Change Log
What’s been happening!
February 3rd: yet another design diary, this time on the complexities of tuning a big simulation; additions to The Greatest Books; and a new Person From History: Reinhold Pabel.
February 2nd: the impact of taxes on the simulation.
February 1st: a design diary for Balance of the Planet concerning the problems of sudden changes in revenues
January 30th: additions to The Greatest Books.
January 29th: another design diary for Balance of the Planet
January 22nd: a new page, The Greatest Books, presenting the books that have most affected me.
January 21st: a new Person From History: Mucius Scaevola, the man who saved Rome by screwing up.
January 20th: an addition to the People Through History section, this on David Atchison. You don’t know who David Atchison was? Then read this!
January 19th: another new feature: a section of the library entitled “People Through History”, presenting tales of interesting people you’ve never heard of.
January 18th: a Skunky to the entire computer industry for spawning a freshet of languages for programming, scripting, and applications.
January 17th: two new Skunkys, the first to Network Solutions for their internal FTP software, and the second for a lousy DVD player program.
January 16th: book review: The Great Divergence, by Kenneth Pomeranz, explaining how the West outran Asian civilizations
January 15th: a design diary about the necessity of simplifying Balance of the Planet.
January 15th: We are all Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, an assault on one of the fundamentals of libertarianism
January 6th: a new feature: Skunkies, design reviews of really badly designed software. First up is Heavy Weather, from Lacrosse Technology
January 5th: musings aroused by John Lennon’s song Imagine
January 2nd: my adventures with Windows 7
January 1st: book review: The Oregon Trail, presenting the adventures of Francis Parkman in the Great Plains in 1846.
2012 ↑
2011 ↓
December 31st: on human mental data structures, mnemonics, and memory: Oh be a fine girl, kiss me now
December 30th: book review: Travelling Heroes, by Robin Lane Fox, a massive, erudite, and pointless book about the origins of Greek mythology.
December 28th: I’m a genius for having figured this out, and an idiot for not figuring it out sooner.
December 26th: I’m such an idiot!
December 25th: you don’t think I take Christmas off, do you? I’ve got work to do on Balance of the Planet!
December 19th: comparing the Business as Usual Scenario in Balance of the Planet with the Environmental Fanatic Scenario.
December 14th: an error in the handling of education and high technology in Balance of the Planet
December 5th: a new design diary for Balance of the Planet: should I reduce the game to a single turn?
December 4th: a review of Death in the Pot, an unsatisfying book on food poisoning through history.
December 3rd: The Phylogeny of Play, a video of a lecture I gave in Cologne in May of 2011
November 21st: Time’s Man of the Year
November 17th: reconciling temperature with snow cover and sea level
November 14th: deep-sixing the fishies
November 13th: Moose saves the day!
November 12th: another design diary
November 8th: Meadow Laser 2.0 is now operational!
November 6th: a tale of riding my motorcycle in 1969, and a design diary for Balance of the Planet
November 5th: Letters from an American Farmer, a book describing life in America in the 1770s.
October 29th: The gargoyle is dead. Sniffle, sniffle.
October 13th: another design diary, this time on the complicated details of supply versus price for various energy forms.
October 12th: The Triumph of Science and Reason, 1660 - 1685, a book you don’t want to read.
October 8th: another design diary for Balance of the Planet, concerning balancing the system of equations.
October 8th: two additions to When Algorithms Go Bad
October 6th: a new design diary for Balance of the Planet, discussing turn length and turn step size.
October 6th: a book review of Under a Green Sky, a book on climate change and mass extinctions
October 3rd: a new essay in my History of Thinking hyperdocument: Chinese Science and Technology
September 29th: another book review: Rare Earth, presenting the hypothesis that life on earth may indeed be special
September 28th: a new book review: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham.
September 27th: two additions to my page When Algorithms Go Bad. Whoever suspected a connection between an Albanian-English dictionary and the game “Halo”?
September 17th: another design diary for Balance of the Planet, on the problems of resource supply
September 15th: book review: Riddled with Life, on parisitology, by Marlene Zuk
September 7th: a proposal for a crowd-sourced research project on the Perseid meteor shower.
September 7th: I wrote down my list of goals for my life. I’ve got to cracking!
September 3rd: book review: The Mountains of St Francis, by Walter Alvarez, about the geological history of Italy.
September 2nd: another design diary for Balance of the Planet, on the problem of allocating deaths for scoring purposes.
August 29th: a scientific breakthrough! The world’s first (I think) hydraulic laser
August 28th: Supernormal Stimuli, by Deirdre Barrett
August 27th: another book review: End of Empire. It’s about Attila the Hun!
August 13th: A new and exciting book review of a magnificently boring book, The Oxford Companion to the English Language
August 4th: Once again, I hate Java, Chapter 38
August 3rd: another design diary addressing the problem of how to display history information.
July 31st: a short design diary in which I step back and consider the overall state of the project.
July 29th: and another design diary, on the problems of assigning differential points
July 28th: another design diary, about the value of brush hogs to the game designer
July 27th: book review time: Reading in the Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene
July 25th: a new entry in the design diary for Balance of the Planet: establishing simulation formulae.
July 23rd: a political commentary on Oslo and ‘Blameless Responsibility’
July 22nd: I hate Java, chapter 37 in a book without end
July 21st: a new personal tale: Behavioral Spoonerisms.
July 10th: I’m offering a new five-part webinar on How to Think, but it will happen only if I get five takers by July 29th.
July 6th: same old thing: a new design diary for BotP.
June 30th: more design diary problems
June 28th: another design diary for Balance of the Planet: explanatory pages and formula handling.
June 27th: a new book review: Law and Crime in the Roman World, by Jull Harries
June 23rd: embedding HTML inside the data structures; ugh!
June 22nd: how to measure the effects of technological progress?
June 20th: Egad! Four days without a diary entry!
June 16th: yes, I have another diary entry for Balance of the Planet.
June 15th: another
June 14th: yep
June 13th: You’ll never guess
June 11th: again
June 8th: and another.
June 7th: one more diary entry
June 6th: I just can’t seem to stop making diary entries.
June 5th: another diary entry.
June 4th: yet another diary entry for Balance of the Planet
June 3rd: a new entry in my design diary, and a book review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
June 2nd: Here’s something new and interesting: a design diary for my latest project, Balance of the Planet 2011
June 1st: My sixty-first birthday.
May 29th: A new page explaining how transistors work. You won’t find anything this clear on the web.
May 26th: A video of a recent lecture, plus a new book review: Barbarians to Angels, by Peter S. Wells
May 24th: book review: Witchcraft and Society, by Marion Gibson
May 23rd: a trip to Amsterdam
May 19th: a new solution to the problem of radioactive waste disposal.
May 7th: a new book review (The Taste of Conquest) and a newly uploaded video: Part 4 of the “graduate seminar”.
May 6th: I have now added the first six hours of video from my “graduate seminar” on game design at Incredible Technologies in 1987
May 4th More videos! Fundamentals of Interactivity, The Mystique of the Loop, and Revolution.
May 3rd: New videos! These are the Video Visits series from my Atari days: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
May 2nd: I have finally gone through the entire site with a link checker and cleaned up broken links.
April 29th: final conclusions of my 2011 analysis of the 1999 Leonid outburst, with downloadable data
April 25th: corrections to the correlation coefficient analysis yields strong evidence against nonrandomness
April 23rd: use of correlation coefficients between cameras to determine nonrandomness
April 21st: Chris Hondros
April 20th: a revolting development in the Leonid research
April 20th: important revisions to The Achaeans, part of The History of Thinking
April 16th: a report on my impressions of a conference put together by UC Santa Cruz
April 12th: review of The Salem Witchcraft Trials, by Peter Charles Hoffer
April 10th: book review time: How Language Works by David Crystal
April 6th: a new essay on linguistics: Semantic Waist-Spreading
April 2nd: weird (almost certainly wrong) Leonid results
March 30th: a new book review: Vermeer’s Hat.
