Posts by matt

DARPA’s next Grand Challenge (the one they usually hold in the desert, where they race robot cars over inhospitable terrain) will be held in a simulated city next year. The unmanned vehicles will have to handle traffic and deal with intersections. (Wired.)

• Awesome Coke commercial. (Ad blog.)
  (tags: commercial cool beautiful)

Just ’cause we never mention it, and it’s the first day of the month, here’s what I remember reading last month:

David Leavitt, Collected Stories: I love this man’s short stories. So. Much. But for whatever reason, I’d never read a collection of them until now. Leavitt is a master of depicting the oddness of a family at the precise moment of dissolution. And the endings of his stories leave the world shifted just slightly askew. The cycle of stories about Lord Alfred Douglas near the end kind of disrupt the rhythm, though.

Anita Diamant, The Red Tent: I’ve always been fascinated by the Bible story of Leah, Jacob’s first wife. As the story goes, Jacob sees a beautiful woman named Rachel tending sheep one day, and he goes to ask her father Laban for her hand in marriage. Laban says, “Sure, if you work for me for seven years.” So Jacob does. Wedding day arrives, bride and groom are married, bride’s veil comes off, and surprise! It’s actually Rachel’s un-hott older sister Leah. Jacob’s totally disappointed, and he asks Laban, “WTF?” Laban says, “Yeah, sorry, here we marry off the older sisters first. But work for me another seven years, and you can have Rachel for realz.” So Jacob does.

Read more…

• Natural-language interactive fiction. (GTA.)
  (tags: programming literature videogames writing storytelling)
• Digg-ified Ask MeFi. (Solution Watch.)
  (tags: community social tagging opensource customerservice ideas)

I have big love for the fact that Dan Okrent’s book is titled “Public Editor #1”:

I didn

• Oh my God! They killed Nnenna! Bastards!
• Chris Daughtry’s performance of “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman” on American Idol this week was incredible. It a) made me not hate that song, and b) made me push Chris to the top of my favorites list, even ahead of my beloved Paris.
• Check it: Journerdism.com, from ’05 Poynter summer fellow Will Sullivan.
• So you wanna blog? LaFry breaks it down.
• Why didn’t anyone tell me Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson’s blog is really awesome?

• Walt Disney: self-plagiarist. (Brandflakesforbreakfast.)
  (tags: animation art cool movies culture)

• Top 10 WinXP tips. (LifeHacker.)
  (tags: computer windows list tips tools lifehacks best)
• List of programming books online.
  (tags: books computer education list programming reference)
• Ten essential science questions. (Strib.)
  (tags: article science list ideas nature)
• Ten science questions reviewed. (Kottke.)
  (tags: list science article ideas)

Saturday was the immortal Minnesota Geek Prom. (Full disclosure: Because I’m rumored to occasionally contribute to a so-called “Weblog,” I was given free VIP admission for me and a guest. I took my buddy Nathan, but I would totally have taken you if you’d asked.)

Observations:

• I wish I’d been cool enough in high school to be friends with the girl who wears leather to the prom and sneaks in a flask of bourbon. That made the 10-year-old Omnimax movie infinitely more entertaining.
• Actually, now that I think about it, I did go to my high school “prom”* with a badass, leather-wearing girl. And I was, if anything, slightly geekier then than I was at the actual Geek Prom. So the whole experience was kinda dejà vu.
• As Alexis notes, I was not crowned prom king, nor was she crowned prom queen, despite the honest-to-goodness Klingon tattoo on her chest, and despite my Buffy thesis and singing of the score to Evita.
• Chuck Olsen’s hott MNStories video story will give you the best taste of the exuberant mood that reigned o’er the evening. (Look for me very briefly at about 5:04.)
• Alexis’ photos will give you the best taste of my adorkableness. (Note: there’s also some XXX NSFW geek ass on display. Not mine, though.)
• While there was an ironic sheen on all of this, there also seemed to be unspoken widespread understanding that yes, most of us present truly were geeks. And we were embracing it. And it was awesome. I’m totally going next year. And I will be King of the Geeks.

* Because I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school, we did not have an actual “prom” with actual “dancing.” Instead, we had the Bible-rific “Junior/Senior Banquet,” typically held at schools like Bob Jones University.

Horrible segues, with anchorman Clive Rutledge:

“… Experts say speed dating’s popularity continues to rise. After seeing that clip featuring the hottie in the halter-top, something else is rising, too, heh-heh, if you catch my drift—that’s right: interest rates. Today the Federal Reserve recommended they be upped by half a percent.”