Amazon link A friend lent me this book, purporting to be “an ethnographic account of the invention of PCR, the polymerase chain reaction” at Cetus, one of the first biotech companies. Unfortunately, I think that the book fails at both of its primary tasks. As somebody who still doesn’t understand a lot of biochemistry despite […]
Author: Eric
Television ads
The American Museum of the Moving Image has put together a repository of campaign commercials, dating back to 1952. The commercials of most interest to me, of course, were the current commercials being run by Bush and Kerry. Since I live in California, which both parties are ignoring, I yet to see a single campaign […]
The Living Web
I came across this article called “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web” today, which I really liked. Some things to think about when writing for the web. It’s good to help me reflect on what I am doing with this weblog. On the occasional days when I actually write something. I should at least […]
Seven Seasons of Buffy, ed. by Glenn Yeffeth
Amazon link This is the third book analyzing Buffy that I’ve bought, after Reading the Vampire Slayer and a Buffy philosophy book. This one takes the angle of inviting other authors (the book is subtitled “Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Discuss Their Favorite Television Show”) to analyze the show. There wasn’t actually a lot of […]
Hypertext thesis
While talking to somebody today, I made a reference to the Panopticon, an idealized prison, but couldn’t remember the details of it. So I typed it into Google, and found this page describing it. The page turned out to be part of a collection of pages that was this guy’s master’s thesis in English, titled […]
Busy busy busy
Very few updates recently. It’s been an incredibly busy month. I just finished two weeks of singing Mahler 2 with MTT, which ate up all of my evenings but was an absolutely thrilling experience that will be a fantastic album. My parents were here for the past two weekends to celebrate my birthday, which was […]
"Autistic Social Software" talk by danah boyd
One of the few blogs I try to keep up with is the Many-to-Many blog at Corante, because the work they’re doing involving studying community fascinates me. One of the posters there is danah boyd, who posted an interesting talk that she gave at a conference, noting that social software has many of the same […]
Bringing Down the House, by Ben Mezrich
Amazon link I read a Wired article a couple years ago about the MIT blackjack team, a group of MIT students who used their ability to count cards to beat the system at Vegas and make a lot of money. Millions of dollars allegedly. This intrigued me both because it was about MIT students, but […]
Keeping Score
Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony have apparently launched an effort to bring more people into appreciation of classical music and how it fits together (here’s the Chronicle article this morning). The effort is called Keeping Score, and is going to be a five year multimedia effort. The first fruits of that effort […]
Zoning at Burning Man
I went to Burning Man in 2000, mostly because a bunch of my friends were going, and I figured it was one of those things that everybody should experience once. It was an interesting experience. I think the best part from my perspective was getting there early before the party started (I was there nine […]
