It's amazing how much distance can be covered walking in tiny areas. Take, for example, the Viex Carre --- roughly .9 miles from Canal St to Esplanade Ave, roughly .4 miles from Decatur St to Rampart St. Walk up each street lengthwise and then back down the other, and you end up with .. 12.4 miles. :)
 

Daft Punk is going on tour.

Europe:
06-10 Inverness, Scotland @ Loch Ness (RockNess Festival)
06-14 Paris, France @ Bercy
06-16 London, UK @ Hyde Park as part of the "02 Wirless Fest" (via Pollstar)
06-17 Leeds, UK @ the Harewood House (via Pollstar)
07-08 Naas, IRE @ the Punchestown Race Course as part of the Oxegen Festival (via Pollstar)

U.S.:
07-21 Los Angeles, CA @ LA Memorial Sports Arena
07-27 Berkeley, CA @ the Greek Theatre*
07-29 Seattle, WA @ the WAMU Center* (pre-sale starts 3/22)
07-31 Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks* (pre-sale starts 3/24)
08-05 Toronto, Ontario @ Arrow Hall*
08-07 Montreal, Quebec @ Bell Center*
08-09 New York, NY @ Keyspan Park*

* --- with rapture

http://www.cheddarvision.tv/

Ugh.

Friday, I bailed at work around 2.30, to go home to take the train to take the other train to Richmond to get in a car and drive to Ashland. It was opening weekend at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, not to mention the only weekend Ithat both $LIBRARIAN and I could arrange to be free while the play we really wanted to see -- Tom Stoppard's On the Razzle -- was playing.

A few paces behind last week's good news comes some other, not quite as good news, which leaves me almost completely flabbergasted.

Some days everything seems to go wrong.

It seemed like a good idea at the time: walk to work! Previous experimentation had seperately concluded that the walk from the Redwood City Caltrain station to the Hillsdale Caltrain station -- a distance of 5.1 miles -- would take 1 hr 20 minutes to walk, and the walk from the Hillsdale train station to work would take 50 minutes to walk. Good, nice, exercise before work. I'd get to work energetic and happy, with that nice post-exercise buzz.

Usually, when walking from Hillsdale to Foster City, I walk on the north side of the road. Yesterday, for reasons involving convenience at earlier lights, I was on the south side. The south sidewalk over 101, on the east side, curves down, mimicing the curvature of the freeway onramp. In that curve, there is a section of sidewalk which has broken, with a jagged, two-to-three-inch deep discontinuity where one piece was thrust upward while the other not. This discontinuity is not visible from further up the sidewalk, as it is masked by the curvature.

I stepped on it just wrong, rolled my right ankle under me (spraining it in the process), and tumbled, off-balance, until my glasses and head hit the concrete.

One of the things I was doing to keep myself entertained during the fall was taking a course in English history, offered by the Stanford Continuing Studies department. As part of this, I was spending a fair amount of time in the library, reading far more than I ever imagined could be written on the still-contentious subject of the politics which led up to the Act of Union of England and Scotland; having done so, I proceeded to write a mediocre paper on the subject.

Now that the professor has read and evaluated it, I can post it. Enjoy, if you wish. (Warning: PDF).

It isn't often that I read a work of fiction which significantly changes the way I think about a topic. I like to think I'm open to change, but I'm also aware that my fundamental worldview is fairly impervious to change, and the way I think about many things seems to be ossifying as I age; but fiction which can cause me to reflect about a topic and force me to see things differently has always been rare, and I cherish such books for that reason. Blindsight, the new novel by Canadian author Peter Watts does this: it is the most interesting discussion of the evolutionary meaning of self-awareness which I have seen in print. And, besides that, it is an uncommonly effective first-contact story.

Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas.

"I couldn't believe it," said Dr. Michael Salter, a pain expert at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the scientists. "Mice with diabetes suddenly didn't have diabetes any more."