Friday Night Geek Fest and Other Nerdy Stuff

Friday Night = Stargate, Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, NUMB3RS, House, Monk (although we TiVo Monk and watch it another night). A regular geekathon of TV.

I'm also a Smallville fan, so this week's episode was a sad one for me. John Schneider gave SciFi Wire an interview about his feelings.

On "My Yahoo" one of my sections is news from various tech and science sites. The other day I saw an article about the world's smallest fish being discovered in a peat bog in Sumatra. I sent the article to Frank Baron (What Fish Don't Want You to Know). The very next day NPR's All Things Considered did a piece on it. I don't know why, but I felt quite happy that the little fish was getting all this attention.

Sci Fi Wire also printed in its "Rumors" section that Paramount might want Patrick Stewart to play Jean-Luc Picard again but by the time they get around to shooting he feels he might be too old (Stewart is 65 now).

Google won the copyright case. "Google's storage of the material was "fair use" under copyright law." the article says. A meta tag on his (the plaintiff) page could have prevented it from being searched and cached. I think there may be a lesson there for anyone who is putting their work on the web or in a blog. Not sure how those meta tags work, and it's not really a big worry for me - but some of you might want to consider learning about it if you're putting original works on the web.

Another cool article I found was "Freezing Assets: Human Corpsicles Could Wake Up Rich" not so much on it's information about Dynasty Trusts but for all the references in the article to Science Fiction stories featured in it. For example, "The word 'corpsicle' was probably coined by Frederik Pohl in the mid-1960's" and this excerpt:

One of my other favorite early cryonics stories occurs in Doorways in the Sand, a wonderful 1976 novel by Roger Zelazny. The story's protagonist is an "eternal" student, whose education is being paid year after year from the trust fund established by his frozen uncle. And what would happen if his uncle were revived? "I deal with problems as they arise. So far, my uncle hasn't."

I'm adding Technovelgy.com to my Stuff and Such links. They're looking for contributors, too - it's not a paying market but it might be fun to contribute.



dawno, technovelgy, Smallville, geek, Patrick Stewart