Let’s see… glancing back through the year, here’s what I’m most glad to have read. I wrote about most of these…
Fiction:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Non-Fiction:
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to […]
My top artists for 2007, according to last.fm. Not the most representative collection, because the long tail of my listening habits is, well, really long. But aside from a few surprises, it’s pretty fair. One thing that’s not a surprise: I am decidedly out-of-date. I think only a few of these folks came out with […]
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The novel centers on a father and son who, realizing they can’t survive another winter, start moving through the southeast towards the coast, trudging through snow and ash with their belongings in a scavenged shopping cart. Where they leave from, where exactly they are going, […]
H.G. Wells: “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of mankind.”
While working on a little research paper a couple weeks ago, I came across cloze procedure. A cloze test is used to measure the difficulty of a text. In a cloze test, you take a text and replace every fifth word with a blank space. The reader, who has never seen the passage before, reads […]
Spent some time playing with Flickr stats the other day. I’m not really looking to be known for my photographs, but I am a sucker for data. As expected, my stats don’t demonstrate that internet users worldwide have come to appreciate my uncanny eye for composition and form, but rather that one can leverage Flickr’s […]
A long essay on why crunch mode doesn’t work. The gist is that productivity peaks within the first 4, 5, or 6 hours of the day, then starts dropping. Eventually it dissolves completely. In the long run, that continuous overtime isn’t helping you or your company.
How to create an extreme overhang with toy bricks [$]. Via BLDGBLOG, where you’ll find some great images of the crazy stacking and some architectural speculation. I’d love to see some crazy buildings tilting over like that.
“After Darwin, after Einstein—just as after Galileo and Copernicus—we can’t have the same theological ideas about God as we did before.” An interview with theologian John Haught on science, faith, and the troubles of the new atheism.
I did not know that Wikipedia has a reference desk. Sort of like the super-helpful Ask MetaFilter.
From the Rope Swing Manifesto:
The absolutely best rope swing is one currently in use by your friends. If you approach a rope swing in use by persons not known to you, realize that you may get a cool reception or worse. As we’ve seen, rope swings usually occur on private land. The swings themselves, […]
“I don’t know how anyone can try to be universal. The way you really do it is to take care in your own work, do the best job you can, be as truthful as possible about the things right under your nose.” -Steve Reich
PhD trivia: “Only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10.” That sounds completely insane to me. Granted, I’ve never been in a PhD program, but… wow. Just wow. Some schools are implementing policies to encourage professors to help students complete […]
Lapham’s Quarterly looks like a worthy new periodical. Each volume covers a specific theme and the essays come from a wide range of historical texts. The current issue, “States of War,” draws on Patton, Ruskin, Lenin, Goebbels, bin Laden, Virgil, Tim O’Brien, Whitman, Vonnegut, Tolstoy…
Merriam-Webster’s words of the year, with the lovable “w00t” winning the number one spot.
Reuters Pictures of the Year for 2007. Not sure how to link to each, but I like photos number 2, 16, 22, 45, 63, 86, 92, and 98. [via kottke]
Tumblr and tumblogs are great, but the attribution can be shoddy. I had to click my way back through 4 or 5 websites to to get to the primary source for these really cool illustrations, No Hugging Is So Hard. [sorry, I lost track of the vias, but the next-to-last was startdrawing]
Flash Fiction Forward collects a bunch of stories that only take a couple of page turns to finish. One thing I thought was odd is how none of the stories take on a particular genre, and how many of them seem to have a contemporary setting. Why not a tight little detective story, or a […]
The Twitter Curve. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It’s one of the best things distractions going, but I have to be really careful to keep my signal/noise ratio in balance.
Neil Gaiman helped one of his fans propose at a book signing. Read the story, and someone caught it on video as well.
This Saturday in Atlanta, The Happenstance at The Earl: “We select 30 musicians, make them meet us early in the morning at a local rock club, randomly divide them into 5 piece bands, and send them off to create a 20 minute set of music which they will perform that evening.”
“History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans – sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.” Humans are evolving, and there’s a difference even over the small time frame of the past 1000-10,000 […]
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is one of my favorite regular reads. It just never gets old for me. I’ve also previously recommended the photo group for “Quotation Mark” Abuse.
I don’t know where the nonist found this image. I love it. Maybe he will tell if you ask nicely.
Geometry of Circles is a series of animated shorts that appeared on Sesame street in the late 1970s, with music by Philip Glass. Someone put together four of the Geometry of Circles videos for your enjoyment on YouTube. [via lined & unlined]
Yesterday I stumbled on the I Want to See That! podcast—wherein Ben Brown and Katie Spence review upcoming movies they haven’t seen. Ill-rehearsed and delightful to watch.
At the heart of You Don’t Love Me Yet is a band. Well, a band without a name that hasn’t had a gig yet. The story follows Lucinda, the bassist, as she navigates the post-break-up phase with Matthew, the lead singer. The whole book is about process, creation, becoming, limbo, liminal states. The book starts […]
James Wolcott on book reviewing and Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.
I learned about Parkinson’s Law while twittering today: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Here are some other eponymous laws.
Art has no shortcuts, folks:
In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen—alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Bezedrine, etc.—but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to affect the health of the cook, and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as […]
A few impressive woodcuts from the Otto Nückel book, Destiny: A Novel in Pictures. Really cool work. I haven’t been able to find much other information about him, aside from a Wikipedia entry in German and his being an inspiration for Lynd Ward and Art Spiegelman.
The Web that Wasn’t: Alex Wright talks about precursors and alternatives to the web we know.
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