Category Archives: Uncategorized

Christmas sentiments

By | December 24, 2010

Reading through my Google Reader backlog, I found this poem in a Thanksgiving post on Get Rich Slowly. I think it serves just as well as a Christmas sentiment, so here you go: Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann (1927) Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.… Read More »

Bill Buxton – NUI: What’s in a name?

By | November 3, 2010

Took a break from running my Cthulhu game tonight to go see a presentation by Bill Buxton for the Puget Sound SIGCHI entitled “Natural user interfaces: What’s in a name?”. Here are the key ideas I took away from it: Know your history – Bill talked a lot about history in design, how many of… Read More »

Hagakure – The Way of the Samurai

By | October 15, 2010

I’ve been reading the “Hagakure”, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo1. The name translates as “In the shadow of Leaves“, but you might know it as “The Book of the Samurai”. It’s a distillation of commentaries made by Yamamoto between 1709 and 1716, mostly about bushido, the samurai’s warrior code, but also about a fairly wide variety of… Read More »

Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act

By | September 15, 2010

Like many, I’m pretty incensed at the passing of the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act (CERRA) in the last 24 hours or so. For those who need context, please read these two posts, one from Idiot/Savant, the other from KiwiPolitico. Basically, the act allows the governor-general (at the request of Gerry Brownlee, a Minister… Read More »

“The TV Show”

By | December 18, 2009

A most excellent animation borrowed from Mark Chen’s blog Fourth walls crashing down left, right and center, with a kick-arse soundtrack. It gets particularly excellent when the worlds start to merge.

Mad Science

By | December 15, 2009

So, I really need this book: Mad Science – Experiments you can do at home, but probably shouldn’t. I feel that it would be of great relevance to my ongoing research into unnecessarily hazardous fun.

Suspended humiliation

By | October 8, 2009

I just want to quickly articulate the concept of suspended humiliation. Like suspended terror, where one is not presently terrified but well aware of the likelihood of a terrifying experience occurring at any moment, suspended humiliation is the sense that one might be called out and humiliated at any second. It’s the feeling you might… Read More »

On Procrastination, the iPhone, and Grinding.be

By | September 1, 2009

Clearly I’ve got work to do, because I’m procrastinating with blog posts. #include<speculative comments about motivation> Interesting piece about the futurist implications of the promising new technologies on the horizon becoming corporate controlled walled-gardens, much as everything is now. It’s clear that some level of profit driven development is good, as it spurs innovation, but… Read More »

SD Conf. – VIII – Sterman et al – Climate Change modelling with C-ROADS

By | August 4, 2009

Notes from one of the closing plenaries at the 27th System Dynamics Conference:: Using C-ROADS to Support Analysis of International Climate Change Proposals by Andrew Jones, John Sterman, Thomas Fiddaman, Travis Franck, Elizabeth Sawin Following on nicely from the presentation by Moxnes, in this presentation John Sterman talked about climate change, modelling, and decision making.… Read More »