A few weeks ago a friend of mine gave me a free five-bladed razor she’d gotten through her [...]]]> For years I’ve been making fun of razor manufacturers’ ongoing arms race. Three blades! Four! No, five! Make that six! For the longest time I’ve used a three-bladed razor to shave my head, and even that felt excessive.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine gave me a free five-bladed razor she’d gotten through her awesome ninja couponing skills. I tried it out.

I got a better shave.

Man, don’t I feel dumb.

It’s GET LAMP, Jason Scott’s awesome documentary about text adventures. Liza is modeling the coin that comes as a feelie with every copy of the movie, and let me tell you, that is one high-quality coin. I know the trouble Jason went through to get them minted, [...]]]> Look what I got, two days after my birthday!

It’s GET LAMP, Jason Scott’s awesome documentary about text adventures. Liza is modeling the coin that comes as a feelie with every copy of the movie, and let me tell you, that is one high-quality coin. I know the trouble Jason went through to get them minted, and they were absolutely worth it. As I’ve mentioned before, the documentary is worth seeing if you love passionate people explaining why they love what they do.

What the Cast – Live! Saturday 11:30 AM, Hilton Room 204 Brian, Crispy, Stephen and Patrick (also of Dragon*Con TV) bring their chaotic and hilarious “What The Cast” back [...]]]> Looking for me at Dragoncon? I move around a lot, but here’s where you can definitely find me. C’mon, stalk me at the con. You know you want to.

What the Cast – Live!
Saturday 11:30 AM, Hilton Room 204
Brian, Crispy, Stephen and Patrick (also of Dragon*Con TV) bring their chaotic and hilarious “What The Cast” back to Dragon*Con.

(These are always a lot of fun, since it’s us being geeky about random things and it’s far looser than our normal semi-scripted episodes.)

Physics of the Whedonverse!
Saturday 7:00 PM, Hilton 202
Picks up where Ouellette’s “Physics of the Buffyverse” left off by
covering Dollhouse, Firefly and Serenity, too.

(It’s me and three others (including Jennifer Ouellette, the author of “Physics of the Buffyverse”) trying to shoehorn physics and other science into Whedon-run shows. Come see if I play Mr. Grumpy Physicist and just shout “There is none!” before storming off!)

Make Yourself Invisible!
Sunday 10:00 AM, Hilton 202
Can we finally build an invisibility cloak via the wonders of metamaterials? Or will we never be able play Predator and sneak up on Adrien Brody?

(I’m excited about this topic. Metamaterials and transformation optics are hot hot hot right now.)

There Ain’t No STEALTH in Space!
Sunday 2:30 PM, Hilton 203
Sci-Fi is big on invisibility for space ships. We’re here to tell you it can’t happen. You just can’t hide a ship in space!

(Why, yes, I am trolling con attendees to have them come argue with me.)

Autonomous Technology in Robotics
Sunday 5:30 PM, Hilton 208/209

(There’s no panel description yet, as far as I know, but it’ll be me and a couple of other people talking about robot eyes and robot brains and OH GOD THEY’RE TAKING OVER EVERYTHING.)

A week later, I rolled my ankle while exercising. It swelled up like an angry pundit and I spent the weekend with it propped in the air. Even now I am wearing this crazy ankle brace which, if science [...]]]> You may remember that, a while back, Liza fell and had to have stitches in her lip.

A week later, I rolled my ankle while exercising. It swelled up like an angry pundit and I spent the weekend with it propped in the air. Even now I am wearing this crazy ankle brace which, if science had any compassion, would let me leap hundreds of feet in the air before landing without harm.

Last Thursday night, one week after I rolled my ankle, Eli came running into the kitchen, crying. “I hit my head,” he said, holding his hand to his forehead. Blood covered nearly his whole face.

Our responses, in order, were, “That’s going to have to have stitches!” and “How did you do that?”

“I was jumping off of Liza’s bed and over her Dora dollhouse and I hit my head on her dresser,” he sobbed.

So it was that we bundled him up, left Liza with our friend Alana, and drove to the nearby Urgent Care. There we once again got to confirm that the only thing urgent at an Urgent Care is your feeling of anxiety, as we waited for a little over an hour to see the doctor. Eli soon felt good enough to play with another kid in the waiting room, returning to us every once in a while to get the blood wiped off of his forehead.

