Peter’s Blog

The New York Times has a nice photoshoot mixing together many of the actors and actresses and characters from many films by the Cohen brothers.

The Cloisters - Medieval - Middle Ages - Art - New York Times

A decade earlier a turreted mansion had stood on the spot, the home of C. K. G. Billings, a self-described “capitalist at large” who kept a staff of 23 servants and a fleet of 13 cars.

Capitalist at large. Doesn’t that sound both incredibly sexy and scary?

BLDGBLOG has a really nice interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. A lot of the interview talks about utopian ideas and how he’s continually tried to rehabilitate them in his writing. Some early examples, and not mentioned in the interview, are the books in his Wild Shore trilogy. I read and enjoyed Pacific Edge, and the other two, The Gold Coast and The Wild Shore, also look good. Speaking of KSR, Escape From Kathmandu is also quite good.

Even spineless liberals can get vicious, or at least own vicious dogs. But will the Times’ Baghdad correspondents get in as much trouble as Michael Vick? =)

I just read on Bruce Scneier’s blog that the Handbook of Applied Cryptography is available for free online. Cool!

I’m not positive, but it looks like my back is on the cover of Colophound, a magazine created from the Colophon magazine conference I attended last March in Luxembourg. What do you think, does that green t-shirt and slight hunch scream me?

I just finished Absurdistan this morning and read Bangkok Haunts and Zodiac last week. All good books and I recommend, though Absurdisan was something of a downer. Funnily enough, the back of Zodiac has lots of quotes about how Stephenson makes the future seem like it’s already here but the story to me felt like it’s talking about the near past – incidentally, the book was published in 1988.

Valleywag has a pretty spot on guide to starting a writing career. While I admittedly have more experience as an editor than as a freelancer, all the points strike me a very true, whether they seem silly or not.

A few days ago I made a post that may have seemed to some to claim that an article I wrote had been plagiarised. I did not intend to give this impression and have deleted the post in question. I apologise if I gave anyone that impression.

The Stirred Up website has seen a doubling of traffic in the past few days thanks to an article on the Parisian catacombs from our very first, web-only issue becoming the top search result for “cataflics” (”catacomb cops” in French) on Google. Likewise one of the images from the article is the top result in Google Image Search for the same search term. This is an example of the long tail in action. Of course, now the challenge is the keep these Google searchers and convince them to check out the rest of the magazine.