![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) maryrobinette is liking of the Green [ Powell's | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Borders ].
newroticgirl liked Green maybe a bit too much
Moving the goalposts — My last Tor.com guest blog post from the recent run.
Carnivorous Clock eats bugs, begins doomsday countdown — Brings a whole new meaning to the idea of a "mainspring". (Thanks to lillypond.)
The danger of safety — Road, rail and air crash comparisons.
?otD: Where is Mendocino County again?
7/3/2009 Body movement: 60 minute urban walk (Buena Vista Park and back) This morning's weigh-in: n/a (forgot to get on the scale before I showered and ate) Currently reading: P.S. Your Cat is Dead by James Kirkwood
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| 2009-04-05 04:47 |
| [links] Link salad flies through the Sunday morning sky |
| Public |
| books, clockpunk, cool, links, mainspring, personal, politics, religion, reviews, science, tech, travel |
|
A reader reacts to Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb | Audible ] — Not so much with the liking.
Anachrotechnofetishism: artifacts by pioneers of american steampunk — (Snurched from Dark Roasted Blend.)
Lunniy Orbital'niy Korabl (LOK) — Soviet lunar module.
Cellphone calls fail to crash airplanes
Political Pullback for the Christian Right? — Wow, if these guys aren't careful, they might accidentally rediscover their own virtues. Which would really suck for the GOP, if Christian America started, you know, acting Christian for a change.
?otD: Which witch is which?
4/5/2009 Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride This morning's weigh-in: n/a (spaced out) Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville; Making Money by Terry Pratchett
8 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
jimhines is smart about the author's response to the publishing meltdown
More on the Piri Reis map, from Juan Cole — Debunks the Antarctic theory (again), while offering an even more fascinating historical thesis that I've never run across before. A must-read for you alternate history types.
Ghost Rides: Abandoned Parks in South Korea — As lt260 says, it's enough to make Yokohama Sid proud. (Thanks to lt260.)
Steampunk Mechanical Elephant — Well, metalpunk, at any rate. If I were wealthy, I'd buy this, or commission a similar one. (Thanks to lt260.)
The (WU)ltimate 33-Part Guide to Abandoned Places — As longtime readers of this blog know, I can name a few such places, such as a Titan missile silo near Moses Lake, WA; as well as the power plant at White River Falls [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ].
Lost city of 'cloud people' found in Peru — Some cool archaeology. (Thanks to danjite.)
First Light-Driven Nanomachine — A silicon nanobeam uses optical force to do mechanical work in an integrated circuit. So, how cool is this?
UK plans lunar phone network
A Star-like Model for Brown Dwarf Formation — Brown dwarfs are part of a critical McGuffin in Sunspin, so I am paying extra attention to this stuff lately.
Putting a Value on a C.E.O. — (Snurched from America Blog with this post.)
?otD: Where's the beef?
12/06/08 Body movement: 40 minute stationary bike ride This morning's weigh-in: 221.8 Currently reading: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville
4 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Girl Genius is more brilliant than usual — “Face the terror of the hand-cranked runcible gun!” Hahahahahahah. If you’re not already reading this, why not?
The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget — Moving. (Thanks to willyumtx.)
Dark energy: the quest for galaxies — South Pole Telescope offers fresh view of Universe’s expansion. (Thanks to lt260.)
Slime Mold Rehabilitated — Some awesome nature photography. (Thanks to willyumtx.)
For U.S. Astronauts, a Russian Second Home — U.S. Astronauts at Star City, in Russian. (Thanks to lt260.)
Can Microsoft conquer cloud computing? — More near-term futurism from Technology Review.
Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes — Yep. Definitely need more tax cuts here.
Peak Wingnut — “…wingnut is a renewable resource. Peak Wingnut was the shortest lived ‘theory’ ever.” Hahahahahah.
10/15/08
Body movement: 110 minute suburban walk
Last night’s weigh-out: n/a
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two by Anu Garg
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Fiction of mine: Tom Edison and His Telegraphic Harpoon — Weird Tales does an online reprint. This story is from my Original Destiny, Manifest Sin continuity.
Scientists exhume British diplomat to study flu — I’m pretty sure Connie Willis wrote a book about this. (Thanks to lt260.)
Stephen Hawking to unveil strange new way to tell the time — Some serious clock neepery. (Thanks to swan_tower.)
Arctic sea ice reaches annual low — Not quite to last year’s record low. Never mind that global warming hoax. (Thanks to lt260.)
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my — Big cats loose in Galveston in the wake of Hurricane Ike. (Thanks to my Dad.)
If Palin were a Democrat — The K Chronicles nails the conservative narrative. (Thanks to my aunt M.)
Sarah Palin’s powerful “First Dude”
9/18/08
Body movement: 50 minute suburban walk
Last night’s weigh-out: n/a
This morning’s weigh-in: 233.6
Currently reading: FenCon workshop manuscripts
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.
11 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
Some really cool steampunk jewelry — Wowzers. (Thanks to ericreynolds.)
Green objects in space — Soylent Green is people! (Actually, some cool astronomy stuff for you hard sf types, or you “green sun” fantasy types.)
Strange clouds at the edge of space — (Thanks to lt260.)
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Last Days — Wow. Our society really has come to this. Either that or my irony meter is broken this morning. (Thanks to chriswjohnson.)
8/29/08
Time in saddle: 25 minutes (switched back to non-load-bearing exercise)
Last night’s weigh-out: n/a
This morning’s weigh-in: 237.2
Currently reading: The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.
8 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
A very clockpunkish telescope from the early part of the twentieth century, found in the University of Wyoming astronomy and physics building.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
SF Signal reviews Seeds of Change
slushmaster notes that the art for “Roger Lambelin”, published in Realms of Fantasy, is up for a Chesley — That’s a story by specficrider and me.
Dr. Roundbottom is at it again — “Interview with a steam rat” at clockpunk.com. (Thanks to lt260.)
Travel guides to remember — Weird old travel guides. (Thanks to danjite.)
Endangered primates found in Africa — A new population of western lowland gorillas has been found in the Congo.
World’s smallest snake discovered — Think of the places that little dude could slither in to. (Thanks to lt260.)
Radio-Vitant — Some 1920s medical weirdness from Shorpy.
8/5/08
Time in saddle: 0 minutes (long city walk this morning)
Last night’s weigh-out: n/a
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: Launch Pad Workshop class materials
Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.
Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
|
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 ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) 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.)
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 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.)
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 ]
3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
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.
8 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
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.
11 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
 |
| 2007-12-07 03:01 |
| [links] Link salad, sleep deprivation edition |
| Public |
| OMA, Gate A7 |
| what mood? |
| moronic holiday earspam |
| clockpunk, funny, language, links, omaha, photos, politics, religion, videos, weird |
|
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.
8 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
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...
5 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
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.
6 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
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
15 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link
|
|
|
|
|
tired