I found a shower gift…
Lisa Congdon turned her scissor collection into a gorgeous mobile —
think of the incredible mental scars you could leave on your child by
hanging this over her crib!
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Why free reading is important
Neil Gaiman’s got some good further ruminations on the nature and
reason for free ebooks in a post he called “The nature of free.” Bottom
line: low-risk/low-cost books are how readers discover new authors, and
the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading
books, not people reading for free. The more barriers there are to
reading, the worse the former gets.
During one of the interviews recently, a reporter said something like, “Of course, a real publisher wouldn’t give away paper books,” and I pointed out that 3,000 copies of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy were given away by Douglas Adams’ publisher, with a ‘write in and get your free book’ ad in Rolling Stone.
They wanted copies of HHGTTG on campuses in the US, and they wanted
people to read it and tell other people. Word of mouth is still the
best tool for selling books.
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Happy belated valentines…
Also, a nice valentines meal… of sorts…
Damn, I love UK commercials…
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Free download of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
Neil Gaiman’s publisher Harper Collins has put his magnificent novel American Gods online for free reading as an experiment to see free digital copies sell print books.
This is a great idea — it’s really exciting to see publishers trying to get actual data about the market, rather than simply condemning all copying as piracy and hoping that the Internet just goes away.
However, I think that Harper Collins got this one wrong. They’ve put the text of American Gods up in a wrapper that loads pictures of the pages from the printed book, one page at a time, with no facility for offline reading. The whole thing runs incredibly slowly and is unbelievably painful to use. I think we can be pretty sure that no one will read this version instead of buying the printed book — but that’s only because practically no one is going to read this version, period.
The fact is that the full text of American Gods has been online for years, and can be located with a single Google query. I managed to buy/download the entire text of the book in less time than it took me to get the Harper Collins edition to load the first page of Chapter One (literally!). The “security” that Harper Collins has bought with its clunky, kudgey experiment is nonexistent: pirates will just go get the pirate edition.
Unfortunately, the “security” has also undermined the experiment’s value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn’t going to cost Neil any sales, but it’s also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that’s completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.
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Brief books in style
Brief books are in style. “Fine, old-fashioned self-improving middlebrow literature.”
Series mentioned:
*Penguin Lives (Penguin Group)
*Books That Changed the World (Grove/Atlantic)
*Eminent Lives (HarperCollins)
*Ackroyd’s Brief Lives (Doubleday)
*The Canongate Myth Series (Canongate)
*The art of .. (Graywolf Press)
*Great Generals Series (Palgrave
*The American Presidents Series (Times Books)
*National Geographic Directions (National Geographic)
*Jewish Encounters (Next Books)
*Very Short Introductions (Oxford University Press)
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Don’t you die on me man!
Experience the thrills of amateur surgery as you play Amateur Surgeon over at Adult Swim . You’ll be performing transplants with a chainsaw, suturing wounds with staples and shocking patients back to life with a car battery.
I’ve been playing this all week. Uber fun
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Woman vs Desert Eagle
Haha, hot chick, but damn, test fire with blanks first so you dont blow somebodys head off with that damn thing.
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New ‘Iron Man’ Trailer Continues Clever Use of ‘Iron Man’ in Soundtrack
As much I find Iron Man and his glib alter ego Tony Stark to be intolerable characters, I have to admit that Jon Favreau looks to have made a decent adaptation of the source material. And with a non-stop barrage of hard rock (AC/DC, Audioslave, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man”, of course), constant alcohol imbibing, and the flagrant use of sports cars as backdrops, Iron Man looks to be the first superhero movie to fully capture the sensibilities of Maxim Magazine. The biggest surprise isn’t that this looks like a surefire hit but that they didn’t put Gwyneth Paltrow in a bikini. Make sure to watch this if you’re a male 13 to 35. Otherwise, you’re totally going to look like a gay..
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Tampires are out to suck your blood….
Tampires – The tampons that want to suck your blood.
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Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts
Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts (pdf), a recently-updated paper on the Cornell arXiv peer-review site. By Hrvoje Nikolić of the Rudjer Bošković Institute in Croatia.
Note: the presence of a paper on arXiv does not necessarily mean it has been reviewed and is not equivalent to having been published in a journal.
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An optical illusion
Stare at the dot for 30 seconds. Then, without moving your eyes, move the mouse over the image. The image will look like it’s in color until you move your eyes. (How make your own | More examples)
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Lots and lots of money.
David Horvitz will do things for money.
Though I really doubt anyone will send money for the larger things, the things he offers are pretty interesting.
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Students Rewarded for Destroying Productivity
The Winners of the 10th Annual Independent Games Festival were announced Wednesday night at this year’s GDC. Finalists in the Student Showcase included Crayon Physics Deluxe, Flip Side and Empyreal Nocturne, as well as a 2-D platformer named Polarity, developed by the same team behind Bandology and Skyrates.
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The Amber Room.. Found?
The Amber Room found? German treasure hunters using electromagnetic pulse measurements are “90% sure” the Russian “Eighth Wonder of the World” was buried by the Nazi’s in a man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf (map), but it will take “..until Easter to get into the chamber because it may contain booby traps and has to be secured by explosives experts.. The chamber is likely to be part of a labyrinth of storage rooms that the Nazis built.” Russia is eyeing its return, “If, hypothetically speaking, the room still exists.”
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Songs for Drella
21 years ago, Andy Warhol died of complications from gallbladder surgery. Lou Reed and John Cale, two founding members of the Velvet Underground — Warhol’s Factory house band — paid tribute to their mentor on the 1990 album Songs for Drella. Edward Lachman‘s recording of a 1991 performance is available on YouTube: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15.
New York Times review; Rolling Stone review (that curiously only credits Reed for the album); Cale-centric commentary on the album; a look back from Brooklyn Heights Blog. Bonus Reed/Cale performances from Saturday Night Live and Letterman.
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Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do & die.
Over 400 classical images of Death [warning: embedded music]
When I think of death The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson always pops into my head.
|
Half a league half a league, ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’ Cannon to right of them, |
Flash’d all their sabres bare, Cannon to right of them, When can their glory fade? |
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Multilingual malware writers in hot demand
Security researchers are noticing an uptick in help-wanted ads for malware programmers who can write grammatically in many languages so that they can help send out targeted, plausible spam:
Advertisements for virus authors fluent in languages from Japanese to Portuguese are increasingly showing up online. Such recruiting efforts are finding traction thanks partly to the economic conditions in nations like China and Russia. Both countries have a surplus of skilled coders who lack regular work, or possibly any work at all. Laws against cybercrime are also more lax in these and other developing nations… If you’re going to host malicious servers in another country, it only makes sense to offer its citizens the gifts of herbal enhancements and Nigerian banking deals that make the rest of us so happy–but if you’re going to bring such presents to another nation, you have to know the local language. The Russian Mafia’s interest in cybercrime is also reportedly growing–a fact that could have significant repercussions for the future of malware business on a global scale.
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The trunk monkey
Suburban Auto Group in Sandy, Oregon has a great series of “Trunk Monkey” commercials created by r-west.
More things need to come equipped with some kind of monkey activation button.
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Design and the Elastic Mind
Design and the Elastic Mind is a MOMA exhibit of cool objects, gadgets, websites and ideas. Some personal favorites are The PainStation, The Religious Helmet, Body Modification for Love, The Minutine Space and Lightweeds.
RobDurdle.com 
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