Anyone else see the buzz yesterday about MIT's new "Leaf", which hopes to provide cheap power from water & sunlight?

I wonder if Scott Adams saw it too, or was today's Dilbert just delicious serendipity?

I tried putting my own estimates into Wolfram Alpha's Drake Equation page. It didn't go well for SETI :


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I have to interview two candidates for relatively junior roles today. I've pretty much forgotten what to say to candidates with no practical experience (both are close to completing PhDs).

Worse, I just realised that they're both near my kids' ages than mine, even the 28 year-old. Maybe I should start by asking how they spend their allowance?

Utterly stealing John Scalzi's work (derived from someone else's idea, but a good one nonetheless) I've taken a selection of reasonably accurate but misleading SF (and related) movie synopses and removed the titles.

You get to figure out what the movies are. Or not. Answers, with more of the same kind of thing, at Scalzi's filmcritic blog.

1. A well- ( Read more... )

So I got David Foster Wallace's meisterwerk, "Infinite Jest". Blimey. 980 pages, with another 60-odd of "notes and errata". For a novel. Small typeface, not many paragraphs. Going to take a while. And a stronger pair of reading glasses, I shouldn't wonder.

In the same package was Carcassonne which, being very behind on what's been occurring on the ( Read more... )

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I guess one upside of the World Cup is that the English players got an extra week of holiday without the Germans grabbing all the best sunbeds.

The family PC has been creaking under a heavy load of photos (over 20K files now, because Pam likes to (a) shoot with the continuous mode and (b) keep everything "just in case"), videos, MP3s and Windows ( Read more... )

Runner-up from the Vile Puns section of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

As Jeffrey Hicks, the event safety coordinator for the Renaissance Festival finished posting the revised standards for weaponry, he thought of the day an unleashed dog wandered onto the jousting field, causing the rider from Indianapolis to stop short, impaling himself ( Read more... )

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