books

March Madness for nerds

Ah! The Morn­ing News has posted its Tour­na­ment of Books bracket. There’s a lot of math on that page, and it’s okay if you space out or just go re-read the OkCu­pid blog instead. Because the impor­tant thing is the bracket, pre­sented as a down­load­able PDF at the bot­tom of the page, which tells us that:

  • Snark­mar­ket favorite Molly Young is in the first round, read­ing Snark­mar­ket favorite The Anthol­o­gist and some other book.
  • Snark­mar­ket favorite Jason Kot­tke does not face this pres­sure, clear on the other side of the bracket.

I pre­dict that: Molly Young will choose The Anthol­o­gist; Jason Kot­tke will choose between The Lacuna and Let the Great World Spin; the final show­down will be between The Anthol­o­gist and Let the Great World Spin; and The Anthol­o­gist will prevail.

Yes: my method here is about as rig­or­ous as it is with the non-nerd March Mad­ness. (Wow, scope out that 2004 post. Who wrote that?)

 

In the courtroom

I am lov­ing James Grimmelman’s nuanced notes on the lat­est Google Books Set­tle­ment hearing—both because I’m inter­ested in the issue and because it’s inter­est­ing to under­stand the actual legal process bet­ter. Okay, also because James throws in stuff like this:

Judge Chin, how­ever, threw a curve­ball, ask­ing how Rubin would respond to Sony’s argu­ments about com­pe­ti­tion. The sub­stance of the ques­tion was squarely in line with the issues Rubin was argu­ing, but I think the unex­pected form it took, like the Stay-Puft Marsh­mal­low Man, caught him off guard.

This is my kinda court reporting.

 

Textbook remix

This is super cool, both in con­tent and process: Python for Infor­mat­ics is a new text­book that Chuck Sev­er­ance, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, com­piled in eleven days. It’s based on an exist­ing Python text­book that was released under a Cre­ative Com­mons license; Sev­er­ance culled, sharp­ened, and extended it.

And if you were one of Severance’s stu­dents in Ann Arbor, you could get a phys­i­cal copy printed on the uni­ver­sity library’s Espresso book machine.

I find every part of this sce­nario really excit­ing. It’s like the pieces are all start­ing to click into place.

(Via Publishing2.)

 

Instrumented reading

This is basi­cally a direct follow-up to my Snark­mar­ket post from the mid­dle of 2009 titled The Post-Orwellian Future of Con­nected Books and Every­thing Else: I made a con­nected book! Well, sort of. In the most min­i­mal way imaginable.

But I got the data, I plot­ted it, and… hmm. This instru­mented read­ing thing might not be all its cracked up to be.

In all seri­ous­ness, it was an impor­tant step for me—from long-trumpeted the­ory to prac­ti­cal imple­men­ta­tion. I’m still excited about the idea… but it’s going to take a more sophis­ti­cated (or more cre­ative) imple­men­ta­tion to actu­ally deliver on, like, the premise.

But, if noth­ing else: the graphs are pretty!

 

Android Karenina

It’s gone too far, but I still love it. Although I do think these books would work bet­ter as video games.

I won­der how many copies of Pride and Prej­u­dice and Zom­bies (et al.) have actu­ally been read, though? It’s almost like that’s not what they’re for.

 

Monday tab dump

Some things worth sharing:

  • These pho­tos by Ruben Bru­lat are like Where’s Waldo meets The Road.
  • The blogpost-of-fragments is actu­ally not an easy thing to pull off! At least the BOF that does more than coast on the fake rev­e­la­tion of jux­ta­po­si­tion. Tim Maly pulls it off here. “Grad­ual calamity!”
  • Who knows what the future holds… but I bet Geoff Man­augh could make a pretty bad-ass movie. It would take place in NAKATOMI SPACE.
  • I like what the New York Pub­lic Library is up to with Can­dide here, though I haven’t found the bit that really clicks for me yet. I’m going to keep an eye on it as they add more. Also: It reminded me of Rachel Leow’s won­der­ful Google Map chart­ing the Trav­els of Marco Polo.
  • You might have seen this already: Al Gore’s eye for typog­ra­phy. I just wanted to add that this jibes pre­cisely with my expe­ri­ence of him; he has an incred­i­ble eye for detail, and in the, like, actually-cares-about-cool-stuff way, not the crazy-famous-person way.
  • Google Street View update (pre­vi­ously): Hmm, per­haps they’ll sell vir­tual bill­boards com­pos­ited into Street View space.
  • A very cool new track from The Knife and some col­lab­o­ra­tors that are new to me: Mt. Sims and Plan­ning­torock. I love it that, in 2010, this is almost pop music. It’s from an opera about Charles Darwin.
  • (Wait… The Knife made an opera about Charles Darwin?!)
  • Broad­band yes; toi­let no. (Via BA.)

Voilà!

