This was originally written as my response to this page. I felt I was eloquent enough to repeat my rant here. Since this is one the deepest parts of myself and my personality, I could rant on and on about why science is so important to me. I could name endless anecdotes where I had [...]
So over the last few months, I’ve been using VoIP to join in tabletop RPG sessions with friends around the world. With players in Bahrain, Thailand, NYC and San Diego, we’ve been running play sessions nearly every alternate Thursday for few months now. Now, this is probably old news to some of you meatspace gamers [...]
Looking back on my ancient past, there were a lot of alternatives I could have taken. For example at several points in my childhood I was quite serious about going into puppetry, going into animated film, going into cartooning, and even designing and building models and props for science fiction films. Those were all paths [...]
So back in May, after serving her well for 10 years, the power supply on my mother’s venerable Dell Optiplex (Which was a very well made machine in my opinion.) finally died. So I told her, we could go hunting around for a compatible power supply to fix the machine or, far more simply, just [...]
So I’m revising this entry on the bus home from work. Thank you 3G! And the next hour or so, I roll some dice with Toby, John and the New York Crew on Skype. People in Thailand, the Persian Gulf, NYC and Seattle and it feels like we’re all in the same room, with video [...]
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, I present to you the return of the mighty, mighty Farlops Industries. The ponderous and sluggish engines of thought have been stilled for more than two years now but, no more! Let’s see what horrors and wonders the factory produces in this epoch, eh? So I’m wondering what [...]
In science fiction movies, games and television, I’ve seen lots of attempts to depict spatial wormholes and “portals to other universes.” In nearly every case they get the geometry wrong. It doesn’t look like this nor does it look like this. Even a recent image from Scientific American got it wrong. The ex-mathematics and physics [...]
So I read today that scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have received death threats. The LHC death threats are example of ignorance out of control. The risk from the LHC is minimal. How do we know that for certain? Because we know that cosmic rays routinely slam through our planet at energies much higher [...]
When I was in college back in the middle Eighties, I had a Casio calculator watch. This was the expensive apotheosis of nerdery back then. In the Eighties Japan was kicking everyone’s ass in consumer electronics. At the time microchips had become so cheap that towards the end of the decade, they were giving away [...]
So I haven’t wrote anything here for all of January and most of December. Actually I’ve been writing up tentative entries on the bus to and from work but nothing has jelled up into a good article to post here. It’s the digital equivalent of the horror of the blank page that all authors must [...]