I have to set this joke up a bit for some of you. Vernor Vinge is a mathematician and science fiction writer from out of San Diego State. Some years ago he proposed that there would be (in the future) a kind of intelligence explosion—that as technology became intelligent, humans would no longer even be able to keep up with the massive changes brought on by new artificial species capable of re-inventing themselves thousands of times faster than evolution could change biological species. So, with that as background, I found this astute and funny comment over at Overcoming Bias.

As I’ve mentioned [here before](Murad Shibli) I am desperate for some way to enjoy the awesomeness that is Youtube without accidentally looking at the utter stupidity of the comments. It looks like Chris Finke of Mahalo has done it. Thank you, Chris, you’ve made Youtube a better place.

You know, it’s just rude to have a comments link on your article but close the comments (or render it inoperable) and not state that somewhere on the page. I clicked on the stupid link several times before giving up when nothing happened. Whatever, the web is a rude place. I’m used to it. The point is Ross Rubin wrote (in aforementioned rude article) that he believes Apple needs to include Flash support as part of the iPhone. He makes a good argument, and it looks like Apple is going to do it; but I think there are still two two key issues that the no-flash complaints are missing: Can Apple do it without Adobe and the fact that the Flash plugin is crap. ((Not Flash itself. I am a HUGE fan of Flash the media. I’m talking about the program that renders Flash in the browser. It blows.)) Read more…

Over at Podymouth I found some disparaging remarks regarding Lulu, the self-publishing system that I myself am using to publish my own book. I think you can lay out the general criticism as this: the way Lulu works—free to publish with fees per book sold—is ultimately unfair to authors because the majority don’t sell any copies, while the much fewer successful authors are essentially paying all of Lulu’s revenues.

I don’t really understand this criticism on several levels. The first problem is the idea that it’s a problem that 2% of Lulu’s titles are really supporting the other 98%. Perhaps you aren’t aware of how publishing companies, music labels and movie studios operate. They look for what they think will be hits, fund them, and hope that some of them make money. Most of them don’t. Most bands don’t get re-signed after a sophomore album. Lots of movies don’t make money. Thousands of (published) books never sell more than a few thousand copies before they go out-of-print—and some of those still win Pen/Faulkner and Pulitzer awards. The only thing that Lulu has done is turn the filtering process of what is successful over to audiences—the market decides. This puts the responsibility of marketing squarely on the shoulders of authors.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. Real creative work is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. So yeah, authors who are apathetic or uninterested in taking their work to the next level aren’t going to do well, but then, they never were, and you can’t blame Lulu for that. As for how the 2% are getting screwed by Lulu because they’re not switching to a POD or a “real” publisher; again, I just don’t see the problem. You keep the rights to the book. Market your work. Put it in the hands of reviewers, sell it, have a copy on you at all times. Use Lulu to organically build a fan base. Then, take your numbers to a small publisher and show them that if they opt-in on your next book, you come with a built-in audience. Lulu’s not going to stop you. But as opposed to traditional publishers, the onus to market your work is on you. And you know, if you talk to a lot of published authors you’ll find out that it’s not as if there was ever a guarantee that traditional publishers were ever going to do that good a job of marketing your book. Author’s will (even with traditional publishing) always have a responsibility to curate and sell their work (provided you care about having a career as such).

Now and then I have to steer myself over to the conspiracy wing of the Internet. There are so many conspiracy theories out there that you have to assume some of them are true—if only in part. Some part of me has no question that our government is nefarious enough to act out covertly against its own citizens, but when the facts start becoming visibly distorted—look at the domain on that link again, because the report is not coming from Ananova—you have to question the motives of the conspiracy theorists themselves. Worse still, rather than present coherent data or evidence, they point to the fact that Hollywood stars are asking the “same questions.” I don’t know if they are fair-minded enough to post my comment to their article, but here’s what I had to say about it:

Mark Ruffalo and Martin Sheen and George Carlin are all men that I respect and admire for their talent. But they are not engineers, architects, and physicists. I respect your right to question the government’s investigation, but where here on your site are the opinions of professionals with valid arguments against the facts as they currently stand?

I really don’t think the 9/11 truth movement does itself any good at all by trying to change the physical facts of what happened. If you believe that someone was behind it, pursue who you think was responsible; but stop reducing the travesty of the event by claiming that it was something other than what it was. Calls came off those planes—to friends and loved ones. There were witnesses to these crimes who testified just before losing their lives. There were men on those planes who steered them into the towers. If you believe those men were paid by our government or secretly given access with weapons to the planes, that’s one thing. Publishing nonsense about missiles and cockpits being empty or how Hollywood stars don’t understand structural engineering isn’t helping your cause any.