Category: Geekery

Introverts are Coming Out

5, 4, 3, 2, 1!

Continuing the theme of outing myself as an introvert from a few weeks back, a commenter on Boing Boing (you know, Boing Boing? You don’t? What’s wrong with you!) has happened to provide a link to the following article – which although it seems a little harsh on extroverts (most of my friends are extroverts and are nowhere near as annoying as the article suggests 😉 is an excellent overview on the subject…

The Atlantic – Caring for your Introvert

As the Sirius Cybernetics Electro-Sensa-Book Division would say, Read and Enjoy!

I want Hermione Granger and a Rocket Ship!

Take a ride on Rumbleroar!

I’m definitely coming late to the party but if you’re any kind of Harry Potter fan you owe it to yourself to check out A Very Potter Musical – an incredibly silly, completely unauthorised musical “reinterpretation” of Harry Potter put together by students at the University of Michigan last year. I could go on and on about how great it is, but all I really need to say is that it features a tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. You hear me? A tap-dancing Lord Voldemort. What the hell are you waiting for? (And what the hell is a Hufflepuff?)

The downside is I now have a crush on Draco Malfoy. Before anyone gets out Scarf of Sexual Preference I should point out that I have a crush strictly on the AVPM version of Draco Malfoy who is played by the very cute and downright hilarious Lauren Lopez (I have no idea why was she continually rolling around the stage but it was extremely amusing).

Anyway, tomorrow’s Australia Day (Boo! Hooray! Boo! Hooray! Call me when you’re finished) so you can expect an entry on how crap the Hottest 100 turns out to be at least 😉

Tribes of Londinium

Here comes the new religion, same as the old religion.

Yes yes, happy new year all, I’ve got better things to talk about than what I did on New Years Eve (bugger all really).

I’m using some of my time off work to get some more of my holiday snaps from the UK up on Flickr. One of said photos is of a pile of the Hungerford Bridge in London, festooned with the broken carcasses of skateboards.

I presumed at the time that there was some sadistic security guard who enjoyed confiscating boards off skaters who tried to ride them across the bridge, snapped them in half then threw them onto the pile. However on later reflection it became apparent to me that it was more likely that skaters from the nearby Queen Elizabeth Hall were deliberately depositing their broken boards on the pile as a sort of graveyard, and some quick Googling today suggested that this is in fact the case.

This is great. Why? Because it’s a complete throwback to the old, pagan traditions of neolithic and bronze age England!

Further upstream at Battersea there’s a stretch of river that’s yielded vast (well, vast for archeology 🙂 quantities of relics. Swords, shields, spearheads, that kind of things. The sheer concentration of them leaves no explanation apart from that they were deliberately thrown into the waters as some kind of sacrifice. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the urge to commit treasured personal possessions to the river that motivates today’s skaters is fundamentally the same one that motivated the ancient Britons of Battersea.

Even more interestingly this site compares the Hungerford pile to a neolithic mortuary enclosure – a separated, sacred space in which the bodies of the deceased were left to break down to just bones (which were then collected and buried). The author points out that the bridge pier is “an unreachable island in the Thames” – small islands (neither being exactly land or water) meeting the requirements for all kinds of sacred spaces. Great stuff!

Seriously people, there is a thesis in this…

ME GO TOO FAR!

Me am play gods!

There’s a new Dresden Codak out! Strange and wonderful as usual.

Poking around in the archive (because reading one Dresden Codak is never enough) I came across the Caveman Science Fiction strip which remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. Go on, take a look.

My obsession with FreakAngels has finally broken my mind. How else can you explain this? I mean, I could be out there living an amazing life of action, adventure and fast women, but instead I sit in the dark customising a mediawiki installation and combing through webcomic panels for every last, insignificant, tiny detail. I’m clearly insane.

A Most Significant Anniversery

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

It was 150 years ago today Darwin published his book explaining exactly what was going on. If I had time I’d compose an eloquent tribute, but as I don’t, the following quote will have to do…

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Indeed Charles, indeed.

Found in Space – Again

Another entry…

By the time a species achieves interstellar flight it has usually developed a sense of aesthetics so refined that exposure to poor design causes nausea, lethargy and (in extreme cases) death. As such the post-humans of Nova Eritrea had long divested their culture of all but the very highest in art and architecture, and had no inkling of the dangers contained in the ancient data device they found in a derelict spacewreck orbiting a nearby star… A year later fourteen billion Nova Eritreans were dead, taken by what the chroniclers would call “The Plague of the Lovely Lady Lumps”.

— Boing Boing 100-word fiction competition

Found in Space

Things I’ll do for a new computer, honestly…

When the joint European probe finally arrived at Lagrange Point four most commentators expected to find at least something. Interplanetary dust. A few rocks. Maybe even some ice – although almost everyone agreed that was a long shot. What we didn’t expect was shoes. Eight of them. Not pairs either – single shoes, floating idly in the gravitational void. Once the initial shock passed, the ESA set it all off again by announcing that they each had a desiccated human foot inside. Well, all apart from one. They said that contained a bear paw, but I mean – come on – that’s just crazy…

— Boing Boing 100-word fiction competition

Fly Season, Beetle Season

Biological controls for the win.

The fly season is on us again.

Way back before Europeans screwed things up, Australia didn’t really have a problem with flies. Water being scarce down here, animals didn’t waste it on excrement – kangaroos and other native animals generally produce small, dry pellets unsuitable for flies’ purposes. The only place flies could breed was in animal carcases and while there were enough of these to keep the flies in business, there were never enough to let them breed up to plague proportions.

Then the Europeans turned up and brought with them all those water squandering northern hemisphere animals like cows and horses and sheep – which wandered around the continent dropping big steaming pats everywhere. The flies thought that they’d died and gone to fly heaven and Australia became a place where you couldn’t open your mouth in summer without three or four dozen of the damn things plunging in and trying to claim your lungs in the name of all flykind.

After decades of this kind of thing the government finally decided to do something about it. They engaged in years of trials and careful testing (we at least learnt a lesson from the cane toad fiasco) and eventually a species of small, inoffensive dung beetle was imported from Africa and distributed across the country. Confronted with massive piles of excrement that the ecosystem was totally failing to deal with the beetles thought they’d died and gone to beetle heaven and got on with what they do best – rolling it up into balls and burying it.

Result? Fly numbers plummeted and summer became bearable again.

Except for October.

You see the flies start breeding in late September. The dung beetles don’t start breeding until late October. This means that for one month of the year the flies are back in force and we all suffer.

But hey, at least we can comfort ourselves remembering that all of summer used to be like that.

I can’t stop listening to this…

I can’t stop listening to this…

I’m not very good at singing songs but here’s a try…

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
You must first invent the universe,
Space is filled with a network of wormholes,
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Somewhen else in time,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The cosmos is full beyond measure,
With elegant truths,
Of exquisite interrelationships,
Of the awesome machinery of nature,

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos,
In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky,

The brain does much more than just recollect,
It intercompares, synthesises, analyses,
It generates abstractions,
The simplest thought like the concept of the number one,
Has an elaborate, logical underpinning,
The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The sky calls to us,
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will one day,
Venture to the stars,

For thousands of years,
People have wondered about the universe,
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?
From the big bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible big crunch,
Our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas,

How lucky we are to live in this time,
The first moment in human history,
When we are, in fact, visiting other worlds,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with four hundred billion suns,
The rising of the milky way,

The surface of the earth,
Is the shore of a cosmic ocean,
Recently we have waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting…

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