Archive for February, 2011
Dead Island trailer
February 18th 2011 at 1:11 am
I love zombie genre stuff. This new game has a pretty dope trailer: Impressive storytelling. Also, IGN has helpfully recut the whole thing and put it in sequence. More Dead Island Videos I will be using this as a teaching aide about story and plot, in all seriousness. The sequence in linear order is often [...]
538 explains why Republicans have no incentive to heat up economic recovery
February 17th 2011 at 3:14 pm
538 spins it out: if Republican congressmen want to get reelected, they need a tepid, steady state and slow middling recovery. Because economic collapse means they’d get voted out (even if it might mean a Republican president would get voted in), and economic growth that looks awesome would mean Obama gets credit and they lose [...]
Florida gives away fully funded high speed rail
February 16th 2011 at 3:01 pm
No high speed rail for Florida, the Republican Governor rejects it based on ideology: Numerous private corporations — including international conglomerates such as Siemens, Alstom, and JR East — have indicated that they would be willing to pick up the state’s tab and cover construction and operations risks, in exchange for the right to operate [...]
Kindle, Apple, and the myth of “direct” self published eBooks
February 15th 2011 at 12:11 pm
So the reason some of you are wondering why book people are getting nervous about the Apple 30% in-app decision, which is now formalized by Apple here in this press release, can be found in this quote: “Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; [...]
eBook sales fun
February 14th 2011 at 11:51 am
Over at Machine of Death, a look at some book numbers by distribution channel: Although Amazon announced last month that it’s now selling 115 ebooks for every 100 print books, we’ve still mainly sold print books — in January, at least 74% of all copies of Machine of Death sold were print books, and we [...]
Egypt’s Mubarek steps down
February 11th 2011 at 11:30 am
The ideas of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, non-armed but well-organized resistance, have seem to have taken down another dictator, this time in Egypt. Of course, the big question is what happens next? As many pointed out, Iran’s student-led revolution ended with clerics taking over. To be honest, though, this is shaping up to look [...]
The amphibious human
February 10th 2011 at 11:00 am
Boing Boing had this awesome link (which I can’t find to attribute) to a prof in one of my new favorite disciplines, neuro-anthropology, talking about mental and cultural adaptations to water living, specifically, free diving. Too often, in discussions of human adaptation, we allow a flabby distinction between three basic types of adaptation: genetic, phenotypic [...]
China debt fear
February 10th 2011 at 12:32 am
John DeVore: I know I’m supposed to fear China. I’m just starting to wonder why I also know that America owes a ton of money to China and from recent experience surfing the waves of the recent recession, that it is easy to vilify creditors. You know, this ‘thing everyone knows’ is another one of [...]
If you’ve tried to contact me via the ‘contact’ link and form… it’s broken
February 9th 2011 at 8:54 pm
So yeah, that post header pretty much sums that up. My ‘contact me’ form has been broken for a while. How long? I don’t know. But if you’ve sent me a message via it, I never got it. Sorry. Please resend to tobias@tobiasbuckell.com and I’ll reply as soon as I can. Sorry about that.
An antidote to false information about Chinese high speed rail numbers
February 9th 2011 at 11:35 am
The Atlantic’s Brian Glucroft (as well as several other blogs I’ve read from people who’ve, you know, actually used the trains), notices that the anti-rail rumors about China’s high speed rail being unused are not matching up to on the ground reports: As has been much discussed in the US, China is rapidly building a [...]
