Today, many friends and loved ones of Erik "Possum Man" Stewart gathered at Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery to remember him and his life. I gave a eulogy. Many of Possum's friends asked me for the text of it, and I promised them that I'd post it here. — Read the rest

Erik "Possum Man" Stewart was one of my oldest, dearest friends. He died last week, of a sudden and freak cerebral hemorrhage. It happened while he slept, and his housemates found him the next day, appearing peaceful and not distressed. The coroner believes that his death was instant. — Read the rest

In January 2015, security researcher and beloved, prolific geek Michael "Hackerjoe" Hamelin died in a head-on collision that also hospitalized his widow, Beth Hamelin.

In a gorgeous animation, Malin Christersson shows how much simpler it is to plot out celestial mechanics when you assume that all the bodies in our solar system are in orbit around the sun, rather than the other way around.

My latest Locus magazine column is "The Internet of the Dead," which discusses the collision course the Internet is on with death. It was inspired by my work to preserve the personal data of my old friend Erik "Possum Man" Stewart, who died unexpectedly and tragically in June:

It was while I sat in Possum's room that I began to think about his computer.

Ian Alexander Norman contributed his long-exposure pic of this year's Temple of Remembrance at Burning Man to the Boing Boing Flickr pool. The Temple is a huge, ornate structure that burners fill up with their regrets, grief, memorials and testaments to their dead, their lost, and their sorrows. — Read the rest

A redditor called Frankie842 snapped a photo of a public hair stuck to a urinal in a near-perfect treble clef. I once experienced something like this, back when I was roomming with Possum Man. We'd cooked a pot of spaghetti and we tried the technique of tossing a strand against the wall to see if it would stick. — Read the rest

Here's Scot Nery's list of eight reasons why normal people should learn to juggle. My old roommate, Possum Man, was a hell of a juggler, and though he took it up as physiotherapy for an arm injury, it quickly built to an avocation. — Read the rest

My old highschool roommate, Erik "Possum Man" Stewart, has started a free school in Toronto callled AnarchistU, in which anyone can propose a class, organize its curriculum on a wiki, sign up enough students and start teaching. Each semester has seen substantial growth in enrollment, and the model of peer education is really working well for a surprising number of people. — Read the rest

My former school-chum, roommate, and co-worker Erik "Possum Man" Stewart is hard at work on building a free-school called AnarchistU in Toronto, coordinated via Wiki.

The Anarchist U is a volunteer-run collective which organizes a variety of courses on social science and the humanities.

Looks like SEED Alternative School is on its very last legs. This is the alternative high-school I attended from 1988 to 1992; it's the oldest public alternative school in Canada. The school's new administrator (who pitched a tantrum when he met with alumni, students and parents, rejecting the notion that SEED's stakeholders had any business advising him on his custodianship of a unique educational institution) has proposed the elimination of every "alternative" element of the school's day-to-day functioning. — Read the rest