And finally have time to update.

• Power in Numbers: UNITAID, Innovative Financing, and the Quest for Massive Good, Philippe Douste-Blazy and Daniel Altman, with a preface by Bill Clinton, PublicAffairs Press
• The Winner's Brain, Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske,
  with Liz Neporent, Da Capo Press
• Baseball Prospectus 2010, Steven Goldman and Christina Kahrl, eds., John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Libertarianism from A to Z, Jeffrey A. Miron, Basic Books
• and others ...

I'm also beginning work on an RPG, but it's in only the very beginning stages.

I've done a few updates for the Telecommunications History Group site (added a newsletter, other little fixes) and for apartmentinalghero.co.uk (updated the calendar functionality).

In game development (which in this case means "Learning to do it" rather than "Comes up with incredible new game"), I've created versions of Breakout and Space Invaders using VB.net and DirectX, and then translated Space Invaders to C# and XNA. (XNA allows development for Windows or the XBox.)

... but tech stuff!

I've been updating the Telecommunications Virtual Museum and working on a site for a doughnut shop. I've also written my own Tetris-style game (for my own amusement and to begin developing game programming skills). What next? Space Invaders? Breakout? Pac-man? ;P

From Japan, where humanoid robots are cool, comes the Vocaloid: a virtual singing idol whose voice is, well, all her own.

Using a software engine produced by Yamaha, Crypton Future Media has released at least three "Vocaloid" idols (Hatsune Miku, Kagamine Rin/Len, and Megurine Luka). Each uses software to synthesize speech (or at least singing, if not spoken words) in an incredibly realistic way. Gone are the days of the "computer-speech" that sounded as if a monotone were being filtered through the blades of a fan; these idols' voices are heavenly. Well, maybe not that good, but very passable as human speech. (Listen to samples at http://www.crypton.co.jp/mp/pages/prod/vocaloid, or look up the names of the characters for other samples.)

As near as I can tell, Crypton provides the character software--images and the vocal library, plus the engine--and anybody who buys it can create songs using the idol's voice. I'm not quite sure what the licensing/copyright arrangement is, but loads of people have bought the software and are creating not only songs, but music videos.

These idols are very popular in Japan, especially Hatsune Miku and Megurine Luka.

BlipFact--1) hearkening to the Blipverts of Max Headroom's era, a short, digestible fact; a factoid. Esp. as seen on the Net, where ephemerality is the way of things. Blipfacts in their purest form morph from day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute. Example: "The pound sterling is worth $1.43."

Impurity, however, beckons, as in the following:

According to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have formed in the Milky Way galaxy since its formation, or possibly as many as 38,000.--www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/02/25/galaxy.planets.kepler/index.html

These kinds of estimates are always changing--I remember working through an equation in Carl Sagan's Cosmos (the Drake equation), happily trying different values for life-bearing planets and, sometimes more pessimistically, numbers of civilizations that didn't blow themselves up before we could get to know them. The Drake equation is hardly based on firm numbers, but it tends to result in low numbers of civilizations (I think one more recent estimate is 2 or 2.3, if you can have a third of a civilization).

Of course, saying how many civs there are right now as opposed to "at some time since the galaxy formed" is very different, but my gut feeling is that our guesses are becoming 1) based on slightly more solid foundations and 2) more optimistic, as we have already discovered hundreds of planets outside our solar system, even using fairly limited means. One estimate in the same CNN article was for 100 billion habitable (Earth-like) planets--and that's not counting life that has evolved for conditions very unlike Earth's.

It looks a little bit more like science fiction every day ...