scott_sanford

Oh, you may think your government is full of crazies and drunkards but...um, you know, never mind. The point is you're not alone. (Okay, if you've been following our Republican primaries you already knew that.) But did you know the State of Arizona sold off its own capitol building?

Now, I'm not sure how it occurs to somebody to think this is a good idea. For that matter, I'm not sure who'd buy such a thing. What would you do with it? Rent it out to a new and upcoming state government? Haul it off to another state so they can have two capitol buildings? In Arizona, the answer was to lease it back to the original tenants - you know, the people who'd been there in the first place, only now the government had to pay money to occupy the building they'd constructed for themselves. Arizona now wants to buy it back, and if I'm reading the article right someone's pocketing over twenty million dollars in this little caper, and it's not the taxpayers.

According to this and this, we've gotten a proof-of-concept prototype on the contact lens display already.

It's not ready to go yet. The rigid lens form factor is a minor concern. Also, the prototype is fitted on rabbits; it's not clear that they've built one that can be tried by humans. The fact that the display only has one pixel is the real problem - we're a long way from a usable HUD at this point.

I admit I'd expected to see a wearable HUD in a pair of glasses well in advance of contact lenses (if you've missed this idea, watch Dennō Coil for an example); the ones on the market now are a long way from the convenient glasses we've been hoping for. Maybe the age of wearable computing will skip past the glasses stage more quickly than we'd guessed.

That's the title of this article, found in a discussion of the recent articles about a circulation scam at the Wall Street Journal. If you're not into math it may make your eyes glaze over, but take this to heart: after a report of the Wall Street Journal lying about money, this is worse.

Not as immediate, though, and there are no fingers to point at specific malefactors. Rather, it suggests that there are a number of people doing tricky things in the corporate world, and the numbers presented to the public are not always good representations of what's really happening.

Okay, this is a pleasant surprise. Apparently a high school student confronted with a banned books list decided to open a library, turning an ordinary hall locker into a secret library for contraband literature. Names are redacted from the story for obvious reasons. This gives me great hope for our future.

Quipped a friend of mine, "The school doesn't exist to prevent illiteracy, the school exists to preserve illiteracy."

Word on the net says that China has banned time travel. Yes, really. Not, technically, the actual doing of it (although I'm sure they would), but the depiction of time travel in media. How this will affect any rising Chinese SF authors we'll have to wait and see - unless of course they send their novels back in time to May 2011, which would be illegal.

Oh, and you'll need a license to reincarnate. Apparently that can't be left to amateurs any more.

It seems the Brits found a Do-17 that they put into the Channel back in 1940, substantially intact. ( Read more... )