are claimed as ‘essential’ here are two page layout, and underlining/highlighting and marginal notes. Two page layout would again seem to be taking elements that are coincidental to the physical form of a book, and assuming they are essential, changing to single page layout as a standard format will change very little, for most books probably simplifying design. And while marginal notes etc are useful for books used as textbooks and similar references, the vast majority of books are never so marked, so its obviously not an essential element of what a book is. E-books need not be the same, merely mostly the same, and other advantages (full text search, for example) may outweight some minor uses of the printed word.

Another argument, in many ways opposite to the ‘ebooks must do everything real books do’, is that e-book readers are pointless because they are too much like a real book, that really, e-books readers should be combined into that one magical device that is also our phone and our music player and the way we watch tv and that receives email and so on. In a funny little counterpoint to luddite sf fans arguing against high tech replacements for book, this argument was made recently by a friend of the squid whose involvement in, and knowledge of, the dead trees book industry (especially the SF part) is extensive and profound. I think there is a little truth in this, but not enough. Being able to move my e-books to another device for convenience would be a really useful and desirable feature for me. I’m almost always lugging a giant laptop around with me. It would be great, and very useful, if it had a big bundle of reference works of various kinds on it. But ultimately, I don’t have any desire to read most books on a device the size of a phone, and I don’t have any desire to make my phone the size of a book. Plus the display point mentioned above. A true do-everything device ends up being something too big to do half of those jobs the way people want. And a multi-purpose device that IS big enough, like a laptop, generally ends up being too big, and generally not as good (due to display, battery life, etc) as a dedicated device. It’s probably inevitable that some sharing of ebooks between ebook readers and other devices will take place — Amazon, as we will see, regards this distinctly as a sideshow, but it may well be an important part of its appeal for purchasers.

So, I think the Kindle is pretty much the right kind of device. I’ve never used or seen one, so I can’t tell if its the right actual device (iPods and Zunes are both the right kind of device, but only one of them is the right actual device). It does seem, compared to the iPod, to have been hit rather hard with the ugly stick. But I think that about a lot of consumer electronics (most laptops made by people that aren’t Sony or Apple, for a start) and people seem to keep buying them anyway. My suspicion is, so far, that its mostly the Sony earlier devices repeated with mild improvement, increased marketing muscle and publisher sign on thanks to Amazon clout, and the same mistakes repeated.

What are those mistakes? Well, essentially, greed. Greed, and the desire for control. This is essentially what has crippled most attempts to sell ebook readers so far. Generally, a new product media category goes through a few cycles. You get a few attempts that fail due to either content provider greed, or lack of content provider support. A company launches a new product with nifty features that they think consumers will like, and it turns out early adopter consumers either think it’s a nice idea, if there was actual content to use it with that was easy to get and legal, or it’s a nice idea, if it wasn’t priced in such a way as to obviously be a bad idea to actually use if you aren’t rich enough to not care about being ripped off, or sometimes it’s just a good idea badly made. Greed manifests partly as crazy overpricing, and partly as incredibly restrictive rules on what you can do with the device, in case someone somewhere actually uses the device for something without paying them money.

Eventually, a median is reached whereby the content providers’ greed is held in check enough for someone to actually want to buy their product. The content providers then have a prolonged inner war with themselves, during which some people who work for them will decide that maintaining high margins and control is the most important thing, and some smarter people will decide that making money is actually more important and it’s better to sell more (even if the margin is smaller and some misuse slips through). Eventually, a compromise device arrives that allows people to use content they pay for easily, to use content they don’t pay for with a bit more work; most people are honest and enjoy their devices (and buy heaps of them) and everyone is happy.

This was pretty much how it went with the portable music players market, for example. Early devices were in a weird legal limbo because digital music services were under constant legal challenge and companies like Sony fell over themselves to make devices with less functionality and crazy pricing in order to protect their investment. They protected their investment so well they ended up with hundreds of millions of dollars in players that nobody wanted, and sometimes whole generations of product (commercial DAT tape and Minidisc, for example) that never caught on outside a tiny core of enthusiasts or niches for professionals. Apple succeeded with the iPod mostly because it’s a smart, well-designed product. But they succeeded with the iTunes store because they tried hard to minimise music company greed, and so people were prepared to spend money there.

