Tag Archives: tech-culture

So I was in a bookstore browsing the new non-fiction when I came across “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley.  The cover blurb was intriguing: For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon … Continue reading →

I recently had the pleasure of taking one of Edward Tufte‘s seminars, “Presenting Data and Information”.  He’s a professor emeritus of statistics, political science, and computer science at Yale, and the author of an important set of books on charting: … Continue reading →

Last Friday, Jan 28th, mass protests began in Cairo against the oppressive regime of Hosni Mubarak.    They were well covered by Al Jazeera, but the New York Times had nuthin’.   The government had shut off  cellphones and the Internet in … Continue reading →

This is a breezy memoir by a Caltech astronomer, Mike Brown, about how he discovered the major new bodies in the outer solar system: Quaoar, Sedna, Haumea, Makemake, and the biggest of all, Eris.  The book is available here.  Eris … Continue reading →

So I was with the kids in the toy aisle of a drugstore when I saw something that made my blood run cold: This Kung Zhu toy makes squeaky little Ai-ee karate noises, and runs around on a table avoiding … Continue reading →

Or rather, the lack thereof. The recent movie about Facebook, “The Social Network”, claimed that those guys became billionaires by abandoning their schooling and being as jerk-ish as possible.   Two of the four billionaires created by Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and … Continue reading →