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Place your bets for the upcoming state of the union
Every year there has been a red herring in the President's State of the Union speech. Hydrogen cars, steroid abuse, mission to mars, etc. Well, we're losing two concurrent land wars in Asia and the housing bubble is looking like it may be going down, so what irrelevant thing will be brought up this year? Place your bets. Winner gets bragging ( Read more... ) -
11 People, 11 Winter Seasonal Beers, 1 winner
We held a seasonal ale taste-test and had a big party, much like last year, but 11 people instead of just 3. We poured little glasses of many seasonal ales and had people rank them in order of preference. Ties were strictly forbidden. There were 11 beers:
- Anderson Valley Winter Solstice - Perennial medal winner, Tracy's favorite of ( Read more... )
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All systems have bugs
mycrust had a half-snarky comment about helping his father-in-law fix the family entertainment system, and it made me go on a tear. Because there's a pretty deep issue here, and it pleasantly touches on lots of stuff close to my heart. But I think I should start by pointing out that the fix to the problem involved some small mucking-about with the ( Read more... ) -
Art made from memes and open data
Here are the things I like with the letter G, as requested by pants_of_doom. There are very few surprises inside, but it's a pleasant list:
- Graphs - vertices and edges or just well designed presentations of data, I like them all
- Gift economies - be a capitalist to the world, but be a communist with your friends and family
- Games - board, mind, video
- Green Day - ( Read more... )
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"I am far from thinking that nomenclature is a remedy for every defect in art or science: still I cannot but feel that confusion of terms generally springs from, and always leads to, confusion of ideas."
-- John Louis Petit, "Architectural Studies in France", 1854
On an unrelated note, goteam and I made 2 pumpkin pies on Thursday. 48 hours later, we ( Read more... ) -
Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving!
We had a pretty successful thanksgiving and it was nice to stay at home and cook and not worry about research or anything else. But that's not what I want to talk about - instead, I want to say that the no-knead bread recipe from the NY Times is fantastic. It's the first time we've cooked bread that ended up like snooty bread ( Read more... ) -
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Please point me to news reports of electronic voting machines erring to give the Democrat candidate more votes. Conspiracies make me very uncomfortable, but so does the current state of affairs where I haven't heard of ONE error that went Democratic, and I have heard of lots of errors that went Republican. -
Samuel R Delany, Philip K Dick, Ursula K Le Guin, and (maybe) William Gibson.
What scifi/fantasy authors would you be willing to defend as writers of high quality literature and not just genre fiction? What authors both have something to say, and say it well?
NB: I'm primarily looking for people who are by default filed in the SciFi ghetto, not "real" authors who have occasionally been filed in SF/fantasy. Because Kurt ( Read more... )
