I've read and reread the Fuzzy books several times, and I do love them, but what always gets me is how they represent The Fifties In Space. There's no Verne/Clarke-style prescience whatsoever. (The Martian Chronicles has the same problem, but it's so much more obvious in the Fuzzy books.)

They have cocktails every day at five. They have videophones, yet movies of the Fuzzies must be brought home on film reels and developed. The writings's not as sexist as it could be, but it's close.

I've always thought these books' only bow to the predictable march of progress was the ridiculous "melting pot" names of some supporting characters.

Hirohito Bjornsen. SRSLY.

This just makes me want to go to Amsterdam.

What a great way to prove CC licensing doesn't sell fewer books. I hope someone at the Times does a story about their own list.

I want this to be true. I've been holding off buying an iPhone until it had fast data, so it can replace my Treo, and/or 32GB, so it can replace my 5G iPod. Ideally both, but I'd take either.

I reeeeeally want this to be true.

I want one just based on how awesome a name 1337motif is.

Irrelevant to the comment thread, but relevant to the damn post: If you happen to be in Thailand can you really get three suits, three blouses, three skirts, a dress, and three silk scarves custom-made for two hundred bucks? Or do I misunderstand the ads?

GNI per capita, in purchasing power parity dollars, is a fairer measure than straight GDP, but you have to take into account access to water, human rights, environment, school enrollment and completion rates, maternal mortality, and multitudinous indicators of quality of life. The UNDP's Human Development Index comes close, but all these factors combine to form a big picture that simply can't be reduced to one number.

My job is typesetting books of these indicators. I read them every day. It doesn't take long to realize that while GDP (though PPP GNI is used more now) is just an economic indicator, the trends among all those other indicators are pretty much tracking it. Yes, the manufacturing dollars in China mask bad human rights and environmental indicators, but China (and India, and a few others) are gross outliers on a pretty clear curve.

I just remembered my parents, who are RVers, can ALSO often not see my sytes.net blog from public libraries because of "pornography." The filtering company we've seen is WebBalanced.

Their marvelous website includes this gem:

Employees average 2 hours per day viewing porn, reading email, chatting with friends, playing games, downloading, shopping, searching for jobs, and more, at your expense.

My inconsequential blog is hosted by a friend; they use their domain to host blogs for a small group of us. Their domain, slithytoves.org, redirects through dynamic DNS to slithytoves.sytes.net, and that's the issue: ALL of sytes.net, regardless of WHICH subdomain or WHICH redirect, appears to be blocked as "pornography" by some filtering software. My brother, who works for a large company you've heard of, can't see my blog at work because it's "pornography."

It seems so lazy to block an entire dynamic DNS forwarding domain because maybe there was a naked lady on one subdomain at one time.

My brother did this himself in his S4, carved out the vent and ran the new gauge in. It looks pretty slick if you don't examine it super close.

Awesome, thanks so much to Bjarne.

For some reason Lego has always been one of those companies whose internal workings are completely intriguing down to the smallest detail. Some companies, I don't care, but how things go down at Lego (and other places, including Disney and McSweeney's) just fascinates me.

My copy of The Wall Chart of World History (which I've had since 1988 and which I believe dates from around the turn of the 20th century) has a similar collection of images in it, just broken down into fewer categories:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kostia/2230983727/

Battlestar Galactica paper (and books, and picture frames, and dogtags, and photographs) is a lovely design element but makes NO SENSE. Why would you ever print anything on paper that isn't a shape that tessellates? Where is the planetful of little diamonds and triangles of paper?

"I continued to collect Castle sets after this, but more and more ended up building the models from the instructions and leaving them on my shelves. I remember especially the ninja and samurai sets, which I spent hundreds of dollars collecting, but never ended up using for much at all."

I did the same thing--buy them, put them together from the instructions, and display them--for years. I bought castle and pirate sets anywhere I could find them. I got the biggest castle set available at the time for Christmas, from my parents, in 1996--when I was 23.

I was active on the alt.lego (and, later, rec.toys.lego) newsgroups. I participated in text-code-driven auctions by email through AucZILLA to buy specific fascinating parts. It was wondrous.

