politics

Wednesday various

Monday various

  • The Tea Party is a movement without a compass? Who could have guessed?

    In an unruly, unpredictable and chaotic election year, no group has asserted its presence and demanded to be heard more forcefully than the tea party. The grass-roots movement that was spawned with a rant has gone on to upend the existing political order, reshaping the debate in Washington, defeating a number of prominent lawmakers and elevating a fresh cast of conservative stars.

    But a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process. [via]

  • Astronaut Uses Foursquare to Check In To Space Station. Oh noes! Does this mean one of his followers is going to use this opportunity to rob NASA? [via]
  • Can we just stop with the Battlestar Galactica spin-offs for a while? Personally, I like what I’ve seen of Caprica — just a handful of episodes, but then, I never did finish watching the original Ron Moore series — but with this new series planned to “take place 10 years into the first Cylon war,” I can’t think of another sci-fi universe that’s been this over-explored. Outside, say, of Dune.
  • An angry Leonard Nimoy writes to Gene Roddenberry in 1976. It’s funny, today blooper reels are pretty much par for the course on any television DVD set, but I can see Nimoy’s point.
  • And finally, could the world be heading towards a frightful kimchi shortage? [via]

Tuesday various

Monday various

  • 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]

Wednesday various