When the doctor asked him how he hurt his head, he repeated his story, with one twist. “I wanted to jump over Liza’s dollhouse and the third time I hit my head.” At the words “third time” both Misty’s and my heads swiveled towards him as if we were wrathful owls.

We’ve now had enough of doctor’s visits and emergency stitches for a while. If anyone needs us, we’ll be hiding inside of giant hamster balls trying to avoid getting hurt by anything.

We’d gone out shopping on Sunday because it was tax-free weekend and I needed pants. How could I resist the lure of tax-free pants? On the way back from pants, we stopped by Michael’s so Misty could buy some yarn to knit Liza [...]]]> It happened when none of us were looking, and it was my fault.

We’d gone out shopping on Sunday because it was tax-free weekend and I needed pants. How could I resist the lure of tax-free pants? On the way back from pants, we stopped by Michael’s so Misty could buy some yarn to knit Liza an amigurumi animal that will certainly look nothing like Hello Kitty, a product of the fine Sanrio corporation.

Come to think of it, maybe it was Hello Kitty’s fault.

I stopped outside the store, entranced by wooden dinosaur kits. Misty came back outside to find me, trailed by Eli and Liza. The next thing we knew, Liza was wailing loudly.

Misty picked her up from where she fell, and I took Liza from Misty. “Oh, you’ve cut your lip,” I said, looking at the fine line of red just above the right side of her lip.

“There’s a lot of blood,” Misty said.

“I hope her teeth are okay.” I gently lifted her upper lip and quickly realized that, one, there was indeed a lot of blood, and two, that was because the corner of one of Liza’s teeth had gone all the way through her upper lip. The cut I was seeing on the outside was where her tooth had poked through.

The pediatrician confirmed that we should go to the ER and get some stitches. Every time I said the word “stitches” or “hospital” on the phone, Liza went into hysterics. Not even her beloved Ellie the elephant could calm her.

Huntsville Hospital has a pediatric ER, which means that there are old Playstations in the lobby and Disney Channel on the TVs. Two efficient triage nurses had us in a room in five minutes. A short time later they taped a cotton ball to her upper lip with a numbing agent on it. I was excited. “This is going fast,” I said.

Two hours later, I took Eli so he could get something to eat and I could return with food for me and Misty. That meant, of course, that I missed Liza getting her stitches. Misty and a nurse held her down while the doctor sewed and Liza screamed. I imagine it was a lot of fun.

She calmed down immediately after, since they gave her a small teddy bear and a popsicle. When I got back to the hospital with a cold, greasy bag of Moe’s burritos, Liza saw me, ran to the car, and promptly fell on her face again.

You know, I think I’m going to blame this on her feet.

For entertainment, I’ve been telling Eli and Liza stories of me versus various objects. There’s the story of me versus the manual typewriter, in which one-year-old me fell and split my head open on my dad’s typewriter in his office. There’s me versus the air conditioner, in which I scratched my stomach on a corner of the air conditioner. There’s also me versus the curb and me versus the street. Now Liza has a story of her versus the sidewalk. At least she waited more than two years longer than I did before having her first ER-worthy accident.

P.S. Her stitches had tiny ends on them that stuck out of her lip, which led to us calling her Liza Cat. She played with them all yesterday. This morning one of them popped loose, so Misty trimmed the long end. Evidently even that wasn’t enough for Liza, as she showed up for lunch saying, “My stitches were bothering me so I took them out.” Indeed, she now has no stitches.

I was lucky on two counts: I’m one of the about 80 people interviewed for the documentary, and I got to see an early cut of it at PAX East this year. GET LAMP is funny, affecting, and informative, which isn’t a bad trifecta to [...]]]> GET LAMP, Jason Scott’s documentary-slash-love-letter about text adventures, is now available.

I was lucky on two counts: I’m one of the about 80 people interviewed for the documentary, and I got to see an early cut of it at PAX East this year. GET LAMP is funny, affecting, and informative, which isn’t a bad trifecta to hit. If you have any interest at all in early computer games, in how technology can shape lives in unexpected ways, check this documentary out. It’s a labor of love, and the details from the metal coins that come with every order to how the DVD itself is structured like a choose-your-own-adventure story, add richness to the subject.

The most [...]]]> Fair use is one of those US legal concepts that, like the first amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, gets badly misused on the internet. Chances are you don’t understand it. That’s okay; I don’t fully understand it, either. But there are some misconceptions that you absolutely positively should rip out of your brain.

The most common and most pernicious one is that, if you only use a little bit of a song or excerpt a tiny piece of a novel, that’s fair use. Well, no. That can be a part of a fair use defense, but there’s more to it than that. Saying “I only used a bit, so it’s fair use!” is like going up to a cow in a field and saying, “Look! I made a hamburger!”

There are four things that go into fair use. Yes, length is one of them. If you use a short excerpt compared to the entire length of the work, you’ll more easily be able to claim fair use. But there are three other things you need to be doing for you to claim fair use.

What are you using the excerpt for? You need to do something transformative with it. You also need to use it to comment on or expand upon the original work. Using it for criticism about the actual work? Excellent. Using it because it would sound cool in your movie? Not so good.

What’s the nature of the work? Are you excerpting facts? Or are you taking pieces from a work of fiction?

Finally, what’s your excerpt going to do to the copyright holder’s ability to sell the original work? If you’re using the excerpt in something that will compete with the original for market share, you can’t easily claim fair use.

Those four elements are only guidelines, though. Take the restriction on length. Copying an entire TV show to watch it later? Fair use. Using just over one minute of a 72-minute Charlie Chaplin film in a new report of Chaplain’s death? Not fair use. About the only way to really know if something is fair use or not is to fight it out in court, at which point you might as well turn large piles of cash into bonfires.

Now I will sit back and wait for my lawyer friends to correct this post, because Aahz’s law doesn’t just apply to Usenet.

(And in case that last sentence doesn’t tip you off: I am not a lawyer, and this does not count as true legal advice. Consult your lawyer if fair use lasts for longer than four hours.)

(Glenn Baeske of The Huntsville Times took that picture.)

The article touches on the Hermes system that we’ve been developing to help helicopters automatically pick up cargo and then guide them to the delivery point, which has a lot of potential applications for everything from medical [...]]]> Hey, look who was in Sunday’s issue of the Huntsville Times.

(Glenn Baeske of The Huntsville Times took that picture.)

The article touches on the Hermes system that we’ve been developing to help helicopters automatically pick up cargo and then guide them to the delivery point, which has a lot of potential applications for everything from medical heliflights to logging to resupplying soldiers in the field. I wrote our original proposal for the project back in 2005, and now, five years later, it’s on the cusp of being a real honest-to-goodness product. A lot of very smart people have put in a tremendous amount of work to make that happen, and I’m thrilled to see it all coming together.

So that’s what I saw on Sunday! How was your weekend?

The article is talking about a specific flavor of creativity, [...]]]> Newsweek’s article on the “creativity crisis” has been making the rounds lately. It fits the usual template of such stories: extrapolation of a trend leads to prognostications of vague gloom. In this case, it’s that US kids’ Creativity Quotient scores have been falling since the 1990s.

The article is talking about a specific flavor of creativity, namely the ability to generate a lot of ideas, pick out and combine the most promising ones, and then follow through on them. The article contrasts problem-solving-based education that can foster this kind of thinking with US schools’ focus on rote memorization and test taking, and does a good job of citing research into creativity.

The article is less persuasive when it trots out the usual bogeymen of TV and videogames. The best videogames, and games in general, give you a set of rules and invite you to then solve the problems creatively, the kind of creative problem-solving that the article calls for in schools. And as fanfic and other transformative works show, people will watch TV and incorporate their stories into their own. The article approvingly notes that creative kids often make their own alternate worlds to play in. Can you get the same benefit from in part populating your alternate worlds with elements borrowed from TV shows? After all, most kids at that age are synthesists, creating those worlds from pieces of whatever stories they’ve heard, whether those stories came from books or TV or their family.

Programs exist to foster creative problem-solving, including Dr. Torrance’s Future Problem Solving Program. I’ll be interested to see if Eli and Liza’s schools offer such programs. But at least for now, I’m not that worried about them.