928 wpm according to this test.

Went to laserquest for tisme's birthday with Ed, Padmini, Brian and two of her drumming pals, won by a huge amount (750 points, next best of our group was 350), followed by mexican food with margaritas, staggered home at 11pm, slept in until 11am with the world's most odd dreams*, woke up slowly with an episode of Avatar: The Legend of Korra, and am now off for tasting for our wedding menu.

And on top of that, I'm on call for a production deployment going on from 6am today and haven't received a phone call! Could life get any more awesome?

*Who has dreams where they're on drugs and their visuals and sound don't match up?

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Original post on Dreamwidth - there are comments there.

Oops . . . Gay reminded me that I forgot to note that astronaut Fincke was a student of mine at MIT, back in 1987.  Perhaps the only one who's actually been in space -- though I also had Peter Diamandis, a few years earlier, also in 21W.759, Writing Science Fiction.  He's the founder and Chairman of the X-Prize Foundation.

Joe

These are links I have discovered whilst on my travels around the Internet in the last few days.

• Thirteen people were hurt in an accident on Leicester's London Road on Wednesday evening.
• The ICC have been considering a timeless Test for the final of the World Test Championship.
• An image showing the timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (i.e. the family of Avengers films).
• A teacher leaves teaching for academia after being rather oddly labelled the worst eighth grade maths teacher in NYC.
• Unreal Engine 4 is ready. How awesome are these visuals?!
• A really interesting article about how tastes change, with bonus Shatner.
• Could this virus be the key to powering gadgets in the future?
• An ex-Law & Order lawyer wants to become another lawyer: She-Hulk.
• Facebook confirmed to start trading at $38 a share.
• Aggregated Amazon reviews give an indication of quality as reliable as professional critics.
• Take a person, and then blast them with air whilst taking a photograph of their distorted face. Priceless.
• Clark Gregg talks about Agent Coulson, his death, and whether or not he might reappear.
• Over time most city subway systems converge on an ideal form, similar to London's.
• Some excellent behind-the-scenes photographs from EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI.
• Was Jeff Atwood right to say average people shouldn't learn to code? The @Verge's Joshua Kopstein doesn't think so.
• Canada's warrantless e-snooping bill is dead due to a combination of social media and Govt stupidity.
• An in-depth look at the challenges Apple would face, if it went to a 4" screen on the next iPhone.
• An Institute of Directors report concludes that Britain should aim to be the site of the world's next spaceport.
• Seth MacFarlane and Neil DeGrasse Tyson are both involved with a 'reboot' of Carl Sagan's COSMOS.
• A list of every SF or fantasy television show that will be coming in September.
• Twitter tracks you as you browse the web, just like Facebook does.
• Woz has been hired to help out with a forthcoming Sorkin-scripted Steve Jobs biopic.
• AllThingsD with a really interesting article about indie videogames and what they bring to the wider industry.
• Ridley Scott has announced a sequel to BLADE RUNNER involving the original writer and a woman in the lead role.
• Melancholy story about a breakup gone wrong. Worth reading, but I don't want to spoil it.
• A man who owns the only known prototype Macintosh 128k talks to Cult of Mac.
• Developers celebrate their ability to set their own prices for games, hold a huge sale from 24th May.
• An excellent article that details the growth of the App Store and what needs fixing.
• Aaron Sorkin gave the Commencement address at Syracuse University. This is that speech. Brilliant.
• Aen Tan explains why the 44px rhythm in iOS is broken and how he would fix it.
• Where is the closest star to Earth that could go supernova? @badastronomer takes a look.
• A new podcast featuring @scalzi talking to @jonathancoulton about music and SF. There's no RSS feed, sadly.
• Cupcakewurst. Yes, really.
• Aero, which is one of my favourite Windows 7 UI features, has gone away in Windows 8. A step backwards.
• There is a great disturbance in the Force as Dan Harmon confirms that he's no longer attached to COMMUNITY.

Posted via Feed This To That.

Having fun hanging around with old friends at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Washington.  Lots of sitting around in the bar and talking about people who aren't here.  Strictly social so far, but today I'll be getting together with editor and agent, separately.  So we'll move from milling and swilling to wheeling and dealing.

Yesterday we played tourist with a trip to The Library of Congress (or Congreff, as they ufed to spell it).  The tour was both interesting and a little sad, nostalgic.  As I think I've mentioned here, I used to live in Bethesda, before I left for college, and have wonderful memories of the LoC.  I was a chemistry nut back then, and I would sit for hours immersed in a 12-volume encyclopedia of chemical reactions, copying down equations that I could translate into experiments in my home laboratory.  Sometimes with loud or noxious results.

