Jay Lake: Writer

[links] Link salad hears the voice of reason, disregards

Iain Banks dies of cancer aged 59 — Author Iain Banks has died aged 59, two months after announcing he had terminal cancer, his family has said. Sigh.

An oil painting of Green — By artist Lindsey Look. This is cool.

Jade de Jay Lake — An apparently favorable review of the French translation of Green.

Almost All the Way Home From the Stars is now available as a trade paperback — Collaborative fiction from me and specficrider.

Unpacking the “Real Writers Have Talent” Myth — Yup. This. I’ve said for years you need some combination of talent, persistence and luck-facilitated-through-professionalism, but you don’t need all three. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

What Game of Thrones Season 3 Did Better — And Worse — Than the Book

Vintage Buses — Ooh. Though when it comes to buses, I always wanted one of these.

Human-scale invisibility cloak unveiled — I see what they did there, with that headline.

100 years after ore boat disappeared in Lake Superior storm, searchers locate wreck

Department of Unusual Ordnance Finds — Huh. Increment charges. Who knew? (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)

Old Opportunity Mars rover makes rock discovery — Ah, clay.

Waiting on new climate deal ‘will set world on a path to 5C warming’ — International Energy Agency chief economist says rising emissions make limiting increase to 2C ‘extremely challenging’ As always, the real world doesn’t conform to conservative ideology. History will be baffled that one country’s minority political party whose ideology is based on blatant and knowing counterfactuals managed to hold the entire word hostage and cause trillions of dollars worth of damage in the process.

Biblical Marriage Not Defined Simply As One Man, One Woman: Iowa Religious Scholars’ Op-Ed — “The debate about marriage equality often centers, however discretely, on an appeal to the Bible,” the authors wrote. “Unfortunately, such appeals often reflect a lack of biblical literacy on the part of those who use that complex collection of texts as an authority to enact modern social policy.” That’s the Republican party sorted right there. Too bad no one in conservative circles ever listens to reality-based messages like this.

Civil Disobedience on a Turkish Game Show — That is some serious courage. (Via danjite.)

I’m Not A Conservative And You Shouldn’t Be One Either — What if the problem with your political party is that the policies it advocates are bad? You can’t fix that problem by “rebranding” the same platform or finding younger, less-white candidates to promote it. You definitely can’t fix it by leaning into your failed policies and becoming more extreme.

Its the Corporations, Stupid: Why we are 2nd Amendment Fundamentalists but the 4th Amendment doesn’t Count — Actually, it’s the conservatives, who will hold the line on the 2nd Amendment no matter how many tens of thousands of people die every year, but otherwise believe you can’t use your civil liberties if you’re dead, and are willing to legislate away the entire rest of the Bill of Rights for fear of Muslims in America’s bathroom.

QotD?: Got any good advice?

6/10/2013
Writing time yesterday: 0.75 hours (WRPA)
Hours slept: 6.5 hours (interrupted)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 246.8
Number of FEMA troops on my block creating tornados for political distraction: 0
Currently reading: Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program by Sharon Salzberg

Tags: Art, Books, Cancer, cars, Christianists, climate, Cool, economy, Links, Mars, media, Personal, Politics, Process, Religion, reviews, Science, stories, Tech, weird, Writing

Posted: 4:47 am Mon June 10 2013 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad’s hands felt like two balloons

Game of Thrones author braces for backlash after shocking ending — Sucker’s been in print for years, not sure what’s shocking about the Red Wedding at this point.

The earwormery — An ongoing academic study of that most annoying phenomenon. (Via Lisa Costello.)

Untouched water as old as 2.6 billion years is found: Don’t drink it — Wow.

An Elizabethan Cyberwar — Huh. (Thanks to my Dad.)

The Extraordinary “Disco Ball” Now Orbiting Earth — A mirror ball–the most perfect test particle ever placed in orbit–should help Italian scientists measure an exotic effect predicted by general relativity It’s called LARES. Does that mean we’ll soon see one called PENATES?

Microsoft and IBM Researchers Develop a Lie Detector for the Cloud — A way to check whether calculations have been tampered with could make cloud computing more reliable, and boost privacy.

Fox’s Stossel Dismisses Aid To Needy With Claim That No One Starved During The Great Depression — Yet another in the endless series of objective proofs that conservatives lie about everything. (Especially on FOX.)

QotD?: Can you tell me where it hurts?

