I keep recommending in-person that people read Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, so I ought to write about it too. I describe it, tongue-in-cheek, as a secular self-help book. Gawande, Michael Lewis, …
Variation: Google Platitude. It analyzes your recent SMSes, your emails, and the galvanic response of your skin to choose a cliché relevant to your mental state, and displays that to you and your circle of …
We learn from surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations. I recently had a surprise that taught me about my own competence. In response, I wrote a new Geek Feminism post: "On competence, confidence, pernicious socialization, recursion, …
At my first WisCon, Ellen Kushner's aid led to a new shirt in my wardrobe. It's dark and velour and has a mild V-neck. Leonard calls it my T'Pol shirt, after the Vulcan from Star …
Am barely back from Boston. In old newspaper speak, "slugs" were phrases referring to stories, unique identifiers a few words long, just for that day. I have slugs rattling around, stories to be told or …
Leonard & I are watching Battlestar Galactica from the beginning -- we'd started watching at season 3 while it was airing. Leonard says that the worst sin on BSG is not doing your job. Maybe …
In India the number of institutions and organizations installing computers is growing at a rapid rate. This is a welcome sign. More and more of our workers in factories and offices will now turn the …
Asheville, North Carolina, is a radiant place to visit. The gorgeous downtown is the most walkable I've ever seen, even a vegetarian can't help but eat very well, and the beer is tremendous. (My tasting …
I started off 2011 by making friends laugh, learning more Unix and git and Python, reading that great David Foster Wallace essay for the first time, taking a nice long train trip next to a …
Now that my mom's situation has settled and I don't think I'll have to make big sudden India trips in 2011, I'm working on my travel schedule for next year. I expect whatever new job …
