Category: general

I finished reading Red Mars last night. Things get pretty weird and intense at the end of the book, and I really liked how it went. It made me think a lot more about capitalism and historic themes. Mars was a neutral place like Antartica, and then when big companies found out they could mine…

I went home sick yesterday, with something stomach-related that felt like the flu or something. I don’t know. I’m here today, and I feel a little better. I spent the afternoon in bed, reading Red Mars and/or taking a nap. It’s a very cool book, and it covers a lot of details about Mars colonization…

I’ve been reading about the Artemis Project, which is this effort to launch people to the moon in the next 10 years or so. (You can read about it here) It’s a pretty cool plan, really, and involves a lot of commercialism and a lot of volunteers. I guess if you are a rocket scientist…

I spent all afternoon on a boat. It was a work thing, they took the whole team out on a little chartered cruise with some food and beer and stuff. We were out for about 3 hours, and it was pretty decent. The weather’s been pretty shitty all week, so I wasn’t sure if we…

It’s one of those days where you wish you could wander the streets aimlessly, with no purpose or goal. It’s cold enough outside to make it prohibitive yet seductive. Not like a hot and sunny summer day, where you biologically feel a need to escape and have fun. It’s more like a day when you…

I’ve been thinking about Turing machines a lot, and doing some reading about them. The basic explanation, if I can remember it: there’s a machine that can read this paper tape (probably mylar if it was invented now). The tape looks sort of like a piece of movie film or something, and each square can…

It’s amazing that there are things in the Rumored to Exist draft from two months ago that I’ve completely forgotten about. I was just editing down an excerpt for the next zine, and I found about 10 pages of really incredible stuff that I don’t remember writing. So that’s pretty cool. I have about four…

I no longer advocate Details magazine as a worthwhile publication. At one time I said it was a good read for its price, but all of the good parts have vanished in favor for their idiotic new look. Plus they have these 200 page advertizing layouts that are disguised as genuine articles that pad out…

It’s one of those days. The temperature has changed enough to make me think that it’s fall. And with every change of season, I feel like I’m transported to some other year, or era. When the fall leaves are rustling and it gets chilly enough to need a jacket, I think about sitting in my…

I read far more about the liver than I’d ever need to know last night, and studied Gray’s Anatomy for about an hour, finding out what hooks up to what. The problem with Gray’s is that it was written about a million years ago, so it doesn’t talk about modern surgery – just old fashioned…