• BookMooch: exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter

I’ve joined Bookmooch, an interesting book-trading social site. You join, add books you’re willing to give away to your inventory, and when somebody else wants to “mooch” the book you mail it to them (you pay the postage). Doing so accumulates points that you can then use to mooch books off of others. Economically, it probably works out to your advantage…it costs about $2.13 to send most paperbacks anywhere in the US, but since you need a 2:1 ratio of books sent to books received, that’ll be about $4.50-$5.00 including packing materials. Oddly, you get 1 point per book mailed, plus additional fractional points just for listing books, and it only costs 1 point to mooch a book; the 2:1 rule is separate from the points accounting, so it seems like over time you’ll accumulate more points than you can possibly use unless you’re mooching books from overseas (which cost extra points).

So far, I have sent out about eight books, and haven’t mooched any myself since I haven’t really dug through what’s available or bothered to enter a wish-list of books I know I’d like to mooch if they were available. On the other hand, since I’m mostly doing this because I can’t stand the idea of throwing out books even if I’ll never read them again, but pretty much every other way of disposing of books has gotten to be too much of a hassle (local libraries won’t even take paperbacks any more, used bookstores cherry-pick one or two titles, etc), I’m not too concerned. Eventually I’m sure I’ll mooch something…or, you know, get tired of it.

I got this a little while back, and while it was enjoyable enough, I found it a bit repetitive. If you know anything about linguistics (even as little as I know), there’s not a lot here that will be new to you…I’d guess that you’d be able to outline the main argument of each essay if not all the details just from the title. Possibly the most surprising thing to me was encountering a myth that I’d never even heard before, that “In Appalachia They Speak Like Shakespeare.”

Possibly the most eye-rolling bit is treating all black people regardless of time or geography as belonging to the same culture in “Black Children are Verbally Deprived” (so the oratorical traditions that gave rise to Kwame Nkrumah, Odumegwu Ojukwu, or Desmond Tutu, or even Frederick Douglass are somehow supposed to count as part of the culture of African-American inner-city children); it would have been better to stick to Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan, and Martin Luther King as examples of the richness of at least semi-current African-American oration. But, beyond the question of whether the examples are actually relevant, the structure of the argument is off.  Nobody would accept that inner-city African-American children aren’t economically deprived just because they’ve come from a culture that’s given rise to the multi-millionaires Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and so forth.  The rest of the essay goes on to do a much better job,  but it’s a really weak opening.

I’d say my favorite essay was “English Spelling Is Kattastroffik.”  I think it’s the juiciest, with the most concrete examples, and so probably the only one I would have referred back to later.

I passed this book along yesterday via ;Bookmooch, so even though I wasn’t blown away by it, I hope its new owner finds it informative and useful.

I’ve started using this for all my personal note-taking projects; the ability to just copy a page and have a new wiki that you can carry around on a thumb drive is nifty^2.

• TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

  • Welcome to TiddlyWiki, a popular free MicroContent WikiWikiWeb created by JeremyRuston and a busy Community of independent developers. It’s written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript to run on any modern browser without needing any ServerSide logic. It allows anyone to create personal SelfContained hypertext documents that can be posted to a WebServer, sent by email or kept on a USB thumb drive to make a WikiOnAStick.

I finally got the OED working again on my new machine (which involved sending the original disks back to OUP-US so they would send me the new point release version that works under Vista, because there’s apparently no patch process).

So, yay.

EconLog, Alcohol and Non-Linear Dosage Effects, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty Annotated

tags: statistics

Our years overlapped, but when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, I never met Aaron Wildavsky. My loss. Here’s a great passage he wrote (along with Adam Wildavsky) for Henderson’s encyclopedia:

Another questionable assumption is that cancer causation is a linear process, meaning that there is no safe dose and that damage occurs at a constant rate as exposure increases. This is known as the “linear no-threshold hypothesis.” Scientific evidence increasingly shows that there are indeed threshold effects.

His example:

Consuming two gallons of 100-proof liquor is an hour would be enough to kill most of us. If the linear no-threshold hypothesis applied to alcohol, one would expect that if 256 people consumed an ounce of liquor each, then on average one of them would keel over and die. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that were the EPA to regulate ethyl alcohol… the same way that it regulates other chemical compounds, we would each be limited to sixteen-millionths of an ounce per lifetime.

No particular comment here, I just thought it was an interesting observation. And yes, I do plan on drinking a beer tonight

Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut - Pravda.Ru

As 40 years have passed since Gagarin’s flight, new sensational details of this event were disclosed: Gagarin was not the first man to fly to space. Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin’s famous space flight, Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located in Khimki, in the Moscow region) said on Thursday.

update: My friend Mac, who follows stuff about the Russian space program closely, doubts the authenticity of this story.  She says that these claims have been floating around for years, but there’s no new evidence presented here.

Candidates Face the Changes - CollegeHumor video

Another amusing CollegeHumor video.  Make sure you watch to the end

NoScript - JavaScript/Java/Flash blocker for a safer Firefox experience! - what is it? - InformAction

I don’t know if you care, but I’m reasonably paranoid about computer security, and this Firefox plugin is the best approach I’ve found.  It defaults to disallowing every form of scripting on any site you visit until you explicitly approve it (via a little toolbar button in the status line that shows you all the sites the page is trying to run scripts from), either temporarily or permanently.  It would be hard to get control more fine-grained than that and still be useful, though I do still use Adblock to block certain scripts from running on a site that I otherwise trust, just to block out ads that contain motion.

Note to advertisers if you happen to stumble across this:  I will never put up with any ad that contains anything that moves, blinks, or changes color.  As soon as  I see one of those, I not only block the offending ad, I block the entire provider.  If you want me to see your ad, you had better make it just sit there rather than demanding my attention.

What I Did Over Christmas Vacation « Miss(ed) Manners

‘This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien.’

The above was actually from last year. This year, they’ve done The Battle of Pelennor Fields (the siege of Minas Tirith). It’s truly made of awesome. And candy. Awesome candy.

protagonize: interactive fiction & collaborative story writing community

Welcome to Protagonize: your destiny awaits.

Protagonize is a creative writing community dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the\naddventure, a type of collaborative\ninteractive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches to it in different directions. The result is\nan organic, evolving story where everyone can participate

via EFL Geek

We had something like this on the computer system where I went to college–I think either written by, or just mostly populated by, folks in the Science Fiction Club.  The fiction that resulted was god-awful.  Some of that may have been the form, some of that may have been the folks (hard to expect much coherence from a club with the motto “Randomness Rules!”), but it was a way to while away time, and sometimes was pretty funny.