6/3/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.75 hours (revisions to “Rock of Ages”)
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (interrupted)
Body movement: 0.0 hours (feet hurt)
Weight: n/a (traveling)
Number of FEMA troops on my block creating tornados for political distraction: 0
Currently reading: Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Books, Cool, history, Links, media, music, Personal, Politics, Science, space, Tech

Posted: 3:03 am Mon June 03 2013 | Comments(3) |

[links] Link salad for a sleepy Friday

Why John O’Halloran shaved his head mustache and beard — For Christine, and for me. Go read this.

Jay Lake, Alien Hunter — The recent Waterloo Productions video in a non-Facebook environment.

Jay Lake’s Tub (and on being a newer writer) — Writing advice, which I originally got from Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch. The tub is not original to me.

The System: C’est La Wifi — Haha. We had exactly this discussion in my house earlier this week.

Sad Cat Diary — Hahaha. (Via David Goldman.)

Great tweets of science — Hahahahah.

Parents have gastric bypass; children’s DNA may receive the benefits — It’s epigenetics: Kids’ gene expression may occur a generation after surgery.

Neuron growth in children ‘leaves no room for memories’ — The reason we struggle to recall memories from our early childhood is down to high levels of neuron production during the first years of life, say Canadian researchers. I have very few memories prior to age seven. (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)

Mars mission astronauts face radiation exposure risk — Ya think?

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity Discovers Evidence for Ancient Streambed and Flowing Water

Oceans Under the Ice Worlds? — This is intensely cool.

How the turtle got its unique hard shell — How the turtle shell evolved has puzzled scientists for years, but new research sheds light on how their hard shells were formed. The really great thing about science is how it institutionalizes uncertainty. No easy answers, no hard truths, just a continual process of observation and evidence gathering and refinement of theory.

Slow-motion 7.0 earthquake drags on for 5 months under New Zealand

Northern Ireland Town Fakes Prosperity for G8 Summit — Um…

The Questions People Get Asked About Their Race — Wow…

Pundits get more followers for being confident than correct — Dunning-Kruger FTW!

As Glaciers Melt, Alpine Mountains Lose Their Glue, Threatening Swiss Village — It’s amazing, the lengths liberals will go to for their global warming hoax. Thank God for Rush Limbaugh and the Republican Party, otherwise we might have to do something about this before it’s too late.

What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers? — Wow. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson actually said this. Replace “humanity” with “my bank account” and that’s conservatism in a nutshell. They’re not even pretending any more.

Big Utah Gun Rights Advocate Arrested, Accused Of Domestic Violence — Yep. We are definitely all so much safer, especially with guns in the hands of people like this gentleman and all he represents.

Rick Perry Vetoes “Buy American” Bill Approved 145-0 by Texas House — Because patriotism! (Via shsilver.)

Imprisoned CIA Torture Whistleblower John Kiriakou Pens “Letter from Loretto”

Michele Bachmann is gone, but her paranoid politics has become the norm for GOP

Lincoln Chafee’s long journey from Republican to Democrat — But what’s remarkable is that someone with Chafee’s priorities was once a Republican. Chafee left the GOP six years ago, largely because he had decided it had squandered its mantle as a party of fiscal responsibility. Yep. Reality will do that to you. If you’re in favor of fiscal responsibility, strong on defense, and interested in pro-business economic growth, the GOP is not the party for you based on the historical record of both major parties in the past thirty years. If you’re in favor of social justice, income equality, consumer protection, jobs or the environment, the GOP has never been the party for you. What’s left? Proudly fact-free rhetoric bent on generating angry white men is all I can see.

QotD?: What week is this?

5/31/2013
Writing time yesterday: 2.0 hours (revisions to “Rock of Ages”)
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: n/a (forgot)
Number of FEMA troops on my block scamming disaster aid slush funds: 0
Currently reading: Thud by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Cancer, climate, Cool, economy, Funny, guns, health, healthcare, Ireland, Links, Mars, media, nature, New Zealand, Personal, Politics, Process, race, Science, space, Tech, Texas, Videos, Writing

Posted: 5:07 am Fri May 31 2013 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad is always questing

Kyle Cassidy reads steampunk in the original Klingon

A quiet scene from The Matrix demonstrates how to make exposition compelling — (Via Daily Idioms, Annotated.)

Ghost War — Electronic and physical deception during WWII.

