Category: Resources

Cities of North Alaska: Kotzebue,
Barrow. Interestingly, both of them are “damp” towns, meaning you can bring in your own alcohol, but you can’t sell it.

Also interesting is how so many of the buildings in Kotzebue seem to be prefabricated.

Some links from googling for New York 1888:

• A Hashish-House In New York (1888)
• Blizzard of 1888: The Blizzard of 1888 lasted 36 hours and began on March 12. New York City was virtually isolated when snow halted transportation and disrupted communications. Messages to Boston were relayed via England [Enc Am Facts & Dates] National Geographic 1888 I:37.
• 19th Century Skyscrapers.

• The John Dee Society site
  seems to consist mostly of an online book and a thesis, as well as a
  lot of links.
• A good site about Astrology.
  I used to have a good book about Astrology – I think it was The
  compleat Astrologer, by Derek and Julia Parker – lots of nice pictures
  and charts, but I remember detesting it – I would have prefered a book
  about Astronomy. I think Astrology is so mainstream that it’s pretty
  dead as an occult system, but it still has a lot of cool symbolism and
  crunchy bits (as they say in gaming), so I’m curious if bits of it can
  be pinched for use in designing a roleplaying game.
  It’s interesting how “uncool” Astrology has become among geeks (myself
  not only included, but put forth as a prime example). Even hardcore
  rationalists (and I guess I am, sorta) can find stuff like Tarot
  intriguing (if only as a fictional/dramatic tool), but even geeks with
  New Age leanings will probably prefer nearly anything to Astrology.

Some links about Amotz Zahavi and his Handicap Principle: a Why We Take Risks, a feature article by Richard Conniff from December 2001, an introduction to The Theory of Honest Signalling from the site of Carl T. Bergstrom, a researcher in Theoretical Biology (here’s another academic page by Michael Lachmann), and a review of Zahavi’s book (The Handicap Principle, written with his wife), by Geoffrey Miller, which accurately describes how Zahavi often comes across:

Depending on your viewpoint, they (the authors – DD) act like (1) dangerous hyper-adaptationists even more extreme than Steven Jay Gould’s worst caricatures of Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, weaving just-so stories out of thin air, (2) harmlessly entertaining, pseudo-scientific fabulists in the tradition of Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead, (3) classical Victorian natural historians (somehow displaced to contemporary Tel-Aviv University) using the same hypothetico-deductive methods as Darwin himself, or (4) ardent, creative biologists who, whatever one’s qualms about their methods and examples, deliver a revitalizing shock to animal communication theory, sexual selection theory, kinship theory, reciprocal altruism theory, and evolutionary psychology. I favor this last judgment.