I love gadgets with a real purpose

12 Good Gadgets for Hard Times | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

Multi-tasking Sci-fi

The only way I can stay on an elliptical machine for more than just a few minutes is to be distracted by something that makes me concentrate. Music will work for a little bit, and the TV's on the wall are okay, but there is not much I want to watch for long that other people will want to see. So I've been listening to podcast/mp3's of science fiction. I posted some links over at my Speculative Fiction blog.

Cool, and unsettling future is now

- Mind-Reading Computer Takes Images
Straight out of Your Brain
- Multiple Kill Vehicle’s Hover Test

No complaints

My leg was too sore to run more than a couple of blocks this morning & my team lost the conference championship this evening. But the truth is I'm not really unhappy or particularly disappointed. I've been working out regularly since April and I'm in such better shape and feel better than I have in years. It was fun being out at the track team fundraiser/run with the Austin people and my friends. As for football, Alabama vastly overachieved, is way ahead of our rivals and doing things the way they should be done. Considering the alternatives - things are still going pretty well. No complaints.

Coach Saban on the State game.

"You wanna know how I feel about it?
That's how I feel about it!"

Phoenix Goes Dark

The Phoenix Lander was an outstanding success. It seems to have finally been overtaken by the Martian polar winter - BBC News .

Backyard nuclear power plants

I'm in.
This strikes me as very important:
"Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb." - in The Guardian

Chaos

Pat Forde is a college football writer after my own heart - BCS Chaos.

One at a time.

Checklist - step one - crush Tennessee - done.

Everybody take a breath.

- The insanity of my beloved Alabama being #2 in the country and people across the spectrum picking us to win the SEC and play for the national championship is making me crazy. I'm not all concerned that we are winning close, which is how a young thin team wins. I'm concerned that people, not just Alabama people, have lost their minds:
- We go to Knoxville to play Tennessee. They are playing for their lives. It could salvage everything (and everybody's job) to beat us. We are 1-5 in Knoxville in the last 6 there. Why is this a gimme?
- Okay, we'll crush Arkansas St. (who is QB'd by a Decatur High grad). This will give us 8 wins, the high end of our expectations.
- We play LSU, the defending National Champions, at Baton Rouge. They want to beat Saban worse than anything imaginable. With the jealous hatred of the jilted that cannot be expressed in words. This may actually be bigger to Miles needs this more than he needed the National Championship. We are 1-7 in our last 8 against LSU. 1-7. How are we the favorite?
- We host Mississippi St. They have beaten us the last two years. Has everyone forgotten this? Coach Croom really wanted the Bama job. Now he really wants to make us pay for not hiring him. And he has. Until we beat them, I assume nothing.
- We host Auburn. We all know guys. We've lost 6 in a row & 7 of the last 8. 1-7. How can anyone assume we are going to win? It's in Tuscaloosa, and it will save their season if they beat us.
- That anyone can assume that we are going to cruise through this is simply insane. They all hate us and it will make their each of their seasons if they beat us. A coin has only a 6.25% chance of landing on heads four times in a row. Should we really expect any more chance than that? Have you seen our quarterback?
- Even if we did win all five games. Then we get to play Florida or Georgia in the Championship. Did anyone see the Florida-LSU game? Oh my the gators are fast. And don't you think Georgia wants so badly to make up for the embarrassment we gave them when they were so beloved, just a month ago?
- We have a real coach and will have a real team as long as he stays, and a chance to hire a quality successor. We're in the discussion, which is all I want.
- But come on guys, everybody take a breath.

Economic collapse? Not so sure.

- I bought gas yesterday for $2.79.
- Maybe few more brokerages and banks should collapse.
- (and maybe lower fuel costs will offset the inflation sure to follow the monopoly money supply the fed is spreading out there)

Get it over with.

- I am so ready for the election to be over. I am so sick of it I can't bear it much longer. How embarrassing. Is there no one here interested in limiting the size of the national government or who thinks that government is not the best way to solve problems? Anyone really concerned about the limitations of free speech & civil rights that come from both the overzealous rightwing and the PC left? Where did the reasonable people go?
- The best irony of the election is that many people want to punish the Republicans for being spendthrifts and too socialist, so they want to elect a Democratic senator who really is both.
- I think that Senator Obama will win the electoral in the low three hundreds, but will lose or nearly lose the popular vote. But then again, apparently I'm a kook.

Ah, Mr. Hitchens

America the Banana Republic in Vanity Fair
The ongoing financial meltdown is just the latest example of a disturbing trend that, to this adoptive American, threatens to put the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave on a par with Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Equatorial Guinea.

How my day goes

From the facebook of one of my former AP History students:

And Now, A Day In Coach Ray's Class:
- Look, all I'm saying is at the end of the day the new 3 Star Wars movies suck.(him)
- What Did You Say Pace?(me)
- Those movies suck.
- Run that by me one more time.
- The Final 3 Star Wars films suck.
- You know, I thought you said that Star Wars sucked. And if that were the case, then I was going to fail you.
- Oh. Well I'm a die hard Star Wars fan, but I hate the Episodes 1-3.
- Guys! I love the enthusiasm but none of this will be on your test tomorrow. And even though the last three Star Wars moves were filmed like 20 years later, they are still okay movies...With that said, Jar-Jar Binx can die in hell.

