There is a Fritz Leiber story entitled "A Pail of Air", a story that despite its hopeful ending always strikes me as spectacularly bleak. In it, Earth has been ripped out of the solar system by a wandering black hole, and story is set in the aftermath, where the average temperature of the Earth is the Universe's average temperature of 3K. The atmosphere of Earth has frozen out.

The story centers on one family scratching out a precarious existence in the face of global, complete, utter catastrophe by keeping a fire going. (As it turns out, the atmosphere freezes by gas, so the ground actually has highly refined sources of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc. in it, so getting oxygen is as easy as going outside and scooping it up... if you can deal with the temperature of the gas, that is.) Two children in the story have been raised in this world.

As much as I love science fiction, I will always begrudge it for the OMIGOD RADIATION!!1! attitudes it has promoted, which seemingly have lodged firmly in the public conciousness.

(Oh, sorry, you don't like that typography? Be glad I didn't use <blink>... I seriously considered it. I also almost made it <font size="+4">... ;-) )

People need to realize how much radiation they are exposed to every day as a perfectly normal part of life. Bananas, cat litter, porcelin, this is only the tip of the radiation iceberg. Cosmic rays along account for a lot of the background radiation we receive.

Changing my weblog's name to iRi has had one unanticipated downside: There are a lot of other IRIs out there, including but not limited to:

• Information Resources, Inc.
• International Republican Institute
• International Research Institute for Climate Prediction
• Industrial Research Institute
• Initiative & Referendum Institute in Europe
• Some punk's weblog, what the heck is this doing here... oh...
• Some sort of climate data library
• Some Japanese site
• A ship registry
• Several Italian sites
• the International Reference Ionosphere: a mathematical model of the ionosphere

This page has strategies for reducing your dependence on Microsoft. I'd like to submit that that page is really way too complex. Like any other massive company, it's better not to think of it as a monolithic entity but a tight coalition of many entities. Microsoft makes significant money in only two divisions, Windows and Office. It is no coincidence that the things that bother people most are how they handle Windows and Office.

Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world's energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington.

Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, cold fusion has continued to be worked on by a small group of scientists, and they say their figures unambiguously verify the original report, that energy can be generated simply by running an electrical current through a jar of water.

I just discovered Pink Floyd.

Yeah, I'm behind the times. (My tastes have crept out in both directions from the late 1950s/early 1960s over the years; in the past I just recently got into pre-Equal Temperament (Bach) music, and I just got into the late 70's/early 80's apparently. Disco really impeded my 70s exploration, but I've discovered there was more to 70s pop then disco and disco wannabes. Sometime around 2025 I should catch up to, and subsequently pass, the present.)

Dotan Dimet has some comments on Iron Lute, which I think contains some misunderstandings about Iron Lute that mostly stem from the developer-centric view of Iron Lute y'all have seen so far. I posted a comment containing some follow-up on his post, and I replicate it here for posterity and RSS readers. Note it contains links to some of the actual code which I posted to provide evidence of how hard it will be to provide bi-directional text support in Iron Lute, so if you want to see some of my actual code, now's your chance. Comment I posted follows:

"Iron Lute, on the other hand, looks like another case of someone falling in love with the technology...."

I strongly disagree. Iron Lute is being created because there is no good platform to create LEO on. LEO is, with all due respect, a hack with regard to outlines, in the sense I can't build anything interesting on top of that, other then LEO. I don't care about outlines intrinsically and I look forward to the day I can actually do things with them. If a good platform existed (in a reasonable, non-Java language) I would have used it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, no such open platform exists.

Since 1996, a handful of foreign-policy wonks have been kicking around the idea of a "democracy caucus" at the U.N. Two administrations, first Bill Clinton's and then George W. Bush's, took quiet but significant steps in that direction. Now, according to Bush administration officials, the concept will be test-flown at the six-week meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that began on Monday in Geneva.

I am one of those people who is very down on the United Nations in its current form, believing it to be worse then useless. I think it is worse then useless because along with being nearly useless, without only some humanitarian programs to its credit, it seems to be impeding the creation of some group that wouldn't be so useless.

I have a case of the multi-disciplinary writer's block.

I'm having a hard time writing the outline saving code in Iron Lute. I have an essay I want to post here, but it is obstinately refusing to go into focus. (I may yet just post it in a nebulous state, as I'm not convinced it's ever going to focus, by its very nature, but I think it's important that I write it.) I also have a technical post on the inner workings of Iron Lute which I'm having a hard time writing; I've mostly written it, but it's quite dull.

Just a quick note: I'm still working on the XML save format for Iron Lute outlines. I'm trying to use a library I've put together for XML serialization and it's not going so well right now. I think it still has potential but I may need to re-work it into a "version 2", because version 1 is sucking pretty badly.