The last week has seen me:

* startle Neil Stephenson [1]
* have an annoying contact lens incident [2]
* apply the necessary teachable-moment to a kid outside my workplace who was messing around with my bike when I left the office
* meet Stewart Brand* watch a superconducting toy train, a sort-of real quantum computer and a really pretty 3-d movie ( Read more... )

Friday night we saw the movie Diabolique, which was one of Hitchcock's style-influences. It was an OK (but merely OK) suspense/horror story ( Read more... )

I found myself wandering The Prospect of Whitby, the co-op house I lived in at Cornell. The house president was missing, which felt fairly ominous. I walked up the stairs, admiring the brand new 4th and 5th floors (which somehow hadn't changed the exterior profile of the house). There was lots of open space and I marveled at how much larger it ( Read more... )

It's quite shocking to me that in something like 9 hours, melted_snowball and I will be in Italy. Yow.

In honour of sitting in an airport, for reasons that will become clear if you follow the link: this is one of the best science-fiction short stories I've ever read. If you like "Castle in the Sky", Epistemology, or steam-punk:

Biographical Notes to ‘A ( Read more... )

Natural selection is so cool. The Dec. 24 issue of the Economist has a neat article about humans' shift from hunting to agriculture; how it was in a sense a desperation move as they hunted the big game to extinction. Such as the rhinoceroses in France. 30,000 years ago. That's... amazingly recent. When they ran out of rhinos, they went on to ( Read more... )

It's a white whale in the sky! Where's the petunia?

60 rooms, cruising speed of 280km/h, 3-day circumnavigation of the Earth.

I'm not holding my breath, but I do really want to see this.

I read PKD's original book of Scanner Darkly last year, and on the basis of that, decided to skip the movie ( Read more... )

A bit over a month ago, I saw Paprika, and its plot reminded me of one of the novels that turned me on to Greg Bear- Queen of Angels, a police thriller set in 2048 where an illegal device can read the "Geography of the Mind"- a remapping of one person's brain so it will make sense to others. I remember I had been really impressed by this book, ( Read more... )

On my lunch hour, I:

- made a physio appointment in the student centre 100m from my office. For this afternoon. This seems speedy, considering that I made a doctor's appointment less than 48 hours ago, and saw the doc yesterday. What's the catch ( Read more... )

For anyone who appreciates sci-fi and has 30 seconds to spare: Understanding Grandpa.
Via boutell.

For melted_snowball: Things I Don't Believe In.