malvasia bianca

Back from vacation. 4 days in Berlin, 2 in Göttingen, 4 in Amsterdam, plus some travel days. Quite pleasant until Liesl came down with a rather nasty cold; I didn’t get as good a feel for Amsterdam as I would have liked, but such is life. I apologise if I accidentally deleted any queued up […]

I’m going through my backlog of stored up links; this animation of cellular behavior deserves its own post. Just watch the video – in its own way, it’s the coolest thing that I’ve seen in, like, a decade. My favorite part is where this cellular machine walks up a rope dragging a big bubble of […]

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. […]

There would seem to be a vaccine company named AlphaVax. I guess they thought AlphaVaxPdp11 would be too confusing?

We’re planning an upcoming vacation; we’ll be in Berlin for four days, then elsewhere in Germany for a few days, then in Amsterdam for a few days. Details will probably be worked out on the fly – we’ve bought the plane tickets and done a hotel reservation in Berlin, but no train tickets or non-Berlin […]

When I mentioned my earlier post about questions I had about driving in traffic, Jordan pointed me at this article that claims that a single driver, by leaving a large amount of open space while entering a traffic jam, can actually (at times) break up the jam. Which is pretty amazing, if true. The author […]

See, this is why Apple is so annoying. I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t want one. I don’t have a video iPod, I don’t want one. But the iPhone sounds awesome, despite being a jazzed up combination of those two. I’m not going to go out and buy one on release or anything, […]

Now that I’m seeing queues everywhere, I’m getting curious about both the underlying math and the underlying pragmatics. Take a highway, for example: say you want to get the most use out of one. What does that mean? I guess it means maximizing total throughput, or more specifically the car miles driven on the road […]

I spent much of the Christmas break in a house where news was frequently being watched / listened to on TV. (CNN mostly.) Not a pleasant experience; why I’m supposed to care about teachers having sex with students, or people who apparently falsely confessed months ago to murdering glamorous children, is beyond me. And people […]

We had dinner at the excellent Sushi Tomi tonight. Two of the tatami tables were taken over by a birthday party, hosted by a young caucasian girl, with a Bob the Builder theme. Multiculturalism at its best.

I lost my iPod nano a couple of months ago; oops. Which gave me a chance to see some of how the iPod has evolved: I had to use my old iPod for a little while so I got reminded what the previous generation was like, and then I got to experience the newer model […]

If you do a Google search for “bonny doon”, the top three entries are currently: Bonny Doon Vineyard, Bonny Doon Engineering, and Bonny Doon Alpacas I do not currently have a need for “Exceptional Alpacas for Stud”, but it’s good to know there’s a local source, should such an eventuality arise.

I hope that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a nice one. We did; a congenial bunch of guests, a meal headed by cambodian chicken curry. Though there were other nice bits on the menu – in particular, Liesl made a very pleasant beef soup, also from The Elephant Walk Cookbook, and we made […]

Some people at work were talking about LinkedIn, so I decided to finally give it a try. I’d been a bit put off earlier by receiving an invitation that was trying to look like it was written by a human and failing badly (well, it was written by a human, but not the human who […]

There’s this list of categories on the right side of my blog. And it’s starting to annoy me. I don’t post on baseball much these days; does it deserve its own category? Go started as a category, got deleted, got added back. In my last post, I started to think that I should add a […]

I should really catch up on my blogging; in the mean time, some random links: Will it blend? I know where I’m buying my next blender from. John Baez on the state of fundamental physics. Just the link for the panda fan in your family. A followup to a traffic experiments article that I mentioned […]

It seems that I should have pushed my earlier gardening/programming analogy further. After all, we all know what happens when we rip out code with plans to rewrite it: rewriting always turns out to be harder than we thought, and it usually would have been better to improve matters in place. In this particular instance, […]

I was going over some pro games last weekend; as always, I was conflicted about how to approach that. Some options: Just play the moves as fast as you can. Go over as many games as possible, trying to get the moves into your fingers, without worrying about understanding them. Try to understand the key […]

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 […]