It’s not often a YouTube video grabs my attention for the better part of an hour, but this did. I did want them to be a little less polite at a couple of points, but still utterly compelling for me. Read more →
Month: May 2010
More on the Synthetic Life thing
Oh, This Is Going To Be A BIG Deal
“I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.” If you haven’t read this yet, read it. I’m going to need some time to take this all in, but I’m going to have to go along with Dyson on the… Read more →
Not How O’Toole & Hepburn Would Do It
What you’re looking at there is apparently around $613 million. (And yes, it is very odd when you think about the difference between owning digital copies of the images, which is free… and owning the originals, which are apparently somehow worth over $600 million. But that’s not the point.) Those five paintings were stolen last night from the Museum of… Read more →
Aside
I am unable to resist “obscure words” lists, and generally most of the words on them are actually familiar to me. Not so with this list, on which I knew these ones from prior encounter: agraffe, bathykolpian, blandiloquent, callipygean, defenestrate, mumpsimus, slubberdegullion, and yclept. These, while I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before, were obvious in their meaning from their components: autohagiographer, autotonsorialist, batrachophagous, cruciverbalist, dephlogisticate, interfenestration, and preantepenultimate. And the rest were new to me. I think the most fun one to say, although rarely called for, would be “zenzizenzizenzic“, the one with the most fun definition is “sphallolalia“, and the one least likely to come up in my life is “mallemaroking“. There are several, though, that I could easily see coming up in my life, not least of which are “gambrinous“, “philosophunculist“, and “ultracrepidarian“.
Keep Hitting Play
I like to think of myself as pretty musically eclectic: it’s not so much that I like one category of music or another, but rather that I like the good stuff. Which leads to lots of pockets of music that appeal to me throughout the entire space of music. There are areas I’ve kind of shied away from for one… Read more →
Aside
Four acquaintances of mine are tromping about Japan at the moment. While I have a very low interest in doing that myself, I am quite interested in following along with their escapades through the Internet. Today, the escapades included ice cream flavours. “But there’s also tomato-flavoured ice cream. And sea urchin. And fried noodle. And lamb raisin. Yes, lamb raisin. No, I don’t understand why it’s lamb raisin.” And that’s not the peak. Go. Read.
I can prove it with charts
If you’re a night owl, you probably don’t need me to do anything more than show the chart, and this link: Why Night Owls Are More Intelligent than Morning Larks (If you’re a morning person, find someone who likes the night to explain it to you.) I believe I shall now go to bed and sleep in until after 11. Read more →
Link posts are easy
Links, pithy comments, you know the drill. The graphics on this one might not be astonishing, but the idea of supermassive black holes being flung from collisons at galactic cores is probably cool enough on its own to sustain interest. I love how science writers drop line like “these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns” the way… Read more →
How Peter Singer destroyed me in a couple of paragraphs
I like to think of myself as a fairly philosophical person, and a fairly rational one–that is to say, I like to think that I examine my life, my motivations, my actions, and my beliefs on a more-or-less continuous basis, and try to integrate them into a framework that makes some kind of objective sense when considered in the light… Read more →
Aside
While I’ve internalized selections from The Jargon File (well, sections thereof, from particular versions) I have to admit that the stuff in the new programming jargon collection run recently at Stack Overflow is all new to me. I don’t see myself using many of them heavily, but I think I can see drug/shrug/smug report all making their way into my lexicon.
Emilio Morenatti
One kind of photographer that always particularly impresses me is one who can capture pieces of the world and use them to take me to a place I’ve never been or show me a bit of just how different parts of the world are from the part I know–and how the same in some ways. After spending a lot of… Read more →
Called to mind while watching UK election results
These results make me think of the same poem the last Canadian results made me think of. Politics That land full surely hastens to its end Where public sycophants in homage bend The populace to flatter, and repeat The doubled echoes of its loud conceit. Lowly their attitude but high their aim, They creep to eminence through paths of shame,… Read more →
In Britain’s time of greatest need
I’ve been following the UK elections with more than a mild interest this time around. Partly it’s because this is the most interesting election in Britain for a long time. Charlie can explain why, if you haven’t been following. I’m enough of an optimist to think there may be a swing away from a corporatist agenda, or towards a more… Read more →
Golden Books 2: Mindplayers
A while back I wrote something about Steven Brust’s The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars—an entry discussing how it was one of those books that I read at the exactly correct time, and literally had the way I see the world changed (and to some extent shaped) by the experience of reading it. That experience is probably something that… Read more →
