Ramblings & ephemera
Let me recommend Codeweavers’ CrossOver, a commercial implementation of WINE that works on Linux & Mac OS X. It’s reasonably priced, & it makes setting up & configuring both WINE and the programs that run inside WINE much easier. Plus, the company is made up of good people, & they’re very upfront on their site [...]
Posted on August 30th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Patrick Hruby’s “The Franchise: The inside story of how Madden NFL became a video game dynasty” (ESPN: 22 July 2010): 1982 Harvard grad and former Apple employee Trip Hawkins founds video game maker Electronic Arts, in part to create a football game; one year later, the company releases “One-on-One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird,” [...]
Posted on August 29th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Keith Phipps’s “Treasure Of The Black Falcon, by John Coleman Burroughs” (The Onion AV Club: 25 March 2010): Burroughs’ circuitous prose, which reads as if he absorbed the paid-by-the-word style of his dad’s early work, doesn’t help. Opening the book at random, I found this passage: The air was warm, humid, sultry. Everywhere the [...]
Posted on August 27th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Ed Yong’s “Male water striders summon predators to blackmail females into having sex” (Discover: 10 August 2010): Water strider sex begins unceremoniously: the male mounts the female without any courtship rituals or foreplay. She may resist but if she does, he starts to actively strum the water surface with his legs. Each vibration risks [...]
Posted on August 16th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From a summary of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (Abridge Me: 1 June 2010): The Concept of the Conventional Wisdom The paradigms on which society’s perception of reality are based are highly conservative. People invest heavily in these ideas, and so are heavily resistant to changing them. They are only finally overturned by new [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert E. Lauder’s interview with Woody Allen, “Whatever Works” (Commonweal: 15 April 2010): Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Damon Linker’s “Another Kind of Atheism” (The New Republic: 11 May 2010): But a different kind of atheism is possible, legitimate, and (in Hart’s view) more admirable. Let’s call it catastrophic atheism, in tribute to its first and greatest champion, Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote in a head-spinning passage of the Genealogy of Morals that [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Jeff Bezos’s “We are What We Choose: Remarks by Jeff Bezos, as delivered to the Class of 2010 Baccalaureate” (Princeton University: 30 May 2010): What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Errol Morris’s “Film Legend Errol Morris Salutes New Graduates At 2010 Commencement” (Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: 10 May 2010): I have often wondered why we need the phrase investigative journalism. Isn’t all journalism supposed to be investigative? Isn’t journalism without an investigative element little more than gossip? And isn’t there enough gossip around [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Errol Morris’s “Film Legend Errol Morris Salutes New Graduates At 2010 Commencement” (Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism: 10 May 2010): There are many things I liked about noir. But in particular, there are images of one benighted character after another struggling to make sense of the world – and sometimes failing in the effort. [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From James Fallow’s “Inside the Leviathan: A short and stimulating brush with Microsoft’s corporate culture” (The Atlantic: February 2000): Financial analysts have long recognized that Microsoft’s profit really comes from two sources. One is operating systems (Windows, in all its varieties), and the other is the Office suite of programs. Everything else — Flight Simulator, [...]
Posted on August 13th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Penguin Books: 2001): 43: [Peter Samson, one of the first MIT hackers], though, was particularly obscure in refusing to add comments to his source code explaining what he was doing at a given time. One well-distributed program Samson wrote went on for hundreds of assembly language [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Penguin Books: 2001): 40-46: Still, even in the days of the TX-0 [the late 1950s], the planks of the platform were in place. The Hacker Ethic: Access To Computers — And Anything Which Might Teach You Something About The Way The World Works — Should Be [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Penguin Books: 2001): 23: The core members hung out at [MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club in the late 1950s] for hours; constantly improving The System, arguing about what could be done next, developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance [...]
Posted on July 31st, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Cory Doctorow’s “How Heinlein plotted” (Boing Boing: 22 July 2010): My notion of a story is an interesting situation in which a human being has to cope with a problem, does so, and thereby changed his personality, character, or evaluations in some measure because the coping has forced him to revise his thinking. How [...]
Posted on July 22nd, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From PZ Myers’s “High Priest Epstein in Newsweek” (Pharyngula: 14 June 2007): The “new atheism” (I don’t like that phrase, either) is about taking a core set of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world — you’ve probably noticed that many of these uppity atheists are coming out of a [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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This is pretty much what I think happens when we die, and unfortunately, what happens eventually after we die. There, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brain That flared three several times in seventy years; It cannot lift the silly hand again, Nor speak, nor sing, it neither sees nor hears. And muffled mourners put [...]
Posted on June 7th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Clay Shirky’s “Does The Internet Make You Smarter?” (The Wall Street Journal: 5 June 2010): In the history of print … complaints about distraction have been rampant; no less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained, “The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to [...]
Posted on June 5th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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Man, these are beatiful, evocative lyrics by Johnny Mercer: When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze and touches with her hand the summer trees, perhaps you’ll understand what memories I own. There’s a dance pavilion in the rain all shuttered down, a winding country lane all russet brown, a frosty window [...]
Posted on January 26th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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