No kid can do what I used to do; take the trolley downtown and use the Library as a library.  Want a book, no problem; just look up the catalog number and write it on a slip of paper, and the minions would send your request to the basement via pneumatic tube, and the book would be delivered to your desk in a few minutes by courier.

The mechanism still exists, but only for members of Congress and their staffs, and other high government officials.  There are probably twice as many books now, in three buildings, and delivery takes thirty or forty minutes, with computers as well as pneumatic tubes.

And to be realistic, any kid with Google can access much more data much faster than I could, sitting at an oaken desk that might be two hundred years old.  Why do I feel sorry for him?

The most interesting exhibit, by far, was a reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson's library, which formed the nucleus of the new LoC after the British burned Washington in 1814.  He had his own system of classification (based on one devised by Francis Bacon) to arrange 6,487 volumes, which he sold to the government for $23,950.  There was another fire in 1851, which destroyed about two thirds of the volumes.  The collection now has about two thousand of the original volumes and three thousand replacements, which carefully match the lost editions.

John F. Kennedy famously told a party of Nobel Prize winners and other intellectuals, invited for lunch at the White House, "There has never been such a collection of talent and intellect gathered in this room since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone."

Speaking of famous people, I've enjoyed talking with astronaut Mike Fincke, who will be the keynote speaker at the banquet.  He's spent 48 hours in space-walk mode, more than any other human being.  A very smart guy, who incidentally has read a lot of science fiction.

Signed books for a couple of hours yesterday.  One fan gave me a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey to read – I'd mentioned Thornton Wilder in my sffnet column – but then ran off without explaining why.   It's been forty years since I read it, so I'll enjoy rereading it on the way home.

There was a panel on writing humor which, as expected, didn't give me any killer tips.  I guess the subject has a butterfly-like quality:  if you can pin it down, it's dead.

I remember reading an article in the Washington Post when I was in high school here, about literary cocktail parties – specifically about meeting Art Buchwald.  The writer described Buchwald's scowling cigar-chomping public persona, and said it was generally true that humor writers are in person very grim, where serious writers tend to reach for the lampshade at parties.  I'm in between, I think, though some people would roll their eyes at that assessment.  "What, he thinks he's serious?" or "What, he thinks he's frivolous?"  I am all things to all fen.

Joe

If we pretend to be vicariously rich in order to avoid the fact that so many of us are becoming unnecessarily poor, if the shift of the national wealth has within it elements that we're willing to root for as though they were the U.S. Olympic Plutocrats Team, we will get ourselves suckered again and again.

Charles P. Pierce refrains from cheering for the Facebook billionaires

Tags: money

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - they're all Sunday. And I shall be looking at manuscripts and manuscripts and manuscripts*. My deadlines have switched around a bit unexpectedly. The old ones don't reassert themselves until Monday.



*of the Gillian variety, not of the Medieval variety.

• How the government is providing advice to new parents on how to raise their children.
  (tags: children parents uk )
• What if Ayn Rand wrote computer languages?
  (tags: AynRand software language satire )

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Original post on Dreamwidth - there are comments there.

Tags: aynrand, children, language, links, parents, satire, software, uk

• Fri, 23:59: I appear to have bought the red keenes & the green keenes I've been wanting & a hoodie & shoes in exactly my green http://t.co/R3NrmAmv
• Sat, 04:59: Bison chocolate stout lit by two other smartphones as torches because flash was burning out on the reflections http://t.co/0pv0vB79

Tags: twitter

• Fri, 16:31: RT @elonmusk: Rocket and spacecraft went vertical on launch pad last night. Liftoff in ~18 hours. http://t.co/YnOwaCKg
• Sat, 01:58: RT @cstross: Two flavours that go worse together, even in programming: the Objectivist-C language ... http://t.co/AaWB3Sxk
• Sat, 02:42: RT @elonmusk: Next time Dragon sees the sun, it should be doing 17,000 mph over the Atlantic. ~8 hrs to liftoff. http://t.co/fnKtCQPy
• Sat, 04:55: If you chew on a blackberry-flavoured one does it explode? http://t.co/UfqjlU8n

Tags: twitter

Jon Carroll reports on the problem of more good causes than colors.

Tags: blog

I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.

