As you may or may not have heard on the interwebbytubes, the DC metroplex was rocked by an earthquake that measured 5.8 on the Richter scale this afternoon and was felt as far away as Ontario, Canada. Various and sundry other locales reported the quake as well, from Pittsburgh, PA to Tampa, FL, to Brooklyn and New York, NY. An aftershock measuring 2.8 on the Richter scale was reported a little while later (I don't know how long). This is the second to hit the area in the last couple of years; the quake that occurred in July …
As I'd mentioned in an earlier post, here are the pictures I took at the concert. Yes, this would be the show that gave me my first suntan in over six years (by way of a sunburn) and kicked my body's immune system off the edge of a cliff by exposing it to a hellish cauldron of airborn illnesses and allergies that can only come from going to a convention or camping out for a concert.<
Highlights of the show: hanging out with lots of killjoys of all shapes and sorts. I got to meet a lot of new people …
If you've never heard of a flashmob before, it's when word gets out somehow for everyone who finds out about it to gather at a particular place and time, count down from five, and then do something weird. There have been flashmobs where everyone opened an umbrella for precisely 23 seconds, made chicken noises, turned their shirts inside out, had a pillow fight, and even briefly created a supercomputer. About five years ago, there was even a silent disco held in the stations of London's subway system and 1,000 people gathered for a flash rave in Union Square in …
Now that I've got a little time to breathe, here are the pictures I took at the showing of The Transcendent Man two weekends ago. Not yet scanned is the piece of memorabelia Ray Kurzweil was kind enough to autograph for me.
I didn't get a chance to post about it at the time, but Lyssa, Keely, and I went to Washington, DC's Chinese New Year Celebration downtown. Once again, I went in cold because I was curious about the experience, mostly because barely-remembered memories of television shows about Chinese New Years from my childhood aren't really anything to go on. I knew in some hazy fashion that fireworks were involved, but I hadn't realized that they'd be unrolling gigantic strings of firecrackers - Black Cats, we used to call them. Specifically, they were strings that, when coiled up, were about three feet …
Some months ago I caught word that somebody had made a documentary about possibly the most high profile transhumanist in the history of the movement/subculture/distributed multicellular mass of hackers, geeks, and technologists, Ray Kurzweil. He was the first to not only speculate seriously but write at length about the possibility of what Verner Vinge dubbed the technological singularity, a hypothetical point in human history at which the rate of change goes asymptotic. Which, so the hypothesis goes, could either go weakly godlike or pear-shaped, the jury's still out on that particular point. I've kept a sensor array peeled …
This is an hour's worth of accumulation, mind you. It started snowing when Lyssa and I were on our way home and hasn't stopped yet. While stopped at a light, we saw a bolt or two of lightning streak across the sky, and our return home was hearlded by thunder.
Yes, DC is known for occasional thundersnow storms.
Chances are if you've been on the Net in the past couple of years you've heard about the neigh-omnipresent surveillance network Great Britain has built. It's been said that there are over four million securicams watching the street, alleys, storefronts, street corners, front stoops; to put it another way, that's about one camera for every fourteen people, though some estimates are higher than that. That's a scary number if you think about it a little. Did you know, however, that my hometown of Washington, DC is building its own panopticon network?
In hindsight it shouldn't be that surprising. From time …