Asteroid Mining Company Kickstarts a Space Telescope — Just think carefully about that headline for a moment. I love living in the future.

Awesome Time Lapse Video Shows 281 Days Of Roving On Mars

Scientists poke frozen mammoth, liquid blood squirts out — A variation on the age-old “poke it with a stick” method revives cloning hopes.

Volcano nerds will love Oregon’s Newberry Monument

Holy Land for sale — Wow. Weird.

Police: Maine man staged kidnap that killed girl — What is the matter with people?

I was a liberal mole at Fox News: From Bill O’Reilly to Roger Ailes, here’s all the inside dope — (Via shsilver.)

Americans Underestimate How Many Other Americans Support Same Sex Marriage — This is in line with the fact that most conservative positions poll much worse than politicians of any stripe believe. Viz the recent votes on gun control in the Senate. Strangely enough, Your Liberal Media significantly overrepresents the socially marginal ideas of the GOP as being a balanced part of the American zeitgeist. Think about this: Why aren’t the core GOP stances of evolution denial and climate change denial laughed right off the newspaper page and television screen on the face of it? In any rational society, they would be. Like many if not most GOP positions, these aren’t debatable issues among intellectually honest people with a grounding in reality. Conservatism has become a religion.

Health Care and Social Justice — Look at which states have rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion — and see how “color-blind” public policy can produce bigoted effects. Ta-Nehisi Coates on ObamaCare and race.

Gun Deaths Outpace Motor Vehicle Deaths in 12 States and the District of Columbia in 2010 — Because guns make us all safer. And unlike automobiles, there is absolutely no reason a sane society that values the lives, health and safety of its citizens would register or regulate firearms. Just ask the GOP and the NRA, they’ll tell you.

This Is How the NRA Ends — A bigger, richer, meaner gun-control movement has arrived. We should ever be so lucky as to get those vile, death-worshipping NRA bastards out of our political system.

Top Ten Michele Bachmann Goofs on the Middle East — Well, she is a Republican. As such, there’s no political or cultural expectation that her statements should correspond with reality or those liberal “facts” and “data” in any way. Certainly Your Liberal Media doesn’t hold conservatives accountable for their Reality Gap.

QotD?: Can you remember what you forgot?

5/30/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hour (revisions to “Hook Agonistes”)
Hours slept: 6.75 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 248.2
Number of FEMA troops on my block scamming disaster aid slush funds: 0
Currently reading: Thud by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Cool, gay, guns, healthcare, Links, media, Movies, Oregon, Personal, Photos, Politics, Process, Religion, Science, steampunk, Videos, weird

Posted: 5:20 am Thu May 30 2013 | Comments(2) |

[links] Link salad wonders how it can dance when our earth is turning

JayFest — Sci-Fi Book Fair & Group Signing — My friends at Powell’s are hosting a group signing in support of my cancer journey, book sales to benefit the Clayton Memorial Medical Fund. The evening of June 13, 2013, two days before JayCon, at Powell’s Cedar Hills in Beaverton, OR.

Almost All the Way Home From the Stars: Seven Science Fiction Stories — An ebook of my collaborate work with Ruth Nestvold is now available. Includes the story we had in SCI FICTION together.

Vintage Book Jacket Art — (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Two uncomfortable truths: New Merida looks a little whorey. Fewer people care about this than you would think.

Brain Training Helps Clear Cognitive Fog Caused by Chemotherapy — The mental fuzziness induced by cancer treatment could be eased by cognitive exercises performed online, say researchers. I play sudoku online rather obsessively when I am in chemo, as a form of cognitive self-check.

Ranbaxy: Looking Under the Rock — Why generic drugs do not always stack up. (Via David Goldman.)

Eyeball — A throwable building-mapping sphere from Bounce Imaging was recently chosen by PopSci for a 2013 Invention Award. The “throwable, expendable, baseball-size probe,” in PopSci’s words, “has a shock-absorbing shell embedded with six cameras, plus clusters of near-infrared LEDs to light up dark rooms (for the cameras).” Wow.

Opportunity Breaks NASA’s 40-Year Roving Record

Danish Teenager Makes Rare Viking Find — Cool!

Thrilling video of Portland PD high-speed chase… wait for it… — Ah, Portland.

Survey of 12,000 studies finds strong agreement on climate change — We already knew 97% of climate scientists backed the scientific consensus. It’s amazing the lengths liberals will go to in order to spread their climate change lies, even to the extent of using reality-based “facts” and “data”.

