If you're a San Francisco-area* man who has sex with other men and have grumbled at my blood-donation humblebrags: There's a study going to confirm that the you-can't-give-blood policy is stupid; Go ...
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Book Report: The Doomsday Calculation (How an Equation that Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe)
Back when I was a humble computer science university student learning how to write operating systems, we learned a simple trick. A computer might run several programs at the same time: a web browser...
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Are you up for filling out daily surveys and sharing your phone's location data to help some UCSF researchers track how Covid-19 is spreading around the world? Install this app on your phone (perhaps...
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Book Report: Gideon the Ninth
It's a horror-scifi-mystery: necromancers travel to a distant world to study secret death magic. They're murdered one by one. Fortunately, they're terrible people. Thus, instead of sorrowfully mourni...
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Book Report: Bad Blood
Content warning: all the gross bodily fluids Today I was walking along, minding my own business, and I felt something wet on my hip. I looked down and saw blood and guts on my sweatshirt. My brain s...
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Book Report: Krakatoa
It's a book about the big volcanic eruption at Krakatoa. This was a popular book back in the day; a lot of folks talked about it. Thus, instead of learning new things by reading this book, I mostly w...
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Book Report: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017
It's a collection of popular science articles. I checked it out because one of the articles is about wave-based navigation by Marshall Islanders. If I hadn't already read so much about the topic, thi...
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I went to see the Rube Goldberg exhibit at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum—or rather, I went to see "Contraption," an exhibit accompanying the Rube Goldberg exhibit. There was a Rube...
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After Thanksgiving dinner, my parents figured out they could brew more coffee faster if they had two coffee filter cones—they could brew two pots at the same time. They haven't had much luck fi...
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Book Report: A Man of Misconceptions
It's a biography of this kinda-scientist kinda-pseudo-scientist of renaissance times. It's about a priest, Kircher. Kircher wrote some true things about music theory. And he lied about medical and ma...
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As a wordplay enthusiast, I was excited to hear about an old book called Ars Magna by Ramon Llull that tried to find new occult truths by re-arranging letters. The letters of "Ars Magna", after all, ...
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Book Report Rise of the Rocket Girls
It's a history of computers at JPL, the rocket people. But the focus is on their computers. These were "computers" in the sense of "ladies who compute things by hand because we haven't invented elect...
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Book Report: Internal Medicine
It's a book about learning to be a doctor. All I remember now is that he works at an asylum with folks who want to self-harm. They found some horribly creative ways to carry out that self-harm which ...
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Book Report: The Powerhouse
It's a book about advanced battery research in the USA. I learned that this field is favored by "charismatic thieves, swindlers, who are tricking people." Not all such researchers are charlatans; som...
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Book Report: Flow
I got this book on Kindle and kind of wish I'd read the paper version instead. The Kindle version is broken partway through: if you try to read past the first page of the endnotes, you get kicked out...
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Book Report: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
@hpmor is Harry Potter fan fiction...no, wait, don't run away. I'm serious. It's funny because in this book, Harry Potter doesn't just let himself get pushed around by the plot. He thinks things thro...
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Pretty sure that @GoogleArt lets me see this intricate old astrolabe more closely online (if I zoom in) than I could in the "live" museum, where it would be in a glass case. And what are the chances ...
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If I win my bet, then these guys have to poke around in wolf poop. Or something like that. Petridish.org is like Kickstarter for science instead of art. ...
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Book Report: Ignition!
It's a book about the history of the development of rocket propellants. I'm not a chemist, but this was still fascinating because it talks about really dangerous stuff. The whole point of rocket prop...
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Link: Clang MapReduce video
If you're a computer programmer and don't have much computer code, then refactoring is easy. You start up your IDE, fill out a little dialog box, and there you go. But if you're part of an organizati...
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Just got back from the Mystic Fish interview with the folks from the Trenchwood Institute. Glad we weren't following Team Lowkey. It looked like they had some kind of art/science thing going on that ...
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Book Report: Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?
Try to stay awake through the short description, because it gets better after: autobiography of a bench chemist. Max Gergel learned practical chemistry: someone wants some quantity of some substance ...
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Comic Report: The Tell
This comic book might be called "The Tell" or it might be called "The Inventor's Story", part of something called "Sunless Circus Mysteries". It's kind of hard to tell what it's called, which might ...
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If LASER stood for Liquid Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Ripples http://goo.gl/Mdb2p. ...
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Link: LOLMaybeCat ...
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Book Report: Aramis, or the Love of Technology
This book was pretty good but it was painful to read. It was painful because it was good... and it describes an engineering project that flopped and stopped: Aramis. It was going to be a railed pub...
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Comic Report: Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards
It's a story of paleontologists racing through the wild west to dig up bones and racing to scientific organizations to present dinosaur theories. This was a fun comic book, and some of the stuff in ...
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Dueling theremins! Theremin on fire! If Man... or Astro-Man and Octopus Project are playing your town soon, I advise you to go. That means you, Portland and Seattle people. ...
