David Friedman is a very interesting thinker. Here’s a talk he gave at Google in 2008 about his recent book Future Imperfect.
I came across an unfamiliar word in the translation of Don Quixote I’ve been reading: guerdon. (Walter Starkie was fond of archaism.) According to the Oxford American Dictionary, it means ‘a reward or recompense.’ This isn’t terribly exciting, but the etymology is.
Get this: guerdon comes, via Old French, from the Medieval [...]
Google is celebrating Stravinsky’s birthday today with the following logo:
I was able to guess the occasion from the image–the firebird gave it away–but is a caterpillar and a bunch of daisies really what leaps to mind when you hear The Rite of Spring? Come one people: it’s a ballet about ritual human sacrifice. [...]
I love Zooborns as much as the next guy, don’t get me wrong, but why don’t full-grown cute and or awesome animals get any screen time these days? To redress this great wrong, and to give Joe a source of animal pictures to share before Skylar does, I present a recurring segment: Eat This, [...]
I no longer own a television, which is probably for the best. But sometimes I really want to sit back and be entertained. ABC offers their full lineup in high definition on the ABC Full Episode Player, which I’ve been using to keep up with Lost for a few months now. But [...]
From the life of Pompey (very end of [25]):
The people were furious at this suggestion [that Pompey should not be sole commander against the pirates] and, so it is said, raised such a shout that a raven which was flying over the forum was stunned by it and fell down into the crowd. [...]
Given how often I think: “if only I could go back and take linear algebra and multivariable calculus again given what I know now, think how much intuitive understanding I’d get out of it!” I have no excuse not to use Academic Earth to do precisely this. And it’s so much more fun that [...]
A college education is many things to many people: a chance to expand the mind, gain employable skills, make the transition to adulthood, have a good time. But let’s abstract for a moment. Taking a college course in subject X is widely considered a way to:
bring to me a certain level of [...]
Caesar and the pirates (Plutarch’s Caesar [1] and [2]):
[Caesar] stayed for a short time with the king and then on his voyage back was captured near the island of Pharmacusa by some of the pirates who even at that time controlled the seas with their larges fleets of ships and innumerable smaller craft.
First, when the [...]
