Wired Kingdom

Sad to report that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, amongst many other game systems, accessories, and novels has passed away at the age of 69 from long standing health problems.

While Dungeons & Dragons became famous for its voluminous rules, Mr. Gygax was always adamant that the game’s most important rule was to have fun and to enjoy the social experience of creating collaborative entertainment. In Dungeons & Dragons, players create an alternate persona, like a dwarven thief or a noble paladin, and go off on imagined adventures under the adjudication of another player called the Dungeon Master.
-link to New York Times obit

You know, I can’t even begin to tally how many endless hours I spent playing characters, creating worlds, reading rulebooks, etc. The above quote really does capture the spirit of it though, the game was fun, for sure, but even more than that it gave you a reason to hang out endless hours (and many sessions lasted until literally the sun came up) with friends, shooting the shit, some times about what was going on in the game, other times about movies, comic books, the future, whatever else. The education that I got from having a collaborative environment really did open up my eyes to the possibilities of what life could be. I discovered that things that I had never considered before, like college, was a real possibility, just through the friends I made playing the game. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for D&D and a desire to have another roll at the table.

Just read this amazing article in Wired about the study of autism and the lives of people who have autism. For me it was fascinating. I’ll admit that my knowledge of autism and Asperger’s is very limited, coming from packaged news products and Time magazine or whatever you may find while waiting at the doctors office. Which unfortunately has informed me more about the common (mis)conceptions about it rather than going to any depths. This one article in Wired destroyed all of that.

One researcher in Canada, Laurent Mottron, is looking at autism from a completely different angle: not as a disease, but a variance of biology…

“I wanted to go as far as I could to show that their perception — their brains — are totally different.” Not damaged. Not dysfunctional. Just different.

By far the most intriguing part of the article was about 27-year-old Amanda Baggs, who lives in public housing in Burlington, Vermont. I’ve embedded one of her videos, which she produces herself and has received 400,000 hits so far. It is just mind-blowing and really humbled me. But I’ll let her speak for herself, she communicates much better than I can…

Just saw this amazing article on Discovery.com about ginormous sheets of dark matter found in the galaxy… they’re so big we can’t even see them… or something:

The newfound filaments and sheets of dark matter form a gigantic features stretching across more than 270 million light-years of space–three times larger than any other known structure and 2,000 times the size of our own galaxy.

Giant Sheet of Dark Matter Detected 

So my Juliette and I caught the lunar eclipse the other night with one of our neighbors. There was intermittent cloud cover which meant that we would only see about thirty seconds before the moon was covered for more than a couple minutes. It was fun, but not nearly as great as the eclipse I witnessed back in August, probably due to the aforementioned clouds.

At some time between 10:15 and 10:30 we were all leaning against the car, just chatting when suddenly the whole sky lit up in a brilliant blue green flash. It was bright enough that it lit up the neighborhood, lasted about 3 to 5 seconds and then flashed out. It was without doubt, one of the most intriguing things I’ve ever witnessed. We were all floored by it, a couple of neighbors came over and asked if we had seen the event as well, and there was much excited chatter for a while.

Since then, I’ve contacted the City of Lake Worth to see if any transformers had blown, nope. I’ve gone to meteor siting pages, local newspapers, I even contacted the news desk at the paper I work for, basically combing the web as best as I could to figure out what it was and have come back from the search empty handed.

So, basically I have two hypothesis on what happened. Either it was a meteor that went unreported or it was a piece of junk flying off of the satellite that got shot down. The latter seems very improbable though, because it was shot down over the Pacific, near Washington and Canada. Perhaps debris could cross more than 2500 miles in a very short time, but I haven’t heard any reports of others witnessing debris falling anywhere in the southeast at all.

Okay, it was either a meteor or aliens. I’m coming down on the side of aliens and pledging my allegiance to them now, others would do well to follow suit.

Wow, I am dumbstruck by this…. the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, in coordination with UCLA’s Urban Simulation Team has digitally recreated the World’s Fair of 1893 and made a virtual tour out of it. Also known as the Columbian Exposition it’s featuring this weekend only. Participants will be able to take a virtual hot air balloon ride and a drift along in a gondola to tour the grounds of the Expo just as the original fair-goers did. (Click here for a link to the video of the gondola ride, it starts off with shaky embedded source images but after about 30 seconds smooths out… warning: wmv format. See more videos here.)

The Columbian Expo was an amazing feat, the least of which was bringing it to Chicago versus other competing cities. In fact, the nickname of “the Windy City” was borne of the affair, not because of the weather, but because of the boasts of the Chicago politicians and architects who wanted the expo in Chi-town. I won’t recall all of the reasons here that this was such an amazing event, but I will list a few details:

• They built the expo on over 630 acres of drained swampland and featured over 200 buildings made in a classical architecture style. In many ways, this was a culmination and first major triumph for truly American arts and architecture and projected both ideals to the world stage.
• Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla lit the entire fairgrounds with streetlights and lamps via alternating current, the first time this technology was exhibited to the public.
• The first Ferris Wheel at 264 feet tall was built by George Ferris for the fair to rival Paris’ Eiffel Tower.
• For more info, check out wikipedia’s great entry on it… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition

In another life, when I sold a few items on ebay, some of the coolest items that passed through my hands were memorabilia from that fair.

