Joe Blaylock

Go read this one and tell me you're not the least teeny bit interested in buying her book. Go on, I dare you.

One of the things on my Christmas list this past year was Tales of the Red Panda: The Crime Cabal. anami's dad ordered it for me on preorder, and it took a while getting to me. I think I finally had it in my hands in late January. Well, now the mass-market edition is out, and it's even been updated (more polite than retconned) to track with revelations in the most recent season of the show.

So anyway, I thought it was pretty good. Folks should consider getting ahold of it. Or at least listening to the show.

From my google News feed of July 01, 2009:



Part of me thinks this is really unfortunate, and part of me finds it funny, and part of me thinks it's just really really icky.

Where are you, Semantic Web?

Today was my last day at work for the Summer. I got furloughed, which means I've been asked to do no work, for which I won't get paid. It could be worse; I'll have insurance, at least.

On my way in for my last day, I noticed a sign I had never seen before. The overwhelming appropriateness of it made me stop and get a picture taken.

So as some of you know, I've been climbing at Planet Granite in Belmont with Anami since shortly after the beginning of the year. I've gotten to be not so bad, too. I've certainly met my new year's goal of .10b's.

Anyway, PG has this rule that you have to pass an elaborate series of trials involving fire and flesh-eating beatles in order to be allowed to climb on lead, or to belay leaders. (Not really. actually you just have to be safe and not suck.) Well, today I passed, and I earned my lead card. I even got to climb with a couple guys there for a while. It was nice.

It's like starting all over again. The fear and the methodological rigor necessary to check it - just like when I first started toprope at the Evansville YMCA with Paul, in 1999.

very very tired. more later.

Anami and I visited the doctor today for routine physicals and establishing new relationships. We went down to the hospital at Stanford. Everything was clean, to be sure (there were antibiotic pumps by the doors), but not sterile, if that makes sense. There was lots of space and light and natural-looking stone and plants. Everyone was friendly and briskly efficient at the same time. There was a lot of paperwork to start with, but after you're logged into their system, everything is online. Anami got her lab work back already, for example. Something got messed up with my registration for the service, though, and HIPAA makes things complicated; I'll have to wait for a PIN thingy in the snail mail.

I've a long and rambling sort of rant in the back of my head about how hospitals should be. My influences are various interactions with hospitals as a spectator while someone else suffered, and witnessing the way that the Establishment often exacerbated that suffering. I was surprised to see how much closer to my ideas Stanford Hospital came than any other hospital I've visited.

I wouldn't mind if parking were cheaper, though.

the poet Rihaku
   the bottle says
would drink a big bottle of sake
and write a hundred poems

but i can't hold my liquor
and won't let my liquor
take hold of me
    so
one will have to do

Invented by me, this very morning.

Pick a term from the first list. Pick a term from the second list.

Now, open Google Search and turn on the Wonder Wheel (in Advanced Options).

Start at the first term; find a path that takes you to the second term. Now, find your way (without retracing your steps) from the second term back to the first. Try to find the shortest path you can. Post your results here.

For example, I navigated from "Wrath of Khan" to "SARS" and back to "Wrath of Khan". It took 38 mouse-clicks. Can you do better?

List 1: List 2:
Wrath of Khan SARS
Gone with The Wind E. Coli
Detroit, MI Gliese 581c
William Shatner Alexander the Great
Kansas City, KS Crazy Ludwig

Holy crap, it's good. You should go grab the StarShipSofa episode so you can hear it: http://www.starshipsofa.com/20090325/aural-delights-no-71-gord-sellar/

No, seriously. It's neat.

This is for you, gentoopengie.

Escape Pod has started their annual posting of this year's Hugo Award Nominees for Best Short Story. They kicked off with "Article of Faith", by Mike Resnick (of Cincinnati. Woot!)

"Article of Faith" isn't the most deeply moving Resnick story I've ever read or heard. That would probably have to be "Down Memory Lane", a 2006 Hugo nominee. Still, this story struck a nerve. I've spent a lot of time worrying about the Bodhisattva's Vow to aid all sentient beings. It sounds good, but it begs the question: What is a sentient being? Despite its trivialization as a trope of popular television series, films, and Hugo Award-winning short fiction, this moral conundrum has real consequences.

For example, it's generally considered poor form to eat ones' neighbors. So how do you decide what you can ethically eat? One could take the Genesis 9: 2-4 approach, and say, "Anything slower than me is food. Except for a few restrictions." If one really wants to save all sentient beings, though, this might seem awfully selfish. Do you save them by eating them? I guess that depends on what you grok their purpose to be.

Of course, deciding who and what counts as having a soul (in popular parlance) doesn't begin nor end with deciding what to eat. It informs every facet of how we choose to relate to the rest of the world. While Resnick's written stronger stories, I think that he indirectly (accidentally?) captured this in "Article of Faith". The fate of the robot, the minister, and even of the town, all seem intertwined with what the people choose to accept. To me, the story felt almost like an environmental piece.

But perhaps I'm reading into it over much.

A possible link between musical training and enhanced empathy. And a suggestion for a new treatment for autism?

http://www.physorg.com/news155309993.html

Thanks to Mary at The Thinking Meat Project for the link.

Everyone creating dense interactive information displays in software should probably at least skim this book. To visual types, a lot of what he has to say will be preaching to the choir - but the care with which he selects his examples will make the argument easier to present to others. To nonvisual types, there are probably a lot of new ideas here - or at least, old ideas made concrete.

http://isbn.nu/9781600330193

I hope you have a great day!

