Consider Bookhling

Have I ever mentioned that I’m really particular about teas? I usually don’t go for those instant stuff. I mean the premium stuff, the tea leaves with pedigree. Of course, such teas are usually somewhere between somewhat and very expensive, and I can’t often afford such teas with my budget, especially considering my equal love of good red wines. I try to make do with what I can find in this mass produced society, by filling up my diet with all things tea related. It goes without mentioning that my favorite ice cream flavor is green tea (why aren’t there any other great tea tasting ice creams? Hmm. Synthetic receptor issues?).

I’ve recently come across the white tea line from Inkos, and I must say that these thing are probably the best instant-packaged teas I’ve ever drank in my life. It’s quite refreshing without being too sweet or having bitter aftertaste. Their taste is ‘light’ compared to similar sugar water being sold by, say, Nastea, which I consider to be a simple sugar water compound/leftover coke with tea additives. The worse of the instant, packaged teas usually leave terrible aftertaste and bad breath. This white tea doesn’t do that. Even better, they actually sell their products online by the box, at a cheaper price compared to what you would have to pay at a local convey…. I might get the full box later on, once I get my life a bit more organized.

I just wanted to take the time to remind everyone that the io9 synthetic biology contest will be over at midnight tonight.

That is it, folks. The deadline is only about five or so hours away. I hope those of you thinking of participating already have a good thing going. It had been two months since the contest was announced, now that I think about it. I am glad to say that my entry is ready to be submitted within few minutes as well.

Now I can only wait and see. I just hope lots of people came up with very unusual ideas. Give a breadth of fresh air to the field, so to speak.

I’ve been googling some Neal Stephenson articles on the net in preparation for his new upcoming book, Anathem.

Here is an interesting excerpt from a Wired article I encountered from a blog about Neal Stephenson and his upcoming work (I recommend you read the full article as well if you are interested in current status of Neal Stephenson’s life).

…

Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day–”It’s part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff,” he says–so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He’s particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos’ space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there.

“In Neal’s books, he’s been fantastically good at creating scenarios and technologies that are purely imaginary,” Myhrvold says. “But they’re much easier imagined than built. So we spend a certain amount of our time imagining them but the rest of our time building them. It’s also very cool but different to say, ‘Let’s come up with new ways of doing brain surgery.’”

That’s right–brain surgery is one of the things Stephenson is tinkering with. He and his team are helping refine some mechanical aspects of a new tool, a helical needle for operating on brain tumors. It’s the kind of cool job one of his characters might have.
…

This article seem to further compound my idea about Stephenson’s (or any other writer/artists’) almost instinctive urge to see the products of their written fantasies manifest in their world in a more corporeal form. Many artists throughout history seem to share that trait in particular, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Jasper Johns, methods of manifestation sometimes taking form of involvement in things of the ’secular world’ or integration of their artistic ideas into lifestyles and memes. Such universally observed trait might as well be the reason that synthetic biology, or rather, any and all forms of artificial life holds so much promise for artists of the world. Synthetic/artificial life might as well be the catalyst needed to bridge the unreasonable cultural and intellectual gap between the arts and the sciences.

Indeed, I might even go as far as to say that the utility of artificial life in the field of arts would be an inevitable development of the future, based on the innate human desire to breathe life into immaterial thoughts.

Once I get past the deadline season, I might do a bit more detailed post on the matter of human creativity and obsession towards its manifestation…

Just a quick update on something I found on the net by chance. As many of you would know, I will not be able to do a full post until I get some work stuff done, which should be early September…

Those of you in the know would probably be aware of the SciFoo that took place a few weeks ago. While looking at the Flickr photostream for the SciFoo 08 (deep in contemplation on how to get invited to the inevitable 09 meet up) I found an interesting picture… Well the picture itself is not interesting per se, I am really talking about the person in the picture.

Neal Stephenson was apparently present in the recent iteration of SciFoo. He is the writer behind the Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and the Baroque Cycle. A sort of cyberpunkish economics-hacking system-forming stories are his forte (so far). He had been inactive for a while though. His new work titled Anathem is set to be released this September, something that is coming out after six or so years of silence from a prolific author. To say that I am excited would be an understatement, since I consider him to be one of the best entertainment writers around today (for those of you who take offense at the term, Victor Hugo was a pulp-fiction writer of his day. Yet his name went down in history and he is not likely to be forgotten anytime soon).

One thing I can not stop thinking about now: Which sessions did Neal Stephenson attend?

P.S. :Is he still using Mac? (He should really update his essay In the Beginning there was Command Line sometime in the future…)