Year End Roundup for 2019

This New Years marks close to six years of blogging every day.  I write ‘em, a few of you click on ‘em.

The Traffic Stats Were Weird

The total hits on this blog increased again, up more than 10% from 2018.  As before, there is a huge amount of “long tail” in this traffic, with hits spread widely over the thousands of posts from the last 8 years.

But it isn’t clear exactly how many people actually look at this blog.  The stats I get are defaults from wordpress, so I don’t really know much about them.

This year saw a couple of mysterious blips.  I don’t know how much of this is real traffic, and how much of it is artifacts of the data collection.

Early in the year, the daily hits dropped dramatically.  This approximately corresponds to the European data privacy requirements, and the dearth of hits from that region suggest that the blog is either not available to some people (not being compliant in some way I don’t know about) or accesses are not reported (not having permission to collect that data).   I dunno.

But then, around August, traffic picked up.  Really picked up, to 100 hits per day.  During this burst, it tended to be bursty, with a few days of high traffic, as much a 300 hits per day, and then several days of low traffic.  From the imperfect information I can see, the bursts might be from Hong Kong (perhaps scraping the internet to make a copy to be used inside China?)

Then, around November, traffic dropped off again and has stayed low.  This drop approximately coincides with the increasing troubles in HK, so perhaps this reflects a cut off of Internet access there.

I really don’t know.

The Usual Stuff

The blog continued to cover the usual stuff.

Cryptocurrencies, the Future of Work (and Coworking), Dinosaurs, Birds, Robots, the Ice Is Melting, Renewable Energy.

I blog about anything that interests me and is worth the trouble.  I try to have something useful to say, though sometimes it’s mainly a link with “this is cool”

Many of the things I discuss are from current academic papers, which I cite and generally try to read at least the abstract and always point to the original sources.

“Coworking – The Book” and other Writing

My 2018 book “What is Coworking?” continues to sell like hot cakes–if nobody had ever heard of hot cakes.  I think it sold a couple dozen copies.  My plans for a new villa are on hold…. : – )

Writing is hard.  Selling books is even harder.

Speaking of writing, I also contributed an article to a local free paper, which I really like the title to:

1. Robert E. McGrath, Think Heliocentrically, Act Locally, in The Public I: A Paper of the People. 2019. http://publici.ucimc.org/2019/04/think-heliocentrically-act-locally/

I archived a report on the 2013 Alma Mater project.  Versions of this report was rejected by several conferences and journals.  A problem with working outside the box is that the journals of boxology won’t publish your results.

1. Robert E. McGrath, A Digital Rescue for a Graduation Ritual. Urbana, Illinois, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/105503

Onward

This blog will continue in the same vein, and daily posts will continue at least for now.

---

Band Names

In a continuing homage to Dave Berry, I have identified a bunch of phrases that would make great names for a band.  In general, these phrases are taken from actual, real scientific and technical papers.  So I am not making them up—just repurposing them.

Here is this year’s crop.

gerbil’s casket
Preen Oil
Carolina Preen Oil
Carolina Junco
Dark eyed Junco
Arctic Albedo
Mean Surface Albedo
Arctic Amplification
Amplified Arctic Warming
Surface Air Temperature
Snow Cover Fraction
Buckypaper
Pacific Pumice Raft
Sichuan Mudslides  (also a great name for cocktail)
Soft Exo Suits
The Weddell Gyre
Giant Miocene Parrots
Eocene Whale
Chicxulub ejecta
Perching Drones
Perch And Stare Mission
Due to a lack of sunlight in Scotland
Blogging Birds Of Scotland
Huddle Pod
Cuddle Pod
Giant Hopping Tree Rats
Kangaroo Ancestors
Prehistoric kangaroos
Tiny Pronking Robots
Computational Periscopy

---

Books

As always, I have continued the weekly review of one or more books that I read this year. This year I wrote about a total of 73 books, 24 non-fiction, 49 fiction.

Some Favorite Books of the Year

Fiction:

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Angels of Music by Kim Newman

Non-Fiction

Breaking and Entering by Jeremey N. Smith
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer
You Look Like A Thing And I Love You by Janelle Shane

All the books reviewed (in no particular order)

Fiction

Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear
Stone Mad by Elizabeth Bear
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
Equoid (2013) by Charles Stross
Toast (2002) by Charles Stross
Speak Easy (2015) by Catherynne M. Valente
Six Gun Snow White (2016) by Catherynne M. Valente
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash
Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré
Anno Dracula 1999 Daikaiju by Kim Newman
The Princess Beard by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
Grave Importance by Vivian Shaw
The Grand Dark by Richard Kadrey
Amnesty by Lara Elena
Outside Looking In by T. C. Boyle
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Noir Fatale ed. by Larry Correia and Kacey Ezell
Inland by Téa Obreht
The Origins of Sense by Adam Erlich Sachs
Fall by Neal Stephenson
Gather The Fortunes by Bryan Camp
Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
The Future is Blue by Catherynne M. Valente
No Country For Old Gnomes by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
European Travels for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss
The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School by Kim Newman
The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School by Kim Newman
Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald
Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst
Someone Who Will Love You in all Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
Unto Us A Son Is Given by Donna Leon
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Angels of Music by Kim Newman
The Burglar by Thomas Perry
Grim Expectations by K. W. Jeter
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua
Macbeth by Jo Nesbø
No Sunscreen for the Dead by Tim Dorsey
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Infernal Devices  by K. W. Jeter
Fiendish Schemes by K. W. Jeter

Non Fiction

Lakota America by Pekka Hämäläinen
The Laundromat by Jake Bernstein
You Look Like A Thing And I Love You by Janelle Shane
They Will Have To Die Now by James Verini
Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik
Proof!  By Amir Alexander
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Four Queens by Nancy Goldstone
The Next Billion Users by Payal Arora
How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell
Places and Names by Elliot Ackerman
Eyes in the Sky by Arthur Holland Michel
American Carnage by Tim Alberta
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
The Ice At The End Of The World by Jon Gertner
Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton
Devices and Desires by Kate Hubbard
Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid
Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff
Breaking and Entering by Jeremey N. Smith
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” by David Treuer
Brilliant Green by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohllenben
Before and After Alexander by Richard A. Billows

 

Q2 2019 roundup

This quarter marked the milestone: 2K days in a row!

This quarter also saw a dramatic drop in hits reported in the stats.  (I have states only about hits.)  The drop seems to coincide with the shutdown of Google+ on April 1.  I had been automatically posting every blog article to Google+, so maybe that was getting them more visible in Google searches. I dunno.

The Usual Suspects

This quarter saw lots of posts about the usual suspects: The Cryosphere, Solar power, as well as the usual Cryptocurrency Thursdays and Robot Wednesdays and so on.

A couple of great names for band:

Eocene Whale
Chicxulub ejecta

Books Reviewed This Quarter

Weekly book reviews continued every Sunday.  Here is a list (in no particular order).

Fiction

Gather The Fortunes by Bryan Camp
Anno Dracula by Kim Newman
The Future is Blue by Catherynne M. Valente
No Country For Old Gnomes by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne
Early Riser by Jasper Fforde
European Travels for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss
The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School by Kim Newman
The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School by Kim Newman
Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald
Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst
Someone Who Will Love You in all Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

Non Fiction

Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton
Devices and Desires by Kate Hubbard
Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
The Rise and Fall of Alexandria by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid

 

Book Review: “Stony The Road” by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Stony The Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This was not an easy book to read.  The Jim Crow years were some of the worst times in US history, and we seem to be entering yet another period of terrible repression. Yes, it very well can happen again.