For my writing friends:
"Waiting For Inspiration, a Writer's Morality Play

This charming story, by Ellen Klages (read by Rachel Swirsky), is about a little girl being raised in the Carnegie Library by seven librarians who take their jobs very seriously. It was sweet, but not saccharin, and as I was listening in the car, I found myself not minding the traffic on the 101. I did mind tearing up a little though.

http://podcastle.org/2009/01/08/pc038-in-the-house-of-the-seven-librarians/

I'm surprised and saddened to realize, with the help of Google, that I've never posted to LJ about my fascination with alternative means of exchange. Economies based not on the US Dollar, but on other systems - systems based on time, or local resources, or whatever. I went through this period a while back when I was reading a lot of Bernard Lietaer and I got pretty excited. I even interviewed some of my neighbors in Bloomington about theBloomingHOURS project, trying to discover why it never really went anywhere.

It will come as no surprise then that I was pleased when I was browsing the web the other day, reading about the onrushing economic apocalypse, and I came across one reference after another to alternative exchange systems. Oh, don't get me wrong - I think we'll all have to be standing in bread lines before something like IthacaHOURS takes off in most of the country. But I still think it's a strong set of ideas, and I like to see good memes spread. Perhaps we'll end up in some middle way, infecting honest, hardworking Americans struggling to get by with the technocratic meritocracy of the free software community.

An article on WorldChanging about alternative currencies. They claim that local exchange systems are on the rise in these tough economic times.

(Hi kellix!)

Until The Red Panda returns to production, I'm satisfying my hunger for audio drama adventure with Black Jack Justice. The latest episode, #27: The Family Jewels, is played for laughs more than some of their other episodes. In my opinion, it's not Gregg Taylor's best writing. On the other hand, it is a wonderful example of a story in which nothing much happens, but we still forget our troubles for a while.

Perhaps I'm grousing at nothing. It's not that I disliked the episode. I was entertained; it was great dog walking listening. But I didn't love the episode, and I think that there's a lot of potential to love the episodes in Decoder Ring Theater's work.

So I guess my point is this: If you like noir detective comedy, played straight rather than self-deprecating, you should check out BJJ. The episode quality is slightly uneven, but it's a great light entertainment, and combines well with walking, driving, and shopping. This is a virtue that half-hour TV sitcoms decidedly lack. (And when it's funny, I find it very funny.)

Ok, first, the link: http://www.impactlab.com/2009/01/05/robotic-rice-planter/

Now, why I think that is totally bad ass.

There are several reasons this is bad ass: it's a robot, it plants rice, and it makes good economic sense.

First, because it's a robot. And it's big, and it has all kinds of gnarly slapdashery to its design. There's just something cool about prototypes which, combined with the inherent coolness of robots, makes my heart flutter. It's like getting to watch your favorite science fiction series, while it's still being written.

Second, it's bad ass because it plants rice. Planting rice is hard work, and the world's population is aging. Who will plant the rice in the future? It's not like Japanese (or Punjabi, or even Han) children sit around with their friends saying, "I want to spend my life doing backbreaking labor up to my knees in water. That sounds so cool." No. They're all saying, "I want to learn about computers and then become a rock star." The Japanese have a very vested interest in automating as much of the annoying, dirty work of maintaining their populations' lives as possible, but this is also an economic opportunity. If you look at demographics, environmental issues, or economics where goes Japan, goes the world (eventually). So them solving their food problems holds out hope that we'll be able to solve ours.

As money-making-money starts to look like a less and less appealing strategy for world domination, our old friend capitol capital investment starts to look better and better. In the 17th century, the smart money would be building mills and buying farmland. Today, it's energy infrastructure and automated production.

oops. capitol investment. yeah, graft's a good strategy too.

Copy of an email I sent to radio@thislife.org tonight
Dear This American Life,
( Read more... )

Since anami's been out of town seeing her father, I've been on my own a lot. Mostly, I've been working late hours, but I've also been reading stuff on the Internet. Here's some of that:

1. Over at The WELL, Bruce Sterling has been managing a conversation about the economy, ecology, politics, and just how screwed we all are, coming into the new year. There are some fascinating threads, touching on deflation, Tokugawa Japan, Icelandic sustainability, alternative currencies, distributed manufacturing, and radically long-term thinking. Surprisingly, there's a lot of optimism, too:
   
   http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/343/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html


2. Infosthetics posted an infographical animation claiming a capsule history of the Internet. I thought that it was a little shallow, but perhaps I know too much already? Could someone who doesn't already know this stuff watch and let me know if its actually informative?
   
   http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/01/the_history_of_the_internet.html


3. This review for "DIY Language Learning" makes it sound very cool. If I were going to be traveling someplace new for more than a couple weeks (for example, to Spain or South America), I'd definitely want to pick this up:
   
   http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/003442.php


4. I also spent several hours catching up on all of December's Planetary Radio. Space is so freaking cool.


5. Among the many boxes and piles of crap littering the house I grew up in were these deep boxes of magazines and comic books, stashed up in the eaves. Sometimes I'd get lost up there for hours, crawling around under the roof and reading Popular Mechanics from the 1970's. It was with a delight of recognition, then, that I found "Space-Age Illustrations", a collection of magazine covers from the 40's and 50's from a variety of popular science and mechanics magazines. The best part? Most of the covers link to scans of the interior material.
   http://wellmedicated.com/inspiration/45-vintage-space-age-illustrations/


6. One of those interiors was a Modern Mechanix which contained this truly rad Mission Staircase. kragen, take note!
   http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/11/20/mission-stairs-conserve-space/


7. The Philogeny of Mixed Drinks:
   http://spaghettilogic.org/drink_phylogeny.html


8. Body Counts in Israel and Palestine, represented pictorially:
   http://www.moiz.ca/coffin2.htm