Friday, October 09, 2015

Weekend Reading: The Still Really Busy Edition

I'm entering the home stretch on the super busy period... Okay, So Look comes out next week (but you can pre-order now!) and the early bird registration period for my "project management for non-project managers who still need to get sh** done" class ends tonight.

I've also got almost all of the pieces for my next book project assembled- it will be a collection of public domain short stories, and will be an Amazon-only ebook (I'll probably post somewhere about why, but the short version is that the alternate "go wide" strategy isn't as easy to pursue with a book built from works in the public domain). However, I'll give a free copy in MOBI, ePub, or PDF format to everyone on my Tungsten Hippo weekly digest mailing list by the end of October. Pushing to release the next book so soon after Okay, So Look comes out is a bit... intense. But it makes sense so that I could tie it in with my Tungsten Hippo birthday celebration. Also, if I don't release things, people can't buy them, and if people don't buy things, I'll have to go back to having a regular job.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I should be writing more "real" posts here soon. I miss it!

In the meantime, here are the links I have for you this week:

On getting your research topic explained to you by a less knowledgeable man. Which reminds me of these tweets from @ClaraJeffery:





Speaking of Clara Jeffery, the story of the billionaire who sued Mother Jones is chilling. I mean the good guys won, in the end, but what a fight.

This essay about lockdown drills makes my heart hurt. I want to cry every time my kids tell me about the drills at their school. How do we keep deciding that the best answer we can come up with for the problem of school shootings is to make our kids practice hiding from "bad guys" in their school?

Mother Jones published a very good story about threat assessment teams that try to prevent these tragedies. If we had any sense we'd make guns harder to get, too, as the experts in the article agree.

On a more hopeful front: if the preliminary results for Lemtrada hold true in the full data set, there is potentially some very good news for MS patients on the horizon. I expect there will be a lot of discussion about the price of this drug, though. I'm sure it will be expensive, and even cures cause controversy when they're expensive, as the debate about Sovaldi shows.

While we're talking about the drug discovery business, Derek Lowe has a good discussion of the problems with the Valeant business model.

I heartily approve of Laura Vanderkam's daughter's taste in picture books!

And, speaking of princesses, this is obviously a product of the impressive Disney PR machine... but hooray for the girl who is the voice of Moana. I'm really looking forward to seeing that movie, to be honest.

The niqabs of Canada is an awesome tumblr.

Some fodder for the next time you need to show someone that correlation does not equal causation.

Some cool shirts for kids. (Thanks to the twitter friend who sent this to me... apologies for not remembering which of you it was!)

This is a really cool thing:



I have to link to this xkcd cartoon rather than embed it because the mouse-over is the best part.

And finally, one more closing laugh, courtesy of my pun-loving husband.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Sorry for the CAPTCHA, folks. The spammers were stealing too much of my time.