Le Guin reads Jon Carroll and called Carroll's column today a terrific example of politically aware speculative fiction.

Thanks to Jeana, I attended a lecture by Ursula K. Le Guin today and even spoke with her a tiny bit. She seemed very happy that I'd had such a great experience teaching her book. …

I have been thinking for quite a while about the ways in which different technologies lead people to communicate in different ways. Joel Spolsky points out that -- for example -- when a message board …

Poor Leonard. Segfault and his weblog and Scott's and Frances's and Susanna's weblogs are offline and he doesn't know exactly why. To boot, one must use Google's cache of his front page if one has …

Jeff might use information on Ishi, last of the Yahi, in his linguistics dissertation. He mentioned this today in Russian class, which amused me for two reasons. First, the anthropologist whom we most associate with …

Dan and other people in the OCF just found out about INTERCAL. Dan is laughing hysterically.

From Steve Hofstetter's Observational Humor: Most colleges have huge ever-expanding libraries with hundreds of thousands of books, so they need a complex system of numbers and maps to tell you exactly which shelf your book …

I used to have all sorts of theories about the Harry Potter books. I'd talk about how the weakness of the French and the evil of the Germans had to do with World War II, …

I really should go to sleep. Then again, I really should eat well-balanced meals every day and keep up on the reading for my classes and take care of other responsibilities as well. Me on …

From Jeana's journal: For anyone in the Berkeley area, today (being Friday) at 4 pm, Ursula K. Le Guin will be speaking in the Morrison Room of Doe Library. The "K" in her name stands …