Memory Diffuses Fact

Books read since September

2011-05-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Non-Fiction:

The Man Who Lied to His Laptop by Clifford Nass
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
With the Old Breed by E. B. Sledge
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
Half Empty by David Rakoff
Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz
Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks by Ben Goldacre
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
Laws of Fear: Beyond The Precautionary Principle by Cass Sunstein

Fiction:

Kinki Lullaby by Isaac Adamson
Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey
Kraken: An Anatomy by China Mieville
Year's Best SF 15
The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
The New Space Opera
Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Kraken was the best fiction. Being Wrong is the best book I've read in ages; not only is it beautifully, quotably written, but once the phenomenon is pointed out, I started seeing it everywhere.

Books Read Since June

2010-09-25T13:44:00.000-07:00

Fiction:
Transition by Iain Banks
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Freedom(tm): A Novel by Daniel Suarez
The Trade Of Queens by Charles Stross
Chronic City: A Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Non-fiction:
The Checklist Manifesto: How To Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communites That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand
Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki by David Chadwick
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

Best fiction was Transition and, mmmm, maybe Chronic City. Best non-fiction was Whole Earth Discipline, but all of them are worth reading.

Music Bought in Last Four Months

2010-07-15T16:09:00.000-07:00

"Venus on Earth" by Dengue Fever
"Ultimate RUN/DMC" by RUN/DMC
"Aswad" by squaremeter
"Collide" by Beats Antique
"Treats" by Sleigh Bells
"Into the Trees" by Zoë Keating
"How To Destroy Angels" (EP) by How To Destroy Angels

I also bought year of Pandora One, which is exposing me to a lot of other music to buy (e.g., Beats Antique). Here's my Pandora profile.

Books Read since March

2010-06-27T15:59:00.000-07:00

Another list-of-media-that-I've-consumed-in-time-period-X post.

Fiction:
Year's Best SF 14 edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Seppuku by Peter Watts
Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy
The Candy Shop War by Brandon Mull
The God Engines by John Scalzi
Reheated Cabbage: Tales of Chemical Degeneration by Irvine Welsh

Non-fiction
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou
Greetings from Afghanistan, Send More Ammo: Dispatches from Taliban Country by Benjamin Tupper
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Sane Asylum by Charles Hampden-Turner
Music: I-LXXIV by August Kleinzahler

Best fiction was The Windup Girl and Blood's a Rover, and Year's Best SF 14 was a surprisingly good short story collection. Best non-fiction was Columbine and Sane Asylum (a mid-1970's examination of the Delancey Street Foundation), and despite what is said about writing about music, Music: I-LXXIV was really good.

Books I've read in 2010 (So Far)

2010-03-20T18:55:00.000-07:00

From the library:

John Adams by David McCullough
Inside Delta Force: The Story of America's Elite Counterterrorist Unit by Eric Haney
The City: A Global History by Joel Kotkin
Don't Hassel the Hoff by David Hasselhoff (a gag gift from my brother)
Mariposa by Greg Bear
Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi
The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception by H. Keith Melton and Robert Wallace

And I've also been reading books on my Nexus One with the Aldiko reader:

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Starfish by Peter Watts
Maelstrom by Peter Watts

For fiction, the Peter Watts books are great. John Adams and Age of Wonder are the standout non-fiction.

More Books from the Library

2009-12-29T15:01:00.000-08:00

Books I've gotten from the San Francisco Public Library (Mission Bay Branch) since my last books post in August:

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs
Beijing Coma: A Novel by Ma Jian
Our Inner Ape by Frans De Waal
The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan
Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace by William Lobdell
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Wireless by Charles Stross
Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age by Andrew F. Jones
The City & The City by China Miéville
A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist's Chronicle of His Daughter's Developing Mind by Charles Fernyhough
The Works: Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher
The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard
Quantico by Greg Bear
Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress by Candacy A. Taylor

And I'm currently reading John Adams by David McCullough

The best fiction was a tie between "Beijing Coma" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin", both of which are extraordinary. "A Thousand Days of Wonder" was the best non-fiction, but I'll call out "The Works: Anatomy of a City" if you're an infrastructure nerd. And if the title of "The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down" sounds really interesting to you, it's worth reading.