The history of this disaster is grim and generally omitted from popular memory.  But I actually have read the history, including Kendi, Jsmison, and, for that matter, Treuer.  But you don’t have to be a nerd reading 400 page history books:  the story was told on network television in 1968.  How could anyone not know about it?

Gates has several specific themes in this history.  One is the documentation of the vast, vicious, and nauseating flood of racist “sambo” art. As pointed out elsewhere racial prejudice isn’t caused by negative stereotypes, stereotypes are created to justify oppression.

This stuff was really, really hard to read about and see. Prof Gates has a stronger stomach than I do.  But this is the reality of history, and Gates insists that “racist representations of black people in the Jim Crow era … must be collected and studied, archived and critiqued, since they played such a key role in the history of the emergence of white supremacy in the war of the interpretations of Reconstruction.”  (P. 93)

And current events certainly show that people still don’t get it, and worse, white supremacy is resurgent.

But it’s only images and stories. Obviously, demonstrably, and even ludicrously false images and stories.  Why did it matter?

Because, the narrative justified and even encouraged the denial of human rights and human dignity, up to and including terrorism and murder.

“It didn’t matter what the individual black man or woman said and did, how much education he or she had, or whether were form the North or the South, because negative images of them in the popular imagination already existed, and were already fixed, imposed upon them like hoods or masks. This practice of xenophobic masking, as it were, still exists.” (p.132)

In those terrible times, what could be done?  Gates documents how some black Americans fought back with positive images and narratives. This, too, is hard to read, because in the effort to counter the tsunami of negative narratives, some victims created excruciating counter narratives that partly validated the lies, in the hopes of winning a little slack, or rolling back a corner of the smothering cloud of hate.

Gates documents the long, sad, history of the “New Negro”, put forward to counter the so-called “Old Negro”.  As Reconstruction was rolled back with lies and slander about “the Negro Problem”, some created a story about the “New Negro”, who is different and better than the “Old Negro” of slavery and reconstruction.

This concept evolved over the years.  Indeed, each generation created its own “New Negro”.

One version of this was the celebration of fortunate elites, who hoped to be seen as distinct from the unwashed masses of poor blacks.  An alternative was the celebration of “uplift” for the bottom up, eschewing elite education in favor of more “appropriate” manual trades.  The Harlem Renaissance was another variant, celebrating the production of fine arts and literature, put forward as “just as good” as white culture.

None of this worked, of course, White racism is not about rational discrimination, it is about oppression of a whole race.  No amount of talent, civic virtue, or financial success matter to racists and racist politics.

As a son of the sixties and seventies, I know that we learned this lesson over and over.  And we are still learning the same lesson in other forms:  oppression of any group is not rational, and is not defeated by culture alone.  Rolling back oppression takes politics, and that means votes and power.

“[C]ultural constructions not build on or allied with political agency were destined to remain exactly what they’d started as: empty signifiers.” (p. 253)

Some black leaders (and allies) knew this all along.  And, after all the “New Negro” messaging, “[e]ventually, politics would win out…” (p. 253)

“Yes, images on both sides of the color line were important, but they were not everything, and whatever power they held paled next to the power of the ballot.” (p. 356)

This, then, is the main point:  white supremacy is a political program, that must be fought through political means, “Black America did not need a New Negro, it needed legal and political means to curtail the institutionalization of antiblack racism perpetuated against the Old Negro at every level in post-Reconstruction American society….” (p. 252-3)

What is needed is “a New White Man.”, and the end of the “rogue ideology of white supremacy”.

As I said, this is not an easy book to read.  And it is not even especially novel.  But it is important to marshall the history for the record, and to make the case as clearly and firmly as possible.

We know what needs to be done.  And we must fight on forever.

(I gather that this book is a companion to a PBS documentary which I have not seen.  The book was hard to swallow, I’m not sure I could bear a video.  But I understand the logic of messaging on as many media as possible.)

---

1. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and The Rise of Jim Crow, New York, Penguin Press, 2019.

 

Sunday Book Reviews