March Pieces Of My Mind #1

• How come we have any idea of the diameter of the Oort cloud? And how does it relate spatially to the Kuiper belt?
• Ridiculous tiny Mac keyboard. No F keys, no delete key, tiny cursor movement keys.
• Research is a pretty open-ended activity that demands a certain amount of creativity. Among the many advantages of my part-time editorial job are that I’ve got it almost entirely scripted, what I should do first is almost always clear and it demands no creativity whatsoever. Guaranteed productivity regardless of mood.
• Jrette asks me why Småland province, “Little Land”, is actually extremely large relative to other landskap provinces on her map. I explain that it used to be called The Little Lands and consisted of twelve mini-provinces.
• “The climate was warm and the colors bewildering, and everyone thought we were gods.” R. Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
• Sometimes a person’s voice gives you an entirely wrong idea about their looks. I was just astonished to see a pic of Planet Money reporter Zoe Chace. I was expecting Queen Latifa.
• Ten years ago I reviewed a book in a magazine. My verdict was extremely unfavourable. Now somebody calls me because they want to get in touch with the author of the book. And they have got the names mixed up, believing that the book was written by one Martin Rundkvist. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
• Jrette: “You’re a girl, Dad. You’ve just got this weird pimple between your legs.”
• I really hope you know how to make your word processing software flow the text according to the size of your editing window, not the margins of the physical page.
• What we need is more poets who are willing to rhyme “weeping willow” with “armadillo”.
• Today’s random sentence from Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser: “The air was very still.”
• I just learned something I’ve wondered about for a long time. Until recently, no airplanes had motorised wheels. Taxiing around on the ground still almost exclusively involves a plane’s flight engines.