Neal Stephenson
Stephenson rocks once more. There’s such a great fantastical quality to his books, everything is stretched so close to absurdity but in such a way that you really just want to believe it. It’s great. This book makes me want a bolt, chord and sphere—how cool would it be if those were my three possessions?
Started it monday, finished it up on the soccer bus ride last night. That gives me a good burn rate of about 200 pages a day.
Stephenson’s bent here is almost spiritual. Where in his earlier books it was more techno–social (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Diamond age; at least as I remember them, rereads are now under consideration), and where the System of the World was historical and philosophic, here Stephenson takes his compelling and marvellous storytelling and wraps it around systems of existence and belief. There’s a very Emersonian transcendentalism (Emerson is even mentioned as an aside somewhere late in the book.)
Which is great, I love it when a book comes along that meshes with my insufficiently explored innate feelings towards some subject, here that of ‘god/religion/whatever.’
Nothing is more important that that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hum you in and come at you in so many ways. Fraa Orolo, 109
Why is religion such a universal in societies throughout history?
That’s right, people have a need to feel that they are part of some sustainable project. Something that will go on without them. It creates a feeling of stability. I believe that the need for that kind of stability is as basic and as desperate as some of the other, more obvious needs. But there’s more than one way to get it. We may not think much of the sline subculture, but you have to admit it’s stable! Then the burgers have a completely different kind of stability. Orolo in dialog with Erasmus, 205
I also love the formalized system of dialog, where it’s an objective of the theors to regularly argue with each other. If only people would actually do that! I’m generally a fan of arguing, and tend to do it just as often as I don’t. If only everyone else did as well…
I no longer respected that oath. Or at least, I no longer trusted those who were charged with enforcing the Discipline to which I had sworn. But I couldn’t very well say as much to these friends of mine who did still respect it. 231
Why do I hate politics? Why does going to church make me feel catatonic? It’s not that I hate democracy or that I think that believing in god in some unforgivably–backward and primitive notion; it’s more that both systems have steadily devolved in their lifetimes, leaving them (and their devotees) at the point where they garner at least as much of my disdain as they do my respect.
…the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise. And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. 573
I like the notion of introspectionist. 697
Stephenson posits the idea that google should ensconce itself as useful to the web by generating endless amounts of crap in different places on the internet, thereby requiring people to use it to actually find anything worthwhile:
Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into The Reticulum. But it had to be good crap. Samman, 795
(Maybe google already came up with this, and that’s why they bought out blogger.)
Mystic vs. Poetic (Laterran):
The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.
“Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there’s an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxational nature of symbols and meaning.”
“Okay, but what’s the pessimistic side telling you?”
“That the poet’s way is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.” Erasmus and Quin, 883-4
And in the second-to-last paragraph of the book, Stephenson nails exactly and precisely they way I’ve tried to see the world for a few years now:
Orolo said that the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle—not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters use the term, for he considered it altogether natural. He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it. Erasmus, 889-90
Neal Stephenson
Stephenson wraps up his Baroque Cycle in high style. Read it.
And man do I wish Stephenson would’ve told what happened to precipitate Jack’s crowd-surfing episode.
So tonight wasn’t just a beautiful, 65º night and a full moon. It was also a harvest moon, and probably the last big moon before things start getting to be freezing around here. Cool I thought, I bet that I could get a good bike ride in.
I wasn’t sure whether there would be enough light, but there was plenty. I went around the pomme de terre loop, which I think comes in at about 7 miles, and was probably out for an hour.
Best thing I’ve done in a while. I don’t know if it was the novelty of biking through the country in the dark or the perfect weather or the absolute silence (but for my bike, which just purrs, and the wind) or what, but I got that sense of euphoria that rises through your whole torso and into your throat, where you just can’t keep from smiling.
At one point I came around a bend and startled a pair of deer in a field off to my right, they took off along the path (which was following a road) and I got to chase them for a few hundred yards.
I took a few photos, and might just have to head back out tomorrow.
Holy shit I want one of these. The controller looks amazing. I’ve never had a console, played PC games a bit, but the furthest I’ve ever gotten with a handheld controller is the one on my C64, with one stick and one button. Beyond that I just can’t do it, and don’t enjoy button mashing. I’m really tempted to blow all my money on this and a tv screen to play it on. (Here’s a good summary of new Wii info)
In Ross’s giant landscapes, you can mak out the woodgrains on barn shingles thousand of feet away, and see mountain trails seven miles off. The pictures seem to be made not of pixels but of vision itself.
