May 2013
4 posts
2 tags
Sam just came back from seeing the British Museum traveling exhibit on the Egyptians at the Art & Science Museum here in Singapore, so we were discussing mummies.
I told him my father told me that Maine paper mills used to use old cotton mummy wrappings to make paper.
Luckily Wikipedia was able to provide some confirmation….
“Dard Hunter is a well-known paper researcher and...
2 tags
April 2013
1 post
2 tags
The following is about my friend Julia’s father….
It’s an excerpt from The New Statesman as it celebrates its centenary as a publication:
One person who is still with us is Norman Mackenzie, who joined the NS as assistant editor in 1943 after being recommended to the editor Kingsley Martin by Harold Laski of the LSE. Norman, who is 91, had been forced to leave the RAF because...
March 2013
1 post
3 tags
“Reader was made for absurdly ambitious readers. It’s designed for people like...”
– Farewell, Dear Google Reader : The New Yorker
I’m going with Reeder now, thanks to Maggie. Because I still intend to read everything…. eventually.
February 2013
3 posts
1 tag
The long slog | Way of the Duck by Buster Benson →
Introspection. Finding yourself.
Exploration. Finding everything else.
Goal-making. Based on values found during introspection.
Strategy-making. Hypotheses about how to achieve your goals.
Experimentation. Trying things. Playing. Iterating.
Finding fit. Person/universe fit.
Slogging. Executing. Doing the work.
As Buster* says, the ideal is to do all these modes of “work” in...
On Advertising: Maria Popova - have you made $1M... →
on-advertising:
Maria Popova is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, regular author for The Atlantic, and was named to the Fast Company 100 Most Creative in Business list. I let her know I was a regular reader of her site when I sent her an email a few months ago after she wrote an article about the dangers of…
Ah, it makes me think my library could be making money via Amazon ads — if I...
5 tags
January 2013
2 posts
5 tags
Plane Companions Worth Reading
Long flights aren’t usually very enjoyable, but I had two in my holiday travels that were fascinating.
I had stumbled across a blog - The Ribbon Farm - before leaving, and the author, Venkatesh Rao, very kindly provides an easy way (via readlists.com which I”m now using) to download sets of his blog posts to epub format - see his For New Readers.
So I just loaded up my iBooks...
2 tags
December 2012
7 posts
2 tags
20 apps to help you keep your New Year resolutions... →
Here are the ones that are free and work with iOS/Apple:
http://21habit.com/ (earn your own money back)
http://www.livifi.com/learn_more (choose from 40 lifestyle goals)
http://aherk.com/ (self-blackmail)
http://lifetick.com/ (set goals & measure progress)
http://www.43things.com/ (the old classic 43 things)
http://www.joesgoals.com/ (simple one-page goal tracking)
...
1 tag
3 tags
1 tag
Chris Van Allsburg | The Polar Express →
Perhaps Christmas morning isn’t the time to share this, but I have been meaning to post about my excitement when I discovered that professor Mary Galbraith eventually did publish her theories about the Nazi echoes evident in Chris Van Allsburg’s famous picture book (forget the movie), The Polar Express. I remember being fascinated by her posts on CHILD_LIT back in 2001.
How’s...
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
“Peter the Great turned out to be too epic a subject even for Tolstoy. (“I am in...”
– Is “Anna Karenina” a Love Story? : The New Yorker
Ah, I love hearing the echos of truth from the past. Some things never change.
November 2012
12 posts
1 tag
Is This Grade School a 'Cult'? (And Do Parents... →
You may have heard of Steiner or Waldorf education. One of those things you do need to place on the spectrum.
Sierra went to a Waldorf pre-school in California, so you as younger cousins were inevitably shaped by my awareness of it through Vicki.
Remember those cool wooden clips we had - which you would use to create forts and spaces using silky colorful scarves and cloths? (In a true Waldorf...
2 tags
Offshore companies and the boom in villas on... →
A familiar set of characters to us…. Phuket, BVI, and companies that help set up offshore companies (cf. your gap year work, Sam).
Read and reflect.
3 tags
Watch(via Post-it Note Diaries: 20 Stories of Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps, and Everyday Adventure)
The Starlee Kine post on the Nieman Foundation site also led me to this - which I have just ordered - and can’t wait to read.
2 tags
“This American Life was just starting out and someone told (them) about me and...”
