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Palimpsest, by Charles Stross
I normally shun stories involving time travel. However Charles Stross could be writing Teletubbies fanfic and I'd read it. Palimpsest is a novella (27k words) about the Stasis, a project for the long-term survival of Earth in a universe several times older than it is now. It has been nominated a few weeks ago for the Hugos, and made available ( Read more... ) -
Crêpes (~pancakes)
I think I have the recipe for crêpes memorised, let's see:- count 1 egg or more per person
- put a batch of 3 eggs in a mixer
- add enough flour for a solid ball to form.
- melt butter, 25g per egg (or more; butter helps crêpes not to attach during cooking), mix with the rest
- add salt, double the volume (or more?) by adding milk. Soy can replace milk, it ( Read more... )
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Politics on the street
Walking down the street unhurriedly, I found a display of these bold and provocative words:
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Big questions that have no answers
Questions that don't have answers and will never have:- Why is there anything? Not just matter, but a universe?
- Why do I have a point of view? Why is there any awareness of the universe, even through the small keyhole of individual experience?
The first question is just your average existential angst. Pointing to a cause for the big bang (bubble ( Read more... ) -
Ada Lovelace day: Fran Allen
It's Ada Lovelace day and the internet didn't remind me!
Luckily kadath just did and I had someone in mind, thanks to her interview in Coders at work (2009): Fran Allen.
In 1957 (about the time lisp and FORTRAN were created, the first programming languages to take off, still running today), Fran Allen joined IBM research. She had a math degree, with ( Read more... ) -
Counting heads, by David Marusek
I just read counting heads (2005), a fun sci-fi novel revolving around the rise and fall of a handful of people in a busy future society, with detailed and interesting world-building.
Let's get the technology out of the way. There are quite a few quasi-magical technologies, where I'd have preferred leaving some out in exchange for more realism. ( Read more... ) -
Comments log
I'd like to keep a log of my comments on dreamwidth and livejournal. I want to use them as a log of whatever I was interested in at the time. I feel possessive of those (even minor) contributions to whatever was going on. Also, this is personal data stored on remote servers, which I should by rights have access to (I don't know of data portability ( Read more... ) -
La vie est un miracle, d'Emir Kusturica
(J'ai écrit cette entrée il y a quelques semaines, rajouté des captures d'écran et mis à jour la date, mais comment faire pour que lj et dw la montrent sur les pages d'amis?)
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visualising time
What does time look like, from a physical point of view? This post fuelled by vague science and a vivid imagination. Don't take it too seriously.
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