Yesterday I uploaded the first packages of TeX Live 2017 to Debian/unstable, meaning that the new release cycle has started. Debian/stretch was released over the weekend, and this opened up unstable for new developments. The upload comprised the following packages: asymptote, cm-super, context, context-modules, texlive-base, texlive-bin, texlive-extra, texlive-extra, texlive-lang, texworks, xindy.
I mentioned already in a previous post the following changes:

• several packages have been merged, some are dropped (eg. texlive-htmlxml) and one new package (texlive-plain-generic) has been added
• luatex got updated to 1.0.4, and is now considered stable
• updmap and fmtutil now require either -sys or -user
• tlmgr got a shell mode (interactive/scripting interface) and a new feature to add arbitrary TEXMF trees (conf auxtrees)

The last two changes are described together with other news (easy TEXMF tree management) in the TeX Live release post. These changes more or less sum up the new infra structure developments in TeX Live 2017. Since the last release to unstable (which happened in 2017-01-23) about half a year of package updates have accumulated, below is an approximate list of updates (not split into new/updated, though). Enjoy the brave new world of TeX Live 2017, and please report bugs to the BTS! Updated/new packages:
academicons, achemso, acmart, acro, actuarialangle, actuarialsymbol, adobemapping, alkalami, amiri, animate, aomart, apa6, apxproof, arabluatex, archaeologie, arsclassica, autoaligne, autobreak, autosp, axodraw2, babel, babel-azerbaijani, babel-english, babel-french, babel-indonesian, babel-japanese, babel-malay, babel-ukrainian, bangorexam, baskervaldx, baskervillef, bchart, beamer, beamerswitch, bgteubner, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-archaeology, biblatex-arthistory-bonn, biblatex-bookinother, biblatex-caspervector, biblatex-cheatsheet, biblatex-chem, biblatex-chicago, biblatex-claves, biblatex-enc, biblatex-fiwi, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-iso690, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-morenames, biblatex-nature, biblatex-opcit-booktitle, biblatex-oxref, biblatex-philosophy, biblatex-publist, biblatex-shortfields, biblatex-subseries, bibtexperllibs, bidi, biochemistry-colors, bookcover, boondox, bredzenie, breqn, bxbase, bxcalc, bxdvidriver, bxjalipsum, bxjaprnind, bxjscls, bxnewfont, bxorigcapt, bxpapersize, bxpdfver, cabin, callouts, chemfig, chemformula, chemmacros, chemschemex, childdoc, circuitikz, cje, cjhebrew, cjk-gs-integrate, cmpj, cochineal, combofont, context, conv-xkv, correctmathalign, covington, cquthesis, crimson, crossrefware, csbulletin, csplain, csquotes, css-colors, cstldoc, ctex, currency, cweb, datetime2-french, datetime2-german, datetime2-romanian, datetime2-ukrainian, dehyph-exptl, disser, docsurvey, dox, draftfigure, drawmatrix, dtk, dviinfox, easyformat, ebproof, elements, endheads, enotez, eqnalign, erewhon, eulerpx, expex, exsheets, factura, facture, fancyhdr, fbb, fei, fetamont, fibeamer, fithesis, fixme, fmtcount, fnspe, fontmfizz, fontools, fonts-churchslavonic, fontspec, footnotehyper, forest, gandhi, genealogytree, glossaries, glossaries-extra, gofonts, gotoh, graphics, graphics-def, graphics-pln, grayhints, gregoriotex, gtrlib-largetrees, gzt, halloweenmath, handout, hang, heuristica, hlist, hobby, hvfloat, hyperref, hyperxmp, ifptex, ijsra, japanese-otf-uptex, jlreq, jmlr, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, karnaugh-map, keyfloat, knowledge, komacv, koma-script, kotex-oblivoir, l3, l3build, ladder, langsci, latex, latex2e, latex2man, latex3, latexbug, latexindent, latexmk, latex-mr, leaflet, leipzig, libertine, libertinegc, libertinus, libertinust1math, lion-msc, lni, longdivision, lshort-chinese, ltb2bib, lualatex-math, lualibs, luamesh, luamplib, luaotfload, luapackageloader, luatexja, luatexko, lwarp, make4ht, marginnote, markdown, mathalfa, mathpunctspace, mathtools, mcexam, mcf2graph, media9, minidocument, modular, montserrat, morewrites, mpostinl, mptrees, mucproc, musixtex, mwcls, mweights, nameauth, newpx, newtx, newtxtt, nfssext-cfr, nlctdoc, novel, numspell, nwejm, oberdiek, ocgx2, oplotsymbl, optidef, oscola, overlays, pagecolor, pdflatexpicscale, pdfpages, pdfx, perfectcut, pgfplots, phonenumbers, phonrule, pkuthss, platex, platex-tools, polski, preview, program, proofread, prooftrees, pst-3dplot, pst-barcode, pst-eucl, pst-func, pst-ode, pst-pdf, pst-plot, pstricks, pstricks-add, pst-solides3d, pst-spinner, pst-tools, pst-tree, pst-vehicle, ptex2pdf, ptex-base, ptex-fontmaps, pxbase, pxchfon, pxrubrica, pythonhighlight, quran, ran_toks, reledmac, repere, resphilosophica, revquantum, rputover, rubik, rutitlepage, sansmathfonts, scratch, seealso, sesstime, siunitx, skdoc, songs, spectralsequences, stackengine, stage, sttools, studenthandouts, svg, tcolorbox, tex4ebook, tex4ht, texosquery, texproposal, thaienum, thalie, thesis-ekf, thuthesis, tikz-kalender, tikzmark, tikz-optics, tikz-palattice, tikzpeople, tikzsymbols, titlepic, tl17, tqft, tracklang, tudscr, tugboat-plain, turabian-formatting, txuprcal, typoaid, udesoftec, uhhassignment, ukrainian, ulthese, unamthesis, unfonts-core, unfonts-extra, unicode-math, uplatex, upmethodology, uptex-base, urcls, variablelm, varsfromjobname, visualtikz, xassoccnt, xcharter, xcntperchap, xecjk, xepersian, xetexko, xevlna, xgreek, xsavebox, xsim, ycbook.

Review: Late Eclipses, by Seanan McGuire

Series:	October Daye #4
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	March 2011
ISBN:	1-101-50253-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	372

Late Eclipses is the fourth book the October Daye series, and relies heavily on characters introduced in the previous books. I recommend reading this series from the start; jumping into the middle would miss a lot of nuance. Thankfully, though, enough is explained that you don't have to have read the previous books recently. (I wish more series would do that.) Unsurprisingly, the book opens with Toby's life getting more complicated. Also unsurprisingly, that means getting more entangled in the affairs of the fae court, as Toby gets pushed farther out of her comfort zone. But that quickly takes a back seat to much worse news: Toby's close friend Lily is deathly ill. That isn't supposed to be possible for an undine. And Lily isn't the last person to get deathly ill in this book. I should note up-front that this book contains one of my least favorite tropes in fiction of this sort: a protagonist who falls under the influence of something mind-altering and has to keep second-guessing her own perceptions. I have this problem with most books about drugs or some equivalent. There was enough of that here to irritate me, but this is just a personal quirk and I'm used to other people liking those books better, so you may need to adjust my rating accordingly. That said, I liked Late Eclipses better than An Artificial Night, even with that drawback. It's less dark, less bleak, and returns to some of the mystery feel of the first two books of the series. A lot of urban fantasy mixes in a bit of a detective element, usually from the noir tradition, and I think that provides a useful plot driver. There's a lot at stake in this story, but Toby also gets a lot of agency. She's out doing things, making guesses and following up on them, rather than trying to endure vast horror. And she has more trust in her instincts and abilities, and is gathering more allies and respect. There was a bit too much of "abuse the protagonist" for my tastes, but some of the court maneuvering is quite satisfying. There's always a risk with power curves taking away the risk in stories like this, or of having to constantly invent a bigger bad than the previous one, but McGuire is doing a good job keeping control of that. Toby is getting stronger, and it's obvious that she's more than she appears or realizes. Coming to terms with the edges of that is part of this story. But the dangers in these stories have been very different in kind rather than escalating degree. The complex political machinations of the fae court help here considerably, creating problems that Toby has to navigate through with allies and careful thought. One of my favorite parts of this series continues to be the supporting cast. We don't get as much of the Luidaeg here, but we get lots of May (who is becoming one of my favorite characters of the series) and several other excellent supporting characters. It's rare that I like the supporting cast of an urban fantasy series this well without feeling like they're overshadowing the protagonist. Some parts of this story bugged me for idiosyncratic reasons, but I still thought it was a step up from the previous installment. McGuire's world doesn't seem to be running out of steam. I'll definitely keep reading. Followed by One Salt Sea. Rating: 7 out of 10