--Willard Romney

Thanx to Shakesville

Tags: quotefile

• $300 Worth of Books for Only $50: The 2012 Hugo Voter Packet Has Been Released
  #fb Hooray!
  (tags: sf )

http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/2012/05/a_rude_awakening.html

Some history. Years ago, we bought a new digital radio, primarily so that we could listen to 6Music in the mornings. We checked out everything on the dial, and concluded that 6Music did have the best breakfast show, but that there was an empty channel broadcasting birdsong, and that that would do very nicely to wake us up at the weekend. So, armed with the manual, I set the alarms on the radio, and we were woken up by birdsong at the weekend.

A couple of years after that, the birdsong stopped; the license had been let for that chunk of bandwidth to a new station with a new business model, Amazing Radio. They played unsigned music. At first, most of the music was terrible and the station was minimal, and I very much missed waking up to the sound of birdsong. But the music is now largely good or at least interesting, and I had got used to our two hours a week of slightly sleepy listening. More importantly, it was never bad enough that I was moved to try to remember how to reprogram the radio, and it never ran advertising.

They're now in contractual dispute with digitalOne, who rent space on the DAB airwaves and provide favourable contracts to the radio stations they own and operate (how is this even legal?), and have gone silent. No birdsong either, just a loud, irritating, repetitive announcement. A Facebook campaign has been launched, of course.

It would, I think, be nice to see it back. But what's really upsetting me is that I'll have to urgently master programming the radio. I can never tell whether this inability to remember how things work is evidence of middle-aged mental inelasticity, or poor user interface design. Or both.

http://www.kittywompus.com/macadamia/2012/05/love_may_or_may_not_tear_us_ap_1.html

Tomorrow you can go and buy an actual single release of "Love Will Tear Us Apart", by June Tabor and the Oysterband, and there's a video!

Filmed at the Union Chapel, probably the best venue in the world.

I'm just quickly finishing up the Week 9 deadline for MITx 6.002, so no time for an extended entry. But I feel like I'm finding it a lot easier than I did in the early weeks.

Dinner notes: We had Jamie Oliver's spring poached chicken on Friday night, with the vegetables substituted for 'whatever happened to be around at the time'. It is as delicious as advertised though I am not sure whether I'll be able to get a second stock out of the bones or whether I should just throw them away. [Memo from the future: I made a quick cloudy stock from the bones and put the veg from it and some of the stock into the lasagne, and the rest of it into the chicken and celeriac curry. Well worth doing.] I was out all day yesterday and the family had takeaway. Today Steven made us chilli, enlivened by the pepper grinder imploding and tipping several hundred peppercorns into the chilli. We fished them all out again but that pepper mill has lasted less than a year and I will be invoking the gods of 'Merchantable Quality' on the morrow. The other meal today was the duck liver pate, on toast.

( Read more... )

Tags: honey, j.j., joanie, mike, oldies

Tags: jeff, zipper

As a result of aggregating my audio files, I've ended up with some odd bits of found sound in my itunes library. A few have wormed their way into my May mix, so I ended up this week on my commute listening to the sound of waves on a beach in Mull plus a snippet of conversation with my Mum several years ago. While watching swallows and terns on the Thames. It was disorientating, but lovely nevertheless.

One of the slightly annoying thing about my new camera is how buried the audio record is. On the last one I just had to bash a button twice. This one needs to be in a particular mode, requires you to open a menu, then scroll to the bottom... I guess not so many people wanted to take sound photos after all.

Unrelated: Bompass and Parr to float Brunel's SS Great Britain on neon lime green jelly. Jelly!

http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2012/05/reflection-of-antelope-island-in-great-salt-lake.html

http://www.pixiq.com/article/connecticut-cop-arrested-after-pulling-gun-on-cop

 

Fellow officers thought it would be funny to photograph David Davis, a Connecticut railroad police officer, sleeping at his desk while on shift.

They probably didn’t expect Davis to wake up, pull out his gun and keep it pointed at the officer who had just taken his picture.

“No one’s taking pictures today,” Davis told John Freeman.

According to the Connecticut Post:

Freeman yelled at Davis to put the gun away, but Davis continued to track his movements with the gun pointed at Freeman's head and his finger on the trigger, police said. After Freeman yelled at Davis a second time, Davis put the gun back in its holster, police said. Freeman then left the office.

Police said Freeman reported the incident to MTA Internal Affairs. Following an investigation, Davis was suspended for two weeks. However, Freeman subsequently pursued the matter and the case was turned over to Bridgeport police.

The incident took place in February. He was arrested Friday.

Davis, 51, a Metro-North Railroad police officer, is now facing first-degree reckless endangerment charges.

Officer Freeman. If you are reading this, please send the photo to the email below, so we can all get a laugh.

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Please send stories, tips and videos to carlosmiller@magiccitymedia.com.

CARLOS MILLER'S LEGAL DEFENSE FUND

I am immersed in a legal case where I not only want to clear my criminal charges stemming from my arrest in January, but I want to sue the Miami-Dade Police Department for deleting my footage, which I was able to recover.

My goal is to set some type of precedent to ensure this does not happen as often as it does today where cops simply get away with it.

So if you would like to contribute, please click on the "donate" button below and contribute whatever you can afford.

You can also contribute to my Legal Defense Fund by purchasing a photographer rights lens cloth and/or laminated card to wear around your neck like a press badge through Zap Rag.Please write "carlos3" in the comments section of the Paypal transaction to ensure I receive a portion of the sale.

 Hair Transplant 

Also, in an unrelated PINAC matter, I recently went through a hair transplant operation and I'm documenting my recovery on this blog if you are interested.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap120518.html

A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy really is

http://www.fictionstream.net/2012/05/siriworn-kaewkan-murder-case-of-tok.html

There are very few novels that explore the separatist terrorism affecting the three small Thai provinces that border Malaysia, and this one, shortlisted for the 2006 SEA Write Award, quickly became required reading that year with an English translation following four years later. So who killed the much-loved imam in the small village of Tanyong Baru, right outside his own mosque? Terrorists or State officials? Soldiers or police? Is there a suspicious connection with a neighbouring Buddhist village? And why are the villagers closing their doors to an actual investigation? The reader’s guess is as good as anyone elses, which indicates the clever structure of this tale of deflections and half-truths that inevitably views the subject from an outsider’s perpective yet at the same time lets the story’s participants speak (seemingly, often less than thruthfully) for themselves. Kaewkan simply provides the necessary pieces to the jigsaw then lets the readers assemble it in a way that indicates there’s an inevitable collective madness going on here. There are a number of possible courses of events discernable if this short novel is read closely, which is easily done in one sitting – just don’t expect a straightforward whodunnit.

After having discussed things with Lisa, we decided I should spend the weekend down here taking it relatively easy. Lisa is coming down for BayCon next weekend anyway. With the hours I've been working, I need to get extra rest sometime.

Tags: lisa, sleep
Location: San Jose, California
call me: sleepy
Soundtrack: Giants Baseball

http://www.pixiq.com/article/april-12-photo-competition-winner

First things first: we apologise for the delay in announcing April's winner. Haje and I both think that it's important to discuss the entries and the winner, and between me visiting the back of beyond and Haje being insanely busy, we just haven't had the chance to do so. Rather than leave you guys languishing, Gareth very kindly stepped in as Haje's stunt-double, and we thrashed out a winner between us.

Without further ado, then, we'd like to name John Cavan as April's winner, for his Smooth Curves Ahead. Gareth loved the 'insanely literal interpretation of the theme'. And I liked it for being so dark and brooding when glass is usually so sparkly and reflective and bright.

John has won himself a 12 inch Fracture from the lovely Fracture and a place in the Small Aperture hall of photo fame.

May's competition theme is 'flora'; it closes on Friday 26 May, so get cracking! And don't forget that you can keep up to date with all our competition news and plenty of other crazy shenanigans from the photography world by following @SmallAperture on Flickr!

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More recent news...

1. They're smaller, they're lighter; they're Sony (17 May 2012)
2. Gumroad: selling images easily (17 May 2012)
3. MiMedia, letting you access your media, wherever you are (16 May 2012)
4. The weekly round-up (15 May 2012)
5. The weekly round-up (6 May 2012)

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© Daniela Bowker. This article has been licensed for use on Pixiq only. Please do not reproduce wholly or in part without a licence.

Last night was a bit of a washout. I got some things done and then health caught up with me. As it does.

This morning, I sorted my scarves and hats and belts. I went through a belt phase in the 1970s and early 80s and a scarf phase from the 70s until the early 90s and the thief spread things all over and I had put them back higgledy-pigglety. Yesterday I spent some of my insurance money on a big plastic tub and I did a big sort. Some of my scarves will go to Folkdance Canberra, and the remaining scarves and belts fit into the plastic tub and are now safely under my bed. The purses and most of my hats now fit on the shelf and I have a drawer for miscellaneous things (a 1960s mantilla, swimming costumes, winter hats). This is as neat as I get, I'm afraid.

Now that's solved, I want to get back to deadline stuff. But I want coffee, first. Before that, though, I have a load of laundry to put on the airer. Today is the day for much housework. If the smoke clears enough, I might be able to put the rubbish out this afternoon. Then my place will be almost inhabitable for a week! Also, I'll have run out of distractions and will have no choice but to work.