Getting Away With It

Ms. Mourey, on the other hand, still operates the camera by herself. She is adjusting to living alone in a city where, for all her Internet fame, she has few friends and rarely goes out. Like lots of other YouTube personalities, Ms. Mourey said, “for the most part, we all just stay in our houses, alone, making videos.

How moving it was to see all walks of political life unite to condemn those unseemly, spontaneous celebrations that spread like prairie fire across the U.K. the moment Van Helsing signed the death certificate. What will be said of this class of politicians when they die – their legacies those of the Thatcherite, which is to say, economic terrorism, amorality, and war?

Even Streng had to give up on some of the planned experiments, though (bonus dormitat Strengus?). Sulfur compounds defeated him, because the thermodynamics were just too titanic. Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens…and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost. The sulfur chemistry of FOOF remains unexplored, so if you feel like whipping up a batch of Satan’s kimchi, go right ahead.

Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessey, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.

What I find fascinating about the anatomy of the Culture novels is the dissonance between Banks’s straightforward statements about the Culture and certain recurrent features of the stories he writes. Banks talks about how “nice” the Culture is, and yet we see hidden cruelties and open desires for universal domination. He clearly envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire. He is aware that the very language of the Culture is a subtle but immensely powerful training in “correct” ideology.

The Culture is a group-civilisation formed from seven or eight humanoid species, space-living elements of which established a loose federation approximately nine thousand years ago. The ships and habitats which formed the original alliance required each others’ support to pursue and maintain their independence from the political power structures - principally those of mature nation-states and autonomous commercial concerns - they had evolved from.