Saturday, January 30, 2010
Obama goes before a bunch of Republicans and takes questions and gives answers here. These days it’s easy to slip back into thinking the American political process is horribly broken, and will always stay broken. And maybe it will. Because I can’t fathom how such a reasonable approach, such a good attitude, and such a [...]
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Clay Shirkey wrote a blog post that people are talking about. Succinctly, it’s about how men are generally more assertive, self-promoting, and annoying than women are, and how that disparity might put women at a disadvantage. It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a [...]
I just wrote a long, rambly post on evolutionary anthropology and the cultural ratchet, then deleted it all except for this line, which I will keep because it really says everything: If your girlfriend lights your hair on fire and the police ask you what happened and you launch into a chemistry lesson on oxidation [...]
Saturday, January 16, 2010
A Bayesian Network is, in a nutshell, a way of describing relationships between things in a probabilistic way. For example: someone might say that if I finish my novel Cloudytown then the world will end with probability .5. Okay, that’s an idiotic example, but if you take a gander at the link you might get [...]
Sometimes I like to save either super good or super bad writing examples. Here’s one of the latter, which I have ripped off in its entirety: theodp writes “To power the Tools for America’s Job Seekers Challenge, the US Department of Labor tapped IdeaScale, a subsidiary of Survey Analytics, which is headquartered in Seattle with [...]
I’m sitting here with my cat Arthur purring on my chest, which he likes to do when I’m laying on the futon, which I like to do because it’s the only working position I can assume for extended periods that does not hurt. The purring is responsible for me loving him; if he didn’t jump [...]
There’s a great post on Ars Technica on the history of the noosphere. The ‘noosphere’ is the term people use for the network as an ethereal communications medium – a place of pure thought, in other words, that transcends whatever physical manifestation that instantiates the medium. If you were online in 1996, you remember some [...]
Monica and I saw Avatar the other day, and had divergent reactions to it. I expected a special-effects bonanza that would leave me with a wet spot on the front of my jeans, and a plot so idiotic it would induce localized brain damage. My reaction, to either, was not so extreme. The special effects [...]
Thursday, January 7, 2010
I know this is utter snobbery, but I don’t care. If someone wants to take me to task for it, that’s fine. But: I remember when, if you went to a cafe, it was filled with weirdos and creative people — wannabe writers, idiot philosophers, the occasional friends catching up or couples on a date. [...]
The results are in, and I won the second-annual post-Clarion-West 2008 writing contest. The top three people were: 1: Me (70 stories) 2: Maggie (45 stories) 3: Pam (42 stories) I turned in #70 just before midnight, New Year’s Eve, and haven’t written anything since then, which has been weird, but not as weird as [...]