Original sin I feel that I was somewhat born innocent, an animal with sound, primal instincts. But if I remained that way, I wouldn't be able to function in a complex society, so I got education. Education taught me what is expected from me in order to be accepted by my peers[1]. Education taught me more than that: it also taught me to enjoy what a complex society can give me: art, science, history, philosophy, adding depth of meaning and correlations to my perceptions and memories. Education wasn't perfect, though. Some of my educators obsessed about some of the expectations, and gave me rules to follow that aren't really needed to interact with a society. Sit down for hours in silence without complaining. Don't talk back to figures of authority, even when they are abusing me. Don't ever feel that my efforts in a task have been enough, because there is always something more that I could have done. Do what people expect me to do, regardless of what I wish to do. Do what I need to do, not what I want to do. So I grew up with a set of arbitrary expectations that weren't needed to function in a society, and weren't in any way meeting any of my needs, yet I still felt them as a part of me, putting every effort into meeting them that I would put in making myself happy. I like to call this set of learned arbitrary, unneeded expectations "neurosis". I like this as an interpretation of the "original sin" myth: in order to go from an innocent animal to a member of a complex society, I acquired a set of neuroses that make me behave in a meaningless way. Or, rephrased going along with the myth, that rob me of my innocence. In some environments like BDSM, many have a name for an unnegotiated practice forced on a person: they call it "abuse". It made sense to accept that I have been abused many times while being educated, because my educators also had their own baggage of parasite expectations, of neuroses. And since I don't currently know how I can ever be sure that I freed myself from all my neuroses, I feel like I should accept that it is possible that I do and will abuse others; by accepting it as a possibility, I hope at least to be able to realise as soon as possible that I am doing it, and try to stop. I have now realised that my life is far simpler and more rewarding when expectations are negotiated between all the parties involved. I have recently spent a substantial amount of my energy in recognising and renegotiating many of the expectations and the neuroses that I had learnt while growing up, and, who knows, perhaps this effort will continue throughout my life. So there you go, an agnostic atheist freeing himself of his original sin, and regaining his paradise lost one step at a time, alive, on earth. And enjoying every moment of it. [1] I suspect that is why people educated in a high class society tend to be accepted more easily by a high class society: they conform to the right set of expectations. But I digress.

For all Spanish-speakers that read my blog, specially for the cyclists among you, and most specially for those that dwell in Mexico City's streets: I was recently pointed to a project started inside the Faceboook labrynth by Sandro Cohen, writer and academic: El zen del ciclista urbano. I met Sandro around twenty years ago. He writes in a very good, simple style. What I didn't know until now is that he has also become an urban cyclism promotor, just as me and many of my friends. In this page he started, he posts snippets on the topic of being an urban cyclist: As of today, he has 44 meditations, each of them a joy to read And very instructive as well. Thanks, Sandro, for the great resource! [update] I always find it... almost funny to read comments by so many people saying they'd rather have a lobotomy than to cycle in Mexico City. Hey! Mexico City is among the best places for cycling! Yes, we have to keep our eyes open and our instincts awake, but... Most of the city's area is flat. Many avenues have wide lanes and span a long distance. And yes, although there are some careless or aggressive drivers, after six years with the joy between my legs I can just say that... things are not as bad as you might imagine. I have very few (thankfully!) bad experiences, and so, so many good ones!

