There is a good book inside Game of Thrones—maybe even two—but they are buried underneath an avalanche of monotonous detail, with four interconnected plot lines fighting each other for attention and strangling each other for air.
The book tries to do too much and instead does too little. As the first part of an epic-scoped series, [...]
Tagged a game of thrones, Book Review, fantasy, George R. R. Martin, ReviewWhy do balanced budget proposals always make up their deficits with automatic spending cuts? Why couldn’t we have a system where the budget automatically adjusts taxes up to close the deficit in the previous year, unless Congress passed a 2/3rds vote to find appropriate cuts?
You’d have to watch out for Laffer Curve effects, because you’d [...]
Tagged economics, Politics(to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody)
Inspired by this tweet from Dave Weigel
Is this the real news? Is this just fantasy? Caught in the cycle No escape to reality Open your eyes Look up to the skies and see I’m a swing voter (Poor boy) I watch news on TV Because I’m easy come, easy go Polling high, polling low Any way the wind blows Doesn’t really [...]
I installed Adobe InDesign CS2 on my last laptop about a month ago. CS2 is old; it came out in 2005 and runs under Rosetta, but it worked great on my MacBook Pro 2007 with its Core 2 Duo.
But that MacBook Pro was getting old, so work got me a shiny new one with an [...]
Tagged Adobe, InDesign, Mac OS X, Migration Assistant, Product RegistrationForeward
I looked over the results and decided that the methodology was a little suspect. Any category that had a large average distance weighed disproportionately into the results, so a good guess on hour (most people guessed late afternoon) or minute (which just had a huge spread) was a big boon. Similarly, results were pretty split [...]
Tagged baby game, funOur next baby is due on the 23rd, but we got word yesterday that if there’s no baby by next Monday, we’ll be picking a day to induce. That means it’s time for a Baby Game!
This Baby Game seeks to be the geekiest it can be. It’s powered by a Ruby script, it uses Levenshtein [...]
Tagged baby game, funThe most important part about the iPad are its limitations.
But they’re important not because it defines what the device “can’t do”; in the fullness of time the App Store will likely bring us all sorts of new and interesting workarounds to the limitations.
Rather, the limitations are important because it delineates the boundaries of Apple’s concept [...]
Tagged Apple, Computing, iPadThere’s been a lot of linking to Stephen O’Grady’s piece on software patents lately, and I thought I’d do the same but provide my own twist on these arguments.
The area of “software that should be patentable” exists between a floor defined by “algorithms and math” and a ceiling of things that are overbroad and are [...]
Tagged IP, Patents, Software, TechnologyI wrote this Wednesday, but embargoed it until today so that I wouldn’t break the news to anyone
Joseph is probably in his late sixties. He’s gruff, jewish, and has a trace of an eastern european accent. He’s bald, with a circle of hair that reminds one of bristles on a broom.
Until a few months ago, [...]
Tagged Food, Lose It!, Lunch, Sandella'sThis Present Darkess is a fun little book, but it’s a novel and not a book about theology. Indeed, if you think about the theology too hard it all kind of falls apart.
Let’s do it anyway.
The book, for those of you who haven’t read it (you should; it’s a good romp if a mite predictable), [...]
Tagged Angels, Book Review, Frank E. Peretti, Religion