Creative Destruction

Sameer Parekh writes:

It appears that everytime I post to the blog, I start the post with, “it’s been a while since I’ve posted here.”

No wonder I forgot that he has a blog!

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like illiteracy is a kind of literacy

Another thing I wouldn’t mind hearing less of: the word infamous used as an emphatic synonym for famous.

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wacky microgravity tricks

Does this really work?

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any old papers please

Today’s assignment was in a building where I hadn’t worked before, so I didn’t know about the fascist gatekeeper. Luckily my Costco card has a picture of me.

I oughta make a laminated card with my picture and a name such as “Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle”. Suggestions of other names are invited.

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flies on fire

It’s a fair bet that my readers include at least one Mutant Enemy fanatic. Got a couple of canon questions for ya.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, anyone seen smoking is either evil, under a spell or doomed. (There’s one exception: Mrs Epps in “Some Assembly Required”, who seems to spend her days watching her dead son’s football triumphs on tape.) I didn’t notice whether the second vampire to acquire a human soul then stopped smoking.

In Firefly episode “The Train Job”, the sheriff of Paradiso shares a cigarette with a prisoner. Is anyone else ever seen smoking in that universe? I can easily picture Jayne with a cigar, but that’s just stereotyping.

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refractin’ back atcha

A few of my Povray scenes include objects with negative indices of refraction; I’ve said of this one that three-quarters of it cannot exist in the real world. Now I read in The Economist that, because a negative-refractive slab could make a “perfect lens” (for obscure reasons), there’s an active effort on to create such a chimera; indeed the effect has been demonstrated but only with microwaves.

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Plutinos, Twotinos, Cubewanos

John Baez gives (among other things) a handy summary of transneptunian objects.

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