Category Archives: Geek

One of my favorite books of all time is being made into a miniseries on SciFi. From BoingBoing:

Neal Stephenson’s Hugo-award winning masterpiece The Diamond Age is being made into a SciFi Channel miniseries. The Diamond Age tells the story of a group of neo-Victorians who’ve embraced strait-laced ethics and craftsmanship as a response to the infinite possibilities of nanotechnology. It features a stupendously imaginative interactive storybook, moments of convulsive hilarity, and a lovely explanation of Turing-complete computing. It’s my second-favorite Stephenson novel (after Cryptonomicon), so don’t screw it up, SciFi!

SCI FI Channel unveiled a new slate of programs in development, which includes shows from executive producers George Clooney, Darren Star and Mark Burnett. SCI FI made the announcement Jan. 12 at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif.

Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions.

More info on SciFi’s web site.

Just received this update from SpaceWeather.com:

Comet McNaught is plunging toward the sun and brightening dramatically.  It is now visible to the unaided eye both at sunset and at dawn. Amateur photographers have found that they can take pictures of the comet using off-the-shelf digital cameras with exposure times less than a second.  Estimated visual magnitude: between 0 and -1.

To see Comet McNaught, a clear view of the horizon is essential. In the morning, go outside and face east.  The comet emerges just ahead of the rising sun. In the evening, face the other way–west. The comet pops out of the western twilight as soon as the sun sets.  Binoculars reveal a pretty, gaseous tail.

Northern observers are favored.  The long, dark mornings and evenings of Canada, Scandinavia and Alaska are ideal for viewing this comet so close to the Sun.  But the comet has been sighted in other places, too, as far south as Kansas in the United States and Italy in Europe.

Good article about number stations in the Washington Post.  I remember this first time I ever heard a number station – my family was on vacation in Warsaw, Poland back in 1976 and there was a shortwave radio in the hotel room.  We were messing around and happened upon a strange voice reciting numbers.  We had no idea what it was, but my grandfather had a sneaking suspicion that it was a coded message.

It turns out that anybody can tune in to the world’s top spy agencies talking to operatives. All you need is a cheap shortwave-radio receiver, the kind available at any drugstore.

Tune it to 6855 or 8010 kHz.

On the hour, you might hear a girlish voice repeating strings of numbers monotonously in Spanish. “Nueve, uno, nueve, tres, cinco-cinco, cuatro, cinco, tres, dos . . .,” went one seemingly harmless message heard last month on a Grundig radio.

It was the Cuban Intelligence Directorate or Russian FSB broadcasting coded instructions from Havana to spies inside the United States.

Turn the dial up to 11545 kHz, and you might hear a few notes of an obscure English folk song, “Lincolnshire Poacher,” followed by a voice repeating strings of numbers. That’s believed to be British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, broadcasting from Cyprus.

On 6840 kHz, you may hear a voice reading groups of letters. That’s a station nicknamed “E10,” thought to be Israel’s Mossad intelligence.

Chris Smolinski runs SpyNumbers.com and the “Spooks” e-mail list, where “number stations” hobbyists log hundreds of shortwave messages transmitted every month. “It’s like a puzzle. They’re mystery stations,” explained Smolinski, who has tracked the spy broadcasts for 30 years.

Continue reading