– “The Power of Storytelling,” Part 3: Starlee Kine on story forms, Mike Sager on suspending disbelief and Alex Tizon on writing your own story – Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard
Max sent me a link to Kottke talking about Truman Capote interviewing...
3 tags
“Growing up, assimilating the wisdom of the past, is in great part learning how...”
– Father Walter Ong, S.J., from The Presence of the Word. This extraordinarily provocative suggestion has only partly been followed up by scholarship. So much more remains to be done. (via ayjay)
2 tags
“Prosecutors in Washington and Colorado have announced they are dropping cases,...”
– Give Pot a Chance - NYTimes.com
There you go — all the states we live in are being sensible…. (ignoring that Iowa reference above)
1 tag
Watch(via Muse: The Brain-Sensing Headband | Indiegogo)
A headband to help you monitor your own mind? They have already raised $30k more than their initial goal of $150k. If we contribute, they say we’ll get a few early apps out of them…. e.g., brain-training?
Doesn’t this fall under the Quantified Self, Maggie?
1 tag
“Political intelligence is as distinct and intuitive a gift as any of the other...”
– Obama’s Political Intelligence : The New Yorker
Adam Gopnik, astute as always….
5 tags
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the... →
An LSE podcast from the summer that I just got around to listening to…. Now I have to get Pankaj Mishra’s book.
Perfect after me just discovering the joy of “The Singapore Grip”. How could I not have read this novel before? Brilliant economic and political commentary while dead funny — and yet sobering — re the British empire in Malaya & Singapore at...
October 2012
9 posts
3 tags
2 tags
“Colorado is the developed world’s only regulated for-profit cannabis market, and...”
– Will Pot Barons Cash In on Legalization? - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
Thinking of you in Denver, Max.
2 tags
“We mostly get that life is mostly neither deep diving or jet skiing, to pick up...”
– Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus? | Culture | Religion Dispatches
(posted because Max and I continue to discuss Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows…. and because I always feel obliged to counter arguments of exceptionalism… there’s something so grounded about the view that...
2 tags
Gawker, Reddit, Free Speech and Such – Whatever →
Sam keeps me posted about what’s going on in the realms of politics and big online issues, like the brouhaha over at Reddit. So it was interesting to see a quote from this blog post come up in my Tumblr feed.
Reading the blog post itself, I highlighted these two quotes:
The issue is people being assholes while anonymous because they don’t believe it’s ever going to get back to them. This...
1 tag
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
Stand-Up Comedy Without the Stand-Up. Or the... →
Go to iTunes, browse the comedy-podcast section and you’ll see them all hiding out there, like subtenants in an illegal loft building of show business: the stand-up comics with their podcasts. There are the alpha dogs like Christopher Titus (“Christopher Titus Podcast”); the antic radio theater of “The Pod F. Tompkast” from Paul F. Tompkins; Jimmy Pardo’s boasting, double-negatively, of being...
September 2012
4 posts
1 tag
3 tags
Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for... →
A long, fascinating article — but the company it’s discussing — Valve — is more fascinating.
I would start with the Handbook for New Employees (PDF), which outlines the “fearless adventure in knowing what to do when no one’s telling you want to do.”
Yes, Valve functions with no management structure at all. Totally flat.
You have to figure out what to...
3 tags
Singapore's Rising Tech Industry Draws Expat... →
National Public Radio (NPR) - All Tech Considered - just did a segment (4 min 13 sec) on expats involved in technology in Singapore. Even mentions doing software out of Vietnam. I’d never heard of Perx, a customer loyalty app.
At a coffee shop near his office, Roth demonstrates howthe business works, by buying a couple of lattes. After paying for the coffee, the cashier shows Roth a...
2 tags
Anthropology is the worst college major for being... →
You have probably already read this blog post, Maggie….
It’s official. Kiplinger declares anthropology is the worst college major for your career. We’re #1!
From Florida Governor Scott’s we don’t need anthropologists to Frank Bruni singling out anthropology in the New York Times, I’m tired of playing defense. We’ve worked hard to get to #1. Anthropology is the worst college major for...
August 2012
10 posts
3 tags
2 tags
Morning sickness: Can more sex help? - Slate... →
This is an article I have told several people about… and now that the stupid comments of US Senator Todd Akin about rape have come out, I’m wondering if he read the same article and mis-absorbed it.
Gallup’s evolutionary reinterpretation of pregnancy sickness is quite new—so new, in fact, that it hasn’t been put to a test. But at the 2012 meeting of the Northeastern Evolutionary...
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
