PHIL BOWERMASTER has further thoughts on technological change.

HEY, someone gets a commencement speech right.

JAMES LILEKS: “As the dyslexic might say, I don’t have a God in this fight.”

Eugene Volokh has a sort-of related post.

A SOLDIER IN IRAQ WRITES:

God forbid, if something happens to me over here, I do not want to be used by the likes of Phil Hansen in Seattle, Michael Moore, Gary Trudeau, or Ted Koppel, to make their political points against the war, the President, and finally the country, all the while saying “they support the troops”.

Read the whole thing. And read Austin Bay’s blog for more reporting from Iraq.

UPDATE: Some much-deserved awards for valor for Raven 42.

And Hugh Hewitt is looking for a spokesperson.

STAGED PHOTOS FROM REUTERS STRINGERS? I don’t know, but it deserves further inquiry.

TOM MAGUIRE explains why Nancy Pelosi is his favorite Congresswoman. Meanwhile Neal Boortz explains why he’s a Dick Durbin fan.

GAYPATRIOT IS BACK. So is N.Z. Bear.

I THOUGHT I’D MENTIONED THIS BEFORE, but here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers.

SCIENCE FICTION RECOMMENDATIONS: It’s now to the point where I’m getting emails complaining about the people I haven’t mentioned:

Where’s Larry Niven? Is he not considered to be that good? Or is he just old?

The book Ringworld is worth checking out. It’s the one about the giant ring that orbits a sun. The popular game Halo was based on it (the ringworld part).

I don’t know if it’s so great, but definitely worthy of note.

He has other fun stuff too, not fancy or mind-blowing, but fun. Why isn’t he on the list?

Niven’s great, and the shared-universe series on the Man-Kzin wars (latest installment, which I haven’t read yet, is here) is very entertaining. But Niven has been around for a while; I was asked for recommendations for post-Seventies stuff. But while I”m at it, I highly recommend The Mote in God’s Eye, a very interesting alien-contact story with very interesting aliens, coauthored with Jerry Pournelle.

Various other readers want to know why I didn’t recommend Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, etc. They’re all good — I just wasn’ trying to be comprehensive. I very much enjoyed Benford’s Galactic Center stories (In the Ocean of Night is the first). Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, and the books that follow, is excellent. Brin’s Kiln People, which I think was the last thing of his I read, was fun, though a minor work. He’s probably best-known for his Uplift Trilogy, of which Brightness Reef is the first installment.

Meanwhile, John Farrell emails:

No one’s mentioned Alastair Reynolds?? Chasm City, or Revelation Space? He’s superb.

Also Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.

I like Joe Haldeman–and recently re-read Forever War; unfortunately, it
seems almost quaint in its datedness now.

I agree about Haldeman — the book’s a period piece. Still good, as long as you remember that. Reynolds (no relation) is very good. Gene Wolfe is a superb writer, but I’m not crazy about his storytelling — though I nearly wrote a piece using his novella, “The Shadow of the Torturer,” as a metaphor for legal education. Reader Rae Leggett agrees about Reynolds:

Since I’ve spent all day home with the flu reading, I’d like to recommend anything by Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space in particular. Good, hard science science fiction with believable characters, and it explores the consequences of nanotechnology, good and bad, very well. His other books are Chasm City, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Chasm City is different from the others…it’s reallly a hard science mystery novel, set in the same universe as the others.

So there — not overlooked now!

LT SMASH TAKES ON the “counter-recruiters.” I think he’s even questioning their patriotism.

I’ll just note that people were jailed for sedition over far less in prior wars. That isn’t to say that we should be doing that now, but it’s worth noting when people emote about the Bushitler Texas-Nazi Police State.

UPDATE: Compare what’s happening in Venezuela.

And Tim Cavanaugh comments on the much-ado-about-nothing Downing Street memo flap:

The moment the left has been awaiting hopefully for the past six weeks has arrived at last—and like everything the left hopes for these days, it’s going to flop. . . . The document itself will now take center stage. And that’s the problem.

As far as I could tell, there’s never been any there, there.

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up!

HITCHENS ON IRAQ AND IRAN: Some interesting observations.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurds are celebrating, while Iranian Kurds are rioting.

UPDATE: In a related post, The Daily Ablution looks at journalists who are not proud to be British, and who can’t imagine why anyone would be.

And it’s interesting to see what Iranians think about the invasion of Iraq. Funny we haven’t heard more about this.

