I’m still trying to keep up with the TED talks, and today’s is a cool one for anyone interested in either Tesla or the concept of broadcast power generally. To be fair this is a much shorter-range version of broadcast power than Tesla was after, but still… The presenter is the CEO of WiTricity, which is commercializing the technology, which… Read more →
Month: August 2009
SF Authors Say Smart Things: Stross on mercy
The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don’t get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy. There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years… Read more →
I shall call her Dr. Wife
Yes, I think the title captures the news from Friday: Trish is now a Doctor of Philosophy. (She was assured that as a newly minted PhD she gets up to six months of people having to forgive her for being asinine about the doctor title–booking plane tickets with it, etc. I don’t know if she’ll take advantage of that, or… Read more →
Book Porn
Yesterday was a marvelous mail day at the McLaren household. Through a confluence of mail karma–or possibly because our mailman seems to be skipping a day whenever he gets bored with the route–I had several books arrive from several different publishers. This will consequently be one long post full of book porn. If you’re not interested in small presses and… Read more →
Newish Old Music
Over the last day or so, I’ve been on an MP3-ripping rampage–I think I’ve done about 120 CDs in the last day or two. I’ve got a goal to get the rest of the CDs I’ve never got around to ripping (about 1000 or so) digitized before the end of the month, so that I can box them up and… Read more →
A continuous moving on
Have I previously discussed my enjoyment of the word flux? I don’t think I have. In fact, I like the word enough that I’ve just officially adopted it for the next year at Adopt-A-Word. As the word’s new guardian, I will, of course, be traveling the web to ensure the word is not misused, or under-used. (This is a charity… Read more →
The Sky
After having lived in Nova Scotia for eight years now, I take most things in stride. However, there’s one area in which I seem to have kept my beginner’s mind: appreciating the sky. The sky here never lets me down–at least not on the days you can actually see it. Several times a week I am literally stopped in my… Read more →
My Awesome Wife, Part 2
Having posted that, it occurs to me that I may still be projecting a picture that doesn’t show the entirety of Trish’s academic awesomeness. I am given to understand that most doctoral students have a very small number of publications, sometimes zero, during their doctoral programs–most are focused on their theses. Trish, on the other hand, has rather a lot… Read more →
My Awesome Wife, Part 1
My wife has a number of incredibly impressive qualities. Among other things she is smart, competitive, beautiful, organized, has a great smile, and has both enough good taste and enough insanity to have married me. I may not mention her sheet awesomeness much–but if so, that’s mostly for your benefit, and not because I don’t recognize it. But let me… Read more →
Natal Day Link Post
Holiday Monday has kept me too busy to properly blog, so you get a bit of a tab-closing list instead. I’m not sure that it covers anything new, but the piece from More Intelligent Life (the quarterly from the Economist) about authors and drinking was a fun read anyway. I’ve seen some stories about tough people in the news, but… Read more →
I am weary of days and hours
Earlier today I ran into this passage in the course of my wanderings: From too much love of living, From hope and fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. Now I’m generally not… Read more →
Conventional Wisdom Validated
Some things I have always posited as true: Women, in general, are more attractive than men. I.e. looking at the average woman, is a more aesthetically pleasing experience than looking at the average man. Men, on the whole, are more interested in appearance in a potential partner than women are, generally speaking. And now there’s some research that seems to… Read more →
