Palestinian Elections

OK, so just one quick thing before getting some work done...

Hamas Victory

My first reaction was: Holy crap! 76 seats! I had no idea Hamas would do so well. Regardless of what you think of Hamas (and for the record, I think killing civilians is always wrong, no matter how just your cause), this result speaks volumes to the level of anger among Palestinians about the Israeli occupation.

My second reaction: the NYT slide show has all the same images of elderly women with ink on their fingers and women lining up to vote that they had for the Iraqi elections, but something tells me that these pictures aren't going to make it into the Bush administration slide show about "changing the Arab world" and "moving towards democracy." Funny thing, democracy.

Anyway, a longer post about Israel and Palestine is forthcoming, but not before Saturday. Ack.

winter

Oooph - this week has been kicking my bootay, and hence no time to blog. After my proposal is turned in Friday I should have something to say. In the meantime, here are some pics I took from the big snow in December. Look at them and then meditate upon how (comparatively) ridiculously warm its been since New Years.

shorn

Before



minus two ponytails



= after.



Yes, the time had come, which chiefly means that the length of my hair finally met the minimum requirement (10 inches) for a donation to Locks of Love, a very nice group who make high-quality hairpieces for children with medical hairloss. And so now I have short hair again, just in time for spring (ha!).

Supernova 1006

Happy New Year! To prove to you that 2006 is not such a boring year, check this out.

I actually do get paid to study exploding stars of various types, but I also happen to think that they are quite cool in a 10-year-old astronomy geek sort of way. And one topic I've always been fascinated with is archaeo-astronomy, or the use of historical and archaeological methods to learn about the universe. Excitingly, for nerds like me, this year marks the 1,000th anniversary of the brightest supernova ever recorded.

Supernovae are fantastically bright explosions that occur when certain types of stars reach the end of their life and decide to go out with a bang. They are also extremely rare events such that only five have ever been observed to occur within our own Milky Way galaxy, and all five happened before the invention of the telescope. Astronomers observe hundreds of these events every year in the multitude of distant galaxies, and in 1987 were lucky enough to observe a supernova occurring next-door in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy in orbit around the Milky Way. But for the last 400 years, there's been nothing going on here at home.

The five historical supernovae were first seen in the following years: 1006, 1054 (which created the famous Crab Nebula), 1181, 1572 (observed by Tycho Brahe, among others) and 1604 (observed by Johannes Kepler, among others). Of these five, SN 1006 was certainly the most impressive. At its peak, the supernova was brighter than Venus and nearly as bright as the full moon. The image here is a reconstruction (by astronomer Tunç Tezel) of how the supernova would have appeared.

It appeared on April 30 or May 1, and was visible in the sky for three years. The "guest star" was widely noticed: observations have survived from China, Japan, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Italy, and Switzerland. It made a big impression on the Chinese court astronomers, who kept very meticulous records of its position, and who reported:

its appearance was like the half Moon and it had pointed rays...
[It was] so brilliant that one could really see things clearly [by its light]

Another astronmer in San'a, Yemen observed:

It rose regularly half an hour after sunset. It was not round, but rather was elongated; at its edges were lines like fingers. It showed great turbulence as though (reflected) in disturbed waters.

The monks at the Benedictine Abbey in St. Gallens, Switzerland also recorded the guest star:

A new star of unusual size appeared; it was glittering in appearance and dazzling the eyes, causing alarm. In a wonderful manner it was sometimes contracted, sometimes spread out, and moreover sometimes extinguished. It was seen, nevertheless, for three months in the inmost limits of the south, beyond all the constellations which are seen in the sky.

Astronomers and historians combined aspects from all these various records to triangulate where the supernova came from. In 1965, Milne and Gardner identified the remnant of the explosion by its radio emission and gave it the creative name G327.6+14.6. Interestingly, the position of the remnant would just have skimmed the top of the Alps when viewed from the Swiss monastery, occassionally passing behind the peaks, which nicely meshes with the monks' observations. The remnant is now an expanding bubble of star material that was flung outward by the explosion and has been slowing down ever since. The image is of the remnant observed in X-rays by the Chandra observatory.

Anyone interested in learning more should check out (from a library) "Historical Supernovae and their Remnants" by Stephenson & Green; it's where I got most of the info for this post, and it goes into a lot of depth about several other events also. The pictures are from the very cool Astronomy Picture of the Day website. Hopefully none of these fine people will sue me.

