Packstation awaits

Got an e-mail saying I had a new package at Packstation. Went to the Post Office with my card, typed in my ID, tapped the screen a few time...

hard not to love

Could hypnosis be a cure for hair loss? The placebo study for a hair growth drug called Propecia is interesting, because it shows that the b...

that clinking clanking sound

Came across the blog of a bookseller in Boulder. Back in December he had a post about trying to cut his orders by 20%. Wrote: The very fir...

why isn't life more like Unicode?

It's 12:03pm in Berlin. The sun is shining. Cars whiz up and down Hauptstrasse outside this café. Wherever Randall Munroe may be it i...

time warp

The worst thing about living in Germany. It's now 1.06 am in Berlin. By OUR time, the Wednesday xkcd should be out. But it's not. We...

found in translation?

OK, I don't get it. Every once in a while I check out Wyatt Mason's blog, Sentences, over at Harpers. Mason is consistently happy t...

OH MM!

Owen Hatherley's Militant Modernism can be pre-ordered on Amazon for the staggeringly paltry price of £7.49, £2.50 less than the cover...

somebody

To my mind, and faithful to Frost, these three Frank Bascombe novels, along with everything else I’ve ever written, have been largely born o...

survival analysis using R

Survival Analysis A great many studies in statistics deal with deaths or with failures of components: they involve the numbers of deaths, th...

wie es eigentlich ist

If you measure the same thing twice you will get two different answers. If you measure the same thing on different occasions you will get di...

books tomorrow, books yesterday

My books used to be distributed as follows: 10% chez moi. 5% in my mother's house in Chevy Chase (where they ended up after a disastrou...

where will it all begin

James Harkin in the Observer on cyber-realism in film Stanley Kubrick 's 1956 film The Killing follows a prickly collection of gangsters...

stop beckett

When, in 1984, The Times asked Samuel Beckett for his New Year’s resolutions and hopes, he responded with a brief telegram: “resolutions...

OH on my old neighbourhood

Owen Hatherley on Tower Bridge: Well-known Venturite architect comments on the curious puritanism of the common critiques of this gigantic c...

Looking at Data course

Courtesy of Flowing Data : Hadley Wickham (creator of the R package ggplot2) will be giving a 2-day course in Washington, DC, Looking at Dat...

Morrrrrrrrrre R

Kevin Connolly, author of the terrific Excel plot on language learning, has just send me a link to a MetaFilter page, Rrrrrgh , with many li...

Oulipo

Oulipo in NY, an event sponsored by the French Embassy: The Oulipo, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, is a collective of writers and mathe...

couldn't

Dearest William, . . . I mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the Golden B[owl]) to try to produce some uncanny form ...

contract theory

Ultimately though the single most limiting factor on deal negotiations is each side's willingness to actually read and understand the te...

inforr

I decided to ride my bike to the gym the other day; it wasn't locked up outside. 'Oh,' I thought, 'it must have been stolen....

the eternal flaneur

Peter, how many become "too many", and for whom? I can assure you I read at least one book per week, and I listen to music and wri...

alien alert

a reader writes Thought you might like to know in case of future nuts like myself asking you about how to work in the UK--as of, I think, su...

NEA

The deadline for the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship has been extended from March 5 to March 17. If you're e...

meanwhile

I get an email from Ben Hinchliffe asking if I would be interested in a year's free trial of Inference for R, a plug-in which allows you...

GPO

Owen Hatherley in the New Statesman on the film unit of the General Post Office: Although they were very different from each other in their ...

let x = x

Andrew Gelman drew my attention to his latest post on different kinds of suspense. Wrote a looooooooong comment which turned out to have mi...