Omega Point

This Wednesday, (March 21st, 2007) I and the rest of the Social Signal team will be at Social Tech Brewing Vancouver, for this month’s topic, “Learning in Virtual Worlds”.*

From the Social Signal blog:

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for the March gathering of Social Tech Brewing’s Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from social media, nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas — and beer!

Beer! Virtual worlds! Community-building! It’s got it all! If that sounds like your mug of beer, you should join us!

From 7-8 PM, we’ll be at WorkSpace at 21 Water St. (See Google Maps)
Afterwards, we’ll be moving across the street to Six Acres.

See the blog post at SocialSignal.com for more or RSVP here!

* You know, like that Second Life thing.

One of benefits of being me is that I have the sort of random thoughts that other people can generally only experience during some kind of medical experiment involving the injection of highly concentrated THC directly into the brain. For example, when drifting off to sleep the other night, it occurred to me to ask: why is the Pentagon pentagonal?

Huh. Why is it? That can’t be the cheapest design for a building in wartime.
A short getting-out-of-bed-instead-of-sleeping later, I was much more knowledgeable about mid-20th-Century civil planning projects than I had been before.

From Wikipedia:

Its unusual shape results from the fact that its originally intended site, Arlington Farms, fronted on Arlington Ridge Road and the Arlington Memorial Bridge approach, which intersected at an angle of approximately 108 degrees (the angle of a regular pentagon). President Franklin D. Roosevelt had it constructed at its current location because he didn’t want the new building to obstruct the view of Washington, D.C. from Arlington Cemetery.

In fact, Arlington Ridge Road no longer exists, its route now mostly replaced by Eisenhower Drive, which winds through an expanded Arlington National Cemetery and terminates near the original site. The Pentagon was constructed as planned, just somewhat south of its intended location.