Statistics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who writes the long-running blog Three-Toed Sloth and the Bactra Review of books.
liked
Mind-candy: the first probes to Venus and Mars in 1962 revealed that we live in Edgar Rice Burroughs's solar system, which rather re-directs the Cold War. This is because Something set the solar system up that way, through millions of years of deliberate fiddling.
His monthly "Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur" post for October 2008 — the books he read that month and feels he can recommend.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The small bar beside a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The bar shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Full and green is recent. It drains, and turns amber and then grey, as the post gets older.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The bar is empty after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
A striped bar means the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no bar.