sir roger

I heard a lecture by Roger Penrose last night. His talk was a bit disjointed, but by end of the night I liked the guy. The long question and answer session was most interesting, except when the talk became too technical for an English major to follow. Beside his own work in math and physics, [...]

my one memory of hunter thompson

Must have been 1973 or 1974 in Ann Arbor. Thompson was invited to speak at a popular U.of M. lecture series and I went to hear him. Of course, there really wasn’t anything resembling a lecture, but I was too young and dumb to figure that out ahead of time. I remember he was carrying [...]

dog’s eye view

After repeated requests, Buddy, the robotic dog, agreed to snap a photo of a stuffed rhino sitting on the floor. At first he didn’t want to use his eye-cam for such a trivial purpose. (Important purpose = finding the pink ball.)

i can help with that exorcism

According to a story in today’s Seattle Times, the Catholic church is facing a shortage of exorcists. The solution? Train more of them. A supposed expert in the field, the Rev. Gabriele Nanni, tells exorcists-in-training that authentic demonic possession includes “utter revulsion to holy symbols such as a crucifix or baptismal oils.” Where did they [...]

shermer

Heard Michael Shermer speak at Elliott Bay books last night. He’s the editor of one of my favorite magazines, Skeptic, and also author of several books. Currently he’s pitching his latest, a collection of essays called Science Friction. He said he had just given a presentation at Microsoft earlier in the day. (I noted that [...]

cosmic span

If the SETI program ever finds messages from distant places, should we open the mail and read it? I was recently perusing a section of Hans Moravec’s Mind Children, and he brings up disturbing thoughts about what could happen if naive young civilizations like ours get malicious messages from outer space.
Suppose, for example, we [...]

urban wildlife

I visited the Year of the Rooster new year’s festival at Union Station. There really wasn’t much of interest at the station except the performance stage, where I saw a group of taiko drummer women. I walked up the street and found a couple dragons. The red dragon is facing away from me in this [...]

lonely planet

Went to a lecture by David Grinspoon at the Pacific Science Center last night. This guy is one happy planetary scientist. He’s practically jumping for joy over the fact that the Mars rovers are still roving, a year later. New data from Mars is flowing in every day like manna from heaven. And don’t even [...]