Everywhere you can read that Al Franken’s victory in the long drawn-out Minnesota Senate race gives the Democrats a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority in the Senate. Actually, both liberal hopes and conservative fears are misplaced. I remember the Carter administration. The idea that all 60 Democratic Senators would vote lock-step on any really controversial issue is not science fiction. It is fantasy.
I know this probably is about electrical switches, but when I saw this near downtown Minneapolis my first thought was about a really serious course on quantum mechanics.
Pin the Disease to Jenny McCarthy
A humorous look at a very serious issue.
From Bug Girl‘s entertaining Con Report.
For the record: mia_mcdavid and I have two children. Both are on the autistic spectrum. T is fully autistic (non-verbal) and J has Asperger’s Syndrome. Both received all the usual childhood vaccinations. We have no regrets about this.
While at Convergence I heard there is a movement to get a star named after Michael Jackson. This idea is destined to the oblivion it deserves: All nomenclature of the sky is managed (quite well, IMHO) by the International Astronomical Union, which is not going to do anything so silly.
Convergence 2009 was a good con, though the sheer size of it exposed a basic structural flaw. In most of my decades in fandom, the social aspects of a convention have been more important than the programming. However, the highlight of this Convergence was one of the programming tracks. It was the most interesting programming I have seen in the several Convergences we have attended. The problem was with the party space: The parties of an ever-growing convention are squeezed into a finite and now very crowded space.
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…. happened because Darwin Killed Off The Werewolf.
Friday night at Convergence there was an interesting and very funny panel about Bigfoot stories.
mia_mcdavid and I are at Convergence, the biggest of the local science fiction conventions. We are having a good time. The programming seems more interesting (for me, anyway) than in some previous years.
Man Burned by Burning Man Can’t Sue Festival
“The risk of injury to those who voluntarily decide to partake in the commemorative ritual at Burning Man is self-evident,” Justice Ignazio Ruvolo wrote.
…”if there ever was a case to apply the assumption of risk doctrine, this is it. This is person who was a well-educated man and experienced with the festival and appreciated the danger, who voluntarily exposed himself to a much higher degree of risk by walking into the Burning Man.”
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 