Coons!

The title links to a story about Dr. Stephen Hawkings conceding defeat in a 30-year old theory. (NY Times, so free registration required.) I can't believe I first read this news from the Major League Baseball website. Google News somehow chose that as the headlining article for this news.

Finally, the "shiny object" that is blogging dimmed in comparison to something else, as evidenced by the almost 2 week hiatus in blogging. I didn't even read other people's blogs in the past week. I've been drawn to newer things for most of my life. In the absence of newer things, I've reverted to older things I haven't touched in a while. This is not true for everything, of course. Objects with sentimental value can't be replaced, but among things that can be, the newer object has a distinct advantage.

In this case, the new "shiny objects" have been Shaolin Soccer, subtitles, and gaming. Each of these have consumed evenings that might have led to web surfing and blogging. Amazing that I've only watched Shaolin Soccer now. A passable plot, but mostly it's about special effects or martial arts, and those are done fairly well. But, I still have several other more critically acclaimed Asian movies that I want to see, notably Infernal Affairs, Hero, and the second half of My Sassy Girl.

Not watching these movies, not listening to any Chinese songs, I far away from my cultural heritage that places me. This query is probably from hanging around too many FOBs in the past 4 years, compared to no FOBs before. But, I do question how much cultural awareness I've gained. In an undergraduate survey I took recently, the questions stressed cultural awareness as a major goal of college. I have to say it hasn't done much in that respect. Probably cause I'm an engineer, which as a major shies away from those humanity questions for quantitative results and is dominated by Chinese. That is to say there is little cultural diversity among my immediate peers.

And now for something completely different...
Today, I've opened my home computer as a battleground in the Browser Wars, and the sides that were allowed to make formal declarations of battle on this computer were Opera 7.53 and Mozilla Firefox 0.9.2. Internet Explorer has been deemed insufficient to participate, but like a good third party, it gets to hang around and do the things that the others don't want to do. The previous winner was Opera, being the fastest of browsers, though I didn't yet see Firefox, or Phoenix then, as an option yet, being so immature. The battle should end in a week, and we'll see who rises from the ashes (and that does not suggest Firefox has been predisposed to win).