Couple good quotes from Tales of the Arabian Nights: The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, though they may be sourced further back in middle-eastern culture:

Envy lurks in every body
Opression hideth in every heart: power revealeth it and weakness concealeth it

I have a much more extreme view of spoilers than anyone I've ever encountered. Here's an email response to a friend trying to understand what spoilers mean to me. Am I crazy? Enjoy!

Spoiler: "to diminish or impair the quality of; affect detrimentally"New books, movies, games, music are personal in-the-moment experiences. I don't want to ( Read more... )

In the bus today, i looked around my section, and was amused to see the 7/7 other people staring at their cellphones, while i had a book in hand. I'm certainly no technophobe, perhaps a gadget-o-phobe since it all seems a waste of money, but it was a bit jarring. For a moment i felt like i was in the wrong century.

Cognitive Dissonance -- Why it's hard to admit to being wrongWe all have a hard time admitting that we're wrong, but according to a new book about human psychology, it's not entirely our fault. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson and co-author Carol Tavris say our brains work hard to make us think we are doing the right thing, even in the face of ( Read more... )

While debating whether I want to get a "free" ipod, I realized what I really would like, is a combination audioplayer/ebook, video is superfluous. Apparently the ipod can read ebooks through the Notes program. Anyone tried this? Does it do the job? Do the new 5th generation ones still limit you to 1000 files of maximum 4KB each? How long does ( Read more... )

The writing is constrained by an interesting pseudo-alliterative rule: the first chapter contains only words starting with the letter a, the second chapter only words starting with a or b, etc.; each subsequent chapter adds the next letter in the alphabet to the set of allowed word beginnings. This continues for the first 26 chapters, until at last ( Read more... )

I came across this description of the absolutely wild book The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold:

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The main character in the book, Daniel Eakins, is given a belt that allows him to travel in time. This results in a series of time paradoxes, which are only resolved by the existence of multiple universes and multiple ( Read more... )

I just realized that I never really write book reviews, despite writing movie reviews (though admittedly only of the simple thumbs up/down variety). I read so few full-length books nowadays that I should definitely mention the occasional one I consume, at least belatedly.

This past summer I read China Miéville's The Scar. It was given to me by ( Read more... )

Accelerando is yet another book I'd read if only I had the time to read all the books I'd like to. When, oh when will we have the ability to insta-grok books through brain-computer interfaces?

It's ironic that when it does become possible, a lot of what I want to read now will be obsolete and uninteresting. :P

[woke up at 6:50pm]

12:51am: Wow. I searched google for LJ transhumanist vancouverites, found but 2 results, started reading the first one, and 2 hours later this has spawned 20 open browser tabs on topics varying from the Book of the Dead to 3001: The Final Odyssey to H. P. Lovecraft. Aggggghhhhh help me I'm drowning, again! :P Let's see how ( Read more... )