from The Economist, 26 June 2008:

Watching Microsoft in the company of Google and Facebook is a bit like watching your dad trying to be cool.

As a dad, I understand just how deep that cuts. And I still don't get Facebook.

But I do get this:

Despite all those efforts, the PC, Mr Gates’s obsession, has ended up as an internet terminal.

I have ( Read more... )

I found this a few weeks ago and was so impressed by it I printed it out for my sons, now in high school--although I'm afraid it's one of those things that make so much sense that it takes a decade or two for much of it to really sink in ( Read more... )

My son and I were watching a DVD last night when the rating notice appeared on the screen. It said the movie was rated R due to "adult situations".

"Oh, no," I exclaimed, "what will you see? Someone paying a bill? Driving a kid to a sports game? Or doing the laundry?"

James Lardner's collective review of three books on the state of American capitalism makes for grim reading if you believe that our future is a linear extrapolation from the past two decades:
The economic policy of the United States has in recent memory been directed almost entirely toward the goal of growth, and treated, accordingly, as the ( Read more... )

I love the obituary section. I almost always learn about someone whose life followed a unique path. Such as Peggy Gilbert:
Musician Gilbert dies at 102 ( Read more... )

from John Berryman's afterword to the Signet Classics edition of Theodore Dreiser's The Titan:

Thank the Lord for second-class novels, or what would we read after the age of twenty-one, and how insufferable would be a criticism that devoted itself solely to first-class novels (the fifty-two or eight-six there are).

I like this line, particularly ( Read more... )

from The Prophets of Israel, by Edith Hamilton:
Still it is true that much of what the prophets said belongs to their own day, not to ours. The politics they threw themselves into with such vehemence are comprehensible now only to the scholar. When they said an earthquake happened because God had arisen to shake terribly the earth, they were ( Read more... )

Over the last six months or so, I've been running a couple of projects that are using several variations of web-based collaboration tools, and I wanted to jot down a few observations from the experience so far ( Read more... )

Among the piles of papers on my desk is a small pile of papers, each bundled folded in half down the middle. This is my reading pile ( Read more... )

I saw a notice about an upcoming lunchtime lecture here at work on "Blood Sugar Disruption," which the notice claims affects 5-6 times more people than diabetes. Out of curiosity, I googled the phrase. 27 hits. Not a good sign.

Many of the hits seem to relate to the following product:

Clear Essential Energy eMug (13 oz) Assists the body to ( Read more... )