(no subject)

So, a small plane crashed in East Palo Alto this morning, and took out a number of the power transmission lines that serve Palo Alto, leaving the offices where I work completely without power. Not to make light of what was a terrible tragedy for the people on board that plane, but watching the employees of a technology company try to occupy themselves in the absence of electricity is pretty funny. By 9:45, I'd read a number of documents that I'd printed to read offline and cleaned my desk, and had a choice between going for a walk or sitting in the office watching my boss fidget. I took a walk, and arrived back at the office an hour later to find the power still out and a note from my boss saying she'd told everyone to go home.

Weirdly, the auto-flush toilets and electronic sensing faucets in the bathrooms at work seem to have a backup source of power. Which is good, really, but...odd.

Link salad

Various items of interest:

Benjamin Cook is E-baying a bunch of Doctor Who goodies. I'm not much of a memorabilia collector, but if you are, there's some nice stuff there - some autographed books and pics, and the Order of Service from "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith".

Pyr Books is now accepting unagented submissions. Only for epic fantasy, sword & sorcery, and contemporary/urban fantasy - apparently they get all the science fiction they want via agented submissions.

Abstract of a paper suggesting that paying students and teachers for passing AP Exam scores improves college enrollment rates, college grades, and graduation rates. Unfortunately, only the abstract of the paper is available for free, so I don't have details. But if this holds up it's quite interesting that such a relatively simple intervention at such a late stage (11th and 12th grade) can apparently have significant and long-lasting effects.

Review: History of the Present by Timothy Garton Ash

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s by Timothy Garton Ash


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well-written and well-observed journalism from Central/Eastern Europe in the 1990s, with a particular focus on Germany, Poland, and the Balkans. The pieces in this collection are roughly contemporaneous with the events they describe, so it's interesting to see how Ash's thinking evolved, and where he got things right and got things wrong. (I found it interesting, for example, that Ash predicted that the eventual fall of Milosevic in Serbia and the achievement of independence for Kosovo would be more traumatic and violent than they eventually ended up being. I would love to see an essay where Ash tries to figure out why things actually went more smoothly than he'd anticipated. It's possible that Ash has written such an essay - he still writes frequently on Central/Eastern Europe for the New York Review of Books, among other places.)

I sometimes felt a little out of my depth in reading this book. My knowledge of Eastern European history in the decade of 1989-1999 was formed from a somewhat confused jumble of CNN footage, photos from Paris Match, and the odd New York Times article. My knowledge of Eastern European under communism derives almost solely from reading of Tony Judt's Post-War. Ash is the sort of writer who might casually toss in a reference to "Hungary 1956" or "General Jaruzelski" and expect you to know what he's talking about. He's a clear enough writer that you get the gist of what he's saying in any case, but I think I might enjoy reading and thinking about the essays in this book again after I've read more widely about Eastern Europe.

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