From Neil Gaiman’s FAQ: Q. How can I get Neil Gaiman to make an appearance at my school/convention/event? A. Contact Lisa Bransdorf at the Greater Talent Network. Tell her you want Neil to appear somewhere. Have her tell you how much it costs. Have her say it again in case you misheard it the first [...]
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Finally, we made it to the end of the tale. There was only one remaining question, and it seemed both obvious and cruel. His project had promised an end to forgetting, but in the end, only Gregory had been unable to forget. The deluge of information had arrived. The other programmers had drifted away. Only [...]
I went to Walmart yesterday and thought of this: If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are [...]
From the bracket analysis over at ESPN.COM: On Jan. 17, Texas was 17-0 and ranked No. 1. Then the Longhorns went 5-8 to close out the regular season. What happened? They boast incredible athletes, but the team’s offense has become a turnover-plagued mess. Plus this is one of the worst free-throw shooting squads around. Beware. [...]
There are various objections to expanding the conventional, up-tight, as-God-intended “one man, one woman” notion of marriage but by far the least plainly bigoted ones I am aware of are the bureaucratic ones. To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and [...]
The first is about what makes a good blog: To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium [...]
Apropos my previous post: He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.” Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding [...]
A meta-lesson: Microeconomics ain’t easy, and don’t let a regression–or division by a baseline–be a substitute for clear thought. It’s a classic error to analyze a decision as if it were a one-time choice, without recognizing the underlying incentives that make the situation come up repeatedly. It’s disappointing to see Levitt make this mistake and [...]
As a former database monkey, I have a lot of sympathy for Harry: If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is [...]