Rough Drafts

Bodies embedded in plastic for display in San Francisco’s Masonic Center are now decomposing, while on display, and they’re leaking. “The bodies were not degreased properly before they were filled with plastic,” says ABC News. (via BoingBoing)

I’ve sat through Wagner operas that moved the plot forward faster. Sure, the computer generated imagery is amazing–but overwhelming. It quickly become so ubiquitous that it’s no longer all that impressive (Coruscant looks a bit like Las Vegas at night, oh and look, here comes another floating droid)

Sci fi author and EFF publicist Cory Doctorow (see my 2003 interview with him) has some good advice on writing. “Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book.” Plus three rules of thumb for novel writing: “… at […]

Wired News reviews Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad Is Good For You and wonders: If video games are making us smarter, why can’t we solve problems like Iraq and Social Security? The answer’s easy: Make a killer first person shooter called Iraq: The Game and a gripping multiplayer online game cal

John Scalzi is not worried about the state of book publishing in an age of easily made, widely-distributed digital copies: I write books, but you know what? I’m not a book writer, any more than a musician is an LP musician or an MP3 musician. The book is the container. It’s not destiny. Want to […]

Just came back from a few days at E3, the massive video game conference that happens every year in Los Angeles. As usual, it was an experience in sensory overload that left me exhausted and slightly depressed by the end. A few things of note: First person shooters are getting a little boring. Sure,

Looks like Clara, who took a Sharper Image robot vacuum I was reviewing to preschool for show & tell, isn’t the only kid who loves to play with Roomba. And why not? Roombas are cute, unpredictable, a little bit scary (but not too much), and they’re vacuum cleaners–an endless source of fascination fo

Only a few days late here. She was born in the Midwest in 1933, when her dad earned $12 a week and movies cost a dime. It was the Depression, but she didn’t know it. … My mother used to sit in the den of our house in the San Fernando Valley chain-smoking Kents and […]

According to the editors of Analog, circa 1984. Lee H. Pappas: Star Raiders Commander Level: Star Commander Class I, no shields used the entire game, 54 Zylons destroyed. April 20th, 1984. That’s it, that’s all. Twenty years from now, will people be laughing about Mobile just as much as we are laugh

Entertaining toys for anyone who might be contemplating a new child in the near future (and I know a few of you): Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager is an amazingly entertaining Java app that lets you see how the popularity of various first names has changed over the decades. When I first found out abo

A few years ago I was working on a story about copyright law for a magazine. For a factoid in that story, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what proportion of the film industry’s revenues come from theater showings vs. video rentals. I wasn’t ever able to find a definitive […

It’s not often that people who love and want to preserve wild land and wild species get to enjoy unmitigated good news. Every battle won is only a temporary win, while battles lost are permanent failures. Today’s wildlife preserve might be tomorrow’s oil field, but a housing development is never goi