Gray Goo Problem in the Absence of Nanotech?

The Gray Ooze That Ate the Indonesian Villages – Los Angeles Times

SIDOARJO, Indonesia — Nothing, it seems, can stop the mud.

For more than three months, the hot, noxious goop has spewed up through a crack in the earth at a natural-gas exploration site, swamping everything in its path.

The expanding, surreal gray lake with the stench of rotten eggs has enveloped more than 10 square miles of land in eastern Java, Indonesia’s most densely populated island. The flow has forced 8,000 to 10,000 people from their homes, engulfed about a dozen factories, contaminated fish farms and intermittently closed a major highway.

Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective

Why Lisp macros are cool, a Perl perspective

I used to be really into learning cool programming languages, which to me included cousins of Perl like Ruby and Python, Lisp-family languages like Scheme and occasionally Common Lisp, functional or logic languages like Haskell and Prolog, and others like Io, Icon, and Javascript. (“Learning” in this context means “reading about and trying out some tiny toy programs with” in the case of all but Ruby, Scheme, and Python.)

I don’t do that much anymore cause I have my brain full with Perl all day, but just because of that, I enjoyed this short note about the main way Common Lisp (and other macroful lisp dialects) rocks over Perl — written by Perl maestro Mark-Jason Dominus, who has just written a book on the really cool topic of higher-order programming in Perl.

I Have No Boobs And I Must Grope

Now tell me that ain’t a grabby title. No pun intended. (Shouts from the cheap seats: “NONE TAKEN!”)

Last year Harlan Ellison was an ass to the Penny Arcade Guys, one of whom gave him a smackdown.

Now he’s on video groping Connie Willis, one of the finest science fiction writers alive,

Appropriate comments here:

Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis on stage at the Hugos wasn’t funny and it wasn’t okay. I understand (from third parties; I haven’t spoken to her about it) that Connie Willis’s position is that Ellison has done worse and she can handle him, but I really didn’t want to watch it and neither, I think, did a lot of other people in the audience. Up to then the comedic schtick aspects of the Hugo presentation had been genuinely funny. After that, I think, many of us just wanted it all to stop.

Just as with George W. Bush’s now-famous uninvited shoulder-rub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the basic message of Ellison’s tit-grab is this: “Remember, you may think you have standing, status, and normal, everyday adult dignity, but we can take it back at any time. If you are female, you’ll never be safe. You can be the political leader of the most powerful country in Europe. You can be the most honored female writer in modern science fiction. We can still demean you, if we feel like it, and at random intervals, just to keep you in line, we will.”

It’s not okay. It’s not funny. It wasn’t a blow against bourgeois pieties or political correctness. It was just pathetic and nasty and sad and most of us didn’t want to watch it. It’s another thing that’s going to stop.

My wife’s been involved in a lot of science fiction convention work back in the day and Ellison’s always come off as a bit of a sleazy jerk.

The video’s out there on google video but it seems like it’d be hypocritically voyeuristic to link to it.

I found out about this a week or so ago, but what made me think to post it was Topher’s suggestion of going back a year and seeing what you were blogging about back then. I saw that I’d blogged on the Penny Arcade thing, and suddenly remembered that Ellison acting like a jerk at a con was also in the news just lately, so I thought I’d post to link them together.