Seasoned Greetings

Tonight we had Christmas Eve service at Montgomery Place. Laura Jean and I took part in a lightly staged reading of W. H. Auden's long Christmas Oratorio, "For The Time Being." We were the first two (of three) Wise Men, decked out in tweed jackets, repenting our "tall errors of imagination." The poem is a pretty interesting, modern re-dressing of the Christmas story, at times funny (as in this excerpt), at times political. It made me want to read through it again.

Anyway, this year is the first year I'll be away from Fresno for Christmas, which is a little bittersweet, but also makes me feel a little bit like a grown-up. Tomorrow we'll have our very own Christmas morning here in Chicago, go to church and then fly to Maryland to catch the tail-end of family dinner there. To all of you I'm not lucky enough to see in person for the holidays, I'd like to wish you each a joyous week. (I really don't want to rant about the so-called War on Christmas except to say: Wha-huh?). To those celebrating Christmas: Merry Christmas. To those celebrating Hanukkah: Happy Hanukkah. To those celebrating something else or nothing at all, best wishes and joy. In the new year, I hope we all may come to better appreciate the gifts of those who are different in various ways.

I'd also like to share my new favorite carol; it's a gorgeous song by Vienna Teng, and you should totally check out her music if you get a chance.


The Atheist Christmas Carol

It's the season of grace coming out of the void
Where a man is saved by a voice in the distance
It's the season of possible miracle cures
Where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
Where time begins to fade
And age is welcome home

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you know now

Don't forget
Don't forget I love
I love
I love you

It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
Of feeling the full weight of our burdens
It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
And knowing we are not alone in fear
Not alone in the dark

Year-end Top 5 Lists

At times, it seems the primary skills I picked up in grad school are drinking beer and commenting on pop culture. In that vein, I'd like to offer my year-end "Top 5" lists for music, movies and books. In reading these lists you may notice that a great many of the titles mentioned were not, in fact, released this past year. Being perpetually behind the times, it seemed simpler to limit the results to stuff that I heard, saw or read in the past year, regardless of how old it is. For example, I haven't really seen any of the movies currently being offered up as Oscar bait and which are making the top 10 lists of all the real movie critics out there. Oh well -- this is just what I liked about the past year; feel free to comment and (dis)agree.

Music

1. Sleater-Kinney, The Woods: Loud. Louder than your boyfriend's rock 'n roll. And better. And they give a great live show, too.


2. Kanye West, The College Dropout: This hip-hop is the new punk rock. The first track, "We Don't Care", is a completely joyous song about how much it sucks to be poor, and it gives a deserving middle-finger to every authority figure in range. I think maybe he had some other big hits also.


3. The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema: Listen to this band if you like super-catchy, yet sophisticated, power-pop. Each song crams in more hooky melodies, hand-claps and "hey ya's" than your average hour of pop radio (and why aren't they on the radio? oh yeah, they're Canadian). And the song "Sing Me Spanish Techno" will totally suck your brain out.


4. The Arcade Fire, Funeral: A cycle of songs about children living in a world without grown-ups. I definitely have days where I feel that way.


5. M.I.A., Arular: She's an ex-pat Sri Lankan, and current Londoner. There's an entire globe's worth of musical traditions in here, yet it mainly sounds like music played on trashcan lids while dancing on top of a burning cop car. In other words, pretty awesome.
   

(Hon. Men.: the Shins, Spoon, Talib Kweli, Neko Case, the Flaming Lips, Cibo Matto)

Movies

1. Batman Begins: I love action and comic book movies, but a lot of them are frankly kinda lousy. This one's not. Christian Bale makes a great Batman and Bruce Wayne, but the film's got an even better villian, exciting action sequences, and an actually compelling storyline.


2. Code 46: I'm also a sucker for any kind of sci-fi (LJ still makes fun of me for liking A.I.), and I really fell in love with this movie. Or perhaps I just fell in love with Samantha Morton's character. Hmmm. Anyway, imagine Gattaca as a zero-budget romance and with better acting. And I love that they filmed modern-day Beijing and Dubai as stand-ins for the cities of the future.


3. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: See here.


4. Brokeback Mountain: OK, so this actually is oscar bait. I don't know if it's as groundbreaking a movie as the critics say; I suppose a movie about gay cowboys is always going to be shocking to some. I enjoyed it for the simple pleasures of unpretentious story-telling, backed up by great acting. Heath Ledger deserves every award he's going to win for this one.
   


