Moonbase University is holding its second session at 7pm this Thursday night, at Cellspace, on 2050 Bryant Street in the Mission. Dr Peter Cheeseman of NASA Ames will be giving a talk on artificial intelligence. Our first session - on space exploration, and also featuring Peter - was great. Drop by if you're in the neighborhood.

"The ancients decorated their sarcophagi with symbols of life and procreation, some of them even obscene. For the ancients, in fact, the sacred and the obscene were very often one and the same. Those people knew how to honor death. Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith - or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind."

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods.