The world after Brexit
I think the real lesson ought to be to stop trusting your instinctive feelings about what can and cannot (or should and should not) happen, and start taking polls seriously. A corollary would be to c…
Personal Media Summary: May 2016
Random selection of interesting reads from May … * To start with a good old pessimistic note, Evgeny Morozov discusses1 “a new age of feudalism”. All these subsidies, though, make it hard to unders…
On World Building
Something I came across (and which would be lost, but for the Wayback Machine): Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for…
On machines that interpret speech
Found this in a book review from the 1970s ("Computer Power and Human Reason", incidentally written by the guy who also wrote Eliza)…
Monthly Recap: May 2016
Eating, sleeping, playing, running, meeting friends, a few trips to the Farmer’s Market downtown, etc. I saw a couple of episodes of Midsomer Murders and mourned the passing of Book Buyers from Mount…
The Parabolic Fabulist
About ten years ago I had this idea of a half-poetry, half-prose piece of surreal fiction, that stayed locked in my head and grew rusty over time. A few months ago (starting with NaNoWriMo 2015, but…
Personal Media Summary: April 2016
A random selection of stuff I found on the web last month (or is there a theme to this? I can’t tell …) * First, a few things that sound like the kind of crazy nonsense found on the back alleys of t…
Monthly Recap: April 2016
Nothing out of the ordinary this month, a bunch of steady plodding stuff: we got Tara her first set of blocks (”Mega Blocks”), and a “learning tower” (see this YouTube video for an exaggerated use cas…
Personal Media Summary: March 2016
Some interesting stuff I read/saw this month: * I knew the Daily Show was over when Jon Stewart left, some people1 just took longer to realize that * I’ve been a fan of ASMR for a while, I’m happy…
Personal Media Summary: February 2016
(Image credit: The New York Times) (Meta: Delayed by a couple of weeks because I was on vacation! That’s also why there isn’t much here or in next month’s post) So, miscellanous finds last month:…
Monthly recap: March 2016
The month was a blur, mostly because three whole weeks was vacation time! Tara had her longest travel ever (yet), with a seven-hour flight followed by a ten-hour flight to get from San Francisco to Ne…
(Untitled)
Most programmers are still locked into the idea of making a program out of a large pile of tiny files containing pieces of programs Tim Daly, “Clojure In Small Pieces”…