Random thoughts from the Pacific Rim
Just before the bombing began, Thomas Ingmire asked friends in an email to send him calligraphy with their thoughts about the Iraq war.
His email was forwarded. And forwarded. And forwarded.
The result: He received more than 400 pieces of calligraphy from all over the world. Some are beautiful, some scary and many are very touching.
Check out the site and if you are in the SF bay area, come to the exhibition in the main library.
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I’m currently reading Bill Bryson’s new book “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, and as the title suggests, it is an all-encompassing tour de force across all the major sciences, their history and personalities.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this book, it is not just a great (but light) refresher in the natural sciences, it offers many wonderful and funny biographies of all the most eclectic and productive scientists of the 18th and 19th century.
Unputdownable, as they say…
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I just found Killer Fonts while surfing through the delightfully random Geisha Asobi weblog…
Now this is a novel idea! Killer Fonts is taking hand writing samples from historic persons like George Washington, Leonardo da Vinci and Jesse James and converts these into Windows and Mac fonts that you can use for your personal correspondence.
I haven’t bought one yet since I can’t really think of a reason to print out email copies as if written by George Washington, but it made me wonder if at some point in the future we can all exchange font files with our personal handwriting – imagine reading all your friends’ email in their handwriting!
Maybe I should go out and patent this before my blog becomes popular! 
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Here we go! Pacific Tides is finally online…
As a first entry, here is some Good Stuff: A couple of days ago I stumbled over the whole Amazon wish list thing. Well, I kinda knew that wish lists exist, but I never realized that you can search for other people’s wish lists. And Jon Carroll here in our local paper pointed out that you can find public libraries in there.
Indeed. Not just libraries. You can find the wish lists of hundreds of primary schools all over the US in there. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this? I don’t think so.
Thanks to the antisocial and greedy politicians populating congress nowadays, it’s not worth waiting for change from the top, I’m afraid. So until a better time, check out if you can find a local school’s wish list.
One school here in the Bay Area is the Steffan Manor School, a primary school that lost their library to a fire a while ago. There wish list is more than 500 books long. For $25 you can buy them 6 or 7 books with free shipping.
It will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside…
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