Because its been too long since I stole something from xkcd…

xkcd offers a glimpse of the reality I confront every working day: It’s always me.

Quick Blogroll Update: Jennifer Frazer/Biodiversity edition

I’d like to draw y’all’s (got to love any opportunity for two apostrophes in a single word) attention to two new listings on the blogroll, both from the same blogger, Jennifer Frazer.  Her science blog, centered on natural history in a modern biological frame, appears under this delightful name:  The Artful Amoeba. Jennifer is a [...]

Why MSM Journalism is Dying

Update: Missing link as noted by commenter WDS now supplied. Update 2: Again TPM, this further demonstration of the APs journalistic collapse.  Mistakes happen.  Mistakes repeatedly pumped over the wire, material signficant ones like inflating the cost of a health care plant that would cover on the order of 40 million uninsured…that could cost lives, [...]

Why I Love Oregon, and some thoughts on subtitles: Sunday Newton and the Counterfeiter Review Update

So, another week, another seven days of  hope that the wide world will get a chance to hear of my new book. Have I mentioned I have a book recently out?  Newton and the Counterfeiter? (Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound)  I have?  Oh good. I’m going to write a “diary of a trade book” [...]

Does the string “Michael Kinsley” correspond to a sentient being? I think not…

…and here’s the evidence, from “Michael Kinsley’s” presumably machine-generated column in today’s Washington Post: The fiscal stimulus was, of necessity, a numbingly huge number, and almost nobody has said it was unneeded or not urgent or too big. Well, no….unless you include the entire Congressional Republican delegation, Fox News, the radio wasteland that is right-wing [...]

Weekend Fun: The Way David Macaulay Works: Finding Ideas, Making Books and Visualizing Our World | MIT World

Something of a Friday brain dump seems to be going on chez Inverse Square. I’m beginning to work on what would for me be another David Macaulay-hosted project. Info on first one in which I participated — the Peabody award winning Building Big — is here.)That led me back to the video of the talk [...]

Friday Music Break (1)

A bunch of tunes clogging up my brain the last couple of days…so I’ll start with one of those that I stumbled upon by a chain of Youtube associations:  from a Steve Earle cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty,” to a version from the singers I heard do that great song first, Willie [...]

For a Good Time in Second Life….

Go to the Nature Publishing Group Island in Second Life where, at 10 Pacific Time, 1 Eastern Time, I’ll be talking about Newton and the Counterfeiter (Amazon,Powells, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound) – where it came from, and at least a few of the high spots on what some of the key ideas might be…. For those wise in [...]

Event the good villagers get it wrong: Hendrik Hertzberg, Al Franken, George Will and why doesn’t anyone pay attention to science edition

Alright, so my title logorrhea is getting a little out of hand, but consider this, mostly just fine post celebrating the elevation of a real policy wonk to the US Senate. In his New Yorker blog Hendrik Hertzberg writes, accurately, The Senate was originally envisioned as a chamber of notables. Its members were supposed to [...]

Paul Krugman is wrong…Spinal Tap edition.

Sort of. Under the headline, “Whom the gods would destroy….” he writes … they first make Republican governors. I mean, I suppose a classical education might incline you that way.  But watching the recent dances, be they tango,* or the funky chicken,**  I must say that the latest news has brought to mind nothing so [...]