Wondering what to do with your Sunday? I know just the very thing: complexity! Nature Physics has an insights issue on the subject (vol. 8 no. 1), and I have heard that the articles are free of charge until February 1, 2012 (the Nature journals are unfortunately otherwise quite fond of paywalls). There’s quite a [...]
Section 3.B; Equations 15 – 19 A few weeks ago I received an email asking about the article Computer generated holograms from three-dimensional meshes using an analytic light transport model by myself and three colleagues published in Applied Optics back in 2008. After taking a second look at the section in question ( 3.B) I [...]
The following essay was written October-November 2010 and presented to a creative writing group in Vancouver, B.C. I have since then edited the piece to its current form. For printing reasons it is in PDF format: Print_this_document.pdf .L
Publishing, on this side of the digital divide, has become not only simple but automatic. Messages are copied from storage to storage. Everything is a printing press, and we are all writers – producers of texts. But then, what does it mean to be read? Write something and put it on-line. Within hours it has [...]
So, here is one of those oops-I-haven’t-updated-the-webpage-the-last-few-months kind of rants. Usually try to avoid them – else they would be the majority of texts I would write. Anyway, a few months between posts are healthy, and probably more of a rule than an exception on these pages. As the year is new (2011) I thought [...]
I borrowed Shop Class as Soulcraft from the local library after seeing it displayed at book shops around town. At first I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read it. The wink, or rather play at Robert Pirsig classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, seemed a bit too obvious: the under-title is ‘An [...]
I was browsing the bookshop in Heathrow, Terminal 3 (almost the only thing worth doing on Heathrow – what you might rightly think is the most horrific airport in the world until you have been to O’Hare) when that feeling started creeping over me – it would be nice to read something by Bill Bryson [...]
What is it in the way Steven Brust writes that make it such a thrill for me to read his books? I have tried to figure this out. My best theory to date (as I have said before) is that it is how he builds the tales of that Dragaeran world of his. The feeling [...]
I have wanted to read Walden for a long time but I don’t know really why. Probably a result of literature classes in high school, or maybe it was from philosophy. Lately it has been calling out to me more than usual though, but I was putting it off until I would have a good [...]
If you thought that a book about bicycling would by default deal with the specifics of riding a bike, or perhaps the mechanical aspects, you should read David Byrne‘s Bicycle Diaries. Indeed Byrne uses his transportation as the seed from which a whole ecology of thoughts grow. Bicycle Diaries is a mix between a diary [...]
