Cetacean species I have seen in the wild

Gray whale
Bottlenose dolphin
Common dolphin
Humpback whale
Fin whale
Minke whale
Blue whale
Orca
Risso's dolphin
Pacific white-sided dolphin

Books on or related to the Singularity

These are all books and major I have read in the last couple of years that are about or deal with some aspect of the singularity:

• The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
• The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos by James N. Gardner
• The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil
• Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom
• The coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era by Vernor Vinge
• Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Fiction:

• Singularity Sky by Charles Stross
• Marooned in Realtime (Peace War) by Vernor Vinge
• Accelerando (Singularity) by Charles Stross

These are on similar topics of science and cosmology but not explicitly about the singularity:

• Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman M.D.

Fiction:

• Rule 34 (Halting State) by Charles Stross

Learning Applescript

I'm a programmer, always have been, always will be. My current job doesn't involve much programming, so I enjoy doing projects on the side. About a year ago I got a MacBook Pro and have been looking forward to doing some programming there, but have been too busy with home improvement projects etc. I  wrote a program to manage backups from my server to a hard drive, but that was just a bit of Perl, nothing fancy.

After upgrading to Lion and buying an e-book about it, I learned that AppleScript is included, so I also picked up an e-book "Learn AppleScript: The Comprehensive Guide to Scripting and Automation on Mac OS X" and also Apple's language guide. I'm only about a third of the way through the Learn book, and I've done variations on several of the exercises.

Wow.

Wow.

I think AppleScript will be my new favorite language. The English-like syntax is OK - I don't really need that level of simplicity - but the power of what it can do ia amazing! Controlling scriptable applications is so powerful. I can envision doing lots of things with mail, Office programs... If one tried to do this in any of the C-based languages, it would take a lot of work. AS makes it simple, at least that's how it works so far.

With just what I've learned so far, I've pulled data on songs from iTunes, linked that to Finder to get data about the song titles, done simple searches... it almost lets you treat iTunes like a database.

Today's exercise involved events and setting up a simple client-server system. It turns out that AS itself is a scriptable app. I created a server script that runs in the background, executes a routine task every 10 seconds, and also responds to commands from a client. From a GUI dialog box in a client app, I can start, stop, and request services from the server app. The client is 11 lines of code. The server (which just speaks "initializing", speaks the current time on request, and speaks "quitting") is 22 lines of code.

And all this fits neatly into the Mac GUI... scripts can be dragged to the dock like any other apps.

Wow.

I can't wait to see what's in the remaining two thirds of the book!