Chatter

As discussions have heated up, more people have been getting trapped in moderation due to excessive links in their comments. I believe that you can get around that by signing in using TypeKey, using OpenID or various other online authentication systems. Try it (this post is a good testbed!) and let me know if it works, please.
Well, it looks like Professor Steve Steve, my laptop, my iPod, a plush octopus, and various other precious papers are not to be recovered. Insurance will help some, but I've put together an Amazon.com wishlist to collect a list of things I need to replace. Anyone who wants to help out would be most appreciated.
Via Tor.com, a meme that I thought looked really interesting. What were the last three genre books that you purchased? Why did you purchase them? And do they feel comfortable together? Daniel Abraham,The Price of Spring (The Long Price Quartet): This is the conclusion to Abraham's Long Price Quartet, which is a wonderful set of novels. Each volume of the quartet is a self-contained story - but the pieces also fit together into a larger story-arc. The volumes each take place over the course of a season, and each is separated by about 20 years. It's fantasy with very rare but…
Some douchebag walked off with my computer bag, including my iPod, my computer, and most troublingly, Professor Steve Steve. My heart is filled with rage. Rage and distinct mourning for my lost computer. If anyone at DragonCon finds a Timbuktu laptop bag with my goddam computer in it, my goddam cards in it, and my goddam iPod in it, the course of action least likely to damage the honor of costumed nerds would be to drop it off at lost and found in the Hilton. No questions asked. Thanks.
Anyone attending Dragon*Con this weekend should totally stop by NCSE's booth, at the Skeptic Track.
IEEE href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/fuel-cells/hydrogen-helper">reports that chicken feathers are superior to carbon nanotubes: src="http://photos-g.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs148.snc1/5494_920199924833_2254023_51033310_7917444_s.jpg" align="left" height="86" width="130">Scientists at the University of Delaware say that carbonized chicken feathers could be a cheap way to store hydrogen for fuel cells. According to chemical engineering professor Richard Wool, the heat-treated feathers could hold more hydrogen than costlier competing technologies, such as metal hydrides…
Remember to double check your train tickets. Showing up at 4:15 for what you remember as a 4:30 train doesn't work if it's really a 4:00 departure.
This is good.  Indeed, it may qualify as the type specimen ( href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holotype">holotype) of snark.  From The New Yorker: href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2009/08/clinton-north-korea.html">It's So Obvious From Avi Zenilman, online news editor, The New Yorker:     Do you think the right is upset about President Clinton's mission because he didn't free the hostages by going through the Japanese to sell arms to the North Koreans and then use the proceeds to support anti-Chavez guerrillas? Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg On the surface,…
There are still problems with this site. All my scheduled entries do not show up "below the jump" after they publish until I rebuild each one individually. So the scheduled mystery bird and the videos will taunt you but you will be unable to comment or read/view anything below the jump until I've found wireless at the airport and have been able to rebuild each and every scheduled blog entry .. unless the SB overlordz have gotten this issue fixed, but alas, I will be out of internet/email/blog contact for roughly 18 hours today, which means I cannot complain to hurry the process along. I…
href="http://annarbor.com/2009/07/didnt-get-enough-of-the-art-fairs-last-week-check-out-this-time-lapse-video.html">AnnArbor.com (HT: href="http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2009/07/soft-launch-day-16.html">Edward Vielmetti) has a youtube time-lapse video at the href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor_Art_Fairs">Ann Arbor Art Fairs.  Get the whole thing, compressed into 177 seconds: This probably is the very best way to experience it.  I still remember going to the first one, at age 6.  It seemed overwhelming then.  Strangely, the Art Fairs have grown at exactly the same…
When I was little, I called every TV anchor "Cronkite." He literally defined "journalist" for me. He will be missed.
This comment thread has gotten long enough to start causing some server load problems. As a result, I'm closing the comments here, and I've added a new post where discussions of this past can continue. If you're not interested in completely off-topic personal rambling, stop reading now. This is very off-topic. But I wanted to say this once, and I wanted to do it in a way where I had some control over the publicly viewable responses. I will not be following my usual commenting guidelines here - anything which I consider to be abusive will be deleted, with no warning. I graduated from high…
I'm in Florida at this teacher workshop, so bloggery will be limited. I had a good talk with the assembled teachers about the history of creationism and education. My ability to accomplish anything at all was a bit of a surprise. My flight was scheduled to arrive in Florida at 12:30 am, which was manageable. I got to my layover in Las Vegas on time and without incident. We took off without apparent incident. I enjoyed watching the landscape out the window, and after a while I was fairly sure we were flying over the Grand Canyon. This was lovely. When we pulled a u-turn, and I got to see…
Sorry that blogging has been extra-crappy lately. Honestly, no Independence Day post? WTF? Well, it's like this. A while back I met Debra Berliner. She was smart and cute and made the same sorts of jokes I liked to make and laughed when I made them and enjoyed the same sorts of projects I do. Our interests meshed and we had lots to talk about. So we spent time together. We went to farmers markets. We went biking. We memorized Muppet movies and Decemberists songs. We knocked on doors in Reno and Las Vegas to get Obama elected. We looked at 3D images from Mars at NASA's Ames facility…
Zombie Michael Jackson has not yet risen to devour LA's few remaining brains. Thankfully, CNN is following this breaking story.
Can society persist without Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon? And will the hubbub over Michael Jackson's death do what the Iranian government couldn't: destroy Twitter?
This is an edited repost of something I wrote nearly three years ago. You can see the original post and comments here. Over at Dr. Isis's blog, there's a post answering a reader's question about whether to tell her postdoc advisor about her troubles with clinical depression. I agree with Isis's advice - without knowing the advisor really well, you can't be sure of how they'll react. If the postdoc had become ill due to something like a diabetic episode, where the change in schedule and environment caused by taking a new job messed up the PDs control of their blood sugar - well, there wouldn…
I just bought Cordarounds and am liking them very much, thank you. Their collection of gingham shorts fails to fully engage my enthusiasm, though they've got a seersucker short that tempts. These cords should go nicely with my Tweed Ride outfit, first deployed last Thursday for an East Bay jaunt. Tweed rides began in London, where a bunch of cyclists donned tweed and had a nice time riding around the city. Some San Franciscans picked up the idea and have now done two rides. A week ago, a bunch of us from the East Bay met up with veterans of the SF rides and explored the tweedy side of…
It has come to my attention that Kalamazoo is on the map, again.  The last time was is 1942, when the Glen Miller Orchestra played href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28I%27ve_Got_a_Gal_In%29_Kalamazoo">I've Got A Gal In Kalamazoo (lyrics). Now, Ratebeer.com has included TWO Kalamazoo beers on their href="http://www.ratebeer.com/Ratings/Ratings-Top50.asp">"top rated" list: Westvleteren Abt 12 Närke Kaggen Stormaktsporter Three Floyds Oak Aged Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout Three Floyds Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout AleSmith Speedway Stout AleSmith Barrel Aged Speedway Stout…
Just a quick status notice: a bunch of commenters have been having problems with the system demanding authetication to be able to comment. I'm trying to fix it with the help of the SB tech folks. My first attempt made things worse, and made it impossible for anyone to comment. I'm trying to re-enable comments now, but since I'm not sure what disabled them, I'm not sure of what will work. Commenting ability using typekey authentication will be re-enabled ASAP; and commenting without authentication will be re-enabled as soon as the SB techs can figure out what's causing the authentication…