Nomads in boats

I saw a video of orcas herding a penguin, and looked at the boat trips available for diving off the Great Barrier Reef, and read a little bit about Somali pirates and a bit about nomads. Had this vision of a tribe of sea-going nomads, with their yurts on their boats, following the fish and using dolphins to herd them, wandering up and down the coast. They'd be sea-going Mongols, for all in tents and porpoises.

Difference Engine

In 1822, Charles Babbage presented a paper proposing a Difference Engine.

Garden

We finished off the first planting of lettuce from our deck garden, and got the first red tomatoes, and the first hibiscus blossom. We also had our first watermelon of the season, although that wasn't home grown; and the first mosquito.

Serenity

The Naro Cinema is showing Serenity and Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog tomorrow. Shiny!

Methane based life on Titan

Just ran across an article that suggests there are signs of what might, possibly, be methane based life on Titan. I don't have the deepest faith in PopSci so I won't be surprised if this turns out to have been disproved already, but...if it's a possibility, it's pretty cool.

Must read books

Books which I consider necessary reading. I'm limiting this to fiction which I actually have on my shelves at the moment, and no author gets more than one entry.

1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
2. The Warrior's Apprentice or other Vorkosigan novels
3. Three Hearts and Three Lions
4. A Ship of the Line or other Hornblower novels
5. Kim
6. The Mote in God's Eye
7. Guards, Guards! or other Discworld novels
8. The Well of the Unicorn
9. The Face in the Frost

What's your list?

Addendum: The reasons I like them are different. Mote is, as advertised, the quintessential First Contact novel. Moon and Well of the Unicorn are for the ideas. The Vorkosigan, Hornblower and Discworld books for the characters, with extra points to Hornblower for the history, and Discworld for the humor. Kim is for the setting, the little details of India which Kipling obviously knew and loved. Three Hearts and Face in the Frost make this list because they each build to a great climax--they're good stories.

Little do they know

This was an email exchange at work today:

Karen: Re: Bruce R--is he going to pay?
Me: Georgette says she's all over it.
Karen: Good, thanks
Me: She did not, however, say "like a hobo on a ham sandwich" [that being an expression one of our top salesmen uses often. Apparently our top sales guy doesn't talk to Karen, however, because she replied...]
Karen: Has anyone ever told you that you're a little strange?
Me: No -- no one has ever said "a little".

Little does she know....

Some years ago, in the second Found Me A Sheep (the Official First Game, since all parties deny that the first game ever happened, not that I was there anyway, I was reading in my hotel room), Roger Burton West's character was wearing powered battle armor. This armor covers the entire body, shrugs off machine gun fire without a care, leaps over small buildings in a single bound, etc. Not Iron Man level, but pretty tough. Roger was attempting to herd sheep, but one of those sheep was Baamelia, who squealed "You brute! You brute!" Immediately the other sheep in the area came after Roger. Roger either forgot he was invulnerable inside his armor or thought these might be unusually deadly sheep; in any event, he panicked and ran, followed by the enraged flock. He slipped and fell; they caught him and piled on, completely covering him. The sheep jumped up and down on him with their little hooves, doing absolutely no damage but embarrassing him mightily.

So if you said "Fill in the blank: I'm all over it, like _________", a normal person might say "a hobo on a ham sandwich"; but I'd think "like sheep on powered battle  armor."