Ink

Don't do anything else until you watch this movie. I'm serious. It's brilliant.

Trillions: A Short Expedition into the History of Computing

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

via Geeks Are Sexy

If Jerzy were a cannibal, this is what he would eat.

Also, The future of Vancouver looks awesome.

The science behind a climate headline.

There is a TED video embedded below for those of you that use Reader and can't see it.

famously besotted trope

via

More Weary Words: Notes from the newsroom on grammar, usage and style. Maybe it will help others who are participating in NaNoWriMo.

room to grow

Just spent the last 2.5 hours building a new shelf and organizing books.


Here are few interesting things I read on the internet today:

-44% of Congress are millionaires while >1% of the population fall into that category.LINK

-Science and Wonder. LINK (all my philosophy professors used to tell me that philosophy began with wonder)

-Meet the NYT's columnist who's helping to ruin the future. LINK

-Ariana Osborne on POD. LINK

Star Trek humor for the day

via


via

Loud Mongolian music and sunshine helps me write. Stopping to juggle, take pictures and blog does not.

What is in a moment?

beautiful video via The Cedar Room

67 and sunny today. Good morning.

Oh, shit.

All told, farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population - roughtly 87,000 pounds of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals - no toilets, obviously, but also no sewage pipes, no one hauling it away for treatment, and almost no federal guidelines regulating what happens to it.

-Jonathan Safron Foer Eating Animals

Happy Carl Sagan Day

Live stream of events taking place in honor of Carl Sagan embedded below. It begins at 2pm EST.

(Video removed)

I've got soup to eat, dogs to walk, a book to finish and 1,667 words to write today. Less video posts coming soon, maybe.

Don't Shoot Yourself

John Irving excerpt on being an author today from an interview on Big Think.





Goodnight.

If the children knew the facts...

via Dangerous Minds

Don't plant your bad days...

Just got back from a cold, cold run. I am pretty excited to have some tomo sencha and read the comics that arrived in the mail today, which are Jennifer Love Hewitt's Music Box, Issue 5 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Volume 3 of Freak Angels by Warren Ellis.

Introducing Information is Beautiful

Hi. I'm David McCandless. I'm a visual and data journalist. I run the blog InformationIsBeautiful.net. There I take ideas, issues and data and try to make them into easy-to-digest and hopefully beautiful infographics and images. I like to use information design to help me understand the world and help me sift through the huge amounts of data and statistics that seem to deluge me every day. I hope they can help you too.

from The Guardian

Previously: How safe is the HPV vaccine?

T-post

I can't afford it but still cool.

Required reading/viewing of the day

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE: A Talk With Frank Schirrmacher

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them

via BoingBoing

via

I have got 6,532 words for NaNoWriMo, which puts me right on course to hit 50,000 by the end of the month provided I stay at this pace. That should not be hard since it is getting easier and easier to write every day. Since I know that I am not editing or worrying about anything more than getting the word count up and a semi-coherent story down, it's very relaxing to just sit down and write. There is no pressure to make it outstanding and I think I will benefit from that. Knowing that what I am writing is crap has always kept me from actually getting farther than a few sentences in the past. That is why the creative writing courses I took in school always stressed me out the most. It was much easier to write a 20 page paper on Hegel than to write a 5 page story on a topic of my choice.

Related: here and here

Singularity Summit 2009

All the videos from the Singularity Summit 2009 are available HERE. I warn you, it can be a big time suck if you are interested in this sort of thing.

This is a panel that starts off a bit slow but gets a lot better.

Changing the World Panel -- Singularity Summit 2009 -- Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aubrey de Grey from Michael Anissimov on Vimeo.

Related: Can you give a drone a conscious? from Times Online

Short intro to the concept of Singularity:

Complicated

I put in a good 4 miles this morning. That's not very far but it was quick-paced and felt good even though I made the poor decision to wear shorts and then run where I would be exposed to the wind. October saw me run only 57 miles. That's a significant drop-off from from the previous few months. I could blame the cold; however, this is actually perfect running weather so that isn't it. I have just been lazy. November is going to be better. I have to remember that sometimes I just have to do the time and put in the miles. I get cranky when I get lazy. Running is how I center and recharge myself.

I'm enjoying the new album.

soundtrack of the night

It's sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew. When you can walk right past someone like they were a never a big part of your life. How you used to be able to talk to them forever, but now you can barely even look at them.

-Henry Rollins Everything

Plants Recognize Rivals and Fight, Play Nice with Siblings

Plants exposed to strangers had greater lateral root formation than the plants that were exposed to siblings.LINK

Hanging Him Proudly

I sent Clyde a PDF. Rigby is now proudly displayed at UNC. If anyone else needs a copy, just let me know.

PREVIOUSLY

Police beating protesters in Iran

Lots more videos from protests in Iran 4/Nov/09 on onlymehdi's Youtube channel.

Shivering Sands

Warren Ellis just released Shivering Sands as a Print on Demand book from Lulu. He's been talking about POD a lot in the last few months, which has coincided and spiked my interest in alternative press, self-publishing and new media. If I didn't just buy two books last week, I would buy this one right now. Alas, it will have to wait until my next dog-sitting job comes through. Also, Wil Wheaton released his book Memories of the Future on Lulu recently too. It's all about his memories of working on Star Trek. I have been listening to him read excerpts of it on his podcast and it's very entertaining. This is also on my list of future purchases. I also have plans to browse Lulu and other sites like it and purchase more POD and self-published stuff. I've been very good about not buying much on Magcloud, though I did get my mom a magazine she really enjoyed last week. There is good stuff out there and I want to find and support it.

Anyway, not much happening around here. I'm gearing up to watch Children of Men and Station Agent today. Those two movies have been occupying my mind for the last two days and I don't know why. I have only seen them once and it was a few years. I just feel like I may have missed something in Children of Men by focusing too much on the hype and the "Hollywood" aspect of the story and not on the foreground/background juxtaposition and what is happening beneath it all. I don't know if that really makes sense; it's very difficult to explain when you don't understand it yourself. Though I guess that means it's a good movie in a certain aspect because I suddenly am thinking about and have an urge to watch the movie 3 years after I first saw it. I hope it lives up to my expectations.