My main site was looking a bit skeezy, so I spruced it up with some new CSS. Thanks, ExplodingBoy, for the menus.
And I moved my picture gallery to Picasa. Same old pictures, but I’m getting a scanner soon so there are more on the way.
I was browsing my list of free programmers’ editors and discovered some broken links. It seems a couple of editors have gone the way of all bits. Farewell, ManyaPad! Goodbye, lpe! We shall mourn your loss and taste your power no more.
In the plus column, I found a living editor: Gobby, a free real-time collaborative editor with support for programming lanuage syntax highlighting.
A short look at the notion of success and how circumstance and luck play a larger role in it than we generally like to believe.
This is Blount’s memoir. He’s a funny guy. He’s also a lot more messed up than I would have expected having only encountered him on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.
Written in his later years, this is Hardy’s paean to and defense of pure mathematics, and his lament at not being able to practice it at the level he once could.
Like “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Clark’s book is attempting to answer the question “why are some countries rich and others poor?” In particular, Clark is asking why the Industrial Revolution started when and where it did. His answer is cultural, and possibly even genetic, evolution resulting from the unique circumstances and Darwinian selection pressures that were operating in England for much of its pre-Revolution period. It’s a striking claim, but he lays out a significant amount of evidence for it.
I think this may be my favorite Hofstadter book to date. There is no denying the brilliance of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”, but GEB is a pretty hard slog. This volume is shorter and, I think, much more accessible.
That is not to say it is just a trip through the daisies. There are some deep ideas being explored here, including all of Hofstadter’s usual interests: consciousness, self-reference, and analogies, with all of it shot through with his trademark word-play.
A graphic novel about three Jewish families in the early and middle years of the twentieth century. It is skillfully done, but I found it a bit wooden.
I liked my first one so much I decided to extend the DNA theme down the rest of my left arm. Since my first artist wasn’t too keen on custom work in the first place, I did some research and found Daryle Fountain at what was then Modern Electric Studio and is now Mojuju Tatu (they moved and added another artist). Anyway, after about six months and thirty hours in the chair, here are the results, thank you Daryle!.
Love this series, definitely worth checking out if you like the graphic novel format.