God took Dallas Wiens’s face from him on a clear November morning four years ago. If you ask Wiens, he will say that it was neither an accident nor a punishment; it was simply what had to happen. At the time, he was trying to paint the roof of the Ridglea Baptist Church, just off Route 30, in Fort Worth. He was twenty-three, and suffering from the complications of being young and living a life of trouble, heartache, and restlessness.

So, "The Island" got a Hugo nom. Which means I'm supposed to pimp it, which is fine because it's been far too long since I swapped out the fiction on this page anyway. So here you go, with a couple of embedded illustrations by Dan Ghiordanescu and Chris Butler.

A bit of background. "The Island" is a standalone novelette. It is also one episode in a projected series of connected tales (a lá Stross's Accellerando or Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles) that start about a hundred years from now and extends unto the very end of time. And in some parallel universe where I not only get a foothold into the gaming industry but actually keep one, it is a mission level for what would be, in my opinion, an extremely kick-ass computer game.

For the time being, though, it's just a story — stretched out across the screen below, or packaged neatly as a pdf under "Short Stories", above, to take with you and eat on the fly. It's also available in Sony Reader and epub formats, thanks to the efforts of a fellow I know only as "Mike". Update: Apparently that e-pub file may not work on all readers — it doesn't work properly with Stanza on the iPhone, anyway — but this file, courtesy of one Fergus Heywood, does. So I'm told. Although I myself don't have an iPhone.

However you take it, I hope you find it to your taste.

Oh yes. Recently (May 8th to be exact) I did a post on potty-mouthed golf caddy George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina who, for some reason, took offense when Sandra Fluke went on Twitter and voiced her support for a bill that would protect the rights of working women when they get pregnant.

Let’s relive The Magic That Is George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina When He Talks To The Ladies, shall we? :

The Goiânia accident was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on September 13, 1987, at Goiânia, in the Brazilian State of Goiás after an old radiotherapy source was stolen from an abandoned hospital site in the city.

Although it’s true that you never forget how to ride a bike, it’s also true that you can forget how to ride a bicycle well.

Earlier this afternoon, somewhere "in the middle of Ohio," groundbreaking indie director John Waters was found hitchhiking on the side of a road. We're trying to find out just what the Baltimore-based director of Pink Flamingos was doing begging for a lift in the middle of the Buckeye State—indie rock band Here We Go Magic says they picked him up! And he's currently riding around in their van.

Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea.

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

It may be everyone’s punching bag, but it’s time to face facts: The Bay State is best.

I have been in bands since 1979 and making records since 1981. I own the recording studio Electrical Audio. I also play poker and write an occasional cooking blog. I'll be answering questions from about 3pm - 6pm EDT.

I actually have a few funny stories about FSM and the Army.

How a volunteer crew brought a crack operating system back

The announcement earlier today of Adam Yauch's death at age 47 has prompted fellow musicians to share memories of the Beastie Boys rapper and reactions to his death. Rolling Stone  has compiled their responses below:

Adam Yauch, a rapper and founder of the pioneering and multimillion-selling hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 47.

The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:

It is with great sadness that we confirm that musician, rapper, activist and director Adam "MCA" Yauch, founding member of Beastie Boys and also of the Milarepa Foundation that produced the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits, and film production and distribution company Oscilloscope Laboratories, passed away in his native New York City this morning after a near-three-year battle with cancer. He was 47 years old.

A powerful Photoshop-like CSS gradient editor from ColorZilla.

A RADICAL EXPLANATION FOR A CONUNDRUM ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY.

Vint Cerf invented the protocol that rules them all: TCP/IP. Most people have never heard of it. But it describes the fundamental architecture of the internet, and it made possible Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LANs, the World Wide Web, e-mail, FTP, 3G/4G — as well as all of the inventions built upon those inventions.

Cerf did that in 1973. For most of you that’s probably 20 years before you even knew what the internet was. That’s why he’s known as the father of the internet and earned himself a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cerf didn’t stop there — he went on to co-found the Internet Society (ISOC) and served as president of ICANN, the organization which operates the domain naming system.

So it was pretty much a given that Cerf would be inducted, as he was on Monday, into ISOC’s internet Hall of Fame in its inaugural year.

Just a few days beforehand Cerf talked with Wired about how the military brought the TCP/IP protocol into being, how he and his co-conspirators knew — almost 40 years ago — what they were unleashing on the world, the threats to the net today, and what he’d like to see next: a vision that includes internet packets raining down from the sky.

Yesterday, I was at the gym.

...Don't worry. This isn't a gym story.

This is the closest I will ever come to New England envy.

