Board Games Storytelling Outside the Box This post comprises a board game review and an interactive map I made, joined by the common theme of non-traditional storytelling. Rogues to Riches is a story-telling board game, created by Sam Fraser [http://growgiantgames.com/] in Halifax [http://www.metronews.ca/news/halifax/2014/08/07/rogues-to-riches-for-halifax-board-game-developer.html] . I
Book Putting Civilization in the Sea This post is a book review. The title is an allusion to another one [https://danbscott.ghost.io/putting-the-sea-in-civilization/] I wrote earlier this year. Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians was written by Joe Quirk with contributions
Book Quantified Conservation This post is a review of the book Quantified: Redefining Conservation for the Next Economy, by Joe Whitworth. At the start of this year, I included a TEDx talk he did in a post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/rational-optimism-about-the-environment/] I wrote and mentioned that this book was on my reading
Review Orbiting Kerbin A coworker recently recommended the game Kerbal Space Program (KSP) to me. I've been enjoying it. I don’t spend a lot of time gaming, but from time to time I like to get into one. I especially like open-ended games (where you choose what to do instead
History Putting the "Sea" in Civilization This post is about a book I finished reading recently. Compared to many of the book reviews I've written, this one took longer to read but the review is maybe a bit shorter. The Sea & Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine [http://lincolnpaine.
Board Games Get on Board in Catalina This post is a brief review of a board game I got recently. I backed the campaign for the board game Privateer [http://ensigniagames.com/products/privateer], on Kickstarter [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/privateer/privateer-0], back in December 2013. After a 3 year wait, it finally arrived, and had
Movies & TV A New Wild This post is a review of Earth: A New Wild, a nature documentary series. Earth: A New Wild is a five-episode series produced by PBS [http://www.pbs.org/earth-a-new-wild/home/] and National Geographic [http://nationalgeographic.org/education/earth-new-wild/]. I have it on BluRay disc. The National Geographic website includes
History Friars black, white, and grey I was inspired to learn more about the history of religious orders after visiting an abbey in Scotland [https://danbscott.ghost.io/highlights-from-scotland-2014/] and while planning a trip to France [https://danbscott.ghost.io/follow-the-red-brick-canal/]. I read a book called The Lord as Their Portion: The Story of the Religious
Book Free Market Environmentalism As mentioned at the top of my previous post, this post is a book review. It's quite a lengthy post so it took a while to find time to write it; I hope it was worth the wait. Free Market Environmentalism for the Next Generation (abbreviated FME below)
Book Mushrooms and Mosses This is sort of two posts in one—reviews of a couple of books I got when I was in the Pacific Northwest [https://danbscott.ghost.io/seattle-trip-2015/] last fall. They are Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms by Eugenia Bone, and Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural
Book The Sky's Not Falling As a break from all the negative [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/bahrain-cuts-ties-with-tehran-as-crisis-widens-in-saudi-iran-split/2016/01/04/145c8824-b271-11e5-8abc-d09392edc612_story.html] news [http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/overnight+stock+market+plunge+marks+gloomy+start+first+trading+2016/11629362/story.html] in the world today, I thought I'd start 2016 with
Water The Waves Shape the Shore, and the Shore Shapes the Waves I'm continuing to work my way through books [https://danbscott.ghost.io/a-winter-in-arabia/] that I picked up on vacation [https://danbscott.ghost.io/oregon-trail/]. This post is a review of Waves and Beaches: the dynamics of the ocean surface by Willard Bascom. (I've been really busy
Book "A Winter in Arabia" This post is a review of the book A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen by Dame Freya Stark [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freya_Stark]. It was published in 1940 and describes a months-long visit she made to the Hadhramaut [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadhramaut] region of
Water Downstream from Eden, by David Knight This post is a review of a book by one of the pastors at the church [http://www.lincolnroadchapel.ca/home.html] I attended while I was doing my master's degree at the University of Waterloo. Downstream from Eden: The Amazing Gift of Water for a Thirsty World
Review Orphan Black is almost back! This post is about what is, in my opinion, the best show currently being filmed in Canada: Orphan Black [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234222/?ref_=nv_sr_1]. Beware of minor spoilers below, but for the most part I've tried to keep this as an overview. The
Book Nate Silver Makes My Bracket Picks Apologies to my readers for not having a post last weekend. I was on the road for my job and had to put blogging on the back burner. My post this week is a review of the book The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—but Some
Yemen Yemen In 2012, I had the opportunity to travel to Yemen for my job (a couple of my photos from that trip are at the end of this post). Since then, that country has held a special interest for me. So one time when I was in The Midtown Scholar [http:
History Whence Finance? This post is a review of The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson. I got it from my favourite used bookstore: the Midtown Scholar [http://www.midtownscholar.com/] (pictured below) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Niall Ferguson [http://www.niallferguson.com/], a historian at Harvard, wrote
Book The Expanse and the human Stop me if you've heard this one before: a closely-knit crew fly around in a spaceship getting in and out of trouble, against a backdrop of intrigue and sinister forces. The Expanse series by James S. A. Corey [http://www.danielabraham.com/james-s-a-corey/] (the nom-de-plume of a pair
Review Safety Lessons from Chris Pine's Unstoppable Unstoppable (2010) [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477080/?ref_=nv_sr_1] is a kind of unique movie that I enjoy. Its antagonist is completely inanimate: a runaway train—with its immense kinetic energy—with no one on board. This train is racing toward a populated area, carrying tanker cars
Yemen An Academic Look at the Hydraulic Hypothesis As promised in my review of Water: the Epic Struggle by Steven Solomon [https://danbscott.ghost.io/history-through-a-liquid-lens/], here is a more scholarly look at the hydraulic hypothesis. As I wrote before, "The hydraulic hypothesis says that large-scale irrigation works that supported the land-based empires of the ancient world
History History Through a Liquid Lens This post is a review of Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon (2010). To start with, I have some general comments on the book itself, and then I'll delve into some of the issues it covers. It's a long book,
Book A Journey Through Ukraine With the current events in the Ukraine, I thought it would be a good time to pick up and read Where the West Ends by Michael J. Totten. Michael Totten [http://www.michaeltotten.com/] is an independent foreign correspondent that I've followed for a while. He initially grabbed
Book Neal Stephenson's Writing An author that I've really gotten into over the past year is Neal Stephenson. His writing is hard to classify, ranging from futuristic hard sci-fi to historical fiction, but has some common themes such as information theory [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory]. So far, I'
History A 'Riveting' Book on the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution is a period of history that has long fascinated me. Largely because of the technological developments and sense of potential, and also for the way that engineering and modern business were shaped during the era. William Rosen wrote The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story