malvasia bianca

A passage I occasionally reread when I get in a certain sort of discussion: Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as […]

Random trivia from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: when moving your eyes slowly from left to right, the left side of your brain is controlling the actions. Like when, say, reading English. I don’t want to make too much of this: I assume it’s true, but exactly what to derive from this isn’t clear. […]

Miranda’s reading rather more comfortably now than she was in the past; at least partly because of this, she’s noticeably expanded the range of her desired sphere of competence. Examples: We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she […]

I’m in the middle of (very painfully – it’s been a while) attempting to compose a letter in German. I’ve had to refer to a bilingual dictionary several times over the course of the process; oddly enough, it turns out that the dictionary doesn’t list the words for either English or German (in either language). […]

Right now, the 51st book on my Amazon recommendation list is Real Numbers: Management Accounting in a Lean Organization, while the 52nd is p-adic Numbers: An Introduction.

Why hadn’t I heard of The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman, until now? Not that it’s transcendantly wonderful (I thought that it was quite good indeed, though), but it was published in 1990, and seems like the sort of book I should have heard of over the last 16 years. I guess I need better […]

I reread Le Petit Prince a month or two ago, for the first time in decades. I’d forgotten how completely, quietly charming that book is. Also, while browsing through Amazon, I see that they’ve finally started translating the Le petit Nicolas series into English. An excellent series indeed; perhaps not in the “timeless classic” status […]

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership: One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to […]

A few days ago, I went to Amazon’s books page, and was greeted with Serre’s A Course in Arithmetic. Which kind of surprised me – I’m pretty sure that, in the past, I’d rated math books, but it had been a while since I’d seen any show up in their book recommendation list. (Do they […]

I just finished Lean Thinking; it’s my current favorite lean book. One thing that made me jealous: they give several (to me) convincing examples of companies wanting to try out lean, and that brought in some people who really knew how lean worked. After doing what those people said, they immediately got some fairly impressive […]

In Jonathan Kozol’s earlier books, I’d already been appalled by the horrible physical condition of schools serving nonwhite populations. And, in The Shame of the Nation, we see that too: In the years before I met Elizabeth, I had visited many elementary schools in the South Bronx and in one northern district of the Bronx […]

The two titles I was considering for this post are both military analogies. Sigh. So I will go with the title from the section in the book. From How Children Learn, pp. 36–37: The other day we went to Carlsbad Caverns, a strange and beautiful place. To get there, we rode many hours in the […]

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down […]

Both DDR players are pretty amazing. But I really love the first one. Go creative commons. Hot library smut. I think my favorite is the Hague. Gender and pitch. (The course sounds cool, too.) I am speechless.

Today’s book: It’s Not Luck, the second of Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novels. Which I actually read after the third; cleared up a few issues, but the reading order didn’t matter too much. (I would recommend starting with The Goal, though.) This book presents some thinking tools for analyzing situations that confuse you, where you’re stuck […]

I just finished another one of Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novels on the Theory of Constraints. I didn’t lose sleep over it the way I did with The Goal, but it was quite good. And useful to see ToC applied to product development situations, instead of just manufacturing situations. One thing that caught my eye: not […]

Project X: Cup Noodle clearly has to go on today’s one-click list. Jackson Pollock. I would seem to be getting into interactive flash sites. House of dominoes. The Foundation replacement saga. Quite a storefront. Our money is badly designed (and getting worse). Nice manhole cover, too. A much longer talk than I usually tolerate on […]

Nevertheless, the beauty of lawn statuary comforts this perhaps overly-serious animal.

I’ve read a couple of business novels recently, and I confess that I hadn’t properly appreciated the genre before. I’m not going to stop reading nonfiction or anything, but it seems like a quite decent way to learn something about an area that I don’t want to currently pursue in depth. Which is the case […]

I just read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the first time in more than a decade. I confess to some amount of trepidation: I used to really like the book, and I was afraid it hadn’t aged well. In fact, the book continues to be awesome. Most novels could not pull off […]