Nabbed from BoingBoing, because I suspect most of my flist needs it:

Ohhh, so that's how you make donuts!

I always wondered. =)

LOL. That is one friendly cat.

Happy birthday to sdelmonte, sir_gareth and viridian!! =D

I had to put my coffee down before I sprayed it:

Carl Sagan would have been 75 this year? He was gone way, way too soon. =(



Then again, go to 4:15 minutes into this interview from 1996 (grabbed from BoingBoing), and it will soon become apparent he probably would have spent the entire past decade in a perpetual headdesk re: the USA.

I thought you guys might have covered this already, but it seems absent from my flist. Maybe people just missed it? Or this is old news? Or we are unimpressed? After all, why have an flist if not to tell me what to think? We like this, yes? Is Good Thing?

Mercedes Lackey embraces fanfic and Creative Commons

Chris sez, "Mercedes Lackey's agent, who also represents a 'persuasive little gnome' named Cory Doctorow, has been talked around to the Creative Commons point of view. Hence, Misty has announced she is going to permit fanfic as long as it is released under a Creative Commons license (presumably a noncommercial one, though she does not explicitly spell this out on the site).

Meanwhile, in other news, the upcoming Apple tablet (last I heard, we can expect this sometime in February) may be getting positioned as a reader not only for e-books but for e-COMICS:

Apple’s upcoming tablet computer (whoops, “rumored” upcoming tablet) just got a little more interesting: there are signs that the company is getting into the digital comic book market.

Which is tantamount to saying “Apple is helping to create a digital comic book market.”

Someone certainly has to. Digital distribution of comics is nearly nonexistent. Comics publishers have made attempts to move into this market, but with the same floundering lack of thought and cohesion that marked the music industry’s digital initiatives back in 2002....

Of all of the major publishers, Marvel Comics is the clear leader. It’s less of a compliment for Marvel than it is an illustration of how carelessly the industry as a whole has pursued digital expansion. Despite its name, Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited is all about limitations....

Maybe Apple could pull an iTunes in the digital comics realm? Who can say?

If robots are going to look like this, I don't think I want one.

I mean, it starts off clever and cool as a concept. And then you actually see it.

D:

You might have seen this already, but if not, READ IT.

But booooo to the Aussie scientists for never writing back to him.

At least there's a comment farther below from a guy who wrote to NASA, with much better results.


I'm now convinced that one of the best jobs in the world would be to work for NASA as the guy who answers all the mail from kids.

1) Aww, yeah, that's why I read comics.

2) Damn you, Warren Ellis! How dare you write both Planetary AND Transmetropolitan? How am I supposed to answer the question, "What's the best thing he's done?" Bastard. And that's not even counting Stormwatch/Authority.

3) No matter how hard he tries to make it seem otherwise, underneath he's just a big ol' sentimental softy, all full of mush. =)

Andrew Sullivan does this thing on his blog called 'mental health break,' and while I continue to think our collective spotlight should remain where it is today, if you do need a break, try this:

Holy crap!

Huge Anglo-Saxon gold hoard found

The UK's largest haul of Anglo-Saxon treasure has been discovered buried beneath a field in Staffordshire. Experts say the collection of 1,500 gold and silver pieces, which may date to the 7th Century, is unparalleled in size and worth "a seven figure sum"....

Leslie Webster, former keeper at the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe, said: "This is going to alter our perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England as radically, if not more so, as the Sutton Hoo discoveries. (It is) absolutely the equivalent of finding a new Lindisfarne Gospels or Book of Kells."

That's HUGE. And an excellent reminder that we still have a lot to learn, and even discover, about the past. My favorite example of that is this villa in Herculaneum, which lies above a large library of ancient manuscripts.

Let me say that again: above a large library of ancient manuscripts.

That means, we don't know what might be down there. That means, if they can find it, and if our technology is good enough to allow us to read whatever manuscripts are found, we might just find a 'new' Greek tragedy. Or a lost Latin history. Hell, maybe Aristotle's second book of Poetics is down there, who knows?

It can take surprisingly little sometimes to transform our understanding of the past.

A bit silly, but kind of wonderful too:


It reminds me how good Carl Sagan's Cosmos was. I can't hear that Vangelis theme now without feeling sad that he died before his time.

That was back in the days of the epic, 'personal', public TV miniseries. I was much too young to fully appreciate them then, but I grew up watching repeats of Cosmos and especially, James Burke's Connections, which remains as close to perfection as a television series about history can be for me.

And there were others too. I never did get around to watching Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, but this three-minute excerpt really makes me want to.

I'm not one for nostalgia usually, but I miss personal takes like this. It's not just about a show having an interesting or funny host. It's about the series advancing a particular point of view, a thesis, a way of looking at a topic. That makes the whole experience a lot more compelling.

They look dated now, of course. The video and sound editing were top-notch for their day, and I think that high quality still comes through, but the visual effects aren't nearly as good as we expect now, etc. But the conversational style of the narrative still holds up, I'd say.

Especially with Burke. Man, I still love Connections and his follow up, The Day the Universe Changed, which opened with another great ten minutes that manages to be straight out of the Cold War and yet equally apt for today.

Of course, they still happen now and then. But it seems like there was a whole bunch of them for that span of a few years, and it would be interesting to see a bunch of new faces taking a shot at it all at the same time.

Was half-watching the end of Fellowship on TV, and for the first time I noticed--is it just me or is Sean Bean really channeling John Noble's Denethor in those moments when he tries to take the ring from Frodo? Especially in those moments right after he realizes what he's done, Boromir really looks and sounds like his father's son (which is appropriate, after all).

Missed a comma there somewhere:

Oh my god, THEY ARE DOING IT AGAIN.

Bad enough we had one group uplifting slime mold into robotic uber-existence.

BUT NOW WE HAVE ANOTHER TEAM giving mold the power to CRUSH identify objects.

"It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."

Who knew SKYNET's brain would be the stuff growing in your refrigerator right now?

WTF, Brit scientists? Are you already enslaved by our future slime mold robotic masters?

Oh, and HEY, while we're at it, why don't we make SWARMING BUG ROBOTS too?


*runs flailing to hide under bed*

This is just the best thing ever.


Obviously, one of those things we invented the internets for. =D!!!

First thing, check this out. "In B Flat" is a very, very clever use of multiple YouTube feeds all on one page.

The way it works is, you can play them in any order and in any number. They're all spoken word performance and music noodlings, so they all blend more or less, in whatever way you want.

Cool, huh?

Second, I'm struck by the range of responses to Ted Kennedy's passing. On my flist, at least, all the responses range from personal sadness to distant respect (as in, "I didn't really know him well, but his death seems to matter a lot, so I respect that"), which is as good a legacy as a person can ask for, I suppose.

The Kennedy family is hard to look at sometimes. They reached such an incredible height c. 1962, only to spend the next thirty-five plus years suffering one cruel body-blow after another. Sometimes the fault was a family member's own poor judgment. Sometimes it was a fatal case of bad luck. In some cases, it was both. But through it all, Ted kept going.

It must have been a long, lonely road for him, filled with disappointments and compromises that were probably incredibly hard to swallow. Some of them, of course, were due to the legacy of Chappaquiddick, and his other indiscretions, and the fault of those was appropriately his own. But he has left a remarkable record of legislation and activism behind him, and I do think he meant that to be, at least in part, as a kind of making up for his own mistakes. He had his faults and his failings, but he tried to make up for them by making people's lives better, and I doubt you can say a finer thing about a human being than that.

Don't know who that is? Take a few minutes to watch. He's a good guy, and fights many a good fight: