Have just got home and found the DREADED letter from the IRS (income taxes). OMG is it a f**king audit? Last year got enough scary letters from IRS, that nasty taste is still in my mouth. Looked inside, something about an adjustment. Turns out line 70 of the 1040 has some kind of "economic recovery rebate", for people who did not get enough in 2007 ( Read more... )

I am, I think, as close as I will ever come to the surface of Mars. I am sitting in Death Valley, and the view looks a lot like the photos from the Rovers. Compacted, wind packed sand in a field of rocks, all smaller than a fist and bigger than a fingernail. An endless plain in all directions (except the oasis I am at fo course but I am looking ( Read more... )

Nice restaurant reviewed in the NYTimes today. Now I want to go to Feast in Houston.
"... the menu doesn’t just slip in a little tongue here, a little liver there. It’s a full-on, extended ode to offal ( Read more... )

In my user interface prototype, I seem to have backed myself into a corner, it is difficult to explain to an impatient customer the distinction between a set containing a thing, and the thing itself ( Read more... )

Growing up with a sister makes people more balanced

Which of you are lucky enough to have a sister? And if you do, do you still talk to her?

I see The Guardian Newspaper is up to its usual tricks! It announced that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter!

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. For example, Martin Luther King's legendary 1963 ( Read more... )

Determined to watch part 1 of 5 o Little Dorrit on PBS tonight. This Dickens classic represents culture, and I am taking a double dose this weekend. First the birthplace of modern astronomey (yesterday), and now a classic portrait of Victorian London. Must concentrate and not just mess about on line or else I will lose the plot altogether ( Read more... )

In the real world, people like new software, some cool app or web-driven display. If it is something that answers a need they have, they will go to the effort of installing it on their own machine. But in science, it is the other way around, it is like each scientist needs to build everything themselves. There is such a fascination with the magical ( Read more... )

I spent yesterday at the Mount Wilson Observatory that is above Pasadena. In the past I have thought of it as a dowdy old thing, the telescopes not really up to modern astronomy, ruined by light pollution from Los Angeles. But changing frame from present to past and I now see the Observatory as the cauldron of modern astronomy, the place where all ( Read more... )

I am HOME ALONE all the wives and children still in San Diego. What a lovely time we had frolicking in the waves and watching the girls in flipflops on SPRING BREAK, and the children being with their cousins ( Read more... )