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Watching time, the only true currency // A journal from John B. Roberts

  • Book: Quicksilver

    The day before Thanksgiving, I finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, the first volume of his Baroque Cycle trilogy. Stephenson takes the ancestors of the protagonists in Crytonomicon (his most recent book) and sprinkles them through 17th century Europe, in key roles, especially among the nascent scientific community coming together (in England) as the Royal Society. I…

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  • Claiming my place

    Just added the Technorati link to the footer of my blog home page. Yes, I’m a lemming. We’ll see if BlogShares ever makes it back, too, so the broken image will resolve once more.

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  • Big promises

    I’ve been reading Vin Crosbie’s posts for about a decade on the online-news mailing list, and his blog for several months. He knows publishing in a digital world. Still, he just made a very big public promise to deliver the business plan for the future of publishing. There is a lucrative business plan for online…

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  • Blogmarks

    Just picked up that term from the comments of Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post on 2004 predictions. I certainly keep bookmarks in Safari only as long as it takes me to post them here… which can be several weeks, admittedly. I’ll have to try one of those bookmarklets (Radio Express?) to see if I can make…

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  • Putting the fan back in…

    Read Sportscolumn.com for biased views on sports. Uneven columns, but that Philly fan is usually entertaining. Too bad the Eagles will disappoint him once again. Not sure how or why or when, but it will happen.

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  • Empire State Building

    Here’s an Empire State Building made entirely of Legos. [via Slashdot] When I was a kid, my dad and I built a paper model of this building from a kit. Took a long time, but it was fun. It was also fun, years later, when it was a bit worse for wear, to burn the…

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  • One of my sisters

    Old link from Wellesley press release promoting her thesis. No one did that for mine… not that it deserved it. And here’s a record of her athletic accomplishment (scroll down to the District 1 Academic All-Americas). Woo-hoo.

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  • Pogue on the iSight

    Significant use of the iSight, as recorded by David Pogue in the NYTimes. A heck of a lot better than that TV commercial for AT&T wireless about a travelling salesman talking to his daughter at bedtime while he sits in the airport.

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  • “smell the children”

    No, no, no. I don’t mean the children. I mean ‘smell’ what’s a few levels down in a heirarchical taxonomy, as Victor Lombardi writes in Where Nav Meets Taxonomy. Children, in this case, are those topics which are subordinate to other topics. Think biological classification: mammals are a parent of canines, and so forth. Lots…

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  • Catalogs = yuppie porn?

    Thanks to Jeffrey Veen for linking to this SFGate.com piece, “The Hot Porn Of Pottery Barn Think Abercrombie & Fitch is racy? You haven’t seen these naked, nubile coffee tables“. The article is amusing, about how some people are (over)reacting to different catalogs and their presentation. But you should skip straight to the gallery of…

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