Baha al-Aaraji, a supporter of radical anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said 144 members of the 275-seat national assembly had signed a draft law that would set a departure timetable for US troops.

Iraq MPs chasing US withdrawal | NEWS.com.au

Fantastic. Did Bush remember to set up Iraq so he had veto power there as well?So lessee, we now believe that a majority of the American people, the Iraqi people, the American legislature, and the Iraqi legislature want the American soldiers out of Iraq. Those seem like pretty compelling facts. Next time we vote maybe we should consider setting up a fact-based presidency? That might rock.  

technorati tags:politics, Iraq, troops

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A lot of Crackdown content is going to hit the Marketplace over the next week. In addition to a Title Update there is a set of Free and Premium DLC that is going hit as well.I’ll make another post when the update and DLC actually becomes available, but until then I thought you’d enjoy taking a look at what is coming up for the game and give you another reason to pop it back in your console other then the Halo 3 beta next week.Check this out: You can essentially “try before you buy” by partnering cooperatively with another player that has purchased the “Getting’ Busy Bonus Pack”. This will give both players full access to pack’s goodies, for that session.

Xbox Live's Major Nelson : Crackdown Title Update and DLC (with video)

This DLC (downloadble content) is sick! A bunch of new options and bugfixes, for free. A crazy cheat mode where you can spawn ramp trucks wherever you want, create explosive drums, get Super strength, etc. You can confiscate vehicles and store them in the Agency garage.

Then, if you blow the $10 you get three new vehicles - two with independently-aiming turret weapons, online street racing, five new weapons including a HARPOON GUN, and 4 new game types.

There are 7 new achievements - some in the free content, some in the premium.

All this and apparently the Halo 3 beta key works next week. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - Crackdown is a game full of awesome!

technorati tags:Crackdown, Xbox360, Marketplace

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Moving right along, let's talk about The Ghost Brigades shall we? (If you're lost, I talked about Old Man's War previously, this is the second book in a trilogy by John Scalzi.)

This is going to be the most difficult book in the trilogy to discuss without spoilers. The thing is, this book is about some special units in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF) that are known as the Ghost Brigades. But the telling you the thing that makes the Ghost Brigages special is a spoiler for Old Man's War. In fact, I think I'm going to give up. If you haven't read Old Man's War and you care about spoilers stop reading now. If you've read OMW, but you haven't read TGB, that's OK. I'll avoid spoiling the second book.

Are they gone yet?

OK, if you're still reading then you have either read Old Man's War or you don't care about spoilers. So let me recap for the latter group. In Old Man's War we learn that the CDF knows how to transfer minds. So basically when somebody turns 65 on Earth they can sign up to enlist and ten years, and give CDF a DNA sample. Unknown to the Earthlings the CDF uses this sample to grow a special body that is based on the original DNA but also has superhuman reflexes, speed, super-blood and so forth. The body also comes with a built-in computer/communicator/PDA (called a BrainPal) with a direct brain link.

Well, some people die before turning 75 or fail to enlist - leaving the CDF with an expensive body and no personality/mind to imprint in it. These bodies are given artificial personalities and enlisted in the Ghost Brigades. They are human, more or less, but they rely much heavier on the BrainPal than normal humans do. They are "born" with full-grown bodies, and they always have the BrainPal interface - so they have access to encyclopedias worth of information at the first moment they awake. Furthermore, they communicate mostly via BrainPal - much faster than normal speech and they can even send some emotional content, making them quasi-telepathic with their squadmates.

We learned all that in Old Man's War, but what does that leave for The Ghost Brigades? Well, Old Man's War tells the story of a regular inductee. He learns about the Ghost Brigades, but it's not really the focus of the story. In TGB we follow other characters - including a newly "born" soldier. So where OMW tells the reader about the CDF basic training, this book follows through the Special Forces training. The book is a little more contemplative than OMW, but there's still plenty of fighting and action.

I griped a little about info-dumping in the OMW review, and it's worse in this book. It's not a major flaw, but there's even more "Here's a big blurb about some background thing that we all need to know here." There's no literal "As you know Bob", but it comes damn close, and there are several "As you now-need-to-know Bob, here is <big blob of classified data>." moments. I said it didn't cross the line to bother me in OMW, but this one did bother me in several places.

The very nature of the Ghost Brigades leads into some contemplation about humanity. Are the Ghost Brigade members actually human? They don't have their own DNA, they don't have a childhood, and they can barely stand to talk to the "Realborn" who insist on using verbal speech communication speeds. What if the bodies they are given are even less human. Is there a threshold where on this line you have a human and on this line you have a new sapient species? It's interesting stuff, and having on a narrator on the inside lets Scalzi explore it.

Furthermore the Realborn use the Ghost Brigades as Special Forces, but it also means the Ghost Brigades are sent in for all the dirty work. The CDF is a volunteer force, but these people were created. What if they don't want to serve? Can they quit? Are they full members of society, or are they second class citizens?

The book also sketches in some more about the political structure of the Colonial Union, although this aspect of the book is less satisfying. I had questions already from OMW, and TGB opens more questions than it closes. Furthermore OMW is a reasonable stand-alone read. The ending of TGB is definitely setting up the third book.

