jinian | chatty day

I can bike! Yay! My right knee still feels a bit weird and swollen, but it wasn't actually painful to ride in to Fremont on my lunch break. I used very low gears, because I'm trying to test the motion without the pressure as much as I can. The bike is staying at work tonight so I don't overdo trying to climb hills on the way home. I suppose we'll see how it feels tonight and tomorrow.

One of the best books I read last year got left off the previously published list. Oops. Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith definitely deserves mention. I might've described it here before. The metaphor that's coming to mind today is, well, you know those bowls of pudding, or sauces, or soups, where half the bowl is one substance and half is another, and they're swirled together with a utensil? Well, OF is like half William Gibson and half Clive Barker, decoratively swirled by a knife made of Douglas Adams. Very cool book.

The book I'm excited about today is The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. Great stuff about very exact studies of the Galapagos finches, mostly on an island called Daphne Major, which has an extremely simple ecosystem, allowing them to do insane things like know exactly how much of what food is available and recognize every finch of the local population on sight. I got all caught up in the stories of intense selective episodes over lunch.

Follow-up to previous post: Teresa Nielsen Hayden has pointed out the full version of the Geek Hierarchy. She also has some rather old erotic fan art linked today. Fun stuff.

Also, science can now grow artificial tadpole eyeballs. And a good thing, too.