Some rather-rambly thoughts on an SF concept I haven't seen before ( Read more... )

Apropos of this discussion on Charlie Stross's blog, the increase in technology that makes it possible to produce as great an amount of our society's material needs with fewer workers can be dealt with by ( Read more... )

What a great party tonight was! In honor of 11/11/11 we served Elevenses (at 11:11:11pm of course), which was in the Pooh style: bread with honey and condensed milk (bread optional). We spent many hours playing many parlor games, including Telephone Oracle, Plenty Questions, Coffeepot, Pavlov, and the identify-the-person-written-on-the-scrap-of- ( Read more... )

Tonight's Classical Music Fans meetup went so well -- first we screened Leonard Bernstein's "Omnibus" lecture on modern music (which I had never seen before and is awesome - clever, funny, smart, insightful and info-dense; it's pretty much a nonstop 45-minute monologue with Lenny pausing only to play the piano and conduct the orchestra he's ( Read more... )

Last night Ethan had a bunch of friends over, and I took part in my first game of Summoners' Scrabble; hopefully it won't be the last. The game was invented by Psi Phi's co-president-with-a-natural-19-charisma, Books Schwartz. It's Scrabble with a bit of Magic: The Gathering and more than a bit of free-form storytelling ( Read more... )

Ethan and I are hosting an improv games afternoon tomorrow. It's been a long time since I've done one, so I'm both excited and a little nervous -- will people get into it? Will they have fun ( Read more... )

"We're Getting There" is an awful slogan (do they still use it? If not, do they have a new one?), but in fact SEPTA is moving into the future, albeit slowly. Presenting...

Real-time locations of all SEPTA buses and trolleys, on Google Maps

Hopefully I'll be doing less waiting-20-minutes-at-the-bus-shelter now.

I just had two current students knock on my door, circulating a petition to get a referendum on this year's ballot on whether the borough of Swarthmore should be a dry community or a wet community -- a referendum explicitly designed to overturn the 2001 referendum that Swarthmore would permit the selling of alcohol only on the premises of an inn ( Read more... )

I just rode in on the R3 ^H^H^H Media line with Vukan Vuchic, who a mutual friend introduced me to.
He too thinks the elimination of color coding on SEPTA's trains is ludicrous, and thinks someone should have been fired for making the type size on the train's signs unreadably small. On the other hand, he continues to defend his nomenclature ( Read more... )

In an attempt to help reldnahkram's efforts to bring more fun to LJ, here's a communal quiz ( Read more... )