Author: Mike Garrity

The Clinton Tapes 1

The Clinton Tapes

I’m not sure whether I’m ready to tackle Taylor Branch’s 700 page account of the conversations he recorded with Bill Clinton during his presidency, but David Runciman’s review in the London Review of Books...

2009 in Ideas 0

2009 in Ideas

The New York Times annual Year in Ideas section is out today. That’s always worth checking out. As their intro says: … we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of...

DIY Film 1

DIY Film

You may think that digital cameras have killed off film, but it’s not that simple. Check out the following two projects. You may already have heard of The Impossible Project. This is a group...

HM 1

HM

Do you know who HM was? He was one of the most important patients in the history of cognitive neuropsychology. In 1953 he had surgery for epilepsy. The surgery was successful in the sense...

Sapolsky’s 2009 Class Day Lecture 0

Sapolsky’s 2009 Class Day Lecture

Robert Sapolsky is always fun to listen to. He gave the class day lecture at Stanford last spring. It’s a neat talk about what makes us humans the uniquerest (his word, not mine) animal....

The Rosetta Clock 0

The Rosetta Clock

Here’s an applet I wrote that draws clocks in 5 different numeral systems. From the top row down, they are: Binary Skew Binary Ternary Balanced Ternary Decimal The first column is the hours, the...

Latest CBO Report 0

Latest CBO Report

The Congressional Budget Office released their estimates of what individuals would pay for health insurance under the Senate Bill. I’m sure you’ve seen this reported in the news. It usually has a headline like...

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The Royal Society @ 350

The Royal Society turns 350 next year. They’ve set up a cool website as part of their celebration. It contains a timeline which lets you scroll through and see some of the more important...

Skew Binary 1

Skew Binary

Remember my earlier post about balanced ternary? Well, another odd numbering system has been in the news recently. Randall Munroe just published a collection of XKCD comics. The page numbers start out like this:...

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SharkBite

This weekend, I needed to move a pipe to add a hookup for the icemaker in a new fridge. The pipe’s in a cramped wall between the downstairs shower and the alcove the fridge...