Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad — a retelling of the Trojan War from the point of view of Queen Penelope — is currently playing at the Buddies In Bad Times theatre. This run has been well cast and choreographed and I’m tempted to go watch it for a second time here. Of course, the whole point of this short blog post is as a vehicle for bad Star Wars references. Few other epic tales involve a princess whose face launched a thousand starships, a son who is told by others that his father is dead (and then unexpectedly having an interlocutor reveal himself to be said father), sirens, and visitations by spirits. Yes, that’s right. Go see the production and may the horse be with you.
Schmidt's on in China (and Hollywood)
Google CEO Eric Schmidt opposes new US copyright laws that requires ISPs to remove offending URLs from the Internet on the grounds that this is censorship. Would he say the same thing if someone leaked Google’s search algorithm(s) onto the Internet? Maybe not, considering Google’s support of censorship in China — at least until they were the target of cyber attacks had a change of heart.
In an ironic twist, he also supports the rights of Hollywood to fight against pirates saying, “Their business models are threatened by theft”. Why ironic? Last time I checked, large swathes of Google are powered by copyright violations. Hello, YouTube! Or even some of its digitization projects.
Edit: This post is short, but tangentially related to a long paper I’m writing that I hope will be interesting. Fingers crossed!
Trick or Treat, Mayor Ford!
I wish a large number of people would dress up as Marg Delahunty ((Would that make her Marg Delahaunty?)), Princess Warrior, and go trick or treating at the Mayor’s house. Those not wanting to go the whole nine yards could grab a video camera and film the ordeal or drive a black SUV carrying the faux camera crews and Princess Warriors.
I love pranks.
Life on a shoestring: Part I — "Friends"
Dunbar’s number is the name given to a theoretical limit on the number of people one can maintain long-term stable relationships. This number has previously been pegged at values around one or two hundred. In this era of social networking, given that the number of on-line “friends” we have can run into several hundred if not thousands, it’s easy to believe that technology, through external cognition, has helped us overcome cognitive limits imposed by the zombie food sloshing around our skulls. Except it probably hasn’t.
Academic nightmare
Back when I was in high school, I had the occasional dream where I’d forgotten to hand in some homework or some deadline was looming. I thought to myself, my high school is fairly high pressure. Maybe the dreams will stop when I start undergrad. In undergrad, I continued to have these dreams every once in a while. I thought to myself, “Self, these’ll probably stop once you’re done undergrad.” I had a few more of these dreams while taking classes in grad school. Whatever — surely they’ll stop when I’m done classes.
Continue reading “Academic nightmare”
I have a confession to make…
I play with my food. Is that really so wrong?
The backwards bystander effect
Last night, there was a cat meowing extremely loudly outside an apartment along Spadina. I, along with three others, stopped to figure out why. Having concluded that the cat had fallen/jumped off a story balcony based on a) an open door and b) another cat looking down from there, and c) the cat had a collar, we stopped to figure out how to proceed.
In defence of climate change deniers
I’ve heard some people say they don’t understand how people can hold the view that climate change is not anthropogenic yet claim that climate change can be countered cheaply using geo-engineering, e.g., by injecting sulfur ((Why, IUPAC, why?)) into the atmosphere. The reason for their concern is that they think it’s logically inconsistent since the effects of geo-engineering techniques and anthropogenic climate change are predicted by the same computer models. However, (anthropogenic) climate change deniers are being perfectly reasonable as far as thinking about temperature goes. Let me explain.
Death of a camera: Part VI
Death of a camera: Part V
The fifth in a series of blog posts about my nearly-dead camera. Included in this series will be images that I haven’t posted to flickr. Don’t get all excited; they’re worse than my other shots. That’s why they didn’t even make the flickr cut.
Continue reading “Death of a camera: Part V”