Spook Country
I finished reading William Gibson’s Spook Country this week. Took a while to get into it, but the second half of the book had me hooked. Not a whole lot happens in Spook Country, though, as (spoiler alert) this negative commenter on the Powell’s Books site notes. Something else that commenter mentioned was [...]

From William Gibson’s Spook Country, p. 83 of the G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover:
“Tell me about Node, she suggested. “It doesn’t seem to be generating much in the way of industry gossip.”
“No?”
“No.”
He lowered his finger-steeple. “Anti-buzz,” he said. “Definition by absence.”
She waited to see if he’d indicate that he was joking. He didn’t. “That’s ridiculous”.
The smile [...]

Cheryl took this pic at 8:30am today. Presumably, they were there for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the passage below takes place during Dr. Heywood Floyd’s flight from the space station to the moon. Although the film version doesn’t give a sense of how long that flight was, the book says it was about 25 hours, so there’d be a lot of time [...]

The most surprising thing about the reactions to Steve Jobs’s passing has been the outpouring of love toward the memory of a man who didn’t do the sorts of things that rich men do when they want to be loved by strangers. Jobs has been treated as something of a secular saint by Apple fans, [...]

Portfolio Armor update
I met with the finance Ph.D. who devised Portfolio Armor’s algorithm yesterday to discuss some potential expansions of the algorithm. More to come on that. If you have any feature requests, feel free to mention them in the comments.
June was another record month for paid downloads of the Portfolio Armor iOS app, [...]

2001: A Space Odyssey was on cable recently, and watching it from beginning to end for the dozenth-or-so time, prompted me to surf around for related clips on YouTube. I found this annotated video clip of György Ligeti’s “Lux aeterna”, the otherworldly music Kubrick used in the scene where the astronauts fly to the Tycho [...]