Nutters: Wow, people on the internet are crazy. I’m not going to taunt Happy Fun Freak any more than to say that, despite temptation, except to note that when one knows absolutely nothing about a topic but insists on talking about it and pretending he does know about it, it’s absolutely clear to the people who do know something how little one actually knows. Comments: A few comments from today which need to be preserved, from a meeting on student presentation proposals, a chat with a professor about the Ministry of Education, and a chat with a teacher in another …
Category: GENERAL
Google Docs? Impossible!
I’m busy working on a paper that should be done in a couple of days — whew! — which is the main reason I haven’t been posting here. When I reformulate it into a “talk,” I post the contents here in some form or other. (Possibly with slides, possibly just the audio, I’m not sure.) Anyway, in the meantime, it struck me that back when I was an undergrad, I was talking with a computer science major about the way the Internet might change our thinking (and use) of software. At the time, I suggested that eventually we might be …
Banned in China: Your Assurance of Quality Content
The title of this post is a throwaway comment Bruce Sterling made in his lecture, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole” (mp3, video with terrible audio), in the course of mentioning that most scientists who are able to do the scary stuff that frightens Bill Joy are unlikely to be willing to take up residence in the caves of Afghanistan or up in North Korea just to get the freedom to research things that have been banned by everyone else. It reminded me of a funny thing an ex-student in Beijing told me — this blog is blocked …
SETI Workshiop at Daejon KASI
As part of the 60th Annual International Astronautical Congress hosted by KASI in Daejon this year (which is, by the way, the International Year of Astronomy!), Dr. Rhee Myung-hyun (an astronomer I met while taking part in the SOAO workshop earlier this year) organized a workshop on SETI and sent me an invitation to it. I decided to set aside a couple of classes (with makeup classes to be held, of course) to make the trip down to Daejon and hear what the discussion would entail. My friend Mark, also known as the physicist down the hall, joined me and …
The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Database Wrestling
My employer doesn’t have good access to any of the fulltext databases with literature stuff (like MUSE or JSTOR). While it looks like this might get rectified in the next while, I am not going to be able to get my hands on this article. Which, in case you’re lazy, is titled “The Singularity Ate My Homework and Other Reasons I Can’t Predict the Future” by Ariel Mameon. It was published in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2004, is apparently available in the Texas A&M database. Or am I misunderstanding the listing? I’m wanting a look …
Two Videos From a Busyish Day
Today was kind of busy, so here are a couple of videos I found amusing, with comments as to why they caught my attention. [kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/iC65ufGUvKM” width=”425″ height=”344″ allowfullscreen=”true” fvars=”fs=1″ /] Have I mentioned that at a high school variety night I performed a freejazz/fusion version of this song? Sort of. Same bass line, and I hollered some of the words into the mic before the atonal saxophone weirdness kicked in. (I played my tenor.) I was accompanied by a keyboard bassist named Jennifer Duggleby and a drummer named Mike Murza. I doubt anyone recognized the song. Maybe one or …
How to Rob a Bank
Jwz has it. Jwz has moved it. And they say you can’t learn anything watching Hollywood movies. This is a crime that just couldn’t have happened without the “heist” genre of films. But reading this, it struck me: there will be a last bank robbery in the world. People will still be hacking banks for as long as that’s possible, but someday paper money will stop circulating, or continue to circulate but become worth less than the trouble it takes to rob it. When it does, there will be no more bank robberies, except as political statements or artistic performances. …
Angst and Rant No(t much) More
Yesterday I had one of those days that is inevitable for everyone who lives abroad. No matter how happy you are in general, there are those days, those cursed days, when everything you don’t like about your chosen place of residence just comes up and slaps you in sequence, one by one. It’s one of those days when the place you’ve decided to live, and the place you care about or even love, decides to drive you crazy. Sometimes, people have those days when it’s just really one jerk who annoys them. Sometimes they have those days because of the …
Moments from a Summer Voyage (Leg 1)
I’m trying to find a new and better way to write up my trip. I wrote a blog post detailing the first leg of the journey — from Seoul to San Francisco, through Denver, Wyoming, Portland, and Seattle, until my departure to New York City. But I don’t think it’s very interesting, and I’m against posting boring crap online. There’s so much of it already, even on this blog. So it’s going to be a slower catchup, I think, as I work out how to say in an interesting way what these places and the people I saw in them …
Losing Wonmisan
Okay, okay, I’m being dramatic. But, then, it was dramatic. Mark and I were hiking up Wonmisan as usual, except we found a couple of new features on our dirt trail. Now, if you don’t know Wonmisan, you should be informed that, unlike some mountains in Korea, it has both stairs and a diirt trail to the top. If you ask me, stairs are for shopping malls and apartment buildings: I don’t go out into nature just to climb stairs. Especially crappily-built, unevenly-sized stairs like you see on a lot of mountains. So Mark and I, we usually take the …