Pretty dead this week. Eris has apparently been under more stress than usual for reasons I don't fully understand, but it's meant a lot of late nights in the past week and a few nights where I didn't get a four-hour block and was consequently wrecked. She's been extra particular and tempestuous. My parents, having heard of my plight, are sending me ( Read more... )

Last weekend, I was in Cleveland for PyCon, so Erica got to spend the weekend with grandparents. The conference was really good this year. I very much enjoyed talking to people at the Google booth in the expo hall. The keynotes were phenomenal. Russel Keith-Magee gave the opening keynote on Python's "black swans", a fascinating look at the future ( Read more... )

I see I've been doing an even worse job at getting around to writing than usual. Recap time.

Two weekends ago: Julie was away for business travel late in the week, then I was at Olin on Saturday for Alumni Weekend (10 years!). Was great to see so many of my classmates ( Read more... )

Sandy Island was fun this year. Erica had a wonderful time and slept very well indeed. Making sandcastles on the beach was definitely the highlight of her trip, but there's a lot of outdoor fun to be had. The weather was good, if very hot, but it did cool off sufficiently at night. There was only one rainy morning, and only the last night was ( Read more... )

Links post! Been far too long since I did one of those. Some very select stuff from the past few months:

Side Effected: A short-story film by my cousin Lev, now making the film festival circuit. Good stuff.

Daylight Savings Time is Terrible: A proposal to eliminate daylight savings time and move the continental US to two time-zones. It would ( Read more... )

At the bus stop yesterday, I was approached by a drunk who asked me to call him an ambulance. There was nothing obviously wrong with him (aside from being a drunk), and he says this in a tone that doesn't indicate he's alarmed in the slightest. So I ask him, why's he need an ambulance? And he tells me I should call him an ambulance because "[he ( Read more... )

Sure has been a while since I did one of these, but here are a few recent tidbits.

Teach A Kid to Argue: On why teaching kids good argument skills is a better idea than you might think.

The Upside of Ugly: On plastic surgery and technological solutions to social problems.

Jay-Z’s "99 Problems," Verse 2: A Close Reading With Fourth Amendment ( Read more... )

Friday: Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross book talk at Brookline Booksmith (there doesn't seem to be video of that, but here's an earlier version of the talk/reading). They were talking about their as-weird-as-possible novel collaboration, The Rapture of the Nerds, and how the ideas behind the modern version of "the singularity" date back (at least ( Read more... )

The Google Glass demo from Google I/O is without a doubt the most spectacular tech demo I've ever seen. Bit of behind-the-scenes footage for the demo here, part of the keynote about Glass here.

ETA: The TechCrunch writeup is also pretty good.

For DFW fans, The Decemberists Play Eschaton.

The real message of the Susan G. Komen / Planned Parenthood controversy.

An essay urging Americans to Raise the Crime Rate.

A 60-minutes interview with free-climber Alex Honnold.