5. Gangs of New York: Finally got around to seeing this, and I actually liked it a lot. I was expecting a polite Merchant & Ivory period piece, but it's really more of an urban western with a story lifted from a fascinating bit of forgotten American history (the Civil War draft riots). They should've lost the Hollywood romance between Leo and Cam, and stuck with the tribal street warfare set to rock music. Daniel Day-Lewis tears it up (as usual).
   

(Hon. Men.: Bad Education, The Incredibles, Million Dollar Baby, Born Into Brothels, Velvet Goldmine, Hotel Rwanda, Harry Potter 4)

Books

1. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A book to savor -- the anti-page-turner. This is the comprehensive tale of the rebirth of English magic, as related by the disreputable love child of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. It has footnotes better than a lot of fantasy stuff you pick up (no joke).
   


2. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: The story of a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and her encounters with the California medical system. The author tries her absolute hardest to be completely fair to the parents and the doctors and everyone involved, which just makes the tragedy of the story all the more wrenching. The most thought-provoking book on multi-cultural America I've read in a long time.
   


3. Neil Gaiman, American Gods: The tale of a war between the old gods and the new gods of media and technology, as waged in the interstate truck-stops and tourist traps across the landscape of the Midwest.
   


4. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A funny and charming novel about comic books, escape artists and the different ways people can come together as a family.
   


5. Joe Sacco, Palestine: Joe Sacco spent a year living in the West Bank in the early 90's after the first Intifada. Here he downlinks his impressions, sketches, opinions, thoughts, and myriad interviews with Palestinians living under occupation. Just cuz its a comic book doesn't mean it can't be hard-hitting journalism too.
   

(Hon. Men.: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince; Ruth Ozeki, My Year of Meats; Laura Kaplan, The Story of Jane; Karen Armstron, Islam: A Brief History)

Graduation

So I finally graduated, and they handed me the piece of paper without too much fuss. Sadly, my Mom, Dad and sister Jessica all missed the ceremony. They were due into town the night before, but the closing of Midway Airport following the runway accident caused their flight to be diverted to Hartford (yeah, the one in Connecticut). The next morning, they had to catch a flight with a transfer in Baltimore (yeah, the one in Maryland) just to get back to Chicago, and the flights kept getting delayed longer and longer. The finally showed up in Chicago, exhausted and frustrated, about an hour after the ceremony ended.

Happily, they made it to the after-party/reception and we got to take photos while I was still wearing the silly robes. Laura Jean, Amy, Judy and David (my family-in-law) were at the ceremony to represent, and we all rallied and had fun for the rest of the weekend.

Here's a blurry picture of the processional - I often think blurry photos are kinda cool.

Look! a gamma-ray burst! Yay for dress-up in silly robes!

Laura Jean's family also got to see her in action at her new church. She gets to dress-up in silly robes every week!

I think Laura Jean looks especially cute in this one.

My family is very cool. They were totally calm and collected under pressure and they dealt with a thoroughly lousy airline experience with grace and humor. Also, they handled the freezing Chicago winter pretty well. Here they're looking sharp in their new winter coats.

funny/sad

In general, I like Maureen Dowd's columns, although at times she's what the Brits like to call "too clever by half." However, today's column got a laugh. She quotes Secretary of State Rice's recent comments defending extraordinary rendition of suspects to foreign countries to avoid laws that forbid us from torturing them on home soil.

"The United States government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees," she said.

and Dowd's response:

It all depends on what you mean by "authorize," "condone," "torture" and "detainees."

And if that's too much laughter for you, check out this article from the Washington Post, about the German national who was kidnapped and taken to a secret jail in Afghanistan and tortured for five months based on a "hunch" by a CIA agent that proved to be totally wrong. The really chilling part is when the CIA realized they got the wrong guy they seriously considered just dumping him somewhere and denying that it ever happened. Accountability please?

Wikipedia: Suck or Rule?

For those not in the know, wikipedia.org is now officially the world's largest encyclopedia, offering nearly a million articles, all written and edited by volunteers. In fact, anyone (maybe you?) who happens to click onto their pages can edit or change them (without registering). This of course, has great potential to let blossom a million flowers of nerdiness, but it also crucially relies on the good faith (and competence) of the volunteer corps.

