MemeMachineGo!

=v= I've been remiss for not having yet mentioned Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery. It's a webcomic that centers on bicycling, thereby combining two of this blog's abiding interests. In many ways I am Yehuda Moon, so I have to admit to some bias, but still and all, it's a great comic strip that's gone through some interesting twists and turns. I highly recommend reading it from the beginning.

One strip in April introduced the phrase "Dateline moms". Curious, I consulted various search engines and only found 3 hits, one of which was an interview with the cartoonist. Two months later, still the same 3 hits.

A friend inquired about the phrase, and the cartoonist mentioned the movie Knocked Up. In one scene, a fretful mother has come across a website of registered sex offenders, and her husband asks, "How much Dateline NBC can you watch?" I don't watch TV, but apparently this is a show that features things you can be scared about. Especially if you're a mom.

At this point, it's been parlayed into a mini-meme, not yet spread very far by the Internet, much. Is that even allowed?

=v= In honor of high gas prices and whatnot, this year the theme of Black Rock City's streets is a celebration and glorification of carsickness.

I was unaware that Nevada needed another Vegas. The Green Man is so last year ago.

I'm currently upgrading to MovableType 4. Any number of things are likely to be broken while I'm doing this.

Updated: Searching and commenting look like they work. The blogroll is toast, though.

Haven’t been blogging much lately. Here are some things I have been doing:

I trashed my system hard drive, and started over from scratch with an Ubuntu 8.04 installation. Still have to see what, if anything, I can recover from the old drive.

New job! I transferred to a new department with my employer. I’ll have to learn Java, which will beat all heck out of Progress 4GL. My commute is a little longer, and almost all of the longer part is uphill, but I can still bike to work in under a half hour, and don’t expect much sympathy.

Visited my parents in New York for my mother’s birthday. Ever since we saw Rivers and Tides, a documentary about Andy Goldsworthy’s art, Pocahontas and I have wanted to visit the Storm King Art Center, to see the Storm King Wall (which may have been featured only in an extra on the DVD instead of the documentary itself — I don’t recall.) We finally made it — it’s a great place and I’d like to go back when we have more time. They also had three George Rickey kinetic sculptures. And we saw Spamalot on Broadway. Sure enough, the geeks have won.

We watched Jekyll on DVD. On his blog, screenwriter John Rogers said:

[…] The easiest way to start a conversation in Hollywood right now is to simply ask “So, favorite bit in Jekyll?” The love is universal.

And it was really good. James Nesbitt’s Mr. Hyde was a better Joker than any actual portrayal of the Joker I’ve seen.

The same week more current geeks were standing in line for a new iPhone, I bought a used Nokia n800 “Internet Tablet”, sort of a laptop for someone with a very, very small lap. I wrote almost three years ago about my lust for its predessor, the Nokia 770. If I write up my thoughts on the device, I’ll post them to Strange Loopiness.

Read lots of books and comics, but if I say anything about them, I’ll save it for another entry.

Back in the day, the blogosphere was abuzz with the story of British novelist Matthew Branton, who was so fed up with publishing, he was just giving away his new novel.

So far as I can see, that novel never had a book publication. And matthewbranton.com has gone 404. And the Independent isn’t hosting the novel anymore.

Had there been a book, one could probably find a used copy (online.) With no book, well, if it weren’t for the Internet Archive (1 2 3 4 5), it might have disappeared entirely.

That’s the slippery thing about the net… obscurity can be one of the things it makes easier.

(US-centric advice follows.)

With some exceptions depending on your exact location, dialing 911 on a cellphone will get you the local state police. If you’re on a major road, that might be the relevant organization. Most other places, it’s not. In an emergency, you don’t want to waste any time, and getting to the top of one 911 queue only to talk to someone who doesn’t recognize the names of local roads and needs to call another 911 system will waste time.

There is an alternative. Many police departments offer phone numbers that go to the same system as their 911 calls, so that you can call them directly from cellphones.

Where I am, most of the local police departments are in the 21st century and present these direct-dial numbers prominently on their websites’ front pages or on a ‘Contact Us’ page, and identify them as what to call from a cellphone. (A couple of towns didn’t have a direct-dial equivalent; I entered their general phone numbers anyway.) I label them all starting ‘911’ so they’re together in one block at the top of my contacts list.

It’ll only take a few minutes to look up the numbers for the police departments of the municipalities you frequent and enter them in your cellphone. Go ahead. I’ll wait. At least do your work and home.

It could be a matter of life or death.

I mentioned before that Tor was promotionally giving out free e-books, while mentioning that I’d never actually finished anything book length on an electronic device.

For one last week, all of the books in the promotion are available, listed in one convenient entry of the new Tor blog.

One of the things I hoped to use my new Nokia n800 for is as an ebook reader. I just finished reading John Scalzi’s Agent to the Stars on it, and I’m happy to report that it was a wholly pleasant experience — the n800’s screen is big enough and crisp enough to make a passable substitute for printed text.

Now I’m off to download all the ebooks.

And this time, I’ll finally finish Blindsight (not a part of the Tor promotion, just something I’d previously failed to finish while reading it on my Palm.)

A mantis shrimp can throw a punch at 50 mph.

In April 1998, an aggressive creature named Tyson smashed through the quarter-inch-thick glass wall of his cell. He was soon subdued by nervous attendants and moved to a more secure facility in Great Yarmouth. Unlike his heavyweight namesake, Tyson was only four inches long.

Previously.

Two brothers in Turin built their own listening station in a WW II bunker to listen in on the U.S. and Soviet space programs.

The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.

“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.

They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index - the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face - to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.

I just read JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, written by comic/TV writer Patton Oswalt. It was disjointed in places, but is redeemed by Batman delivering this superheroic Anna Karenina principle:

That’s why evil always fails. There’s only one kind of good, and it’s all evil ever gets to battle. Makes it weak and narrow-minded. There’s an endless variety of evil. And good’s got a lifetime of tricks up its sleeve. We learn from the best.

I’ve been really lame about my planning for the forthcoming Worldcon, only arranging travel a couple of weeks ago. Just one more tiny little detail to take care of… anyone have any space to share?

My situation has flip-flopped. I acquired a reservation at the Hyatt (the non-party hotel) from friends who weren’t using it, so now I’m looking for roommates. Anyone need a room? (The reservation is for arrival Wednesday, August 6th and departure Sunday, August 10th.)