Year: 2006
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Book: State of Fear
State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s latest, wraps a thriller around two related themes: global warming and the use of fear to maintain power. Crichton paints global warming as a bogeyman, throwing statistics, charts and citations in the midst of his storytelling as if he were Al Gore’s evil twin. Crichton’s most compelling point about global…
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Movie: Ghost in the Shell
Travelling cross-country and back without children for a three-day weekend gave me more than a chance to catch up on my reading. I also brought along my current Netflix choice, Ghost in the Shell , or, in the original Japanese, “Kôkaku kidôtai.” This anime version (apparently there is a live-action one) was entirely dubbed in…
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Book: Wall Street Meat
Andy Kessler has a blog, fortunately. I haven’t read it before, but I’ll take a peek now, after reading Wall Street Meat: My Narrow Escape from the Stock Market Grinder, courtesy of David. As promised, the paperback was a gulp on the airplane this weekend. Juicy, breezy, broken up even across a two-page spread into…
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Book: Silver Kings
Oscar Lewis’s popular history of the Comstock Lode foursome, Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood and O’Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode was published in 1947, and then republished in 1986 by the University of Nevada Press. All of which is to say… I couldn’t find a great place to…
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Measure Map is terribly slow, so FeedBurner buys BlogBeat
(I’m making the connection in the headline, even if no one else would.) The blog measurement service Measure Map craaawwwwllllssss. I know… I’ve been using it for months, even before Google acquired the project from Adaptive Path. Today, I read that FeedBurner bought BlogBeat, expressly to beef up their analytics. And I say to myself……
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I love the web, Zidane edition
Saw this last week, but still worth sharing, especially since the Wall Street Journal print edition even felt it amusing to tell its audience about the plethora of Zidane animations. Here’s Anil Dash’s Zidane World Cup Headbutt Animation Festival, a best (?) of compilation. Never let it be said that editors are dead.
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OpenDNS is live
It’s been a long day, so I’ll simply relish that OpenDNS is now live to the world. More to do, but at least some sleep is in order. Wired covered the release with “Site-Lookup Service Foils Fraud,” and there were more than 1500 diggs today. If you want to learn more, visit the website.
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The web, a decade ago, when it was still measurable
Tim Bray resurrects a presentation he gave in May, 1996 entitled “Measuring the Web.” A worthy part of history, and now it will be preserved in various caches for… well, a long time. Some of the sites named are long gone, and no longer well known. Infoseek, for example, where I interviewed in December, 1996,…
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Movie: Superman Returns
With a bunch from the office, I saw Superman Returns the night after it opened last week. Normally, I wouldn’t brave the crowds to see an anticipated film this early in its cycle, but always more fun with a group. The movie worked, but certainly didn’t feel new in any ways. Brandon Routh, playing Superman,…
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Book: Sprawl
Robert Bruegmann gives book Sprawl a dry subtitle, “A compact history.” To his credit, it’s appropriate. In 225 pages or so, not counting the extensive endnotes and bibliography (which I skipped), the professor (for that’s what he is) does a thorough job of trying to define sprawl and then politely demolish the demonization and negative…