Well, since all the cool kids are doing it, I might as well do it, too, and comment on the Dr. Who Christmas Special. 

a)Absolutely loved, “I resent your intimation of impropriety, sir! She’s my wife!”

b)Ditto, “I’m a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife. Let us in.”

c)Was really hoping for some hot TV-13 lizard-on-human action. Ah well. 

d)The Doctor didn’t recognize her voice? Really? The DOCTOR?

e)The villain was really underdeveloped. While the Christmas Carol episode focused intently on why wossname was the bastard he was (and how the Doctor made it better, then worse, then better, which turned out to be worse, except that it could then be made better), this just gave us “lonely kid talks to snowmen, then grows up and talks to a giant snow globe”, without a lot of ‘oomph’ to it. We could have easily had ‘alien telepathic snow takes over the world’ without a human villain at all, or make it more obvious the human villain was a throwaway lackey who wanted power bwahahahah, without implying he had any real backstory or motivation.

f)The “game of words” was an interesting concept, but only if one includes “mu”, a Japanese word which, I dimly seem to recall, means “I cannot answer the question within the bounds you have provided.” (It is the correct answer to “Have you stopped beating your wife, answer yes or no.”)

g)I do like Carla/Oswin/Whoever. Her personality is very much akin to that of the embodied TARDIS in “The Doctor’s Wife”.

h)The Doctor wasn’t just being arrogant or condescending to his Sontaran buddy; he was actually mean. Maybe it’s a cultural difference; maybe it was supposed to come off as the kind of insulting banter that best friends can get away with with each other, but it struck me as out of character for him. In many of his incarnations, he has insulted or demeaned his companions when he was angry, frustrated, or otherwise on edge, but he just kept picking on the poor homocidal maniac when there was no particular emotional tension. It’s one thing to call your companion an idiot because he/she just pushed the Shiny Red Button you assumed EVERYONE was too smart to press, it’s another to basically go through the day constantly reminding them that they’re inferior to you in every way. That said, I really want to see more of him (the Sontaran). Anyone whose solution to every problem is, in essence, “Nuke them from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”, is my kind of guy!

i)I loved the fairy tale quality of the spiral staircase into the clouds, and the “It’s longer on the outside”. 

j)The TARDIS seems awfully battered and worn on the outside. The inside is wonderfully retro-60s, the kind of thing that might have been used for the program if they’d had a budget.

k)Overall, this felt much less like a standalone story and much more like a setup for the next season, which isn’t BAD, per se. The first Christmas special, introducing David Tennant, was that, as well. However, the tradition has been, since then, for each Christmas episode to be much more self-contained, a chance for the Doctor to have a story outside of continuity, or linking two seasons together without flowing directly into them. 

I love Wikipedia. As a kid, I used to read dead tree encyclopedias for fun, following “links” by opening up new volumes as articles referenced each other. It’s a lot cooler now, and the concept of printing out Wikipedia is bind moggling. Anyway, I stumbled on this article on “Garden Path Sentences“, not sure how, and found it fascinating. The idea the brain has a parser, which trots along until it finds an error or contradiction, then recurses back to reparse in light of the new data, is one I’d thought as a metaphor, but it seems to be an actual physical fact of our neural structure… there’s a specific, mapped, reaction when our brain gets a “parse fail” error and a reset of the pointer to the start of the sentence, now incorporating the new word, to determine if what was previously classed as, say, “past tense” should now be reclassed as “future tense”. 

You know, the silliest thing about blasphemy laws, other than that they’re akin to laws banning insulting Mr. Spock (Sheldon Cooper would approve!), is that they’re inherently contradictory in any nation which is not a theocracy, and most of the nations where these laws exist, aren’t. If you allow any kind of religious freedom, you allow, by implication, an insult to all religions, because anyone who says “I believe in X” is implying those who believe in “Y” are wrong, ignorant, foolish, etc, even if they don’t directly say so and are basically polite and tolerant. If you believe Jesus was the Messiah, you are telling every Jew “Stop waiting for the Messiah, he’s come. Your faith is misplaced and outdated.”, and every Muslim “Mohammed was just a false preacher, no different from Joseph Smith or L. Ron Hubbard.”. If you’re a Muslim, you are telling Christians that Jesus was just another prophet of God, but not God incarnate. All of the Abrahamic faiths are de facto rolling their eyes at the rest of the world’s religions, and so on. A thing cannot be two things; it must be itself. A=A. Jesus can’t be the Son of God and NOT the Son of God at the same time; someone is wrong, and I don’t see how it makes a difference if the “You’re wrong!” is stated politely, impolitely, or not stated but merely implied; when you profess any religious belief, you are saying all the others are wrong.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/12/2012-review-how-blasphemy-laws-are-stifling-free-expression-worldwide

You would think that after the utter failure of the RIAA, the MPAA, and every other such organization to control the spread of digital files, that someone as cutting-edge as Makerbot would know better. But, no. Instead of doing the honest thing, and saying, “Look, there’s really no point in wiping these files from our server when they can be distributed globally in seconds, no matter what”, they are doing the usual thing — which means, trying to look like they’re “doing something” when there’s nothing that can be done.

We are still at the Altair 8800 stage of 3-D printing, at best. I doubt things will improve quite as fast as computers, but each year seems to bring higher resolution and faster printing. The “killer app” isn’t there yet (and I doubt it will be weapon manufacture, despite the pun potential), but it will come, and, like most “killer apps”, it will not be expected or foreseen until its so ubiquitous we can’t remember how we did without it. (I suspect that custom sex toys will be a big part of it; I’m sure most women don’t enjoy going into sleazy “adult” stores and seeing if the 2013 Peter Norths are in yet.)

As all[1] of my fans know, my novel, “Medic”, available in dead tree and kindle edition on Amazon, hint hint, deals with the ultimate consequences of turning war over to non-sapient machines which can’t question their own programming. Apparently, it’s turning into a documentary. 

[1]“All” does not imply a number greater than 1.

Windows 8 is “the perfect gift for someone you hate“… but I’m a misanthrope! I hate almost everybody!