Walking on the Moon

Reviews of Frankenstein and The Skeptical Environmentalist are up on BBC. I had a plane trip, so I got some reading done.

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).

When I debug, which I’m doing now, I frequently hum songs to myself about puzzles or looking for answers – you know – songs about debugging. R. E. M.’s Strange is in heavy rotation for this and I’m sure you can guess others. Today’s was the refrain “I know there’s something going on…” repeated with a little baseline I won’t try to reproduce for you. Unfortunately, I began to think “who did that song?” and promptly distracted myself. I’m pretty good at “name that 80’s song” and really perturbed myself at not being able to think of this.
Google found the lyrics for me on the second hit. I am terrified and delighted. I console myself by realizing that I was able to get an attribute-based fix on it: “it was that girl from ABBA.”

Now back to something that’s going on…

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.

I don’t like the look of this. Closing a Mozart opera because it might upset a bunch of nuts is not an action of the people I’d like to be. The Mayor of Berlin seems to have it together, though:

“Our ideas about openness, tolerance and freedom must be lived out on the offensive. Voluntary self-limitation gives those who fight against our values a confirmation in advance that we will not stand behind them.”

My review of The Subtle Knife is up on BBC.

And then depression set in.  From slashdot.

I’m sure you’ve all made your preparations and are enjoying the day.  It is getting a little commercial, but I love the specials.