Category: Whatever

More than enough about me

So lovely

Medieval Otaku thinks I have one lovely blog and has tasked me with the following:

You must thank person who nominated you and include a link to their blog
You must list the rules and display the award
You must add 7 facts about yourself
You must nominate 15 other bloggers

Um, gee, thanks, I think, M.O.

Over the years, I’ve written about myself perhaps more often than is healthy, and it is difficult to find seven fresh facts worth mentioning. I’ll start with a little recycling. In the past, I’ve written

1. this

and

2. that.

There’s more about me

3. here.

What else? Let’s see….

Continue reading “More than enough about me”

Links in the time of hurricanes

It looks like the Brickmuppet will get a reprieve from Matthew. Down in Orlando, William Luse might not be as lucky. He links back to his posts from 2004, when Charley and friends paid visits to the Florida peninsula.

Update: The Brickmuppet’s luck ran out.

Derek Lowe recently added another post to his “Things I won’t work with” file, this one dealing with a feisty nitrogen compound (“Recall that this is the compound whose cocrystal with TNT is actually less dangerous than the pure starting material itself….”) and anhydrous hydrogen peroxide.

I am told that I barely talked at all until I was nearly four, though when I did start chattering, it was in complete sentences. I was perhaps fortunate that this was back in the dark ages, when autism was a rare and exotic affliction and few people had even heard of Asperger’s.

Working plants

Years ago I grew cacti and other succulents under lights in the kitchen, all of which I started from seed. The collection eventually became too large to maintain, and the plants are long gone. Recently I’ve been considering starting another indoor garden, on a smaller scale and focusing on the more diminutive mammillarias and turbinicarpus and perhaps some mesembs. If I do, I’ll order the seeds from the same source as before, Mesa Garden in New Mexico.

I came across the above interview with Mesa Garden’s Steve Brack earlier today. It’s an amateurish video, hand-held and ending abruptly, and the soft-spoken Brack is often difficult to hear, but it does offer a glimpse of a fascinating place.

Notes from the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies

Various odds and ends:

Fillyjonk linked to an old but not outdated story by Ray Bradbury, “The Murderer.” I found a couple of other favorites, “The Veldt” and “The Pedestrian.”

*****

Perhaps not entirely unrelated to the Bradbury stories:

Having time each day merely to amuse oneself, or just to sit and think, greatly improves one’s life. Yet we’re practically taught to avoid such periods – to stay as busy as possible virtually all the time. The emphasis on work, on “multitasking” (which, as a former expert in the architecture of multitasking operating systems for embedded devices, I can assure you is always an illusion) and on achieving ever more per unit time is using us up in ways we don’t always perceive and even less often appreciate. You’d almost suspect that time spent in introspection had been deemed an offense against the social norms.

(Via Dustbury.)

*****

While Sakurajima is ominously quiet, in the South Indian Ocean Piton de la Fournaise is putting on a modest, colorful show.

Continue reading “Notes from the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies”

Memo to Pope Frankie …

45th parallel

… and others who think that air conditioning is an irresponsible, decadent luxury:

Above is a map of North America and Europe, with the 45th parallel marked in red. That latitude lies halfway between the north pole and the equator. Regions north of the red line are nearer the arctic; regions south, nearer the tropics. Note that most of Europe is above the parallel and that most of the 48 states are below it. Note further that the plains states are remote from any moderating influence of mountains or ocean. It gets hot and stinking humid here in Kansas during summer. Frown and shake your finger all you want, but my air conditioner stays on.