I recently completed my first resolution for the year 2009: Read 10,000 pages of science, economics, health, history, or policy books. Check the Reading page for the master list. Titles in bold are the ones I recommend. (They also are probably the ones I quote the most.) Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection…
That I read books probably lowers my highly coveted geek cred. Instead, e-books read on the computer screen, phone screen, or e-book reader should have long ago replaced reading on dead wood. Unfortunately, I am intentionally avoiding reading books much on computers, phone, or readers. No purse to carry more stuff. I have big fingers, so…
The French and Indian: War Deciding the Fate of North America In high school and college the French and Indian War was this long amorphous event in between settling the colonies and the American Revolution. It took a movie, The Patriot (not even in my top 500 movies), to give some color to the story…
A friend of mine, Steve Ekstrom, is the writer of this comic which I enjoyed for the this first 8 pages. I’m looking forward to the next installments. Check out The Ares Imperative! (And vote for it if you like it. The winner gets published by DC Comics.) Interview: Synopsis: It’s the early 21st Century…
I’ve heard the Library of Congress analogy previously. The question I had then was, “What about the diagrams and pictures which make the books useful. Books are not just letters, numbers, and symbols.”
George R. R. Martin ranting about bad endings seems odd. “C’mon. Writing 101.” One of my bigger terrors is his end to A Song of Ice and Fire will be bad. A slightly bigger one is 3 years between books means the end is possibly a decade away and a sedentary lifestyle will prevent us from…
I ran across this photo of an amazing painting on Flickr. Derrick says: The story goes that the young Sesshu loved to draw. His love of drawing was so great that one time when he was tied to a post as punishment for an infraction at the temple he created a picture of a mouse…
The Long Tail claims consumers, given more options, will reflect their widely varied interests. Physical stores cannot fill all of the demand, so bytes stored on disk are the fastest, cheapest method for getting stuff to consumers. We see a mostly example of this shift in the shift to digital music. Vinyl records were the…