Grendel

Posted on Thursday, 2002 February 07 by Anton

Today I bought Devil’s Legacy, a reprint of my then favorite of Matt Wagner’s Grendel stories. The new color job and slick paper make the Pander Bros artwork even more hard-edged and vivid, unless my memory (of 1986) is what’s soft at the edges.

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bugs in spaaace!

Posted on Thursday, 2002 February 07 by Anton

This article (found at SciTech Daily) tells about tiny autonomous fliers proposed for Mars.

Bees may also provide a solution for navigating on Mars, where there is no GPS network or magnetic field to tell one pole from another. Bees use a combination of polarization patterns in the sky, landmarks, and distance traveled to navigate.

Is satellite-assisted navigation unlikely for Mars? How many birds does it take? If the flier gets even one fix a day, it can correct gross errors in dead-reckoning.

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start somewhere

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 February 06 by Anton

Everybody’s doing it.
Well, what shall I talk about first?
How about the last book I read? Yeah.

I learned roughly three things from It’s the Little Things: Everyday Interactions That Anger, Annoy, and Divide the Races by Lena Williams (Harcourt, 2000):

  • Long un-kinky blond hair is a status symbol forever out of Blacks’ reach, and some resent seeing a White gratuitously flip such hair about.
  • Because of the ‘boy’ thing, Blacks don’t take first-naming as a friendly gesture.
  • You can write for the New York Times for 25 years without learning to use the parenthetical comma properly.
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