Mr. Einstein, meet Mr. Godel

Hermits, hermits everywhere...

Teen murderers in idyllic Vermont: "They are us, and they are ours."

Dan Simmons (of "Hyperion" fame) wants to demolish the wall between genre and mainstream fiction.
What does he mean? Is he serious? And who is he to talk?

"One Book, One City", the latest American groupthink initiative:
"All Together Now" column at mobylives
"It's a novel idea..." from the Guardian
"Pick a book with depth..." from the Sentinel

Taxonomists are being driven to extinction

A bicycle chain the size of a grain of salt.

By the end of 1999 over 30 million people were infected with HIV and 12.7 had died from the disease.
Compare that with malaria which infects 300-500 million and kills over one million people every year.
Yet the funding for the the prevention of HIV is thirty times that of malaria (800 vs 3 million dollars).

Unconventional techniques for managing depression.

Eat poop you cat

US government censorship of scientific information.
More here.

"I am an intelligent, unsociable but adapatable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my long- haired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig)." --An 11-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome describes himself in an excerpt from the American Journal of Psychiatry

From How to talk like Jacques Derrida (Guideline 4):
"Pun like crazy: The thought (which when taught, becomes taut, tight, tense, stretched to breaking, which is to say ever looser as it becomes tightened) is illuminated by the pun, which has been called the lowest form of wit (whereby the bun may be termed the lowest form of wheat), to wit, a pun is more like a pin, which bursts the taut (taught) surface of the meaning, freeing it to explode/ implode in all directions at once."

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it ? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we loved ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." --Franz Kafka (1904)

Today's dilligent research of Everything2 has yielded these gems:
The Lovecraftian compulsion to keep writing even as one is being devoured
What would Cthulhu do?
the newly discovered erotic works of H. P. Lovecraft

Modern Mayan Slaughtercomb:
"...The most talented of the two-legged bipeds shall play in a field with chigger infested grass approximately 3 to 4 feet in height. The grass should be infested with copperhead snakes and deadly Indian scorpions, both of which should be properly taunted with hot, pointed sticks to the point of instant aggression. At mid-field, a bear cave should be constructed of tick-infested paper and fecal glue. The bear will serve as a clubbin' bastard of all approaching players. The players will be totally naked except for 45 pounds of recently killed fish strapped to strategic points on their bodies, including arms, legs, and the ever precious ankle of protection power. The bear beats all who approach -- except those who carry the glowing honeycomb which is obtained from crocodile moats at each teams goal lines. Before each game, if available, a human will be tossed in similar fashion to that of a coin. The tossed human shall be a child, preferably of ripe age and breeding, minimally moistened for maximum flippage...."

Anna Kavan, Thomas Bernhard, and Phillip K. Dick: three of my favorite authors.

"Code Optimization Using the GNU C Compiler" looks what simple optimizations are done by gcc and how it does them.

Bush and Blair have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

"I side with PKD over Pynchon. In fact, I consider Dick to be the one genius, the one absolute genius in US literature since 1945. I find Pynchon to be kind of an Uncle Tom, as a representative of science fiction, making pointless and protracted Faulknerian noises in his prose to suck up to a New-Yorker- sensibility." --John Dolan (from an article on Victor Pelevin)