Photos as Promised

Here are the photos from our recent trip to Maine. Please ignore the boy's pasty white father. And I especially like this shot of our little adventurer.

Back From Maine

The family and I returned from our week-long vacation to Maine yesterday. Pictures will be posted shortly, but I will spare a few moments for a brief summary of our trip. Finn had the poor timing to decide to come down with a nasty daycare disease just before we departed. Running a severe fever, I was uncertain if we would even be able to go. But the fever broke and his first airplane ride passed without incident. We arrived in Ogunquit on Saturday night and enjoyed several days of spectacular weather and quality time with Finn's grandparents, aunt, and cousins. The daycare disease left him with a highly visible rash ("Mommy, that boy has spots!"), but the boy was in high spirits as he enjoyed daily swims in the pool and his first tastes of Cheerios, string cheese, and even lobster. The second half of the week saw us traveling north to Bar Harbor. The weather took a turn for the worse, but we still managed to squeeze in a seal-watching cruise, a kayak trip around the bay, and a foggy hike in the Acadia forest.

Now that we are back, I'm going to try to get back into my routine. Alas, my Internet access has been severely curtailed. My corporate overlords have instituted a draconian electronic surveillance policy, so I can no longer make blog posts or even check my personal email from my work computer. All my personal use of the Internet will be confined to the time between Finn's and my own bed time (as well as weekends). I'm hoping I can at least manage semi-regular posts. I have a lot to talk about. I'm starting a new game ( D20 Dragonspire), I'm reading a fantastic new book (A Game of Thrones, by George R.R . Martin), and I'm considering another attempt at marathon training. And in August, I'm off to GenCon again.

Blogger On the Mend?

Looks like Blogger may be back to normal. Some of my old posts have finally been posted and the link to Circvs Maximvs is now visible in the list of links. Whew! I was worried that I was going to have to move to other blogging software. Until these recent problems, I have had nothing but good opinions of Blogger.

Alas, my posting for the next week or so is still going to be sparse due to a family vacation. But I hope to pick up where I left off when I return.

Blogger Problems

Blogger has been acting wonky all week. That is why I have (until now) been unable to post anything. It is doubly frustrating given that I suffered an unrelated web-server crash last week.

Circus Maximus

My Charlottesville gaming friends first clued me into ENWorld, the RPG site that is the place go if you are at all into D&D or D20 games. Alas, even though I've met some amazing ENWorlders at GenCon and Game Days, I've never been one to hang out on the boards much. I simply don't play D&D/D20 enough and I really don't have time to troll the message boards when I should be a) working, b) preparing for actual games, and c) having a life with my family.

Interestingly enough, I'm starting to get sucked into Circvs Maximvs. CM is an uncensored ENWorld spin-off that seems to have a slightly tighter community. Rather, I should say that it is a community that seems to include most of the ENWorlders that I actually know from previous interactions. They are good people and the CM message boards are lively and interesting. Because they allow discussions of politics and religion, I find myself wanting to jump into discussions about things that really seem important. I mean I like talking about gaming and all, but most threads in gaming boards have absolutely no relevance to my games. Controversial topics, on the other hand, really get me riled up. And for some reason I can't stop playing the song game.

I Am Not Worthy

Ok, I thought I was hot stuff when I duplicated the diet coke and mentos experiment for my nieces and nephews. Looks like I'm only a hopeless science geek poseur. Check out what these guys have done with 200 liters of diet coke and 500 mentos.

Important Science Update

In this post, I mentioned that a fun little experiment involving mentos and diet coke. Well, here's a photo of the resulting carnage:

Technical Difficulties

I haven't posted in a while due to a server meltdown. It's back up, but I've lost some data (including a bunch of new pictures from memorial day). Everything should be repaired this evening.

Hitting the Beach

I haven't been around to update the website because the family and I have been in New Jersey for Memorial Day weekend. Not much to report, other than the boy really enjoyed hanging with his cousins, swimming in their pool, and playing at the beach. His parents finally got out to see another movie ( Mission Impossible III, which was very fun). His daddy also found the time to complete Christopher Priest's The Prestige (soon to be a major motion picture), as well as get well into Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides. Both books are loaded with cool ideas that I hope take advantage of in future games that I run (especially the Powers book... I really need to run a pirates game at some point).

For friends and family, we have more pictures of the boy posted here.