My Google Listen Soundtrack

2009-12-15T09:31:00.000-08:00

I use Google Listen on my Android-powered phone to listen to podcasts. It's quite nice, and I've basically time-shifted all my NPR and other radio listening to it.

Here's what I'm currently listening to, in no particular order:
* Planet Money - Straightforward, non-polemical discussion of financial stories.
* Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! - A weekly news quiz/humor show.
* The Moth - Stories told in front of a live audience with no notes.
* Onion Radio News - One minute humor pieces from the genius that is the mighty Onion empire.
* This American Life - Observational stories or long-view reporting on a theme.
* Radio Lab - A science show? A psychology show? With some some pretty daring editing (for NPR).

Reading the above, I see why I don't write promotional blurbs for a living, but all of them are worth listening to.

Arrrrrr! I were a music pirate fer Halloween!

2009-11-02T16:53:00.000-08:00

For Halloween this year I went as a Music Pirate. I wore a pirate costume, and then sewed blank CD's to my belt. Diane says it was quite dashing.

I also wanted to give away some "Silver Doubloons", so I made data CD's with a mix of music from the many odd corners of my music collection. I wanted to guarantee the listener that there was something on it they'd never heard and something they didn't like. Here's what the contents ended up being:

Aimee Mann - All Over Now

AK1200 - Pornstar Style (VIP Mix)

Alice Donut - Lisa's Father (Waka Baby)

Amon Tobin - Big Furry Head

Asher Senator (from Rumble in the Jungle) - One Bible

Atari Teenage Riot - Speed

Beastie Boys - She's Crafty

Billie Holiday - Body And Soul

Bolia We Ndenge (from Buzz 'n' Rumble from the Urb 'n' Jungle) - Bosamba Ndeke

Chihiro Onitsuka - Innocence

Deee-Lite - Smile On

DJ Hyper (Bedrock Breaks) - Lo Life

Frank Hovington (From Deep Blues The Rounder 25th Anniversary Blues Anthology) - Mean Old Frisco

Gamelon Son of Lion - Sleeping Braid

Gang of Four - I Love a Man in a Uniform

Godsmack - Sick of Life

Hamza El Din - Your Love is Ever Young

Harry Partch - Pollux

Junkie XL - Saturday Teenage Kick

Juno Reactor - Song for Ancestors

Kava Kon - The Atomic Clock

Lamas and Monks of the Four Great Orders - A Buddhist Prayer

Lee Scratch Perry - Roast Fish & Corn Bread

Man or Astroman - Jonathan Winters Frankenstein

Moby - Everytime You Touch Me

Music of Upper and Lower Egypt - Allah

Nerdy Girl - Hate Me

Nine Inch Nails - Sin

Original Punjabi Pop - Nishani Pyar Di

Panacea - Tron Rmx

Pantera - By Demons Be Driven

Patsy Cline - She's Got You

Paul Van Dyk - Forbidden Fruit

Portishead - Machine Gun

Seatbelts - Tank!

Steel Guitar Masters 1928 to 1934 - Wang Wang Blues

Steel Rails Under Thundering Skies - White Mountain Scenic Railway (ex Sierra Railroad)

Tettix - Typhoid

The Humans - I Live in the City

The Specials - Stereotype

The Tandems (From Big Noise From Waimea!) - The Rising Surf

Veruca Salt - Spiderman '79

Weather Girls - It's Raining Men

William DeVaughn - Be Thankful For What You Got

Zoe Keating - Sun Will Set

I gave away a few copies at the party, but the contents are really odd enough that I was disinclined to thrust it on just anyone. I just listened to it at work, though, and I like it. Mood and style-wise, it's all over the map, but that (apparently) is what I like.

A Year at the Library

2009-08-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

For the last year I've cut way back on buying books, and started reading books I've borrowed from the San Francisco Public Library. Mostly I use the excellent holds system, which allows me to have books sent to my local branch from anywhere in the system, as soon as they are available.

