On Friday I had left my car at Sears to get some work done. It poured at lunch, but by pau hana time the skies had cleared enough that I didn’t get wet as I walked through Ala Moana Park on the way back from my office. The drainage canal inside the park was chocolate-brown with silty runoff.
Holy crap, it’s really coming down right now. The sky isn’t usually this dark unless there’s a hurricane coming.
KHPR, the main Hawaiʻi Public Radio station, was off the air yesterday morning but was back by dinnertime. Usually I wouldn’t give it much thought, except for Erika Engle’s story about it in the Star-Bulletin.
The KHPR transmitter is up at the top of Wiliwilinui Ridge, and got knocked out of service by recent bad weather, including a lightning strike that melted a switch. Eeek. When the equipment finally conked out Tuesday night there was no way to helicopter up there to do repairs due to the weather. So instead, Jeff Ilardi, one of the HPR staff, hiked up there first thing in the morning to do the job. Now I’ve hiked the Wiliwilinui Trail myself, and it’s a workout even in dry weather. To climb the two-and-a-half miles to the summit with the ground as slippery and soggy as it must be right now? That takes real dedication. Hats off to Jeff.
I don’t quite know why, but I laugh every time I pass by this restaurant. Maybe it’s just the thought of those little egg plants dancing.
Accelerando, by Charles Stross
I usually don’t comment on books until after I’m done but I am making an exception here.
So there I was, only a chapter or so into what was turning out to be a very fun near-future sf story, and I ran straight into the phrase “in President Santorum’s America”.
My eyes stopped dead and my stomach felt all funny. I couldn’t think for a couple of seconds.
“In President Santorum’s America”.
Brrrrrr!
Damn you, Charlie Stross. Those are the scariest four words that I have read in months.
Never mind the doves and the mynahs and the kolea; I see ‘em all the time. But as I was driving in to work this morning, I saw an ʻaukuʻu (also known as the black crowned night heron) flying over me on North King Street, at the Kalihi Stream bridge, probably on its way out to Keʻehi Lagoon. Wow! It’s cool that wild marsh birds like this still can be seen, even above one of the most built-up waterways in the middle of the city.
Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Larry Niven and Hal Colebatch.
Back in the Dark Ages I was a teenage Larry Niven fan and I geeked out on all his whacky Known Space worlds like Wunderland, Jinx, We Made It, Plateau, and of course, the ultimate sf geek world concept, Ringworld. Niven admitted at one point that the reason he had never set any stories in the period of the Man-Kzin Wars was that he felt he was no good at writing military sf. So instead, he invited other writers to come in and play in his sandbox and write war stories for Known Space. It’s been a successful collaboration: ten books so far, and I doubt they’re done yet.
Plucky humans fighting giant alien cats. What can I say? It’s a guilty pleasure.
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery Of The Brain — and How It Changed The World, by Carl Zimmer.
I really enjoyed Zimmer’s earlier book about parasitology, Parasite Rex, and the short articles at his web site The Loom are very cool. So I figured I’d like Soul Made Flesh, too. But alas, I neglected to take into account exactly what this book was about. It’s not a book about science, really; it’s a book about the history of science — specifically, the origins of modern neurology.
And like most history-of-science books, it necessarily spends a lot of time on… history. In this case, since Zimmer is focusing on a guy named Thomas Willis, of the Royal Society of London, we’re talking about 17th century English history. Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, etc. Never my favorite subject. Even when Neal Stephenson tarted it up in his Baroque Cycle novels, I really couldn’t get excited about that period. About halfway through Soul Made Flesh, I found myself skimming over all the politics and world events and slowing down only for the brief sections of actual science.
Overall it was a worthwhile read, but for his next book I hope Zimmer goes back to writing about present-day science.