Recently they've decided to clamp down on unrestricted editing of articles, after a bio of John Seigenthaler (a former aide to Robert Kennedy) was edited to insinuate he might have been involved in the assassinations of both Kennedys. Oops. Mr. Seigenthaler was understandably upset and consequently ripped them a new one in a USA Today Op-Ed piece. Still, abuse like this seems difficult to control, given the nature of wikipedia. In my mind, the controversy is a another round in the struggle between free speech and (occasionally legitimate) state control over speech. No magic bullets here.

On the subject of wikipedia's general quality, one friend of mine likes to refer to the site as "decision making by a committee of twenty idiots". I don't quite agree: I like the fact that the site tends to have reasonably good articles on topics you can't get elsewhere. So it's not really a competition between "good" and "better", but rather between "good" and "nothing". The few times I've looked at subjects I do research on and know a fair bit about (gamma-ray bursts, HETE-2, astronomy) I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of detail. No obvious mistakes, good external links. Sure, some of the articles could be longer and more interesting, and there is a fair bit of stating the obvious, but for the most part way more informative than the string of generic news articles you would get from a google search. A good first start, which is what an encyclopedia should be.

Of course, gamma-ray astronomy is a fairly non-controversial backwater. I could easily put in a few hours of editing and improving the afore-mentioned pages (a better option than complaining about them) and be fairly certain that someone won't come along and undo everything. The same couldn't be said for articles on "aliens", "George W. Bush" or "Kennedy assassination", I guess.

So I'm curious. Do other people use wikipedia? Do you trust the stuff you find?

The Truth Is Out There

Turns out that the L'Enfant Plaza in DC (where conference I just attended was held) has a shiny glass pyramid that leads you to its underground entrance, just like the IM Pei pyramid at the Louvre. Of course, the Louvre entrance leads you to the finest art collection in the western world, while the L'Enfant entrance leads to a shopping mall. So it goes.



At any rate, it is clear that both pyramids mark sites of ancient power. The L'Enfant pyramid is actually the transmitting post for the gamma-rays that the alien Illuminati conspiracy uses to control the world governments, conveniently located in the heart of DC. Legend has it that the bones of the Messiah (a.k.a. Jean-Luc Picard) are buried beneath the pyramid's apex, and there have been reports of manifestations of great power from the pyramid.

Tellingly, when I snapped a photo of the Great Pyramid, I was accosted by a security guard who told me that photos of the plaza were not permitted unless I crossed to the other side (!) of the street. I'm probably violating some Homeland Security law by posting this photo, but the people need to know the truth!

heartwarming

I'm back in Chicago for less than 48 hours. Thanksgiving was fun and it was good to be home and hang out with the family, but I'm getting a bit tired of traveling. Tomorrow I'm off to D.C. for the annual GRB conference, which should actually be fairly interesting, and as an added bonus I'll get to spend some time with my in-laws. Still, it would be great to have more than a nodding acquaintance with our apartment. Oh well.

Anyway, since the holidays are upon us, I know we're all in the mood for some heartwarming family movies. You know, It's A Wonderful Life, movies with kids and puppies and hugging and learning, stuff like that. Well, here's a trailer for something in that same vein. Enjoy.

http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov

[Warning: it's a quicktime video and it takes a while to download on a slow connection. Thanks to The Onion Blog for the link.]

2K, why?

Last Friday, the Wage Peace group brought a traveling exhibit called Eyes Wide Open to campus to illustrate the costs of the Iraq war. They arrayed 79 pairs of boots in the quad honoring the 79 casualties from Illinois, some adorned with flags and photos. There was also circle of childrens' shoes memorializing the Iraqi civilians who have died in the conflicts (which credible reports have numbered at 20,000 to 30,000). The exhibit is a project of the Quaker pacifist group, the American Friends Service Committee, which has a long history of opposition to war.



The exhibit also emphasized that the Cost of War has reached more than $220 billion dollars (with no end in sight). The National Priorities Project emphasizes that the money spent on the conflict could have been used to fund any one of the following:
29 million more children enrolled in Head Start
full health insurance for 132 million children
nearly 4 million public school teachers hired
nearly 11 million four-year college scholarships
nearly 2 million housing units
9 years of fully-funded global anti-hunger programs
22 years of fully-funded global AIDS programs
basic immunizations for every child in the world for the next 73 years.