GOP raffling AR-15 “Sandy Hook”-type rifles as macabre pro-gun stunt — Stay classy, conservative America. It’s what you do best.

CBS: It was congressional GOP who faked Benghazi email — Conservatives can almost never win on the facts, so of course they lie. That’s the entire idea behind FOX News. And the Bush administration. (WMDs in Iraq, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) Why should it be any different in the GOP congressional delegation? Water is wet, too.

QotD?: How do we sleep while our beds are burning?

5/17/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (0.5 revisions on my novella for METAtropolis: Green Space, plus WRPA)
Hours slept: 6.25 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: 249.2
Number of FEMA troops on my block covering up evidence about Benghazi: 0
Currently reading: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Books, Cancer, climate, Cool, events, Funny, guns, health, healthcare, Iraq, Links, Mars, media, Personal, Politics, Portland, Publishing, Science, stories, Tech, Videos

Posted: 4:36 am Fri May 17 2013 | Comments(4) |

[personal] Editorial process on Link Salad

For no particular reason, here is an explanation of my editorial process on the daily Link Salad posts.

I scan 46 Web sites every morning, clustered in bookmark groups I refer to as “Science”, “WritingArts”, CultPol” and “Ego”. I also go through my Google News main page, from which I exclude sports and minimize regional coverage in favor of top stories, international news, and science news. Curious headlines, interesting stories, or anything that falls within a specific range of my interests generally get posted into Link Salad.

As the day goes by, I have a bookmark group called “Reloads” which I check every few hours that I happen to be near a keyboard, time permitting. That’s weighted towards politics, where the breaking stories I’m most interested in, tend to happen, but it also picks up some writer and automotive blogs.

People also send me links on a fairly regular basis. I don’t always use them, for any number of reasons, but often as not I do.

When assembling Link Salad, I put them together in a loose order. The political stories, including my ranty comments, appear at the bottom. This is so people skimming for writing or science or other news don’t have to read them if they don’t want to. (Not everyone shares my political views, obviously.) Personal news about writing, awards and cancer go at the top. Everything else spreads in between, usually but not always science, then culture, with miscellaneous stuff inserted where it makes a sort of thematic sense.

I never, ever use stories from FOX News or its affiliates. Anything with the FOX brand. I’m not averse to conservative sources, but FOX’s long record of knowing distortion of the truth is extremely well-documented, as is the singularly ill-informed nature of their viewership. I simply assume anything on “fair and balanced” FOX is wingnut propaganda. (I have been known to see a FOX headline and invest some effort in finding the same story from a reliable source.) I very rarely cite The Wall Street Journal for much the same reason. Unlike FOX’s nonstop drivel, their reporting actually can be excellent, but their editorial page and policies are the country club version of FOX’s trailer park wingnuttia, which renders even good reporting useless. WSJ is FOX’s paranoid bigotry and counterfactual fantasies in a nicer suit, basically.

Beyond that, stuff I note or that falls out of the sky on me winds up in Link Salad. If you see something interesting, tip me. I’ll credit and link to the first person who sends me something.

Tags: media, Personal, Politics

Posted: 5:21 am Wed May 15 2013 | Comments(3) |

[links] Link salad prove to you that it’s no fool, walks across your swimming pool

It’s hard to rely on my good intentions, when my head’s full of things that I can’t mention — Lisa Costello on how my cancer news is affecting her.

Game Theory and the Treatment of Cancer — Thinking about cancer as an ecosystem is giving biologists access to a new armoury of mathematical tools for tackling it, such as evolutionary game theory.

The History of Typography – Animated Short — This is kind of nifty. (Via threeoutside.)

Alice E. Kober, 43; Lost to History No More — Ancient languages and eccentric professors. It doesn’t get any better! (Via my Dad.)

Dull Flag and Tongue of Gangsta: The Laugh-out-loud Place-names of Shetland and Orkney

Beatnik JFK: 1957 — For some reason, I find this photo very funny.

Researcher Analyzes Oldest Fossil Hominid Ear Bones Ever Recovered

Fossil Amber Challenges Theories About Glass — Scientists discover that glass doesn’t flow like a liquid.

Kangaroos have three vaginas — Mmm, marsupials. (Via David Goldman.)

One Small Step for Geoengineering — or Is “Ecoengineering” Better?

Space Oddity — David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. We are indeed living in the future. (Via David Goldman and others.)

