recourse to discourse

Wikipedia's pointless reductionists

This is an unapologetically angry post.

I am so hacked off and disillusioned with Wikipedia and the copyright-enforcer-bureaucratic-tossers that it seems to inspire that my contributions there are substantially declining. I spent a long time working on the article for Fluke from a very limited range of sources and the payback that I get is petty disputes over the images in the piece.

1. The band no longer exists. It is impossible to obtain a fair use picture of them as Fluke. = Fair Use.


2. The band DO NOT CARE. I have spoken to Jon Fugler and Mike Tournier regarding the distribution of Fluke live recordings on one of my other sites, 2bitpie.net and they are happy with it. The additional publicity garnered from the use of album covers/images of the band far outweighs any "losses" they might incur.

Whilst I appreciate that Wikipedia needs to protect itself legally, the principle of the site can only operate on good faith and common sense. So hey, you may not care, but your senseless, reductionist, officious policing of images (by non-lawyers who have nothing better to do) has lost you my contribution time which I shall instead pour into closed, non-freely available efforts.

 

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Reply from Steven Weisenburger re 18th December 1944

In reference to this post

Dear Martin,

Thanks for your interesting information. All weather information I reference came from the Times, Pynchon's source for much detail in those episodes.

Keep in mind that Pynchon was often interestingly off about such things: for example, late in Part III he's fudged certain geographical details in northern Germany, and (as Bernard Duifhuizen has shown) he's fudged chronologies in parts III and IV.

In any case, other information from the times, for example BBC radio broadcasts and the like, further help to sketch the chronology in Part I. But it's never wholly exact, nor does he strictly follow the Times, for instance when he invents BBC radio broadcasts.

Bottom line, I think: in a work of historical fiction, he's writing a fiction, finally.

All best,

Steven Weisenburger

 

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Sneaky new permalink structure via wp-aspxrewriter

Ok, so I have updated the permalink structure on this blog. It now appears to present .aspx pages as the permanent links whilst it is actually serving the php content from wordpress. The reason for this is that the pages are handled by asp.net, which uses a HttpModule to reroute the PHP request which allows some nice permalink style URLs without having to actually configure IIS.

Now at the moment it is using a grim WebRequest object to impersonate the client's cookies meaning that technically for every request served, it has to make two. Then again, IIS would die under a heavy user load anyway, so doubling it isn't really going to be very detrimental. Don't digg me. Ideally it would be far nicer to just force IIS to reselect a handler and rewrite the php as some form of child request, which I'm pretty sure isn't doable (reason cited: can't guarantee no infinite loops), at least not on IIS6 in classic pipeline mode. Will do more investigation to determine if this is possible in IIS7.

Obviously the most awesome solution would be to sandbox php within .NET. I did attempt a solution that called php-cgi.exe and read the output, but it seems my trust settings (on this host at least) prohibit it. There is an attempt underway to put php within ASP.NET called Phalanger... perhaps more on that later.

For now, please let me know if you hit a 404 - it's probably still buggy.

 

comment from Switch/Twitch
[...] Well, today I deployed an early version of my wp-aspxrewriter component to my personal blog at http://www.pynchon.net/discourse/2008/02/23/18/sneaky-new-permalink-structure-via-wp-aspxrewriter.as... [...]

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False premises lead only to uncertainty

An interesting piece of logic:

No insects have six legs.
All spiders are insects.
Therefore, no spiders have six legs.

The logic is sound (no a is b, all c is a, therefore no c is b). However, despite the first two premises being false, the conclusion is true.

From Theodore D. Kharpertian, A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), p. 20.

 

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Gravity's Rainbow Companion - 18th December 1944

Well, today I got around to writing to Steven Weisenburger regarding the differing sources for the weather on the 18th of December 1944, which Weisenburger believes is the setting for the first 5 episodes of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

My gripe stems from the following data supplied by the London Met office:

17th Dec 1944
A cloudy day with intermittent rain and drizzle. Maximum temperature
of 48F (9C) and a minimum of 47F (8C).
0600GMT - Barometer at MSL: 89.8mb
Change in 3 hrs: - 22
Wind: SSW force 6
1200GMT - Barometer at MSL: 92.8mb
Change in 3 hrs: + 20
Wind: SSW force 4
1800GMT - Barometer at MSL: 97.5mb
Change in 3 hrs: + 20
Wind: SSW force 3

18th Dec 1944
It was a cloudy day, with some light rain during the morning, and some
blue skies later on. A maximum temperature of 52F (11C) and a minimum
of 46F (8C) were recorded.
0600GMT - Barometer at MSL: 03.2mb
Change in 3 hrs: + 14
Wind: SSW force 4
1200GMT - Barometer at MSL: 08.1mb
Change in 3 hrs: + 20
Wind: SSW force 4
1800GMT - Barometer at MSL: 12.4mb
Change in 3 hrs: + 20
Wind: SSW force 3

This weather record does not seem to tally with Pynchon's descriptions. The wind has shifted round to the Southwest, but it had one so on the previous day also (Weisenburger notes at V17.9 that the cold fog originated on the 11th of December, but it seems from this record that he temperature was above the "upper thirties"). Furthermore, it seems that, in contradiction to the injunction at v20.1, the barometer was not falling on the afternoon of December 18th into the evening, but showing a marginal increase.

Perhaps this is a discrepancy between Pynchon's source (presumably the Times) and the London Met office.

More info upon a reply from Professor Weisenburger.

 

comment from recourse to discourse » Blog Archive » Reply from Steven Weisenburger re 18th December 1944
[...] In reference to? http://www.pynchon.net/discourse/2008/02/20/11/gravitys-rainbow-companion-18th-december-1944.aspx [...]

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International Pynchon Week

Just a promotional heads up for the International Pynchon Week conference taking place at the Amerika-Institut of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich from June 11-14, 2008. I'll certainly be attending and if you plan on doing so you should book soon, because all the hotels are rapidly filling up.

See http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~poehlmann/IPW2008/ for more information.

 

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Respect for the Will to Power

It seems that Nietzsche's concept has sadly shaped a great deal of our society. By teaching our children that they should respect their teachers because they hold a power over them (albeit under the guise of knowledge) we create a world where respect is only born out of a fear of those who can dominate. This leads to a problematic division where many people feel unable to question the orders from above. See the case of Ehren Watada, and the potential consequences. I believe that humanity would prosper far better if, amongst the herd, we cattle did respect each other for our existence, rather than for our ability to dominate, to know or to produce. This is to say that mutual respect should be entirely that; mutual. Then finally university students might stop treating their seminar leaders as if they were alien entities that do not exist outside the course.

 

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