Category Archives: Readings

How to write a best selling fantasy novel.

In Making Light, Teresa Nielsen Hayden describes in detail how and why the astroturf organization 'Common Good' is in fact a Common Fraud.

TNH is also, in case you didn't know, the inventor of the disemvowelling concept (“The rule of thumb is that grossly offensive messages and drive-by trollpostings get deleted, but an excessively uncivil tone just makes your vowels disappear. Vigorous argument is appreciated, but a civil tone is required.”) Hmm. Maybe I should say “inventor or at least major popularizer, as apparently a [link fixed] related strategy has been around for a while. Online disemvoweller.

Today's Fablog essay transcribes Giblets's rant against Cheap And Tawdry Political Tricks, to wit John Kerry's blasphemous mention of Dick Cheney's daughter's sexual preference.

Ms. Cheney is, among other things, the former gay and lesbian corporate relations manager for Coors Beer and member of the Republican Unity Coalition, a 'a homosexual activist Republican group' according to the CWA — not exactly a closeted role in life.

I can reveal, however, I have proof that Giblets is not the author of most of this essay. Indeed, other than the penultimate paragraph, the satirical part, this “Giblets” essay is materially similar to a rant I heard someone named Mickey Kaus give on NPR this morning.

Unless “Mickey Kaus” is a pseduonym for Giblets we can only conclude that Giblets listens to NPR! While adding a paragraph or two to the end of this rant transforms the meaning — from something offensive and smarmy based on innuendo and the idea that there's something wrong with being gay into a much funnier, indeed subversive, essay — one has to ask whether this sort of substantially derivative work with just a bit tacked on can be defended as parody.

Slashdot reports:

“Tit for Tat, the reigning champion of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Competition, has been defeated by a group of cooperating programs from the University of Southampton. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a game with two players and two possible moves: cooperate or defect. If the two players cooperate, they both have small wins. If one player cooperates and the other defects, the cooperator has a big loss and the defector has a big win. If both players defect, they both have small losses. Tit for Tat cooperates in the first round and imitates its opponent's previous move for the rest of the game. Tit for Tat is similar to the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy used by the two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War. Southampton's programs executed a known series of 5 to 10 moves which allowed them to recognize each other. After recognition, the two Southampton programs became 'master and slave': one program would keep defecting and the other would keep cooperating. If a Southampton program determined that another program was non-Southampton, it would defect.”

Haven't read the paper yet, but this sounds like a significant result, as the empircal superiority of 'tit for tat' is received wisdom in most accounts of applied game theory I've ever read. 'Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm' calls it delightful and suggests that,

This is the classic model of all game theory! And even in this tiny little dishpan model collaborative groups form and once they form they out compete the players that fail to collaborate. As Dave Weinberger once pointed out, we are a species that will form communities even if it means tapping out the alphabet on the wall of our cell.

I wonder if real-life applications may be limited by the difficulty of the earlier game to determine who gets which role…