‘Einstein’s Planet’: New Alien World Revealed by Relativity

Climate Sensitivity Stunner: Last Time CO2 Levels Hit 400 Parts Per Million The Arctic Was 14°F Warmer!

The Dark Art of Racecraft — Jason Richwine’s place in the long history of research on race and IQ. Ta-Nehisi Coates is powerful on race and racism in academic tradition.

Infographic: Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably) — I’m so proud of America at moments like this. With all the budget problems of government, and all the human suffering in our debated economy, we still have our priorities straight. (Via danjite.)

Japan WWII ‘comfort women’ were ‘necessary’ – Hashimoto — A prominent Japanese politician has described as “necessary” the system by which women were forced to become prostitutes for World War II troops. Oh, God. Really? Not only seven kinds of wrong, but disgusting and morally depraved. China indignant at Japanese politician’s “comfort women” statement.

Homophobes Might Be Hidden Homosexuals — A new analysis of implicit bias and explicit sexual orientation statements may help to explain the underpinnings of anti-gay bullying and hate crimes. Also, this just in: water is wet. Inside a great number of angry conservative bigots is a fabulous gay man struggling to get out.

Naked TSA Protester’s Appeal to Be Heard Tuesday — A story of local interest here in Portland. It would be pretty funny if it weren’t so darned serious.

Police search for 19-year-old man shooting, wounding of 19 at New Orleans Mother’s Day parade — Because an armed society is a polite society, and guns make us all safer. Think how much harder it would have been for this shooter to exercise his theoretical defense of essential liberties without the smiling protection of the NRA and the Republican Party.

Right-wing media check up: still crazy — The right-wing media hasn’t learned anything from its failures in 2012. It’s the same-old ‘Obama is evil’ conspiracy theories.

Gates: Administration Critics view of US Military Capabilities in Benghazi “Cartoonish” — Former Bush and Obama administrations secretary of defense Bob Gates, a lifelong Republican, replied to some of the GOP fantasies about the possibility of a US military mission into Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. The Republican obsession with Benghazi is just as bizarre and counterfactual as the vast majority of their other obsessions. Not that bizarre counterfactuals stopped Whitewater from morphing into the Clinton impeachment. Essentially, the GOP has been unable to accept the legitimacy of any Democratic president since LBJ.

Government secretly obtains phone records from journalists — Prosecutors targeted the Associated Press in an attempt to learn who leaked information about the CIA and an apparent terrorist plot in Yemen. If proven out, this is seven kinds of wrong. I don’t care what your politics are, this isn’t what our government does or should be doing. Should these allegations be substantiated, Attorney General Eric Holder needs to go, and Obama needs to answer for this. If nothing else, can this administration give us accountability? And some counterpoint on this.

QotD?: What is it that you have got that puts you where you are?

5/14/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.5 hours (1.25 hours of revision, plus WRPA, editing METAtropolis: Green Space)
Hours slept: 5.0 hours (fitful)
Body movement: 0.5 hours (stationary bike)
Weight: m/a (forgot)
Number of FEMA troops on my block digging for fossils in the yards of God-fearing Republicans: 0
Currently reading: The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Cancer, climate, Cool, economy, gay, guns, health, history, Japan, Language, Links, media, nature, Personal, Photos, Politics, race, radiantlisa, Science, space, sports, Travel, Videos, weird

Posted: 5:15 am Tue May 14 2013 | Comments(4) |

[links] Link salad lazes on Sunday morning

‘Mockingbird’ Author Sues to Regain Copyright — Huh.

Exotic Alloy of Ferrous Oxide Man — Scrivener’s Error is very funny (and snarky) about the new Iron Man movie [ imdb ].

Mis-printed sign amuses Thorndon residents — Things like this always give me the giggles. (Via Sally McLennan.)

Dream with cancer game — My old friend goulo (whom I first almost a quarter century ago) dreams about me, cancer and gaming.

Wright Brothers Flight Legacy Hits New Turbulence — Not to mention the Wright sister.

A Supercell Thunderstorm Cloud Over Montana — Another amazing image from APOD.

Political Extremism Is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding — Asking people to explain policies in detail both undermined the illusion of explanatory depth and led to attitudes that were more moderate. That’s the Tea Party in a nutshell, along with most of the conservative movement. It’s also why the conservative dominated media machine is so critical to the GOP: Rush Limbaugh saying, “Look, this is simple folks…” helps a lot of people with tenuous positions feel affirmed. Much better for manufacturing angry white males than actually doing the nuance of understanding any issue.

