Lakeshore

The tourbillion — A watch which shows only day or night. Incidentially, Tourbillion is my working title for the third Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon | Audible ] book. (Thanks to chriswjohnson.)

Wake up, smell the music with Japan perfume download — Smell-O-Vision finally comes to life, in Japan, home of all that is too weird to be cool and too cool to be weird. Best line: "NTT Communications also plans to conduct trials of another service that would allow mobile phone users to send files with scent attachments."

Earth's Crust Shows Long-Term Wiggle Room — New thinking about continental plates.

A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity — The creative disease. Fascinating stuff about cognitive psychology, creativity and selective dementia. (Thanks to GS.)

1692 in America — A year of history in a year of blogging. Deeply cool. This is going on my daily blogroll.

Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars — Luxury condos for fish. Interesting story about re-use. (Thanks to my dad.)

antitheism on delusions — A bit more fuel to the atheism fire — (Thanks to lt260.)

CFI Issues Critique of Civics Textbook — This is pretty interesting. I especially like: "the alleged influence of the religious concept of “original sin” on the structure of the Constitution." Christianists seem to want to distory the reality of our entire society to fit their worldview. Except when they need antibiotics or a decently educated doctor, of course. (Thanks to lt260.)

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4/9/08
Time in saddle: 17 minutes
Last night's weigh-out: n/a
This morning's weigh-in: 275.0
Currently reading: Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon [ Powell's | Amazon ]

Clockpunk ring — Mmmm. Tasty. (Thanks to princejvstin.)

80,000 jobs lost, well done George — Actually, I'm mostly linking to this for the photo of the president. It's my favorite of him since this one.

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’ — The Bush administration tried to disappear the term "abortion" from a public database at Johns Hopkins. Market forces indeed.

Doonesbury on the myth of GOP fiscal responsibility — I've been asking this question for a long time. The answer, of course, is branding. And Bush 43 has done more to dismantle the Republican brand than any legion of opponents could have done. I don't really think the Republicans care that he has been just aboutt he worst president in history — if they did he wouldn't have been elected in 2004 — but I do imagine they care about the state of their reputation.

Last week the clockmaker came to set up the grandfather clock my parents recently gave me. My grandparents brought this 19th century piece back from Germany in the 1950s, so the original provenance is unknown, but I have strong early childhood memories of its gentle ticking and mellow chimes in the stained glass light of their front hall in Gainesville, TX. Somehow it seems apropos that this elderly gentleman shares a room with my display copies of Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon | Audible ] and Escapement [ Amazon ]. (I gave copies of the books to the clockmaker as a thank you.) It's a two-weight weekly winder, for those that care about such things.

( A few photos. )

As usual, more at the Flickr set.

Why don't we love science fiction? — The Sunday Times on the parlous state of SF. (Thanks to AH.)

The gear clock — :: mmm :: wants ::

Indian Thriller — This video still makes my brain hurt.

Chiranjeevi tractor fight — Another brain-buster.

garyomaha points to this rather detailed critique of the way the Omaha World Herald's online presence responded to the recent shootings

Moonbeams, nothing but moonbeams

Probing Exoplanet Atmospheres in Texas — She blinded me with science.

Flying frogs, goliath frogs, and the one who can eat 16-and-a-half baby cobras — From the wonderful Tetrapod Zoology blog that the_flea_king turned me on to quite some time ago.

Juan Cole on Romney and religion in public life — He nails my viewpoint almost exactly, much more elegantly than I manage to do. Money shot:

So Romney's so-called plea for tolerance is actually a plea for the privileging of religion in American public life. He just wants his religion to share in that privilege that he wants to install.

Stir-fried wikipedia — I swear, the next major religion will arise from the revelations found in Chinese restaurant menus.

lowercase L — A language blog devoted to sightings of incorrectly capitalized occurences of the letter "L".

chriswjohnson photographs autumn, and enters a bat cave — Money shot:

The consensus was that I could enter without disturbing the myotis, provided that I wasn't disturbed by the flesh-eating beetles.

The Roundbottom Interview — ktempest interviews the_flea_king's alter ego.

Orrery Maker — For all your clockpunky goodness. :: wants ::

Venus May Be Earth's Hellish Twin

Why science can't save the GOP

On planets in the galactic bulge

The longevity pill? — Resveratrol? Who the heck named that compound?

Class conflict on airplanes — This should surprise no one, and is a logical extension of American socioeconomics.

Magic Highway U.S.A. — Some beautiful ca. 1958 images of the future that never was. Sort of Roadrunner meets Heinlein.

Cartoon pr0n — Hilarious, and not work-safe or child-safe. (Snurched from dinogrl.)

Top secret repair job was no wind-up — Real life clockpunk. Thanks to kadath for the tip!

Retrofuture: To the Stars! — Classic SFnal art from Western and Soviet sources.

Gore and Bush Chat About Global Warming — Money shot:

Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, told reporters the president is willing to let bygones be bygones.

“This president does not harbor any resentments,” she said. “He never has.”

