A couple of my favorite reviewers were in action over the weekend. At the Washington Post, Michael Dirda takes a look at the new Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence. While he doesn’t rate it as one of the author’s best works, he also notes:

It is a romance, and only a dry-hearted critic would dwell on the flaws in so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.

Meanwhile at the San Francisco Chronicle Mike Berry gives his thoughts on Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. Just about everyone in the SF&F community has already waxed lyrical about this book, and Mike is no exception. It is definitely on my buy list.

There might not be many sessions on speculative fiction at Hay, but the session on creative writing courses is applicable to everyone. The Guardian has some highlights, including Hanif Kureishi:

The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers – and no one will disabuse them of that.

And Fay Wheldon:

the fewer adjectives and the fewer adverbs the better, you’re just doing the world a favour.

Tough job, this writing lark.

Having gone through the process of setting up an account with Revolution Money Exchange (see here) it seemed rather silly not to use it. So I have set up a donations page. This is not because I’m desperate for money. I’d much rather have work than donations. But I did want to see how the thing worked. The conclusion so far is that they have gone over the top on the Flash, and they don’t quite understand about “donations” as opposed to “payment for products”. PayPal’s donate button works better, but it is PayPal and they are annoying in other ways.

Kevin and I will be on the road for most of the weekend. We’ll be able to get Internet access from our hotel this evening and tomorrow morning, but for the rest of the time we’ll be offline.

Fark.com is having a competition to design a flag for a nanny state. This one is ours. Go ye here to vote for it.

(LJ people, you’ll need to click through to the main blog to see it.)

(Hat tip to Alex).

If you are following the comments feed for this site you may have noticed that I got another Challenge Cheryl question. This one was about the fact that BASFA, our local science fiction club here in the Bay Area, does not have a clubhouse. I have answered this question here. What you should take from this is that if you ask me a silly question then you will get a very silly answer.

Further questions are, of course, still welcome.

If only this were an April Fool, but it isn’t. Further to my comments on work visas in The Travel Question, the H1B season opens today, and once again the number of visas available is so much smaller than the number of applications that the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services is resorting to a lottery to see who gets one. The Economist’s blog has commentary.

Welcomed back at BASFA tonight was our very own traveling TAFF delegate, Chris Garcia. As expected, he was full of entertaining stories about his time in the UK, and his TAFF report is already written. The British Museum story is particularly good.

But you know that old thing about an irresistible force and an immovable object? Something’s gotta give, right? Heathrow Terminal 5, Chris Garcia, ’nuff said.

I’ve just posted my answer to Carolyn’s question about differences between living in the US and UK. You can find it here. As ever, new questions are welcomed.

Yet another piece of science fiction that looks like it might one day come true – the self-driving car will make its commercial debut at a trade fair in Hanover in April. As some of you will know, this project originated in one of those DARPA challenges, and form what I can see the Germans don’t expect to be selling the car as much as to be selling the technology that makes it work. But if the technology works, can commercial deployment be far off?

Of course there is always the issue of consumer perceptions. Evidence from public reactions to things like railway accidents prove conclusively that the the public always thinks that a transport system is less safe if they are not driving, even if the statistics point massively in the opposite direction.

Taking an entirely different approach to the problem of climate change, MIT has been experimenting with a new form of fusion reaction called a Levitated Dipole. As this article explains, one of the big problems with a Tokamak is keeping the plasma under control (what Feynman described as “trying to hold Jell-O with rubber bands”). The new reactor design uses a much simpler magnetic field pattern which, the MIT folks hope, will result in a much more controllable reactor.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

It being a quiet day, work-wise, I have been doing a little tidying up around here. Mostly it has been cosmetic, and I don’t suppose many of you will notice. However, there is one question I wanted to ask. I’ve been thinking of dropping the “Recent Comments” box. It may be useful to some people, but I’ve noticed that I get a lot more comment spam on the Mewsings that I do on SFAW, despite SFAW having more readers and a massively higher Technorati rating. I suspect this is because when they do get through they appear in the “Recent Comments” box, which gets the spammer paid (I’m pretty sure only manually-posted comment spam is getting through). So the question is, does anyone out there actually use the “Recent Comments” list, or do you all subscribe to the comments feed like sensible people?

Next job, try to find some means of dealing with the damn sploggers.

Update: Aha! I’ve found a plugin that claims to check trackbacks for spam. That should do the trick.