A while ago I did the usual song-and-dance with the California DMV to renew the registration of my vehicle, as one does periodically. Due to the fact that I live in a fairly high-infrastructure area (not quite New York City, but certainly not as underdeveloped as Pittsburgh or the part of the DC metropolitan complex I used to reside in are in this respect) it's actually kind of rare that I need to actually drive anywhere. If I can't walk to it in half an hour or therabouts I can take BART and not think much of it (usually because …
Readers of my site or social aquaintenances may be aware of independent presidential candidate and outspoken transhumanist Mr. Zoltan Istvan, who is at this time on the campaign trail. More specifically Zoltan is one of the residents of the Immortality Bus which is driving across the country to raise awareness of death and why time and funds must be allocated to study cures for aging and decrepitude in the human animal. Zoltan Istvan seems, in the times I've spoken with him on a casual basis a reasonably decent, intelligent, and well read person. He is a very successful and ambitious …
All of the t-shirts commonly available in California seem cut to make you feel bad about yourself. No matter your self-image, no matter your body shape or configuration, just about any t-shirt you find is going to make you feel fat. At the very least, most sizes run one size smaller (i.e., what is marked 'large' is actually cut as a 'medium', and so forth).
Upon reflection, this might be why personal exercise is so common in California.
A little over two weeks ago Sitwon, Haxwithaxe and I made the trek to Barcelona, Spain for the International Summit For Community Wireless Networks, partially because we thought that we might get some useful things out of it for Project Byzantium, but also because Project Byzantium had been invited to attend and present some of our work and ideas for the community at large at the conference. So, arrangements were made in due course, and our journey took us from Baltimore to Philadelphia for a layover, and then an eight hour transatlantic flight carried us to Spain. Sitwon was traveling …
For man years I'd always looked somewhat askance at Terrence McKenna's talks about the year 2012, his hypothesis of time having a fractal nature, and Everything Changing in the year 2012 of the common era. That I've taken for myself the name of a certain British science fiction hero (and have a certain interest in Time) aside, it never seemed, well, plausible, to put not too fine a point on it. I even went so far as to ruminate about it a couple of years back to get it out of my system. Then, earlier this year I conceeded …
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 …
Note: All links anonymized due to the possibility that Someone might subpoena web server logs.
Earlier today during my morning news crawl (Twitter has pretty much supplanted everything I used before due to how fast word travels on that service, even Google News) I ran across something that made me shiver while considering the implications: the US Department of State is considering implementing new paperwork that United States citizens would have to fill out to apply for a passport which includes a biographical questionnaire that asks some pretty outlandish things which are analyzed in depth here. The proposed form, called …
I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of us are glad that the year 2010 of the common era is over, done with, and a candidate for erasure from the Time Vortex if it starts getting uppity again. Sure, it had its ups and downs for all of us - they always do - but last year was a particularly bad one on a large scale. There was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that's destroyed a entire ecosystem, perhaps permanantly. Last January was the earthquake that devastated the island of Haiti, resulting in the …
Note: I started working on this article the day after the first one went up. Since that time, I've been keeping an eye on things while on vacation in Pennsylvania and collecting another queue of a few dozen links to sort through. I've also had a couple of disressing conversations with people which went something like this: "The TSA is there to keep us safe when traveling. It's worth being imaged nude to stay safe. It's worth being skin searched to stay safe. No, the TSA would never hire screeners who abuse their power. No screeners are abusing their power …
I was originally going to fold this into my follow-up post on the TSA's "get imaged by a pornoscanner or get felt up by a screener" policy but I think this deserves to be brought up by itself, lest it get lost in the noise.
