I still love this thing, but I update it so very, very rarely these days. Everyone went to Facebook about six years ago, and now people are even leaving Facebook for Vine or whatever. And of course a lot of LJ bled off to Dreamwidth ( Read more... )

So yesterday was my visit to the gym for chest, biceps, and shoulders. To my surprise, even though this week is the week to up my weight, I was strong enough on that workout that I'm going to kick my weight up another notch again next week. By next week, I'll be bench pressing 180 pounds and curling 45s (with a weight of 80 or 90 pounds on ( Read more... )

Back when I was 18, I read Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. That doesn't embarrass me.
What embarrasses me is that I saw nothing at all objectionable about the fact that the villains of the story are an army of black cannibals (with hippies serving as the brains of the outfit). How did I not realize that was awful at several ( Read more... )

So apparently America's flying laser cannon failed it's second test. Poops. Well, we still have our flying robot assassins.

We have an International Space Station high above the earth.
Down below, the United States of America has an army of flying robot assassins and one working laser cannon.
Not quite as science fictional, but odd (and mildly disquieting) is the fact that the White House has a presidential kill list drawn up--and our president is a liberal Democrat. ( Read more... )

So somehow I missed this. It appears that back in February, the United States Missile Defense Agency successfully shot down a missile in mid-flight in a successful test of the Airborne Laser.
The United States of America has a working prototype of a laser cannon. Holy. Crap.
This has got to be the greatest thing ever.

So I wanted to find a YouTube video of Obama's speech in which he announced an increase of troop strength to Afghanistan. So I naively entered "Obama call to arms" in the search. The results, oh, holy crap, the results were terrifying. They were *not* Obama's call to arms... Holy crap, these guys are nuts. I hope the Secret Service is doing ( Read more... )

It wasn't someone on the team of the best engineers that BP's money could buy: It was a plumber. Seriously, that has got to be the coolest thing ever. The man didn't even give his name, just called in with an idea of how to fix the problem, and it worked. That man is a fucking hero.

So I ran some of my dissertation through this nifty thing folks have been linking to that compares your writing style to that of other writers. The result?


( Read more... )

My brother has safely finished his deployment to Afghanistan! So after one seven-month deployment to al Anbar and another to Helmand, he is, hopefully, done with war zones for the time being.