On a business trip to California I had the good fortune to bump into two pretty famous actors in the Baton Rouge airport. On the left is Ray Wise (a.k.a. the Devil from the television show “Reaper”). On the right is Paul Wilson (a.k.a. one of the two Bob’s from “Office Space”). Who else would [...]
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Global warming took a holiday today in Baton Rouge. We awoke to a major blizzard, and being the Northerners we are, we immediately went out and constructed a snowman and engaged in battle with snowballs. We then came in and had hot chocolate. Insanely, LSU remained open despite reports on the radio of accidents “too [...]
Picture from the Advocate Me, Sir Noah, and Darth Babelcon is Baton Rouge’s science fiction and fantasy con. It is small, but has been rapidly growing. This year was a major leap forward for the Con in many ways. Excellent care was provided for the halfings (kids) on the Con’s “Shire Track.” My son greatly [...]
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Recently my son and I participated in a pinewood derby. He wanted to make a “Black Panther car” (Black Panther, of course is the superhero known as T’Challa, one of the Fantastic 4 and husband of Storm). Of course, Black Panther doesn’t have a special car so we had to make one up. Hopefully Marvel [...]
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I’m attending the Mardi Gras conference hosted by the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU. The first keynote speaker, Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka, described “solar compute tiles” — essentially the same idea that I suggested in previous post entitled “Infinite Sunshine Computing.” His group has apparently been working on this idea for quite a while [...]
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You may not think of me as a daredevil. But this year at Supercomputing 07 I rode a bicycle upside down and around this insane contraption. I had to sign a waver saying I would not sue if something happened to me. I pedaled furiously for a few minutes, then the straps holding me in [...]
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The “Great Race of 1908″ was a race from New York to Paris. Four countries competed: Russia, France, Italy and the US. This may not sound so remarkable, but remember that there were no roads and no gas stations in 1908. The racers faced many hazards, from the mud of Nebraska to bandits in Sibera. [...]
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I recently attended Armadillocon in Auston TX. This CON was focused on the literary aspects of sci-fi and fantasy, so there were very few people who attended in costumes. I met a number of authors: Julie Kenner (demon hunter soccer-mom books). There is a picture of me with her at right. Chris Roberson (see books [...]
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We just finished visiting the local Fantasy/Sci-Fi convention BabelCon. The things I had most fun with were: The talk by Randal Scott from The Duelists. He discussed medieval weapons and fighting, the errors you commonly see in movies, and the progress we are making in learning how medieval fighting was really done. In a later [...]
Recently I was involved in an effort, sponsored by CCT at LSU to teach high school kids about supercomputing. Five local high schools were involved, each of which sent a teacher and about four specially picked students. Each school’s team did the following: Connected 5 nodes to form a mini supercomputer Installed the Operating System [...]
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