Review: Passion Play, by Sean Stewart

Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	1992
Printing:	December 1993
ISBN:	0-441-65241-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	194

Diane is a shaper: an empath, a sort of telepath, who sees emotions and the actions of others in the form of patterns and stories that she is nearly compelled to follow. She uses that skill as an investigator, a semi-official adjunct to the police who can read crime scenes and motives and hunt down criminals with uncanny ability. That makes her almost socially acceptable, but a shaper is still not something it's safe to be, something best kept hidden. Diane's world is one of theocracy, of dominance by aggressive religion, and even shapers working with the police are not exactly okay. This is Sean Stewart's first novel. He's since gone on to write many other books, one of which I've read and quite enjoyed (Nobody's Son) and another (Galveston) that won several awards, although he's probably most famous for his work on the ilovebees ARG. Passion Play won a minor award itself: the Aurora for the best Canadian SF novel of the year. I found it surprising as a first novel, since it's sharp, focused, and very short. Usually first novels are stuffed to the gills with ideas and plot, as if material had built up for years and exploded in the first book. Passion Play doesn't have that problem; if anything, it errs on the side of telling too little. This is, at its heart, a mystery. A famous actor died in the middle of a play. It was possibly suicide, possibly an accident, and possibly murder; the events of the death are quite ambiguous. But the actor is very important in Redemptionist politics, which warrants an investigation, and then Diane's shaper instincts start finding a pattern and a story in the death. The rest of the cast and crew form the obvious set of suspects, and have the normal mystery novel variety of flaws, foibles, strong personalities, and possible motives. I'm not much of a mystery novel reader, and to be honest I had some trouble tracking all of the characters and remembering Diane's suspicions about each one. But the details of the mystery are less important to this book than Diane herself. Shapers are not exactly stable. The patterns they see are all-consuming, the experience of others' strong emotions acts like a sort of drug, and shapers can burn themselves out. They can fall into a spiral of seeking stronger and stronger emotions until they can't feel anything at all. That's the core conflict of the book: Diane is slowly losing herself. She has a tenuous existence at the outskirts of a society that has inculcated her with an inflexible set of religious beliefs and an uncompromising attitude towards law and justice, but it's not a stable existence, she knows it, and she doesn't know what to do about it. She knows that the pattern of this particular death is deep and powerful, but she can't stay away from it. This is an unusual, and sometimes disturbing, focus for a story. It's risky, unconventional, and doesn't quite work. I think some of the failure is because of first novel problems, but most of it is due to character problems. In the first novel problems category, Passion Play is a bit too choppy and a bit too disjointed. I think Stewart was trying hard to keep the story focused, fast-moving, and tight, but the introduction of the world background is not particularly smooth, and Diane's first-person account of her emotional state is a bit too labored. The plot wants to build in a smooth arc towards its climax, but the writing and scene-setting jerks and jumps instead of flowing. But the larger problem for me is that there aren't enough interesting characters in this book; specifically, there aren't enough to show all sides of Diane's character. Stewart tries, by introducing Jim early in the book to serve essentially as Diane's friend (and she's desperately in need of one), but he's too much of a non-entity. He serves some plot purposes, but he doesn't have a strong enough voice and character to hold his ground against Diane and balance her obsessive internal monologue. And, other than Jim, all the other characters in the book (with the possible exception of the murder victim) are playing bit roles. They're not bad characters, but they don't feel fully real to either Diane or to the reader. It's very easy to put them into boxes that they never break out of. This does support the feeling of narrative inevitability about some parts of the book, but I think it would have been stronger with more conflict, more open challenging of Diane's perspective. I would characterize Passion Play as interesting but flawed, and ultimately a minor work. I'm not sorry I read it, but neither would I have missed much if I'd gone through life without reading it. It has a few interesting ideas, and a bravely unconventional narrative resolution, but it felt choppy and off-balance. Unless you love Stewart's writing and want to read everything he wrote, or unless you (like me) has a quirk about reading all award winners, this is probably best skipped over in favor of Stewart's later work. Rating: 6 out of 10

