- Jonathan Coulton remembers Benoit Mandelbrot, who died last Thursday at 85:
I can remember stumbling across his book “The Fractal Geometry of Nature†in my high school library, reading it and not really understanding it, but finding it mind blowing nonetheless. To me, that particular brand of hazy understanding feels like the correct way to think about a lot of things – fractals, electron clouds, cats in boxes waiting to be poisoned – the natural world is really too complicated and beautiful for any of us to fully understand, and that’s OK. That’s in fact what makes it so beautiful.
- I don’t even watch Mythbusters and I still find the idea that Barrack Obama will appear on an episode pretty cool. [via]
- The Sunburst Awards need your help:
We’re looking for short (30 second to 2 minutes) videos that say what you think about Canadian speculative fiction. These should be interview-style videos in the vein of Speaker’s Corner and can be recorded as simply as with a web camera. Prior interviews or footage can be submitted provided that you have permission to do so. We will host these individually on a YouTube channel (sunburstaward), but will also edit them in order to create a series of short videos to promote awareness of the fundraising campaign. A longer video will be shown at the opening remarks to the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium.
- Seven Authors Who Wrote While Nude thankfully includes no photographs. [via]
- And finally, I really liked this Paolo Bacigalupi interview, not least of all for the pronunciation guide to his last name (“BATCH-i-ga-LOOP-ee”) and the idea that it translates to “kiss of the wolf.” But he also some interesting writing advice:
But mostly I sat down and said, I’m not going to write a boring story. And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems. Don’t dick around too much in the weeds of, oh, gee, this character’s deep interiority or anything like that. Get it done and make this character do some stuff and make stuff explode. That seems to work pretty well. [via]
canada
Wednesday various
- I think this Arcade Fire video/Chrome plugin would seem neater to me if Google Street View had been to my neighborhood.
- Then again, if you want to see where Street View has been, you could do a lot worse than the random shuffle that is Globe Genie. [via]
- Google (and everybody else) better be careful when driving in Vancouver… [via]
- Meanwhile, over the summer, Google Maps “lost” a major Florida city. [via]
- And finally, xkcd’s revised online communities map. Are we sensing a theme to today’s links?
Wednesday various
- Take the House Season 7 Challenge. Win points by correctly guessing the conditions or diseases that will turn up on the show week to week.
- The Room: The Game. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” [via]
- Things I’ve Overheard My Roommate Say to Her On-Again/Off-Again Boyfriend or Works by Joyce Carol Oates? [via]
- J.G. Ballard’s self-edits [via]
- And finally, Heather on why you should visit the Banff Centre for the Arts:
Just watch out for the elk. And the mathematicians.
Monday various
- Maybe you’ve seen these clever Old Spice commercials, or these responses to Twitter fans? But have you seen this terrific parody? Well, now you have. [via]
- I’m not always in love with Improv Everywhere’s “missions,” but this was pretty cute. How is it that I never seem to run into these things in Manhattan?
- John Sclazi discusses Canadians in Science Fiction Because, you know, there are.
- Also coming soon to Canada: Netflix streaming. This was part of the exchange deal for Tim Horton’s, right?
- And finally, last week I mentioned how this “I Write Like” meme that’s been going around was kind of dumb and inaccurate. Turns out, it’s probably also kind of a scam.
Wednesday various
- Six degrees of literary separation? [via]
- If nothing else, I think this elaborte fake ATM is proof that you don’t need a carefully designed forgery to fool a lot of people. [via]
- The Cracked Guide to Fonts [via]
- You know, I’m sure Tin House‘s heart was in the right place with this prove you bought a book somewhere before you submit anything policy, but it’s not hard to see why it’s upset some people.
- And finally, an interview with Michael Palin:
I’m very proud of the fish-slapping dance we did in Python. We rehearsed this silly dance where John Cleese hits me with a fish and I fall into Teddington Lock. We were so intent on getting the dance right that I didn’t notice the lock had cleared and instead of it being a 2ft drop into the water it was a 15ft drop. I’m very proud of doing that.
The rest of the interview is pretty interesting too — he didn’t think A Fish Called Wanda was a good script when he first read it — although residents of his “worst place ever,” Prince George, British Columbia, might not love it.