Here's an incomplete list of the books I've checked out from the library in the past year.:

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

The Merchants' War by Charlie Stross

Accelerando by Charles Stross (I'd already read this, I got it for Diane to read)

The Cornel West Reader by Cornel West (barely cracked it, waaay too much about philosophy)

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Crime by Irvine Welsh

Saturn's Children : a space opera By Charles Stross

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Y, the Last Man (series of ten short graphic novels) by Brian Vaughan (disappointing)

More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman

Street Gang by Michael Davis (a great history of the Sesame Street show)

Tokyo Suckerpunch by Isaac Adamson

Self-made Man: One Woman's Journey by Norah Vincent

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You by Sam Gosling

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

The Sagan Diary by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Off The Books by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

The Wine of Violence by James Morrow

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas by Matt Miller (stopped reading after first chapter, was clearly a my-agenda-to-save-world book, not about how ideas hold us back in general)

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard

Sit Down and Shut Up by Brad Warner

Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate by Brad Warner

Broken Angels by Richard K. Morgan

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan

Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries by Noah Levine

The Revolution Business by Charles Stross

Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life by Michael Krasny

Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan

Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

and right now I'm reading Spook Country by William Gibson.

As you can see, I find the library handy to go through someone's backlist once I start to like an author. And I love not having these books filling up my house, and the price. Plus, I can try a book for free, and if I don't like it, so what?

My Shuffle 15

2009-08-03T16:03:00.000-07:00

So I just noticed this meme: Put your entire music collection on shuffle, and list the first 15 tracks that pop up. I don't actually use the loathesome iTunes, but I faked it by listing all the tracks in my music drive and then getting a Ruby program to shuffle them. Here's my result:

Led Zeppelin - Box Set (Disc 1) - Communication Breakdown

Screw 32 - Under The Influence Of Bad People - Don't Let Them Take You Alive

Miles Davis - Greatest Hits - E.S.P.

Tettix - Conformatigmatic - Pro

Brian Eno - Ambient 4 (On Land) - Shadow

Bessie Smith - The Complete Recordings Vol. 1 (Disk 2) - Cemetery Blues

Robert Johnson - The Complete Recordings - Disc One - Phonograph Blues (Take 2)

True Funk (Disk 1) - I Know You Got Soul by Bobby Byrd

Beastie Boys - Licensed To Ill - No Sleep Till Brooklyn

Front 242 - Front By Front - Im Rhythmus Bleiben

Tribe 8- Fist City - Think

AK1200 - Lock & Roll - Funky Sound

The Mermen - Krill Slippin' - Neptune's Revenge

Asha Bhosle - The Golden Collection (Sensuous Moods) - Raat Akeli Hai

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures - New Dawn Fades

As a sample, it's lighter on the electronica/dance music and heavier on the blues than I'd expect, and I'd skip the Front 242 track, but a reasonable impression about what I have.

Diane now has a Blog

2009-02-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, my wife, Diane, is now working on the thesis for her Masters in Clinical Gerontology degree. While that's a whole boatload of work by itself, she has also started writing a blog called Gerobabble. It's about issues affecting elder care and news about aging. She's enjoying writing it, and I hope you'll check it out and enjoy reading it.

106 Most Unread Books

2008-05-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

An idea courtesy of Larry Hosken:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

Here's my version of the list (with a few notes in parentheses):

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell *
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude *
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick *
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies *
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods *
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius *
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha *
Middlesex
Quicksilver *
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World *
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum (reading right now!)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange *
Anansi Boys *
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 *
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections *
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay *
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir *
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present *
Cryptonomicon *
Neverwhere *
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves *
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed *
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion *
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road *
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything *
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences *
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Music for Massage

2008-03-11T15:28:00.001-07:00

Seen at Incredible Records and CD's in Sebastopol while we were on vacation there this weekend. They also had a small didgeridoo section. We did get a massage while we were there, at the always amazing Osmosis.

Power, Disenfranchisement, and Legos

2008-02-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

Children and the politics of who controls the Lego bricks.

Why We Banned Legos

Marlowe: 'If your parents say you have to eat pasta, then that's power.'

Lukas: 'You can say no.'

Carl: 'Power is ownership of something.'

Drew: 'Sometimes I like power and sometimes I don't. I like to be in power because I feel free. Most people like to do it, you can tell people what to do and it feels good.'