In my last blog post about smartphones, I urged the universe at large to help maintain a variety of ecosystems, to help foster competition and originality amongst vendors and the same day I hit publish, WebOS was killed. Apparently the universe hates me. Since then, a few things have changed. My main phone since the day of its release was the HP Pre 3, running WebOS and whilst I still have a soft spot for the OS, the Pre 3 was simply too buggy for me to use full time. The main issue is that I use my phone as an MP3 player in the car but the Pre 3 would pause playback at the end of a track every half dozen tracks or so making it impossible to drive the 85 miles to work without needing to root around in the armrest and poke a touchscreen. Not something I really want to do whilst moving and ultimately too big a papercut to deal with. So, come the new year, I moved on to my next device, a Nokia N9 running MeeGo Harmattan. Ultimately, this was an even bigger failure for me than the Pre 3 was, and I lasted maybe two weeks with it before giving up and going back to the HP. Beyond massive usability errors in the software (especially the braindead unkillable pop-up demanding Internet access, even when none is available), the worst for me was how it handled the MP3 player task. My usual way of working is to have the phone hooked up to the stereo with a 3.5mm jack, and the car switches to headset Bluetooth profile to handle calls this is pretty common on cars too old to support A2DP profile (Stereo music-capable headphones). WebOS and Android are fine with this but not the N9. The N9, instead, will output all audio through the last connected audio device, regardless of how much that might not be helpful. Get in car, start music playing, plug in cable, start engine and it plays audio for about three seconds before the Bluetooth connects, and it switches to outputting music via the Headset bluetooth profile (not something that my car can do). Unplug and replug the cable, and music works but incoming calls are silent until I disconnect the 3.5mm jack, as it outputs the headset audio through the headphone socket. I just couldn t deal with this big a step back from WebOS as far as my workflow goes, and gave up. So, where next? Well, a funny thing happened a co-worker with generally very good instincts regarding consumer electronics usability told me that his housemate had just bought a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows phone (the WP7-based cousin to the N9) and loved it. Enough that said co-worker was considering getting one himself. This was a very strange thing to hear, especially from an iPhone owner, about a Microsoft product. I d been generally interested in WP7 on an academic level for a while, but to hear that degree of praise of the actual product was interesting. Also interesting, and roughly simultaneous, was seeing Sajid Anwar s reverse engineering of the proprietary Zune file transfer protocol go from theory into an actual set of libmtp patches. So if the capability to use Banshee to transfer music on is here or near and it can t be as braindead as Harmattan when it comes to headphone/bluetooth behaviour, then why not jump ship and squeeze a handset out of Orange? About a week after my co-worker replaced his iPhone with a Lumia 800, I bought one too. So where to begin? Well, I ll begin at the start: WP7 is a joy to use. It really just is. It s the first mobile OS to try something radically different in the UI department for years. Everyone else these days (especially Android) builds iPhone rip-offs to varying degrees, and even the iPhone interface has a lot in common with the old old OLD interfaces found on the dumb Nokia phones of the 1990s. WP7 has an interface which provides just the right level of passively visible information and interactivity, and manages to do it with an elegance that no Android home screen filled with widgets will ever manage. The uncluttered screens are easy to read, and the Metro usability paradigms are trivial to pick up and learn. Without a doubt I d recommend WP7 to friends and family from a usability perspective, and the Microsoft engineers and designers responsible for cooking up the WP7 interface are worthy of praise. And I m not the only one saying this Apple co-founder Steve Woz Wozniak recently came out with a similar line. That s the good. There s also some bad, make no mistake. I m going to cover all the reasons WP7 sucks over several paragraphs. But overall, a smartphone is a device which I expect to suck the question is how bad the suck is, and whether it gets in the way of me using the device for what I need at the time. Moreso than MeeGo, moreso than Android, and even WebOS (and I m still a big WebOS fan), WP7 has more good points than bad points. But there s still some room for improvement, and some room for caution and since I know there are a few Microsoft folks following me on Twitter, I m going to go over my prescription for continued platform success. Oh, one more thing before I start: I know WP7 isn t Free Software. As an end user, I really don t care about that. I just want something that works something I didn t get from WebOS and Harmattan, both of which are primarily Free Software stacks. I m not saying there s a causal relationship there, or that a mobile OS can t be both Free Software and good just that as an end user, my favourite platform right now is non-Free. Take from that whatever you like. It s also vitally important, as Free Software folks, never to lose sight of what the other players in the market are up to. If you can t objectively assess why people are using a proprietary option by using it & recognising its good points (i.e. what to steal & what to improve) then you can t hope to win over users. So. WP7 s downsides in detail. In-place updates. Seriously guys, even Apple can manage this now. Why can t Windows Phone? I understand that making backups is smart and all updates come with a mandatory backup but I really shouldn t be tied to a PC to update a post-PC device. Also, those backups are useless, since they cannot be restored