Revolutionaries

“The majority of revolutionists are the enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures, too, to whose sense of justice the price exacted looms up monstrously enormous, odious, oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable. Those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries.” — from The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad

Xenophon

Chicago Boyz’ Xenophon Roundtable includes a post by Steven Pressfield, Alexander and Cyrus: Two Different Routes to Babylon.

After dinner

“The dinner hovered over the point at which empty chairs begin to appear, and people misjudge their moment and tiptoe out at the beginning of a speech, and others reckon the chances of catching their distant friends before they are gone. At this point every dinner contends with destiny, and if it is fortunate concludes in a rapid and ecstatic climax; if it is unfortunate it drags out a lingering death, and enters afterwards a shuddering oblivion.” — Shadows of Ecstasy, by Charles Williams

Atmosphere

“Behind Riddlesdale Lodge the moor stretched starkly away and upward. The heather was brown and wet, and the little streams had no color in them. It was six o’clock, but there was no sunset. Only a paleness had moved behind the thick sky from east to west all day. Lord Peter, tramping back after a long and fruitless search for tidings of the man with the motor-cycle, voiced the dull suffering of his gregarious spirit. ‘I wish old Parker was here,’ he muttered, and squelched down a sheep-track.” — Clouds of Witness, by Dorthy L. Sayers

Reading, science, math, politics

• Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2009 Results are out.
• Scientists see no dietary benefit to replacing corn syrup with sugar, but I still think it’s creepy how it’s in everything. At least I know what sugar is. Besides, it would just be wrong spread lardand high-fructose corn syrup on your sody crackers.
• Like he says, Wolfram|Alpha is creeping into my workday. Lately I’ve used it at about once every day. It does more than you might think.
• Epic fail, then onward to health care and climate change!

Maps

“Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. … People read stories of adventure – and write them – because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity.” — Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood, by Michael Chabon

Censors under the bed

H.L. Menken defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The Annoyed Librarian doesn’t explicitly give us a name for the people who worry when “someone you don’t know living somewhere you don’t live doesn’t buy a book you think they should,” but if she did give them a name, it would be explicit.

New ways to read

• Read at work. This is funny, and maybe useful. Use full-screen mode for the best result.
• It’s less funny, at least if you’re a printer, that printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle.

Finding and reading books

“This outcome was not anticipated at the outset.” Words to live by, from Google & the Future of Books. “If Google makes available, at a reasonable price, the combined holdings of all the major US libraries, who would not applaud?” Well, I’ll tell you who:

Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine. Mostly because Worldcat is evil, according to the Guardian. Of course they don’t come right out and say it. I can’t help thinking, if you could type in the title and Google told you the nearest library, the Guardian would think that was evil.

UPDATE: As Doc Rampage notes in the comments, The Guardian added at the top of their article a paragraph where they completely climb down, saying they “misrepresented a new record use policy, etc.” It’s to The Guardian’s credit that they admitted their mistake, and did so prominently.

Meanwhile, you can still use interlibrary loan to borrow almost any book in the world for free.^* Or you can buy any book in the world on line and have it delivered to your house. Or go to the bookstore, sit in the comfy chair, and read a chapter a day. Or sit in the library and read. Granted, you have to leave at closing time.

^*Unless you live outside the city limits. Then, since you aren’t already taxed for the library like the rest of us, you have to pay for a library card to borrow books. Oh, the injustice!

The life of the mind

Collect. “Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read… the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof.” — Only Collect (h/t)

Then having collected, synthesize something. “Google has been using search data to model flu outbreaks for a number of years. Generally, they look at the number of searches for words related to “flu” (graphs) and look for sharp increases in the number of searches (slopes, derivatives)… Perhaps, intrigued by this, you’d like to see if search trends make any other predictions…” — Google Search Data vs Real CDC Data: Guess who wins?

But be careful. “Language can also convey pure ritual, for example. By ritual, I mean ‘language games’ that a person or group of people can ‘act out’ – translate from just the remembered song or the big tome into some social practice in the real world, people really ‘acting out’ the ritual with no understanding – no meaning beyond ‘here, we do the ritual.’” — Tom Lord on ritual, knowledge and the web

Be very careful.