Stephen Fry is an amazingly erudite, charming, and just fun writer about technology. This is one of the best, or at least freshest, looks at what open source means. It avoids the stridency of some open source advocates, dodges the now nearly-dead “not free like beer”, and has an interesting comparison of operating systems to plumbing.
The credits are fun too, almost all of the images are sourced at flickr.
He’s also got a fun column about the Wii.
Just came across references to the NEA Big Read Meme in Cocktail Party Physics. The NEA is trying to “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture”, a worthy goal questionably stated. I would think a Trojan horse approach (reading that entertains, books that are fun) would work better than a return to the past and an attempt to displace the web and mp3 players. But that’s non-profits for ya.
The list below, and I haven’t found the original source yet (and see no point in trying to having found the same list three times already), has 100 books that are somehow worthy of people’s attention. It’s a mix of popular and fun (Harry Potter, LOTR) and more traditional classics (Lolita, Pride and Prejudice). The viral activity around it is to see what we have read, intend to read and which ones we love. Great fun to play with, critique, and build your own.
One thing around the categories worth doing is distinguishing between “Read and discarded from thought” which would apply to most of Tess of the D’Urbervilles which was part of AP English, “Read and Internalized”, “Read but should Re-Read”. Not all read-s are equal.
Look at the list and bold those we have read.
Italicize those we intend to read.
Underline the books we LOVE.I’ve also put a footnote anchor by incomplete reads, with notes at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [1]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [2]
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [3]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving [4]
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert [5] (Currently reading this.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (No, but I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that was enough for me!!)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt [6]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [7]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
From a NY Times article about Jon Stewart’s status as one of the most trusted journalists in America, a nice quote from Stephen Colbert about the craft of satire. It can apply to so many things where you are looking at the difference between amusing and brilliant, mockery and satire, good and great:
“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”
… as opposed to paranormal. I like my conspiracies and para-normal stuff as much as your average pulp-minded citizen, but sometimes the real normal or veri-normal (cute, huh?) is even more fun. The latest mystery is in today’s NYT, in an article about how scientiests are still trying to figure out why glass is hard:
The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass?
“They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”
Other mysteries include, how do trees manage to bring water up to leaves 100 feet in the air? and why is ice slippery (and skateable)?
Jon Evans’s new book Invisible Armies, has a trailer. (It’s also free for a month, and the author has travel tips and the publisher is running a GPS contest)
Better still, it has a blog-blurb-review-endorsement from Bruce Sterling that works for on an absurd number of levels.
(((That’s a pretty good book, actually. It’s kind of a tough-as-nails technothriller from a leftie Seattle 99er perspective. People who aren’t morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.)))
I believe this came up while reading a link from a friend about laser etching my moleskine:
It points to this:
Feels like a stunt, but I dig it anyway.
Comcast has a technical support person on twitter. John Dvorak TWiTed that he is responding to people individually.
While it’s not a great movie, Walk Hard has some great moments that I can’t stop re-watching (the protest song phase, India, the Beatles(!), and the world music song in particular). While obsessing about the movie’s attention to detail in spoofing 70s rocker career (the Dewey variety show interstitials are awesome), I found the Dewey Cox album covers below. I love when movies put together these kind of artefacts (right down to the tortured punctuation):
“Join the stuggle while you may
The revolution is just a t-shirt away”
Just saw this while ordering some forgotten/hidden/kooky New York books. It’s a customer review for Lost New York:
