Immanentize the Empathy
We just had an earthquake! About 20 seconds of my house shaking, walls creaking, and bed moving like a washing machine agitator. Woke me up, too – just after 5:30 this morning.
Forget coffee – nothing gets you out of bed like a big steaming cup of ADRENALINE!
If your answer to the above two questions is “Yes”, then there is a book you need to read. It is call Blindsight and the author is Peter Watts.
Blindsight is a first-contact novel set in the year 2082. I don’t really want to give any details, other than the fact that the ship is captained by a vampire, which Watts makes plausible by demonstrating that, in fact, it is not entirely out of the question that vampires could have existed once upon a time. He even throws in the hard science explaining how it could be possible, which is – in my experience – absolutely unprecedented in vampire novels. But don’t just take my word for it: You can read Watts’ research notes here (PDF), or watch a powerpoint-ish presentation (Flash – highly recommended) from a the Big Pharma company which successfully brought vampires out of extinction. And if that isn’t enough, you can read Blindsight online, for free.
Aaaaannnndddd, if Blindsight makes you hungry for more Peter Watts, you can read his other books – Starfish, Maelstrom, and Βehemoth for free as well.
One warning, though: The other novels are much darker than Blindsight.
But wait: There’s more! Watts is working on another novel, which takes place on Earth at the same time as Blindsight is happening in space. The title is State of Grace, and an excerpt can be read here.
Enjoy!
I eat a lot of avocados.
Truth be told, I probably eat more avocados than any other single fruit or vegetable, except maybe bananas or pizza.
This means I end up with a lot of avocado pits.
This past summer, I did a little research, to see if there was anything I could do with an avocado pit after the rest of the avocado had been eaten. Someone – possibly my girlfriend – told me I should try to grow an avocado tree.
So I did. They are easy to grow, if you happen to have a pit which has within it the spark of life. Perhaps 9 times out of 10 the pit will sit there and shrivel and get slimy. But O, that tenth time!
I have managed, in the last eight months, to sprout three avocado trees. The first one was this past summer. After the roots looked good and long I transplanted it into a pot out on my front porch. When I got home from work, the plant was gone and there were SQUIRREL FOOTPRINTS in the soil in the pot.
Argh.
Round about the end of summer another seed germinated. This one I kept inside, and at the moment the plant is about eighteen inches tall, green, leafy and – as far as I can tell – happy and healthy. This one is staying inside until it is too big to be eaten by any of the local wildlife.
This past weekend, I noticed that one of the seeds sitting in the kitchen window had begun to grow.
This is how I start the seeds. All it takes is a small jar, three toothpicks, a sunny window, and some patience.
That little nubbin coming out of the bottom of the pit is a root. In another couple of weeks a small stem will sprout from the top of the avocado, and then, once it begins to grow a couple of leaves, it will be time to put it in a pot.
If you want to try this yourself, I recommend using the seeds from organically-grown avocados, rather than the big supermarket chains, although this might not make any difference. Don’t expect to have fruit bearing trees any time in the next decade, and then only if you have several trees in the same space. This is definitely a labor of love.
The above is a photo taken at the Meijer Gardens last week, during the Foremost Butterflies exhibit. The place was a zoo, people packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the arboretum where the humidity is kept somewhere north of 100%.
Despite the overpopulation of Homo Sapiens, love was in the air, and the bunch of us were treated to a display of quail sex in the middle of one of the walkways.
Outside in the open air there were still a lot of people, but more room to move. Beside one of the paths a nest of garter snakes had just opened up, and we happened across a couple of them making the Beast with Two Backs, which, if you suffer from Ophidiophobia, I suggest you try to avoid seeing.
Click the photo to see the rest of the set.
I have been a big fan of the various works and projects of Dave Eggers for several years. He brings a wise-yet-quirky view to things that quite often rings true with me.
Recently, Mr. Eggers won a TED Prize, and a couple of weeks ago his TED Prize Wish speech was uploaded to the TED website. Therein he tells of the history of the writing workshop 826 Valencia, and its various offspring and spin-offs. Very funny, very inspiring, and it gives me an unaccustomed level of hope for the future.
For more inspiration, watch every other video at the TED website.
Yesterday the girlfriend and I took a long walk around the Howard Christensen Nature Center in Kent City. Click the photo to see the rest of the set.
A random bit of browsing this morning revealed to me that, with little apparent fanfare, the Encyclopedia of Life launched a few weeks ago. Right now there are about 30,000 animals in the database, which is about 1% of what they hope to accomplish over the next ten years.
Here are some notable links related to the EOL:
E.O. Wilson’s TED Prize wish.
Kevin Kelly’s meditation on the EOL.
Write-up at the New York Times.
I could go on at length about the significance of this project, but I think of Mr. Wilson just about covers it in his talk.
Another science fiction great has left us. Arthur C. Clarke, author of Rendezvous with Rama, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many other works of speculative fiction, long and short, died earlier today in his home in Sri Lanka.
I have not read many of his books; 2001, 2010, Rama, and perhaps one or two others. One of the earliest serious science fiction works I remember reading was The Nine Billion Names of God (warning: spoilers), which left me in equal part awestruck and deeply spooked for some time.
In case you are wondering why Mr. Clarke should interest you, or how he has been a part of your life, ecce: Communication satellites in geostationary orbit were pretty much his idea.
And people say science fiction is only so much stargazing.
One of our students, Anna, recently took several photos of one of our kung fu classes. She has posted them, along with others she has taken along the way, in a gallery at her DeviantArt page. She has also graciously allowed us to post some of her photos on Master Lee’s website. I will be putting those up as I have time and energy.
Class has been going well this year. We have more students than I have ever seen, with a steady influx of new people. The youngest is about seven, and the oldest in his early seventies. We are already signed up for the annual Festival of the Arts show, about which I have high hopes. The shows just seem to keep getting better and better, which is a tribute both to Master Lee and his students.
I love what I do.
My good droog Scott turned me on to an awesome Firefox browser plugin called PicLens. PicLens is a 3d browser built on top of Firefox which allows for browsing of online collections of images, such as you might find at Flickr, Deviant Art, or looking at a Google Image Search result. The experience is pretty seamless, and there is a search bar sitting unobtrusively in the upper corner, out of the way of everything.
Launching it is extremely simple. Either click on a small icon installed in the upper right corner of the browser chrome, or hover over the images on whatever page you happen to be visiting. If you see a small blue arrow appear in the lower left corner of the image, click on that arrow and it will launch PicLens.
This is a much more elegant and engaging way to peruse stacks of pictures than is the usual browser interface. And at a lowly 1MB download, it is well worth the time to try it out.