blog.rightreading.com

Rightreading is a little worn out. This is about 10 of the 120 cubic yards of dirt that he is using to fill in his swimming pool.
I think I’ll be back blogging tomorrow.

Web 2.0 experiments with open content are showing the value of moderated forums. Democracy is great, but chaos isn’t necessarily so hot.
Once upon a time tech types used to track stories on Digg.com. When a post got promoted to Digg’s front page it would bring your site a huge amount of traffic. The web [...]

Sorry I’ve fallen behind in answering e-mail and comments. I’ll try to catch up this weekend — according to the weather forecasts it will be a good one for staying inside. — tom
If Folly link with Elegance no man knows which is which ….
– William Butler Yeats

Interview with Walter Mosley
20 Things You Didn’t [...]

Click for larger version (pdf format). Commentary below.

A daughter got me doing crosswords over the holidays. One thing that struck me was that the persona of the puzzle maker emerges pretty clearly from the puzzle — and many come across as, well, unhip, for want of a better word.
With my usual arrogance I figured I [...]

Sorry to have had a lull in posting just when things were getting interesting. I thought I would have occasional access to the internet over the holidays, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. I will take a few days to regroup, and return with my usual daily posts no later than Monday, [...]

And they were 126 years overdue. The books were taken by Chile from Peru during the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific. The Guardian reports:
Nivia Palma, national director of libraries, archives and museums in Chile, presented the books to Peruvian officials at a ceremony, calling the act a “concrete expression of our deep commitment to building [...]

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.

That’s what Carole Cadwalladr, in the Guardian, is calling this year’s Frankfut Book Fair. Sounds about right (except that it misses the boredom element that is never quite absent at Frankfurt), and this is the best report from the fair that I’ve read so far. Click the excerpt to read the full article.
Visit the Frankfurt [...]

 
via Veer: The Skinny

To see your genius rewarded, follow these seven guidelines.
Bottom line: “All the rules suggest that the perfect MacArthur genius is still out there: a one-named Berkeley professor who choreographs interpretative jazz dances about how genetically modified food will destroy humanity.”

Light posting while I’m on the road, but just now I have an internet connection and a few moments to use it. Here’s a photo from a bright sunlit day at the Huntington Gardens.

Victim and perp: broken ankle and the dirty mango what done it.
When Carol told the person at the hospital that she broke her ankle slipping on a mango on the sidewalk outside the Asian Art Museum the hospital person said “Well, that’s random.”

It won’t come as a huge surprise to many people to learn that people are walking 10 percent faster than they were a decade ago. Where have things especially speeded up? Well, in Singapore people are walking 20-30 percent faster than they used to, and Singaporeans count as the world’s fastest walkers, according to a [...]

That’s what Sly Stone sang back in the day. Well — boom shaka laka laka boom shaka laka laka — it turns out he wasn’t just on something, he was also onto something. At least, that’s what researchers at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management maintain.
Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing (hmmm) there, [...]

examples of Gill Sans, an English institution, from Designer magazine
Ben Archer has an interesting article in Singapore’s Designer magazine in which he compares Eric Gill’s Gill Sans to its predecessor, the typeface designed for the London Underground by Eric Johnston. “To pick an argument with something that is akin to a typographic national monument might [...]

The letter to the Financial Times went like this:
Dear Economist,
I’m looking for ”the one”. Is he out there?
Yours,
Ruth, Barcelona
And the answer, from Tim Hartford, the “Undercover Economist”:
Dear Ruth,
It might help if we understand which elements of marriage are common to many potential husbands, and which are unique to ”the one”.
First, marriage offers economies of [...]

Step-by step-instructions here.

You paid attention during 100% of high school!

 
85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don’t get scores that high! Good show, old chap!
Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

How can it not be merry? We are so much smarter than we were a year ago. Just consider the BBC’s list of 100 things we now know that we didn’t know last year. (Check out their site for more info.)
Some of the new knowledge includes:

Urban birds have developed a short, fast “rap style” of [...]