Delicious Valentine

2008-02-15T11:10:00.000-08:00

Diane and I had dinner at Prana last night for Valentine's day (we both had the aphrodisiac tasting menu). We'd never been there before, so we didn't know quite what to expect. It was one of the best meals we'd had in, like, forever. And I had oysters for the first time; delish!

Gorgeous Handmade Computer Keyboards

2008-02-10T20:32:00.000-08:00

Seriously nice steampunk keyboards. Extravagant, to be sure (roughly $800-$1000), but, phew, beautiful.

How Steve Martin Became Funny

2008-01-31T07:41:00.000-08:00

In a Smithsonian article, Steve Martin describes the evolution of his act before his breakthrough performance on The Tonight Show. For someone like myself, for whom Steve Martin defined teenage notions of comedy, this is a fascinating narrative of what it takes to become an overnight success.

Walter Kirn on Multitasking

2008-01-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

Kirn in the Atlantic Monthly about how multitasking is shrinking your brain, making you prematurely old, trying to kill you, and also not nearly as effective as you think.

"Would it be possible someday—through drugs, maybe, or esoteric Buddhism, or some profound, postapocalyptic languor—to stop coming up with ideas of what we are and then laboring to live up to them?"

Five Secrets to Success

2007-12-26T21:59:00.000-08:00

Link!

While this is written for and by people in the non-profit sector, these are pretty good rules to live and work by.

Book Time: Postsingular by Rudy Rucker

2007-11-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

I also recently finished Postsingular by Rudy Rucker (you can read the entirety free online at http://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/). I'm not usually a huge Rucker fan, but a book that starts with the Earth being almost completely turned into a giant computer that is simulating earth by rogue nanotechnology has me at "Hello". As in much science fiction, the emotional lives of some of the characters makes them seem as if they're strangely unfamiliar with normal emotional lives, but, hey, read it for the fun of the ideas.

Book Time: The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

2007-11-21T11:22:00.000-08:00

I just finished The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski. He was the Africa reporter for the Polish state news service for several decades. It's Africa from very close up; the book isn't so interested in the politics of Africa as it is the daily lives of Africans, and how different the expectations about life are from the Western experience. His prose is so tight and the subject so novel that you want to quote it to people as you read it. Recommended. (Thanks to Marcel for suggesting it.)

Past Life of My Weblog

2007-10-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

Combining some Ruby code, an old file, archive.org, and my old Hiptop weblog, I've managed to reconstruct my original weblog that I kept from 1999-2005. I've been wanting to do this for quite some time now.

You can read each year of it here.

Practice and a sense of Theatre

2007-09-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

That's what it takes to do something like this:

When the barrier to getting video published plummeted, I wondered what would succeed on it. The traditional forms of displayed entertainment (90 minute movies, 30 minute TV shows) seemed to have not worked well. The two genres that I think succeed best so far are short-form comedy and what I'll call look-what-I-can-do videos, like this one.

Art by Livestock

2007-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

Salt licks take on sculptural qualities as they are used.

New Tech Splurges

2007-09-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

Bought a couple items recently that are pretty sweet additions to the home computer:

1. A Drobo storage device. It's basically a box with bays for up to four SATA hard drives that looks to the computer like an ordinary USB drive. Each bay has a status light, telling you, in effect, "everything's fine" or "replace me" or "getting full, swap in a bigger drive". All of those are actions you can do on the fly, without powering down or telling the Drobo in advance. The Drobo ensures redundancy of data on the drives. It's such a charming device that I almost want to replace drives to see it in action, but really, it's a place to store data and not worry about it. No more worrying that I should do a backup; all i really need to concern myself with is offsite backups in case the whole device is destroyed or lost at once.

Given that we dropped major $$$ to retrieve data from a dead drive a year ago, this is a great thing to have. It's like a RAID drive or a NetApp for the masses, minus the administrative headaches.

2. Ostensibly I bought a 30 inch monitor for Diane so she could work on her school stuff and have many more documents open and visible at the same time. It also sort of vaguely (cough, cough) occurred to me that it might be nice for gaming, especially with so many great games out (BioShock, Team Fortress 2, Half Life Episode 2). In fact, it's beautiful and it works great for Diane, but it's so huge that I fear I can't see everything that's happening in a FPS game, much like sitting in the front row of a movie theatre. Will I have to switch game genres? Or sit back further from the computer (shudder)?