It's not just us

Commentary By Jeffrey A. Miron Special to CNN:
Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer
Story Highlights
- Government encouraged lenders to relax their standards
- Mortgages were given to people unqualified to repay them
- Rather than a bailout, government should let firms go bankrupt
- Talk of economic Armageddon is scare-mongering

Jeffrey A. Miron is senior lecturer in economics at Harvard University. A Libertarian, he was one of 166 academic economists who signed a letter to congressional leaders last week opposing the government bailout plan.

Private Space Success

SpaceX Did It -- Falcon 1 Made it to Space

"Go Teach the Bulldogs to Behave"

Alabama 41 Georgia 30 (and it was much worse than that)
ESPN
Alabama Papers
Tuscaloosa News

More of my List5 of recommended books

IV. I have recommended George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire to anyone who has somehow missed it, even if they don’t usually read fantasy. Well-drawn characters, harsh realities of life & death, political intrigue and multiple POV. A fun series.

V. I’ve convinced CRL and PC to read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It is a four-book sci-fi/fantasy series written in the early eighties, but that’s like saying The David is a sculpture. The series is simply overwhelming. The author is so obviously brilliant and the books are nearly hallucinogenic as you read them. A far future in which the protagonist passes through a world that has peaked and is in decline and he eventually fulfills his roll in determining the fate of the world. Both of my victims refer to this series when something simply weirds them out.

VI. Recently I have been reading (and listening to) newer sci-fi authors I wanted to recommend - Cory Doctorow (of boingboing) is an excellent author, especially of short stories that address a lot of tech and privacy issues within a wide variety of sci-fi styles.
Charles Stross is a new favorite as well, I enjoyed Halting State, about an MMORPG heist and so much more recently, and have read his multiple award-winning opus Accelerando about a singularity-enhanced future and Singularity Sky.
I’m also reading stuff by John Scalzi who won a Hugo this year (for his blog & reviews) has a very Heinlein-like future universe that many RAH fans will really enjoy - starts with Old Man’s War - just a lot of fun, finished the third one last weekend. (There are two side books I’m going to read as well.)

If you made it this far, thanks & I hope a thing or two is of interest. It’s funny, I always think I don’t read enough.

List5 Books Part 2

II. Books I have suggested recently and tried to get people to read, often unsuccessfully.
1. I have to second American Gods. Traditional ideas vs. the technological age. And Gaiman is just so cool. It would be cool and frightening to be working for a Norse god, and hang out with Egyptian Gods and long forgotten deities of various cultures. I got CRL, who prefers horror & mystery to read Gods and some Gaiman short stories, like “October in the Chair”. She loved it. It’s well worth it.

2. Neal Stephenson, in particular the Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and The System of the World.. I like books that make me go to the dictionary and Wikipedia to make sure I know what’s going on. The Cycle is about the Enlightenment and the growth of a monetary system in Europe, and is as much fun as that sounds boring. Issac Newton & Leibniz and the later Stuart Kings (I did my graduate History work on this period) and the Glorious Revolution and Barbary Pirates and…it’s just incredible, and they were all bestsellers. But I have trouble convincing those I hold near and dear to read it. It’s just 3,000 pages or so. C’mon. I think sometimes it was written for me and I should just accept that. But if you’ll just start with Quicksilver, I swear you’ll love it, just like I do…
It would be easier to read Snow Crash, which is incredible near-future neo-libertarian cyberpunk, or The Diamond Age, about neo-Victorians and nanotech, or Cryptonomicom, which is about cryptography, the nature of money, modern data havens,World War II and the Enigma machine. These are all by Stephenson, and great so I usually let people negotiate me down into suggesting these, which are all incredibly brain-expanding, (and not 3,000 pages.)

List5 - Books Part I

My friend Roach has a great site in which he asks friends to make lists of five things that answer his prompt - List5.

I respond there a good bit and will post some of that here. His latest is very appealing to me, but I must grade papers. So I'll post what I've written so far.
Works of literature you suggest others read is the latest.
I. Great Topic. (This is in my wheelhouse.)
It also made me quickly realize that I am an evangelist for science fiction & fantasy. Not just from a geek point-of-view, which I clearly have, but because it deals with big ideas, things I euphemistically call “manly ideas”, like justice, loyalty, & responsibility that can seem pedantic or contrived in non-speculative fiction, but seem to make such good sense in science fiction. (I read a book reviewer recently who suggested that this is because mainstream novels have become more small & personal in recent years.) I recently read The Road and I’ve decided this is why Cormac McCarthy is so popular. He writes about manly themes and has used the western as a framework for putting those ideas in the mainstream in the past. I thought The Road was good but not great, but he took very traditional, almost trite, sci-fi ideas about an apocalypse and then used them to study a man struggling to make a better life for his son, while barely hanging on to his own humanity and life. And people love it because it is a “manly” story, but by using the science fiction framework, it was more acceptable than a straight-forward, modern story. But I digress… and I could be full of it.