Stylesheets take over the world

In a stunning victory of form over content, this long-inactive blog has received a stylesheet makeover. Borders are a fine toy, and look terrific. Browser-safe colors are still a good idea, even though I'm using them less often. BBedit's built-in syntax checking makes writing correct code a lot simpler. Mariner Write provides a tool for slightly more intuitive word-processing. Fetch simplifies the FTP process.

So what's been going on?

DC is entering something that feels like summer, or rather summer as it should be, not as the District often plays it. By August, we may well feel like we're walking through a steam-room and breathing bus exhaust. But today there's a lazy balm in the air. The Easter flowers have not yet faded. Birds are still looking puzzled with bits of dried grass in their beaks, poking their heads into any likely hollow in the brickwork, joining into proud dawn choruses. One wakes to them and imagines the choruses of the Cretaceous, the dawn songs of nesting hadrosaurs.

Me, I'm in the brief respite between feeling-wretched-after- surgery and feeling-wretched-during- radiation. The process is still new enough to be fascinating. There's something about lying under one of these machines, with their stately motions and implications of cosmic forces, that reminds me of being treated by a planetarium projector.

Before this, I had assumed that a linear accelerator was something like SLAC, which I used to see from the air flying south from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was the straightest line I had ever seen, straighter even than the chord of the Earth on which it lay. And nearby stretched the linear features traced by the San Andreas Fault. There's a power implied in linearity.

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