Archive for July, 2011
New unbundled short stories up
July 27th 2011 at 10:03 am
As I mentioned a while back, I was going to cluster bomb everyone with more short stories set up as eBooks for sale. There are some tweaks I need to make to product descriptions (and I need to fix my name and add the S. on many of them) to format just right, but here [...]
Monopoly’s real fucking rules
July 26th 2011 at 1:08 pm
I’m so embarrassed. I’ve never read the instructions. Apparently one simple rule tweak makes Monopoly fast and a lot more interesting. Because it’s crap. It takes ages to play, suffering long action-free periods in which the players endlessly circle the board in search of the streets they need to complete a set, and lacks the [...]
Testing students is a failure
July 21st 2011 at 4:23 pm
A new documentary looks at the amazing education system in Finland: There is no domestic testing except a very quiet auditing program to test demographic samples of kids; not for accountability, not for public consumption, and not for comparison across schools. The fascinating thing is that because they have created such a high level of [...]
The narrative of the soda bottle light
July 21st 2011 at 10:43 am
A handful of people who knew I would be tickled by a video about MIT scientists bringing natural light to poor neighborhoods in the Philipines forwarded me this article via Boing Boing: It’s awesome. It’s a low tech hack to bring light to the inside of a building. It’s great that MIT is doing it. [...]
A brief Google Plus review
July 19th 2011 at 10:14 am
The copyedits for Arctic Rising have arrived, which will now be eating a lot of my attention. I’m also spending a lot of time playing with Google Plus while I get the hang of what it can be used for. I’m rather impressed with the Google Hangouts feature: videochat that lets up to 10 people [...]
ynAttitude interview
July 16th 2011 at 12:02 pm
Youth show ynAttitude interviewed me while I was in Barbados. Hi, I need media training. Also, for some reason, even though I know better, I swapped soca and calypso in my head and couldn’t stop myself (I wanted to faceplant.) Embarrassing. Chalk it up to nerves. We took so long to set up the cameras [...]
More Americans moving to cities, driving less, not being served by policy
July 14th 2011 at 1:50 pm
More and more Americans are moving into cities, with city-living Americans outnumbering rural Americans. In urban areas, we’ve hit ‘peak driving.’ Driving in urban areas is actually decreasing. However political parties in the US (particularly one of them) are investing further in roads, car-oriented infrastructure, and demonizing non-car transit. Meanwhile, 6 reasons why driving has [...]
The Saga of Biorn
July 14th 2011 at 1:24 pm
Via Steve Bucheit, cute and very funny animation from Denmark: The Saga Of Biorn from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.
The first rule of…
July 13th 2011 at 8:39 pm
XKCD notes that Fight Club has not aged as well as his teenage self hoped. I concur… now I have to get back to figuring out which piece of Ikea furniture really represents me. Seriousness? I fucking love Ikea, it’s made organizing my house so much easier. I really wish I hadn’t spent four years [...]
Somalia: no government… still not a libertarian paradise
July 13th 2011 at 8:29 pm
Hmm… Al Shabab controls most of the country and about half of the war-torn capital, Mogadishu, but it has avoided trying to govern its territories and provide social services, experts say, choosing to remain a purely military force. And yet, it hasn’t turned into a libertarian paradise yet. Shocking, I know. Maybe the real word [...]
