Review
gregladen | September 17, 2017I love the The Mathematics Calendar 2018.
Math Calendar sample days
It has an equation or other statement about math for every day, often linked to that day (like, the January 13th entry is "the sixth prime number"). Some entries are little mat quizzes for you to fugue out. Some are funny jokes, like the entry for Thanksgiving (any guesses as to what that might be? Hint: It is a formula.) The level of difficulty of understanding the reference or solving the problem ranges from suitable for a smart 7 year old (Huxley has figured some out) up through college level. Also, the picture that…
gregladen | June 4, 2017Several weeks ago I tried once again, after many prior ill fated attempts over several years, to get a device that would play music, audio books, and be a radio. The audiobook part wasn't the most important part, but the ability to play various audio files AND act as a radio AND not be a big giant thing I had to strap to a body part AND be sturdy were all important. This latest attempt has gone very well, and I now have a device that is very nice and therefore, I figured you'd want one too.
This time I tried the AGPtEK M20S 8GB Mini MP3 Player(Expandable Up to 64GB), Lossless Sound Touch…
gregladen | May 9, 2017Evil Speaks: Warriors and Watchers Saga by S. Woffington is a new scifi/fantasy novel with an interesting twist.
If there is a Bechdel Test for ableism, it would pass.
This is an interesting story written for youthful readers (see publisher's summary below) that is well written and mostly devoid of the usual plot holes we find in this genre, but where the characters represent a range of non normative persona.
Benny, fifteen, is solitary by circumstance more than choice: he counts each move to a new town as “a life.” He’s on Life Number Seven. His last! He plans to run away from his…
milhayser | November 21, 2016The new film Arrival, based on a story by Ted Chiang, is unlike most any science fiction blockbuster at the box office these days. It's a tense, thoughtful, somber meditation on the human condition and the nature of a higher reality. In many ways, it is a religious film that deals with eschatology (the end times or judgment day).
Unlike Chad Orzel, I haven't read the source material, so I experienced the film with fresh eyes. I was immediately reminded of Philip K. Dick and his real-life experience of being 'touched by an angel.' Dick, both a life-long Christian and prolific author of…
gregladen | October 25, 2016Lenovo makes two Phablets that are similar, the 4G and the 4G plus. The latter is not bigger (in fact, it is a little smaller) but rather, has higher specs all around, making it a fairly expensive device. But the Lenovo PHAB 4G Phablet (regular) is practically free and is actually rather Phabulous.
OK, well, not fee, but about 170 bucks or so, except now closer to $130 from Gearbest. (As far as I know this is the only place to get it. Gearbest has a very large selection of Lenovo phones and phablets, as well as a high diversity of generally very affordable tablets.)
So, I tried out the…
milhayser | August 30, 2016The centerpiece of the latest Star Trek film is a bright celestial bauble, a tremendous re-imagining of a Federation starbase, named Yorktown.
Yorktown is on the scale of a Death Star, but instead of incinerating worlds it is presumably dedicated to a lot of peace-mongering bureaucracy and some very nice apartment buildings. To quote Memory Alpha, "Yorktown's structure consisted of a matrix of city-sized interlocking rings and radiating arms enclosed in a spherical translucent surface; Enterprise doctor Leonard McCoy likened it to a giant 'snow globe' in space." At the center of it all the…
gregladen | August 25, 2016The ePaper Kindle is back in my life. I started out with one (the original model), then moved on to using tablets and phones and computers and stuff to read ebooks. Then, I got a Kindle Fire (see this discussion), and that was nice.
But I wanted an ePaper reading surface for all the reasons people tend to discuss. It is more like paper, perhaps does not have the down sides of constantly staring at a light emitting screen, etc.
There is an ePaper kindle that is under $80 (with the non obtrusive special offers on the sleep screen) that has very long battery time, holds a gazillion books,…
gregladen | May 13, 2016I'm just passing this information on, I've not handled this device. But the price and performance seem like such a sweet spot that I am compelled to tell you about it. Let me know in the comments if you have experience with this item.
The Dragon Touch M8 2016 Edition 8 inch Quad Core Tablet is a competitively priced high quality tablet, with excellent reviews. It costs 80 bucks. A while back, I asked if you should buy a $50 Kindle Fire Tablet. I concluded that maybe you should, because it is cheap and if the main thing you are doing with your tablet is grazing your Amazon Kindle booklist…
gregladen | January 16, 2016One mouse to rule them all
I had previously reviewed the Logitech Ultrathin Touch Mouse, suggesting it as a replacement for the Apple Magic Mouse. Now, I've tried it on my Linux machine (don't know why that took so long). It turns out to work very well, better than most, possibly all, mice I've used.
One's mouse is a very personal thing, and everyone is going to have a potentially different opinion about what the best mouse is. The Ultrathin is designed to work with laptops/notebooks because it is small, and it is assumed that everything you use with such a portable device must be small.…
gregladen | January 3, 2016This is a review of the Kindle Fire with 7" Display and Special Offers by Amazon. In short, this is a tablet/eReader that a lot of people will want, as long as certain needs are extant and certain expectations understood. I have one, and I'm very happy with it. It would take very little convincing for me to get a second one.