onto replacement devices in the case of failure or theft, so fix that too. Update all the things. An iPhone sold in June 2009 still has access to the latest iOS releases. Android phones are notorious for shipping with an outdated version of the OS, then getting at most one major update over the phone s lifetime (usually the device is abandoned by its manufacturer within months of release). Which camp does Microsoft want to align with, there? Every Windows phone 7 device released should receive Windows Phone 8, even with some features disabled. Anything less is punishing every existing customer, in the hope that you ll attract new ones not a winning strategy for a fringe platform whose biggest evangelists are its users. Fix IMAP. IMAP isn t hard. Yet WP7 never seems to work properly with a subset of my mail, never showing the message body & just saying Downloading forever. Fix it. Bing sucks. Bing s search results are terrible. Either do something to make them bearable, or allow me to pick which search engine I get when I hit the search button. A Google live tile isn t the same thing. Make killing apps easier. I know you stole the WebOS card view for multitasking (hold the back button) please also steal the WebOS ability to close apps. I don t want to have to go into an app and bash back repeatedly until it quits. This is particularly annoying for Internet Explorer. Make reinstalling apps easier. If I want to install every app I previously had installed on a new device, without restoring a backup, this should be easy. There are third party apps which try to plug this gap. Find a way to support copyleft. I d like to port a few C# apps to WP7, but because they re LGPL, I can t. The code s copyright holders would have no issue with their code being on WP7, as long as end users have a mechanism to replace the libraries, so why not find a way to allow this? e.g. when compiling an app, let me mark a library as user-replaceable , then allow for some mechanism where an end user can replace those assemblies with their own version. Let me use multiple Google calendars. WP7 only lets me add/see appointments on my default Google calendar. I want to add/see things on my wife s calendar, which is shared with me. WebOS can do this. MTP-Z is the devil. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my camera device, to transfer a photo off. I do not need or want encrypted end to end communication between my PC and my MP3 player to transfer a photo on. Let s be honest, the only reason for MTP-Z is to enforce DRM on Zune-rented music tracks and honestly, there s no good reason to require MTP-Z for *all* communications if all you want to do is protect one folder or file extension. Now, since MTP-Z theoretically forces me to use Zune for many tasks better handled by other apps, now I get to write multiple criticisms of Zune s desktop app and as long as MTP-Z is enforced, every Zune failing is a Windows Phone failing too. Zune: Support Windows codec infrastructure, and transcode where needed. Windows Media Player can play Ogg Vorbis files. No, not out of the box, but if one installs the required codecs. Zune should support the same files as WMP if you want to ensure people don t try to copy files to a portable device which are not supported on that device, then you should have an API in place to allow for pluggable seamless transcoding of files as required Banshee allows me to do this (e.g. to copy files I have as .flac to devices which do not support it). Zune: Search my tracks, not the web. Zune s searching is terrible it doesn t do as-you-type searches, and when I hit enter, matches from my collection are given a tiny little space compared to matches from the Zune music store. Let me easily pick the track I feel like listening to, don t make it a chore Zune: Let s solve metadata together. I absolutely love how nicely the Zune app on desktop and on phone shifts as appropriate to the currently playing artist (e.g. changing the lock screen to an image of the artist in question). However, Zune doesn t make it obvious how to set an album s metadata to support this, and it s particularly frustrating when it s a minor difference of spelling causing a track not to get the nice treatment e.g. UNKLE versus U.N.K.L.E. . Either start making heavy use of audio fingerprinting services like MusicBrainz to fill in metadata, or allow me to search for fully supported artists when filling in track metadata Zune: Random playlists are useless on devices. I like smart playlists. In Banshee, I have one to pick 12GB of random tracks, which I can sync to my phone. I can t do this with Zune. If I try to just sync all my random music to my phone, it errors out due to lack of space. If I have a random playlist, the random selection changes multiple times during a sync resetting the sync, wiping out half the tracks that were transferred on, and starting again. As a result, the sync goes on for literally hours, never ending up with more than a gig or so of tracks on the phone. Random playlists should be freezable, so I can transfer them to my device in peace, then get a new random selection when I want. So, that s my list of miserable failure and it s still a less painful list than any other mobile OS I ve used. Perhaps one day Android will approach being usable, perhaps Blackberry s BBX will actually appeal to human beings rather than corporate IT managers, and perhaps Mozilla s delightfully named Boot to Gecko will get some traction. Who knows. All I know is, My Lumia 800 is the best phone I think I ve ever owned, and it s important for anyone working in the mobile space to understand why.

