implausible connections
stoat | October 10, 2012 I remember old sci-fi stories, where the colony ship would take generations to turn up in a new system, they'd take a brief look from orbit, land, and get overwhelmed by monsters / bacteria / natives / whatever exciting thing the author had thought up. And the obvious question was always: well, why didn't they spend a bit longer checking everything was all right? And the answer of course was that would make the story too boring.
But the contrast with Curiosity is fun. BA reports that because they've seen one odd little thing, everything is on hold until they've figured it out.
stoat | August 17, 2012Yes really, complete with miss-spelling of "enlightenment". Don't stop reading just because its about Hobbes, though :-). Its really about the LaRouche nutters, I think (the connection is via the Schiller Institute). My source is Brian Lantz, from the Spring 1996 issue of FIDELIO Magazine, found in the course of trying to work out the relationship between Hobbes and Francis Bacon (was he a pupil of, or just secretary to?). But moving on from that, we have a cornucopia of delights including
Over the past century, for geopolitical purposes, the British oligarchy has orchestrated a true…
stoat | March 15, 2011 Nukes in Japan are going off like badly-racked champagne bottles, and the only thing fiercer than the radiation levels is the press circus (I liked that as a sort of simile-thingy, but actually at the moment the radiation levels aren't desperately fierce). How do you folks without blogs manage to bottle up your excitement without writing stuff? Perhaps you actually talk to people, how last-century. Anyway, taking advantage of a brief surge of SB uptime (still dunno what is going on, some people don't see any problem, but it was down for me all last night):
Some people are using the disaster…
stoat | April 17, 2010Apparently we're all going to die because The Spooky Face means all that healthy foreign-grown lettuce and fine green beans can't be flown in. Or so said the radio this morning; I wasn't paying too close attention because I was sleepy, they may have phrased it slightly differently. However, when I got to Waitrose I was disappointed to find no panic-stricken queues - indeed it was quite quiet - and plenty of vegetables. Still nothing at all to see in the sky - well, other than the moon and so on, which remain perfectly clear.
While I'm on the misc stuff, I warn you I'm going to blog about our…
stoat | September 9, 2008BBC R4 had an interview this morning with two prof-types, prior to the LHC startup, and in a nod to the science they were asked for an analogy about how the Higgs particle (wot I don't believe in) produces mass. So they said (apparently this is a familiar idea): its like a cocktail party; if someone famous, for example Thatcher, moves through the guests, they get slowed down - given mass, effectively - as the guests, the Higgs, congregate around them. "Ah thank you", said the science reporter. "And good luck in your search for Margaret Thatcher". ""The guests, actually" said an aggrieved prof…
stoat | September 6, 2008These were part of my reading matter for the summer. They contrast somewhat; the former is by Paul Graham and is a collection of essay about the software world; the latter is a classic novel by Stendhal. But they do link together, vaguely, in this sense:
One of PG's themes is money, or wealth as he would prefer (wiki has a stub, which will at least point you to the book and the essays online). How to make it, and why its fair to have large disparities, and such. He asserts that a rapid rise in wealth occurs when socieites allow individuals and groups to retain the rights to the wealth they…