Personal Media Summary: July 2016
Random general reads from July: * A “scientific” take on the basic shapes of stories1 (no kidding) * Behind every romantic myth is a bunch of B.S., which, this author claims, is the case with _Bush…
Monthly recap: July 2016
Interesting stuff the last month: * Long weekend staycation in San Francisco (went to some place in Tiburon for lunch, and checked out the new stuff at the recently opened SF MoMA) * Hung out with…
Personal Media Summary: June 2016
Random general reads from June: * ”The Cave of Forgotten Dreams” introduced1 me to millennia old human-painted caves, but Bruniquel Cave has been dated2 to an astonishing 176,500 years! * The annua…
Monthly Recap: June 2016
The major event of June was our trip to Puerta Vallarta, Mexico around the beginning of the month. Mostly lazed around, Tara had her first pizza (a Marinara veggie), and we had some fun in the pool.…
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…