Book Report: Brotopia
It's a book about various ways women in tech are made miserable by men in tech, focusing on some recent news stories. (It's not all recent stuff. E.g., we find out that part of the reason that progr...
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I've blundered into an American-Colonies history-mystery. Today I visited the American Bookbinders Museum. They have old-timey equipment on display such as one might use to bind books by hand. And o...
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Book Report: The Everything Store
It's a history of Amazon. That's Amazon the company, not the Amazon region of what-have-you. As near as I can tell, mean people thrive as Amazon negotiators. In various areas, Amazon will start out w...
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Power outage reminds me how few of my hobbies don't require light or power. Uhmm, none of them? ...
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I drew five letters in chalk, one letter in each of five sidewalk squares. I drew slowly, deliberately, neatly. Maybe ten seconds per letter? So figure it was about a minute before the security guard...
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Book Report: Operation Mincemeat
It's about WWII spies. The central thread is a plot by English counterspies to fool the Nazis into thinking that the invasion of Sicily would actually be an invasion of Greece and Sardinia. It's a gr...
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Book Report: Claudius the God
The people of the United States of America came together to elect a man who would turn this nation into a panopticon—choosing him over another man who was all that plus bigotry. Bigotry was vot...
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Book Report: The Collapse of Complex Societies
This book looks at the collapse of the Roman empire, the Mayan civilization, and those Chaco folks you heard about from the X-Files. Why do civilizations collapse? There's a bunch of theories runni...
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Turns out my net hookup is too slow for onlive service. Now trying to find a place to put an Xbox in this tiny apartment. May involve hollowing out a wall and adding a load-bearing television set. ...
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Book Report: Killing Neighbors
I used to work for a lady named Lee Ann Fujii. She was pretty cool, so when I heard that she wrote a book, I figured I'd read it to see what she's been up to. She's now a foreign policy wonk special...
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Link: Auto-translation of foreign web pages getting more convenient
I sometimes visit web pages that are in languages other than American. To understand those pages, I need translation. For a while, the Google Toolbar has had a useful button: you can press this bu...
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Book Report: The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You
I read this book because it's by Dorothy Bryant who wrote the excellent The Confessions of Madame Psyche. I read it even though my mom read it and didn't care for it much. I didn't care for it much...
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Book Report: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
I guess I made through ~100 pages of palace intrigue before I realized I don't especially want to read through that much palace intrigue. Yeah, that's right, I'm yet another person who made it partw...
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Book Report: I Claudius
Someone asked for the origin of the name of the Canary Islands, with the caveat that it was a trick question. So everyone present wracked their brains. I asked, "Were they named after dogs?" and th...
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Book Report: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser
Shinteki Decathlon 3 was awesome. Since then, I have had approximate 0.0 hours of unstructured awake time. Thus, not so much blogging. But I will paraphrase a conversation I was in a while ba...
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Link: Steven Pitsenbarger at Alternative Photography
Apparently, "anthotype" is a photographic development system which uses dyes from plants. I never would have heard about it if it wasn't for this guy: "Pitsenbarger has had a lifelong fascinati...
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Book Report: Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
On the one side: snake-oil salesmen selling land, politicians seeking more consituents, consultants boosting their chances at government grants with Pollyannish lies of a land of plenty in need of s...
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Book Report: Earth Abides
George R. Stewart wrote Earth Abides, a story in which about 9999 out of every 10000 humans is wiped out by a big plague. What will happen afterwards? Will our hero preserve civilization's triumphs ...
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