Monthly Archives: October 2005

Today’s Google alert turned up this press release…

No longer do you need a physics degree or a slide rule to enjoy science fiction! Adventure fans from young adults to seasoned citizens can now jump into the genre without intimidation, because with the release of “Resurrection of Liberty,” science fiction is now accessible to all.

It goes on.

On a more serious note, my favorite commentary on the intelligent design debate is Dahlia Litchwick’s Mind the Gaps from Slate.

ID says we shouldn’t bother ourselves with resolving scientific inconsistencies or untangling puzzles. We should recognize that what God really wants is for us just to stop learning. … What if we just recognized, for instance, that we can’t make the Standard Model of particle physics work? This theory, which purports to describe all known matter — including subatomic particles, such as quarks and leptons, as well as the forces by which they interact — is plagued by scientists’ failure to observe something called “proton decay.” Now, if we apply the ID principle to particle physics, no one ever needs to put on a lab coat again. Quarks and leptons? They’re made of God.

Still tinkering with the design mod, spending lots of time looking at other sites for cues. It’s remarkable how few site designs use curves at all; I feel a bit retro clinging to my rounded corners. But I will for now.

UPDATE 7:30 p.m.: I’ve posted the design mod. Look at it for a couple minutes, then back at the old design.

OK, I’ve suppressed comments.

Only one comment (via e-mail) so far to the current re-design study of the homepage. I’m happy with the layout and colors except for the new headlines boxes, which I’m still tweaking, especially the colors.

I see today that Salon has converted to a blog-type format, posting time-stamped items in reverse chronological order. Makes sense…

Lost is getting more interesting, with revelations about the purpose of the bunker underneath the hatch, though I think the writers are making too much of this ‘science’ vs. ‘faith’ debate; under the circumstances, it was clearly *prudent* of the survivors to enter the code one more time (i.e. there was nothing to be, er, lost by doing so), whether or not anyone had ‘faith’ that it was necessary…. Not quite blinkable, this item about how last night’s show has given a boost sales of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

Finally, I’ve made the commitment and bought an airline ticket in order to attend the World Fantasy Convention in Madison WI, the first weekend of November. If anyone who’ll be there is reading this, I’ll arrive Thursday night and leave Monday morning.

First, I’ve changed the comment option for this blog to allow ‘only registered users’, which I hope will eliminate the dozen or so comment spam I’ve been getting every day for the past few days. If not, I’ll just prohibit comments altogether; it’s not as if I get all that many. Which is not to say that comments aren’t appreciated; they certainly are, and if I’m reduced to allowing them only by email, I’ll just manually paste any into the blog that are of general interest or needful of reply.

Second, I’m toying as ever with design refinements to the homepage of Locus Online. The latest study is here. There are three things going on here.

1) I’ve replaced the biege color of the left sidebar and date bars with a soft bluish green. I’ve never been really fond of that biege color, but it’s hard finding soft colors (that don’t distract from the overall page layout defined by the curvy rocketship line) that don’t look like easter egg colors. I found the biege — it’s f7efde — on another site, years ago. Looking at the new page on my laptop, on which colors aren’t as intense as on a PC screen, even a flatscreen, the bluish green is perhaps not distinct enough from the purplish blue of the Locus Magazine right sidebar…

2) I’ve widened the page by another 50 pixels, to 800 pixels. (For the moment, some of the graphics have been stretched, rather than rebuilt.)

3) Most obviously, I’ve set up a ‘highlights’ or ‘headlines’ set of boxes at the top of the center pane, as a place to preserve links to the most worthy content of the past few weeks or months, to overcome the drawback of the strictly bloglike chronological format of the past 2 years, whereby such content scrolls down like everything else and might be missed by occasional viewers. Here again I’m not sure I’m happy with the colors; it needs to stand out, but perhaps the block of darker color is too much like a sore thumb.

Comments, opinions, feedback, are welcome, as always. (Via email if necessary.) I get so few, those I do get tend to be disproportionately influential…

PS Cynthia Ward’s Battlestar Galactica review arrived today. Balancing the desire to ‘space out’ such reviews, with the currency of the review given the recent release of the DVD, and my own schedule… well, look for it by the end of the week.

UPDATE — I’ve tweaked some colors on the posted file, so some of the comments above are no longer quite pertinent.

Over the weekend we dropped in on the Living Desert, a zoo and gardens in Palm Desert CA (just down the road from Palm Springs), about which I’d known nothing other than the name on the map. Worth a visit. The place had a respectable selection of live, mostly African, animals — one or more each of giraffe, warthog, leopard, zebra, and many many others… not to mention meerkats (they have a Name a Meerkat contest, open only to kids). And the most spectacular model train display I’ve ever seen or could have imagined. It was very hot.

We also went up the Palm Springs Aerial Tram, which lifts you up 6000 feet in about 10 minutes to near the top of Mt San Jacinto (I always hear Peter Gabriel in my head when I’m in the area), in enormous 80-passanger tram cars, new since the last time 10+ years ago I was there, with rotating floors. And ate dinner at ‘Elevations’, the restaurant at the top, as the sun set on the valley floor nearly 8000 feet below.

We did not buy a time-share. Ahem.

More comment spam, usually to older posts, some a year or more old. I suppose I should disable commenting…

I see our SoCal wildfire has attracted the attention of Kathryn Cramer, at least to the extent of wondering about mapping tools. A legitimate concern; moreso than a flood, the location of a wildfire is difficult to pin down from news broadcasts or any other source, while it’s underway. On Friday the winds had died down such that a pall of brown smoke descended over the entire west San Fernando Valley; no apparent source of the smoke, let alone visible sign of flame, was possible. Today the skies are clear and the fire under considerable control. Lost, perhaps, among the misleading headlines (“thousands of acres of suburban LA in flames” it said on Netscape’s homepage, ignoring the fact that most of the fire was in Ventura County, and in the hills, hardly the ‘suburbs’) and the alarming photos was that the response to the fire has apparently been a phenomenal success. Only two houses were burned, the fire was controlled, and credit is being given to lessons learned from the disastrous fires of 2 years ago, and building and brush control codes that have been in place the last couple decades. (The first house, at least, that burned was built in 1946.)

FYI, on the map that Kathryn links and thumbnails, I live just southeast of the 101 freeway and Topanga Canyon Blvd, which runs north-south between the 27 designator and word ‘Topanga’ on the map.

I am leaving within the hour for a half-weekend in the low desert, Palm Springs area, and… and… I’m not taking my computer. So I hope nothing earth-shattering happens while I’m away from e-mail.

P.S. I seem to be getting comment spam. Hmm.