(In reverse chronological order:)
Shogun, James Clavell. It’s not a bad story, really; it’s extremely detailed, and he does a good idea of giving an impression of 16th century Japan. I just couldn’t get past the fact that he absolutely butchered the Japanese language, which he scattered throughout for a well-intentioned but disastrous attempt at verisimilitude. [...]
Aside from assembling a fairly complete and easy to use webcomic scraper, my thoughts recently have been on such issues as:
Is it possible for a mathematical point, a singularity, to rotate? My opinion: no. Reasoning: Rotation requires an axis to rotate about, and a distance from that axis. A point on the axis of rotation [...]
As fate would have it, my first apartment disaster ever happens when I’m in a foreign country whose language I barely speak. The short of it is that during the night, for no reason I discern, the hose connecting my washing machine to a faucet in the wall fell off, leaving the faucet blasting water. [...]
I read a lot on vacations.
So I go to my public library, and cruise around, picking books that look interesting by authors I’ve never heard about. I do this because I’ve already read the library’s entire stock of books by authors I have heard about, because I’ve been frequenting this library since before I was [...]
Gah. Time to decorate the Christmas tree.
This year, I got home from school, and it was all set up, with only a string of white lights as decoration. I really like it that way; especially compared with the way we traditionally decorate it: 20 pounds of ornaments, tinsel, and electronics, so that you have to [...]