In the movie Avatar, one of the floating mountains has a waterfall, at which my suspension of disbelief groaned: there’s not enough rain catchment area, and obviously there can’t be a spring.

But now I thought of a possibility. There wasn’t any sign that the waterfall flows continuously. So maybe the mountain has a concavity (however shallow), which spills over when something – such as a steady wind from one direction – tips it.

When Jeff Riggenbach said that Butt-Head is smarter than Beavis, I told him about this bit (the relevant part begins at 1:30). I say Butt-Head is more worldly but Beavis is more imaginative.

Travis Corcoran wrote, in response to a question:

This is deserving of a longer post, but the ultra-brief version:

I started out soft atheist, but always accepted the absolute existence of good and evil (it is evil to kill Jews in gas chambers, even if both the law and the prevailing culture say that it is OK).

The acceptance of an absolute moral code eventually lead me to theism.

Given that one absolute that I accept, I felt I had to accept theism.

I guess hope there’s a lot hidden under that word eventually.

I rashly commented:

Hm. Should I bother writing up my godless views on objective evil?

and, to my amazement, someone took me up on it:

If you’re feeling like it, I’d be happy to read them!

( . . more . . )

I see I haven’t mentioned here that Charlie Stross’s novel Saturn’s Children is printed in modified Bembo, with single-loop ‘a’ and hook-tailed ‘gy’. It’s remarkable how much the page color is affected by those three letters.

I’m reading Ken Macleod’s novel The Execution Channel (Tor hardcover 2007). It appears that someone replaced every ‘fi’ or ‘fl’ with a ligature, without checking case.

I designed a bumper sticker, which is not acutely relevant just now — but I wanted to get it done ahead of the rush.

Apple’s TextEdit refuses to save as .txt. What’s up wit dat?