One of the sweet ironies of my time at SILS was that I entered with a long-term interest in personal information management, yet I never took a single PIM class nor did any research on it. Another of my long-term interests is human memory and my personal library has always had lots of memory books, starting with …
Author Archives: brownstudy7975
Science must leave beauty at the margins of experience as it pursues truth. Art must leave truth at the margins as it pursues beauty. In the end, science will hopefully produce knowledge that helps us to live more intelligently. Art will produce works that help us experience life more fully. But neither the art nor …
Review: “The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter”
Over the 2010 Christmas vac, I took six books with me but read only one: the 700-page The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter. The book is a compilation of emails exchanged between Doctor Who producer/head-writer/show-runner Russell T. Davies — the man we have to thank for the series’ 2005 reboot and reimagining — and Benjamin …
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This is why my favorite quote on writing comes not from a book about writing but from a book about meditation—The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise by Karlfried Graf von Dürkheim. Though he wrote about Zen meditation practice (and unfortunately in a sexist way), most of what he says applies to the …
Panhandlers
On my old blog, I devoted a long post to thinking about moral and ethical responses to panhandling. One economist suggested only giving money to those who are not asking for money; a playwright suggests giving when you feel charitable and holding back when you don’t. I was reminded of that old post by this Yahoo …
Review: Doctor Who, S7, Eps. 1-5
I have thoroughly enjoyed showrunner/head writer Steven Moffat‘s fresh take on Doctor Who, and I’ve equally enjoyed Matt Smith’s take on the character and the deepening relationship between the Doctor and his new companions, Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill). Part of the excitement may have been being in on Seasons 5 and 6 as …
Having fun with Wikipedia
Wikipedia has become such a daily part of my online life (like email — remember life before email? Anyone?), that it’s both startling and a little thrilling to find outré articles or even stray sentences and paragraphs that make me do a double-take and read them again to make sure I read them right. There’s something …
Software: MacBreakz and Joe Ergo
You. You who are reading this blog post. You have already spent an ungodly number of hours sitting down, hunched forward, staring unblinking into this screen. Do we really need your computer to remind you that you need a break every now and then? Sadly, yes. There are many software-based solutions out there for Mac …
A shortcut for Googling the current web site
I use a lot of bookmarklets to make my browsing faster and more convenient. I use them to stop blinking text, subscribe to RSS feeds, post to this blog, hide all images on a page, and so on. One of the most important bookmarklets I add to my browser is one I found at MacWorld that …
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Assorted links
Will tablets kill PCs? Daniel Lemire thinks tablets more than satisfy the mainstream (non-techie) user’s needs. Jeff Atwood opines about his spiffy new ultraportable laptop, which is everything he wanted in a laptop 10 years ago. A great animation showing the secret law of page design harmony (scroll down). The oldest self-help book: a 19th-century American …
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