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If I was a SF bay area parent of a kid old enough to hold a glue gun, I'd want to know about the "young makers" and Open MAKE at the Exploratorium http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIX5a9HouKM . Lo...
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Book Report: The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I've read plenty of books about the development of the atomic bomb, but concentrating mostly on Los Alamos. It's a tale kind of like Camelot for nuclear physicists—for a time, the world's best...
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Book Report: Trick or Treatment
It's a book about alternative medicine. Going in, I had some idea of what I wanted to learn. I figured that some alternative medicines are probably good for curing some things... but probably not g...
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Book Report: Kraken
I guess this book's genre is horror. Or urban fantasy. In modern-day London, some normal folks are drawn into conflicts between wizards, armageddons, and objects of worship. So there's a secret Lo...
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Comic Report: Meanwhile...
The local members of the National Puzzler's League had a party last weekend, their Equinox party. I didn't go—I'm still not quite enough of a puzzle enthusiast to want to join the NPL. But I wa...
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Comic Report: T-Minus
Radven livetwittered a shuttle launch. The excitement shone through, even at less than 140 characters per. Hey, speaking of NASA, this must be a book report for T-Minus. This is a comic book about...
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Book Report: Silent Thunder
I saw two cousins today, which is good. As of this morning, I didn't hope to see any. But that's not what this blog post is about. This, as you might guess, is a gratuitous blog post to see if I g...
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Comic Report: Suspended in Language
Last night I had dinner with a few co-workers and conversation of course turned to what Albert Einstein would do if we extended his lifespan 1000 years. Would he ever get used to quantum physics? F...
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Comic Report: Girl Genius Collection #8 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones) | Act-i-Vate Primer
It seems kind of silly to post an online review a comic book when folks can go read the comic online and decide for themselves. And yet, here we are: Girl Genius. Girl Genius is a darned fun story ...
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Book Report: Lewis Carroll in Numberland
This book is about Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson as a mathematician. There were errors in the parts that I understood. So I didn't trust the other parts to help me to understand new stuff. Maybe I...
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Comic Report: Ex Machina (the first several collections)
When I first heard about the comic book "Ex Machina", I stopped paying attention too soon. I heard that the protagonist is a superhero who can talk to machines. And those do what he says instead of...
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Book Report: Stiff (The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
There's some interesting stuff in this book about scientific, medical, and engineering-testing uses of human cadavers. There's some interesting stuff, but there's some "humorous" reportage to slog t...
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Book Report: The Eyre Affair
This book is set in a parallel universe. In this universe, mad science reigns. People care about literature! There are vampires! It's all different from our universe! And yet somehow similar! Y...
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Book Report: He, She, and It
During BANG 18, I found out that plenty of local goyim puzzlists don't know what a "golem" is. A puzzle required players to recognize monsters by looking at pictures. I thought that was pretty tough...
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Book Report: The Air We Breathe
This was a fun novel. As with other Andrea Barrett novels, the heroes are scientists, so I'm inclined to be sympathetic. This novel is narrated in the first person plural, by a community of people....
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Book Report: The Middle Kingdom
I didn't plan to spend today filling out an alternative minimum tax form for my friends at the IRS, but they insisted. I thought maybe I'd write something. But I didn't write anything. Except numb...
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Book Report: iWoz
It is Steve Wozniak's autobiography, as told to Gina Smith. It's a fun read. Keep your wits about you as you read--they didn't fact-check all of this material. So when Wozniak tells you what was g...
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Book Report: She's Such a Geek
This is a book of essays by women geeks. It's pretty inspiring. That's partially because geek stories can be inspiring. But also because the stories from several years back tend to be about women ...
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Book Report: Girl Genius vol 4 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Circus of Dreams)
Tonight is Sleater-Kinney's last concert before they "go on indefinite hiatus." I tried to get tickets, didn't try hard enough. But you know, it's not the end of the world. Each of the Sleaterians...
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Book Report: 109 East Palace
July 4th is a holiday in the USA, celebrated with fireworks. On July 5th, I was looking at a stretch of road next to Candlestick Park on the southern edge of San Francisco. It was covered with card...
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Book Report: The Control of Nature
I'm still sick, a little. I'm better than I was. This morning I thought I was all better. So I hopped on the bus to work. I had a coughing fit on the bus. And another few during the day at work....
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Book Report: Tuxedo Park
Jennet Conant's biography of Alfred Loomis is fascinating. Loomis was an interesting character. He was a physicist, founding a Physics lab in the hoity-toity community of Tuxedo Park, NY. When WWII...
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Book Report: The Curious Life of Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke was a scientist during the 1600s. Did you read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle? Of course you did. Or you at least got started. Robert Hooke was one of the mad scientists that figure...
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Publishing News: Opposite of Google Print
Today I went to a talk by best-selling author Neil Gaiman. There was a question and answer period. Someone asked for Mr Gaiman's take on the recent Google Print kafuffle. (Some authors did not dei...
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