My public contempt for the Red Sox is so profound that I hardly consider Boston a part of the republic. My fury spills into other matters of Massachusetts, including the Patriots, Ben Affleck, the native, noxious accent, and perhaps anyone named Kennedy.

But they got one thing right: keeping Fenway Park. It’s Boston’s bedrock ballpark, a temple that doubles as home to a signature franchise and a resounding salute to the sport. Fenway belongs in baseball as much as any accoutrement over the last century. There is now no other place on the planet where Babe Ruth played in his loved and loathed uniforms.

I have been playing with the Chrome Developer Tools lately. Here is a cool feature I didn’t know about.

There are many times I have ran some code in the console like to bind to an event and simply log the result.

Christopher Nolan prefers film to digital, shoots with one camera, and doesn’t believe in 3-D. The director who resurrected Batman, made time go backward in Memento, and deconstructed dreams in Inception speaks his mind.

It all started with Snow Crash

But Kobe is just the tip of the labeling iceberg – there are literally hundreds of other food items, from the extravagant, such as Champagne and Cognac, to the more common, like Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, whose production and sale in this country would violate many very old and well-known foreign trademarks – except that these trademarks are not recognized by U.S. law. Like Faux-be beef, this domestic production is undertaken mainly for one reason – to reap the benefit of good will and quality brand reputation created by someone else, namely foreigners who have no recourse in U.S. courts.

And for that we can thank the U.S. government.

What about “Domestic Kobe” or Wagyu? Savvy eaters may have noticed that in recent years some menus and meat packaging have switched to these terms. I’ve also seen “American-style Kobe” and “American Wagyu” (I’ve even seen Kobe pork, Kobe bacon and Kobe pigs-in-a-blanket!). I’m not sure if these are attempts to be slightly less dishonest, but if so, they fall far short, since none of these terms mean anything to the buyer.

Think you’ve tasted the famous Japanese Kobe beef?

Think again.

The one I liked best was a tiny pale guy with a goofy name and a goofier haircut, crouching behind a couple of laptops. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Jack White Is the Coolest, Weirdest, Savviest Rock Star of Our Time

Since that controversial last episode of The Sopranos, in June 2007, the cast and crew have never spoken so candidly about the show that changed both their lives and the showbiz landscape. With creator David Chase leading the way, Sam Kashner gets a behind-the-scenes history of a national obsession as James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, and other Sopranos insiders talk about their years as a family, the trauma when someone got whacked, and making their peace with the finale.

Nearly everything about the Foxwoods Resort Casino is improbable, beginning with its scale. It is the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere — a gigantic, labyrinthine wonderland set down in a cedar forest and swamp in an otherwise sleepy corner of southeastern Connecticut. Forty thousand patrons pack into Foxwoods on weekend days. The place has 6,300 slot machines. Ten thousand employees. If you include everything — hotel space, bars and restaurants, theaters and ballrooms, spa, bowling alley — Foxwoods measures about 6.7 million square feet, more than the Pentagon.

I have recently upgraded to OSX Lion, and I have to say that I love everything about it. Except for one thing. In many apps, the key repeat has been disabled in favor of the new press-and-hold popup for getting alternative characters.

This is fine for most apps, but for apps like PyCharm where I use vi key maps, it becomes very, very frustrating.

I came across this little tip to re-enable the key repeat, and my life is measurably better (first world problems, I know…).

TODAY is my last day at the Empire. After almost 12 years, first as a summer intern, then in the Death Star and now in London, I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its massive, genocidal space machines. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

Think Steve Albini is a bad dude? Well, think again. A few months ago, he offered up his recording expertise and his studio, Electrical Audio, gratis to a young passionate musician named John Grabski III. Grabski happened to be dying of testicular cancer, and wanted to record an album his way, finally. He recorded two albums worth of material with his band Teeth at Electrical Audio, with Albini manning the boards and the great Bob Weston providing the mastering. In the twilight of his life, Grabski actually got to realize his dreams – something few of us ever do. That alone is inspirational.

Does the success of Trent Reznor, Clint Mansell and Mark Mothersbaugh suggest that the days of the orchestral soundtrack are numbered?

On the morning of Sept. 12, 2011, a white Land Rover with a dragon on the door ferried the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, his longtime recording engineer Graeme Stewart and Radiohead’s co-manager Chris Hufford to Alvernia Studios, about an hour outside Krakow, Poland. For several years, when he’s not recording or touring with Radiohead, Greenwood has pursued a second career as a composer of orchestral music, and this day he was cutting new versions of two of his classical pieces, “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” (17 minutes, inspired in part by the sound of radio static) and “48 Responses to Polymorphia,” both of which are unabashed tributes to the early-’60s output of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose compositions abandoned melody in favor of dense, dissonant tone clusters. Greenwood’s recordings will be featured on an album due out in March on Nonesuch Records, along with two new performances of Penderecki’s work conducted by Penderecki himself.