A Singular Challenge

CNN has an article about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity Summit that was held a few weeks ago. For those familiar with Kurzweil and the idea of the Singularity, it's pretty standard stuff. However, it did mention that the DARPA Challenge was a particularly good illustration of how quickly technological change is accelerating. In 2004, the competition was kind of a joke. None of the robot vehicles could even complete the course. Last year, twice as many cars entered and four cars finished in good time. The most amazing thing is the the 2007 challenge will be held on city streets, where the vehicles will need to obey all traffic laws and avoid collisions. Now THAT is a pretty cool challenge.

One More Step Towards a Neural Interface

This is what I want for my next video game controller. Actually, that's not strictly true. I'd be perfectly happy with an interface that is slaved to my actual body movements through motion sensors. Obviously, I'd need a special place to use it (it's hard to jump kick or swing a pretend sword at your desk). But it would be super if I could get a workout while playing video games. I hate the claustrophobic nature of most console controllers. I prefer mice and keyboard over the thumb-rending XBox/PS2 controllers.

 

Holy Power Quads!

Did you know that Christianist nutter Pat Robertson can leg press 2000 lbs? Well, it says so on his website that promotes his holy fitness shake. Where's the video of him leaping tall buildings in a single bound?

Treasure Tables

Ok, a new RPG resource just opened up. It's called Treasure Tables, and it has a wiki that looks very promising. The site as the potential to be a great place for one-stop "shopping" for free RPG resources. I hope they keep up the good work.

10 Things I Hate About Commandments

Gratuitous remixed movie-trailer here. Gotta love the Internet. :)

Unintentional Parody

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has made a couple of television commercials that seek to counter calls for regulation in the effort to halt global warming. The first, called "Energy", is like one of those fake ads they run on Saturday Night Live. If you wanted to do a parody of lame anti-regulatory public-relations campaigns, you couldn't really do worse than this add.

"CO2: They Call it Pollution, We Call It Life."

The best bit is how they try to scare people into thinking that if we regulate C02 emissions, it will somehow harm the environment. Video available at their site.

Lab Rats

Thanks to our awesome Slaying Solomon web content crew, updates from the last session have been posted here . Wow, I'm doubly pleased with how the session went. Like I said before, I was feeling a little rusty. It had been a while since I had been in the Buffy GM mindset. But despite not getting an extra three hours of prep time that I wanted, the session really did play well. I was thinking that somebody had to do an episode about a psche experiment gone wrong, and the plot where a supernatural character wakes up in a mundane universe is a classic sci-fi cliche (done at least in the real Buffy and Deep Space Nine).

Learning from Children Learning Language

Something very interesting is going at MIT's Media Lab. Associate Professor Deb Roy, head the Media Lab's Cognitive Machines group, has decked out his house to monitor his own child's acquisition of language. The surveillance equipment will watch for every stimulus that the child receives and try to piece together how people move from simple utterances (like my own boy's "ba-ba" and "ah-duh") to more complex grammatical constructions. I'm very curious as to what they will learn from this experiment. Since my own child is approaching 9 months, I'll be conducting a smaller-scale version of this experiment of my own... albeit without the expensive video equipment and computer processing. Here's hoping that this research is a step towards computers that actually understand language.

Move Along

Nothing to see.
Actually, I mean it. I've been focusing on life stuff and getting more Risus Monkey updates. Speaking of which, I am now honored to be hosting Dan Suptic's second work: Arcadomai. Best... Risus... fantasy... supplement...evar.

SNL Visits Alternate Universe

I missed it on Saturday night, but SNL offered a glimpse at that parallel universe that was created in the wake of 2000 election debacle. Check it out here (courtesy of Crooks and Liars), it's a hoot.

(Be patient with the link, it's getting a lot of traffic)

Singularity Summit

Responsible Nanotechnology is one of many sites that have posted on this weekend's Singularity Summit . I sure wish that I could have gone. To some, the idea of the Singularity seems like crazy science-fiction, a "Rapture for nerds" if you will. But it is undeniable that the rate of technological advancement is accelerating. Simply extrapolating on these trends, as Kurzweil does, leads you to some pretty wild predictions. While I don't think a Singularity event is inevitable, I do buy into many of these predictions. As an AI developer, I am the most skeptical about our ability to produce sentient AI any time soon. This is not because we won't have the computing power (we certainly will), rather I think this is a software problem that will require some sort of breakthrough. Super-fast computers or networks aren't just going to "awaken". Somebody's going to have to design intelligence. Of course, Jeff Hawkin's On Intelligence may be planting the seeds of this breakthrough.