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Fugu.

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I am a fan of many authors and songwriters who are famous for their brevity and wit, for their pithy epigrams, for their quotability. Franklin, Twain, Heinlein, Sagan; I pepper my speech with references to all of them.

My favorite quote, however, is not a nice, tidy little soundbite. It's not an epigram. It's not pithy. I can't randomly drop make an oblique reference to it in casual conversation.

I first discovered it in a book my grandmother left me: The Ascent of Man, by Jacob Bronowski, based on his PBS series of the same name. More than any other passage, it spoke to me.

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. This is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashed of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.'

I owe it as a scientist to my friend Leo Szilard, I owe it as a human being to the many members of my family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

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What do you love about the wintertime?

Some people talk about weather in terms of whether it's cold enough to need a sweater, a jacket, or a gigantic wool overcoat. Some will, in fact, assert that California "never gets cold enough" to justify the last item on the list.

I wait all year for it to get just cool enough to let me pull out my peacoat, and bundle up in layers.

I love winter clothing. It's cozy, it's comfortable, and it's a whole lot easer to approximate "dapper" (or at least "presentable") when you can mix and match a few layers of apparel and not have to strip down to a minimum of lightweight garments to stay comfortable. When it's cold, I can always put something more on; when it's hot, there's only so much you can take off before you have to pull out the flensing knives.

All my favorite clothes are warm clothes. I don't have any real "favorites" in summerwear; it's just a matter of "this will minimize my suffering".

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I can't answer that! There's so much time that hasn't happened yet, and hundreds of thousands of years of music that never got recorded!

And that's just limiting things to Earth!

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What’s your favorite Tom Hanks movie or character, and why?

That poor guy. His career's been all downhill since he played Kip Wilson.

You know, I was joking when I started this post, but watching the opening credits reminded me just how much I liked that show, and what a great cast they had. And yes, a big part of its consistently-entertaining quality was the guy who would go on to become one of the big stars of the next three decade. His good humor, his improv chemistry with Scolari, and his ability, shared with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, to maintain some level of gravitas in the most humbling, embarrassing situations all served him well both in this series and in his later career.

And I never thought of myself as a big Tom Hanks fan. I just enjoy his stuff -- but I enjoy it, I realize, pretty darned consistently, and have since the days when he and Peter Scholari answered every knock on the door with that distinctive falsetto "Who is it?"

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If you won a free trip to the moon, would you go? Why or why not?

Yes.

Why?

So many reasons, but let's go with the one in today's xkcd:

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

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If you had to give up swimming, skiing, hiking, or biking for the rest of your life, which would you choose, and why?

Skiing.

Totally skiing.

Without hesitation.

In fact, I hereby give up skiing for the rest of my life.

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Would you live in the perfect house or apartment rent-free if you found out a brutal murder had taken place there and it was rumored to be haunted? Why or why not?

Maybe, maybe not. Depends on the house, really—and not just the quality of the physical structure.

You see, I've done "haunted" before—at least twice.

One place was still one of the best places I've ever lived, even with the plainly-visible phantom who regularly walked through the front door and down the hall in the evenings.

No, seriously. My wife and I would both see the Walk-In at the same time; the living room sofa that faced the TV also had a clear view of the entrance hall. We were seeing the same thing, too; she caught clearer glimpses of him than I did, but we both saw Plaid Shirt.

I don't think the Plaid Man had any connection to the body that was found just down the road about six months after we moved in. That was a fairly recent occurrence, and the Plaid Man felt like he'd been Walking Through for a very long time. that whole area had something of a haunted air: former military family housing turned student housing, smack in the middle of a creepy oak forest full of gnarled, twisted trees. I don't know if any of our neighbors had similar experiences ... and it doesn't really matter: I'd move back into that apartment, or any of the near-identical ones in that neighborhood, in a snap.


On the other claw, I've also lived in a place that definitely wanted us Out Of There. I don't know what the previous tenants were up to before they got evicted, but it took four or five coats of paint to cover up the cryptic symbols and arcane writing on the walls of one room, and even after that, the house did everything short but whisper "GET OUT".

In fact, as we were packing up the moving truck, I made one last sweep through the house to make sure we didn't forget anything ... and on the way out the door, I said, "... and good [bleep]ing riddance."

And it definitely responded in kind. The low-level Bad Vibes that always plagued the place immediately cranked up to eleven. I moved very quickly out the door, jumped in the truck, and said, "Go. Now."

Really, I've watched enough movies to know better than that.

... damnation, now I get to to to sleep with this stuff fresh in my mind.

And so do you.

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Who is your favorite mythical creature/character, and why?

That would be ... well ... me.

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