I really like the simplicity of Comet and its particular style, but it lacks certain basic features like UI for browsing to next and previous entries (even though there is the widget for “Latest Posts”). And the ability to reply to a comment instead of add another comment. Time to find a replacement.

Followup: the new version of (previous) template, Comet, has added previous and next post buttons and at least knows when I logged in and doesn’t ask me to supply info for comment responses. Good, I have things I’d rather do than seek about and apply a new template right now.

Stalking the followup: Found a new template named “Arjuna,” compact, easier to read, mo better options, and just a little shiny (for its namesake). Applicado!

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Hormonal zombie spies in India during the Napoleonic era. (How the hell do you think the East India Co was so successful?) More anon.

(The problem: to write more on this or a more important topic would consume time I can’t spend right now. But zombies are, ironically(?), keeping more than one genre of publishing alive, so I thought (while considering scenarios for a background project), I could splash them here, too.

Back to creating and undoing Celtic knots of data–my day job. If any zombies approach, I’ll be able to keep them tied up for several software releases, at least.

Followup: Hmm, looks like zombie spies in general are nothing new. However, googling “zombie spies of the Punjab” yielded no direct hits (although plenty of hits for spies in the Punjab, including the expected references to Kipling’s Kim).  Also, no results for zombie spies of the Kalahari (not even in HD), zombie spies of Minneapolis (Garrison Keilor is safe–for now), and zombie spies in Basque Country.

Bonus: Everyone on my blog roll is a certified zombie spy. Unfortunately, the identity of the certification board is a closely held secret that I cannot reveal here except under pressure of currency.

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Have not abandoned the blog, just very very busy. (I have a wife, you know.)

In the meantime, be kind to your smart mouth broccoli and don’t ignore the gentle simple banana–yellow with a natural smiley shape, it’s just the thing to perk up your day.

Watch their careers take shape on YouTube and befriend them on Facebook.

More later.

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I’ve started a minor paid blogging gig (really, just rolled it into my day job), supporting a skunkworks project that promotes health and wellness for kids via in-house videos of talking produce (filmed by our Creative Director, also a standup comic). The blog entries will be responses to the videos, mixing in vignettes from life (real and imagined), my voice mixed with a handful of other in-house bloggers representing different voices and demographics. Following a spoof entry I wrote as Abraham Lincoln as a gypsy fortune teller (robbing the Gettysburg address) that I sent round via email, I’ve also been encouraged to try writing as different characters. We’ll see how that works or if it just turns out to be self-gratification.

I’m also providing web site support, for now.

More later when the project goes live. So far, it’s been a lot of fun, when we’ve had time to work on it.

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I posed this rhetorical question recently on Facebook (because I was mindlessly tired and thus in a perfect Zen state to communicate via FB). The context, while sounding general, is Loading the Dishwasher.

Tell the truth, brothers, it’s good to be right, isn’t it?

Here’s the unedited response from my sibling brother. Remember, this is for posterity:

Of course it’s good to be right. The more serious moral question is how to act towards others when they are forced to admit you are right.

For instance, is it “bad” to victory prance laps around a person who just admitted you are right and while looking with puzzlement at the big foam hand you are thrusting in the air ask in a loud sing song voice why they don’t make giant foam hands that say “We’re #2,” then slapping yourself on the head and saying, oh yeah, that’s right, because when it comes to being right, there is only one number that matters. BIG foam hand in your FACE! IN. YOUR. FACE.

Struggling with this question I did what any reasonable person would do. I invoked the Dalai Lama in a dream and asked him,

“Your Holiness, I know that Buddhism holds that there is no life without suffering and that enlightenment can only happen after travelling the Eightfold Path, which if I understood Wikipedia correctly, is basically about how to be right all the time about everything. Which I am. As obvious as this is to me, less-informed people around me still struggle to accept that I have transendenced the wrongness from which they still suffer?”

Sensing the truth in my view, the Dalai Lama closed his eyes and breathed in slowly through one nostril, then the other, considering how to make his answer acceptable to me. Finally he answered.

“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. Even when you are battered by the shrill winds of the less-informed.”

Bringing his hands together, he then bowed and continued into the hotel as an aide handed me this cool publicity headshot:

The next day I left my big foam hand in the dumpster area and resolved in the future to temper my disrespect for insufferable ignorance and baffling absence of taste by ending all debates I win with a statement like, “Not that anything matters,” or “Being right is nothing compared to all that hair. Man, you’ll never be bald.”

I think this is what Buddha would do.

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These have been developed spuriously and sometimes out of desperation at my daughter’s bedtime since last Thanksgiving. I usually tell the stories in mad lib style, leaving blanks for her to fill in and guide the plot or character actions. She’s five and is not short of ideas or decisions.