But when I finally realized about two years ago that I hadn't recreated the displays after my last move, I started thinking hard about what to do.

As it happens, I sold all my Lego sets on a site called BrickLink, and as it happens I made a profit. Some sets I'd bought on clearance or even at overstock stores in the early- to mid-90s went for three and four times what I'd paid, sometimes for hundreds of dollars.

I really miss my Lego some days. I miss the way all those castles and pirate ships looked lined up on glass shelves in front of a window, and I miss the sense of accomplishment that came from finishing a large set.

But I know--I *know*--that all those sets are now in the hands of people who wanted them more than I do. The online adult-Lego-fan community is more active and better-equipped than ever, and I really like knowing that I made some people's days when the boxes arrived with sets they'd never put together before.

Even back in the heyday of Streamline, its output was never as good as what you could get in Photoshop from a high-res scan. Change the file to black and white, bump up the levels to get high contrast, select the black areas with the magic wand and make a work path from the selection at the tightest tolerance. Export that path to Illustrator, and while it may look like what Streamline put out, it's got a lot more detail.

The white areas in your original vector file could have been removed by making compound paths out of the overlapping areas. Depending on what (ancient) version of Streamline you were working with, that maybe should have happened automatically.

I'm amazed at what VectorMagic can do, and for free! I almost can't wait until the next time some client sends me a crappy scan when I ask for a vector version of their logo!

Trepanned skulls figure prominently in The Golden Compass (the book; I assume it's not in the movie). The obvious reason to do it is to let Dust in or out.

Not that I ever bought anything purple from them, through Blowfish, a year or two ago, or anything, so I wouldn't know, but yes, the magnets in the packaging are great.

I wish more packages would pick this up. It's far, far superior to the cheap plastic not-Velcro-brand-fastener you have to rip open to look under the flaps of a box a computer game comes in, for instance.

Before doing any serious thinking about what you'd eat and when and under what circumstances, read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy.

Even as a longtime fan of postapocalyptic fiction ("The Stand" is a big favorite), it completely changed my outlook on the situation from an individual-survivor standpoint.

Imagine seven, eight, nine years after the disaster (it's not clear, but that's my guess), when nothing--and I mean nothing--has been restocked, rebooted, recreated ... and all that's left is all that's left.

You'd eat a lot worse than meat.

It doesn't give queues, it gives cues. It isn't discrete, it's discreet.

I hope that wording isn't from a published review.

If you don't drink tea, it's far from essential. The last time I wanted one was when I was living in a college dorm room, with my own sink and electrical outlets, but with no access to a microwave or stove. There's nothing better than electric-kettle macaroni and cheese at 3 am.

Why is it so hard to type a proper apostrophe? If the font you're using doesn't have one, you don't paste in a foot mark (a completely different character) in 48-point Times!

Blackwater is above the rules, of course, though.

I know I've seen this from Levenger, years ago, but of course it isn't on their website anymore.

I don't think that baby is old enough to have been put down on his side, and even if he is, having a pillow there to prevent him rolling over onto his back seems dangerous.

That lantern battery thing isn't true.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/humor/batteryhack.asp

The one where you can get button cells out of an A32 is true, but lantern batteries are all different inside and aren't made of AAs.

I swear I read "Beatles," not "Beasties," and when I listened to the track I was really confused.

I have one. I got it on Woot for $80. It's awesome. The iPod (mine is a 5G, and yes, it probably won't work on the new models) DOES dock inside, and if it's black it looks like part of the same unit, just slick as hell. The fit and finish are great, and the sound and screen are acceptable. The biggest drawback is that it doesn't charge the iPod; even if the V55 has a full battery, you're done watching if the battery in the iPod dies.

When I see "pencils" and "bench" in the same sentence, all I can think of is the Group W bench.

"But we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there."

No, a 'capitol' is a building. A 'capital' is a city.

I spotted Benign Girl in a dollar store back in 2005 along with several other bizarre toys. There was a "Bazic" sketch pad with the line "Finally, the exciting festival starts in the herb land." on top, but my favorite was these blocks:

http://www.kostia.net/photo/0510-OctoberMisc/slides/Photo_102605_004.html

featuring typical alphabet-block words like Eglantine, Nabs, and Xograph.