Today, I went Geocaching. I found one cache, and failed to find two.. but I had a good time, and that's really the point of the entire exercise.. Hiking through the parks for about 3 hours, climbing up and down very steep hills... Unfortunately, while heading down one of them, I slipped on some wet leaves, and landed on some hard, pointy rocks, squarely on my right knee. While it did draw some blood, more significant is that it bruised the heck out of the area, making (I just found out) biking nearly impossible, as it hurts to exercise the full range of motion. I was going to go to an indoor 'rock climbing' thing tomorrow with some people I met at the coffeeshop, but unless it's a lot better when I wake up, I'm going to have to cancel. Ugh.

A friend pointed me at an alternative to friendster, called tribe.net. Does the world need another friendster? Well, friendster is indeed a cool idea, but it promises to become increasingly commercial, is edited by party poopers, and is slow (maybe anything of its size, using a similar design, would be slow though.. ). Tribe.net is cooler in many ways -- it doesn't require people to be in one's web of friends to be searchable, and it has much richer notions of a community -- imagine yahoo mixed with friendster, with all the group features. Some things to watch out for... will tribe.net follow in friendster's footsteps someday, and start charging for things in a way that people will want to leave? Has friendster accumulated enough critical mass that it no longer matters if it's worse (microsoft situation)?

An interesting collection of things about Singularity, the transhumanist notion that.. well, read it yourself. It's interesting, and it's not as kooky as it sounds.

I again am amused at Wally (my cat)'s interaction with the computer -- he's shown in the past that he can see, and be amused by, the mouse pointer on the screen.. but he recently showed that the pads on his paws can move the same cursor, using the trackpad. This is interesting -- note that not everything touching the trackpad can activate it. I'm not quite sure how it works, but it might be based on the same principles as touch lamps..

An interesting form of Paganism. Although.. it seems a bit odd to use that term here. I guess I'm coming to dislike the term -- it doesn't really say very much, apart from that a faith is (probably) polytheistic.

I recently found out that One of my favourite authors has a BLOG. If you like science fiction, and like politics, but are skeptical as to if/how they can fit well together, I suggest you get a copy of "The Stone Canal", and work forwards and backwards in the series from there. Politics is actually kind of a perpetual background theme in his books -- he doesn't beat you over the head with it, but just lets you into the head of people who have accepted diverse ideologies, set in the background of a colonized space.

On the topic of space, it appears that women have been suggested as being better suited to space missions than men, but because of mysogeny in the field, they haven't had much real opportunity. The first seems indeed likely -- as stated, average female bodies are much lighter than males, and are perhaps more resilient. The second is rather unfortunate, and it's rather surprising how crude some of the comments made by well-known astronauts were. One of the quotes seems to suggest that its author would enjoy sexually harassing women. What a pig..

Here's an interesting peek into how the Chinese provincial/tax system works. Apparently, they have a city status called zhixiashi (I hate this style of anglicization, by the way. The other big one is much nicer), whereby a city leaves its province and becomes, in effect, a province of its own, avoiding provincial taxes (and perhaps other controls). The article suggests that, done correctly, it leaves the city to thrive, but there are some risks.

On the way back from Eat'n'Park, for a second I thought I saw someone on the sidewalk in front of me, wearing a blue sweatshirt, and walking towards me, but they were suddenly gone in a way that suggested they never were there. A trick of the light, on sleepy eyes, perhaps. I noticed about 5 minutes ago that I was seeing the text on my laptop distort a bit, like a certain screen saver. Probably sleepy eyes and sleepy brain, waltzing together.

This is really funny. Apparently, in China there were some visiting Japanese students and their teacher, and they decided to have some fun in their play.. Japan must be considerably more liberal than China, for this kind of thing to happen.. On the topic of odd things, take a look at this, and this.

I found the second of those three linked from an article examining suicide trends in Chinese society. It's interesting how much a difference societal attitudes and institutions can make in these things.

I'm not sure why I find this kinda thing so interesting -- I just eat it right up when I see that kind of creativity. It's probably why I occasionally buy D'n'D stuff, even long after I've stopped playing.

A final bit of weirdness before I go to sleep.