I thought the whole Bing thing was a joke, until I saw the announcement of McCain’s plan to invade Canada.
Aside
As a general rule I am entirely in favour of freedom of speech and thought, and I look askance at any government attempts to curtail them. I can go on for quite a while about how hate speech legislation is probably a mistake, especially in a country where the current government wouldn’t think twice about blasting down that slippery slope, but… well, there’s one particular group that I don’t mind at all being on the shitty end of that stick. I’m a complicated man–I can live with some shades of grey.
Some Lovely Canadian Music
While I was driving today, I took the opportunity to listen to Tom Barlow’s eponymous album. I’ve mentioned the album here a couple of time before, embedding the song Billion Dollar Rockets in a previous post, and also discussing How Low Can You Get and Married By Elvis in some other posts. So I did a little YouTube digging when… Read more →
Aside
No problem. One hour of mist and fog, three hours of full on torrential downpour and high winds, and then seven hours of lovely fall driving in the “clear after a storm” weather.
Passed six cars in the ditch, and eleven emergency response vehicles with lights flashing during the downpour bit. These are people who don’t slow down even when the highway is under water and they’re hydroplaning along at 120km/h. Thinning the herd.
A/C stopped working in Maine. Windows down, driving fast, listening to Thin Lizzy and the Clash really loud. Excellent.
Aside
You know, I probably wouldn’t be worried about this storm if Jesus was my friend.
It’s hard out there for an atheist.
Road Trip?
In theory I’m driving down to Boston tomorrow. My route will look something like this: The tiny eight ball there indicates roughly where I expect to be at around 2PM local time. Why 2PM? Hold that thought. Normally I take the southern route, going through Saint John, and crossing into Maine much closer to the ocean, but for reasons that… Read more →
Aside
Shannon worked for Bell Labs (now owned by Alcatel-Lucent).
Guess who just shut down “fundamental research” in physics?
Not quite sic transit gloria mundi, but definitely a chunk of the glory of American research.
I Just Don’t Get It.
In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear to me that I… Read more →
Golden Books 1: The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars
Over at the blog Steven Brust shares with his roommates, the question was posed about the “golden books“—those ones that because you hit them at just the right time, and they were just the right thing, made a lasting change in you, and how you interact with the world. I didn’t comment there, but I’ve been thinking about it. Several… Read more →
Aside
If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you probably haven’t noticed that Homo Sum now has “asides”–certain short posts that display differently from the larger more detailed posts.
At the moment they only display differently on the front page–not when you’re looking at them in single pages, or in any kind of archive, or from RSS.
These are implemented with the help of the AsideShop plugin for WordPress.
Aside
I’ve been holding this link, brought to my attention by Jeff Ford, to a story on the Dancing Plague (and some other odd afflictions). I find the theorizing quite interesting, although I suspect the truth, when it is discovered, will end up being something to do with parasitism.
A Linkpost Before Sleeping
I think I’m going to soon look at setting up the site with “asides”, so that instead of gathering up large buckets of links that I have only a few comments on, I can just drop them in as “asides” between my longer and more content-y posts. In the meantime, another (possibly final) agglomeration of miscellaneous links. This might be… Read more →
Browser Neepery 2008 Style
So, like all the other serious geeks, I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a the last couple of days. In general, I like it–it’s fast, and there are lots of nice little UI bits that I quite like, plus the deep nerd in me likes the multi-process architecture and the built-in memory profiling, etc. However there is absolutely no… Read more →
Why I Will Soon Have To Get A New Job
I work every day with people all over the world. Consequently, it is often hard to set a meeting time that is useful to everyone who needs to be in a meeting. I am quite prepared to work in the evenings, and often do, but I really, really, want to keep that narrow window of time between “Sarah gets home… Read more →
Missing The Joke: Or How I Learned To Bind The Spirits
You know what I hate? When I can tell that something in what I’m reading (or seeing) is a reference to something, and I don’t know what that something is. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, but more often it’s a literary reference, or an allusion to some knowledge I don’t have. Most of the time I can spot the reference,… Read more →
