Rough Drafts

Just came back from a few days at E3, the massive video game conference that happens every year in Los Angeles. As usual, it was an experience in sensory overload that left me exhausted and slightly depressed by the end. A few things of note: First person shooters are getting a little boring. Sure,

Looks like Clara, who took a Sharper Image robot vacuum I was reviewing to preschool for show & tell, isn’t the only kid who loves to play with Roomba. And why not? Roombas are cute, unpredictable, a little bit scary (but not too much), and they’re vacuum cleaners–an endless source of fascination fo

Only a few days late here. She was born in the Midwest in 1933, when her dad earned $12 a week and movies cost a dime. It was the Depression, but she didn’t know it. … My mother used to sit in the den of our house in the San Fernando Valley chain-smoking Kents and […]

According to the editors of Analog, circa 1984. Lee H. Pappas: Star Raiders Commander Level: Star Commander Class I, no shields used the entire game, 54 Zylons destroyed. April 20th, 1984. That’s it, that’s all. Twenty years from now, will people be laughing about Mobile just as much as we are laugh

Entertaining toys for anyone who might be contemplating a new child in the near future (and I know a few of you): Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager is an amazingly entertaining Java app that lets you see how the popularity of various first names has changed over the decades. When I first found out abo

A few years ago I was working on a story about copyright law for a magazine. For a factoid in that story, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what proportion of the film industry’s revenues come from theater showings vs. video rentals. I wasn’t ever able to find a definitive […

It’s not often that people who love and want to preserve wild land and wild species get to enjoy unmitigated good news. Every battle won is only a temporary win, while battles lost are permanent failures. Today’s wildlife preserve might be tomorrow’s oil field, but a housing development is never goi

I wonder if it has to take time-outs when it malfunctions? Japan Today – News – Sony’s Qrio robot attending nursery school in California While the children were at first apprehensive about Qrio, they now dance with it and help it get up when it falls. “The children think of Qrio as a feeble younger

Robert Rodriguez’s inspiring 1995 book, Rebel Without A Crew, makes a convincing case that anyone can make movies–all you need is chutzpah, a few friends, and the ability to previsualize the entire movie in your head, so you can do everything in one or two takes and edit it together in a few weeks b

It’s impossible for me not to love Postsecret. People make postcards confessing something that they’ve never told anyone before. They mail them to the site’s owner. And he scans the cards in and posts them in public. It’s everything you might imagine such a site could be, and more.

I’ve never been a particularly picky eater, but reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s book The Man Who Ate Everything about five years ago changed my life. Steingarten’s enthusiasm for food, his erudition, and his ability to combine the two into unmitigated gustatory delight are unique and inimitable. He’s

Driving home last night, stop-and-go traffic on the 101, gas gauge pegged to E, I finally ran out of gas about half a mile short of my exit. Restarted the truck and made it as far as the exit, then a couple blocks up Poplar, before the truck ran out of gas again while I […]