March 29th: an old joke from World War II that my father told me when I was a kid.
March 28th: two additions: more on Leonid nonrandomness, and a proposal for Superdogs.
March 27th: the first solid statistical proof of Leonid nonrandomness!
March 26th: concluding the analysis of Leonid light curves
March 25th: Leonid analysis of ablation
March 24th: the corrected analysis of Leonid light curves
March 23rd: I screwed up something in the Leonid analysis
March 22nd: Part I of an analysis of Leonid light curves
March 21st: book review: A Splendid Exchange, about the history of trade in Eurasia.
March 20th: Leonids: average flare count per minute over time.
March 19th: a perplexing analysis of deceleration of Leonids.
March 17th: another set of results from the Leonid study, this time concerning absolute luminances
March 16th: an important essay for software designers: A Rigorous Measure For Interactivity
March 12th: first results from the Leonid analysis!
March 10th: a new section providing links to videos involving me
March 6th: a new book review: The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright
February 27th: some problems with the determination of the heights of Leonids
February 25th: some preliminary results from the Leonid research
February 21st: the role of peril in interactive storytelling
February 19th: an essay on Strategic Thinking.
February 16th: I’m finally in production with the Leonid analysis!
February 13th: a detailed analysis of the spherical trigonometry used in the analysis. For masochists and sphericaltrigonometrophiles only.
February 11th: a review of Life Ascending: the Ten Great Inventions of Evolutions, by Nick Lane
February 10th: a strange Leonid
February 9th: some thoughts on the drab heroes we see in the movies these days
February 6th: I have actually completed the analysis of the datasets in my possession!
February 3rd: a short update on progress with the Leonid analysis
February 1st: problems in the Leonid analysis with the star-tracking algorithm
January 30th: another report, this time on the lack of progress with the Leonids.
January 28th: the latest report on progress with the Leonids.
January 15th: more Leonid trickery
January 14th: the Leonid diaries march on with yet another tale of tribulations and successes.
January 11th: yet another diary page on the Leonid work
January 10th: another diary page on the Leonid work
January 9th: a new page on my current work with the Leonid data from 1999 (astronomy research).
2011 ↑
2010 ↓
December 27th: I fixed some dead links in the JCGD area of the library
December 25th: a personal essay, The Evolution of my Musical Tastes
December 24th: another update to When Algorithms Go Bad, celebrating “Google bobbles”
December 23rd: Gadzooks, I’m a book-reviewing monster. The next book: Early Greece, by Oswyn Murray
December 21st: another book review: Trail of Tears, a poorly organized history of the Cherokee people
December 11th: book review: Catching Fire, about the fundamental role of cooking in human evolution
November 21st: book review: The Evolutionary Origin of Human Behavior, a real stinker
November 14th: Contemptible Breeders, an essay on how much incompetent dog breeders cost all of us
November 12th: a design essay on Negative Lessons from Storytron
November 8th: A new essay, Aliens Must be Nice, on life and interstellar travel, with (as always) some surprising conclusions.
November 6th: an update to the essay Sixty
October 22nd: I corrected an absent link so that now you can read all about Gargoyle Gulch, the 40 acres on which I live.
October 21st: A long, sad tale, of the evolution of Internet discussions from my own perspective.
October 18th: I reorganized some essays into a group: How to Think, and added a new one: Boolean Foolishness
October 14th: more progress in A History of Thinking: an improved discussion of Greek thought.
October 11th: a personal tale of a heroic musical performance
October 10th: a review of Guy Deutscher’s new book, Through the Looking Glass.
October 1st: continuing improvements to A History of Thinking: revisions of The Achaeans and Tacking.