 

Bookdrop tagging

This lit­tle mockup almost speaks for itself:

20100104_bookdrop

Almost… but not quite. The story it rep­re­sents is really remark­able. Nina Simon explains:

Haar­lem Oost is a branch library in the Nether­lands that wanted to encour­age vis­i­tors to add tags […] to the books they read. […] To do this, the library didn’t cre­ate a com­pli­cated com­puter sys­tem or send peo­ple online. Instead, they installed more book drops and return shelves, labeled with dif­fer­ent descrip­tors like “bor­ing,” “great for kids,” “funny,” etc.

Is that great or what? Phys­i­cal tag­ging! It feels like the infor­ma­tional equiv­a­lent of turn­ing a dance floor into a piezo­elec­tric power gen­er­a­tor. But alas—the library has now aban­doned the sys­tem. Why?

[…] peo­ple were using the sys­tem so seri­ously that it took them a lot of time per book to decide where to place it. That caused some logis­tic prob­lems in the (small) build­ing, espe­cially as they have some peak times.

It’s clear to me that this is a totally beau­ti­ful, clever mechanism—it makes me want to use the too-snooty term of art “intervention”—that just needed a lit­tle extra engi­neer­ing. There’s a great com­ment thread over at Nina’s blog that dives in even deeper.

 

Who needs books? Just gimme the covers

It’s offi­cial. Folded-out book covers—book cov­ers abstracted away from books entirely—are my new favorite thing. For instance, I like this view of Michael Cho’s new cover for White Noise a lot. It’s almost like a lit­tle comic:

20091230_cho

See also: his neat process post for another recent cover.

 

The five texts

Eco­nom­ics has, dur­ing its entire his­tory, from the mid-18th cen­tury until today, been dom­i­nated by only five text­books. David Warsh lists them and explains:

[F]or the entire his­tory of mod­ern eco­nom­ics, all 250 years of it, from its begin­nings dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment of the eigh­teenth cen­tury to the present day, the dis­ci­pline has been dom­i­nated by five canon­i­cal text­books — and only five (though, of course, each had many imi­ta­tors). Those who found com­pelling the author­ity of these texts became econ­o­mists. Those who didn’t became some­thing else — soci­ol­o­gists, polit­i­cal the­o­rists, anthro­pol­o­gists, psy­chol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, lawyers, reform­ers, busi­ness­men, reli­gious leaders.

Isn’t that an inter­est­ing way of fram­ing it? “Those who found com­pelling the author­ity of these texts became econ­o­mists.” Won­der­ful phras­ing; neat idea, too. The five texts were writ­ten by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stu­art Mill, Alfred Mar­shall… and Paul Samuel­son, who died recently, and who is the sub­ject of Warsh’s piece.

The piece also includes this fun anec­dote, new to me. Samuelson’s epochal text opens with an epi­gram from Willard Gibbs, a sci­en­tist and math­e­mati­cian: “Math­e­mat­ics is a lan­guage.” The story behind those words, from Muriel Rukeyser:

[Gibbs] would come to meet­ings — these fac­ulty gath­er­ings so full of cam­pus pol­i­tics, scarcely veiled maneu­vers, and aca­d­e­mic obsta­cle races — and leave with­out a word, stay­ing politely enough, but never speak­ing. Just this once he spoke. It was dur­ing a long and tir­ing debate on elec­tive courses, on whether there should be more or less Eng­lish, more or less clas­sics, more or less math­e­mat­ics. And sud­denly every­thing he had been doing stood up — and the past behind him, his [philol­o­gist] father’s life, and behind that, the long effort and voy­age that had been made in many life­times — and he stood up, look­ing down on the upturned faces, aston­ished to see the silent man talk at last, and he said, with empha­sis, once and for all: “Math­e­mat­ics is a language.”

“And sud­denly every­thing he had been doing stood up.” Jeez. More won­der­ful lan­guage. What an image. “Every­thing he had been doing stood up.”

 

The inky swamp

Jonathan Har­ris, in one of his thought­ful photos-of-the-day:

I would like it if some­body worth emu­lat­ing would give me a list of the 100 books that I need to read, in order to push and poke at my stiff sense of self until I am larger and more dynamic, expanded like a rub­ber bal­loon in 100 direc­tions by 100 well-expressed world views.

With such a list, I would have no prob­lem with a com­put­er­less cabin-bound exis­tence, and I would never ven­ture back to the swamp­land of the Smith Fam­ily book­store, nor any other wet­land like it, trudg­ing through printed sprawl to look for pearls.

Two things. One: the photo-of-the-day, with a good cap­tion, is really ide­ally internet-sized, isn’t it? Two: I admire the ele­gance of his artic­u­la­tion, but I dis­agree with Jonathan Harris’s des­ti­na­tion. We’ve been stuck in cab­ins with too-short lists for too long! The printed sprawl is where the action is. Dive in, I say.

 
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