Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Invasion of the body hackers (“Footsteps, sweat, caffeine, memories, stress, even sex and dating habits – it can all be calculated and scored like a baseball batting average. And if there isn’t already an app or a device for tracking it, one will probably appear in the next few years.”) (via)
- A field guide to bullshit (“But the more we rely on mystery to get us out of intellectual trouble, or the more we use it as a carpet under which to sweep inconvenient facts, the more vulnerable we are to deceit, by others and by ourselves.”) (also via)
Bookish Linkage
- Someone else notes “biblio-amnesia,” a form of something I blogged about last year.
- The Internet Archive project is now archiving physical copies of books it digitizes, i.e., a paper backup. (via)
- The Guardian comes up with a list of 100 greatest non-fiction books. I’ve read seven .
- Questions of e-reader etiquette.
- Chad Post opines that selling e-books for 99 cents destroys minds.
- The Atlantic asks, “Where is the great novel about the war on terror?“
- At least in British crime novels, the average body count was 8.38, with 150 the most people “killed”’ by one author. (via)
- Irish author Colum McCann won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize for English-language fiction, for his novel, Let the Great World Spin (which has been on my TBR shelves for more months than I care to admit).
Nonbookish Linkage
- What if a brain scan could tell you a child has a 75 percent chance of becoming a criminal? (via)
- Does NASA need a philosopher?
The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy
