robot-alert!

Another useful invention.

AMHERST, N.H., Dec. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- ActivMedia Robotics, LLC (MobileRobots.com) has just released video of what is possibly the world's first intelligent autonomous robotic Christmas tree! The trimming of this unusual tree is scheduled for this afternoon, but instead of employees gathering to trim the tree, the tree will travel from office to office, requesting ornaments.

But read a bit further down and it turns out the seemingly cute and innocent robo-tree is a sinister surveillance weapon:

While the tree is just for fun, it sits on a serious instrument for Homeland Security. The PatrolBot robot base underneath is designed for professional guard duty. Because the robot knows its location within a building at all times, it can respond differently to intruders found in restricted and non-restricted zones and according to the time of day. The robot can react to calls from standard security alarms and camera systems or can patrol on its own. Like PatrolBot, the Christmas tree uses laser- rangefinder readings fused with specially corrected encoders on its wheel shafts to map the buildings it works in. Once ActivMedia robots have learned a building, they can patrol and respond to alarms automatically.

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I just got some photos of my book at the printers. They say it looks good! Hooray! I'll even be seeing it (and the inevitable typos...) in a few days!

The military is going to cut out the filter and give direct access to the news.

According to Mike Allen of the Washington Post, the administration believes U.S. media emphasize "violence and setbacks in occupied Iraq while playing down progress" and that the palliative is a C-SPAN Baghdad feeding happy news about Iraq to U.S. news consumers. Dorrance Smith, the Coalition Provisional Authority's media maven, views C-SPAN Baghdad as a means to "get our message out without having to create an event and have it be covered by somebody and be seen through their filter," as he put it to the New York Observer's Joe Hagan, who broke the C-SPAN Baghdad story.

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The Great American Parade is a self-published novel about George Bush planning a big parade. It is apparently intended as a satire on George W. Bush's policies favouring the rich, but the satire is so subtle as to be undetectable.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Mary Beth announced, addressing no one in particular.

“What's interesting?” David asked.

“Only the Marine Corps band will be playing marches of John Philip Sousa,” his mother replied.

“I think that I can explain that,” Billy Bosworth said. “I remember that he was the director of the Marine Corps band for many years. I suppose it is to honor his association with that band that they’ve been chosen to play Sousa marches. And those works, of course, remain among our most popular parade pieces.”

Here's another good excerpt. Maybe we could do this for our Crap Books book club?

“What can be done?” Rumsfeld anxiously asked Cheney, as they both saw the color rising in Bush’s face.

“Not a damned thing! Not a damned thing!” Cheney replied, teeth clenched, face reddened in outrage. “This whole damned affair has gotten out of hand--but what can we do? It’s all on camera. It’s in every living room in the country. Right now! And, God damn it, it’s being watched everywhere else in the world!

“And we’re here to celebrate America's achievements--and its most notable achievers! What a mockery these damned college students are making of our parade!” he continued, seething with anger.

“And of us--of all of us!” lamented Colin Powell at his side.

Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post's interview with the author.

Me: It is possible that some people might have found the plot a little improbable. They might find it hard to believe that, in order to garner political support for his tax cuts, George W. Bush would secretly arrange a giant parade in Washington honoring the richest people in America, who would march front to back in order of their net worth. Or that a cadre of earnest, teetotaling college students would get wind of this and, encouraged by Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, rise up to stage a heroic counter-parade honoring basic American values like morality and hard work. Was this perhaps deft satire, a nifty Swiftian touch?

Burrows: No.

Me: Ah.

Burrows: My idea of the novel is that the concentration of wealth among a small percentage of Americans is inimical to democracy. When primogeniture was outlawed in the Constitution, the Founding Fathers didn't foresee the development of colossal fortunes in stocks and bonds. You used to be able to see the accumulation of land among the wealthy, but you cannot see stocks and bonds. Cutting the tax on the wealthy from 39.6 percent to 33 percent was a terrible idea, even though Congress compromised at 35.1 percent.

Me: Your characters don't seem to have personalities.

Burrows: This was a novel of ideas. I didn't go into personal relationships.

Me: You have people speaking in paragraphs, using words like "indeed" in casual conversation. After your protagonist, Joan Milton, watches the planes hitting the World Trade Center, she turns away in horror and says to her friends: "What an almost unbelievable tragedy! It will take a great resolve to overcome this terrible blow." My question is, have you ever heard real human beings speak?

Burrows: This is the way I speak. In my circle, I am regarded as a fascinating conversationalist. I have a dinner group that has been meeting for maybe 30 years. I admit that may be a little limiting.

His next book will be about 'Bush's plan to exempt stock dividends in perpetuity from taxes'.
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Apparently, it's illegal to sell vibrators in Texas!!!
FYI Brisbane is a city in California.

Texas housewife busted for hawking erotic toys

A Texas housewife is in big trouble with the law for selling a vibrator to a pair of undercover cops, and the Brisbane vibrator company she works for says Texas is an "antiquated place'' with more than its share of "prudes.''

Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid.

Webb, a saleswoman for Passion Parties of Brisbane, faces a year in jail and a $4,000 fine if convicted.

"What I did was not obscene,'' Webb said. ""What's obscene is that the government is taking action about what we do in our bedrooms.''

The arrest of Webb in Cleburne, a small town 50 miles southwest of Dallas, was the first time that any of the company's 3,000 sales consultants have been busted, said Pat Davis, the president of Passion Parties. She said the company was outraged by the charges and stood behind Webb.

"It makes you wonder what they're thinking out there in Texas,'' Davis said. "They sound like prudes, with antiquated laws. They must have all their street crime under control in Texas if they're going to spend tax money arresting us.''

For the past year, Webb has sold the company's line of vibrators, gels, lubricants, strawberry-flavored nipple cream and "edible passion puddings.'' The merchandise is offered for sale in private, Tupperware-style parties to women who may be reluctant to visit an adult novelty store.

Among the company's top items are a $12 jar of passion pudding in chocolate and strawberry flavors ("apply head to toe, wherever you want your lover to linger"), a $9 jar of nipple cream in strawberry, raspberry and watermelon flavors, and battery-powered vibrators that sell for $17 to $140. The company also offers such lubricants as Slippery Stuff ($13), Lickety Lube ($12) and Lucky Stiff ($11.50), and a $22 battery-powered item for men known as Jelly Julie ("with soft jelly silicone lips").

"Our products are not obscene,'' Davis said. "All we're trying to do is help people build loving relationships.''

Webb suspects she got in trouble because she ruffled feathers in town by daring to join the Chamber of Commerce with her sex toy business. She said her arrest had caused her husband of 20 years to suffer a nervous breakdown.

Webb said she was amazed that the town's narcotics squad would be put on the case.

"We have a real problem with drugs in our schools,'' she said, "and they're using our narcotics officers to entrap me for selling a vibrator.''

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Lots of cables and computer controlled switches involved in this giant xmas display arranged annually by a techie guy.

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Amusing enough to click on.

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Sony's new humanoid robot can run and jump. link

One of the things that's puzzled me about Lord of the Rings for a long time is: where did it come from? What is it exactly? How come nobody had ever done something like that before, i.e., an imaginary world created in such depth? Or was there some precedent after all? Was there something similar going on at the same time? How can we put it into perspective?

The conventional image: LOTR is this book that created a whole genre of heroic fantasy that takes place in remote pseudo-medieval worlds with some mysterious attachment to our own. Tolkien was either an eccentrik genius or a kind of crank who worshipped the Anglo-Saxon past or maybe a fanboy of mythology, his book a 1950s version of Internet "fan fiction". Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (I think here they say "a don" rather than a professor), which means he was an expert on all things related to language and probably folklore and mythology as well. He drew on just about every kind of myth and folklore imaginable including the Bible and Norse myths to create his fantasy world.

Tolkien also says somewhere - was it the introduction to the Silmarillion? - that his aim was to create an imaginary ancient age, complete with its own legends, songs and tales, which would provide a backdrop for his made-up languages.

OK, so how to make sense of all this?

Folkloristic background
I think it's useful to look at folklore studies as a way of understanding this book. Here's a passage I came across in Joseph Campbell's commentary on Grimm's Fairy Tales:

The Grimm brothers regarded European folklore as the detrius of Old Germanic belief: the myths of ancient time had disintegrated, first into heroic legend and romance, last into these charming treasures of the nursery.

Later on, when he's describing the folk literature of the late middle ages:

Compounded with themes from the Cloister and the Castle, mixed with elements from the Bible and the heathenness of the Orient, as well as the deep pre-Christian past, the wonderful hurly-burly broke into the stonework of the cathedrals, grinned from the stained glass, twisted and curled in humourous grotesque in and out of the letters of illuminated manuscripts, appeared in tapestries, on saddles and weapons, on trinket-caskets, mirrors and combs... no matter what the origin, they were now the re-creation of the European folk.

This literature later gets re-assimilated into the folklore which ends up in the Grimm collection.

So there are two ways of looking at folklore and legends:

1. The view that they are descended from ancient belief (a myth)
2. The reality that they are compounded of material from a variety of sources, fashioned into an expression of European culture.

National myths
Tolkien said everything started with his made-up languages, but I think you can view the languages as part of his overall urge to recreate a mythological past that he felt was missing from the Anglo-Saxon world. I think that's key, his sense that there was no English version of the ancient myths of the Germans or the Finns or whatever. Those countries have national myths that define their sense of origin as a people or nation, and that's something Tolkien felt the English lacked. So, he synthesised a cycle of legends in a way that, although it used elements from outside England - the Bible, Norse sagas, medieval romance, etc, "made sense" to the English mind, and was designed to give a sense of the mythological origins of the world from an English point of view.

Campbell has something interesting to say about "the folk-epic of Finland, the Kalevala, "The Land of Heroes":

With respect to the Kalevala, Julius Krohn concluded that neither was it a very old legend nor were its materials originally Finnish. The narrative elements had arrived on the waves of a culture tide that had streamed over Europe through the centuries. Stemming from the gardens of the East and the fertile valleys of Antiquity, they had crossed southern Europe - largely by word of mouth -, then turned eastward again to the regions of the Slavs and Tatars, whence they had passed to the peoples of the north. And as each folk had received, it had developed, reinterpreted and amplified, and then handed along the inheritance to the neighbour.

The Kalevala, by the way, was itself the product of a guy who collected loads of folk tales about legendary Finnish heroes and then synthesised it into a uniform work in 1835; he was inspired by the Brothers Grimm.

So, could we say that Tolkien created his English mythology in much the same way that the Finnish people created theirs, or perhaps in the way that Elias Lönnrot synthesised the Kalevala?

Tolkien and folklore
I don't know much about folklore studies, but obviously it's something Tolkien was familiar with, and I think he probably thought of himself as doing something along the lines of Lönnrot when he created The Silmarillion. The difference: Tolkien's is impressionistic and personal, while the other work is on a public scale and is presented as a part of the national heritage. There have been plenty of other fantasy worlds created before, but the difference with Tolkien's is that it's the work of an expert in Anglo-Saxon language and literature, rather than of a novelist or poet, like, say, Alice's Wonderland or the worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs or the Brontë sisters.

Tolkien's imaginary world is interesting because of its detail and linguistic authenticity, but clearly, it's Lord of the Rings, not the Silmarillion, that most people have read. The imaginary world and languages, by themselves, seem like a linguist's eccentric hobby.

However, I think it's a mistake to try and analyse the novel in terms of contemporary literature. Of course, it has literary precedents, namely every other adventure story set in a fantasy world. But I think what makes the book stand out is the very fact that it isn't the product of a novelist, but of an expert in Anglo-Saxon literature and languages, who didn't care for English literature produced after 1066. I think that's the book's defining characteristic, the crossover between the worlds of academic folklore study and literature.

That characteristic is probably directly related to Tolkien's own peculiarity, an unusual ability to read texts simultaneously as linguistic sources and literature. This was described in an obituary as "his unique insight at once into the language of poetry and the poetry of language".

Tolkien's times
So, was there something about the cultural climate of early 20th century England that brought this work about? Could it have happened at any time? If there was something particularly of its time about the book, was there anything similar that emerged from the same climate?

I do think there's something clearly 20th century about the work, mainly in its attitude to the modern world, i.e. its nostalgia for the pre-industrial past. The Grimms and people like Lönnrot were inspired by 19th century nationalism. Tolkien's stories are nationalistic in the sense that he was trying to do something that was uniquely English or Anglo-Saxon, but unlike those folklorists, he's writing from the point of view of an industrial world where the past seems to be slipping away.

So, if Tolkien's work was partly the product of his times, is there something similar from similar conditions? People usually compare Tolkien with C.S. Lewis, but Lewis' writings are allegories and are very different from Tolkien's stuff. One related thing could be that there was a renewed interest in the importance of folklore in that time period. For example, the Campbell essay I quoted was published around the same time as Lord of the Rings started to come out. I suppose you could also relate his book to Edwardian literature that looked back with nostalgia on the time before WWI, and had a similar melancholy atmosphere. Can anyone think of any other examples?

Hello, robot lovers, Marv here. James has been indisposed for a few days with a mysterious illness that makes him very tired and irritable. So I will have to entertain you in his absence. He's been reading The Arabian Nights, a book he bought when he was eleven (i nearly typed elven because i'm so excited about Lord of the Rings tomorrow). He is feeling very sad because he isn't going to be well enough to go to his work Xmas bash - and he's bought the train ticket. So please write him some kind Christmas messages.

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In America decorating your house with huge amounts of xmas lights and plastic santas and things is cool, but in England it would look really tacky.

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A Spanish phone booth went berserk last week, trapping a lady by her finger for two hours. Reports are hazy but the booth it is thought to tried eat the woman whole, starting with her finger. This is firm evidence that the machines are starting to turn on their humanoid masters. link

At lunchtime I had a craving for potato wedges with sour cream. It being Friday, I thought I'd treat myself to some down in the local pub. There are of course several to choose from. First I looked in at The Cross, which pretends to be a gastro-pub, but it doesn't serve real ales. I went to the one across the street. Possibly the new signs there advertising all food for less than £2 should have warned me. I've eaten there before but not since the recent change of ownership to some pub chain.

Another warning sign, in retrospect: at first I asked for a steak sandwich, but the guy told me the steak was still frozen.

Undeterred, I ordered my potato wedges with fish and chips. They didn't have sour cream, to my chagrin. I sat down to wait with my lovely real ale (Deuchars, from Scotland) and read my book. After 20 minutes or so the waitress came along with the fish and chips - no potato wedges. The fish looked a little freaky. The tail was sticking up off the edge off the plate at a surprised angle. The waitress had to take it back though, as she'd forgotten the potato wedges.

Time passed and I started to get impatient. After a long time, the waitress came back. The first thing I noticed was that the fish tail wasn't sticking up any more... it had gone limp. The second thing was that the potato wedges were huge, they were like 1/4 potatoes sliced lengthwise, and there were only two of them. The next thing I noticed was that they were covered with a generous slathering of barbequeue sauce. On closer inspection I suspected the waitress had popped the fish in the microwave to keep it hot, as it looked a bit rubbery. There was something unnatural about the potatoes, as though they had been reconstituted from powder or something. There were some unhealthy looking, dried-out carrots and peas scattered to the side. The more I looked at the dish the more clearly I realised that there was no way I was going to eat it.

In the end, after all that waiting, I left the plate untouched on the table, feeling a bit embarrassed for some reason. Fortunately the pub next door had potato wedges.

He is senior editor of LinuxWorld Magazine, but by the looks of him he should start his own New Age religion.

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