Sony is the textbook example of corporate greed destroying their ability to make good products in other areas, including ebook readers. Prior to the Kindle, Sony was the leader in ebook readers. They made great readers, but tried very hard to make you only buy books from Sony. They actually charge far more for an ebook version of a book than for a paper version, and then restrict your rights so it’s less useful than a paper version. Unsurprisingly, people didn’t buy that many. And then they virtually crippled its use for works not from them, deathly afraid that someone else might work out how to make money from the device when they couldn’t. People who buy Sony ebook readers either do a lot of their own format conversion, or hack the things like crazy.

The big question is not whether the reader device is the right idea (I think so). The big question is, has Amazon overcome the greed impulse to make a device people actually want to buy and use?Part 2 soon…

As 2007 draws to a close, it is instructive to look over the box office figures for Hollywood. Using the arbitrary point of any film that took more than $50 million at the US box office, I count a total of 41 movies of which nineteen are fantasy, science fiction, or horror (Spiderman 3, Shrek the Third, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ratatouille, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, Evan Almighty, Meet the Robinsons, Enchanted, Bridge to Terabithia, Beowulf, 1408, Fred Claus, Saw IV, Halloween 2007, TNMT, and Resident Evil: Extinction).

Another seven films would also be listed as genre if they were books, either as thrillers, Westerns, or crime/mysteries (Bourne Ultimatum, Rush Hour 3, Live Free or Die Hard, American Gangster, Disturbia, Ocean’s Thirteen, and 3:10 to Yuma). Then there’s a small number of borderline cases that may be technically fantasy (The Simpsons Movie, Surf’s Up, and Bee Movie) but don’t fit the usual genre expectations or conversely are not overtly fantastical (300) but have stretched historical events to fit the epic fantasy template and therefore riff on genre story structures.

Nearly two-thirds of the top-grossing films of 2007 are genre films — and all of the top five and nine of the top ten (Wild Hogs scrapes in at #10). Same story in 2006: only one of the top ten films was non-genre, and it just made it. Same again in 2005, although at least this time the single top 10 film that was non-genre made it to #6. Lest you accuse me of choosing the $50 million mark to bolster my argument, note that sitting just outside the cutoff are many more genre films (Premonition, The Kingdom, Shooter, Underdog, 30 Days of Night, Stardust…)

And it’s not just box office; it’s critical praise as well. While many of the top-rating genre films are multiplex fodder like Spiderman 3 and Transformers, many are on RT’s list of top-rated films of the year. Even the multiplex fodder has been much more intelligent and rewarding than most years — with the exception of the uninspired franchise-churners Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean 3, the uninspired wannabe franchise Ghost Rider, and the existential horrors that are Fred Claus and Evan Almighty. Still, there are just as many non-genre films that tested the limits of human endurance like The Comebacks, Strength and Honor, and Lions for Lambs.

Now this raises some puzzles. Why, when movies are so dominated by genre, does the book industry still treat genre like a set of exclusive enclaves and assume that readers will never want to venture beyond rigidly defined walls? Why are non-genre writers so pompously dismissive of genre — even when they choose to write a genre book?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I strongly suggest that readers make an effort to break away from their usual hangouts in the bookshop and try something from another genre. Ask the bookseller for a recommendation in another genre based on other authors you like, even if it’s a high-lit author like Ian McEwan (in which case try Ian McDonald, Dan Simmons, Ursula K. le Guin, M. John Harrison or Michael Chabon). You may just discover you have a new favourite author. And vice versa. As a science fiction fan myself, I can’t thank Justin at Slow Glass Books enough for opening my eyes to crime writers like Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett. The last chapters of The Getaway and The Glass Key are classics in any genre — and were rewritten or entirely neglected in the movie versions; you won’t ever get what was so monumental about these books from their adaptations.

Set yourself a task over this holiday period: try a book in a genre you’ve never read before. And don’t cheat by choosing a book you expect to hate so as to reinforce your prejudices. Yeah, I’m onto you, Ms Winterson.

Malcolm Gladwell has published an excellent article on IQ and race in the New Yorker. It’s almost enough to get me to forgive the New Yorker for the Darkness in El Dorado debacle. Here’s a taste of what Gladwell has to say:

When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”

(more…)

Big Don made a point that I needed to respond to at length, so I’ve broken out of the comments section. This is what he said:

Chris, I was merely refuting the point that sub-Saharan Pygmies and Bushmen must have had IQs greater than 54-60 for them to have survived. Not so. Rats and cockroaches, however smart, are probably below IQ-10 on the human scale. If you checkout the beautiful color photos in 1940s-era National Geographics, you can see the Pygmy standard of living was barely above that of rats & roaches. As a boy of 10-12, I grew up on those mags…it was the only place in those days, before Playboy & Penthouse, a kid could see photos of women’s tits…

Now I have to say that my initial impulse was to be scathing. After all, Big Don was still comparing an African ethnic group to rats and cockroaches and was backing up his argument with evidence derived from his memories of National Geographic from before 1953 (the year Playboy was first published) when his attention to the text was perhaps not as focussed as it could have been.

But then I realised that Big Don was right. I did some reading on the relevant peoples of Africa and discovered that they were, indeed, hunter-gatherers, much like rats and roaches. They build huts out of wood and leaves and arrange them in complex patterns to maximise their foraging efficiency, just like rats and roaches. They make music using a combination of instruments and vocals that are famous for their “dense contrapuntal communal improvisation” and which (some observers claim) exhibits a level of complexity that was not reached in European music until the 14th century, and others believe has yet to be realised by any other group of people (especially in the complex “super-patterns” of cyclical repetition that nobody ever gets to hear aloud in their lifetimes, not even the singers themselves), again just like rats and roaches. They have communal rites and religious practices, just like rats and roaches. They keep beehives for honey, just like rats and roaches. They hunt using poisoned arrows and spears, just like rats and roaches. They have two methods of fishing. One is to dam a river and then rapidly drain the dam. The other is to disperse a herbal poison in a river and collect the fish that float to the surface downstream. Just like rats and roaches. Traditionally they were so good at hunting that the German and French colonialists used to employ them to hunt elephants for ivory, a practice that continued until the colonial masters realised that rats and roaches were even better at hunting elephants and would work for less. They hate being called “pygmies”, this being a term they consider highly insulting as it is derived from the Greek work meaning the length of one’s forearm. They much prefer to be called after their specific groupings, such as Baka or Gyelli. Just like rats and roaches.

Many people don’t know all that about rats and roaches, but I found two award-winning documentaries that showed just how complex the lifestyles of rats and roaches are. ^1,2

A friend of mine also told me that one group, the Babongo, don’t have lungs. I told him this was ridiculous. My friend replied that plenty of animals survive without lungs. Fish, insects, and mollusca all survive perfectly well without lungs. Well that changed my mind quick smart.

But I still didn’t understand why various forest-dwellers of sub-Saharan Africa had evolved under a differential selection pressure for intelligence compared to Europeans and Asians. Big Don had already provided me with the answer.

As for Europeans emerging with higher intelligence than Africans, it’s a no-brainer. In the colder climates, food must be planned for and stored during growing season in order to survive the winter. By contrast, plentiful food was available year-round for hunter-gatherers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Now I have a long-standing distrust of anything called a “no-brainer.” It seems to me that as many times as something really is a no-brainer requiring no thought to be understood, just as often it means “calling this a no-brainer stops me from having to think about the flaws in my precious beliefs.” But in this case Big Don is right. Those peoples who live in colder climates have to use their intelligence to store food for winter. That is why the most intelligent people of all are Inuits. It also explains why the sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers are less intelligent than those who store food over winter like Scandinavians, Koreans, and squirrels.

