The word of the day is Mojibake, and I am not happy about it.
At the local coffee place, the barista asked about the Tiptree Award t-shirt I was wearing. The shirts, designed by Freddie Baer, are beautiful and always attract compliments.
I told her about Tiptree being the pen name of Alice Sheldon, who wrote science fiction in the 1960s through the early 1980’s.
She said her grandfather also wrote [...]
March 15, 2008 – 12:09 am
You may have heard that Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld books, recently learned he had early-onset Alzheimer’s.
A couple of days ago, he gave the UK’s Alzheimer’s charity a half a million UKP donation. When Pat Cadigan, an expat American science fiction writer living in the UK, heard about that she kicked in a few [...]
March 10, 2008 – 11:06 pm
Looks like Charlie and Annalee are going to have some competition. Two science fiction blogs with great production values? Excellent.
The HiRise camera on the Mars Surveillance Orbiter caught an avalanche in progress on the edge of the northern polar cap. Awesome.
February 28, 2008 – 12:22 pm
Julian Bell released his book Tiny Life, about the text-based LambdaMOO virtual world of the 1990’s, as a free PDF download. LambdaMOO is one of Second Life’s ancestors.
He wanted to release it under a Creative Commons license, but ran into complications.
Thanks to Aleks Linden for the heads up.
February 25, 2008 – 10:42 pm
Friday night Cynthia took me to see geek troubadour Jonathan Coulton play a show in San Francisco. The tickets were my birthday present. You might recall that he wrote the closing theme for Portal, the popular game about cake, companion cubes, interesting guns, and mad computers.
At least here, the cake was not a lie.
Dinah Sanders [...]
February 22, 2008 – 5:24 pm
Alert reader Deryck Hodge was surprised as I to see on my about page that I had whump.com registered since 1986. No, that’s a typo. In 1986 I was still in college and UUCP was king. I’ve had whump.com since 1996. Sorry about the unintentional error.
February 20, 2008 – 1:27 am
Larry Lessig announced he’s is considering running for California’s 12th district, a seat left vacant by the death of Representative Tom Lantos. I’m not sold on the idea that Congress is the best place for him to be.
And, even though the seat is vacant, he’ll face considerable competition from State Senator Jackie Speier, a veteran [...]
February 9, 2008 – 12:56 pm
The World Wide Web consortium would appreciate it if our tools, such as libxml2, would stop hitting their servers every time we parse (X)HTML.
As I’ve mentioned previously, XML Catalogs matter.
February 3, 2008 – 3:08 pm
Even when she’s writing a promo for her monthly literary event, Charlie can shove a ton of SF-nal kicks into a paragraph.
We’re really sorry that January’s Writers With Drinks was such a mob scene. Apparently the problem was that one audience member had installed the new “seamless branching” alternate timeline manifesting wetware. So every time [...]
January 31, 2008 – 1:30 pm
Now that MarsEdit supports tags for WordPress, I no longer have to edit the post on the server to add the tags after publishing from the tool.
January 25, 2008 – 12:38 am
Fermilab Beam Jockey Bill Higgins reminds me that since The Atlantic Monthly have opened their archives, I can now link to a good copy of Vannevar Bush’s legendary article “As We May Think.”
Doug Engelbart’s famous demo is on Google Video.
Now if Ted Nelson would put Computer Lib on the web, we’d have three of the [...]
January 23, 2008 – 1:33 am
Ken MacLeod on creationists:
Creation science is a purely destructive enterprise, like comment trolling or wiki vandalism. Its entire impact results from scrawling across the work of real scientists questions and cavils phrased in a manner just scientific-sounding enough to trouble anyone who knows nothing in detail about the field being traduced.
Like the griefers who bother [...]
January 20, 2008 – 2:43 pm
Maybe JavaScript needs a same-origin rule for document.location. [ via Simon Willison ]
