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It feels like I was not able to read as many books this year as usual. I know I got behind on a lot of my reading, and still have some books backlogged, which I had started last year and thought I would have finished by now but kept getting distracted from. Plus it seems like I had a lot of things come up this year which deterred from my reading. But all in all I still did pretty well.

1. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow ****
2. Snow by Orhan Pamuck ****
3. Mrs. Dalloway by ...

Well today is the first day of the new year. I am kinda tired, we were at my moms house yesterday but me and the boy walked home before 12 cause I was scared the dogs would be freaking out alone at home. They were OK and we just celebrated the new year and watched the Muppets movie. Here on the ice people buy fireworks for crazy amounts of money and then everybody is blowing them up in their backyards. My son was terrified walking the streets with all this going on. People stop traffic and are just ...

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Memory is strange. The human memory isn’t completely analogous with computer hard drives, but there is a lot of similarity. The biggest difference is that we can’t tell whether our memories are accurate. But with magnetic memory we can’t tell whether the data was accurately recorded; although errors in the actual memory are usually obvious. There may be errors in our memories, but the brain plasters those over with something, so we can’t tell whether there was an error or something else ...

It’s been another busy reading year, and an interesting one as they generally are. I had two reading goals this year: to read more books written by women, and to read more non-fiction. The first goal I have met with ease, with 65% of my reading by female writers. My second goal has proven more of a challenge and though I have read a few non-fiction books, not nearly as many as I had planned. It is a goal I will carry forward into my next reading year. Of course I have been doing a lot of factual ...

Sometimes I wonder about designers of various things, including architects, designers of consumer goods, industrial goods, computer software, and so on. I have known for a long time that they seldom use the things designed, so they don’t know how to get things to work correctly. But that’s old news. I am wondering now if it might be a good idea to train people who design things to consider how those things will be used.

I recall having heard that Marcel Breuer said something along ...