September 25th: some thoughts on confusing motivation with results in scientific work
September 23rd: another book review: Thumbs, Toes, and Tears
September 19th: a new book review: Marco Polo
September 18th: I have completed second edition revisions to The History of Thinking as far as the time of the Egyptians.
September 11th: I am rewriting my web book on The History of Thinking. This second edition is much expanded and improved!
September 6th: a suggestion for really smart electric cars
September 4th: a proposal for archaeologists
September 3rd: another book review: When Asia Was the World
September 2nd: a collection of my best answering machine messages
August 31st: another book review: In the Blink of an Eye: how vision kick-started the big bang of evolution.
August 29th: a sad tale of bad software design
August 28th: a review of Justinian’s Flea, the story of the bubonic plague that devastated the Roman Empire.
August 26th: a new and improved collection of pages about each pet we’ve owned; it’s still in progress.
August 19th: a clever story about economics, game design, and algorithms
August 18th: have you ever wondered why some music just goes round and round inside your head? Here’s my guess.
August 16th: a new book review: The Winds of Change, about abrupt climate change.
August 14th: the history of the Computer Game Developers’ Conference
August 13th: new photos and stories added to the tale of Frogger-Rogger.
August 11th: my famous ancestor, William Harris Crawford
August 10th: a book I didn’t much like, Moral Minds.
August 7th: my peculiar ability to identify people by their voices.
August 6th: a book review of the sayings of Mencius, a Chinese philosopher.
August 5th: How many colonists would you need to send to another planet to make the colony self-sustaining?
August 4th: another book review: India Unbound
August 2nd: a book review of The Anglo-Saxon World
July 31st: Human Universals, a book review
July 27th: The price of defying rationalism, a heavy gloom-and-doom essay. We’re all going to die!
July 20th: Technology advances in some surprising ways. Read all about it.
July 19th: A game design essay: Advanced Tinkertoy Text. It’s still a work in progress; I expect to make changes.
July 6th: Yet another eccentric creation: The Meadow Laser
July 4th: My latest eccentric creation: Duckhenge
June 29th: Sixty. You’ll just have to read it.
June 28th: yet another book review: Tricks of the Mind, by Derren Brown
June 21st: a book review of The Richness of Life, by Stephen Jay Gould
June 13th: a book review of The Case for India, by Will Durant
June 12th: a new book review of Ideas by Peter Watson
May 26th:A new speculative essay revealing the true nature of the universe.
May 22nd: I was caught in the great volcanic ash cloud fiasco in Europe in April. Here's my woeful tale.
April 3rd: I've given so many lectures that I thought it might be a good idea to publish my tips on public speaking.
March 15th: A speculative political essay: What would happen if Sarah Palin were elected President?
March 7th: A new book review, Prehistory
March 6th: A new book review, Empires of Time
February 25th: A Requiem for Jane, an unhappy person.
February 10th: Personal observations from my recent trip to Mumbai, India, where I delivered a keynote speech at a conference on children, play, and education.
January 28th: A new page presenting where I've been. Not terribly important, but I thought it might be interesting.
January 7th: A new page showing my most magnificent artistic works.
January 3rd: A short essay describing network effects in the mind
2010 ↑
2009 ↓
December 31st: I added a new section, Speculations, presenting my choicest half-baked ideas (all the other ideas in this site are 3/4 baked).
December 29th: Could Tyrannosaurus Rex run? Here's one intriguing way to answer that question.
Dec 24th, 2009: An analysis of pounding dirt.
Dec 21st, 2009: a new book review: Plutarch's Parallel Lives
Dec 18th, 2009: How I would change our government if I were king.
Dec 11th, 2009: An update to a humorous look at how the Google News picture-picking algorithm sometimes screws up.
Dec 9th, 2009: Another diatribe against climate change deniers
Dec 2nd, 2009: A second look at the problem of consciousness