TinkerX

“Winter’s Tale” is my second favorite novel of all time. And Mark Helprin’s other novels are wonderful, too. But I hate loving his work when the guy is such a, well… dick.
I’ve known forever that we held different political views. He was a speechwriter for Bob Dole, among other conservative activities. That’s cool. I can [...]

Another in my series that examines the rise of “hunting” behavior in our connected, mediated, informationalized world.
An op-ed piece in the NYT titled, “End the university as we know it,” seemed, to me, to have lots of hints of my ongoing, multi-post rant about how we need more hunting behaviors in our current world, and [...]

n. The study of the neuroscience behind magic tricks and illusions.

I don’t know if you remember the (thankfully) short-lived Fox version of “The Daily Show,” “The Half Hour News Hour.” You shouldn’t. It was awful. If you’d like a sample, try this on for size:
Yep. Nearly four minutes for one, prolonged sexual harassment gag. “Hey, look! That pretty lady is harassing that man. He clearly [...]

I was never a huge “Golden Girls” fan, but she was funny as heck on “All in the Family.” And she did great stand-up.
Sorry to see you go, Bea.

A few weeks back, I posted my favorite statistics puzzle… and Justin Horn is the winner of the, er… figure it out and post the right answer in the comments… contest. Sort of.
Not really a contest, but Justin got it right.
You can do the gag yourself with cards. Take three cards; two “2’s” and a [...]

Awesome. Just awesome. This (and IMDB) are the real reasons for teh interwebs.

I had a discussion recently with a friend about the difference between truth and fact, and it occurs to me that this has an important place in my religious beliefs. I think that something can be “true,” while not being a “fact.”
For example, many of the morals espoused in fables seem, to me, to be [...]

I have mixed feelings about Seth Godin. On the one hand, he’s clearly a very smart, funny, creative guy with lots of good ideas about media, technology, marketing and social systems. On the other (and he has this in common with many pundits), he often says either: a) obvious things in a fun/smart way that [...]

If you’re not familiar with Smashing Magazine, you need to check it out. If you’re a designer, artist, photographer, or just love any of those things… you REALLY need to RSS it. They have a ton of lessons, collections of free fonts/icons/stuff, links to tutorials by theme, general “how-to’s” on all-things-graphic, and, on Mondays, inspiration.
On [...]

Language can be very powerful. Well, duh. We are moved by words every day of our life, governments have risen and fallen because of good writing, and people have died for their belief in one set of words over another.
Why, then, do we put up with such bad language from those we pay (sometimes indirectly) [...]

How many times have you heard the term “nuclear powered toaster” in your life? Maybe once? I think you’re lying. I don’t think you ever have. I know that, until last Monday, I never had either.
Then, in the space of 72 hours, I heard it twice.
The first time was in the book, “The Pig Scrolls,” [...]

Just signed up (a few days ago, anyway) for the service Lala. This is an online music service similar, at first glance, to Pandora, which I have now loved for years. Lala, though, may be my new best friend. Pandora plays you a kind of personalized, web radio station based on songs, artists or genres [...]

So I’m thinking about the difference between Cirque du Soleil and Starbucks. I went, along with my wife, son and dad, to see the Cirque show Saltimbanco last weekend. As always, it was great. Not their best show (which is Corteo, imho… of the four we’ve seen), but certainly great.
At one point, during the show, [...]

I haven’t blogged much recently. Partly I blame WordPress crashing a few times and being busier at work than normal. Partly I blame the self-censoring mini-me who lives in my brain. Partly I blame not really having a theme. Not that I’ve ever had a theme, but it couldn’t hurt. With no theme, nothing seems [...]

Hmmm… thought I had it all worked out with the WordPress thing. Not so much. Trying again.
I begin to suspect bloglins.