saturday snippets

Kurt Vonnegut is both venerable and wise; you're either a Conservative, or a Liberal, or else practically a doughnut -- a discussion of the General State of Things, including the bizarre polarization of politics recently:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/print/cold_turkey/

In These Times is cool, and they've got a syndication feed here on LJ: inthesetimes.

Also, today we saw the ASIMO robot at the FERST center, and it was really impressive, if somewhat creepy, because you're made to think that it's performing the show autonomously... they let you know, at the end, that the robot's actually being puppeted from backstage and most of its cleverness has to do with regulating balance (but they're working on making it more autonomous). But it's still really slick.

And even if Mel delamancha didn't enjoy it, Ghost in the Shell II was at least interesting. The plot goes really slowly, and the dialogue is mostly carried out in the form of random Japanese sayings about elephants in forests and chunks from the book of Proverbs... but they kick around some funky ideas about the nature of soul and different levels of reality and waking-and-dreaming. And the visuals are sick-beautiful (complete with falling cherry-blossoms and millions of birds!), and the fight scenes are quite good.

Also: Yaël's new haircut is very nice, and there is coffee to drink, miles to run, and code to write.

more questions and answers

Do you ever feel like this?
( cut for angst )