The new R2, a video camera made by the same guy, captures nine gigabytes of data per minute. It takes 360º of video.
I’ve mentioned it before, but as far as TV shows go, Monk is in the top 2. Just watch this.
So I’m apparently popular with the arctic explorers these days! I’m just awestruck. The other day Tony Haile stopped by and left me a comment, coincidentally on a book that I’d seen over at his site a month or two ago and decided looked good enough for a read.
Now I see that Ben Saunders (Tony’s partner in SOUTH, they’re leaving for a few months expedition to the south pole this fall(!!), an all around cool looking guy, who’s blog I’d also been following) links to me in his Elsewhere section, and as they apparently say over there in england, I’m chuffed.
I’m thinking that I’ll undertake adding in some sort of sidebar to return the favor, but for now here’s the good old linkage. And a good excuse for some bragging, I all to often take the I’m just some dumbshit kid approach to life.
Grizzly bear webcam. Someone is pointing the camera at all the action on a salmon stream, bears are frolicking. If it weren’t for the grainy 200×200 video stream it might feel like you were actually there. (Impressive tech setup, there’s a remote control wireless video camera hidden in a faux boulder, wireless signal is relayed 100 miles than sent over land to seattle.)
All I hope is that they’re breeding the dog and haven’t spayed her, because holy shit, how cool would a race of dogs evolved to walk upon their hind legs be.
There are all kinds of videos of this getting performed floating around the internet, but this one truly deserves the link. Fucking a. (If this is what MTV is becoming, I’m definitely about to start watching it.)
Amazing images of earth from NASA.
Google has launched it’s Arabic <-> English translation machine, which fascinates me. A computer takes two examples of the same text and analyzes them, to the point that it knows how to translate the languages. Al Jazeera’s arabic homepage translated. An excerpt:
Thousands of people demonstrated in New York to demand the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. They declared their willingness to continue this campaign until the legislative elections in the US November next.
Some of it is a bit incomprehensible, but overall it’s quite impressive.
Continental drift images – wow.
In other words, locked into the rocks of Europe is the largest musical instrument ever made: awaiting a million more years of wind and rain and even war to carve that reef into a flute, a buried saxophone, made of fossilized glass, pocketed with caves and indentations, reflecting the black light of uncountable eclipses until the earth gives out.
Apple’s newest mice project a mouse when lifted up a bit. That my friends, is why apple is the coolest.
Completely mind blowing. Imagine the sum of all games you’ve ever played – and here you go. There are some videos around, here’s one, demonstrating gameplay. I haven’t played videogames in any capacity since the Sim City 2000, Marathon, Madden ‘00 days, but all I can say is holy shit.
Nothing but amazing. Three minutes you won’t miss.
I caught wind of the film from a review on kuro5hin. Quite the review of the film, I read the first few paragraphs about a guy living 13 summers in Katmai National Park, in the middle of nowhere, for the most part all alone. (I applied for a job at Katmai maybe a month ago, and would really love to get it – but I’m grossly underqualified, and doubt it will happen.)
He took rolls and rolls of photo and video footage of bears roaming, romping, playing, fighting, eating. Right in the park, in an environment where over the course of a summer a few planes would fly over, a few boats might come for the afternoon. The documentary deals more with his personal side then it does his bear footage, but I can only imagine what kind of bear footage he managed to get.
It’s really amazing. Awesome. Reckless, maybe stupid, the guy might just have been a total wacko. But the film got the best out of me, I’d feel like laughing and crying at the same time, there would just be that energy surging through my chest.
I can’t say I feel bad for the guy, he was living among fucking grizzly bears. But what he managed to do, the film he took, the fact that this guy could walk up to and pet wild grizzly bears right on the nose. He knew them by name. That’s impressive.
What the world looks like from space, right now.
I’ll sure miss Arrested Development. Best TV show ever.
I remember that I caught onto the first episode of the first season mostly by chance, but I’ve been more then hooked ever since.
I watched episodes 10, 11, and 12, and it sounds like there’s an episode 13 out there – but the copy I downloaded was identical to 12.
