Back in 2008, Barack Obama made a comment comparing the longshot odds of an African-American winning a presidential election to the odds of the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series.1 Famously, the Red Sox had won in 2007 for the first time since… well, OK, since 2004. But before that they hadn’t won since 1918.
An oft-discussed topic among writers of speculative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy, is how to name characters, places, and ideas of extraterrestrial or otherwise non-human or alien origin. Naming is a difficult part of all fiction writing — it’s more difficult than one might think to make names for characters. Some (myself included) believe that character names ought to suggest something about the characters, the themes of the story, their roles in the plot, or perhaps stand in ironic contrast to those roles.
Apologies to Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Thunders.
Also, apologies to heroin addiction. Being compared to the 2016 US Presidential Election is unflattering even to heroin addiction.
Whoops! OK, that was my fault. I was actually quite surprised at how smoothly and quickly the transition went. As it turns out, it appears to have taken longer than expected for the DNS to update. In fact, the problem may have been in DNS cached in my browsers. When I tested the site with a browser I had no problem accessing it. When I tested the domain with dig and ping it looked like my system was seeing the new records.
As Monochromatic Outlook prepares to celebrate its 21st anniversary, we are preparing to transfer the splicer.com domain to a new registrar. This is a pretty simple administrative change, but it’s quite possible that there will be some time between the change in registration and when the new registrar publishes the name service information and as that information propagates across the Internet.
I posted a write-up of my Infrared Inhaler project over at Positronic Works.
It’s unclear why anyone is surprised by Bernie Sanders’ tax return. The outrage appears entirely manufactured built on distortions and an assumption that no one will check facts.1
Pop quiz for self-described Republicans, Libertarians, Conservatives, and Classic Liberals.1 What is your first thought when you see this headline from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal?
PayPal Cancels Plan for Facility in North Carolina, Citing Transgender Law
Choose the one option which most closely corresponds to your belief:
Letter to the FBI from a concerned citizen.
Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign just ended.
Hopefully I won’t have to eat those words; it’s the risk one takes when making predictions, and there are plenty of ways I could be misconstruing the results of last night’s Iowa Caucus. I’m not a political expert, nor am I immune to the lure of thinking something to be so because I want it to be so. It would be irrational to count him out, but in considering a candidate so anti-rational as Trump, indulge me my gut feeling.
