Year: 2004
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Working towards something
Testing something… sorry about the nonsense.
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I’m not sure I even want to know…
…but I’ll hope that my credit cards are not yet among the public. With a name like John Roberts, I’m a ripe enough target for identity theft as it is. Article is at CNET News.com, by Rob Lemos.
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Maps from the David Rumsey collection
Looks like a doozy of a map collection, especially since it needs specialized viewers… GIS is a whole technology subset I know very little about, but the end product is fascinating. The ever-increasing detail in which we think we can represent something is fractal; the deeper you dive, the more you realize you can never…
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the bombs bursting in air
Jonathan Delacour provides an Australian perspective to all the flag-waving in an American election year. Lots of refreshing viewpoints and facts, with a few jolts along the way, like this: the United States: …accounts for 5 per cent of the world’s population, 20 per cent of the world economy, and fully 50 per cent of…
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Book: Nickel and Dimed
Next time you want to complain about your job (assuming you have one), pick up Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The author spends one year trying to live on minimum-wage jobs alone and can’t pull it off. So much for the minimum wage actually adding up to something…
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Book: The Janson Directive
I read The Bourne Identity when it first came out, in 1980. I devoured it. The movie, 22 years later wasn’t bad, and I’ll be sure to see the new one. I’ve read many of Robert Ludlum’s other books, including the very funny The Road to Gandolfo, so I was pre-disposed to grab Ludlum’s The…
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Book: Moneyball
On a cross-country weekend without the kids (a story for another post), I enjoyed Moneyball by Michael Lewis. In answering a “simple” question — how does a poorer team, the Oakland Athletics, win so many baseball games — Lewis tells the story of orthodoxy and upheaval in a small, very public world: professional baseball. To…
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Barely got started
Last night’s BlogOn panel clearly was only to whet the appetite of the crowd, so I’m looking forward to today. While I and other other panelists did need to prepare, beyond bringing our brains and tongues (and hopefully connecting the two), the panel didn’t feel much different from other public discussions. We were really only…
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Book: The Commodore
Patrick O’Brian’s The Commodore handles one of the more challenging steps in Aubrey’s career: promotion. Simply put, if the author removes one of his main characters from the sea, it’s hard to imagine the result. Promotion in the Royal Navy eventually removes a captain from commanding a ship. First, the rising officer commands a small…
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eBay… on the radio
I’m driving to the Albany, New York airport on Sunday morning. As I enter the Northway (US 87) at Exit 30, my tenuous link to North Country Radio, the regional NPR group of stations, finally fades into static. So, I start the Seek experience. And I find eBay on the radio. WOKO, 98.9 on your…