And please dear god, I hope Ron Howard was hinting at an AD movie at the end of episode 12. Maeby was discussing the TV series that her family had just signed the rights away to, with Ron Howard, and Howard said it wouldn’t make much of a TV show, but that he wanted to see it as a movie.
Holy shit, I’d rather be off skiing right now. More videos on the Warren Miller site.
There’s nothing I want more from life then to be skiing in powder so deep that I’d need a snorkel. Silverton Mountain? Heaven on earth.
Pixar has become the envy of Hollywood because it never went Hollywood.
We’ve made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We’re trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It’s no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it’s a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people. Nelson
Pretty impressive stuff. I’m hoping something apprentice-ish like this comes to eventually take the place of university. Like filmmaking? Apprentice with pixar, learn the ropes, stay with them if you’re good enough. School shouldn’t end once you have a degree in hand.
Pixar University is at the center of Mr. Nelson’s agenda. The operation has more than 110 courses: a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting, drawing, sculpting and creative writing. “We offer the equivalent of an undergraduate education in fine arts and the art of filmmaking,” he said. Every employee
[Steve Jobs] continued, “You know, I’ve been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day.”
“Well, let’s say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you’ve saved a dozen lives. That’s really worth it, don’t you think?”
The best ever.
Ultrahot graphical breakdown of how the government spends money collected in the for of taxes. In short? 399 Billion dollars on the military, 383 Billion on everything else.
12:38 < xal> sam-: 2 things
12:38 < xal> a) you are nuts. those selectors are pure crack
12:38 < xal> b) could you add them to actionpack so that update_javascripts grabs them?
13:02 < madrobby> c) add more crack
How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.
Hitler
Edward Burtynsky takes some impressive photos. Photos showcasing the unimaginable scale of human undertakings, in all their obscene glory. They’re just as beautiful as they are frightening.
I don’t think my photographs are neutral but they do allow a multiplicity of meanings. Burtynsky
I drove through Butte (MT) about two weeks ago now, there was a huge hole in a mountain that just blew my mind. The Berkeley Pit is a huge mining crater filled with groundwater that is so polluted with traces of metal that in 1995 a flock of geese landed there, and all 342 of them died. But there’s a monster dog who manages to survive on the site.
Incredible.
Those (548) who paid more then $100,000 to Bush’s reelection fund dictate his presidency. Doesn’t quite sound representative to me.
Kittinger became the first man to reach the speed of sound without an aircraft.
Sandals that stick to the bottom of your feet and simulate walking barefoot. I want some.
Amazing photos shot in the north of minnesota, one each day for 90 days.
One of the best sites on the web. Manifesto’s are publishes intermittently, in batches, and consistently rock.
Starting this march, on XM Satellite.
More great nature shots.
I want one, but those goddamn prices…
Very impressive photos. Coral cache, the actual link takes forever to load.
I hope you didn’t get tired of this earlier this year, becuase it’s just that good. I’m really not that much of an OutKast fan, nor have I ever loved Charlie Brown.
But who can’t smile while watching this movie?
I’m so impressed there isn’t anything I can say.
Carnivorous Russian Squirrels:
A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.
Bas ass sweet prototype bicycles, for release 2006.
It’s one of the first bikes in the world to have no rear hub. That’s right, no rear hub. The rear wheel has a special magnetically polarized rim that is suspended inside the frame, where it floats inside a magnetic suspension field. [...] The Viper looks crazy, but it works!
Neat ruby block syntaxes.
[OS X is] The Who playing live at Leeds, where Windows is your kid’s middle-school class playing “Jingle Bells” on the recorder. Andy Ihnatko
Excellent talk about how the new Library of Alexandria is coming to be through the Internet Archive.
15 yo boy has been meditating until a pipal tree, the same kind that Buddha meditated under for 49 days, for six months.
Local doctors failed to reach a final conclusion, although they were allowed no closer than five yards from the boy mystic, declaring that they could confirm no more than that he was alive.
has not eaten or drunk
Drank, thank you very much.
Bienvenue sur FLIPBOOK.info, un site enti
the Glass Bridge will be suspended 4,000 feet above the Colorado River on the very edge of the Grand Canyon.
More than one million pounds of steel will go into the construction of the Grand Canyon Skywalk.
Paper structures/sculptures.
Neat exercise idea – just be careful not to hit anything.
Through Paris in an F1 racecar, insane speeds.
Mac is religion, I’m not surprised.
