interesting things

Randomness for 12/14

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1) So infuriating and depressing: What happened to Hope Witsell.

2) In a less awful note, Dominick Dunn: bestselling writer with appalling taste.

3) Comfortable interstellar travel

4) Terminator Offers Some Lessons for the Salvation of Your Novel

5) One thing that continually astonishes me about people is the way they leap to the defense of the powerful. Some seem to want to side with authority as a matter of habit. But before I could write about this–and about Dr. Peter Watts’s experience at the U.S./Canadian border–Jo Walton did it better than I ever could.

6) Frank Frazetta’s son smashes through the Frazetta museum with a backhoe to steal $20 million dollars worth of his father’s paintings. via James Nicoll

7) Joe Lieberman promises to filibuster health care reform. His current rational is that he’s against the expansion of Medicare. He had the opportunity to negotiate with Senators on this issue but refused to show up for those meetings. Of course, he previously supported the policy when he ran for VP. He doesn’t want to negotiate; he wants to obstruct. He’d previously opposed the public option for completely counterfactual reasons; in fact, he seemed about as knowledgeable on the subject as trolling conservative commenters on John Scalzi’s blog. Why did Connecticutters vote this asshole back in?

RPG-7 Question

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Here’s something I haven’t been able to find out for myself: If person with an RPG-7 fired an anti-personnel grenade into an apartment, would it destroy the walls, floor and ceiling of the apartment? Would it blow out the windows of those other apartments?

I’m assuming it wouldn’t collapse the building.

James Nicoll’s Nightmarish Future

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Global health and wealth, with UN data mining and an amazingly skillful presentation of data.

For you Facebook users, this is a TED video from 2006. You can watch it here.

Awesome concentrate

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via mightygodking

Randomness for 12/3

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1) “Climategate:” Not as damning as certain people would like.

2) My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement Former front man for the band Too Much Joy jousts with a major label over royalty statements. Much more interesting than it sounds.

3) NFL creates more stringent rules to prevent players from going back into games with concussions. Which is great and all, but it doesn’t tempt me to watch again.

4) I wish I understood why the NY Times included this as the second sentence in this article: “She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.” Maybe it’s a valuable piece of information in an article about a new bill in the French parliament that would require all retouched photo to be labeled as such. Maybe they wanted to deflect accusations that the politician was just a jealous fatso who should get to the gym. Maybe the writer couldn’t write a story about fashion and women’s bodies without taking careful note of who has an approved body type and who doesn’t. It just seems unprofessional to me.

5) I do not want to know.

6) Patrick Nielsen Hayden on HP Lovecraft, the founding of SF fandom, and friendships with people you’ve never met in person.

Randomness for 12/2

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1) Perils of translation: Emailed out-of-office autoreply text from translator used on road sign.

2) Seductive monsters, Batman-style. Has to be seen to be believed. The “best” part is that this is part of a villain’s origin story.

3) “The slush pile seems, in some sense, to serve as a sort of representative sampling of the collective unconscious of the American public—a surreal landscape of vengeance, conspiracy, otherworldly beings, and really big guns. Sexual relations between ladies and gentlemen are fraught with peril (especially given that one or more participants in any romantic endeavor may very likely be aliens, demons, were-vampires, undead, or in a coma); queerness is almost nonexistent, as is any sort of radical politics (unless by “radical” one means “hoping to overthrow the government and install in its place a parliament selected by extraterrestrials from a more spiritually advanced dimension”); and people of color exist only as grotesque caricatures.”

4) The NY Times 100 Notable Books of the Year. No, I’m not going to read it, either. I loaded the page, “control f” searched for my name, and of course found nothing. Now I’m done with the list.

5) Cormac McCarthy donates his typewriter to charitable auction. The most amusing part is that the dealer handling the auction thinks it’s astonishing that McCarthy wrote all that fiction on such a primitive machine. Someone should explain to him that it’s the machine in McCarthy’s head that did the real work.

6) Celestial Soul Portraits. The perfect gift for your most hated enemy. via tnh’s Particles.

7) Maureen Dowd in a telling misstatement: “Barack Obama is the ultimate party crasher. He crashed Hillary’s high-hat party in 2008 and he crashed the snooty age-old Washington party of privileged white guys with a monopoly on power.” A quick note for Ms. Dowd: Barack Obama didn’t crash a thing. He was invited by the only people empowered to give out invitations.

SETI@home and recipe contest followup

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As a followup to the previous post about a guy fired for loading SETI@home, apparently, he’d done other things as well, such as “bring home” 18 computers, download pron at work, and claim to have done work he hadn’t done.

So, it’s not the wacky story the idiotic cnet writer made it out to be.

Also, we ate the T-Day leftover empanadas from the recipe contest for dinner on Monday. Verdict: we liked it! The next time I make them, I’ll cut the salt in half for the pastry–it was a little thirst-inducing. Least favorite for everyone was the bacon and cheddar mix. The favorite was different for each, with the boy liking the gravy best, and my wife and I favoring the cranberry.

Yeah, I’ll be making them again.

You know how your read an article that makes you want to slug the writer in the gut?

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Yeah, you know. But aside from the ignorant and infuriating he-wanted-to-talk-to-Klingons! tone of the article, the author reports a claim (without checking it, obviously, since that would have required work) that startled me.

Let me back up for those who didn’t want to click the link. The article reports that the Higley Unified School District asked an employee to resign after he installed SETI@home on all the district computers. More backing up: SETI@home is a program that uses idle time on your computer to scan radio signals for signs of alien communication.

This is what caught my eye: “And his alleged downloading of alien-hunting software might well have used additional energy resources and caused other related damage or accelerated depreciation to the hardware. The school district estimates these losses at between $1.2 million and $1.6 million.”

Over a million dollars, maybe up to a mil and a half, just for SETI@home? Is that fair or complete bullshit?

Randomness for 11/28

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1) Can this be true? It sounds like an urban legend. Peruvian gang spends 30 years murdering people and extracting their fat for use in European cosmetics. Where was *your* makeup made? via lilaschow

2) Now, a palate cleanser: Freelancer funny. Via autopope.

3) Evil kisses? I think I’ve found my first “Nick Biter” title.

4) Ten percent off King Tractor Press comics until Christmas!

5) This link is a serious one: Patrick Stewart describes his personal history growing up with domestic violence. Heart-wrenching stuff. via James Nicoll

This is beautiful

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So expressive!