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Tor Books has a current promotion: sign up on a mailing list, and each week, you’re mailed links to download free e-book novels of theirs. Coming up next is 2006 Hugo Winner Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, a fine novel.
Then again, I’ve never managed to read a novel-length e-book, despite having taken a couple of stabs at 2007 Hugo nominee Blindsight. I look forward to the day e-paper readers get cheap.
I attended an engineering school. I’ve participated in programming contests. I’ve attended science fiction conventions, comic book conventions, gaming conventions, a furry convention, programming language user group meetings, Linux expos, technical conferences. I know geeky. I’ve worked with geeky. Geeky is a friend of mine.
And Friday night’s Jonathan Coulton concert may have been the geekiest event I’ve ever attended.
The opening act was Paul and Storm, half of what used to be Da Vinci’s Notebook. I saw Da Vinci’s Notebook in Berkeley a while back, in their last tour before breaking up. Between songs, Paul said “We have a theory about our demographic. Raise your hand if you’ve ever owned a d20.” At least half the hands in the audience went up. “Now keep your hand up if you still have it,” he said. Most of those hands stayed up. And one audience member threw a d20 onto the stage. Yes, he’d had it on him.
So that tells you something about the geekiness level of the opening act. While I was disappointed when I heard Da Vinci’s Notebook had broken up when I only got to see them once, Paul and Storm’s act has consoled me — they’re funny as hell and I’d pay money to see them headline anytime.
Then came Jonathan Coulton. I’d heard references to him in the blogosphere, but was first really aware of him when I followed a link to the Code Monkey remix contest. and listened to Code Monkey.
Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting with boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not functional or elegant
What do Code Monkey think
Code Monkey think maybe manager wanna write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy just proud
I was singing it so much that Pocahontas adapted it to
Code Monkey drive his wife crazy
Singing Code Monkey song
So he sang his set about code monkeys, zombies, mad scientists, Mandelbrot sets (you’re one badass fucking fractal.) He took out a Zendrum to play Mr. Fancy Pants, explaining that he needed to get one for the song “and because it’s frikkin’ awesome!”, obviously beside himself over how cool a toy it is. He played his theme song to Portal, one of the huge video games of 2007, and then later reprised it by bringing up prominent bloggers to play the Rock Band version.
And he owned the audience, who had variously dressed as zombies, brought homemade monkey-pony hybrid stuffed animals to wave during Skullcrusher Mountain, sang along. It was like it was the most important holiday of the year.
Come to think of it, I don’t think that’s far off.
The Unburdened Mind Ever think one of your co-workers was a psychopath? Odds aren’t bad — about 1% of everyone is.
Wonderland: re-creating children’s drawings as photos.
Embodied cognition — humans don’t think by brain alone.
An sf story I read a while back included people being teleported by representing their bodies as data, transmitting the data, and creating a physical body based on it at the destination. Conventionally, the data was compressed by using templates for various body parts, instead of representing every nuance of the real parts. In the story, one such transmission was taking a long time due to the transportees having insisted on foregoing compression. “There’s something awfully precious about making sure you have your very own small intestine,” the narrator said.
It’s a good line, but I’m not sure that it’s a precious concern after all.
A man is claiming he taught high school for 17 years while illiterate.
For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher’s assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.
“What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn’t the written word in there. I always had two or three teacher’s assistants in each class to do board work or read the bulletin,” said Corcoran.
I find this story hard to swallow, though it would also be an odd thing to lie about. (Then again, he’s made his current career out of being the formerly illiterate teacher who promotes literacy.)
This professor had an interesting technique to keep his students’ attention.
“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.” And thus began our ten-week course.
This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention - by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly checksum new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact. Early in the quarter, the Lie of the Day was usually obvious - immediately triggering a forest of raised hands to challenge the falsehood. Dr. K would smile, draw a line through that section of the board, and utter his trademark phrase “Very good! In fact, the opposite is true. Moving on … “
Read the rest. It gets better.
Bartleby offers a large number of references online, many of them public domain and available elsewhere, like Project Gutenberg, many of them not.
Some highlights are:
There are tons more.
Elsewhere you can find the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. And For convenient downloading (and sharing), Project Gutenberg offers large numbers of books packaged as CDs and DVDs. Get them with BitTorrent to ease their server load.