This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.
I finally finished my final run-through of the last book I ever plan to write. Even though I had a bunch of Slopers do copyediting, and they found hundreds of errors – – I still managed to find another fifty that all of them missed! And, I’m quite sure, there are still errors lingering, but I think it’s just about as good as I can get it for now. I’m sick of this damned thing! Anyway………it’s coming soon.
Thanks to the generous help and support of some fellow Slopers, who spent many hours reviewing and copyediting my latest creation, I am optimistic that Silicon Valley Babble On will be available before this month is over. I wanted to give you a sneak peek at the cover and let you know it is on its way. I consider it my best work, and I eagerly look forwarding to letting you know when this book is released.
Next month, I am going to announce my latest & greatest book for sale, which I’m very proud of. One amusing thing that happened recently is that I got a proof copy from my publisher. I excitedly opened it and found…………well…………I’ll let the video show you. Today I got the replacement copy, which has some remarkable advantages over the first one.
I’ve been working almost my entire life. I have done so because I have almost always been able to labor at something I love.
This web site has been my life for over thirteen years. Far longer than that, however, have been the books I have written. I wrote my first nationally-published book at the age of 16, and I am going to be releasing my 25th book in a few weeks. I consider it my finest work, and a large number of Slopers have kindly volunteered their time to proofread it (note to that group: hang in there, it’s coming).
Each of these books has been dedicated to someone important to me. I have been considering the appropriate person to whom to dedicate what I consider my latest, greatest book. Who has loomed large in my life? Who has always been there for me? And then, on Friday the 13th of all days, it hit me.
And it’s this guy:
As I mentioned earlier, I am putting together the biggest book I’ve ever written before. In fact……..it’s TOO big. My publisher refuses to take anything over 480 pages, and at 540 pages, well, I’ve got some cutting to do. I look forward to letting everyone know when it’s ready.
However, there is something I’d like to get a small handful of you to do for me, which is to proofread the book. I want to make this as unappealing as possible, since I only want to send out a few, but here’s what I need: some folks that are willing to:
If you’ve got time on your hands and want to do this, please drop me an email with your shipping address. Like I said, I only need a few people, so if I get too many, I will send you a polite refusal. Thank you!
I started Slope in March 2005, and about six years later, I decided to throw together a book of what I thought were some of its best posts. I called it the Slope of Hope Bathroom Reader, and it was a thin little volume which, oddly enough, has my highest average rate of any books I’ve ever written.
About a month ago, I got the idea to perhaps update the book. After all, seven more years had gone by, and many thousands of posts had been written since then. Surely there must be a better book that could be drawn from all that content.
It didn’t take me long to realize how right this was. I have been going through all of the “Best Of” posts, and selecting the best-of-the-best, and although I am not through with my examination of the site’s history, I already have enough content for a book at least three times bigger and MUCH higher quality. (more…)
At the risk of getting all Holden Caulfield-y on you, I really hate phony. Anything fake or phony drives me to distraction. Dyed hair. Insincere compliments. Ulterior motives. Plastic surgery. Anyone or anything constructing a facade just rubs me the wrong way.
And that is the principal reason I have written so many posts about Theranos (this is my eleventh one) even though it was never a public company and there’s nothing to chart about it. Some have even wondered out loud if I’m obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes. Far from it. First off, take my word for it, she isn’t my type, and secondly, I don’t get all tingly about baritone-voiced business criminals. Never been a turn-on. Honest. (more…)
Back on the 21st, I wrote an extremely brief book review about Sapiens. “Review” is probably too highfalutin a word, though, since I did little more than paste a few paragraphs from the Amazon site and wrote that I really enjoyed the book. I wanted to say something meaningful, but I was being lazy and just tossed it out there as a post to close the day.
However, Strawberry Blonde made this comment (I think she has ESP):
For Christmas, my son bought me a copy of the book Sapiens
which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ll once again be a lazy bum and share with you Amazon’s own description: “One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?
Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.
(more…)
Some of you know that I wrote a history book called Panic, Prosperity and Progress. The first chapter of that book discusses the “Tulipmania” of nearly 500 years ago, and since it seems no one can conjure up a better analogy for the Bitcoin mania going on than the aforementioned tulips, I thought I’d share a page from my book with some highlights. I thought of this particularly since Bitcoin futures (!!!) start trading within days, just like tulip futures were invented all those centuries ago.
