link backlog
Things Of Interest by Sam Hughes
This guy's blog is wonderful, for example this entry about meeting a favorite author. Also his short fiction; a friend at work retold me this story without remembering the origin. I think the first page of his site I stumbled across was the delightfully deadpan "How to destroy the Earth".
I found this article when looking for academic support for the aphorism "happiness is other people":
What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk
(Or a PDF if you don't care for the video interview, needless pagination, and ads.)
It's primarily about a study which tracked a single population of Harvard undergrads for their entire lives. It's hard to summarize, and one of the points seems to be that human lives are also hard to summarize. I'm glad it's not my job to draw conclusions from this sort of data. I'm left with the sense that not only do we not understand each other very well, we frequently don't even know ourselves.
Kirsten and I finally saw "Black Swan" last Saturday. Aronofsky really had her number with the fingernail mutilation. It reminded me of hearing about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome on the radio, and I wanted to read more.
An Error in the Code by Richard Preston (PDF)
I read several of Preston's books in my teens: _The Hot Zone_, _American Steel_ (I'll never forget the story about the safety inspector), _First Light_. Good stuff. I wish more journalism was done in this form.
This guy's blog is wonderful, for example this entry about meeting a favorite author. Also his short fiction; a friend at work retold me this story without remembering the origin. I think the first page of his site I stumbled across was the delightfully deadpan "How to destroy the Earth".
I found this article when looking for academic support for the aphorism "happiness is other people":
What Makes Us Happy? by Joshua Wolf Shenk
(Or a PDF if you don't care for the video interview, needless pagination, and ads.)
It's primarily about a study which tracked a single population of Harvard undergrads for their entire lives. It's hard to summarize, and one of the points seems to be that human lives are also hard to summarize. I'm glad it's not my job to draw conclusions from this sort of data. I'm left with the sense that not only do we not understand each other very well, we frequently don't even know ourselves.
Kirsten and I finally saw "Black Swan" last Saturday. Aronofsky really had her number with the fingernail mutilation. It reminded me of hearing about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome on the radio, and I wanted to read more.
An Error in the Code by Richard Preston (PDF)
I read several of Preston's books in my teens: _The Hot Zone_, _American Steel_ (I'll never forget the story about the safety inspector), _First Light_. Good stuff. I wish more journalism was done in this form.