Anne Chernock's A Calculated Life was an Amazon Kindle Daily Deal at about the time I was reading Average is Over, so of course I had to buy it. I liked it a lot. It's hard to summarize without spoiling, bc half the fun of the book is the unfolding of the story (and how often do you hear me say that?) But a heroine who is the pinnacle of biotech ( Read more... )

Last week was tough: I had 5 productive days in a row, taking my shiny streak to 7, but I whined whined whined the whole way through. My Friday plans fell through when we couldn't get confirmation that there'd be a hardpoint at that night's party. Instead, I had an unusually frank conversation with my mum about my love life and then had dinner with ( Read more... )

Speaking of men (& women) in black (robes), my inamorato has invited me to hang out in DC while he attends a dorky lawyer conference next week. On the one hand, I'd get to meet the people he talks about, wear a gorgeous dress, and then go to a sex party that a current crush is attending; or, I could go for a mud run in Fenway. This is a tough ( Read more... )

In my family, there are a lot of things you don't hear about unless you catch my mother at the right moment. For example, I first heard about my niece bc my mother was late dropping something off at my apt and didn't want to stay and talk -- bc it turned out she was on her way to dinner to discuss the issue with my brother and his gf. Thanks to ( Read more... )

I have emails from the MIT Enterprise Forum about 3 different events in the next two weeks, about making NYC a tech mecca, biz plan presentations, and hearing from the current director of the Media Lab, but I can't get excited about any of them. The answer to the first is no critical mass of entrepreneurial people and I'm tired of talking about pie ( Read more... )

Poll "As you wish"

When I first heard about If It Had Happened Otherwise from the Wiki article about counterfactuals, it sounded brilliant: Churchill writes alt history!! As do a bunch of other learned dudes I've heard of but never read ( Read more... )

The problem with being a polymath is that I never know, when I read a book or hear a lecture, what is novel and what is known to anyone in the field. For all my posts where I pontificate, but particularly this one, I apologize if I sound like a moron. I can only talk about what is novel to me ( Read more... )

I hate the UN, although I admit I have less tolerance for Obama's visits than I did for Bush's. (Possibly bc I was less worried about Bush sucking up to Dinnerjacket.) The only car company that had anything available was Lincoln Limousine -- which sent us a white stretch limo, but an hour late. Grr. Fortunately, our flight was delayed half an hour ( Read more... )

Poll Mostly about Pakistan

Why yes, I do write polls months in advance: frankly, with the outages and the PT and the what-not, I'm years behind on polls. But that's okay, that just means I can link to this excellent article by a reporter who got access to Seal Team Six. CoastGuardBoy was teasing me at lunch yesterday that the reporter thought he was speaking to Seal Team ( Read more... )