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I couldn't possibly be in a worse mood.
Talk the talk - gamer style.
Your search - "exoatmospheric thrill vehicle" - did not match any documents.
I find that hard to believe.
I never told the story about Janet taking Theo to Mexico. When they tried to board the plane the airline wouldn't let them, saying Janet needed a notarized letter from Bruno, the father, stating that Janet could take her child out of the country! Needless to say they missed their flight.
Apparently this has something to do with entry into Mexico, rather than being an airline policy. Still, it's strange I had never heard of this. Seems like something the airlines might want to mention when you book the flight.
They eventually made it. I'll get the full story when they get home.
Occasionally in the morning we'll wake up and MB will open the laptop and surf the web some. This was one of the ideas behind getting that machine. She still uses OS 9 for working (thanks for nothing quark,) but this gives her a little time in OS X. And a little aimless surfing time which is what you need to really get comfortable on the web.
I think news.google.com convinced her that this all might turn out to be useful. I'll bet that's the case for a lot of people. Makes reading any one newspaper rather silly.
Anyway, when this happens I'm at a bit of a loss for what to do. Make the coffee. Clean up any leftover dishes. Maybe make the bed. I've gotten more conscientious about such things in my new homemaker phase. But still, it's hard for me not to check right in first thing.
Luckily I can fall back on my sidekick. I can't wait until the power of my laptop is the size of this phone. Shouldn't be too many years. Three? Keyboard and display (input and output) are going to become the real issues. How do we shrink these things?
I cooked dinner again last night. That's four times this past week, which is quite a change. Very satisfying. And it's hard to beat the price. I'm going to try to keep this up. It feels healthy. Mentally. I'll probably start wishing for a garden soon. Somebody stop me....
I just got an email that consisted of an embedded voice message. I hadn't seen this yet. This companies technology was involved. The mail seemed to suggest I needed to download and install something (yeah, right) but it worked without doing anything in mail.app on OS X 10.2. Just click play.
This is one example of a larger and more complex issue: voice over IP (VOIP.) Clay Shirkey explains why the telecoms are doomed. I can't wait.
Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory is the coolest thing I've found in a long time. Maybe ever. It's defended by David Deutsch here, and that's probably as good a starting point as any.
The key discovery in the omega-point theory is that of a class of cosmological models in which, though the universe is finite in both space and time, the memory capacity, the number of possible computational steps and the effective energy supply are all unlimited. This apparent impossibility can happen because of the extreme violence of the final moments of the universe's Big Crunch collapse.In Tipler's theories, intelligent beings (like humans) are not epiphenomenon, but are instead required by the laws of physics. They are required so that the collapsing universe can be "steered" along the correct course to result in an approach to the Omega Point (singularity) in which the universe becomes an infinitely powerful computer.
The stabilization procedures, and the accompanying knowledge-creation processes, will all have to be increasingly rapid until, in the final frenzy, an infinite amount of both occur in a finite time. We know of no reason why the physical resources should not be available to do this, but one might wonder why the inhabitants should bother to go to so much trouble. Why should they continue so carefully to steer the gravitational oscillations during, say, the last second of the universe? If you have only one second left to live, why not just sit back and take it easy at last? But of course, that is a misrepresentation of the situation. It could hardly be a bigger misrepresentation. For these people's minds will be running as computer programs in computers whose physical speed is increasing without limit. Their thoughts will, like ours, be virtual-reality renderings performed by these computers. It is true that at the end of that final second the whole sophisticated mechanism will be destroyed. But we know that the subjective duration of a virtual-reality experience is determined not by the elapsed time, but by the computations that are performed in that time. In an infinite number of computational steps there is time for an infinite number of thoughts - plenty of time for the thinkers to place themselves into any virtual-reality environment they like, and to experience it for however long they like. If they tire of it, they can switch to any other environment, or to any number of other environments they care to design. Subjectively, they will not be at the final stages of their lives but at the very beginning . They will be in no hurry, for subjectively they will live for ever. With one second, or one microsecond, to go, they will still have 'all the time in the world' to do more, experience more, create more - infinitely more - than anyone in the multiverse will ever have done before then.Here's an interview from transhumanism.com. And here's his disinfo page with lots more links.
I think I'll need infinite time to understand all this suff.
MB did some graphic work for a fabric company and they sent us a mattress pad made out of a new material. It's called Outlast adaptive comfort.
Probably you won't believe me, as I wouldn't have believed anyone claiming that a mattress pad can change your life. But it's true.
You lay down on it, and for several minutes you can feel it pulling heat out of your body. But then it reaches temperature equilibrium, and it holds you there. All night. External temperature fluctuations be damned.
So what? Well, I didn't realize it until I started sleeping on this thing, but the main reason I would wake up in the middle of the night was to rearrange the covers because I was either too hot or too cold. But no longer. Seriously. I sleep right through now. And long. Twelve hours is no problem. This stuff is going to put a hurt on productivity like nothing since tetris. And I say bring it on.
Everybody can use good night's sleep.
You can watch Steve Jobs and his amazing reality distortion field today at noon eastern time.