Month: September 2013

  • Abraham Lincoln

    “The problem with internet quotes is that you can’t always depend on their accuracy”. – Abraham Lincoln -1864

  • Nice Try, Pharoah (520 BC – 380 AD)

    Once again we made a choice to go with a new guiding principle in our governance. This time it was Meritocracy. By rewarding those who do the best work, our citizens become happier. A gloriously large empire such as ours takes time to link up all its cities. In 360 BC the main Chinese road…

  • Mid-September Photojojo

    It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago. A break from the…

  • A Living Wage? What a concept!

    I heard about this on Boing Boing and then a month later on Marketplace: a sushi restaurant in New York that has eliminated tipping. Sushi Yasuda decided that instead of making people sit there at the end of the meal and agonize over how much to give the wait staff, they’ll just pay them the…

  • I often feel like the main character of this short film

  • Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) on Journalism as the Fourth Estate

    Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent…

  • Solo Empire, Pyramids, and Republic (1600 BC – 1300 BC / 2560 BC)

    If I may step out of the fictional narrative mode I’ve been using for a few weeks now, I have to say that it’s a shame these two games are my first Civ games in somewhere between 6 months and a year. Unfortunately, I didn’t listen to my brain for the first half dozen or…

  • Mid August to Mid September Photojojo

    It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

  • Survivorship Bias and the Brain

    Earlier in the year I came across an io9 article around 15 science fiction and fantasy novels that were rejected by publishers. The implication, of course, is what fools those publishers were – look at how many sales these books got and how how popular they remain today. Some of the books included The War…

  • This blew my mind

    But as you reduce the speed that the drive shaft is rotating, you lower the frequency of the sound it’s making. There comes a lower limit where the engine is making what Gordon calls “groan-y and moan-y” noises which people find unpleasant. The car sounds broken. So cars had to keep the engine’s RPM above…

  • My favorite Hitchhiker’s Guide Quote

    “And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all…

  • I Think You’re An Ignorant Savage and New Social Policies (2620 BC – 1960 BC / 3280 BC)

    A bearded leader of some so-called civilization met with our Beneficent Empress, Wu Zetian. At the time we did not know where his cities lay. Savages attempted to attack Beijing, but we destroyed them by bombarding them from the city gates. We shall soon have to send an army to destroy their camp. We finally…

  • Mid-August Photojojo

    It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago. In this installment: the…

  • Teenagers, Sex, School Sex Ed, and The Church

    When I became sexually active (which I’ll loosely define as when I started trying to kiss and touch girls), here’s what I’d been told: School: there are tons of diseases you can get so don’t have sex Parents: If you have sex, make sure you use a condom to protect from aforementioned diseases as well…

  • Science and Female Sex

    First of all, it’s a complete accident of timing that this post appears next to tomorrow’s post. I wrote tomorrow’s post about a month before I wrote this one. With that out of the way, let’s talk about one of the most interesting things I recently learned about the fairer sex and, well, sex. What…