Did you see that "blog" was the number one new word in the English language - according to those who would know, I guess. Well, I agree. Blogs are the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I say that even though I don't mind slicing bread, and even though I worked at a wholesale bakery in Seattle and sliced a lot of bread. Fer instance, I just stumbled on Bob Mould's blog, and from there, a bunch of other interesting things I had no idea about. One of my favorite columnists Robert Dvorak has a blog, about any little thing that catches his eye. It's great. And then there's the science ones. Like Preposterous Universe - the great thing is to hear the voice of all these creative types and heavy duty thinking types in just an ordinary way. Sure, I scan a lot of it, otherwise there's not enough time in the universe to read everything. But I love just stumbling across Bob Mould's blog, and reading about his tour and his drive home yesterday, another life...



I'm reading Lee Smolin's Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. I'm a bit tapped out from end of year business stuff, and so I tend to nod offf with it, but it's energizing - at least intellectually - to think about what things are like at the Planck scale. Lee Smolin was the writer that turned me on to Julian Barbour's writin. Reading Smolin and Barbour makes me envious of the physicists and their incredible group workings. Their global friendships and partnerships, in an effort that seems more and more to me like building the cathedrals... the edifice of the Grand Theory, hundreds of physicists, members of the most elite clan, working away night and day on things most of us really, and here I mean this literally, really cannot even begin to understand. The secrets of the cathedrals... hey, those builders were the Masons! Wonder if we'll enter a dark age (he said casually) and the physicists will form a secret society to protect the knowledge against, well, yes, I hate to be so blunt about it, but the fundamentalists, who of all stripes are moderately to severely anti-intellectual. But back to physics: I wonder when they're going to tackle the question on Consciousness... and maybe find out that the Buddhists were already there 2500 years ago...



enjoy the holidays. relax when you're driving...