The famous pack mules that carry supplies and people in and out of the Grand Canyon have back pain, as you might imagine. One man is on a mission to make the lives of these beasts of burden a little less painful

Almost one-third of Americans believe the ancient Mayan prediction of global calamity this December are “somewhat true,” according to a recent National Geographic poll. The prediction is based on a huge stone calendar wheel but exact nature of the disaster — already the subject of major motion pictures and fodder for a Super Bowl ad of remarkably black humor — is an open question. Perhaps an apocalypse will be sparked by expensive gasoline or another Charlie Sheen tantrum. Or maybe those early Mexicans just ran out of stone.

The Argonne Anti–Jet-Lag diet, as the putative antidote is known, was devised in the 1980s by the late Charles Ehret, a “chronobiologist” at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois who discovered that our biological clocks are cued in part by when and how much we eat. After experimenting on protozoa, rats, and his eight children, Ehret recommended that the international traveler, in the several days before his flight, alternate days of feasting with days of very light eating. Come the flight, the traveler would nibble sparsely until eating a big breakfast at about 7:30 a.m. in his new time zone—no matter that it was still 1:30 a.m. in the old time zone or that the airline wasn’t serving breakfast until 10:00 a.m. His reward would be little or no jet lag.

Mick Jones, co-founder of seminal punk band The Clash, his hair as thin as the crowd, plays a few solo songs at the opening of the Rock and Roll Public Library, a converted office under a motorway in West London, in between swigs of lager. That is all. But what else do you need?

Hi friends!

Tyrese Gibson (of Fast and Furious and Transformers) saw my name cc’d on an email that a mutual friend sent out and thought I was the model ex girlfriend of Kanye West, Amber Rose.  (My middle name is Rose and my email adress is registered as Amber Rose).  I’ve never met Tyrese before. He pulled my email addy from that cc list and emailed me wanting to work on an album together.  So I recorded my demos on my iPhone and sent them to him.  I guess you could call them Awareness Raps?  I am the Hilary Clinton of Ghostface Killahs.

Below are all the email correspondences I had with Tyrese as well as the songs I sent him.

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, a shit storm of epic proportions has just gone down. Something which had the potential to affect practically every coder. (Top four stories on HackerNews all related to this crisis).

The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind

15 Years of Vi + 7+ years of Vim and still learning

The Stringbike is a cat’s cradle of alien beauty, a vehicle devastating in its mechanical elegance. Mounted on a sinuous white frame (it also comes in black) the Stringbike’s drivetrain is made up of a triangular aluminum swinging arm connected via colorful Dyneema strings to spring-loaded hubs mounted on the rear axle. You pedal it like you’d pedal a regular bike, and the weird shape of the inside of the swinging arm converts your circular pedaling into a horizontal back-and-forth motion. This force is relayed to the rear by the Dyneema strings, which pull on the hubs and rotate the rear axle.

Terry Francona is still looking for a little perspective.

Spring training officially begins this week, but the first whispers of a new season actually came early last month at the annual convention of baseball’s groundskeepers, a hardy bunch who can discourse on soil science, analyze weather radar and, when necessary, work ridiculously long hours.

Ask die-hard Boston Red Sox fans what they love most about their team’s home ballpark, and the answer is invariably the Green Monster left field wall, with its manually operated scoreboard.

“That has been there forever,” said Jason Chaves from East Bridgewater. “The scoreboard? Absolutely been there forever.”

Actually, that’s not true. The scoreboard, which for the 2011 home opener is showing a deplorable 0-6 season start, has only been there for 10 years.

It’s a replica.

The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?

Sifting through the confusion about the rock legends' new album

This is an intervention. Detox is a tiny Safari extension that automatically expands shortened t.co links on the Twitter site (third-party desktop app users are out of luck, sorry should see the 1.1 update below).

In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon — who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family — responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below (a letter which, according to newspapers at the time, he dictated).

Rather than quote the numerous highlights in this letter, I'll simply leave you to enjoy it. Do make sure you read to the end.

If Hollywood could cast the Super Bowl teams, it wouldn’t choose most of the guys who make up the New England Patriots and the New York Giants. It also couldn’t invent the stories of how these people got here any better.

Battlestar Galactica attracted a lot of fans and a lot of kudos during its run, and engendered this sub blog about it. Here, in my final post on the ending, I present the case that its final hour was the worst ending in the history of science fiction on the screen. This is a condemnation of course, but also praise, because my message is not simply that the ending was poor, but that the show rose so high that it was able to fall so very far. I mean it was the most disappointing ending ever.