Harvard Professor Trashes Keynes For Homosexuality — That’s liberal academia for you. Bigoted, ad hominem attacks free of facts.

The Conservative Logic of Ferguson’s Smears of Gays, Muslims, Obama and Krugman — I would argue that the reason that conservatives like Ferguson hate Keynes is that Keynes demonstrated conclusively that when the economy goes into a deep recession or depression, the only way to get back out of it is for the government to increase spending. Contemporary conservatives do not want to admit that government plays an indispensable set of economic roles. This is pretty simple, and doesn’t require much nuanced analysis. Most conservative ideas do not survive contact with reality. (viz. supply side economics, reduced regulation, PNAC, privatization of social services, almost anything in Republican educational policy, guns, Iraq, climate change, marriage “defense”, et cetera ad nauseum.) The conservative response is not to assess the evidence and revise their ideas, but to deny reality. We’ve seen this played out over and over again, increasingly blatant, in politics and the media over the past few decades. The BEST study of climate change is one of the vanishingly rare counterexamples of conservative intellectual honesty in response to countervailing evidence, and it was widely condemned by media and political figures precisely for that intellectual honesty.

QotD?: What’s on your plate?

5/5/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (WRPA on audiobook prep)
Hours slept: 8.75 hours (solid)
Body movement: 0.0 hours (foot hurts)
Weight: n/a (away from home)
Number of FEMA troops on my block digging for fossils in the yards of God-fearing Republicans: 0
Currently reading: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Cancer, Cool, economy, Funny, Language, law, Links, media, Movies, Personal, Photos, Politics, Publishing, reviews, Tech

Posted: 7:24 am Sun May 05 2013 | Comments(1) |

[links] Link salad marks the calendar and sighs

2013 Hugos: Best Novella — A reader offers capsule reviews of the Best Novella Hugo ballot, including my own “The Stars Do Not Lie”.

‘Stoned wallabies make crop circles’ — Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, a government official has said. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

Invisible, unhealthful toxics in Portland’s airshed need immediate attention — “Airshed” is a new word to me, though I immediately parsed it correctly as a back-formation from “watershed”.

Congress finds it hard to let Federal Helium Program run out of gas

Climate Change or Global Warming? Both. — This whole thing with Fox would be funny if it weren’t so damaging. A lot of people only watch Fox News, and while it’s easy to mock Fox for being so reality-deficient, so clearly wrong so often, the fact is for millions of people Fox is their sole news source.

QotD?: What does this day mean to you?

4/28/2013
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (0.5 hours and 800 words on Original Destiny, Manifest Sin, 0.5 hours WRPA editing work on METAtropolis: Green Space)
Hours slept: 8.5 hours (fitful)
Body movement: 0.0 hours (foot still hurts)
Weight: n/a
Number of FEMA troops on my block helping welfare recipients buy cell phones and big screen tvs: 0
Currently reading: The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett

Tags: Awards, Links, media, nature, Personal, Politics, Portland, reviews, stories, weird

Posted: 6:43 am Sun April 28 2013 | Comments(3) |

[culture] The Boston bombings

First and foremost, my heart sorrows for those caught in the Boston bombings of yesterday. The dead, the injured, their friends and loved ones, the first responders and volunteers; everyone. The date and venue of the attack is just a twist of the knife, I suppose.

I don’t consume broadcast media other than the odd snatch of NPR in the car, or watching online videos of segments which for some reason have been recommended to me or caught my eye. My understanding of the bombings thus far has been from a mix of (mostly) liberal blogs and the some news Web sites, as well as secondary commentary from those sources.

While I have my own private views of what is likely to be uncovered about the perpetrators, I am the first to acknowledge those views are currently not grounded in any facts whatsoever. Therefore I decline to speculate in public pending reliable evidence emerging.

What I will say is this: I hope for swift justice tempered by mercy. I likewise fervently hope that we can avoid another national paroxysm of retributive anger like that engendered by 9-11. Despite our manifold imperfections, we are a nation of laws, and a people who value a moral and orderly world. Our internal disagreements are for the most part about what those ambitions mean.

Please, let America be lawful and orderly in our response to this terrible event.

Tags: Boston, Culture, media

Posted: 5:47 am Tue April 16 2013 | Comments(22) |