Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Overcoming Genetic Failure
September 15, 2010

I’m connecting some seemingly unrelated phenomenon lately about success and a potential relationship to genetics. It didn’t start with, but became most noticeable lately, a trip to pick up Riley from Kindergarten.

Things you need to know in advance: I live in a reasonably well off area. People around here are often stay at home mom, in-ground pool, luxury car, dinner party people. Also, the public schools are just good enough to at least get kids started before moving to a private middle school. And being public schools, for some reason or other, they have a lot of rules.

Web Art Newsletter
September 03, 2010

I used to receive an email newsletter that I don’t recall how I signed up for. The premise was to give you a list of daily trending topics. This aspect of the newsletter utterly failed, but the result was even better.

Trending terms in the newsletter were linked to pages that were completely artistic “how is that done?"-style HTML-built sites that seemingly had no purpose but to exist and inspire. I used to look forward to those newsletters, which were otherwise mostly filled with random, untranslatable Swedish text with all of those strange, pretty to look at characters.

Tiny Sci-Fi
August 18, 2010

I’ve been subscribed to @sfshorts on Twitter, which is not about short pants worn in San Fransisco. No, it’s a micro-fiction publication run by my friend ElizabethN and her friend (and someone I know online) preinheimer, wherein they publish a full science fiction story within the space of 1 or 2 tweets – that’s a full sci-fi story within 280 characters.

Micro-fiction seems like a great medium for people that aren’t as invested in the whole effort of writing, but it offers some challenges of its own. Stylistically, one of the rules seems to be no txt-speak; You can’t abbreviate every little thing to make your stories longer. And still, it has to make sense.

Making the Beer
August 16, 2010

Berta and I have started making beer at home. It’s actually not that hard, and it’s pretty rewarding as far as hobbies go. The effort is only a couple of nights out of a month, and the result is something tangible that you can enjoy and share.

We’ve actually been making beer for a little while now, since the beginning of June. Berta bought me a beer making kit from Artisan Homebrew for my birthday. The kit was a starter kit plus some extra parts. Altogether it included two brewing buckets, a glass carboy (basically, a big bottle with a stopper), some tubing, sanitizer, a siphon, a bottle capper, and some miscellaneous stuff essential to the brewing process.

Twitter Influence
July 29, 2010

Technically Philly recently cross-posted a piece to Philadelphia Magazine concerning the most influential Twitter users in Philadelphia. Twitter - along with general social bookmarking sites - have always intrigued me in terms of influence; how emerging topics in the social networks can indicate trends in the real world. This localized aspect of Twitter is also very interesting to me. I can think of a specific example from my recent vacation.

Around here at home, the kids have gone crazy for these things called “silly bandz”. They’re basically rubber bands molded to take a specific shape, like animals or cars or dinosaurs. There are different kinds. Some glow in the dark, some are tie-dyed, some are rare shapes. It’s not uncommon to see kids around here wrapped with armfuls of them. But on vacation in Williamsburg, Virginia, there was no sign of them.