TWCDC

UA 901 - Asynchronous Sun - SFO to LHR - May 23, 2026

See my comment in the New York Times,

I will be live broadcasting algorithmic art over VHF to a 1970's TV! And collaborating with Paul Greyson of Sublingualism.com fame.

After reading a raft of 19th century literature, I am on a mission to bring back shall into everyday usage. Shall makes me think of shells and the sea, and days at the beach as a child, and Englishness.

she shall sell seashells on the seashore

I like that feeling in my language. And I would like to talk a little more like how Mary Shelley must have.

200 million dollars worth of space garbage

Project Hail Mary is two hundred million dollars worth of space garbage.

I have only ever walked out of two movies in my life. The first was Kung Fu Panda (2008), the first 5 minutes of which had my 4 year old sobbing in fear. A feeling that would have been so welcome in the bland waste of time movie Project Hail Mary.

Let's start with the things I liked about the movie. Well, Ryan Gosling emerging from his cocoon was pretty good and he looked super sexy with the beard and the long hair. That was about it.

And the worst parts were, well, the rest of it. There are so many dumb, illogical and unfunny slapstick parts to list. The very very worst are:

Grace (Gosling) playing skittles with rolls of duct tape and boxed Reynolds Wrap in Home Depot with his security detail who became Grace's amateur lab assistant on a project to save the world. Product placement was that scene's only possible saving grace.

Sandra Huller singing Sign of the Times was atrocious, not because she is a bad singer but that there would be an incongruous drunken Karaoke party just before lift off. Apparently the scene was added at the last minute at Gosling's request.

Oh Rocky, you started out so smart cute and scary but then they turned you into a Spielbergian cliché. It was barely believable that Grace could have synthesized Ricky's sounds and translated them. But then Rocky started actually talking in afore mentioned Spielbergian clichéd voice.

My partner and I kept looking at each other (as well as we could in the dark theater), in disbelief, that something could be so bad.

The first week of war cost $11.4 billion. There are about 150 million tax payers in the US, so on average that's $76 per week each. That is about 40% of my weekly rent.

The annual Federal budget for Medicaid is $900 billion; or $17 billion per week. So the US is spending 11/17= 65% of the Medicaid budget on the war.

The annual budget for USAID before it was dismantled by doge was $21.7 billion. So the US has spent 11.4/21.7 = 52% of that in just one week of the war!

This is my comment on The New York Times op-ed Trump's Smash-and-Grab Presidency Reaches New Heights

Part of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine which was fully designed but never completed

Charles Babbage, aided by Ada Lovelace, designend the first Turing-complete general purpose computer in 1837. The engine was mechanical and designed to have input via punch cards, perform binary calculations, and store numbers in memory.