I’m in the middle of reading Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. It’s a biography of a Burundian man named Deo who escaped the genocide in Burundi by going to Rwanda only to have to escape the genocide there by going back to Burundi. Through connections he, a poor son of a farmer (who [...]
I wrote a post about Shad at some point but last week–before he even found out he beat out Drake for the Juno for rap recording of the year–he said something that’s worth repeating for those who missed it. Shad isn’t just all class, he’s a quality human being. In an article he wrote for [...]
From the shores of Haiti–or maybe the mountains, I’m not sure–we bring you the latest installment of Peters’ Pick. I’m pretty sure this is what CBC’s Dispatches would sound like if it was hosted by his Ipod: My old beat up Ipod has been through a lot with me and has saved me in more [...]
I wrote this post over a year ago hoping to put it up when I felt RadarLake was well underway. I think I’m a little late with that considering we’ve had almost 10,000 visits. I’m posting this now because it’s also going to go onto the “About” page letting people know what this page is [...]
Amanita design, a group of Czech video game designers, are the masterminds behind the point and click puzzle games Samorost 1, Samorost 2 and Machinarium. The landscapes are unusually eerily beautiful–in the Samorost games , many of the landscapes are actual photos of moss patches, mushrooms or logs blown up to look as though they [...]
Here’s a letter I wrote to The Sherbrooke Record in response to an article equating Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the man who started the MMR vaccine-autism controversy, and Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis who discovered in the 19th century a way to reduce puerperal fever among women giving birth but whose results were ignored . The article concluded [...]
I love sports analogies. I love the way the way NYU professor William Easterly thinks about development. But I have to nitpick. In a post at his blog, Aid Watch, he writes about what March Madness would look like if teams were coached by development economists. I get where he’s going with this but he [...]
I hope none of my profs read this because I’m about to completely regurgitate a story that was told in class today. It’s a short story and it involves a very famous statistician, Abraham Wald, who worked for the British Airforce during World War II. The basic idea was simple. Being a mathematician, they asked [...]
“”I can make a C+ feel like a congressional medal of honour and I can make an A- feel like a slap in the face.” Inspirational: (HT: Greg Laden)
You can read about an international movement of running races called Fat Ass, gourmet poutines or watch the Eagle Cam. That’s right. Eagle Cam. Or you can listen to Iron and Wine below. Or you can do none of those things. It’s all in pi anyway.
