Author Archives: brownstudy7975

Spar supermarket pins from Lisbon, PortugalTesla Electronics pins from Prague, the Czech RepublicChairman Mao pins from the People’s Republic of China From Random Travels

I thought this was too shocking to be true but the other system admins confirmed it – Google officially wants to be the next god of the universe. The datacenter that houses over a hundred of our servers also caters to some of Google’s servers, and apparently Google also owns part of the building or …

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I can’t seem to get enough of them. “Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe” is an early SF story about flying saucer kidnap, physics, and God. It was also the title story of my first collection. 1 December 2007: What is it about flying saucers?

David Lance Goines started out as a student of classical languages, reading ancient texts in the original Greek and Latin.  After being arrested and expelled from the university for participating in student protests in the 1960s, Goines found work as an apprentice to a nearby printer, “becoming in the fullness of time a journeyman of …

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Roger Shattuck (1923-2005) on how to read Proust: I believe it is best to approach the reading of Proust as if it were a kind of long-term cure, or an initiation to unfamiliar mental and physical movements evolved by another culture. A steady, leisurely pace, without the tension of fixed deadlines, serves best. Certain habits …

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Design by Paola Ecchavaria Saw this on the new books table last night. It’s the latest in this year’s mini-trend: the “book-on-a-book-cover” approach (also seen on The Last Novel and House of Happy Endings). It’s really quite beautiful and elegant in person, and I’ll leave it to those more zoologically inclined to determine if the …

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Hit Comics #23Hit Comics #23

1. How economists lose weight2. Does it matter if leaders are female? 3. Cory Doctorow on what is wrong with Facebook 4. Gretchen Rubin on Inner Economist and how to get people to tell the truth Assorted links

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I’m making progress. I won’t claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so …

Continue reading “Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups”

Tuitio Fidei et Obsequium Pauperum Founded in the 11th century as a lay religious order of hospital workers who observed vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta (variously known as: Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem; the Soverign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of… Tombs of the …

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