If I were still an active programmer, I’d try to automate this:

Amazon.com has thousands of public-domain books for the Kindle. They are garbage. They are poorly formatted and riddled with typos. They were all computer generated, never proofed by human beings.

Project Gutenberg has most of those same titles, formatted better (though not perfectly) and proofread by human eyes.

But Amazon has user reviews and ratings, and I can list their public-domain books by popularity.

So I’m using Amazon to assemble my reading list, which I then download from Gutenberg.

I’m sure the program to automate this is straightforward.

(via Jeffrey Tucker)

This is Sherlock Holmes, explaining the reason for his disguise:

I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)

One of the many things I love about reading on my Kindle is that I can point to a word on the screen and immediately see how the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term. (This turns out to be the same dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, so I get the same definitions on both platforms.)

“Instinctive sympathy or fellow feeling between people with something in common.” I had no idea that “freemasonry” had this secondary meaning. I love it. I’ll try to slip it into casual conversation at some point.

“For users of the fast-growing messaging service, the outage means no tweeting about lunch plans, the weather or the fact that Twitter is down.”

From Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook:

Although some educators had been complaining about writing scores for decades, it was the mushroom cloud of business e-mail at the end of the 1990s that sparked the greatest change. Almost overnight, corporate America switched from telecommunication to written communication and, in the process, discovered how many CEOs, CFOs, and mid-level executives couldn’t string ten words together in a coherent sentence. Corporations were suddenly spending almost $3 billion a year to teach college-educated employees how to write, but the crisis was so deep it was often a case of “the blind leading the blind,” like this request to an online writing consultant:

i need help i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you.[34]

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[34] Sam Dillon, “What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence,” New York Times, December 7, 2004, p. A23.

I received this helpful comment from a reader:

This is FYI only. I tried accessing your blog through my office proxy, and this is the message I get:

Somehow your site has been categorised as “Adult Theme”. I know you don’t exactly write kids’ stuff but blocking access seems excessive to me :)

Now, first of all, I do write some kids’ stuff. See, for example,

• “The 3 Austrian Pigs and Their Different Rates of Time Preference” or
• “Goldilocks and the 3 Sovereign Clients of Ursa Mutual”

Secondly, I did get a rather furious denouncement about 4 years ago for posting about “female breasts” (see also “giving offense”), but even if you think I was being sexist, misogynistic, and objectifying, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any images in that post that you couldn’t find at an art gallery, museum, or comic-book store.

Finally, I do have an image folder called “sexy” for my more PG13-rated images, but here’s the lot of them (decide for yourself):

[Read the rest »]

While discussing my desert-island books with my wife last night, I realized I already carry all those books with me all the time:

You can probably spot Homer and King James there. Mises (and Rothbard) are in Kindle for iPhone (which looks like someone reading under a tree that says “Amazon” dead center).

The best few (very few) bucks I’ve spent recently:

$7.99 for 10 hours (1 GB)

$7.99 for 15 hours (1.5 GB)