Coincidentally, Jessie and Katie both just found me on Goodreads within the span of a week. I think making reading more social will encourage me to establish a regular-reader habit. It’s neat to see what they are reading and whether they liked it.

However, I really wish that Goodreads had a real recommendation engine, like Netflix. In my experience, Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” sucks. I know about What Should I read next? but I haven’t been very excited by the recommendations it comes up with — not enough data, maybe? I bet they could gather more data if it was integrated into a site like Goodreads which has extra hooks that make reading history data entry fun satisfying instead of boring.

In the mean time, I will definitely take advantage of all the used bookstores within walking distance of my house and check out the AAPL.

My grandparents had a bunch of copies in their bookshelf at home and I never looked at them at all. But now that I see it is available at the Regenstein I think I will check it out tomorrow.

I think I will also check out Wars of ideas in Spain: philosophy, politics and education by my great grandfather, which has apparently been digitized by Google Book Search (via the Library Project, which means none of it is viewable online).

• Yoga Club. This is a University of Chicago student organization that offers MWF drop-in yoga classes, $5 for students and $10 for non-students. I went for the first time last Friday. For whatever reason, I didn’t feel like I was getting much out of it physically then. But yesterday I went back and it was really good. I think I am going to keep it up. It’s good to have some directed, social physical activity in addition to my solo walks.
• Regular reading. Last quarter I borrowed a bunch of books from the U of C library, but I didn’t read very many of them, and didn’t read in general as much as I would have liked. I think part of the problem is that I always pick up a bunch of academic books when I go there, discovered through overly ambitious stack browsing, and it’s just not realistic for me to slough through that much dense material when it’s not associated with a class. Most of the fiction books I am interested have already been checked out by other people. This quarter I have discovered that you can make IIL requests through the Chicago Public Library’s website! So I am attempting to keep up a steady diet of mixed fiction and non-fiction books.
• Knitting. My manager Lynn introduced me to Ravelry. I’m not sure how much I’ll get into the site — I am not the most disciplined nor prolific knitter, so I’m not hat interested in documenting my projects. But it is a good place for inspiration, so good that I am already inspired to pick up some yarn and start on the waffle-knit raglan sweater of my dreams. Maybe I’ll even check out the Knitting and Crocheting Circle at the Blackstone Library some time.
• Photography. Not much going on with this yet, especially because it is so cold. But I renewed my Flickr Pro account today and posted a couple of photos of my new family of succulents and Kuma, my roommate’s ferret.
• Movies. I need to take more advantage of Doc Films, and AMC’s A.M.Cinema ($6 tickets before noon! And the 6 bus stops a block away!). I am already happy with my recent discovery of ITVS Community Cinema. They show free documentaries every month, with a panel discussion afterwards. Last month I saw Helvetica, and today I am going to see a screening of Tulia, Texas.
• Project Gutenberg volunteering. Go massively distributed proofreading! Admittedly my enthusiasm for this activity is directly correlated with how interesting I find the book I am working on. But it’s nice to have a volunteer thing that I can anywhere, any time, and for as long as I want.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, organized all the world’s content through a one-way mechanism of uniform source locators, or URLs. Lost in the process was Mr. Nelson’s two-way link concept that simultaneously pointed to the content in any two connected documents, protecting, he has argued in vain, the original intellectual lineage of any object.

Two way links! My mind is blown!

I am definitely going to order Ted Nelson’s new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts, which features a fantastic mugshot of young Bill Gates on the cover. (In the true spirit of the internet, this is self-published through Lulu.) And I just put a hold on Computer Lib/Dream Machines at the library, described as:

The book was written as a pastiche, in the tradition of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and as a paper-based placeholder for the Xanadu system that he believed would inevitably take hold. The book was seductive fun. It was actually two books in one: beginning on opposite covers, it could be read forward and backward, with the book on the opposite side titled “Dream Machines: New Freedoms Through Computer Screens — a Minority Report.” The book provided an exhilarating peek into the world foretold by the arrival of personal computing, which was just then being invented at the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox. It offered the first hint that computing would become something more than the control systems associated with the mainframe computing era of “do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate.”

On Saturday I helped chop down and haul out invasive plant species on Wooded Island, which is part of Jackson Park. It was an enjoyable experience except for getting burrs in my hair. Thankfully I managed to pull them out without pulling out too much hair along with them.

I have started reading books again, thanks to my borrowing privileges at U of C! I am over halfway through Ghostwritten by David Mitchell, which is unfortunately nowhere near as good as Cloud Atlas. I just started Stranger in a Strangeland which is excellent.

And that’s pretty much it for now…

But then Harriet gets a letter from Ole Golly, the wise nanny who moved away, who tells Harriet something that all children need to learn: Sometimes, you have to lie. Otherwise you’ll lose a friend.

“Little lies that make people feel better are not bad, like thanking someone for a meal they made even if you hated it. But to yourself, you must always tell the truth,” writes Ole Golly.

Side note: Archives by date are down right now, because teb-super-archives was not playing well with the latest version of Wordpress and the move from below10host. I’ll try to install its successor. I know it will be tough, but I think you guys will live.

Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

What results has helped small, quality publishers like Berenberg. But it has also — American consumers should take note — caused book prices to drop. Last year, on average, book prices fell 0.5 percent.

Anyway, still very interesting. I might take some more of the tests later, I wonder if I am more biases when it comes to something like gender and science.

…I remember attending a lecture given by eatrice and Allen Gardner about their famous “talking” chimpanzee Washoe (she uses American Sigh Language, and her achievement is of great potential interest to students of language). There were some philosophers in the audience, and in the discussion after the lecture they were much exercised by the question of whether Washoe could tell a lie. I suspected that the Gardners thought there were more interesting things to talk about, and I agreed with them. In this book I am using words like “deceive” and “lie” in a much more straightforward sense than those philosophers. They were interested in conscious intention to deceive. I am talking simply about having an effect functionally equivalent to deception.

The “more interesting things to talk about” part could be straight from Rorty.

My room is still in ruins. Salvation Army is coming to pick up my old desk today, perhaps that will be the final catalyst. I’ve finished my first book of the summer: Number9Dream by David Mitchell. I didn’t like it as much as Cloud Atlas, but more than Black Swan Green. But really, everything he writes is solid. Now I’m tackling the small collection of contemporary Russian literature I acquired from McComas, leftovers from a Vassar class. First up is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Putter putter putter.