Name That Fear @ 05/25/2008 08:38 PM
The last couple of months have been packed: my wife losing her job, a spring break vacation, my daughter’s coming up on her high school graduation. Add to that, that I can’t blog from work (where I’m at my computer for 8 hours) and I don’t want to blog from home (where I don’t want to even look at a computer), and you have what you see before you (assuming anyone is actually looking at this blog anymore): a neglected blog, thin and unfed. It’s a sad, sad world…
Let’s see about changing that a bit, shall we?
First, I suffer from writer’s block. I’ve been trying to write a short science fiction story for months and can’t seem to get past the opening paragraphs without a terrible choking feeling taking hold of me. If you’ve ever had a nightmare where you’ve been paralyzed, unable to move while the thing you fear the most advances upon you, then imagine that happening while you’re awake, staring at a blank piece of paper or computer screen, words crowding your mind and trying to form up into some coherent narrative, unable to find their way onto that paper or screen because the channels are blocked by something that you can’t put a name to, some fear or anxiety or terror that refuses to be named, and thus, tamed. I hate it.
Second, when I can write, when the words and sentences and paragraphs and pages flow from my mind and hands like some wild river, it carries me away into a timeless place where the story writes me: where I become just the doorway for the story to enter this world. It’s the closest I come to what I’ve heard called “the zone”. I love it. (The other time when I enter this state is when I write programs, scripts, etc. at work.)
Third, I am determined to overcome this unnamed terror. I want to become a science fiction writer, join the ranks of those writers whose stories have inspired and thrilled and frightened and entranced and moved me. One way or another, I shall.
Okay, having gotten all that off my chest, here’s some links, accumulated over the time: messages from, as my friend Mollie put it, the world of Mike:
Mars
- NASA’s New Clues to Guide Search for Life on Mars
- Evidence Of Glaciers On Mars Suggests Recent Climate Activity
- Touchdown! Phoenix lands on Mars
Climate Change and The Environment
- Antarctic shelf ‘hangs by thread’
- Specially-designed soils could help combat climate change
- Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry
- Lakes of Meltwater Can Crack Greenland’s Ice and Contribute to Faster Ice Sheet Flow
- Arctic Ice More Vulnerable to Sunny Weather
- Coral reefs coming back from the dead
Tips, Tricks, and Tools
- Pepper spray a viable alternative to guns for deterring bears
- Instant science-fiction convention finder, just add ZIP codes
- Sync iCal-Based Calendars Together with FuseCal
- Mount USB Drives in Assigned Folders to Keep Them Straight
- Automate System Shutdowns and Restarts with GShutdown
- Trinity Rescue Kit Resets Forgotten Windows Passwords
- Email ninjitsu revealed
- Get Complete Help Files for Any Google Service
- eGO Cycle
- Nite Ize S-Biner
- Built’s cargo laptop sleeve
Food for (Serious) Thought – About Education, From Robert X. Cringeley
Resilient Communities – A Series From John Robb
- RESILIENT COMMUNITY: TRANSITION TOWNS
- RESILIENT COMMUNITY: MICROGRIDS
- RESILIENT COMMUNITY: FABRICATION
- JOURNAL: Food and the R[esilient]C[ommunity]
- THE THERMODYNAMIC CRISIS
- DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES
- JOURNAL: Why use the Thermodynamic Crisis as a framework?
Interesting Bits From Around The World
- World’s oldest tree discovered living in Sweden
- Flu tracked to viral reservoir in tropics
- Humans Nearly Went Extinct 70,000 Years Ago
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Teetering On A Knife's Edge @ 03/22/2008 09:56 PM
From BoingBoing: Good comment thread: What’s happened to the U.S. economy?:
There’s a good discussion revving up in the comment thread of Mark Frauenfelder’s entry, Documentary examines possibility of US dollar collapse.
Here’s one example comment:
And we’ve had this inflation/recession building up for approximately a decade now. It could take at least that long to get back out of it. So I would not chalk this up to “fear mongering”. Fear mongering of the phantom menace called “terrorism” is what got us into this hole.
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Food For Thought @ 03/22/2008 09:51 PM
From I, Cringely: War of the Worlds: The Human Side of Moore’s Law:
Here, buried in my sixth paragraph, is the most important nugget: we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
Cringely goes on to lay out the case that the way kids are learning on their own to search out information, communicate with each other, and view the world as one big interconnected whole, is chipping away at the very foundations of our school-based educational system.
The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world. I live in Charleston, SC where the public schools are atrocious despite spending an average of $16,000 per student each year. Why shouldn’t I keep my kids at home and online, demanding that the city pay for it?
It’s a good, deep question that deserves comparable thought.
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Going, Going... @ 03/22/2008 09:43 PM
From BBC News: Glaciers suffer record shrinkage:
The rate at which some of the world’s glaciers are melting has more than doubled, data from the United Nations Environment Programme has shown.
Average glacial shrinkage has risen from 30 centimetres per year between 1980 and 1999, to 1.5 metres in 2006.
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Martian Ice @ 03/13/2008 12:46 PM
Via BBC News: Huge ice deposits ‘seen’ on Mars:
Large volumes of water ice have probably been detected below Mars’ surface, far from the planet’s polar ice caps, scientists have said.
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