The story behind the Columbian Exposition and the “White City” that was built on Chicago’s near south side for the event is fascinating. One of the best books imho to check out that really seems to capture all of the wheeling and dealing, disagreements between the titanic egos of the architects and politicians that were involved (oh and the serial killer who marred the memory of the fair forever), is Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. Really, read this book, it’s amazing. And if you live in Chicago, go see this exhibit, it’s only around for this weekend!

From the Chicago Trib’s article on it:

The “virtual” digital version of the legendary World’s Fair will allow a limited number of visitors to the Museum of Science and Industry this weekend to glide in electric boats along canals past the fair’s classical pavilions or take in the monumental scale of the ornate buildings while strolling on the sidewalks. They can even soar 1,492 feet in a hot-air balloon to look down on the White City.

Sorry to get all history dork on y’all, but goddam, I wish I was in Chicago…

I’m not sure that there is anyone under the age of 40 who believes they’ll ever recover a single payment they’ve ever made to Social Security, but it’s still depressing to learn in an article that today begins the babyboomer assault on the system. Over the next 20ish years, 10,000 people a day will join the rolls according to this article, which goes on to say that by 2041 Social Security will be completely depleted. Hah, just in time for me to receive nothing…

Right, so I know I haven’t posted anything in a while, so here goes a little one. I admit, I have a very off and on relationship with blogging lately, but it’s a little irritating at times when you realize that what you’re posting on your blog is coming off of someone else’s and from someone else beyond them. Sheesh, the regurgitated society is in full swing. So, I get a little irritable about that, but honestly, ask any of my friends and they’ll confirm that I’m usually a little irritable about something. Now, on to the regurgitator:

The Fabulist! is a fun little blog that I occasionally check out who specialize in a mild brand of emo/goth, for lack of a better descriptor. Recently they featured an artist named Nick Jaina, from their site:

Nick Jaina has discovered an abalone cross during an archaeological dig at San Juan Bautista Mission, written a jazz opera about a funeral parade in New Orleans, and drummed for the band The Be Good Tanyas. Yes, he has lived an interesting and productive life, and now he’s made it all the more interesting and productive with the release of his new album, Wool (coming March 11). 

Personally, I would have said he’s a bit reminiscent of Leonard Cohen (and no, not just because he also has a song about another Marianne). He also reminds me of someone else but I can’t quite put my finger on it… any thoughts?

Here’s a link to the post.

And here are links to a couple of songs found in that post:

• Maryanne
• Power

I’m bored, suffer.

My first impression of this amazing device is that it was a contraption like a meat grinder that turns your cat into litter.

My second impression was that it was a cross between a toilet and a sewing machine.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Hey ho there, it’s just come to my attention that google quit supporting inline objects on their igoogle home page product. What this means is that people who were using my little tutorial to stop igoogle from auto-refreshing and to get another window, such as pulling in google reader, are pretty much s.o.l. One caveat to this is that if you managed to load in that inline gadget prior to December 12, 2007, google supposedly took a “snapshot” to allow you to continue using it.

After a cursory look around the tubes, I haven’t seen anything that could replace the inline tools I had suggested. I’ll add more info if I find any updates on this scenario…

The antiwar group Codepink had their rally and press conference shut down over the weekend by the anti-Castro Cubans of Little Havana, a neighborhood in Miami…

Here’s a link to the article that appeared in the Sun-Sentinel.

The rally that they were attempting to hold was to call for the addition of Luis Posada Carriles to the FBI’s most wanted list. Posada Carriles is wanted in Venezuela and Cuba for the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976, as well as several bombings around Havana as recently as 1997.

The US has repeatedly offered safe haven to this man, in spite of immigration fraud charges and, well obviously, a history of terrorism. Wait a minute, wasn’t there supposed to be a big “war” on that or something, I thought maybe I heard about it on Fox News. Oh well, whatever, I guess we’re not at war with ALL terrorists, just the ones that we don’t like. Perhaps his service to the Reagan White House as a key player in the Iran-Contra affair had something to do with it…

His supporters say Posada Carriles is a patriot and a hero in their struggle against Castro’s communist regime.

Another great quote from the article, “Posada Carriles is no terrorist. The terrorist is Fidel Castro,” said Rene Vidal, 77, among those gathered.

Well said Mr. Vidal, not to defend Castro, but all this time I thought that terrorists were people that targeted civilians with violence for political or ideological reasons.