The Michael Canfield Channel

Oblique Strategies

Many years ago, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a series of I-Ching-like oracle cards for facilitating creativity called the Oblique Strategies, and they are online and they are fun.

Planet Hunting

Link: Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Star Shade Could Reveal Earthlike Exoplanets.

[snip]

Stars shine so brightly that any planets orbiting them are lost in the glow. In fact, astronomers can only detect exoplanets indirectly by their effects on parent stars: either gravitational or, as the planet passes in front, by dimming. But a 50-meter-wide, daisy-shaped star shade could block stellar light, allowing direct observation of their planets, according to a new paper in today's Nature.

Oh snap! Cingular fails to qualify.

Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile OK'd for wireless sale - Jul. 7, 2006 to get some new licences by the FCC. I love T-Mobile. The only wireless carrier that I've even had remotely decent service from. Remotely decent: the gold standard in mobile service.

Nature Ranks Top 5 Science Blogs

And makes a very detailed link title out of it to boot: news @ nature.com�-�Top five science blogs�-�Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success.

Neologism

to scifichannel (v.) 1.The act of reassigning race, age, or gender of characters in a fictive work when adapting that work into a new medium - ostensibly for the purpose of "broadening appeal." 2. The act of casting actors of color in background roles, such as shaman, mentor, savior, or sidekick, etc., and to use those casting choices to proclaim a project's "diversity."

Sources:

1. A Whitewashed Earthsea - How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books. By Ursula K. Le Guin.

2. The Black Commentator - Magic Negro - Issue 49

A Shocking Insult Against Human Beings

For Gay Rights Movement, a Key Setback - New York Times.

Nowhere did gay marriage seem like a natural fit more than New York, where the Stonewall uprising of 1969 provided inspiration for the gay rights movement and where a history of spirited progressivism had led some gay couples to envision their own weddings someday.

Yesterday's court ruling against gay marriage was more than a legal rebuke, then — it came as a shocking insult to gay rights groups. Leaders said they were stunned by both the rejection and the decision's language, which they saw as expressing more concern for the children of heterosexual couples than for the children of gay couples.

Let's at least be clear about one thing, if you today do not support the rights of gays to marry each other, to adopt children, and to otherwise lead their own lives unmolested, just as we straight people are allowed to, then one day - perhaps ten, perhaps thirty years from now, perhaps longer - but someday, I promise you; you will be held in the same contemptuous dismay we today hold those people of times past who blithely accepted slavery, or the oppression of women, or any number of inexcusable ills, as the natural order of things.

See who you look like ...

I'm not going to try it on myself but Russell Shaw of non-affiliated Blackerrry weblog BBHub ran RIM co-CEO Jim and Mike's mug shots thru facial recognition and you can try it too: MyHeritage.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes ...

Link: Global Pulse.

In case of extinction, a "doomsday vault" for three million seeds will be built on Svalbard, a very cold island about 966 kilometres (604 miles) south of the North Pole. The seed vault will be guarded by polar bears.

Avoid the White Ones ...

CNet: Some MacBooks have premature age spots