Epistemology and Art

“Two great corrugated-jello-head surfaces that mentate great together!” Hmm, ok, not the most catchy slogan ever devised. Another reason I don’t work in marketing.
TechShop open house today was great. Did a bunch more scanning of stuff from my old notebooks that either I never built or that I want to build again, [...]

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Science Fiction Predicts the Future, Again

Bits of old stories were flitting through my head last night, like birds seen about their business out the window behind one’s desk.  A phrase here and there, in my peripheral literary vision.
This morning I set out to re-read a couple of the stories, couldn’t find them, and read, or re-read others instead.  I’m reminded [...]

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Towards a Sustainable Environmentalism

Remember when nerds ran through the hallways of MIT chanting “The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!”?  OK, I don’t remember directly, as it was rather before I got there, but my realization today was equally shocking.   Environmentalism isn’t sustainable, not the way it’s practiced currently.  Let me tell you how I got [...]

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That TransCon Rails Ta(il|le)

Nathaniel Talbott is really rocking my world with his recent essay comparing the transcontinental railroad with the ruby-on-rails phenomenon. As he points out, there are some surprising similarities in enabling markets and disintermediation– the physical railroad opened up new territories and new markets, and the rapid development cycle of ROR is enabling software customization [...]

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"Science" encompasses many things…

…including practices that will be thought of as sheerest quackery 50 years from now, as were some of today’s practices 50 years ago. I’m not interested in outlawing science, not even remotely. I AM interested in calling attention to the fact that a lot of *really bad science* seems to insist [...]

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Addendum: on dogs, and on animal research

Most people grow up so far out of touch with animals that they probably shouldn’t even be doing animal research. Researchers ’surprised’ by dogs’ abilities? Did any of them grow up with a family dog?
Growing up with one or more dogs, two or more cats, and various numbers of goats, chickens, and occasionally [...]

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foo-year’s revolution

Speaking of whole grains, in the last post, remind me (and scares me!) that we’re almost halfway through another year. Yeesh!
I don’t recall now whether we made our New Year’s resolutions at Rosh Hashanah or in late December, but I thought I’d post them and see how we’re doing.
These are our family resolutions, rather [...]

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cut yr work week in halvsies

(Hassan…CHOP!!)
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/minimize-work-cut-your-work-week-in-half-in-6-steps.html
Some decent advice here. Some of it I’ve been implementing without codifying it, but it’s nice to see it in one place.
[Oh, and I know, first I sez, no more LJ, then I posts zillions... gotta get my new wordpress bloggie up, "My Summer Vacation" to hold all this stuff... any day now, yez, [...]

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