This ought to take care of my friday night.
I’m saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb… Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman
Laser Guns finally get REAL.
How long do you think concrete lasts? It has many problems and it’s very difficult to replace or fix. If a paper tube is damaged it can be replaced by a new one. The lifespan of a building has nothing to do with the materials. It depends on what people do with it. If a building is loved, then it becomes permanent. When it is not loved, even a concrete building can be temporary.
The next year, the Kobe earthquake struck in his native Japan, and Ban came to the aid of the Vietnamese refugee community. “All the temporary houses were outside the city, but if they moved out of the city they would lose their jobs. So they had to live under plastic sheets in the park, and it became very unhealthy. Neighbours tried to kick them out. I thought maybe if I redesigned everything very nicely they could continue living there.” Ban came up with a simple “log cabin” made out of thick paper tubes, with plastic sheeting for the roofs, prefabricated windows and beer crates filled with sand for the foundations. Each cabin can be assembled in a few hours. He also built them a new “temporary” church out of paper columns (and money from his own pocket), which was only dismantled a few months ago – to be reassembled in Taiwan.
Rails hits c|net, buzz buzz wow.
Impressive photos.
2,000 too many.
I just watched Wellstone!, and you’d better go see it yourself. Wellstone died three years ago today.
These days, with fucking baboons dominating american politics, I’d sure love to see a guy like Paul show his face.
Office builds all it’s furnishings out of cardboard. And they look pretty sweet.
Impressive looking subterranean ultra green home. When I build my house it’s going to be south facing and subterranean with a green roof – this is almost my dream home. More at CNN, and click via to read the great summary at treehugger”
Go apple go. I’ve pledged allegiance to you ever since I’ve had an allegiance to pledge. You could rule the world way better then google.
The Republican party’s gift to the American people, and the Bush administration’s legacy, will be the normalization of treason. They are trying to convince Americans that betraying our country during wartime for personal gain is no more serious than running a stop sign or going 60 in a 55 zone.
I can’t believe the change in politics since bush got elected. In 2000 I was in eighth grade, and took a politics class. I volunteered for both Gore and Mark Dayton (running for the only open MN Senate seat, still serving).
I remember staying up late watching the election coverage and going to bed completely and utterly stunned.
I’ve always gone to public schools within Minneapolis, and I remember in that 8th grade class of twenty or thirty, just one girl pledged republican. In my high school the only known republicans ware that same girl, and the health teacher.
I’ve never understood how bush managed to get elected. But holy shit, he is sure fucking things up. I still can’t understand how people can put up with all the stuff he has done and is doing. I’ve stopped capitalizing his name, not to mention losing any shred of respect I ever had for him.
(Yet all I do about it is show up at a student democrats meeting and flame about it?)
Viral myspace hack – embed javascript so that it embeds itself in the pages of those who view your profile. Make the js do cool things like make you everyone’s hero. 20 hours and 1,000,000 people get infected. But myspace sucks.
Verizon is starting to bring fiber right into the home to build it’s internet tv system, with 30-50mb/s!
Ruby is really starting to hit the big time. I picked a good one to start with. I’m working with php now with my campus job, and it really pales in comparison. Now ruby leapfrogs both perl and python into a prestigious publication.
Is this even real? It’s just a movie, but a sweet demo of a totally new physical interface to your computer. I want one.
Ski movie trailers. And more ski movie trailers. And just for fun, some fixed gear bike photos to boot.
!!!!!!
Tim O’Reilly looks like a pretty cool guy.
Called a brain-computer interface, the device detects activity in certain brain areas linked to movement, and uses the signals to mimic that movement in a virtual world.
Could make for a kickass video game.
A new fabric which presents a 3d image on its surface, coupled with computer aided optics makes a cloak that makes you invisible.
Yum.
Just the other day I started a facebook group evangelizing anthropomorphics. I’m not kidding! And Gruber comes along with this bit of genius.
The thing you need to understand is that it’s not a question of “using only 10% of your brain”. The point is, you are only 10% of your brain. The rest of your brain is bigger, smarter, and better-educated than you, because it can learn things you don’t even know you’re learning, faster and better than you.
This is what I mean about not getting in your own way. Your operating system has enormous parallel processing power, whereas “you” are a serial processing filter.
most of us don’t really know how to use our own brains in a systematic way. We give them commands like we were a cat walking across a keyboard: every now and then we end up with something syntactically valid, but semantically… questionable.
Holy Shit.
For example, the sentences I would like to book a first-class flight to Chicago, I want to book a first-class flight to Boston and Book a first-class flight for me, please may give rise to the pattern book a first-class flight—if this candidate pattern passes the novel statistical significance test that is the core of the algorithm.
Next time I’m riding an elevator I’ll have to test this: press the door close and floor number buttons together, and some elevators enter express mode and won’t stop until your there!
Neal Stephenson
Sweet novel by Neal Stephenson. Set in the near future, the US has fallen into a collection of corporations controlling everything from Suburbia and Religion to Pizza Delivery. The Metaverse becomes the global vessel for person to person interaction, and Hiro, the main character knows his shit about the metaverse. But when Da5id, Hiro’s close friend and co-conspirating hacker is infected with a deadly virus after watching a virtual video, Hiro knows something big is happening.
Collection of panorama’s from 1912 to 1991. Spectacular view of milling era Minneapolis.
Impressive panorama photography from a kite rig.
Mike Matas is 18, my age, and worked for the Omni Group for a few years before starting his own software company (Delicious Monster!) and now is shipping himself off to Apple. Do I just set my goals low or what?
I felt that in the light of the last post I might as well showcase my number one political hero, Paul Wellstone. It might have been that I was at an impressionable age while he was a prominent figure in local politics (I tend to think it was because he was simply a spectacular person), but he is my number one cultural icon.
He was just an honest and hard working guy, who spoke from his heart and worked for what he felt was right. The thing that makes him stand out against his peers is that he was a good man before he was a politician. In the throes of his final campaign he voted against the resolution for war with Iraq, after confessing to his wife just that morning that the vote would cause him to lose his senate race. Nobody in politics today is as earnest a man as he was, I don’t know if anyone will ever be.
Here are a few Wellstone quotes, a quick primer on his life, and the Wellstone Action Foundation.
Hike from Nova Scotia to Washington…
A keyboard built with little screens as keys – want to change a keyboard layout? All you need is the software for the keyboard, all the keys can change magically. an interview with the head of the firm responsible.
The last six days have been easily the most agonizing of my life – I’ve been compulsively checking the shipping info on my powerbook, jumping up and running to the window whenever I hear a truck rumbling nearby, and anticipating the arrival of this guy like nothing else. But it came!
Try this – type some product into the location bar of firefox (I pasted motorola i860 there instead of in the google bar) – and whoa! Firefox routes me to the particular phone at phonescoop.com. works with nokia [model number], apple powerbook, windows xp… neat.
The phone looks cool because of a neat little easter egg that lets you upload your photos (with latitude and longitude) to flickr instead of motorola’s own photo site. I want a gps phone.
update: are you kidding me?! I ordered my powerbook, and have compulsively been checking the status of the order since. Type apple store order status into the location bar, and boom! I get to the sign in page to view my order status. I wonder if it looks through my history and learns new places and keywords for them, in addition to some basic ruleset thats programmed in (because I’d never been to the windows xp page or the phonescoop page, but it still worked). Wow.
update again: Firefox redirects you to googles first result for whatever query you put in the location bar, and its very very useful.
Amazing animated looking mammatus clouds.
I’m finally ready to get a computer, now I just need to pick the right one and get it. Just some rumination. update: I ordered it this morning, and boy am I giddy now (and I deleted the last post because I hated it).
Reduce the amount of sleep you get into six thirty minute naps, and your body will apparently compensate by quickly dropping in and out of REM sleep. And you will feel as rested as ever once you acclimate yourself, although you sleep only three hours per day.
Azby Brown
Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.
Per Eide
Coffe table book full of fascinating photographs of the Norwegian landscape. Panoramas galore. The book was a gift from Joachim, the norwegian AFS student, and I’d leafed through it but not fully read it until yesterday.
From the author’s website you can check his Picture Archives for a good peek at some of his work, but the book is just incredible. It’s a wide format book, and half of the pictures in it take up two pages across the fold. The photos are just spectacular.
I saw this last night and it was mondo impressive.
Wow, camera phone + foot + software lets you play a soccer shootout by mock kicking a ball for the camera! Sweet, I really want a high tech phone to be able to play with stuff like this.
Build your own lightsaber. Six different base designs, and yes – they have emitters for the light part.