All in all I enjoyed reading The Ghost Brigades, but it's my least favorite of the three books in the universe. Part of that is normal "second part of the trilogy" blues, and part of that is it's much more difficult to identify with a member of the Ghost Brigade. John Perry narrates OMW and The Last Colony (the third book), but he's not even ever "on-screen" in TGB. Nor does it follow Jane Sagan (although she is a major character in the book), instead following a brand-new soldier.

technorati tags:JohnScalzi, TheGhostBrigades, OldMan'sWar, BookReview, ScienceFiction

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I'm curious about something. Those of you who read the site do you:

A) just check the site periodically looking for new posts

or

B) Use a RSS feed of some sort.

If you answered B) do you use:

B1) The regular feed (index.xml)

B2) The feed with both the posts and the comments (fulltext.xml)

B3) The feed with just comments (comments.xml)

or

B4) Read both index.xml and comments.xml separately

There are other possibilities, but they get increasingly less likely from here. But feel free to elaborate in more detail whatever Rube Goldberg contraption you use to access the content.

technorati tags:blog, RSS, poll

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I'm on a book-reviewing tear! Or something. Actually I decided to make an effort to review any book I read. I read a lot of short fiction these days, but trying to review something like an Asimov's doesn't make sense to me. Read Locus Magazine if you want that. But I think it's probably reasonable to write a review of anything book length, so here we are. Mixed in with my recent splurge of Old Man's War books I read a nonfiction book as well - Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. You can get the book from Amazon at the link above, but I got my copy by signing up for a three year membership in The Planetary Society. If you think space exploration is worth pursuing there are worse places to throw a few bucks.

Pale Blue Dot is inspired by this photo taken by Voyager 1 in 1990. The bright spot is Earth. Sagan had fought to get the picture taken, it has minimal science value but he felt it was the next step after the "Earthrise" photo from Apollo. and that mankind needed to see Earth from 4 billion miles away.

This book, to put it simply, is a fantastic read. It's a tiny bit dated these days (it talks about Cassini and Huygens as probes on the drawing board and not probes that actually returned increadible images last year), but the science is still pretty intact. This is simultaneously an indictment of current NASA where nothing has changed in the last 13 years, and an endorsement of the gripping prose that Sagan is famous for. Even when I said to myself "well that's dated" it was still a good read. Space exploration lost a great communicator when Sagan passed away, and his is a voice that is sorely missed in this day and age of religious fundamentalism and short-sighed policies.

The book cover both some philosophy of why we should explore space, where we should use robots vs where we need humans, as well as a remarkably current snapshot of what we know about our solar system. As Wikipedia puts it:

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) is a non-fiction book by Carl Sagan. It is the sequel to Cosmos and was inspired by the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph, for which Sagan provides a sobering description.[14] In this book, Sagan mixes philosophy about the human place in the universe with a description of what was known about the solar system at the time the book was published. He also details a human vision for the future.[15]

Pale Blue Dot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The book opens by discussing the wandering nature of mankind but quickly moves onto what Sagan describes as "The Great Demotions" as human science moved from a Earth-centric view to (relucantly) a Sun-centric view, to realizing that even the Sun is really just an "uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy." (that last bit is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some people would say that mixing Sagan and Adamns is odd. Those people are wrong. Some people would say if we understood the connection the planet would overall be a much better place to live. Those people are right.) The Great Demotions took centuries and human culture, human religion, and human nature resisted each one, but here we are today where anybody not wearing blinders will accept that cosmologically speaking there's nothing particularly special about the Earth.

From the Great Demotions he begins to move through the Solar System, discussing what is known about all the planets and all the major moons. The thing that is the most striking is how little of this is dated in the last thirteen years. We know a lot more about Mars where Spirit and Opportunity continue to astound anybody who cares to pay attention, but there's dashed little science being done about Venus, or Mercury, or even Jupiter. I'll give NASA credit for Saturn - Huygens may have returned the most surprising data, but Cassini has done some excellent science, and it's not like Huygens would have even gotten there without Cassini driving the cab. But for the most part Pale Blue Dot will get you current if you have no idea what's happened in the Solar System other than the Pluto brouhaha.

He also covers the major explorations - Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager. Note the timeframe - all of these predate the Space Shuttle and "better, faster, cheaper" over at good ol' NASA. To me this was all recap, but it's recap of things I haven't really paid attention to in years, so it was sort of revisiting childhood friends to discuss the great space probes of the 70's.

After we go through what we know and how we found it Sagan moves to discussion of humanity's future in space. Should we explore with manned craft? Why? What can we gain and what are we risking? Of course, Sagan's conclusion is likely obvious to anyone but it's worth the effort to see his why's and wherefores. The discussion about handling near Earth Orbit asteroids alone is very relevant to today's society and worth the price of admission.

So what didn't I like about this book? The printing I have doesn't have any of the photographic plates. Every image he references is easy to find on the web, but it's odd that Pale Blue Dot doesn't even bother to have the image that inspired the book - at the very least I think it'd make a better cover than the goofy Sci-Fi "rockets & Jupiter" image that it has. The images are so key to the humanist appeals that Sagan makes in the book that it's frustrating to not have the pictures at your fingertips. The text specifically references them so I assume an earlier edition contained the color images and that this one doesn't for cost reasons. But that's a minor issue, the book is well worth reading despite the need for external Googling. And frankly in today's day and age, it's refreshing to read a book that assumes that everything will eventually be All Right(tm). Even if it is missing a few photographic plates.

If you care about the future of the species or if you're interested in space exploration I'd recommend Pale Blue Dot as an excellent read. Even if neither of those strike a chord with you, I'd urge you to read the book anyway and see if Sagan can change your mind. He's a much more compelling author and scientist than I am ;-)

technorati tags:Science, space, PaleBlueDot, CarlSagan, BookReviews

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