I’ve published some photos from my trip to the 2008 Maker Faire.
The set includes a Babbage Engine constructed from a Mechanno Set, my friend Peter’s iPhone controlled watering can, the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, a flying model of a Mercury Redstone rocket, and a large, menacing alien tripod.
I found an airship avatar at Grendel’s Children.
It’s great for tooling around Steampunk sims like Babbage Square.
And as you see in the photo below, it’s small. Great for days you want to be a Steampunk version of a drone from Ian M. Banks’ Culture novels.
Hey, wait, I was on a GSV with that guy.
Regarding Game Four of the NHL Western Conference Semi-Final:
We do what we must because we can.
The Sharks still have science to do. See you in San Jose on Friday night.
The management at the Moscone Center try to prevent a panelist at the Web 2.0 conference from bringing their 4 month old child with them. Kirrily Robert comments:
Yeah. If given a choice between a crying kid who can be taken outside and out of the way, let alone a well behaved kid, and that bearded guy in the second row who’s always interrupting speakers to ask tangential, rambling questions (which, in fact, are actually statements), I know who I’d rather have at my tech conference.
Yeah, I think we all know that bearded guy interrupting panels.
Jens, I think it’s fine to reply to someone’s blog post with a post in your own blog, rather than a comment:
Jan Chipchase has one of the best jobs: traveling the world, and understanding how people use their mobiles. [via RC3.org]
Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (published in the US as Daughters of the North) won the Tiptree Award for the best work of science fiction or fantasy dealing with gender published during 2007.
Also of interest to readers of this blog, Charlie Stross’ Glasshouse was on the short list.
More details in the press release. Waiting for tiptree.org to be updated.
John Archibald Wheeler, contemporary of Einstein and Bohr, died this past Sunday.
When he was at the University of Texas, he taught a non-major survey course on relativity and quantum mechanics. It was one of the best classes I took there. Professor Wheeler was witty, patient and a great teacher. Every lesson was designed to build on the last. I wish I had kept his handouts.
He had a wonderful, “ha, ha, only serious” view of cosmology, ending the term with a cartoon of a question mark with an eyeball at the end of the loop, looking back on itself, illustrating what he referred to as a “Participatory Anthropic Principle.” I’m probably misunderstanding what he meant by that, but the idea that observation of a photon that has been traveling for a billion years might affect the past is dizzying.
Daniel Holz, a student of Wheeler’s, has a great remembrance at Cosmic Variance.
Liz Henry: A reg exp is a thing of beauty but it is not a joy forever.
I just bought music off of MySpace from a band that only appears in a virtual world.
But to do that, I had to sign up for yet another vendor, Snocap. Fortunately, they use PayPal, so I didn’t have have to give them a credit card.
However, I wish that MySpace would had struck a deal with eMusic for selling tracks since I already have an account there.
Some of Chouchou songs have that sing-song, treacly sound that can make J-Pop annoying.
Their track ‘Neverland,’ however, sports a bossa-nova piano, breathless vocals, and a dead-on hook. Recommended.
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 SF, in French, under the pen name Francis Carsac. He carried on correspondences with Issac Asimov and Fred Pohl. But his fiction hasn’t been translated to English. Maybe someone will be interested in doing that?
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.
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.
Looks like Charlie and Annalee are going to have some competition. Two science fiction blogs with great production values? Excellent.