Main characters:
Four quadruplet (but not identical) late teen Princesses opening a chain of teashops in usual and unusual locations

Recurring or single appearance characters:
A King, who builds transdimensional zoos and swings through trees at night (thanks to night vision goggles)
A Queen, admiral of the fleet
A ne’er do well enchanted Prince, asleep in a tower
A guardian tiger spirit fond of disguises (and comfortable in forest and urban jungles)
A temple dragon named Tien Lung fond of tea and conversation
A Chinese emperor worried about dragons
Madame Minus-One Pound, worried about gravity, and an expert in tea
A reformed Ogre, now tea shop manager
A leprechaun constable securing against illegal fairy ring gateway use
A quirky scientist, Professor Adams, and his submarine-based lab
Professor Adams’ alternate (bizarro) personality
A polar bear and grey whale in an interspecies romance on the ice pack
Dread Pirate Bawb and, following a devastating battle with the Queen’s fleet, Former Pirate Fred

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This is a longish response to a post on the blog, Round Dice, on Evolution of the Obvious. Read it first, then come back here if you like. Or stay there and soak up more of Mr. Menon’s encyclopedic mind.

The Day Before Yesterday (also the title of my upcoming disaster novel) my sister-in-law’s chimney caught fire, causing some smoke damage and sending them to a friend’s house for the night. My mother-in-law called my wife and I yesterday to tell us what happened and then, unable to keep herself off the stage, intimated that she had went to bed that night unable to stop thinking about my sister-in-law and, in hindsight, sure that dark clouds were gathering over her daughter’s home.

I have a not entirely irrational habit of taking words and plugging them into Inigo Montoya’s retort, “I don’t think [term] means what you think it means.” In this case, coincidence or mother’s intuition–when your habit is to worry about any one of your children as you wait for sleep, weighting your worry toward those struggling the most, odds are good that you’ll hit jackpot when disaster strikes. The statistics of coincidence aside (coincidence not being all that coincidental), my mother-in-law created an event, then assigned an adaptive value to it (mom still needs to be needed). Societies could (and have) built rules of behavior around such intuition (placing them in the murky realm of the unquestionable–not the inexplicable, because the explanation is the unexplainable intuition, which some people reduce to a lifetime of perceptions creating a complex web of awareness that exceeds the bounds of what most of us can comprehend on an average day, leading to notions of intelligent design–but I digress.)

A nice thing about superstition is that it jumps right to the results–no boring search and sift through data (a word as dry and, to some, as nefarious in meaning as “corpse powder”) to help explain the system–so superstition is an adaption to prevent boredom. (Or weevils.) And it gets us back to work, to surviving the day. BUT (sorry for the big but), ironically, it also causes boredom–as in, sheesh, is that all there is? Or, maybe, as it turns out, there’s this fascinating system of behaviors and cultural transmission tied to genetics that makes it possible to view a node (person) or a group of nodes (crowd, congregation, etc.) as almost impossibly but not inconceivably (that word does mean what I think it means) rich systems that should occasionally make us giddy with delight (or, optionally, disgust) when we look at each other. Like looking at clouds–what do you see, a kitty chasing a bunny, two gods butting thunderheads, a chimney fire, or….

P.S. This doesn’t mean I don’t love my mother-in-law. Or worry about her at night.

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right here: SOFIA Seeks Secrets of Planetary Birth

I know it’s silly to see an alternate spelling of my daughter’s name in this context and imagine her becoming a groundbreaking astronomer when she grows up. Or building a massive intelligent telescope for which she is the namesake. Romantic parents imagine their children as pioneers. Pragmatic parents know the lives of pioneers are anything but romantic and too often have the hero’s share of tragedy. There’s also a post-singularity angle I could work here, but not with my own kid.

It’s romantic enough to think of a giant jet in our stratosphere aiming its telescope into the hearts of planetary accretion disks.

Now to find cool science with the acronyms NOAH, JORDAN, ADAM, and TRAVIS.

Here’s an excerpt from the article linked above.

You don’t always have to have a rocket to do rocket science. Sometimes a mere airplane will do – that is, a mere Boeing 747 toting a 17-ton, 9-foot wide telescope named SOFIA.

Short for Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA will observe the universe while gliding through the stratosphere at 45,000 feet. When it begins operations next year, it will be the world’s biggest, most advanced airborne observatory.

“SOFIA will be able to locate the ‘planetary snowline,’ where water vapor turns to ice in the disk of dust and gas around young stars,” says Marcum. “That’s important because we think that’s where gas giants are born. The most massive planetary cores are fashioned [around the snowline] because conditions are best for rock and ice to build up.” (Sticky ice particles help form planets just as they help you make a snowball to hurl at an unsuspecting friend.)

“Once a large enough core forms, its gravity becomes strong enough to hold on to gas so more hydrogen and helium molecules can ‘stick.’ Then these large cores can grow into gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Otherwise, they remain as smaller rock-ice planets.”

“SOFIA will also be able to pinpoint where basic building blocks like oxygen, methane, and carbon dioxide2 are located within the protoplanetary disk.” Knowing where various substances are located in the disk will cast light on how they come together, from the “ground” up, to form planets.

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Keeping with the oldies pop theme, this made me so very happy:

Setting Sail Into Space, Propelled by Sunshine

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Speaks for itself: http://xkcd.com/137/

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