I suspect this is also going to be in “win the lottery” territory, but wouldn’t you like to be able to tell people, “Yes, my Swiss Army Knife has one terabyte of storage.“?
I know I would.
Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Holy Cow. (Part 2)
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012Holy cow.
Monday, January 9th, 2012Unless I win the lottery sometime soon (and that would require buying a ticket) I won’t be purchasing a Nikon D4.
However, the idea of a camera with built-in wired Ethernet boggles my mind. (The WiFi add-on seems kind of nifty too, especially for the automation it offers. But at $6,000 for the camera, it seems to me to be something that should have been included rather than an extra cost option.)
(Hattip: Les Jones.)
Cahiers du cinéma: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Monday, January 9th, 2012Here are my total lack of qualifications for reviewing this movie:
- I have not read this, or any of the Stieg Larsson books. I have heard people I trust say they’re great. I have heard people I trust say they are awful and overrated. I have heard people I trust say they may have been better in the original Swedish, but Larsson was poorly served by his English translators. My mother wanted to see this because she tried to read the book and couldn’t get more than 20 pages into it.
- I have not seen any of the Swedish movie adaptations of the books.
- I’m way behind in my David Fincher. I liked “Se7en
“, but haven’t seen anything since. I missed “Zodiac
” when it was in the theater (I really should get the DVD), and I have “Fight Club
” on (the extra-special) DVD, but haven’t watched it yet. I had no interest in “The Social Network
“, and I heard strongly negative things about “Benjamin Button
“.
All that aside, I thought “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was a solid 3 – 3 1/2 star movie. I didn’t feel like I spent my $7 in vain, and the actual movie going experience was pleasant enough. (Of course, not everyone is lucky enough to have the Alamo Drafthouse.)
I did have a few quibbles and problems with the movie. I’m going to put those after a jump, even though I’m going to try to avoid major spoilers (there may be some minor ones).
Getting high.
Thursday, January 5th, 2012My sister’s latest post is up at the Park City Snowmamas site:
Dealing with altitude sickness.
(I know she was looking for old photos of us as kids visiting Pikes Peak. The thing that stands out most vividly for me from that trip was the g-dd–n splitting headache. Granted, I was only 8 or 9 years old, but that was the worst headache I’d ever had in my life to that point.)
Just in case you were wondering.
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012List of fatal cougar attacks in North America.
(You know, I have categories for reptiles, horses, primates, and spiders. Do I need a “cat” category? If so, should I have a “dog” category too? Perhaps “mammals” and make horses, cats, dogs, and primates subsets of that?)
(Explained.)
Legal note.
Wednesday, December 28th, 2011The University of California and Dr. Patrick Harran, a chemistry professor at UCLA, have been charged with three felony counts of “willfully violating occupational health and safety standards”. Yes, you read that right: the University itself is being charged with felonies.
The charges stem from the death of Sheri Sangji in December of 2008. Ms. Sangji was employed in Dr. Harran’s lab:
She died 18 days after the incident.
I’m kind of hoping Derek Lowe will have some comment on this, and I’m willing to listen to arguments on the subject. My gut feeling is that the felony indictments are appropriate: Ms. Sangji should not have been working without a flame-resistant lab coat, and it isn’t clear to me that she was provided with appropriate equipment, training, or supervision. This is what trials are for, of course, and details may come out during the trial that will change my mind. But:
But the required corrective actions were not taken before the fatal fire, the records showed.
Edited to add: Many thanks to Chemjobber both for pointing us to Derek Lowe’s commentary, and for providing a link to an article from Chemical and Engineering News summarizing the incident in more detail.
Also, thanks to Lawrence for a somewhat related link, which we had missed: the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board report on the Texas Tech lab explosion in January of 2010. I swear that I covered the explosion at the time, or shortly afterwards, but I can’t find the link now. In any case, the report is pretty much what you’d expect: “the physical hazard risks inherent in the research were not effectively assessed, planned for, or mitigated; the university lacked safety management accountability and oversight; and previous incidents with preventative lessons were not documented, tracked, and formally communicated”.
(Short summary: the lab was working on a government project involving detection of explosives. Part of their work involved making something called nickel hydrazine perchlorate, which goes bang rather easily. The lab had been making small amounts (100 milligrams) but the students involved in the production of NHP that day decided, for various reasons, to scale things up and produce about 10 grams. The NHP went bang while one of the students was trying to break up “clumps” in a mortar and pestle.)
The street finds its own uses for things.
Monday, December 26th, 2011NFS: Not For Storage
Wednesday, December 21st, 2011The Unix-Haters Handbook (which I am proud to say I own a physical copy of) is now available for free download.
(Hattip: Unix tool tip.)
Desert Bus update.
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011You can now get Desert Bus for Android and iOS. Yes, this means you can play Desert Bus on your iPad.
