February 2010
23 posts
How Books Are Made →
Charles Stross demolishes the common misconception that “the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)”:
In summary, while it’s true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to...
Gunfire hits 2 kids at Deer Creek Middle School in... →
Math teacher saves the day:
The bizarre burst of gunfire that erupted just after 3 p.m. at Deer Creek Middle School, 9201 W. Columbine Drive, ended when David Benke, a 57-year-old math teacher, rushed the shooter, wrestled him to the ground and held on as others helped him subdue the man.
adamisacson: I don’t like “country” music or “urban” music. Just songs about SUVs, soccer practice and the Olive Garden. You know, “suburban” music.
Word of Warning
The charm of a narrow cobblestone street is somehow lost when it’s covered in several inches of decaying slush and you can’t walk down it without embedding a half pound of rock salt into the soles of your shoes.
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Recently read: Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought, by Norman Cohn
More Cohn, this time a thin but wonderfully illustrated volume surveying where the story of Noah’s flood came from and how people have understood it and attempted to reconcile it with science and natural history. Though Cohn has the good sense not to stray from his subject, he inspires sufficiently many...
La Vie D’Ennui →
There’s something exquisite about boredom. Like melancholy and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way.
(via ALDaily)
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A generalization of Milnor’s μ-invariants to... →
Ulrich Koschorke
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Recently read:
Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, by Norman Cohn
A comprehensive argument that the expectation of a final consummation in which good will utterly triumph over evil was unknown to the Near East until the rise of Zoroastrianism. In addition to the main argument, Cohn also argues persuasively that Zoroaster’s innovation was due to...
SEPTA logic: Let’s cut prices but run all trains on exactly the same schedule. What is this “price elasticity of demand” of which you speak?
Note to people who keep getting stuck in the snow on my street: stomping on the gas pedal is not going to help.
Burying the lede
That’s the pullquote, which garnered so much attention that it ended up on Tumblr’s Radar; here’s the full article. Sometimes I really wonder about people’s priorities.
Things people try to log into →
Neven Mrgan lays out the steps that the commenters on the aforelinked ReadWriteWeb article would have needed to go through. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are his conclusions:
The degree of faith people put in Google’s top result makes Catholics look like hippies.
I don’t really blame anyone here and I have no clue what the solution is. My only takeaway is that...
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“Priuses are now like the pull-out method of the automotive world: they seem like...”
– Curt
Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login →
Read the comments. Not sure whether to laugh or cry (via marco).
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Contact structures of arbitrary codimension and... →
Erik van Erp
dmoren: Man. I thought only two of The Who were dead.
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“[A]t some point it became clear that the consensus of official Washington,...”
– Duncan Black (via Glenn Greenwald)