50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong
Remember yesterday, when I wrote that the PS3 was getting stupid expensive?
Sony says the leaked price was incorrect, but after reading their statement, think it sort of depends on what your definition really stupid expensive is.
(link goes to my article at SGNews, which is SFW.)
The Trinity Test Site , where Robert Oppenheimer famously became "Death, destroyer of worlds" is open to the public only twice a year, so it’s pretty tough to get a first-hand look at this rather important historical location.
Enter Joshua Ellis, an independent journalist who went to Trinity this year to compile a story on the site, the people, and its history. Josh’s trip was funded by small donations from various people, and he promised to publish an in-depth story with a ton of pictures, and video if he was able.
Josh’s story Dark Miracle is live today, and boy is it amazing:
When I told my friends where I was going, a few of them blinked at me. "Be careful," they said. "That’s, like, The Hills Have Eyes territory." I promised to pack at least a machete, somewhere in the car.
[. . .]
Many of the houses date from the original Manhattan Project —
prefab duplexes and quad-plexes that have been extensively retrofitted
by various owners over the years. It is easy, looking at some of these
houses, to imagine physicists such as Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe or
Edward Teller or Leo Szilard sitting on their porches, discussing
different approaches to building the Gadget, as they called it.It is an odd little place — beautiful, to be sure, but it
seems devoid of the sort of small-town closeness that other small
American cities like it possess, where everybody knows everybody else.
There seem to be a lot of strangers living next to one another in Los
Alamos.
It is part history lesson and part travelogue; Josh paints vivid pictures that put the reader right next to him on every step of the journey, whether it’s talking to Ed Grothus, the excentric owner of the Black Hole Museum of Nuclear Waste, driving up to the test site, or looking at what’s left of ground zero. There are pictures and video, as well as entries in his blog that give additional details and perspective to his story. It is really a remarkable project.
As a reader, I count myself lucky that I got to read this piece; as a writer, I am absolutely thrilled at the idea of freelancing stories that are funded through small contributions from many different people. Josh brilliantly released his story under a creative commons license, so more people can see the benefits of distributed journalism.
(via boingboing)
I swear to jeebus, it’s a good thing so many geeks still live with
their parents, and the rest of them made brazillians in the dot com
boom, because these game systems are getting stupid expensive.
The kids are on Spring Break this week. Anne and Ryan are up in HellaNorCal, checking out colleges, and Nolan and I are hanging out with the dogs until they get back.
It’s been a really fun week so far: lots of Magic: The Gathering, Brawl tournaments, The Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles on TV, and walks with the dogs around the neighborhood when it isn’t raining.
I’ve also introduced him to Lost, and I have the feeling that he’ll run through Season One on DVD in five days, just like I did. Hopefully, he won’t become as hopelessly just-jam-it-into-my-veins addicted to the show as I am (I’m only up to Episode 4 of Season Two, so if you’re going to comment, please don’t post any spoilers, okay? I reserve a special type of wrath for that sort of thing) but I managed to hook him on Battlestar Galactica this way, and I apologize for nothing. Nothing!!1one!
Sorry. I got a little carried away there.
So.
I’ve always felt that, as a parent, my job (and greatest hope) is to help my kids grow into the kind of adult that I’d be proud of, and I’d like to spend time with, even if we weren’t family: honest, honorable, generous, compassionate, and responsible. Sometimes, as part of the whole Pod People experience, I feel like those efforts are failing. Add the bonus of the really great and neverending loyalty conflict game (that I refuse to play, but have to deal with, anyway,) and it’s easy to wonder if any of the work will ever pay off. It’s been easy to lose hope.
But over the last couple of months, I’ve come to believe that the Pods were actually Chrysalises, because it feels like both Ryan and Nolan have emerged as young adults whose company I really enjoy (and I believe the feeling is mutual.) The moments of irrationality are still there, and I’m sure that I am still so lame from time to time, but I have lots and lots of hope.
If you’re a parent dealing with a Pod Person, don’t give up. One day, you may wake to discover that your Pod Person has vanished as quickly as it arrived, leaving behind an honest, honorable, generous, compassionate, and responsible young adult.
Technorati Tags: parenting
I ended up watching a few minutes of VH1 Classic before I fell asleep last night, and, uh, i kind of watched this crazy old video of Kenny Loggins.
It was totally rad, with the whites blowing out and the occasional old VHS noise, and the slightly greenish skin tones. He was playing an outdoor concert which was just filled with girls in tube tops and guys with horrible Kenny Loggins-esque beards, and the whole thing looked pretty stinky and coked-out. If that wasn’t enough evidence that it was the early 80s, he was playing I’m Alright, from Caddyshack, which is one of my guilty pleasure tunes (I didn’t realize until last night that it contains the lyric "No, no, cannonball it right away.")
So far, we’re okay, but you may want to prepare to throw up in your mouth a little bit: he was wearing white ankle-high boots, a huge, puffy red jumpsuit with a novelty-sized belt around his waist, the obligatory rock-n-roll mullet, and seriously rocking out with his bad self while strumming an acoustic guitar.
Maybe I’m uptight, maybe I just don’t understand the rock like I think I do, but when he ran around the stage during a guitar solo (which he wasn’t playing; he had his 12-string a-strummin’) and jumped up on a raised platform so he could kick an amp off the stage, I didn’t think, "Oh man, that guy is a hardcore rockstar!" as much as I thought, "Uh, what the hell was that all about?"
I changed the channel when the Top Gun song started. There was no way I could endure shots of L. Ron Cruise after that.