For me, the exhibit was a good reminder that war = death. It's always non-sensical to try to account for the statistics of death. Does a number like 30,000 mean more to us if it were described as 10 World Trade Center-sized scoopfuls of humanity? Would a number like 79 mean more to us if it were 79 little brothers, first cousins, husbands or daughters? During the major phase of combat operations, the major news networks were reluctant to speculate on how many Iraqi civilians were killed by American forces. This was war, after all. People die in wars.

I'm a strong opponent of this war, but I wouldn't exactly call myself a pacifist. I suppose that violence is necessary in certain situations. But behind the video-game media reports, the pundits debating the reasons for war, the important men making speeches, I think the pacifists understand better than most of us this key fact: war means death for the "deserving" and the "undeserving" alike (whatever those terms mean). I wish I knew better what to do with this knowledge.

Thesis Relief

Well, the thesis is officially handed in, although not before one last snafu.

Wise ones say you will always print out your dissertation twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. I had thought I was all done last night, but this morning I realized that my "extra abstract form" was o-so-slightly mis-formatted (the "extra abstract form" is not actually part of the thesis, but is something we hand in to the publishing company). So I trudged back to my office (through the first snowfall of the year) to re-print. Problem was, when I re-formatted, it didn't quite fit on one page. The title didn't quite fit on one line and it consequently forced the last line of the abstract onto page two. That short, runty little line on page two was completely irritating, but it took me a little while to squish it back onto page one without totally running afoul of the formatting police. Finally re-printed, I marched to the dissertation office and handed it in.

All in all, it's a pretty great birthday present to be done with it. I've been in school almost continually since I was five (with only a few breaks here and there), so it is very exciting to at least symbolically close out one phase of my life and begin another. In fact, I think I just may goof off tonight.

[PS- If anyone really wants to look at my thesis, I've put a PDF version on my website. Beware: it's a very large file (~8 MB). In due time the paper will be published and posted various places on the web that are easier to access.]

[PPS- A smaller, more readable version of my thesis paper can be found on www.arxiv.org at this address. It should be published in the Astrophysical Journal come June, and I'll post the final version after that. (05/08/2006).]

Happy Birthday Tim!!

In case you didn't know... 29 years ago on this illustrious day, little baby Tim was born. Also, Adult Tim finished his dissertation yesterday! Yay Tim! You rock.

Thesis Panic

Over coffee yesterday morning, I had a panic attack over the possibility of a hard disk crash taking out all my thesis research: the text itself, the figures, the datafiles, the code that generated them. Hyperventilate, hyperventilate, deep breath, deep breath, that's highly unlikely to happen, they have automated backups, don't worry about it. But, better safe than sorry, I backed up everything to another server.

Now I'm back to working in some final revisions and conforming to the university's ridiculous formatting requirements. All the requirements are driven by the need for the thesis to be legible after being microfilmed and reprinted. Microfilm?! No color figures?! This is the digital age! If anyone in the universe ever looks at my thesis it will be because I post it at arxiv.org, a nice, searchable, online service where you can print out a full color version for free and download the data in digital format. I will admit it's pretty cool that a bound hardcopy of my thesis will appear in the library and have its own catalog entry. But I have to admit the odds of anyone ever checking it out and taking it home for some bedtime reading are slim to none. Still, it seems like they could at least update their requirements to allow color figures.

Anyway, five (well, really four) days to go until I turn it in.

autumn

Today was quite cold. These are some photos of the trees along my walk to work.

Win some. Lose some.

The bad news is that the Kansas school board voted to approve new science curriculum standards that challenge evolution and support intelligent design (ID). The good news is that the school board members in Pennsylvania who tried the same thing in Dover (site of the on-going lawsuit against ID) were resoundingly voted out of office in favor of a pro-science slate.


What struck me most about these articles was how much the anti-evolution advocates have adopted the language of science in the service of a direct assault on the principles of science. There's just something deviously brilliant in adopting the mantle of "intellectual honesty" and "open debate", all the while leading kids toward adopting their pre-ordained conclusion. The IDers are smart and they know that actual scientists have a hard time rebuting the idea of an open debate.

It's true that there should be no sacred cows in science. This is a core value held by almost all scientists, and in practice there are few ideas that are not subject to speculation, review and criticism. But science is not just about being open to alternate ideas (however wacky), it is also about making rational, real-life decisions based on the evidence. The scientific process always involves judging between competing models. At the end of the day, you sometimes have to make a decision about which drug to administer to a patient, or which design of an airplane wing to implement. The poverty of the ID argument is that it has nothing to say about any of this. And at the end of the day, evolution is one of the most well-tested theories we have; it is the bedrock of modern biology.

