“I’d eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.”

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 pounds in honor of Pratchett’s donation, mentioned it on her Live Journal, and asked other fans and writers to follow suit.

If you know science fiction fandom, these things snowball quickly, and now there’s a Match it for Pratchett! campaign.

Match it For Pratchett Campaign

In the US, you can give to the Alzheimer’s Association.

In the UK, give to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust.

When you make your donation, let them know it’s in honor of Terry Pratchett, or a friend or relative with Alzheimer’s.

If you make your living off your brain, Alzheimer’s is damn scary, and like Mr. Pratchett said, I’d eat the neither regions of a dead rodent if it would keep that particular Death from tapping my shoulder.

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When Blogs Compete, Fandom Win

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.

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Martian Avalanche

March 4, 2008 – 1:21 am

The HiRise camera on the Mars Surveillance Orbiter caught an avalanche in progress on the edge of the northern polar cap. Awesome.

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Book on the history of virtual worlds available for free download

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.

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This was a triumph…

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.

IMG_0173.jpg

At least here, the cake was not a lie.

Dinah Sanders has a better photo of the scene on her Flickr stream.

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A Correction

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.

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Mr. Lessig attempts to go to Washington

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 politician with support from the California Congressional delegation, who started her campaign when Lantos announced he was leaving at the end of his term. The 12th district covers much of San Mateo county and the Southwest corner of San Francisco, which is not the Google heartland.

It’s not my race. I’m in the 14th district. But it’s another round of The Web vs. The Establishment, and will be interesting to watch.

ETA: There’s a discussion of how a Lessig/Speier race could play out, and how Leland Yee could play the spoiler, at Open Left.

ETA: Shelly Powers wrote a thoughtful piece on why Lessig would not be the best candidate for the seat.

ETA: He was considering running, and had not announced. Thanks, Elkit.

ETA: Lessig has decided not to run.

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That URI you keep using…

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.

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Charlie Anders’ microfictional promos

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 she made a decision that altered her life course, she split into two people. Something about the comedy or that weird stuff about Hunter S. Thompson made her re-assess a whole slew of life decisions in one go, and suddenly there were thirty or forty of her all in one place. The Make Out Room has installed filters. It won’t happen again. And this month, we have two touring authors: Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jim Shepard!

And if you haven’t been to Writers with Drinks, you’re missing a fun evening out. It’s usually the second Saturday of the month. Come early, it gets crowded fast, even when people aren’t monkeying with causality.

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A Less Complex Workflow

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.

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As We May Link

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 foundational texts of the World Wide Web all online.

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God’s Own Griefers

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 Second Life, they come in, throw around the furniture, and claim it’s all for a good cause. [ via Doug Miller ]

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Can you trust document.location?

January 20, 2008 – 2:43 pm

Maybe JavaScript needs a same-origin rule for document.location. [ via Simon Willison ]

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Ursula K. Le Guin reads from A Wizard of Earthsea

January 11, 2008 – 2:44 pm

An MP3 of the Hugo, Nebula, and Tiptree winning author reading a chapter of A Wizard of Earthsea.

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It’s Hugo Season, think Feminist

January 5, 2008 – 10:15 pm

Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention, opened nominations for the 2008 Hugo Awards.

The dearth of women nominated for last year’s Hugos lead to a proactive response for the 2008 cycle, including:

The deadline for nominations is March 1, 2008, so if you’re looking for books to read, check the sites listed above for suggestions, and blog your reviews.

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