Voder-Vocoder

“I personally don’t buy ebooks with DRM on them, because I actually like to own the books I own.”—John Scalzi

Compare and contrast the mass-market and the hardcover covers of this book:

I like the mass-market (on the left) cover better.

(Here's a new feature on the blog: Judging a Book by its Cover. I'll present a book cover with no further commentary.)

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“Don’t worry about the sun dying! You and everyone you know will be long gone by then!” (link)

In the energy-efficient future:

Picture a Manhattan block in mid-December, crammed with high-rise apartment buildings full of lights, people, and warmth. Several thousand people live on the block. All of their electricity, the fuel for their daily lives, comes from a compact natural gas turbine running in an underground installation in the center of the blcok., The heat produced from the turbine is used to create hot water and warm the entire block. Each one of these people would have an energy footprint with an efficiency above 90%, compared with the current 33% Americans now live at.

From $20 per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rising Cost of Gas Will Change Our Lives for the Better by Christopher Steiner (9780446549547)

What have I read over the past year or so? Here’s a partial list:

• Eric Flint (et alia)’s 1632 series.
• Roger Zelazny’s Amber series (reread for the first time since college. They hold up well; I’m going to read more of him.)
• Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford series.
• David Weber and John Ringo’s Empire of Man series
• Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and three Earthsea books.
• Michael Williamson’s Better to Beg Forgiveness
• Jack McDevitt’s Seeker
• Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series
• David Weber’s Honor Harrington series
• Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father
• Norman F. Cantor’s Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World

What am I reading right now?

• Anathem by Neil Stephenson, for the second time. (9780061474095)
• John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman (9780060754013)
• Food Matters : A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes by Mark Bittman (9781416575641)
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges (9780811216999)

"All the librarians have to be armed when they're on duty, of course."

Let me mention a few books I've read this year that I want to recommend whole-heartedly.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (9780765319852) from April 2008. Yes, it's a YA title, but as far as I can tell that just means that protagonist is an adolescent, not that the story is dumbed down. Themes include hacking, cryptography, civil liberty, terrorism, data mining, linux, sex, and civil disobedience. Doctorow's best book so far.

Neal Stephenson's Anathem (9780061474095), to be released 2008-09-09. I can't stress the awesomeness of this book enough. Themes include Platonic forms, directed acyclic graphs, kung fu, Gödel metrics, monasticism, space travel, long-term timekeeping, a cappella music, conscienceless, the chronology protection conjecture, and the true nature of quantum mechanics. Just reading that list might have given way half the story. The book is a masterpiece.

Charles Stross's Saturn's Children (9780441015948) from July. Not his best book, as far as plot go, but worth reading if you care about the extinction of humanity, robots, robot sex, and the slowness and uncomfortableness of space travel.