The most charitable thing I could say about ID is that it belongs in a philosophy or theology classroom (although I don't think it works as a very compelling theology either, being essentially a rerun of the old God in the Gaps argument). But I'm old-fashioned. I tend to think you should teach science in science class, and Lord knows there's never enough time to cover everything worthwhile in the course of a school year, even without wasting time discussing the latest political cause of the religious right.

Another funny from the article was from the guy who runs the Intelligent Design Network who said that promoting ID in the classroom would "make science education interesting to students rather than boring." If that doesn't sound like a focus-grouped soundbite, I don't know what does. It's all about creating a brand: ID is fun and rad, while science is a boring subject that only the nerds enjoy. What a good message to be giving our kids.

The headlines make me mad. If I had kids attending Kansas public schools, I would be furious.

Ninjas vs. Pirates

The world demanded a way to answer the age old debate about who was more awesome, and the internet has provided us with answers.

For example, I think we all know who really won the last election.

[PS- This is pretty sweet also. Thanks, Jackie!]

All is right in the world...

So Friday, I came down with some sort of death-illness, a cold or flu or something. Saturday was a gray and dank autumn day, where it couldn't quite make up its mind to rain and be done with it. Ordinarily such events would have inspired me to hide in bed, except that we took it as an opportunity to see.... (da da DA!) the new Wallace & Gromit film: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit!

There were bunnies. There were gadgets. There were daring chases. There were obscure cheeses and many fine examples of British orthodontry. At times you could spy on Gromit's puzzled brow, the actual fingerprints of his creators. I have to say, Nick Park and his team are total Jedi knights when it comes to stop-animation. Sure, making a clay figure walk around seems at least conceivable to me (not that I could actually do it, but the idea is simple, I guess). But I have no idea how they manage to get fog to drift through a moonlit graveyard, or how a were-rabbit grows fur. I can only imagine the time and attention to detail it must take to make even a few minutes of such animation, and this was feature length.

And today, I feel much healthier. Coincidence? I think not. Cracking toast!

[PS- Wikipedia sez that the animation proceeds at a rate of about 30 frames, or one second of film, for each day of production. For a 90 minute film that's about 15 years. I think this means that for this feature they had to use several animation teams working in parallel, but still, that's a lot of person-hours spent molding clay.]

Crap: a new Robert Jordan book.

The Robert Jordan money train rattles onward with Book 11 (!) in the Wheel of Time series, titled The Knife of Dreams. For the uninitiated, Jordan started this series about 15 years ago and the first five installments were pretty awesome. Like most fantasy writing, the ghost of Tolkien hangs heavily over the series, orcs and swords and all that. But at least when it began, it was exciting, imaginative, well-written and deeply addictive. If only he had just wrapped it all up in a slam-bang Book 6. Instead it has all gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Perhaps it will stand as a cautionary tale for the young writer, an example of what not to do after banging out a couple of best-sellers. After Book 5, Jordan started slowing the pace down, exchanging action and suspense for tedious attention to detail, piling on minor characters and complicated subplots until the entire ship began to slip under the waves. The most likeable characters in the series either got pushed to the margins or underwent annoying personality changes. Simply keeping track of what was going on required a searchable index of names and backstory. Book 10, the Crossroads of Twilight, was an especially irritating new low in that it was an 800 page book ($24.99 in hardback) in which not a damn thing happens until the very last page.

Of course, his legions of fans kept buying his books throughout this long descent into suckitude, hoping for a return to his old form, or at least a conclusion allowing us to get on with our lives. It hasn't arrived yet. This has, naturally generated a certain amount of anger, visible in the amazon.com reader comments for book 10. As of now there are 2376 reader reviews with an average rank of 1.5 stars out of 5. Reading through the reviews is a lot of fun. You can find some really funny parodies of the series and its bloated style, and a great fake interview with Jordan discussing his latest volumes (Book 17 "The Paint Dries" or Book 19 "Overtaken By A Snail").

So will I read the new book? Hell no! OK, that's a lie. I'll probably read it, but only because I'm a sucker. And because I'm weirdly fascinated by how bad its gotten. And because I'm totally addicted and need to know how it ends. But I'm not buying a copy, so there.