Lost Avatar
This has been up on our street since just before we moved in. I hope they found their cat; I thought the name was particularly appropriate.
Posts
Yay IAU!
Yay, the IAU did the right thing and Pluto takes its rightful place as a dwarf planet! http://www.iau2006.org/mirror/www.iau.org/iau0603/index.html Short version: Our solar system has 8 classic "planets" (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and at least 3 but probably more "dwarf planets" (Ceres, Pluto, 2003 UB 313 a.k.a. "Xena", etc). "Planet" means (1) it orbits the sun (2) big enough to be round-ish and (3) dynamically dominates its orbit. That actually skimps on exoplanets (that orbit other stars), where the common meaning is "non-fusing thing orbiting a star" instead of #1, but I can let that slide for now. Without #3 we'd have at least 12 and probably more like 30 "planets". Susan actually found a recent kids' book for Caspian last year that only lists the 8 planets explicitly, calls out Pluto as "a large cometlike object in the Kuiper belt" (I'll let the TNO/Kuiper-b...
On transhumanity, books and beaches
So a couple of times lately I've been walking home from work along Francisco which is pretty quiet, and realized that I'm plugged into my MP3 player and reading RSS feeds on my Pocket PC Phone . I think it was about the time that I paused to look up " Barbary Coast " on Wikipedia that I had managed to tune out most of the world and should really pay attention to things like traffic and driveways. Right now I'm typing this on my phone as I head out to Ocean Beach on the N Judah. With the phone's always-on net connection I don't need to carry maps or really have a destination. If I know there is likely to be some service I need in the direction I'm headed I don't have my usual nervousness about the unknown. Of course, I'm still treading on familiar ground. I finished reading Robert Reed's Sister Alice this morning (over waffles, yum!). Reed has a very interesting style. Unlike many other authors who tackle the challenge of narrating the ...
Slightly less old fashioned
Back in January I mentioned that I felt old fashioned: I still pay for a landline I carry a PDA, not a smartphone I only run one IM client I buy my music online, but on plastic things called "CDs" I’ve only bought a few ringtones and games for my phone. (And $5 for a MIDI file seems outrageous!) I only download obscure TV shows over P2P I still use e-mail to communicate with my friends I have more stuff stored on my hard drive than in the cloud Time for some updates: Su and I are planning to cut the landline in SF. We get WiFi and Satellite TV with our rent, so apart from wireless phone service we'll have cut down on our utility dependencies a little. My PDA is now a PocketPC Phone, which is like a Smartphone on steroids. I'm very happy with it. As of tomorrow, I'll have a Mac laptop for work. I have multiple blogs/domains: This one: http://inexorabletash.spaces.msn.com The old-school family site on a Unix box: http://www.calormen.com My map site:...
Old haunts, new directions
Today was my first full day back in San Francisco. And while I wanted to get out I wasn't feeling particularly adventuresome, so after sleeping in I visited some old haunts. Sloat Garden Center is a few blocks from where we used to live, in the Inner Richmond district. Hidden in a residential block, it's a pretty nice gardening store for urban gardeners. The Toy Boat Cafe on Clement St. has food, deserts (lots of ice cream) and toy - on display and for sale. I hiked up to Green Apple Books and picked up a new Stross ( Glasshouse ), a new Vinge (Rainbo's End) and an old Reed ( Sister Alice ). Both Stross and Vinge's writings are heavily influential on... well, the entirely forward-looking community that I'm trying to get myself formally indoctrinated into. Reed's work is very different. I'll admit that most of my favorite contemporary authors (Stross, Morgan, Doctorow) and even some of the old standbys (like Vinge) are excellent authors but the stories ha...