Moro and I went back to the Salton Sea this weekend for the grand opening of the new federal-stimulus-funded Salton Sea Museum, and because last time we got so lost trying to get there we didn't actually have much chance to look around.

( Click for further adventures, in which my foot is eaten by a gryphon )

I recently read (most of) The Road, and now I see there's a movie. The market is open for a video game ( Read more... )

I have a BlackBerry Storm. It does many things, all badly. It drops calls that a flip phone on the same network would not have dropped; its clock is 4 minutes fast, and if you fix it it reverts to 4 minutes fast whenever it runs down the battery (other BlackBerry storms are also 4 minutes fast); it gets blazing hot when talking on it or when ( Read more... )

This weekend Cheri and I went to the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston. It's pretty neat, I recommend that you Houstonians check it out. Its current big exhibition is "Celebrating the Lives and Deaths of the Popes". This was evidently produced with the partial - but not total - cooperation of the Church. The best artifact they had ( Read more... )

Alla (aka uniforall) and my friend Tom (aka Bender) were recently married. Here's the youtube video. Alla's the scaly green one with the claws (you can see her sans scales at around 8:40).

Services like Pandora rate similarity of songs based on a large number of parameters. I'm not sure if these parameters are just bits, or if they're continua; I can imagine a classification scheme based on continuous parameters, though. I have a music library; I'd like to see a graphical depiction of it, but even if it's classified by continuous ( Read more... )

I recently purchased some alphabet blocks for a friend's baby shower. I was delighted to find that the letter placement on these blocks was configured so as to function as a rot13 encryptor/decryptor: you spell out your message in plaintext on the blocks, then flip them over and that's the encrypted form. Decryption works the same way. Rot13 is ( Read more... )

I wandered across a really fascinating Vanity Fair article about how Iceland's financial crisis happened; it also touches on how 1970s fishery laws created Bjork, Alcoa's encounter with the elves, sex-segregated political parties, all sorts of great stuff.

Largely for my own use: I have had to look this up twice, the information is surprisingly difficult to find, and I don't want to ever have to look it up again. ( Details below the cut... )

I think I may have found the most interesting person. He's now most famous for being the person Oscar Wilde was jailed for engaging in somdomy (sic) with - but that isn't even close to the most interesting thing he did. His Dad is not bad either - these are the Wikipedia articles that keep on giving. Someone should make a movie. I especially ( Read more... )