Category Archives: Uncategorized

An interview with Harlan Ellison

There’s a great interview with Harlan Ellison at The Onion’s A.V. Club. I won’t try to explain why but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I strive to be a bloviating asshole like Mr. Ellison.

Chef Owners Who Work The Line

First a dance video, now a cooking story? Yes. Here is Shuna Fish Lydon, in her own inimitable style, telling a story about a day at work, ten years ago, cooking at the French Laundry. Finally Eric says something that makes us all look up from our minute, detail oriented tasks. “You heard me, get [...]

Nice viral ad

I didn’t realize it was an ad until the end. Even if the ball is CG, it’s still cool. (Thanks, Cyberwoo!)

AAAAAAAAA!

AAAAAAAAA!

Shawn Blanc interviews John Gruber

This may be of more interest to me than to you, but I enjoyed reading Shawn Blanc’s interview of John Gruber, the writer of Daring Fireball. They talk a lot about writing on blogs, the evolution of Daring Fireball and Mr. Gruber’s writing style, etc. I found this interesting as a blogger, less so as [...]

Inside the U.S. Navy’s Armed Robot Labs

Wired has a small article about the U.S. Navy’s armed robot labs. Even though on some level it makes no sense to say this: This is good inspiration for sci-fi settings. The Navy’s MDARS-E is an armed robot that can track anything that moves. Told that I was the target, the unmanned vehicle trained its [...]

Frozen Grand Central

Improv Everywhere, a New York based group that causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places involving thousands of undercover agents, recently organized an amazing prank in Grand Central Station. The idea is simple, but the effect is stunning. (Via Boing Boing.)

Pre-registration for PAX 2008 has started

It is unlikely I will ever be in the US at the same time as PAX is held, and even more unlikely I will ever fly over just for PAX. So why am I blogging about it? Gabe wrote a particularly nice post about PAX 2007, and it reminded me how large and positive an [...]

How Goldman Sachs made money from the sub-prime mortgage crisis

Last year, as I am sure you have heard, there was some trouble in the U.S. sub-prime mortage market. Lots of financial companies on Wall Street lost billions, except Goldman Sachs (WSJ article, Guardian article). Bloomberg.com columnist Michael Lewis draws an interesting conclusion from this: I can’t think of another example of a big Wall [...]

Steven Poole’s “Trigger Happy” free for download

You can download Steven Poole’s book “Trigger Happy” for free from his website, as a CC-licensed no-DRM PDF. Yay! [...] I thought I’d try an experiment, and give away for free an “ebook” version of my first book, Trigger Happy, with no “digital rights management” whatsoever. It’ll work on anything that can read a PDF. [...]