Even though he was convicted, I actually like former Illinois Governor George H. Ryan. He was two for three for me; he promised to fix the Hillside Strangler, and did; and then he put the death penalty on hold. So he sold fake licenses through the Secretary of State’s office. This is Illinois, after all. [...]
Cross-posted from Scimatic.com Was out at UofT’s Convocation Hall last night, where I got to listen to Malcolm Gladwell riff on, well, lots of stuff. Gladwell has always been one of my favourite writers, not only because he writes well and raises interesting questions, but also because he’s one of the only writers I know [...]
Hope all my folks and friends down in the US have a great Thanksgiving. I’d love some turkey and apple pie, so save me a slice.
It’s been non-stop election coverage around here. I’m going a bit crazy about it. But I’m going to assume the best about my friends, family and fellow Americans (even those, like me, living in another country) have done or are doing the right thing and voting for Barack Obama. Most of the people I know [...]
I worked for 16 weeks one year in Columbia, SC, with a great group of folks down at SCANA (including the guy who won $100,000 from America’s Funniest Home Videos for his quadruplets). The best contact I met there was Rick Kirkland, all-around great guy. Rick had a tradition of calling people up on Thanksgiving [...]
Cross-posted from Scimatic The Large Hadron Collider at CERN turned on last week to much fanfare. It managed to make Google’s front page image. Fortunately, they avoided this. It’s quite a technical achievement, decades in the making, and the LHC is the "undiscovered country" of experimental particle physics. However, I have mixed feelings about it. [...]
Cross-posted from Scimatic.com Jen Dodd wrote to the attendees of SciBarCamp 2008 to ask “… what has happened for you because of SciBarCamp. New business contacts or opportunities? New research projects? New artistic collaborations? New directions in your work or education?” Well, for me the impact of SciBarCamp was pretty huge. At the time of [...]
Seriously. I’m sitting in the theatre for The Dark Knight (aside: Totally Awesome. Loved it. Wicked. Go see it. Big ups to my friend Matt’s wife who was second assistant accountant on the shoot, and hence associated with something way cooler than I’ve ever done), when the trailer for The Watchmen came on. Within about [...]
Tagged comics, nerdsWe bought a new house! Pretty exciting stuff, as it is a detached house in a slightly better area. By that I mean that we are now in the school catchment that we wanted to be in so the kid can go to JK with all his friends from his daycare. Still in the same [...]
Two nights ago I attended Damian Conway’s excellent talk: “Temporally Quaquaversal Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces … Made Easy!” My notes said that he left out the “Virtual Nanomachine” part of the talk title, although he did talk about virtual nanomachines. The talk was a preview of the keynote session that Damian [...]