Wow, that is mighty white of the president. Nice to know he's so big about how it all went down in 2000: Bush's popular victory but looming defeat in the electoral college, Gore's cousin making a bad call on national news while working closely with Clinton's former political strategist, the "white collar riot" the Democrats staged to stop the Florida recount, Gore's fixed Supreme Court vote that snatched the decision out of the Florida court's hands in contravention of every conservative principle of state's rights.

Or am I misremembering something here?

(Thanks to shsilver and others.)

The Sudan teddy bear incident — This is precisely why I argue so forcefully against a mixing of religion and politics. How can a nonbeliever be guilty of blasphemy? Just because you believe something doesn't make it true. Your religious convictions have no binding on my behavior in a civil context. Every Christian who argues for prayer in school, Intelligent Design, the Ten Commandments in a court of law, or heteronormative oppression in the name of Biblical precepts, is imposing their subjective personal mythology on the objective world in this same way, with the same patently illogical and shameful results. I unquestioningly support your right to your religious beliefs without respect to my personal opinion of them, but equally so I unquestioningly oppose your right to impose the consequences of your religious beliefs on anyone else.

Google’s New Search — for Cheap, Clean Electricity — I am starting to view Google as a social change agent, pure and simple.

Rich and poor gird for climate change - UN report — Al Gore's lackies have spread their liberal lies everywhere! Will the conservative movement ever own up to how dead wrong it has been on climate change? Eventually even the most die hard trailer park crank may have to realize that Rush Limbaugh does not in fact know more about climate than, say, the vast majority of the world's climatologists. Perhaps as his single-wide floats down the Mississippi...

Compiled by danjite in my absence, link salad hereby resumes:

Blackwater rafting

Things that piss geeks off

Iceberg collapse

Steampunk laptop

Creepy shoes

Many thanks to my stunt double. Regular broadcast service will resume shortly.

Ray gun possible for use in Iraq — You have to scroll down the page to find this story.

Lost Luggage, In-Flight Division — Wow, a whole new hazard to flying. Or even a hazard to just standing around minding your own business.

Mary Queen of Scots Skull Watch

Glitch Hits Burial Of Man With Mobile Phone

'The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam' — About Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq long before the "more in sorrow than in anger" speeches stopped.

FEMA Meets the Press, Which Happens to Be . . . FEMA — Mmm...more of that Republican ethics in action!

ETA: Apparently someone discovered their ethics after all.

Rabbit-shaped police lights

17 mechanical marvel calculators

White House Faults Rush Limbaugh Over "Phony Soldiers" Comment

The great American hypocrisy tour — Republicans on parade.

David Lynch's A Goofy Movie — (Snurched from dthon.)

In which blackholly is mentioned

6 die from brain-eating amoeba in lakes — (Snurched from criada.)

Locker room in a bottle — (Thanks to garyomaha.)

Children: the aliens among us — Navy recruiters discover youth these days aren't what they used to be. These aren't your father's kids?

Today the Niece asked lillypond, "Mom, do fish have eyebrows?"

jeffvandermeer points to this Boston Globe article on steampunk. (Registration may be required.) He and I were both interviewed for the article, though neither of us made it into the final draft. Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon ] is referenced, however, on page 3 of the online version.

The influence on steampunk literature goes as far back as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, but those authors can't really be considered steampunk because they were writing about their own era. Michael Moorcock's "The Warlord of the Air" (1971), "Lord Kelvin's Machine" (1992) by James P. Blaylock, "The Difference Engine" (1991) by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and Di Filippo's "Steampunk Trilogy" (1995) are often cited as the central steampunk novels. In "The Difference Engine," the visionary artist William Blake gives Powerpoint presentations using a kind of magnetic tile device. In a novel released this year, Jay Lake's "Mainspring," the sun revolves around the earth along a system of celestial gears.

If anyone in the Boston area could send me the hardcopy, I'd be much obliged.

lasirenadolce took some awesome photos of the clockpunk dinosaurs frankwu used to decorate the trope chest that my friends gave me for my birthday. The chest is on a table in the living room of Neuvo Rancho Lake, and a chance gap in the curtain combined with the angle of the sun to make some cool images for her to shoot.

( The photos... )

As usual, more at the Flickr set

Mobile snaps reveal invisible art — Digitizing the real world.

Smart fabrics hit the catwalk (Thanks to GS for both of these)

The roller suit (Thanks to willyumtx)

Wooden gear clock (Thanks to KM)

For those playing along with the take-home version of "Where's Jay", I'm off to Austin via DFW. I'll be at Armadillocon tomorrow through Sunday, then hieing home Monday.

The $199 laptop

Science goggles!

The linguistic leaps of toddlers

The Riddle of Mars — 100 years ago in Scientific American

What Would Newton Do? — Deconstruction of some Christian silliness about Isaac Newton being a Young Earth Creationist.

Chinese Tuck Into Texas Turtles — First Mars needs women. Now this?

The Programmable Robot of Ancient Greece

The robot programmer of Ancient Greece

The robot programmer of the Golden Age of Islam

The Monkey's Paw — A fable of extropianism.

Tank limousine for hire

(With a nod to danjite, chriswjohnson and some of the other usual suspects.)