Coming up to snuff

We went to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today, so I put on my geekiest T-shirt*. At the desk, we were in the process of paying when a voice cried "They don't pay! They're on me!" and Chris Garcia erupted from a back room. We didn't even know he was a curator there...

So we did the exhibition in stints, with lunch between, and intermittent cries of "Oh great Ghu, I had one of those!" - and then we went to see the Babbage Difference Engine being demonstrated. Turns out it is curiously like every Windows computer you've ever used: four cranks and it crashed. Brass screen of death.

Still, the crowds dissipated, and Karen got me to pose for a photo round the back of the beautiful beast. And then - because she's actually geekier than I am, and I couldn't think of anywhere better if I worked on it with both hands for a fortnight - I asked if she'd like to marry me.**

And now we're back home, she's writing job applications (or possibly playing WoW, I haven't peeked) and I'm writing a gay pirates story. Yo ho, Sebastian. Keep the aspidochelone floating.


*(black, with a Linux cheat-sheet inverted on the chest so that I can read it)

**EtA: she said yes. Yes, she said, she would. So that's okay.

On another matter entirely...

If you wanted to sabotage someone's stock of gunpowder, so that it looked and felt and smelled fine but just wouldn't, y'know, explode, how would you go about it? (You can have a couple of days, for whatever you've done to take effect; you can mix in foreign substances or just too much of any given constituent, to unbalance the mix and make it not go bang. Be scientific with me, people. Or imaginative, or both.)

EtA: Dr Gale's Process! It's technically too late for me, but hey. What he can learn in 1865, someone else can have discovered earlier. Powdered glass it is...

Tanith Lee in a Cairo shitstorm

Post-Mubarak, the universities in Egypt have been having their own quiet revolution. In Cairo, for the first time ever, a dean of faculty has been democratically elected by majority vote. They voted for a woman.

Now the department is under attack, for including a Tanith Lee short story on a reading-list.

"The short story, according to the al-Akhbar journalist, teaches nothing but depravity and moral degradation. It encourages perversion and is therefore "a crime in the full sense of the word". Brandishing his moral sword, he threatened to file a complaint of moral corruption to the public prosecutor and to sue all those involved in allowing this short story to corrupt innocent minds."

Is it a coincidence, we wonder, that this attack comes while the president of the university is still dithering over whether or not to ratify the dean's election?