Now of course, it's turning out that running Diane's documents and a game is proving a strain for the computer, so I'm soon to install 2 Gig of RAM in the machine, which I am hoping will make it less painful to switch from citing academic references to bludgeoning aliens.

Mind wins arguments against reality

2007-09-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

An amazing piece by filmmaker Errol Morris about how we believe our mind's notions rather than facts presented to us.

"The photo of a man holding a photo of the man in the iconic photo created an associative link much stronger than mere words might have. We see the man who purports to be the Hooded Man in a photograph, holding the Hooded Man photograph.

Years ago I became enamored with the writings of Norwood Russell Hanson, a philosopher and ex-fighter pilot who died at the age of 43 while flying his own plane to a lecture engagement at Cornell. Hanson, among others, pioneered the idea that observations in science are not independent of theory but are, on the contrary, quite dependent on it. In his book, “Patterns of Discovery,” published in 1958, he coined the term “theory-laden” and wrote: “there is more to seeing than meets the eye.” I would like to make an even stronger claim: Believing is seeing."

Global culture, indeed.

2007-09-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

Polish rap, bhangra, Bollywood video, and hints of Tuvan throat singing? Genius.

That Pounding Noise is the Sound of Progress

2007-09-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

As I type this on the living room couch on a Saturday morning, workers are cutting out the door that leads from our bedroom to the back garden and replacing it with a new door. The old door was both unattractive and falling apart, the latter due to the fact that we live five blocks from the Pacific Ocean and thus have moist salty air pretty much every day (especially at night). Last week they replaced four windows, including one which I had removed and boarded up six years ago.

This kind of renovation is odd, in that you have tons of decisions to make about the windows and doors before they get made, but the actual process of getting them in place is pretty quick. Admittedly, the painting and finishing aren't done yet (too damp to paint today) and the house is a huge mess, but, you know, there is a window. It's sort of like writing software; often the main point of the software is done pretty fast.

Is there anything good about Men?

2007-09-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

A seriously fascinating paper on the different cultural rules that men and women follow, how they work together, and how they result in men's increased likelihood of being rich (or homeless), having many children (or none). A brilliant look at how the two different evolutionary paths have led to such different behaviors.

"For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky)."

A Generative Brian Eno Piece for Computer

2007-04-11T11:42:00.000-07:00

I was hanging around at Fort Mason last night, waiting to have dinner at Greens with the Harmonic gang (Muffy, Rom, Marcel, and Adam), and happened upon the Long Now offices. I went to many of the Long Now events when they were starting up, but since I started working in Mountain View, it's been impossible for me to go.

Anyhow, they were selling a Brian Eno piece of generative audio and visual work (called 77 Million Paintings) that you can run on a computer. I recall seeing some Eno pieces 20+ years ago in San Francisco, these very slow-moving colored lights built into what I remember as a table top. I thought it was a great idea, and while living in Barrington Hall built some similar pieces with a computer screen covered with foam (to diffuse the light) and a simple program to move colored rectangles around. But I never went any further with it (I've never allowed myself to spend much money on my artistic impulses, to my discredit).

77 Million Paintings, though, really got me thinking about this whole field, and I want to start working on these types of things again. Now that the hardware is relatively cheap, I hope to spend some time pursuing it this year.

As I mentioned in The Journal...

2007-04-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

I was interviewed for a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Not about my work (which would not thrill Journal readers anyway), but about the quotes I put at the end of my emails. So crazy what can interest people. Will post here if anything comes of it.

Noticing Beauty

2007-04-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

An amazing article about our blindness to beauty when we aren't looking for it.

"No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

Well worth reading.

Dad's Patent

2006-12-13T16:52:00.000-08:00

Almost 50 years after he filed it, here is my Dad's patent on Google.

Early Music for Electronica

2006-11-07T15:39:00.000-08:00

So, last week I bought the highly acclaimed independent video game Darwina. If you look at the screen shots, the whole aesthetic is of primitive 70's/80's video games (although rendered in a 3D that was impossible back then). Additionally, for their sound track they use a genre of music I never knew existed, Demoscene Music. Basically, music written and performed on long-obsolete music chips from old hardware (Atari ST machines, for example). You could call it a digital parallel to the Early Music phenomenon in classical music.