That’s right. Hunter-gatherers are less intelligent than squirrels. I realise this is a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, but I have empirical proof of it. I called a friend of mine who works in the Congo and another who lives in North America about all this and together we worked out a new IQ test designed specifically to investigate the intelligence of food storers versus non-storers. It’s all copyrighted, but I don’t think Elsevier will mind if I release one of the questions.

Acorn is to oak tree as beechnut is to __________ tree.

When my friend in the Congo asked this of several Baka tribesmen, they didn’t know. They had to say ridiculous things like “What’s an acorn?” and “I’ve never heard of an oak tree.” Meanwhile my friend in North America noticed that squirrels could not speak and so he had to rely on observational evidence of their behaviour. He found that whenever a squirrel climbed an oak tree, it came down with an acorn and whenever it climbed a beech tree it came down with a beechnut, thus demonstrating that squirrels are smarter than pygmies.

None of this is new. As far back as the early 1970s a research team headed by Rosewall, Hoad, and Bartkowicz showed that penguins were smarter than foreigners.³ Why have liberals ignored this overwhelming evidence? Clearly they are incapable of incorporating “no-brainers” into their thought processes as they have become emotionally dependent on outmoded strategies such as collecting evidence, applying rational analysis, and promoting humanism. Just like rats and roaches.

References
1. Lasseter J, Stanton A, et al. A Bug’s Life: previously unobserved defences by Atta texana against parasitic feeding raids of Eusmastacoideae. Pixar, 1998
2. Bird B, et al. Ratatouille: communal problem solving and dietary diversity in a Rattus rattus colony of central urban Paris. Pixar, 2007
3. Python M. Frontiers in Medicine: The Gathering Storm. British Broadcasting Corporation, 1973

A notice caught my eye calling for general practitioners to sit on the BreastScreen Queensland State Accreditation Committee. The BreastScreen program is the national mammogram screening program and is available to all Australian women between the ages of fifty and seventy (or younger in some circumstances) and screens around 1,600,000 women every year. In 2004, the BreastScreen program identified 3,851 invasive breast tumours. It’s an important program. It’s public health. It involves some fascinating epidemiology. And they want a GP to sit on one of its committees. It’s right up my alley. I was thinking about it until I read more closely.

According to the notice, the position will be reimbursed at 50% of the rate of the F1 category for committee members. It took a bit of looking, but I found the schedule of rates. The F1 rate is the lowest possible tier of reimbursement. For a full day, the fee payable is $191. And you can only claim a travel allowance if it takes more than four hours to get to the meetings. And the reimbursement is only 50% of that rate. Which means an 8-hour day comes out at $11.938 per hour. If I was to include my travel time (1.5-2 hours each way), that would drop to $8.304 an hour. To put this in context, the hourly rate for junior shop assistants on a casual contract is $12.345 — when they are 18 years old and have no supervisory or management duties.

I would still consider the position if I wasn’t already burning up my goodwill to the government working at the University of Queensland, a position that pays me about half what I would earn if I spent the same time in general practice (and I am not a high revenue earner compared to most of my colleagues). But what I am trying to understand is how the same ministers who go on about the importance of public health and of training more doctors seem to be doing their level best to make it highly unrewarding to anyone who might want to actually achieve these tasks.

Fantastic Queensland has released this year’s shortlist for the Aurealis Awards.

Congratulations to all finalists. Ones to watch are Cat Sparks and Garth Nix, with three nominated stories each, and Kate Forsyth who seems to have virtually choked the life out of her competitors for the children’s long fiction.

Fantastic Queensland has vastly improved the awards website layout; it looks superb and is much easier to navigate. Mind you, you still have to be careful saying its acronym out loud in public spaces.

An interesting post at physorg.com on recent work by University of Utah scientists Henry Harpending and Gregory M. Cochran, who have previously argued that the high IQs of Ashkenazi Jews can be attributed to genetic selection. Their more recent work suggests that 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, recent evolution.

The quotes Cochran as saying: “History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans - sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.”

Harpending is now studying whether the mutation that made Indo-European speakers lactose tolerant “gave them more energy, allowing them to conquer a large area. ”

got milk?

snikt ™