I’m about halfway through Jo Walton’s Among Others, a fantasy novel set in Britain in 1979, featuring an unhappy teenage girl who finds relief in reading science fiction and fantasy, and becoming involved with SF fandom. It’s getting rave reviews from a lot of the usual sources, and the concept sounded interesting, so I grabbed… Continue reading The Past Is Another Country, and Vice Versa
Month: January 2011
Replacement Tablet PC Options?
I have a Lenovo thinkPad X61 tablet that I use for a bunch of things, but mainly for working on the book in places that aren’t my home or office on campus, and lecturing. I do use the tablet features, primarily for marking up my lecture slides (I have PowerPoint slides that I use for… Continue reading Replacement Tablet PC Options?
Links for 2011-01-26
slacktivist: Anti-Missourian best-sellers “When some polarizing figure publishes a book, the sales of that book do provide one useful way of gauging the popularity of that figure or that point of view.[…] But say some less polarizing figure also publishes a book taking the opposite view and it doesn’t sell anywhere near as well. Is… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-26
Entry Points and Resource Allocation
Over in locked LiveJournal land, I read a post talking about computer science education, and how it’s biased against people who aren’t already tech geeks coming into college: Taking an intro CS course if you don’t already know how to program is like taking intro Spanish without ever having taken it in high school –… Continue reading Entry Points and Resource Allocation
Links for 2011-01-25
Swans on Tea » Blogging: You’re Doing it Wrong! (Part III) “Completely unrelated to this was a session called “How Can We Maintain High Journalism Standards on the Web,” and it was attended mostly by the professionals. Most of the session focused on ethics standards and disclosure and avoiding the appearance of bias, which means… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-25
The Quota System
They say that, in writing, you should steal from the best. Or, failing that, whoever’s convenient. Like, say, John Scalzi. I made a little headway on the book-in-progress over the weekend, which is nice. The problem is, the words I wrote on Saturday were the first new text generated since Tuesday the previous week. Not… Continue reading The Quota System
Fun in the Snow
We’ve had three pretty decent snow storms here recently, which is nice. Unfortunately, the middle one included a good deal of ice, so we now have a thick layer of snow, covered by a half-inch of ice, with another several inches of snow on top of that. Which makes getting around quite the chore. However,… Continue reading Fun in the Snow
Links for 2011-01-24
Scientists discover snowflake identical to one which fell in 1963 | NewsBiscuit “‘It’s one of the last remaining challenges known to science and we’ve cracked it at last,’ said lead researcher, Professor Kenneth Libbrecht. ‘The team will soon disband to pursue other major scientific challenges, such as the unresolved toast-butter conundrum, and whether or not… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-24
De-Clutter the Internet!
Links for 2011-01-23
Food for Thinkers: The Rise of White People Food – Food – GOOD “White People Food has nothing to do with the relative melanin level of the person eating it. There are plenty of black and Hispanic foodies happily gorging themselves. They, too, in this case, are White People. And it has nothing to do… Continue reading Links for 2011-01-23