It is 99 cents, but the money goes to Child’s Play. So you can feel virtuous while you pretend to drive between Tucson and Las Vegas. At 45 MPH. In real time. In a pretend bus that keeps drifting to the right.
Things. Explained. For the benefit of other people.
Monday, November 21st, 2011This came up in conversation yesterday: here’s your explanation of Desert Bus.
And why did this come up in conversation yesterday? Desert Bus for Hope is running again, that’s why. Won’t you consider donating?
In ancient times…
Friday, November 11th, 2011Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people… the Druids
No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock… Of Stonehenge
Happy Nigel Tufnel Day, everyone.
“The Ones Who Set Off Bombs In The Crowds At Those Festivals in Omelas”
Thursday, November 10th, 2011John Scalzi needs no help from me, but I wanted to link to his “Omelas State University” entry anyway because:
- I think he pretty much hits it out of the ballpark and into the windshield of a car in the parking lot with this one.
- I have a certain fondness for “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” as an example of an SF story that also touches on ethical questions like Kant’s categorical imperative. I know I probably sound like a member of the freshman philosophy B.S. debate club, but it hasn’t been that long since I took “Ethical Analysis”.
- That said, I also really like the critical comments by John Barnes and Elizabeth Moon on “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. I remember reading the debate on “The Cold Equations” in NYRSF; if someone did a similar debate on “Omelas” in book form, I’d buy that. And, yes, I’d preorder the John Barnes book, too.
Quick followups.
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011There’s been quite a few nice tributes to William the Coroner posted since yesterday.
A couple of my favorites: Matt G., Brigid, Borepatch, OldNFO.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Anonymous may or may not be having second thoughts about taking on the Zeta cartel. This HouChron piece seems unclear. I have seen another report that says Anonymous has backed down, but that report comes from a site I do not find trustworthy and will not link to.
On a lighter note…
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011I wanted to toss up a link to Lawrence’s piece on “The Decade of Weirdness: The 1970s”.
I am a little surprised he didn’t mention Transcendental Meditation in his roundup, but the 1970s were a target rich environment; if you brought up all the weird stuff from that decade, you’d probably have a novel-length post.
How then should we behave?
Tuesday, November 1st, 2011The story starts with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation.
Specifically, it starts with Stallman’s “info packet” for people who want to book him to speak. The date on that post is October 20th, but it seems to have been widely linked in the past week; I’m not sure why this is suddenly getting so much attention.
I’ve avoided commenting directly on it because a) I haven’t read it all and don’t have time, and II) I’m not sure what I could say about it. There are many things (based on a quick skim) that strike me as reasonable (don’t change dates and times and expect Stallman to show up, check with him first). Kottke mentions the parrot issue: I am willing to bet that the “DON’T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.” line is in there precisely because people have done exactly that.
I think there are things in that document that can be legitimately questioned: Gruber notes his stance on cell phones as one example. But much of the criticism has gotten personal and ugly. Dave Winer and Reginald Braithwaite have both done very good blog entries about this.
There is a podcast that I’ve been listening to regularly, which features a prominent blogger. (Not Cory Doctrow, Mike.) I don’t want to name the podcast or the podcast network here for reasons I’ll get into shortly, but there are probably enough clues embedded in this piece for folks to figure out which one I’m talking about.
During the most recent episode of the podcast, the Stallman document came up as a topic. That’s fine; it is a legitimate topic of discussion for this podcast. But one of the podcast hosts went on to assert that he’d received email from people (as in, more than one person) who’d hosted Stallman in their homes, and “had to burn the sheets” afterwards. Indeed, the title of that podcast episode is a reference to the “burn the sheets” emails.
I give money to the FSF, but I have my share of issues with them and Stallman. I thought Stallman’s comments on the death of Steve Jobs were out of line, and I seriously considered resigning my FSF membership because of them. I disagree strongly with Stallman’s support for Communist governments. I don’t much care for FSF’s recent Apple bashing. I think there’s room in the world for both open and closed source software, and I think FSF’s dogmatic approach hurts the cause. I don’t believe FSF thinks enough about making it easy for the 80 year grandmother to keep in touch with her grandchildren; I think in many ways FSF would be happy with computers as a priesthood, not as a commodity.
But I believe that there is work FSF does that is worth my monetary support. And I believe that the issues I disagree with FSF and Stallman on are issues that we can discuss and debate like human beings. We don’t need to be schoolyard bullies sitting in the dark tittering over anonymous accusations that people have to burn their sheets after a guest leaves. That’s wrong.
One of the reasons I don’t want to name the people or the podcast is that both of these podcasters have young sons. I’ve made it an ethical principle of mine that I won’t drag people’s families into things, and I don’t want to do that here.
But I would like to ask both of these men, if they’re reading this: is this how you want your son to treat his classmates? Is this how you would like your son to be treated by his classmates?
Is this how decent human beings act?