One of the main reasons to give serious thought to getting one of these is the fact that it will put you back a mere fifty bucks.
Don't expect a brilliant tablet for fifty bucks. You may want a nice full blown Android tablet, or if you prefer, an iPad. That will cost…
gregladen | July 9, 2015Problems with the Apple Magic Mouse
I had been using the stock Apple Magic Mouse on an iMac. The right click often didn’t work properly. Also, selecting and dragging files in Finder, or the Finder replacement I use (PathFinder) often failed. I figured the former was related to the mouse but assumed the latter was related to the OS. That turns out to not be the case.
The Magic Mouse will run on any AA batteries but if you don’t want to change the batteries a lot and have other problems, you need to use super-duper electronic device batteries. I think I was spending at least $50 a year on…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2015The final third of Stephen Jarvis’s upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick continues in the same rather kaleidoscopic fashion as before. The asides and Chinese boxes are innumerable. We never do get an important female character. The frame story is never developed much. In fact, the book only really has Robert Seymour the artist and Charles Dickens the writer, plus innumerable minor characters, and an agenda.
Jarvis's main points with the novel are that a) Seymour deserves credit as co-creator of Pickwick's first two or three chapters, b) Dickens deserves blame for dissembling and not sharing…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2015Stephen Jarvis's upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick is a sprawling book, in terms both of its 800-page girth and of its structure. I've read the first third and decided to write about it now before I forget the details.
There's a present-day frame story about the narrator writing the book, commissioned by an old man obsessed with Late Georgian London's printmaking and periodicals. This story only adds up to a few pages strewn through the first third, but there are weird things going on in it. Why does the narrator suddenly bring up his anorexic mother? I'm more curious about where this is…
oracknows | July 2, 2014Can we just say that vaccines are safe, already? Can we just say that, of all the medical interventions ever conceived by the minds of humans, vaccines have almost certainly saved more lives and prevented more illness? Can we finally say that vaccines do not cause autism?
Of course not, unfortunately. I ask the same question about whether we can finally say that the earth isn’t 6,000 years old, but rather billions of years old, and there are still people out there who believe that evolution is a sham and the earth really is only 6,000 years old. Truly, the irrationality of humans is without…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2014Pär Svensson of Kurtz, himself a rock guitarist with unbelievably eclectic musical tastes, pops in with a guest entry.
Hello Cleveland!
Martin asked me to review the debut album of his brother's death metal outfit (as he put it), citing general unfamiliarity with the genre as a reason. Arguably he's also lacking somewhat in the objectivity department. Or, he hated the record and wanted someone else to bring the hatchet down. Maybe I'm a pawn being pushed in some family power struggle or blood feud. Give this job to Clemenza.
But I digress. At hand is Remnants of Forgotten Horrors by…
esiegel | November 16, 2013"I like to compare the holiday season with the way a child listens to a favorite story. The pleasure is in the familiar way the story begins, the anticipation of familiar turns it takes, the familiar moments of suspense, and the familiar climax and ending." -Fred Rogers
I know it's still the middle of November, but I know that many of you are already thinking about holiday gifts for the lovers of physics, astronomy and the Universe in your life. People send me books and other educational materials throughout the year for review, and although they all have good and bad points about them, I'm…
esiegel | June 7, 2013"From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: one, those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and two, those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review." -Isaac Asimov
You'd never know it unless you were one of about six people in the entire world, but today is a landmark anniversary for me. Three years ago, I was on summer break from teaching at my local college, when I got an email from the Royal Astronomical Society in England.
Image credit: Royal Astronomical Society, R102/0155 Herschel's Great Telescope.
The UK-based society at the forefront…
cevans | November 2, 2012The history of science can be read as a series of brusque reality checks. Once, we thought the sun revolved around the Earth, but modern astronomy relegated our real estate, incrementally, from the center of everything to a hum-drum corner of an unimportant galaxy in a handful of generations. The theory of Evolution turned us from mini-gods into just a consequence of squicky biological randomness. The decipherment of the structure of DNA and the human genome turned the spark of life into something that can be written down, stored, and analyzed by computers. Again and again, we have found our…
cevans | July 10, 2012William Gibson, first in his novel Burning Chrome and then later in the seminal Neuromancer, both coined and defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators." His novels predate the universal adoption of the World Wide Web as a communication matrix, and his psychedelic fantasy of cyberspace–a kind of semantic space navigated by users in virtual-reality, where information takes form as navigable structures–is not quite (yet) our web, but he was correct in his estimation of the network as a hallucination.
Most of us know, on some foggy…
gregladen | October 4, 2011The Amazon Kindle originally promised a technology that would improve your reading experience, at the same time cutting the cost of books in half. Those books would arrive on your Kindle through the magic of the Whisper Net, a free space age delivery service. The Kindle itself would be easier to use, lighter weight, and more readable than an actual book.
Well, there's good news and bad news. As the Kindle technology and the eBook market have developed, all of those original promises have become either vapor or else very different than first imagined. Nonetheless, I want a new-old Kindle…