So people may be wondering, How does Biella pass her time in the vast, desolate Canadian north? Thankfully there are many things to do in Edmonton proper, but I have delved quite a bit into reading so I thought I would take a break and give small reviews of the books I have read or am reading as they are all quite good. I am trying to be more systematic about my reading habits so I am back to using citeulike. I am adding anything new I read and then as I go back to I have already read (for articles), I am adding them to the list also. I hope this pays off in the future! I started the reading bash with a book that was recommended to me over a year ago while I was still in Chicago: The Fugitive’s Property: Law and the Poetics of Personhood as it deals with the bread and butter of my own work, intellectual property, liberalism, market capitalism, and American history. I found the introduction enlivening and was sufficiently interested to continue on. I think there is not a lot of innovative work in the field of intellectual property (only because it has been covered very well) and to bring together slavery/the fugitive person and intellectual property under the same analytical lens, seems productive. Best looks at how the legal treatment of the slave and that of IP, hold striking parallels for their highly fugitive (formal) nature, driven and intensified by the legal/market framework that makes personhood into property. There is a lot of good stuff in there (including a fantastic discussion on legal positivism) but in the end, the labor it took to sift through some really obtuse prose was too much for me. I can’t remember the last time I languished under the heavy weight of language that was far too ornate and under sentences that just lacked clarity. This was compounded by the fact that he assumed you knew a fair bit about slave history, which I did not. My drive also escaped me and while I hope to return to it later, I took a break and turned to more readbale material. After such heavy linguistic ornateness, I needed an antidote, QUICK, and I knew exactly where to go: William Sewell and his book I had on my shelf also nearly for a year: The Logics of History. Along with being a first rate historian he is like that black instrument popularized in the 1980s by the likes of Herbie Hancock, and Brian Eno, he is a synthesizer with an amazing ability to write clearly. Being the synthesizer that he is, he is skilled at connecting the dots between various theoretical topics like event, structure, and agency, making the theoretical implications so crystal clear you feel happy to have entered into a field (the social sciences that is) that feels awfully arcane and pointless at times. I left Stehpen Best, which was like leaving a cluttered medieval castle and into a simply decorated room filled nothing with good theoretical feng shui (I think about writing in spatial terms more than ever). He just makes reading fun, even when the topics can be less than enthralling. Many of the essays were published previously and I had read a number of them, such as his famous essay on structure and agency. What I appreciated along with the great writing, was that he takes serious the question of plurality of social life within the net of various social, economic, political determinants. So while he assumes the existence of structure (and turns Marshall Sahlins to establish), he also is quick to show that structure, like a cultural system, can only act as partial (and unexpected determinants of social life) because of the existence and presence of events (which is really Sahlins great masterful point) but more importantly because of the plurality of structures… This was perhaps on the the central motifs in my dissertation; while I placed hacking within the cultural lineage of liberalism, in no way is this the only cultural system that hackers operate through and with; they move through a cultural domain more intrinsic to their own praxis, not to mention other systems of value that reverberate more widely among the digerati… And it is this movement between social positions that allows for forms of reflexivity and social change. I primarily used Bakhtin to make this point but now I got Sewell to add to this mix. Here is a nice passage from the book that makes this point:

I would argue that a multiple conception of structures would make subjects cultural creativity easier to explain. If the cultural structures by which subjectivities are formed are multiple, then so are the subjectivities… Because persons, symbols, and objects of cultural reference overlap between structural realms, structurally generated rules, emotions, categories, and senses of self can potentially be transposed from one situation to another. Indeed, if actors commonly have the experience of negotiating and renegotiating the relationships between noncongruent cultural structures, it follows they should have some intellectual distance on the structural categories themselves, that they should be able to view one set of cultural categories from the point of view of others that are differently organized, to compare and critizise categories and categorical logics, to work out ways of harmonization or odering the seemingly contradictory demands of different cultural schemes. A multiple conception of structure, consequently makes human creativity and reflection an integral element in the theory of history, not a philosophically prior metaphysical assumption. p. 213

And here is a more engaged review that is a little more critical than my very short comments. As part of a reading group organized by my tireless supervisor, I am also reading The Cultural Locations of Disability written by two of the most prolific scholars in the field, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. Since I am a novice in field it is hard for me to judge the two chapters we have so far read but it is a total total total treat reading a book slowly with a group of other folks from a vast range of departments. So far I appreciate the larger arguments presented in the introduction. For example, they point to two broad categories—capitalism and modernity/enlightenment– as driving forces in a new wave of obsession with the disabled. So while capitalism’s insistence on measuring the worth of humans through an abstract and actual ability to labor, marginalizes those who cannot offer their constant labor power (and makes them an “odd” cultural object), modernity–in its desire to march forward to the mysterious plane of progress, offers a technological promise to eradicate what it designates as deviant or primitive. As they nicely sum up: In a culture that endlessly assures itself that it is on the verge of conquering Nature once and for all, along with its own primitive instincts and the persistent domains of have-nots, disability is referenced with respect to these idealized visions. As a vector of human variability, disabled bodies both represent a throwback to human prehistory and serve as the barometer of a future without deviancy. p. 31 I, think, however, they should have also included some discussion of liberalism, which in many ways, was the legal and philosophical engine that helped to naturalize capitalism not to mention it also offered a vision of person, in which self-development, expression, and discrete autonomy was deeply cherished. Seen in this liberal light, disability becomes also a type of tragedy that can be resolved though new technological interventions they discuss under the guise of modernity. I have just started Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, which promises to be quite a tour de force into the contentious politics of uncertainty and the play of perceptibility and imperceptibility that surround one of many many syndromes sick building syndrome that now are part and parcel of the medical and patient advocacy field. Along with this I read and finished Andrew Lakoff’s Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, which will make for great teaching, and has one of the nicest discussions on the way in which psychiatry’s insecure status among the other medical science was one of the driving forces toward embracing the new scientism of the 1980s that coincided with new more general neoliberal trends. Another nice move about the ethnography is that he was able to clarify some of the trends and rationalities of American and European psychiatry by examining how it was received and resisted among more psychoanalytical Argentinian therapists. Very classicial anthropological lens in that sesne. Finally I am in the middle of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loop and I will say more about it when I am done, which should be soon as I am tearing through it evern night. I have been waiting for this book for a long while now because Dibbell is part of that trinity (Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Julian Dibbell) that offers some of the best writing on hackers, the internet, and virtual worlds. And this book continues in that tradition of providing a fantastic read, a vivid ethnographic picture of the topic at hand, along with key insights into the nature of economies, money, and plau within (and outside of) virtual landscapes. What I respect about Julian Dibbell is that he took a long time to get this book out. He started the research in 2003 and then spent a few years writing up. I think there is a lot of pressure to get any material or book on “virtual whatever” out there as quick as possible but for the most part I think that is a mistake. You need to let these things brew a long while or else they won’t acquire that taste of a finished product.