While procrastinating (my previous post was also a product of productive procrastination), I decided to write a crawler to travel links from my website out into the internet, and suck up images it finds along the way. It's been interesting watching it work, since it's gone to a lot of places I never thought were closely connected. The images it's picked up are the oddest sort of cruft, blogger icons, a British pound sign, and instructional quilting photos to name a few. My favorite was a picture of tiny plastic chairs being stacked haphazardly by a hand.

I think I'm going to run the program every couple of days just to see how the selection of images changes, as the pages linked through me change.

Well I guess I finally made it - a used copy of DTP (originating in New Jersey) is available online from Amazon for $26. As an author I think I should probably be annoyed since it is competing with copies I might sell that will generate royalties, but I can't help thinking that it's really cool - somebody bothered to buy, read it, and pass it along, and I feel like I've passed some sort of milestone.

I've just posted two new articles about the fundamental forces and their relationship to the structure of the universe at different scales:

The Big and the Small - Part 1

The Big and the Small - Part 2

In my wanderings on YouTube, I can across a clip for "A Dog's Breakfast" a movie written by actor David Hewlett (famous for the character of Rodney McKay on SGA, and also the friend of one of the coolest film directors ever IMHO, though totally underrated, Vincenzo Natali). The clip is pretty funny, and sends up some scifi cliches. I hope the film finds it's audience! Or maybe that's the other way around. There's a blog for the film.

This reminds me I need to write more. Too many projects, too few time machines.

After a fractured skull and a dogbite, I was beginning to assume that my hit points would rebound. Apparently not. After I finished the round of antibiotics I got for the dogbite, I immediately came down with - wait for it - bacterial bronchitis. What fun! What irony! The upside is that I finally have been able to see season 1 of Lost in sequence on DVD.

After several bouts of severe chest pain, which I knew originated in my lungs because I've had pnuemonia 3 times, whooping cough once when I was four, and bronchitis several times, I finally went to the urgent care place. The doctor was certain I had a heart attack, to which I protested, then he lectured me about Arthur Ash. He was somewhat sheepish after he saw my chest X-ray, but I don't think he really wanted to admit he was wrong. I just don't understand why so many doctors don't listen to their patients. I hardly ever go to the doctor unless it is urgent because I hate being automatically treated like a hypochondriac. These people either need more vacations and golf or less vacations and golf. They need to chill out!

In other, possibly more relevant news, I started a new short story I think I'm going to end up submitting to the scifi mags. It's called "Factory Day" and is sort of a dark, surreal, fantasy, sort of William S. Burroughs vs. George Orwell.

In response to the North Korean missile tests, I decided to post a couple of articles on rocketry. It's really just one big article, and I feel like it's a bit of a cheat to cut it up and call it two, but the truth is that people don't necessarily fancy reading a lengthy article. I'm just trying to convince myself that this helps in my mission to make physics fun....

Part 1

Part 2

I'm doubling down (up?) and answering Bono's question too:

What can we do to make poverty history?

Because of people like you, leaders of the world’s richest countries met in July 2005 and made a number of historic promises to help end the kind of extreme poverty that is needlessly killing 9,000 people a day in Africa. Millions of lives and the future of a continent are at stake.


My response is #25265, and answered with the same principles, because it is essentially the same problem.

Stephen Hawking recently posted a question on Yahoo Answers, which uses the collective brainpower of people on the internet to solve problems. His question is:

How can the human race survive the next hundred years?

In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?

My response was #19571 and outlines 20 fundamental principles that must be implemented to preserve humanity indefinitely. It took me about 5 hours to write, but might actually be well worth it. All the other responses I read weren't actual solutions, just commentary. But with about 20,000 responses, I don't have a hope in hell of getting "Best Answer" and a paltry 10 Yahoo points (whatever that is) as reward (you get two just for posting an answer).

Yes, I have yet another new obsession - YouTube. Sadly, I was looking for clips of the new Stargate promos (I don't have the SciFi channel since I refuse to pay for non a la carte cable). Yes, this is evidence of my geekiness, but I did find them on YouTube, which I had heard about but never visited. I also found zillions of user-made videos, some violating all sorts of copyright laws, some not. However, I haven't been so entertained in a long time. The internet has recently turned a corner, it used to be you could get any information you wanted on the web, now it's a tool to unleash a flood of latent creativity in millions of people. Power to the Long Tail!

In old news, and further evidence of my geeky-lame life, I got bit by a dog on the fourth of July. I had to go into the urgent care place, and file a report with the county. I felt like an idiot. But it was somewhat fortunate, as I also got to ask the doctor for free about something that happened the previous week - I fractured my skull when I opened a friend's SUV door (into my forehead). Apparently I'll be okay since I don't have any resulting vision problems, but it's such a lame way to get an injury. Though, on second thought, maybe all ways to get injuries are lame. You know, I could have been rockclimbing when my carbiner broke or something, wouldn't that be slightly less lame?