Wikibooks is really getting fleshed out these days – maybe a year ago I was all over the site but there just wasn’t much polished content. Looks like that is changing!
A photo of Wrights Marin County Hall of Justice before additional landscaping work was done, jesus christ it looks sweet. via landandliving’s followup to this earlier post on the subject.
A CT scan of the Apple Design Award trophy, wow, apple rocks so hard.
I’ve never actually taken a class here, but fantasized about it lots.
a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.
How about intro linguistics?
Lego porn. Wow, I thought that I was a half decent builder in my day – but look at this stuff! And this guy has a heck of a building environment.
Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, 1937
I love Wright, and architecture too.
The 15-kilogram (33-pound) battery-powered suit, code-named HAL-5, detects muscle movements through electrical-signal flows on the skin surface and then amplifies them.
Bioengineering, I have a friend going to Michigan Tech to study it. Wow. When do we get electrical systems in our brains to record what we’ve been thinking?
Have a good night surfing wikipedia re transcendentalism. I love this list, identify with almost everything on it.
Wow. Wow. Wow.
Rosetta will allow PowerPC compiled apps to work on an Intel Mac. It’s completely transparent, and does not require a separate emulation environment.
I don’t know whether to love or to hate apple – on one hand, intel could probably make chips just as well as IBM – but to get my hopes up like that for a G5 powerbook… And then just snatching it back from me! I don’t know what I’ll do now, I was looking to get a laptop for this summer, but I don’t want a G4 now that apple has an entirely new processor.
Textdrive turned one today, which means that this site is officially one also. I’d been running it locally on my box, and registered the domain name as soon as I bought the VC 200 account (5/26). Then I spent a few days anxiously awaiting the results of my purchase. I’ve been happy ever since.
Now here is a summer job I should look into a few years down the road. How about smoke jumper! I think this would be fun, but thats coming from someone who just shoveled 14 yards3 of dirt from a neighbors drive over a fence into my yard, for $150 (relatively) easy bucks. Hard labor!
A collection of beautiful and functional small spaces, really cool stuff. The last one (Luke’s?) has the sweetest sleeping loft I’ve ever seen, and I have a fairly sweet one myself. How can anyone not sleep up in a loft?
Wow – fractals, beautiful colors, and the simulation of a cities growth. And built with that processing thing.
Beautiful photo of Venice (?) drawn in MSPaint. This one is going onto the desktop.
The sky was lit up with a bright yellow light — the earth appeared white. The yellow gradually became darker, turning gradually to orange. In the sky I saw white clouds from above the gadget caused by the sudden expansion following the blast wave — the expansion cools the air and fog clouds form — we had expected this. The orange got deeper, but where the gadget was, it was still bright, a bright orange, flaming ball-like mass. This started to rise, leaving a column of smoke behind, below looking much like the stem of a mushroom. The orange mass continued to rise, the orange to fade and flicker. A great ball of smoke and flame three miles across it was, like a great oil fire billowing and churning, now black smoke, now orange flame. Soon the orange died out and only churning smoke, but this was enveloped in a wonderful purple glow.
Another after-image I thought, but on closing my eyes it did disappear, and appeared on opening them again. Others said they saw it too, probably caused by ionised air produced in the great heat. Gradually this disappeared, the ball of smoke rising majestically slowly upward, leaving a trail of dust and smoke. Richard Fenyman, on the detonation of one of the first atom bombs in the New Mexico desert.
At almost 13 I dropped out of Sunday school just before confirmation because of differences in religious views but mainly because I suddenly saw that the picture of Jewish history that we were learning, of a marvellous and talented people surrounded by dull and evil strangers was far from the truth.The error of anti-Semitism is not that the Jews are not really bad after all, but that evil, stupidity and grossness is not a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general. Most non-Jewish people in America today have understood that.The error of pro-Semitism is not that the Jewish people or Jewish heritage is not really good, but rather the error is that intelligence, good will, and kindness is not, thank God, a monopoly of the Jewish people but a universal characteristic of mankind in general.
Therefore, you see at 13 I was not only converted to other religious views but I also stopped believing that the Jewish people are in any way “the chosen people”.
I am glad that I am not so teased because I am sure of nothing, and find myself having to say “I don’t know” very often. After all, I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. It is fun to find things you thought you knew, and then to discover you didn’t really understand it after all.