Yesterday's News 3-21-2018
This prattle is also backed up by the Internet Archive, albeit with much less fanfare.
The Norse Worshipped Assholes - The New Yorker reviews Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology which came out in paperback recently. If you wanted more proof of genre fiction's ascendency, Neil Gaiman discussed in the New Yorker is about as good as it gets.
Typography Of Astronomy - I Love Typography looks at the designs in classical . . .
Yesterday's News 3-20-2018
This Post Brought To You By The Clickiest Of Keyboards
Cue The Alarmists - By now most people have shared their terrible take on this sad event, ranging from a condemnation of Uber to out and out calls for a ban on self-driving cars. Considering the state of discourse and news in our society, I assume that most of this will be forgotten by the time Uber releases what actually happened.
The Dialogues: Conversations About the Nature Of The Universe
By Clifford V Johnson
I am always a sucker for comic books about unconventional subjects. I have tons of Icon books “Introducing” series, as well as the comic biography of Bertrand Russell, Logiccomix. Dialogues is the ambitious project of Clifford V Johnson, a physics teacher from USC. He taught himself to draw just to complete this book.
Each of the . . .
Yesterday's News 3-19-18
Insert witty Rick and Morty reference here.
Further Down The Rabbit Hole - While I think that the Russia story makes the last election palatable for the media, I think there's a lot more to how Trump's campaign exploited social media with or without the help of Kremlin boogymen. Cory Doctorow has said that companies like Facebook don't have any idea how to handle the . . .
Yesterday's News 3-16-2018
Some more night shifts really made it This Week's News.
When Tariffs Work - Considering the outrage around Trump's plans for tariffs, it isn't hard to find any favorable coverage. Hell, even the American Thinker just framed it as his marriage of populism with traditional conservatism, not a stunning endorsement. FiveThirtyEight has a mild defense of the tariffs using Reagan's tariff on . . .
Facebook Didn't Make You A Jerk
Russian Bots Just Told You What You Wanted to Hear
There's a lot of discussion these days about how our Smartphones and Social Media are unhealthy for people. That they become addicted to getting dopamine hits from interactions on Facebook, et al. and that seeing all the artificial versions of people's lives is making us all depressed.
It needs to be reiterated . . .
The End A Brief History
A great mind passes on
Man, Stephen Hawking is a giant mind to lose. Of the people kicking at the edges of the darkness, his mind felt like something special. Not because of his disability, but because he outlived expectations years ago. He felt like the purpose of knowledge kept him alive against the odds. (I’m sure that it was precisely . . .