If I’m translating this French news story correctly, then the BQ thinks they can get Harper charged with obstruction of justice, an offence that could carry a 10 year jail sentence. I’m not holding my breath, but I am crossing my fingers. Le Bloc québécois estime que le premier ministre Stephen Harper pourrait être passible de 10 ans de prison.… Read more →
Year: 2010
Remember That Financial Crisis?
Yes, we’re all supposed to be much more interested in the oil spill at the moment, but we still remember that whole huge financial crisis right? If so, then you will want to read Jeff Madrick’s review of Michael Lewis‘ new book The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine. It’s the best kind of review–it not only gives you a… Read more →
Meme-ery and Kibbitzing
A few years back, I posted some comments about a “great books in genre” list. One of the comments had to do with the lack of female writers on the list, and I tossed out 20 examples of great genre books by women. Sandra MacDonald has taken that kind of effort to a whole new level, creating a periodic table… Read more →
Monday Night Videos
And now, for your amusement, bogglement, edification, and education, a selection of wildly disparate YouTube videos that caught my attention over the last few days. First, from the category of absolutely appropriate pairings and the unlikely beauty where it’s not expected, we’ve got Tom Waits doing a reading of a Bukowski poem: Secondly, from the world of cool ideas that… Read more →
A bit of extreme beer news
If you’ve paid attention to this blog over the years, you’ll have clued in to the fact that I quite like the occasional malted beverage, and that I strongly prefer the black, opaque ones to the ones I tend to disdainfully dismiss as “see-through beer”. I may also have mentioned over the years that I tend to prefer stouts in… Read more →
More Spill Visualization
Today I ran into (over at PSFK) another extremely well-designedThe designer’s site is worth a peek as well. infographic that puts the current oil spill into context in a different way… Of course, this doesn’t really make me feel any better. Criminal charges might, though. Or I could find some way to help. Read more →
Aside
I am very, very pleased by the news that the entire Bletchley Park archive–millions of documents–are going to be digitized over the next few years. While I suspect the vast, vast majority of the documents won’t be of interest to me at an individual level, it will be a wonderful resource for researchers, and hobbyists. (And make no mistake, the fact that people all over the world will have access to the archive electronically dramatically alters the potential for both researchers and hobbyists to actually do that.) And those people will comb through the digital information to extract things–both individual documents, and aggregate results–that I would be very interested in. Generally speaking, I’m in favour of digitizing almost every document store, but as a long time cryptogeek, I’ve got a special place in my heart for Bletchley’s history.
Visualizing The Problem
There is little I could say to add anything to the ongoing discussion around the horrible mess in the Gulf of Mexico–other than, perhaps, to point out that if BP had been required to have relief wells in place more-or-less immediately (as Canada requires) this problem would be resolved already. Those kinds of comments, though, don’t help resolve the current… Read more →
Singer / Dawkins
It’s not often a YouTube video grabs my attention for the better part of an hour, but this did. I did want them to be a little less polite at a couple of points, but still utterly compelling for me. Read more →
More on the Synthetic Life thing
Oh, This Is Going To Be A BIG Deal
“I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.” If you haven’t read this yet, read it. I’m going to need some time to take this all in, but I’m going to have to go along with Dyson on the… Read more →
Not How O’Toole & Hepburn Would Do It
What you’re looking at there is apparently around $613 million. (And yes, it is very odd when you think about the difference between owning digital copies of the images, which is free… and owning the originals, which are apparently somehow worth over $600 million. But that’s not the point.) Those five paintings were stolen last night from the Museum of… Read more →
Aside
I am unable to resist “obscure words” lists, and generally most of the words on them are actually familiar to me. Not so with this list, on which I knew these ones from prior encounter: agraffe, bathykolpian, blandiloquent, callipygean, defenestrate, mumpsimus, slubberdegullion, and yclept. These, while I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before, were obvious in their meaning from their components: autohagiographer, autotonsorialist, batrachophagous, cruciverbalist, dephlogisticate, interfenestration, and preantepenultimate. And the rest were new to me. I think the most fun one to say, although rarely called for, would be “zenzizenzizenzic“, the one with the most fun definition is “sphallolalia“, and the one least likely to come up in my life is “mallemaroking“. There are several, though, that I could easily see coming up in my life, not least of which are “gambrinous“, “philosophunculist“, and “ultracrepidarian“.
Keep Hitting Play
I like to think of myself as pretty musically eclectic: it’s not so much that I like one category of music or another, but rather that I like the good stuff. Which leads to lots of pockets of music that appeal to me throughout the entire space of music. There are areas I’ve kind of shied away from for one… Read more →
Aside
Four acquaintances of mine are tromping about Japan at the moment. While I have a very low interest in doing that myself, I am quite interested in following along with their escapades through the Internet. Today, the escapades included ice cream flavours. “But there’s also tomato-flavoured ice cream. And sea urchin. And fried noodle. And lamb raisin. Yes, lamb raisin. No, I don’t understand why it’s lamb raisin.” And that’s not the peak. Go. Read.
