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Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon is the most recent book I’ve finished. Picked it up in the airport, all 1137 pages of global military events cascade along. Clancy expects that readers know who Jack Ryan — still President Ryan here — is and what’s he done. Various references to events in earlier books abound, and the character is only roughed in a bit… but the book isn’t really about Ryan. It’s about the Chinese deciding to invade Russia to snatch a new gold mine and as-yet-untapped oil fields in Siberia.

However, the real hero, as so often with Clancy, is the hardware, especially an unmanned aerial reconnaissance plane called the Dark Star. The Dark Stars (there are more than one) give unrivaled intelligence to the American forces helping the Russian stave off a Chinese invasion. And for a book initially published in August 2000, there is a period piece, in which this footage is broadcast over the internet to get to the Chinese, around their censorship of other media. The internet as a force of good… is that Pollyanna-ish?

Anyway, I enjoyed it. Pure page-turner. I just wish all the ranks and hardware didn’t add an extra 100 pages to a long novel that really is no surprise to the reader. But if you read Clancy (since Red October) it’s not for the surprise.

OK, it’s not that bad, but just spent five hours at work, fixing some known issues, and uncovered two big problems, one of which should never have happened and the other never should have passed through even the limited testing we did (and I am part of that we). Too late to explain here right now, and may not be appropriate. We’ll fix everything.

First redesign of News.com since January 2001. Bigger project than intended, although less included in this initial release than expected/hoped for. Always the same story, probably. Anyway, big step. And now I can come home at normal hours again!

Like Scott Rosenberg, my son is a big fan of Richard Scarry and his pie rats. I’m sure my daughter will be, too.

Normally, speaking on a panel would be the highlight of the work day. It probably will be, but it’s been a busy, busy, busy week… so today I’m just looking forward to learning from the discussion and taking a short break from this work project. Helps that Moscone West is just a 10-minute walk from the office, although I’ve never been to either Moscone or (the newly opened) Moscone West before. Yes, I’m a confernce neophyte… and I didn’t get a chance to take advantage of my speaker’s pass. Which pass has a purple ribbon announcing me as SPEAKER. Phew. 😉

On Thursday, I’m part of a panel discussing “The Effects of Blogs on Publishing“. I’m looking forward to joining Scott Rosenberg of Salon and Matt May, of the W3C, among other things. My bio mentions this blog… which is probably not why Lauren Wood (an actual nuclear physicist at one point, though clearly not practicing) agreed to have me as a member of the panel.

Actually, as I’m not a regular on the conference circuit, I found the process interesting. I followed a link on ongoing from Tim Bray inviting interested parties to get in touch with Lauren. I was intrigued, and started the process.The resulting email exchange quickly led to my participation, which I think will be worthwhile. I haven’t spoken to or met with any of the other participants, although I’ve listened to Scott once over at Berkeley on some blog panel at the journalism school.

I cannot find the actual invitation link on Bray’s site right now, despite some quick Googling with site:tbray.org as a qualifier. Mild irony, since I’m enjoying On Search, the irregular series. Of course, my blog lacks site search, too!

Mental transaction costs
Shirky extends his argument against micropayments with “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content“. A quote:

This strategy doesn’t work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price.

Wonder if free registration is a significant mental cost in this vein?

Jennifer Capriati and Justine Henin-Hardenne just played a dynamite match, wth every point of their US Open semifinal a battle. Henin-Hardenne wins, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (7-4). Wow.

Patrick O’Brian’s The Far Side of the World enjoys a great title. The author knows it, and various characters use the phrase several times. Where is the ‘far side of the world’ — it’s the South Pacific, off the coast of Chile, where Surprise, Aubrey’s ship, is sent to protect British whaling ships from an American frigate. Over halfway through the novel, Aubrey jumps into the ocean at night to save Maturin, who has fallen in, as is his wont. The ship sails on without them to their dismay. Fortunately, they are saved by a boatload of Poylnesian Amazons, who seem to threaten castration, but eventually just leave them on an island. The Surprise finds them, amazingly enough (well, these are our heroes). The book ends with the ship returning to quell imminent battle on land between the shipwrecked sailors from the American frigate and a skeleton crew from the British ship left on the island. Onec again, O’Brian has no qualms about leaving his readers intensely eager to get to the next book.

I don’t know why the movie-makers are taking the titles from the first and the tenth Aubrey-Maturin novels for a single movie. The movie won’t bridge 10 books… no one is that foolish. We’ll see. If the movie arrives in November, I don’t have much time to get to the next (and last) ten books before opening night. Oh well.

I’m glad to see that W.W. Norton did not Americanize the spelling of Treason’s Harbour, the ninth in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. Stuck ashore in Malta during a ship refit, Aubrey awkwardly makes a pass at a fellow officer’s wife (and fails), but accidentally befriends her massive dog, which leads the island to think he has succeeded. Maturin, meanwhile, is awash in spycraft, and — in an amusing turn — has to rebuff a Spanish-fly-supported, espionage-induced effort at seduction by the same officer’s wife.

Finally afloat, we follow our heroes across the Mediterranean, and across a sliver of the Egyptian desert (pre-Suez canal era) to the Red Sea. A traitor in the English Admiralty dooms their mission there, but I found two incidents memorable. First, the passenger who enjoys swimming from the boat is torn apart by sharks in the Red Sea. Since Aubrey often enjoys a swim, it’s useful for O’Brian to toss over another incidental character. Second, Maturin gets a diving bell, modeled after that used by Halley (the astronomer), and puts it to good use on the mission. Knowing O’Brian’s work, this is all probably historically accurate. Anyway, they return to Malta to report the failure of their mission, and the existence of a traitor. The reader knows who it is, but the characters are going to have to wait another book or two to find out. I guess O’Brian realized he was on a roll by this point (1983), and could leave loose ends as back-story for the future. I know I’m going to read the next eleven (!), so he wasn’t wrong.