Some admittedly date back to last week but they are among the things that have caught my interest over the last 10 days or so:
- I’ve used the Google translate feature on a couple occasions but never thought about the flip side. Hence, I found this is very cool, although I have no idea how accurate it is. (FWIW, my site tracker tells me this came from a visitor in the Ukraine.)
- The American Journalism Review explains what the mainstream media can learn from Jon Stewart.
- An interesting observation on the (in?)consistency of the free speech views of Chief Justice Roberts in light the two free speech decisions the Supreme Court handed down Monday in “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” and political advertising.
- Marc Andreessen comes up with a list of the top 10 SF novelists of the ’00s. While I haven’t read works by all of them, it is a very impressive cast of authors. (Via.)
- Among the authors on Andreessen’s list is Peter Watts. I was thrilled to see he will be doing a 30-minute talk on how he wrote his latest work, Blindsight, at ReaderCon next week. It is one of the better SF works I’ve read this year and a deserving finalist for the Hugo Award for best novel.
- As a follow-up to my LibraryThing post, I have begun “tagging” the books in my library so you can know see my subject cloud.
- Not that I need it, but Lifehack has a list of 14 ways to cultivate reading as a habit. (Via.) For some of us, habit = obsession but I’m proud to say I’ve passed the addiction on to each of my children.
Each book to me is not just the words within its pages, but the story of its provenance.
Matthew Cheney, “All Those Books”, Strange Horizons
