August 2009
20 posts
ekirtcheva: Social science is the kind of science where universal laws can be ignored for convenience
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Recently read: The Whiskey Rebels, by David Liss
An interesting and occasionally fun re-imagining of the Panic of 1792 and the Whiskey Rebellion. Liss does a nice job of portraying the tension, uncertainty, and outrage of this period and, as usual, manages to turn finance into good drama, but his story feels over-constrained by history (to his credit, he alludes to this in the interview which...
gordonshumway: Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Frame a man for murder and he’ll eat for twenty-five to life.
hotdogsladies: Every time I dip a madeleine in some tea, I’m instantly transported to that distant time when I totally never read _Swann’s Way_.
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“So this is in some old paper of mine from the ’60s…anyway, it’s still true.” —Joseph Wolf
S: “Our justice system is based on retribution, not vengeance.”
Me: “Is there a difference?”
S: “Are you serious, or are you just being a dick?”
S: “Is Brazil a developing country or is it third-world?”
Me: “Well, it’s not developed and it’s not in Africa, so it must be developing.”
Açaí + granola = delicious.
…and I’m off to Brazil. Save a caipirinha for me.
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Recently read: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi
I bought these a couple of years ago when the movie came out, but never actually got around to reading them until this summer’s abortive Green “Revolution”.
Satrapi’s story is fascinating, though it’s pretty obviously representative of a fairly small...
hotdogsladies: 4:21pm. Sipping Trader Joe’s Jasmine tea and listening to “Deacon Blues,” I modified an `.htaccess’ file and became the world’s whitest man.
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Recently read: Wireless, by Charles Stross
Like Neal Stephenson, Stross is a much better novelist than a short story writer. Whereas his novels tend toward an exuberance leavened by a sensible amount of cynical humor, in his short fiction Stross has a much greater tendency to indulge a penchant for aggressive weirdness, structural determinism and, worst of all, polemicism. All of those...
colbycosh: US healthcare debate has firmly established one thing: Americans are bewildered, hysterical hypochondriacs.
textism: Firing up RealPlayer feels like having to re-assassinate Lincoln.
Watchmrgan:
Croatian Choosing Song, created for Dalas’s ChoosingSongs.com.
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Recently read: Red Planet, by Robert A. Heinlein
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to see this as anything other than a very early draft of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Censored by Apple →
Fucking ridiculous:
Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.
Update: it looks like Apple is at least aware that there’s a problem. As Gruber says:
This is music to my ears. That [Phil] Schiller was willing to respond in such detail and length, on the record, is the first proof I’ve seen that...