Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

(postmodernbarney.com)
You see, there are dumb action movies, and then there are films that are so fundamentally insulting to your intelligence and so massively ill-conceived in theme and structure that you find yourself idly wondering just how good the blow was that the studio executives who green lit the film had to have been snorting.

When I was a student, in the days before I had covered my walls with art, I used to decorate with words. I would take those cheap 8.5 x 11 frames you could buy at the grocery store, and fill them with nicely formatted blocks of text–poems, quotes, things like that. I’ve always liked to [...]

Remember back in May 2007 when I mentioned my pal, musical genius Danny Michel was planning to co-host a radio show for the CBC with his pal Emm Gryner? (If you don’t remember, click back and refresh your memory)
Well the pilot for that program aired quite a while ago, but it did get picked up, [...]

You may recall that I’ve strongly encouraged people reading this to check out the Shadow Unit project on several previous occasions.
Well, the first “season” of Shadow Unit has been over for a while now, I want to take a few minutes to re-encourage you to check it out. The work got stronger throughout the season–in [...]

I was delighted to find out this week that Emma Bull is writing a sequel to Territory (you might recall I was pretty excited about that one), tentatively titled Claim.
Of course, in the interim, I can always get a hit of Shadow Unit. (I think I might have mentioned that once or twice, possibly.)

I have [...]

Hal Duncan speaking about the Stone of Scone:
Personally, I think it should be ground up into dust and every single Scot given a piece of it as a sort of democratic fuck-you to mediaeval feudalism. The French had the right idea when it comes to inbred, porphyria-ridden, overblown celebrities. If you want tradition then bring [...]

That’s its name. Not that I don’t think it is awesome–I actually kind of do–but I think it’s even funnier that they called it “The Awesome Highlighter“.
And it does just what you think, based on the name: you give it an URL, then you highlight parts of the page, and you get a link to [...]

You know, I’ve always suspected that it wasn’t just that most “nice guys” are insecure, codependent cases. And science has vindicated my suspicion:
New Scientist: Bad guys really do get the most girls
NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty [...]

I’m still loving almost every one of the TED Talks, but every now and then one pops up and really grabs me by the collar.
Here’s the one that really hit me this week.
This is a presentation by photographer Chris Jordan, where he presents some of the images from his exhibition, Running The Numbers. (At the [...]

…is here
The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter’s teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they’d received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been notified.
How did [...]

In my continuing effort to remake this blog into the “all Canadian copyright, all the time” blog1, here are some links to the latest info:

Since the legislation was introduced, there has been quite the protest surge.
Michael Geist ran a five part series this week trying to outline real world scenarios that illustrate what kind of [...]

You know the drill–some things that I found worthy of some comment:

I quite liked Julie Rehmeyer’s short piece on the math scholars who accidentally solved an astrophysics problem. It’s got all the good stuff: pure math, astrophysics (come on, “gravity lensing” just sounds cool, even without any context), serendipity, and above all a good science [...]

I received this response to my “Canadian DMCA” letter from my local MP today:

Dear Mr. McLaren:
Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns about the new copyright legislation introduced by the Conservative government yesterday in the House of Commons. I certainly share many of your concerns and assure you they will [...]

Warning: this will be a Sappy Dad™ post.
I woke up this morning to a smiling three year old face. I was wished a Happy Father’s Day, and handed this:

I was unsurprised by the signature, as I have seen Sarah working on writing her name quite a few times now. I was pretty shocked by the [...]

Something has been interfering with my blogging time the last few days.
I’m not going to name this distraction, but its initials are MKW–and it has nothing to do with audio compression.
Oh, and here’s another hint: