I contain multitudes

Below are 137 “favicons”. Favicons are the little icons that appear in the location field of your browser window along with the URL of the site you’re looking at. Many sites include a link to a custom icon, which is often a tiny version of the logo of the site or its owner. Icons and the like are supposed to be distinctive. But when there are hundreds of them, they all start to flow together into a graphic stew. I have no idea which sites most of these icons belong to. Do you?

All these icons put me in mind of Plato’s One and Many. It turns out that there are many “problems of the many”. For example: the Problem of Many-in-One; the Problem of One versus Many; the Many-Body Problem; and finally the Many-to-One Routing Problem, which I’m sure has troubled more than one of us. It may be that we have too many One and Many problems—a One-and-Many-Problem Problem, about which these few words are surely enough.

If Hillary wins…

In 1971, when this book was published, 1992—the year Bill Clinton was elected—was still part of the hazy future. On another branch of time, Big Brother would have been in power for at least eight years.

Concerning Parley J. Cooper, I find nothing online except titles of books, mostly from the 1970s, all of them genre fiction (romance, horror, sci-fi).

John Grant at Infinity Plus has reviewed The Feminists. He finds the writing “drab and uninspiring”. What I’ve skimmed is like the blurbs, but less punchy. Grant adds that “one cannot imagine any front-line commercial publisher being willing to take such a thing on” now. That is too optimistic. All that a present-day Parley Cooper need do is to wrap the tale in sociological jargon, and call it a “projection”. Regnery would publish it as non-fiction, and Mr. Cooper would soon be a commentator on Fox.

For background, see Laura Quilter, “A short history of the backlash against feminism in SF/F”, Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Utopia. Find The Feminists at Bookfinder.

Sunday cat pix

Incognita.

Sunday cat pix

LG will be fourteen years old in June.

Sunday cat pix

A bit of sun in the afternoon.

Musa, 22 Feb 2008