Same-sex marriage has been a major news topic this week, because of the passage of North Carolina’s Amendment One and Barack Obama’s statement that he thinks same-sex couples should be able to marry. A good time, then, to explore the subject.
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Afternoon, a sunny suburban backyard. In the background, fluttering like clothes on a line, is a large sheet of white paper. Unintelligible writings in blue and black cover it. In the foreground, white-shirted Benedict Cumberbatch[1] drinks from a beer bottle, talking to unseen others.
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Caroline gestured, and the two acolytes came forward, hustling Bethany between them. She was gagged and her arms bound behind her, but she tried to struggle anyway, her eyes wide and wild. While they tied her to the slab, Caroline began lighting the candles in sequence, waiting for them to finish and step outside the circle before she lit the final one.

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Agent Gastusky reversed fast, too fast, out of the driveway. 20 minutes of sneaking around, 10 minutes of brandishing a gun and threatening, and finally the realization that someone had transposed numbers on the address. Someone along the chain, or him, he couldn’t swear it wasn’t his mistake. He yanked the wheel around and shifted into first, flooring it. The delay likely meant the girl’s death, and if she died he knew he’d have to account for it in his report—and that no-one would likely own up to the address mistake.
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PixelJAM won me over with Dino Run, and I like pinball games—and who doesn’t like snow?—so I was happy to see them take on the genre in their own way with Snowball, which feels more relaxed than your usual pinball game. Oh, and snowballs are apparently magnetic.

(Blog posting of the usual length will hopefully resume next week.)

The very first time I saw the Grand Canyon, it had a helicopter in it, rising above the sides. I was looking from the car as we approached, and the blue and white helicopter was there, hanging in space, space with walls of rock behind it, white and ochre stone.
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Last Wednesday I went to a talk by Jonah Lehrer on the topic of creativity, and left it feeling quite inspired. This post is a brief summary of why.

(Any inaccuracies in this outline are my own, as there is no guarantee that I understood what Jonah Lehrer intended to convey; I intend to read his book Imagine: How Creativity Works for more insight, but have not yet done so.)
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Dublin has grown a great deal over the last 30 years, and in so doing has become a case study in how not to manage urban/suburban development, planning, or transit policy[1].

The urban planning process for Dublin County in that period was endemically corrupt, which was common knowledge at the time but has been made extremely clear by the final report, released 22 March 2012, of the Mahon Tribunal, a body set up in 1997 to investigate such matters. It seems unlikely in the extreme that the corruption and the terrible urban sprawl aren’t connected.
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Unlike the previous one, this “transcendent sports moment” is one I watched live on television. 13 October 2001, I was in San Francisco, and it happened not that far away, in Oakland[1].

It stands on its own merits, but has additional cultural relevance because it’s likely that without it the book Moneyball would never have been written.
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I don’t usually comment on vapid “lifestyle” articles, particularly when they’re also year-old Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces, but Kay Hymowitz’s “Where Have The Good Men Gone?” has recently been shared by at least two friends and appears to need refutation.

Unfortunately, while it annoyed me greatly on first reading, further readings exposed a lot of difficulty in discerning what arguments it was making—mostly it’s composed of cultural buzzwords, snobbery, socially conservative hankering for the mores of yore, and the anecdata-driven slandering of an entire generation of males.
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A discussion of common and custom blog features, and candidate applications that might provide them.
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Last week I went through a data loss scenario similar to last year’s, but with a less happy outcome—no miraculous recovery of the data this time. I screwed up some things in my backup infrastructure, so I did lose some data—and this should serve as a warning to you all. Backup your stuff, do it well, do it often, and don’t leave any holes.
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A clear implication of my having settled on some kind of “bioAI” in my examination of AI in the setting is that neuroscience must be quite advanced indeed, given that a strong understanding of brains and how they work would be necessary to bio-engineer them. In the gap between bio-engineering and “pure” manufacture there are clearly many mysteries, but even so, the setting’s neuroscientific understanding must be formidable.
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I mentioned this on Facebook earlier in the week, but it’s important enough to also write a post about.
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Stylistic choices I’ve made for my writing.
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Since moving back to the US, I’ve only missed one Super Bowl: XLII in 2008. I was quite down at the time, didn’t have much faith in the Giants, and couldn’t stand the thought of witnessing a Patriots win and their subsequent enshrinement as the best team in history[1].

Oops. I missed one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, and one of the most dramatic game-winning drives.
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Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal in the Australian Open final, 5–7, 6–4, 6–2, 6–7 (5), 7–5, in 5 hours and 53 minutes. It was an incredible final, one in which both players exhibited astonishing speed, endurance, and resilience. Djokovic was not quite at his best, but still had enough—eventually—to overcome Nadal. I rank it among the best matches I’ve seen, probably just behind the 2008 Wimbledon final.
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Earlier this week I “blacked out” tadhg.com as part of the widespread protests against SOPA. This post includes a number of my reasons for opposing it.
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Football is a very complicated game. I can’t think of another sport as demanding for participants on an intellectual level. Soccer, basketball, and many other team sports often involve specific philosophies or systems that players need to learn, but none involve the level of complexity of football.
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2011 involved less reading for me than any year other than 2004, with a rather low total of 37. I’m not sure why it was so low, but I went through a very slow reading period after starting Gravity’s Rainbow in mid-August, and after starting (and never finishing) it I didn’t finish reading another book until the end of October.

2011 was my year of the ebook; I read more ebooks than paper books for the first time, 32:5. I’d be surprised if that trend were reversed (failing some kind of major economic/technological breakdown), and anticipate reading mainly ebooks in future.
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I’m deliberately giving myself fewer of these this year, partly because I particularly don’t want to start the year feeling as if I’m already behind, so I’m trying to make the first quarter, at least, one in which I don’t have a pile of self-imposed tasks. So, this year, a shorter list of goals.
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I feel as if I did worse than usual on my goals for 2011, but that could be due to getting a bunch of them done early, with not many coming in the second half of the year.
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What I liked most from my posts this year.

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At Clay and Gough, after I crossed the street, there was something. No cars in sight, no car sounds, not even from Franklin. No people in sight. No people sounds, until a man in Lafayette Park broke the spell by speaking to his workout partner.

Until then, however, I had felt as if I were alone.
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