Some links:

Scene Music
DMA-SC
Trash80

It's so delightfully (and authentically!) retro, I'm really enjoying it.

I Look Forward to Killing You Soon

2006-11-03T23:07:00.000-08:00

One of the most spot-on funny sites on the web, Ask a Ninja. Go see it!

Sick

2006-10-16T22:36:00.000-07:00

Been sick with a cold since Wednesday, probably going back to work tomorrow. Still coughing nastily as I type this. Blech!

Being home made me realize how hard Diane works when I'm at the office. Normally, she's half-asleep when I leave and making dinner when i get home, so i don't see how much she does. She studies like a fiend, and all by herself! And she dotes on our two cats. And does lots of boring chores that I always attempt to appreciate and thank her for, but lets face it, laundry is a hard task to throw oneself into with gusto. Yay for Diane!

History of micro-computer TV ads

2006-10-16T22:34:00.000-07:00

Oh, that finger move Shatner does on the VIC-20 ad was long parodied by my brother and I.

Computer ads

Cat and a Tissue Box

2006-09-12T10:51:00.000-07:00


Cat with head stuck in tissue box, or clumsy semi-robotic feline?

Do not Gaze at my Gazebo

2006-08-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

We'd ordered from Smith & Hawken a nice metal gazebo to go over our new outdoor table and chair set, and it arrived on Thursday. But the boxes were pretty banged up, so Diane cleverly signed for as damaged. My friend John came over on Sunday to help me set it up, and we noticed that two of the corner pieces had pretty serious dents in them, and then noticed that at least one of the long metal bars that connect the corners was no longer truely straight. So we decided to return the whole thing, and really, it's probably nicer without a gazebo, since the nice thing about a yard in San Francisco is having long sight lines with no interruptions.

A little disappointing to do all that work and not have anything to look at afterwards, but John and I did go to Spices on 8th Ave. for lunch, and that was really freaking good.

Deadwood Pancakes

2006-08-23T08:52:00.000-07:00

For anyone who is a fan of the HBO series Deadwood (Diane isn't, but I am), this short film will amuse.

Now With Motion Pictures

2006-08-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

Added my first item to Google Video (a birthday video from Clark). Link is on my main page. More to come.

2006-08-21T06:38:00.000-07:00

Spent much of the weekend using Picasa to post pictures to my Picasaweb account. It's really so much easier to do than it was with my old system, so there's already hundreds more pictures up than the old site ever had. I'm only up to 2002 so far, so plenty more to add.

Happy Birthday to my baby

2006-08-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Diane's birthday, so I took her out to a meal at
vegetarian stronghold Greens in Fort Mason. The fog was just rolling in
as we sat by the windows. We don't eat out much these days, so it was a
treat, and the Chocolate Marquis was a just yummy desert.

2006-08-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Hmmmm, I've been quiet for a while. Let me explain.

As of January or so, the computer in my garage that mahlen.org ran on for many years would no longer start. Probably a burned out power supply, and it was a weird computer from 1998, so I was unclear on the availability of a replacement. "Great!", thought I, "I've been working on a port of mahlen.org to Ruby on Rails for a while, so I'll just host at a real hosting service for a change (i.e., not inside my house), and lower my electric bill to boot."

Then our main computer, the one that I had written that port on, and also the one Diane used for grad school, that very important computer, stopped booting due to hard disk errors. Any recent backups? Ha, I say, ha! Oh, it was to laugh. After giving some serious money to the nice folks at Drive Savers, we had our data back. But my MySQL setup was hidden from me. So, to get the Ruby on Rails port of mahlen.org working, i would have had to recreate a bunch of state. Plus, there were a few months of posts that were still trapped on the old computer in the garage, and I was afraid they might be lost forever. It was all very depressing, and I was rather disinclined to think about it all.

And did I mention that I was trying to get up to speed at Google during all this? Just a bit busy there, too.

So, I now officially give up. Now that My Esteemed Employer has some form of almost all the things my site did, I'm going to stitch together my site from various online services, and let other people worry about backups and restarting machines and so on.

More soon.