There was more, of course. Prof. Piotr Dembowski of the University of Maryland, talking about how difficult it had been to crack the GRM. Someone else from Simon Fraser, reporting that something like Firebrand (“it’s always hard to tell when dealing with encrypted genes”) was showing up in some microbe — Bacteroides thetasomethingorother — that […]
It’s a Twin Peaks Christmas, Charlie Brown!
Category: miscI was never much of a family person during my first five decades; anyone familiar with the family of my childhood will understand why I spent a half-century running in horror from the prospect of having to deal with another one of the fucking things. As a result, I’m a bit of a virgin when […]
The Deal with Dumbspeech.
Category: Dumbspeech, writing newsAs some of you may recall, back on May 10, 2010 I clambered onto the ‘crawl to announce the signing of a contract for the sidequel to Blindsight. As of Nov 2 2011, I announced that I’d handed in the manuscript. In between (and occasionally afterward), I dropped what occasional fiblets I could without giving […]
Sunless, Squidless.
Category: astronomy/cosmology, public interfaceSo apparently I’m attending The Waterloo Festival For Animated Cinema this weekend. I’m there right now, in fact. I am surprised to learn this, since I haven’t left Toronto today. I haven’t even left the Magic Bungalow. In fact I haven’t even got out of bed, except to feed the fur and the fins, and […]
The Windbreaker of Shame.
Category: neuro, sentience/cognitionBack around the turn of the century — when I was old enough to know better, anyway — I answered a knock on the door to find an unfamiliar twentysomething looking up at me with a disarming seal-pup expression on his face. He’d locked himself out of his car, apparently. He needed $20 to pay […]
Pics for Posterity.
Category: blindsight, ink on art, public interfaceSo, here’s a nice surprise in my In-box: prototype cover for next year’s Finnish translation of Blindsight from Gummerus. The artist is Jussi Kaakinen, and I think he’s done a terrific job. Oooh, and just after I finished posting this the first time, a courier showed up at my door with a box of these: […]
Corroboration.
Category: miscThis is for Steve. And Private Quentin. And whoever else has nothing else to do but argue on Amazon’s fora on a Thursday night, when you all should be out drinking (which is what I’m doing, although fortunately the Duke of Somerset has WiFi). I’m not Quentin. I’m just me. Steve Ptasznik should lay off.
The Coming Con.
Category: On the Road, public interfaceI was going to save this post until closer to the weekend, but I figure that folks to the south might want something to distract them from voting machines that tally up Obama votes in the Romney column, and election officials who helpfully fill out other people’s ballots with a clean sweep of Republicans. So […]
Geoengineering and the Evils of Conservation
Category: climate, marine, rant, sciliticsWell, traditional conservation, anyway. The kind where you presume to “manage” a wildlife population by ensuring, year after year, that its population remains stable. The problem is that as any population varies, so too does its behavior. Mortality curves, reproductive rates, vulnerability to pathogens and predators — a hundred other variables — all change with […]
Anteaters, Mushrooms, and the Inherent Goodness of Humanity
Category: public interfaceSo the last few days have been both hectic and enlightening, as well as closing a kind of thematic circle about the fuckupedness of the Human Race. It started with Friday night’s appearance of Cory Doctorow and China Miéville on the stage of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, where they were interviewed by Mark Askwith; […]