Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,174 entries, all of them here in full.
September 16, 2010 · 607 words
Sino-Science
I recall being told just yesterday how many Chinese scientists were being trained, as opposed to USAian scientists. Vastly more. Hugely more. We are doomed. The Chinese scientists are going to come over here and pick our dead, bleached bones for the useful bits of DNA. Though, as The Humanist points out, Chinese scienc
Read entry →September 15, 2010 · 576 words
One Great Big Lego . . .
Today’s New York Times article on 3-D printing brought up an idea I had in this blog some time back— using a big 3-D printer to build a house. (I was mocked, I do believe.) Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis either read my blog or my mind, or came up with the idea himself— and now I […]
Read entry →September 12, 2010 · 442 words
Bullet Points
So between the two of them Pat and Daniel convinced me that I should see Machete. This took a little bit of doing, since I’m not a huge fan of the cheap 1970s exploitation films that inspired Robert Rodriguez to make this one. But a $100 million big Hollywood film with Robert de Niro that […]
Read entry →September 10, 2010 · 559 words
Not Your Daddy’s Universe
A few years ago, I wrote a story called “Send Them Flowers” in which the protagonist was able to shift to universes in which the fine-structure constant (otherwise known as alpha) was slightly different from our own. We skipped through the borderlands of Probability, edging farther and farther away from the safe univer
Read entry →September 10, 2010 · 148 words
Cockroach Brains— the Future is Now!
Via Daniel, the news that the brains of cockroaches and locusts contain natural antibiotics capable of wiping out 90% of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Cockroaches live in filth, someone must have reasoned. Why don’t they get sick? The group found that the tissues of the brain and nervous system of the insects were abl
Read entry →September 9, 2010 · 613 words
Three Ships, Two Bridges, One Freaky Rocket
From the Discoveries High and Low Department. Via Geoff Landis, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered two natural bridges on the moon. In a first, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera team spotted a natural bridge on the Moon in an image from King crater, on the lunar farside. The bridge appears to have fo
Read entry →September 7, 2010 · 683 words
Om Shanti Om
Dig it! Women in Afros and leopard-spotted bikinis! Bell bottoms! Pelvic thrusts! Disco jumpsuits! It’s all our Seventies nightmares coming true! What’s even better is that this video, about the Pain of Disco, is supposed to be the love fantasy of a deaf-and-blind paraplegic with no hands. (No, I’m not making this up.)
Read entry →September 6, 2010 · 101 words
Drollery
“This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade
Read entry →September 6, 2010 · 941 words
Resurrecting Tati
Back in the day, when there were actually theaters devoted to showing foreign and classic films, I used to enjoy the occasional festival featuring the films of Jacques Tati. He didn’t comment on modern life, he observed it, and in a singularly droll manner. When one of his meticulously-crafted gags went off, you didn’t
Read entry →September 3, 2010 · 1,260 words
Stuff that Quote!
I posted a couple weeks ago on creepy botnets placing tens of thousands of orders on the nation’s electronic exchanges. Both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal now report that the phenomenon— which now seems to be called “quote stuffing”— is under investigation by the SEC and the CFTC. Quote stuffing is no
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