Pirate This Book

Posted on 2015-11-18 by arjaybe
Cover art by Piotr Czaplarski

Cover art by Piotr Czaplarski

Pirate This Book is the actual title of a book written by Linton Robinson. You can read about it on his website and you can download it from Smashwords, where it’s free, at Noisetrade, where it’s also free but you can leave a tip if you want to, and on Amazon, where they want you to pay 83 cents. I haven’t read the book, but I understand it’s a collection of stories and excerpts from the author’s work. He’s trying to employ the principle that, for non-best-selling authors, the important thing is getting your work out there. The problem for unknown authors isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. So don’t worry about how many pirated copies of your book might be out there without having been paid for. Rejoice in the knowledge that it’s getting into the hands of potential readers. Be grateful that someone cared enough to pirate it.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Pirate this book. Download Green Comet and upload it to a torrent site. Take Parasite Puppeteers and put it in the hands of those scurrilous pirates. I want to see them everywhere. If I google Green Comet, I want to see pages of pirated copies. The same with Parasite Puppeteers. I just trawled about ten torrent sites and only one of them, Torrentz, had a link to Green Comet. Nobody had Parasite Puppeteers. I was disappointed. I was hurt. It’s embarrassing.

So, pirate this book. Please. You’ll make this ink-stained wretch happy.

rjb

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Thirty-nine Percent Majority

Posted on 2015-11-11 by arjaybe

39-percent-majority

Canada has a new government, and it feels like a bright new day. After years of steadily suppressing our better nature, the government now seems to be promising openness and optimism. Here is a previous post with some examples of the darkness, especially the muzzling of Canadian scientists. In it I remarked that a country that permits 39% of voters to elect a majority government should expect that sort of thing. But the thing is, this new majority government got just 39.5% of the popular vote. It seems we’ve gone from one thirty-nine percent majority to another.

Even so, it looks as if some things are set to improve, in particular the freedom of Canadian scientists to speak freely. That was encouraged by such publications as Nature and the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. And now it seems to be happening, as reported by The Star and The Huffington Post. Lifting the chill from our scientists is just one of the things this new government promised during the campaign. If it can fulfill those promises, or even most of them, then it will vindicate the feeling of a bright new day.

So, short term, things are looking up. But the long term problem remains. We still have a thirty-nine percent majority. Surely there are better ways to do this. Are there any examples of more democratic ways of electing a government?

rjb

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Climate Change Signal Emerges from the Weather

Posted on 2015-11-06 by arjaybe

Climate scientists know the dangers in attributing individual weather phenomena to climate change. They have always been reluctant to say that this year’s floods or last year’s fires resulted directly from global warming. However, in the last decade, a field called extreme event attribution has been growing and maturing.

This is a case where the world is getting to watch science unfold in real-time, and that means that there’s going to be multiple groups looking at the same or different aspects of events, possibly coming to different conclusions, but those don’t necessarily contradict each other.

Now climate scientists are less reluctant to say whether or not a specific bit of weather is the result of climate change.

One thing we can say for sure: We don’t say ‘one can’t attribute any single event to climate change’ any more.

Read the linked Scientific American article for a sense of the subtleties and complexities involved in the science of weather and climate.

Source: Climate Change Signal Emerges from the Weather – Scientific American

rjb

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments