I’ve been cutting down on the news I read lately; haven’t gone on a whole-hog bookmark-deleting news fast though. I’ve even still been reading the fascinating conspiracy blog Rigorous Intuition. But I wonder if it might be something I have to abstain from too if I wish to receive the emotional benefits of avoiding the news for a while. This bit was posted today:

These are strange days, even for those who have anticipated them. It’s not so much that things are going to Hell, it’s just that things seem to be getting there so much sooner than expected. Only two more years of drought and the Amazon rain forest may burn and become a desert, a process “that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.” The oceans are devolving into an acidic, primeval goo. Complex life is dying by our hands while we extinguishing ourselves, creating conditions unknown for hundreds of millions of years, in which the very bottom of the food chain, the slimes and invertebrates, reinherit the Earth.

Yeah… RigInt might have to go for a while.

eXile – Issue #243 – War Nerd – A Hezbollah Upon All of Thee! – By Gary Brecher

Gary “War Nerd” Brecher gives a war nerd’s perspective on the situation.  I’m not a war nerd, I’m just a nerd, so I can’t say much one way or the other about Brecher’s nerdly expertise, but I have found his stuff pretty thought-provoking in the past — if only because you can just tell from reading that the man’s thinking for himself, not toeing some party line.  Interesting to see a take on all this that is full of war nerdity, not angry politics.

The Oldest Song In The World

This popped up on Reddit.com.  It’s a Hurrian song written in Cuneiform, with musical instructions.  There are three MIDIs representing various scholarly interpretations of that notation.  Sitting here listening to my computer play a song that was written down thousands of years ago in Cuneiform on a clay tablet.  Who could have imagined that?

The site is Amaranth Publishing, and they have a whole page of links to cool and unusual historical music, mostly in MIDI form.

Wow.

My man Topher has been known to blog the occasional Adorable Child Anecdote. So has Jim, heck, Nate has a whole sub-blog for his fatherly adventures.

I have historically been leery of blogging about my family, so let me tell you a story about an unspecified five year old girl. Let’s call her “K”. Now, K has had a rough year dealing with death. Her most beloved grandparent died this year, and she was at the funeral and saw the burial, not an easy thing to deal with at age 5. She and her brother have had lots of questions about death and the afterlife and burial and stuff, which have been answered as well and honestly as possible. It’s still kind of a hot topic. She’ll talk sometimes about how much she misses her grandma, and her dearest memory is her grandma making her her favorite sandwich (jelly) with the crusts cut off. To her that is ultimate love.

Because of the circumstances, K’s father has avoided playing one of his favorite playstation games, Medievil, because it’s kind of a horror-movie game with a lot of zombie attacks, and the main character is an undead skeleton. Death and things rising from graves might be a little too real.

But he eventually happens across his copy and really wants to play, and it’s been a little while, and probably they won’t even make the connection between this whole fantasy thing and real-world death and mourning, so he plugs it in and plays one night.

And “K” has fun watching it, thinks it’s cool but scary — when she says it’s scary, her dad offers to quit playing but she doesn’t want him to — and he hacks his way, with a sword, through three or four levels of ravening undead, as “K” and her brother watch, enthralled. A couple times in the process he makes sure the kids are clear that there is no such thing, in the real world, as a zombie. They assure him they understand that.

And that’s when she comes out, quite cheerfully and matter-of-factly, with this, and I defy anyone to put together a rational, appropriate fatherly thing to say in response…

“Papa, if Grandma came out of her dead-place in the ground and was a zombie, I would TOTALLY kill her.”

linux kernel monkey log — via Digg or something.  It goes through myths about the Linux kernel one by one and demolishes them.  The author is a kernel developer and so obviously has some bias, but he makes a good case; if nothing else he shows you why the people who think Linux is the best — and actually know something about it, not fanboys — think Linux is the best.