Last week at work, I was looking up a world map, and found a couple sites through Google, clicked around a bit, didn’t think much of it. Until a couple minutes later, when popup windows started appearing every 15 seconds on my screen. I had been hit with adware. I still don’t have any idea […]
Michael Mina
Last week, my friend Wilfred organized a trip to Michael Mina’s restaurant in the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco. The attendees were the same group of six of us who went to the French Laundry last year (almost exactly a year ago, in fact). Unfortunately, that’s where the similarities end. Don’t get me […]
Good to Great, by Jim Collins
Amazon link This and Collins’s previous book, Built to Last, are two standard business books that everybody refers to. I’ve been meaning to read them for a while, but never got around to it. But, at the mega-library trip last Saturday, I saw it, I picked it up, and I read it yesterday on my […]
What should I do with my life?, by Po Bronson
Amazon link I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other works, but when this book came out a couple years ago, I didn’t really feel it was worth checking out. What was the point of reading about how other people had answered the question of what to do with their lives? But it stayed on my to-read list. […]
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman
Amazon link This was referenced in the footnotes of some other book that I read, but I can’t remember which one any more (maybe Six Degrees?). Kauffman is a MacArthur Fellow who works at the Santa Fe Institute, which is a center for studying complexity theory (and a place I’ve occasionally dreamed of working at), […]
Google Maps Pedometer
I’m too cheap (and don’t do enough cool outdoorsy stuff) to buy a GPS unit to track how far I’ve gone when biking and running and stuff like that. So I was excited when Brad pointed to a tool called Gmap pedometer, which combines a nifty interface with the GPS information contained in Google Maps […]
More graphic novels
As mentioned previously, my local library branch now stocks graphic novels. I picked up a few more yesterday, of which the only notable one was Fray, by Joss Whedon. As everybody knows, I was a huge fan of Buffy (and a somewhat lesser fan of Angel and Firefly (although I went to see Batman Begins […]
Moneyball, by Michael Lewis
Amazon link I’ve meant to read this since the day it came out both because I follow baseball and because I’ve liked other books by Michael Lewis, but never got around to it, because I didn’t think it was worth buying. But I finally saw it in my local branch library yesterday, so I picked […]
Thinking different
Beemer commented on my last post: But it makes me think that it would be really, really useful if we had a big long list of all the different kinds of thinking the human brain can do, and if people knew what they were good and what they weren’t good at on that list. This […]
Irony as pointer
I was listening to the Smashmouth song, Walking on the Sun, on my MP3 player on my way back from BART this afternoon. A former acquaintance of mine once dissed the song to me by pointing out that the initial lyrics were ripping off the Coke ad “I’d like to teach the world to sing […]
