Category: Today’s Report

John Scalzi had some smart things to say about the contractual dispute brewing between Amazon and Hachette regarding how to price eBooks. I read through all the comments on the piece and I’m pretty sure I didn’t actually see anyone bring up what I think is the real justification for why Amazon is pushing for this…

Tim Bray, a well-known smart person, wrote a post today about how he’s been reading John Scalzi‘s Old Man’s War series on his Kindle (he’s apparently on book three, The Last Colony). Because of the addictive qualities of these books, he implies that he can feel Amazon siphoning money out of his wallet as he compulsively starts the…

The new St. Ignatius HS Mall is getting closer to completion: http://bit.ly/oMBaon

I was somewhat annoyed but certainly not shocked when my high-school-entering daughter’s textbooks and other required reading material ended up costing us several hundred dollars. And this was purchasing many of the books used. It’s well known that publishers, losing customers in other aspects of their business, are using their textbook publishing divisions to make…

Gruber: “If you use more than 2 GB per month you’re going to pay more, but this strikes me as fair, because most people don’t use that much data.” Wired: “Video streaming and online gaming use much more bandwidth than web browsing or e-mailing. For instance, Netflix ranges from .3 GB per hour to 1…

Inappropriate domain names.

Looking through this site, I noticed many similarities among the photos. Obviously, the people in the old photos are mostly the kid versions of the people taking the new photos. But there are some more subtle things. For example, every single person is holding their old photo with their left hand. Another thing: All the…

LA Times: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids? The Times used public data to figure out something that neither the LA School District nor its teachers union seem to want anyone to learn: Which teachers are good, and perhaps more importantly, which teachers hold kids back. The best part of this article: The reporters name names and…

Radiolab: Words. Fabulous would be one.

Neotropolis: Urban Farming. A nice piece on the new Ohio City Farm. One interesting thing, of course, is that unlike most of the West Side of Cleveland, which was heavily agricultural and was at one time known as “the grape capital of the country”, this specific plot of land was almost certainly never farmed at…