The book goes from several points of view, but the main one is the engineer, who flees the engineer's kingdom for the crime of breaking a Specification: the rigid codes to which all their machines are made. The other characters are mainly nobles in the mountain kingdoms to which he flees.

The politics and the plot are superbly worked out. No pointless McGuffin chases here: the characters react to each other in intricately-plotted ways. Some of the battles are practically unique in the genre in their realism. A blundering officer works to an inaccurate map, delaying crucial weapons. A flailing besieged leader fails to launch an attack on the siege weapons being set up... which turns out not to matter as the besiegers have set them up at the wrong range. In other words, the wars are fought with just the same kinds of cock-up that happen in real life.

Characters are pretty plausible too. Might be a little short on action for some, but I found it pretty compelling. Well worth a look.

Reading 2
Wondering if there's kind of an emerging genre of hard fantasy. Kind of parallel to hard SF: no magic or supernatural elements, just using the opportunity to make an interesting world with interesting plots.

The other obvious example would be "The Merchant Princes" series by Charles Stross: anyone have any other examples?

Things that almost fit: "Ash: A Secret History" by Mary Gentle has some magic, but it's not that important to the plot. Similarly with "A Song of Ice and Fire", while the dragons and monsters are going to get important later on, the early books have worked well without much impact from them.

Watching: "Bender's Big Score"
Saw the new Futurama movie-thing: . Good: well up to the standards of the older series. It's a feature-length thing that will apparently be split up into episodes for broadcast: might be a bit frenetic for a single sitting.

A few jokes about the cancellation, but doesn't get too heavy with the inside jokes. Did seem to be trying a bit too hard to shoehorn too lots of the occasional characters in.

Overall though, if you liked the episodes, you'll probably like this.

Watching: "Deal or No Deal"
Charlie Brooker.

Very late to this party, there seemed to be a lot of fuss about this game show a couple of years ago when it started. However, they've reshuffled the office a bit and everyone where I'm sitting is into it: they always switch it on and follow it a 4:30 (usually with subtitles and no sound, fortunately).

It's an odd game. There are 22 boxes containing known amounts of money, but you don't know what's in what box. The player opens the boxes with lots of forced drama, and ends up with what's left in the last one. Periodically though he is offered the chance to "deal", to stop playing in exchange for an offer which is less than the average payout from the boxes remaining.

So, the rational course to mazimize income is just to reject all the offers and keep playing. However, because the amounts are generally low, but skewed high by a few large amounts, while the mean payout is £25,712, the median payout is a mere £875.

So, most people who play rationally will end up with less than people who irrationally take the deal.

I find it slightly disturbing in a couple of ways.

Firstly, even though everyone around me is a programmer or sysadmin of some kind, people still debate whether to deal or not. The consensus seems to be that the smart thing is to take the deal, while playing to the end is foolish. I don't understand how come they've watched this every day for months, but haven't bothered to look at the odds.

Second, it seems to be designed to make rational behaviour look stupid. Everyone seems to love laughing at the people who don't deal and end up with less. That's the rational behaviour though: taking a chance on the bigger payouts is the way the maximize income.

I may be overthinking this though. I munged some of the first season stats and the actual winnings had a mean of £18,235 and a massively increased median of £14,750.

So it could be that they're being rational in terms of utility rather than income, accepting smaller payouts in exchange for a much greater possibility of a moderate win.

I'm told they have to hang around for three weeks to get on the show, so they could for instance have a first priority of not losing 3 weeks of income.

However, the things that they say, with elaborate stragies, lucky numbers, inspiration from dreams and so on suggests to me that the players are just not very mathematically competent.

Web
Fashion. Ads from Ebony magazine in 1976.

Culture. William Blake. Tom Stoppard in Moscow. Beowulf.

Society. Are beauty salons like prostitution?