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Fillyjonk linked to an old but not outdated story by Ray Bradbury, “The Murderer.”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.”
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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.)
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While Sakurajima is ominously quiet, in the South Indian Ocean Piton de la Fournaise is putting on a modest, colorful show.
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So today is Back to the Future day? I suppose if you’ve seen the movie it’s worth noting, but it interests me more to observe that Yuko “Yasako” Okonogi is nine days old today. Yuko “Isako” Amasawa is six months old. In about ten years they’ll be in Daikoku City, and Dennou Coil still won’t be licensed in North America.
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J.R.R. Tolkien, cartographer and artist.
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Until the end of November, if you are a Brony in Japan, there’s a café just for you.
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Further nonsense:
I forget where I found most of these.
I love watching film of eruptions of shield volcanoes. I always have. The kind of volcanoes we have here are simultaneously more dangerous and less interesting to watch erupt, when they do (which is really very rare). But glowing lava is just visually fascinating to me.
For this one, the only thing that bothered me was that I couldn’t get any scale. I found myself thinking that the cone was maybe 20 feet across — which is not possible, of course. More likely it’s a mile or two…
There’s a picture of the cone with people nearby here
Yikes! It’s immense! (My wild-assed guess of 1-2 miles is about right, I would say)