THE MYTH OF INDIAN LIBERALIZATION: Amit Varma has a piece in the Asian Wall Street Journal. It’s subscription-only, but you can also read it on his blog.

THE SCHIAVO AUTOPSY IS IN:

Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged woman who sparked a national debate as her parents and husband fought over keeping her alive, was destined to remain in a vegetative state and wouldn’t have benefited from therapy, an autopsy found.

Schiavo, who was 41 when doctors removed feeding tubes that kept her alive, had a severely atrophied brain that weighed about half of what a normal brain does, Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin said during a press conference in Largo, Florida. She was completely blind, he said.

“No amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons,” Thogmartin said during the televised conference. “Her vision centers of her brain were dead.”

Which seems to undercut the claim that she recognized visitors.

UPDATE: Neal Boortz offers a brisk I-told-you-so that should be must reading, at least for those of you who sent me hatemail or made nasty phone calls. Shame on you for being such . . . tools.

AUSTIN BAY is reporting from Baghdad.

ROBERT SAMUELSON says it’s the end of Europe. As I wrote recently, I think that such forecasts are premature, but the problems inspiring them are real.

POWER LINE offers an exercise in comparison and contrast.

UNSCAM UPDATE: FoxNews has PDFs of the Annan emails mentioned earlier. And Roger Simon continues to follow the story.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW’S CONCERNS ABOUT “DIGITAL MOBS” receive a polite dismissal from Eugene Volokh. Actually, the media “mobs” who have done the most damage over the past few decades have been composed of professional journalists, not bloggers.

BLOG CARNIVALS: The Tangled Bank, a science-and-medicine blog carnival, is up. And this week’s Carnival of Education is up, too.

I’M GUESSING THAT JAMES LILEKS would like this presentation by Jake Barton and James Sanders on the history of New York.

SCIENTISTS IN CALIFORNIA are working on nanomachines to clear arterial plaque, according to this report. Bring it on!

BLOG JOURNALISM: Jackson’s Junction has a video interview with Newt Gingrich posted in several segments. This link takes you to the index.

HOW TECHNOLOGY IS TAKING US BACK TO THE FUTURE: My TechCentralStation column is up.

MORE SCIENCE FICTION: Lots of readers have been writing in with suggestions as to authors. Iain M. Banks — whom I’ve never read — seems a favorite, particularly his Use of Weapons. And Dodd Harris writes:

One of the best hard SF authors I’ve discovered in the last decade is Peter F. Hamilton. He started with SF detective novels (Mindstar Rising, et al), but it’s his “Night’s Dawn” trilogy (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Naked God) that’s his highest accomplishment. It blends what can only be called a ‘fantasy’ element into hard SF so plausibly that one only notices the fact that it’s a distinct departure from the usual SF fare after the fact. After reading it, one will inevitably end up reading the short story collection “A Second Chance At Eden” (which includes an SF detective story that introduces the Universe in which “Night’s Dawn” takes place) just to inhabit that Universe a little while longer.

Two others that bear mention are Joe Haldeman (“Forever War” and “Forever Peace“) and Vernor Vinge (“A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky“), the latter quite possibly being the best hard SF author now working.

I’m a big Vinge fan, and the Haldeman books are very good, too. Reader Robert Katz emails:

I also liked Old Man’s War, though I found the ending to be just a bit too pat, but allow me to recommend Edward Maret (Willowgate Press, ISBN 1-930008-00-7) by (who else?) myself! It came out in 2001, was picked by Booksense as one of the notable science fiction novels of 2001 and was recommended for the Nebula Award by Paul Levinson, at that time President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. One reviewer referred to it as, “The Count of Monte Cristo meets Robocop,” which was pretty much my intention.

Going back a few years, you might try the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, particularly The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, also Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury (one of my favorite writers), a poorly disguised followup to Asimov’s Foundation series. Also the recent The Myriad, by R. M. Meluch, a writer who deserves to be much better known than she is.

Lots of stuff I haven’t read there. And reader Brett McGill emails:

Please let me call your attention to Dan Simmons’ book Ilium and its sequal, due out a the end of this month, Olympos.

Ilium grabbed me like no other book had in a long time. It wraps together the Trojan War, Greek gods living on Mars’s Olympus Mons, the Tempest, the Iliad, an Eloi-like race of humans living in the future, robotic-human moravecs occupying the moons of Jupiter and the last Jew on earth in book I literally had trouble putting down. (Cliche but true.)

I tried to read Simmons’ Hyperion a few years ago and just couldn’t get into it. But lots of people like his stuff, and I should probably give it another chance.