I think that in my quest to improve at developing ideas, editing myself, etc., I have psyched myself out of blogging. So I’m going to go back to basics, and start posting shorter less-well-thought-out posts for a bit, just to get the juices flowing again. As far as the car, I went in and talked […]
Mercedes sucks
As some of you know, I bought myself a Mercedes SLK230 a year and a half ago, a completely impractical obnoxious two-seater hardtop convertible. But I figured, what the heck, I was young and single and male, and when would it be more appropriate for me to have such a car than now. And, damn, […]
Killer cars and giving notice
No posts in a while. Been distracted by life. On Monday morning, my car tried to kill me. Again. Coming out of the Bay Bridge metering lights into the big merge, where it squeezes from 13 lanes down to 5 lanes in a couple hundred yards, and people are accelerating like mad, trying to cut […]
I bought art!
While I was in New York, I put in a relatively low bid on a piece of art up for auction at a SoHo gallery, as mentioned at the end of this post. I was a bit surprised when, at the end of the month, the gallery called me and told me that my bid […]
More on language alignment
I’d been meaning to follow up on last week’s post on conversational alignment but hadn’t gotten around to it. As I admitted in the livejournal comments on that post, I may have over reached in saying that reality coefficients had to be aligned to have a good conversation, because, as Dan pointed out, we can […]
Comedy and drama
While driving into work yesterday, I started thinking about humor for some reason. I guess I was thinking of practical jokes, of the variety that Ashton Kutcher purveys on Punk’d, and why I find such jokes shallow and cruel and not very funny. It seems to me that such jokes are funny because the audience […]
whee ultimate
This evening was the first spring game of the ultimate frisbee league I play in. I was out of shape, of course. Despite saying I would stay in shape over the winter, I just didn’t. I’m not terribly out of shape – I biked up to Skyline Boulevard yesterday without stopping, which is about 50 […]
Going Nucular, by Geoffrey Nunberg
Amazon link Most of my readers will have heard of Nunberg, a Stanford linguistics professor who’s a regular contributor to Fresh Air and the New York Times Week in Review. This book is a collection of pieces from those venues, where he muses amusingly about quirks in our language for a few minutes at a […]
Stewart Brand talks about cities
Last week’s Long Now talk was by Stewart Brand, one of the organizers and author of the book How Buildings Learn. This talk was about cities, and how cities learn. He started off the talk by talking about demographics. Within the next couple years, more than 50% of the world will live in cities. And […]
New blog software
In case any of my readers were wondering why I haven’t updated in a while, the reason should now be evident. I finally broke down last week and admitted to myself that I was never, ever going to set up my own server at home, so I should just pay somebody to do it for […]
