Walking on the Moon

It’s not every day that you get to see someone achieve a goal they’ve trained for for a year.  Congrats to all the Western Women today.

Warren Ellis on John Kerry’s departure.

Rod and I have been arguing about how bad climate change might be for humanity in the near term. Thankfully Warren Ellis has linked to Jamais Cascio’s perspective on the “how bad could it be” issue.  (Though I think he means “climate change” when he writes “global warming.”)
Rod, take note. :-)

You can expect to see fewer reports on corruption in rebuilding Iraq. The BBC tells me that the US is discontinuing auditing of rebuilding efforts.

Our pals at the BBC (via Warren Ellis) tell me that:

With a rise in the popularity of Christian-style weddings in Japan, some Westerners are finding they can make a lucrative living by acting as priests.

Rod, Sam, you listening?

You may all return from the edge of your seats.  I found my cell phone.  I’m sure I’ll misplace it again soon.

I just deleted at attempted blog comment from a spammer that made me laugh out loud.  It was a little phrase like “I want to help my friends” that’s intended to look as though it came from a person, as opposed the lists of porn and gambling sites that spam posts usually consist of.  The e-mail address for responses was pretty impressive though: albert.fraud33@example.com (where example.com is clearly not the e-mail domain).

My review of The Amber Spyglass is up at BBC.

I spent the morning clearing trails for the National Park Service for National Public Lands Day.  The name is a bit of a mouthful, but the activity’s a lot of fun and a little work to make a local national park more acccessible.  Strongly recommended.  And you needn’t wait until NLPD rolls around again to help out.

Rod Van Meter, famed in song and story, walked in graduation this week. This puts the formal cap on his long quest for a Ph.D – in Quantum Computing, because he’s got to have the weirdest thing on the menu. Rod’s a great guy and a smart one and I’m happy to see him pass another milestone (if you know what I mean and I think you do). Now he’ll be learning how much and how little those 3 letters are worth.

He actually earned his degree a while ago. This post is mostly a chance for anyone who actually reads this to stare in awe at his bad-ass graduation threads. I’m delighted to have done my own Ph.D where I did, but no one at Wisconsin has ever looked that cool at graduation.

I’m also quite certain that this is the first and I presume the last time I’ll ever characterize Rod as looking cooler than anyone else. Perhaps that’s worth all those long hours in the library.