Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ciguatera !

msnbc.com:

The fish was delicious, no doubt about it.

Perfectly seasoned and cooked just right, the broiled grouper on the Texas menu last summer tempted Donna Schroeder to eat every bite.

The only problem? It was poisoned, tainted with a hard-to-detect toxin that produces symptoms so bizarre, they put peanut-linked salmonella infections to shame.

...

Within hours of the July dinner, Schroeder was stricken not only with typical nasty food poisoning symptoms — diarrhea, vomiting and fatigue — but also with a dangerously slow heart rate and neurological problems that caused her hands and feet to tingle painfully and, oddest of all, reversed her sense of hot and cold. Some patients also say they feel like their teeth are falling out — and the symptoms can linger for years.

That big piece of grouper I made last night was delicious! Pan-seared, and accompanied by jasmine rice, pea pods and a Thai curry sauce. Heaven.

My hands and feet are not tingling. Yet.

CATASTROPIC WARNING

There is a new announcement from The Time Cube:




CATASTROPIC WARNING -
Obama must resign to save his people from his
catastrophe.
SUN power will not allow any
Black Skin power to rule over
its Light Domain. Hell cometh
to the dumb, ignorant, educated stupid
"Worshippers of ONE",
for Creation is of OPPOSITES.
Born Cubed I defy God of ONE,
for I have a Yes and No mentality
necessary for cubed intelligence -
no Clyclopic educator can allow.
Unknown transcends the known,
but blocked by Evil of ONEism.
Think opposite of god or perish,
god errored, 1Day does not rotate.
4 corners rotate 16, 96 hrs, 4 days.
Hell begins, economy stands still,
kinda like when Earth stood still.
Obama must resign or Doomsday,
for only Light can rule over Earth.
No god possesses Cubed Wisdom.


Consider yourself informed.

Pithy

Bruce Sterling:
The original sin of geekdom is to think that just because you can think algorithmically and impose it on a machine that this is disembodied intelligence. That is just rules-based machine behavior. Just code being executed. Sure it's an art and science. Calling it intelligence is dehumanizing. It makes you look delusional, sad and pathetic. It's like being an old woman whose only friends are cats.

Books

These are my 50 favorite books. These are books I wouldn't feel bad about recommending; books I already have, or will probably, read multiple times. I do not claim these are the best books ever written.

The order here is: off-the-top-of-my-head (or as I found them on my bookshelf). I didn't go back and do a real ranking, because I don't think I could. Because a book takes so long to read, as compared to listening to an album for example, it's hard to develop the kind of fine-grained familiarity and appreciation I think I need to be able to judge the 43th vs. the 44th. I might be able to rank the top five or ten - things I find truly outstanding. But I didn't do that here.

In other words: it's best if you just ignore the numbers. If it's on the list, I like it.

  1. Jeff VanderMeer - City Of Saints And Madmen
  2. Mark Helprin - Memoir From Antproof Case
  3. China Mieville - Perdido Street Station
  4. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
  5. David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
  6. The Lord Of The Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
  7. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
  8. Jonathan Lethem - Gun With Occasional Music
  9. Edward Gorey - The Ghastlycrumb Tinies
  10. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter (series)
  11. John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy Of Dunces
  12. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
  13. Neil Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
  14. Frank Herbert - Dune
  15. W. Shakespeare - Hamlet
  16. W. Shakespeare - Othello
  17. Hunter S. Thompson - Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
  18. Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
  19. George Orwell - 1984
  20. Michael Chabon - The Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay
  21. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn
  22. William Golding - Lord Of The Files
  23. Walter Van Tilburg Clark - The Oxbow Incident
  24. Larry Niven - Ringworld
  25. Anne Rice - Interview With The Vampire
  26. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
  27. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
  28. Joseph Heller - Catch 22
  29. Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game
  30. Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
  31. J.D. Salinger - The Catcher In The Rye
  32. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
  33. Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird
  34. Stephen Crane - The Red Badge Of Courage
  35. Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
  36. Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
  37. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
  38. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
  39. Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
  40. Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
  41. John Updike - Rabbit, Run
  42. Matt Ridley - The Red Queen
  43. Douglas Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach
  44. Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel
  45. James Gleick - Chaos
  46. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History Of Time
  47. Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life
  48. Murakami - The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
  49. Thomas Hardy - Tess Of the d'Urbervilles
  50. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

Any potentially embarrassing omissions ?