All this god stuff is really simple when you get right down to it.
(Thanks to Alec.)
Dork! (No, really!)
Required reading for the fashion-conscious.
(Via Susan on the ASML.)
On not mounting the horse, and dressing to confuse
Zoomed up 880 to Oakland this evening to have dinner with Steve, Wendy, Chris and Celeste. We ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant with the unlikely name of Le Cheval on Clay Street. (OK, I know, it’s the French colonial influence – but it still seems odd.) Just inside the door is a large bronze horse and a sign bearing the admonition noted above. The food was wonderful, from the firepot soup and the green mussels to the banana flambé desert. (Fire featured prominently, come to think of it.) And the wine list was varied, satisfying, and modestly priced. (Steve and I couldn’t resist the Solaris Pinot Noir, for obvious reasons.) Highly recommended.
Before we ate, there was much trading of goodies. I’d recently completed Stephen Baxter’s novel Evolution (B+ for science, B- for narrative, C for character development) and I traded it to Steve for Franklin Foer’s How soccer explains the world. (Of course it does!) The “confusion” refers to an item that Chris had picked up for me: a royal blue, long-sleeved polo shirt proudly bearing the name of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in gold script. (There was also a Graduate Theological Union t-shirt for Merry.) So let’s see, I wonder when Carson Kressley would recommend that a hard-core atheist should wear a Divinity School shirt?
A thoroughly enjoyable evening, to be repeated at the next opportunity. (Perhaps the end of September?) There was talk of sushi in Berkeley….
The wackos are crawling out of the woodwork
In the spirit of equal opportunity, the Huffington Post is providing a platform for that Sensitive New-age Guy Deepak Chopra*. For an M.D. (lapsed?) he seems remarkably ignorant when it comes to science. For example, one of his “leading principles” is “Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe.” Paging Steve Weinberg….
UPDATE: Michael Shermer deals with Deepak in a kinder, gentler, and more comprehensive manner.
—
* Last heard of on a Buddha Bar Volume II track called “Desire (The Lover’s Passion)/Do You Love Me/Come to Me/Desire”, vocals by Demi Moore.
Call the men in white coats, no sharps
So Tom Cruise thinks he was a noted playwright in a prior life. What a raving loonie…..
“Shakespeare was deja vu for me,” said Tom Cruise. “It was so cool. I felt as if I had seen his words already, knew them all by heart. Then, after I began studying scientology, I realized the words had come from my heart in a previous life. That’s why I say that as glorious and enviable as my present life is, making ‘War of the Worlds’ and all those other great movies can’t compare to writing ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or the sonnets.”
Well, that final point is certainly true. But “glorious and enviable”??? Reminds me of Zaphod’s line in HHGTTG: “If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now!!”
(Via Huffington.)
You know it's Monterey Historics weekend….
I spent last night in Carmel Valley visiting family. It was hard to find somewhere to stay because this weekend is the annual Monterey Historics at Laguna Seca. You know it’s that time of year when there’s a Ford GT-40 parked outside Safeway, Porsches and Ferraris are as common as dirt, and it takes a brand new Lamborghini or a couple of Bentley Arnage’s to catch your attention. As I came off the Laureles Grade yesterday afternoon and turned onto Carmel Valley Road, I passed a pale yellow Jaguar D-type, street-legal, complete with the fairing behind the driver’s head. Gorgeous. (Though after much searching through A9, I’ve reluctantly concluded that it might have been this replica – oh well….)
Small is beautiful
For some reason I find this notion of a micro compact home wholly intriguing. 
Is it really possible to create a living space in a 2.6 metre cube?
The design of the micro compact home has been informed by the classic scale and order of a Japanese tea house, combined with advanced concepts and technologies in Europe.
The tiny cube provides a double bed on an upper level and working table and dining space for four or five people on a lower level. The kitchen bar is accordingly arranged to serve these two levels. The entrance lobby has triple use and functions as a bathroom and drying space for clothing. Storage is provided off each of these four functioning spaces.
To emphasize how small it really is, here’s a picture of a unit being hauled by an SUV. There are more details at We-Make-Money-Not-Art (definitely worth a browse), and more pictures (with German text) at sueddeutsche.de. Apparently you can buy one for 50,000 Euros….
(Via BoingBoing, not surprisingly.)
Please tick box if you know how to make a bomb
I’m glad to see that the bureaucratic mentality that asked me to to declare whether or not I planned to “overthrow the Government of the United States” when I first came to the US is still alive and well. From Harry Mount in New York:
Before Euan Blair took up his job this summer as an intern working for the House of Representatives in Washington, he had to fill out a DS-157 visa form from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
The DS-157 is a special extra anti-terrorist form that asks Euan to give honest answers to questions like “Do you have any specialised skills or training, including firearms, explosives, nuclear, biological or chemical experience?”
It’s a pretty pointless form. If Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein were applying for a visa, they’d hardly tick the box marked “Yes – please explain.”
But, in any case, they wouldn’t have to.
The form is only for men aged 16-45 wanting an American visa. Saddam Hussein (b. 1937, Iraq) and Osama (b. 1957, Saudi Arabia) don’t have to go through this extra level of American security. Euan Blair (b. 1984, England) and I (b. 1971, England) do.
[…]
Issuing precise, catch-all prohibitions on the sort of post you’re allowed to send, or precise age ranges for extra visas, just means that terrorists work out ways of getting round the restrictions. They develop 15-ounce letter bombs that you are allowed to send by plane. They train adolescents and geriatrics to become suicide bombers.
If [you are going after] terrorists, you catch them by going to war with them abroad, or by using intelligence to track them down in your own country. You do not catch them or kill them by restricting what they send through the post or what diplomatic forms they fill out.
(From today’s Expat.telegraph, a newsletter that I subscribe to containing a few stories and many ads that might be of interest to expat Brits around the world.)
Has it really been eleven years?
This evening, I finally got around to doing something that I’d wanted to do for eleven years: visiting my old colleague and friend Rick and his family in Boulder. Some background: Rick joined Sun back in 1986, working with me on the 386i workstation. He and his family moved to Palo Alto, and then to Boulder, where they built themselves a house just outside town on a 7000′ ridge overlooking the Front Range. That was eleven years ago, and despite my best intentions my travels never took me in that direction. Rick left Sun a few years ago, and we drifted out of touch with each other.
A few weeks ago, when I knew I’d be travelling to this part of the world, I contacted Rick, and this evening I finally made it. The house, and the location, are spectacularly beautiful (see sunset picture); what was even more delightful was that all of us slipped right back into our easygoing friendship as though it had been eleven days instead of eleven years. (I say “all of us”, though the two children I remembered have sprouted alarmingly, and have been joined by third.) And as the rest of the family retired to bed, Rick and I rapped on: about music, about Macintoshes (he has a 17″ PB, I have a 12″), about the computer business, about their amazing power system (imagine a five day UPS for your entire house!), and about old friends. And finally I took my leave, and drove down the narrow gravel driveway, to the dirt road with the wicked hairpin, to the canyon road, and then through Boulder and back to my hotel.
(But I shouldn’t have waited eleven years. Friends this good are worth staying close to.)
Sushi Zanmai
An unexpected delight this evening: wonderful sushi – in Boulder, Colorado of all places! – at Sushi Zanmai. Some of the best I’ve had outside of Japan and San Francisco. We were lucky, and got there at 6pm, just ahead of the crowd. (Memo to self: parking really sucks in downtown Boulder).