Thursday, December 8, 2011
Last weekend at Wilson’s house I saw most of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. A couple of days later, on a (rather extended) study break, I saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. These movies brought to mind the release of the first one, and how excited I was at the prospect. [...]
I wonder if Christopher Hitchens’s astounding erudition and productivity over the years is due to the fact that he never wasted time watching a season and a half of Burn Notice; or because he did not suffer the brain damage that results from it. Hard to tease those apart.
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I just overheard a cop at the cafe talking about how she reads Garfield every day because it’s ‘hilarious.’ I think that if someone thinks Garfield is hilarious they probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any sort of firearm.
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Saturday, February 13, 2010
Can you wish you had written something even when it’s taking the piss out of you? Yes, apparently: Also, global warming? Total effing letdown. Americans are no longer believing in it. Do you know why? Not because the mountains of scientific proof aren’t there. Not because it’s not happening. But because it’s not yet happening [...]
Friday, February 12, 2010
Here’s another chunk from that collection of Edge essays that I linked to the other day: It’s less than twenty years since the living presence of networked information has become part of our thinking machinery. What it will mean to us that vastly more people have nearly instantaneous access to vastly greater quantities of information [...]
In 2003, apparently, I wrote an Amazon review for an audiobook. I had forgotten both the book and the review until this morning, when I got an update that some random person had commented on it. You can read the original post and the comment here. Seriously, I can’t tell you how much this brightened [...]
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Tagged amazon
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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’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 [...]
I’ve never kissed a bat I’ve never kissed a goose But I could shake a chicken in the middle of the roost.
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