There was nothing else even remotely interesting at Blockbuster — so we rented ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Well, after all,  I often talk about Ayn Rand and her passionate followers, who have effectively taken over the U.S. Libertarian movement, influencing much of the rhetoric we hear from the American Right… though none of the policies have ever been actually enacted during Republican rule. I’ve published both scholarly papers and popular articles about Rand’s fiction and philosophy.

So, I thought, why not give her acolytes one more shot at selling me on her biggest, most-central tale? An honest person does that. Whereupon, with a sigh, but opening my ears and mind, I slid the disk into the player….

It's been almost four months since the hideous ending to the season and, hopefully, that has put a small portion of emotional distance between us and the 2011 Red Sox, enough to be able to start to see some of the players and their actions in a less jaundiced light; enough to begin a civil discussion about one of the more polarizing figures on the team. As you probably gathered from the title, this is a little post about John Lackey.

On October 30, 1975, three days before he was murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini was in Stockholm to present what was to be his last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, to Swedish critics. A roundtable discussion was recorded with the intent of turning it into a radio broadcast but news of the filmmaker's death oddly resulted in the withholding of the recording rather than, as would surely happen today, an immediate publication. Eventually, the recording was lost, but as Eric Loret and Robert Maggiori tell the story in Libération, Pasolini's Swedish translator, Carl Henrik Svenstedt, a passionate archivist, recently discovered his own private copy. In December, the Italian newsweekly L'espresso posted the audio recording and published an Italian transcript. Here, for the first time, is an English translation. After a couple of informal questions, the roundtable officially opens with "Ladies and gentlemen…"

Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.

Why do people love Trader Joe’s so much? To understand the quirky chain’s success, you have to look to its founder, Joe Coulombe—and then to a former German mogul named Theo Albrecht. Grab some edamame and pull up a chair

A little after 9 a.m. on Sept. 15, 1990, the owner of a steel-products company pulled up to her office in Vinegar Hill, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and spotted a black garbage bag sitting on the sidewalk out front. She parked her car and went to move the bag when she noticed it leaking blood. The woman called 911. Within the hour, Ken Whelan, a homicide detective from the 84th Precinct, peered into the bag. It was full of human body parts.

The break in the Mengele case came shortly after that. On the last day of May 1985, based on tips gathered as part of their own investigations, West German police raided a house in Mengele’s home town in Günzberg, Bavaria, and uncovered a trove of documents, including letters with coded return addresses, which pointed them to Brazil and to an Austrian couple named Wolfram and Liselotte Bossert.9 The Bosserts, who lived in São Paulo, then told police there that they had indeed sheltered Mengele in Brazil, and helped him assume a false identity. They also pointed investigators to what they said was his grave, in the cemetery of a small town outside São Paulo called Embu. He had, they said, drowned at the beach resort of Bertioga in 1979, and they had buried him in Embu under a false name, Wolfgang Gerhard. On June 6th, the Brazilian police exhumed the body

Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had ever heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations.

When John Davidson’s apartment gets robbed, he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer while he lies to the police.

The leader of the crew believed he was under surveillance, and Martin made them leave their phones in the car for safety. He recalled the phones with disgust. “They had all smart phones, and I told them: Bad fucking idea. You have to scale down two generations, at least. There’s too much information on a smart phone.” That’s where Martin could help.

It’s a few days before Christmas, and Julian Assange has just finished moving to a new hide-out deep in the English countryside. The two-bedroom house, on loan from a WikiLeaks supporter, is comfortable enough, with a big stone fireplace and a porch out back, but it’s not as grand as the country estate where he spent the past 363 days under house arrest, waiting for a British court to decide whether he will be extradited to Sweden to face allegations that he sexually molested two women he was briefly involved with in August 2010.

​ Since news broke Sunday of Debbie Cook’s stunning e-mail, sent to thousands of her fellow Scientologists, word of a serious rift inside the church has been appearing in many news outlets, particularly in Europe. In the meantime, we provided additional depth and context about Debbie Cook, her career, and her salvo against church leader David Miscavige.
This morning, the Cook story showed up on ABC’s Good Morning America. We couldn’t help noticing that the editing on it was a bit strange, and it leads us to think it was only part of a larger segment — perhaps something that’s going to play tonight on Nightline?

If so, that means a whole group of new folks may be coming to this story, and we figure they’re going to have a lot of questions about who this Debbie Cook is and what her e-mail is all about. (And plenty more will wonder, “What is Scientology?”)

So this afternoon, we’ve put together an annotated version of Debbie’s e-mail, and we hope it helps you navigate this pretty shocking story about Scientology’s internal crisis.

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.