The Big Think

Dangit! I just missed my 14,000th day! It was January 9th of 2008! I’ll have to wait another 3+ years for the next one! Shoot.

Calculate your own K-days.

This is what it’s like to be a nerd with X-10. Check out the first 2:40. Gets dumb after that.

I spent some time cleaning out the library this afternoon. Our “library” is really just the pretentiously named fourth bedroom in our house. Instead of an extra bed there are four bookshelves, a computer, and a lot of other stuff that needed to be sorted, tossed, or re-filed into other categories and locations to be tossed later.

I went through some of my books (they multiply, you know) and came to my Science Fiction section. Had a lot of Asimov books, naturally, a few Brin, Card, Sheffield, and a whole bunch of Arthur C. Clarke. 2001, 2010, 2069, 3001, The Rama series, on and on. I decided that his stuff passed the threshold of keepability (meaning: too good to toss. I chucked some old or outdated or duplicate stuff). So I re-shelved them and thought “gee, I’m going to have to read some of those again soon”. Clarke is one of those seminal, always-present writers in the SF world. His books were a big, big part of my life growing up. He was really the very first science fiction author of any standing that I read in my youth and I always appreciated how his style of writing was clear and complex at the same time. He could get across some pretty intricate ideas in a way that was easy to understand, without talking down to a 12 year old. In spite of his annoying tendency to kill his main characters at the end of his books in order to Make A Bigger Point, I’ve always liked his style of writing.

Clarke made his biggest contributions during the 60’s and 70’s and has been floating serenely on his fame ever since while living in, of all places, Sri Lanka.

I was surprised and saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke died in his home today at the age of 90. An era has ended.

Australian auctions his life to get a fresh start.

Matt has a good post on subjectivity and objective beauty over at Not-A-Pipe. We’ve had extensive conversations about this topic for a while. Most of my conversations with Matt fall in the “extensive” category, for which I’m pretty grateful.