Category: books
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The Issues of the Self-Publishing Future
In 2009, 764,448 books were published outside of “traditional publishing and classification definitions”, according to Bowker. This plethora of self-published titles can be thought of as the ‘slush pile‘, says Laura Miller, and while this future offers authors better options than ever before, it’s the impact on readers themselves that we should be considering (e.g.…
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Letting Go of Goals
Designed to help you find focus and tackle “the problems we face as we try to live and create in a world of overwhelming distractions” is focus : a simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction. This is Leo Babauta‘s latest book and he is producing it iteratively online. One issue I have is that…
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The Presence of Books and Children’s Intelligence
The number of books in your household has more of an effect on your child’s academic achievements than your education or income, a recently published study (pdf) has found. Suggesting that the effects seem to be far from trivial, the conclusion indicates that simply the presence of books in their house can make children more…
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Why Preserve Endangered Languages?
With his book on “the politics of language” due to be published next year, international correspondent for The Economist, Robert Lane Green,Ā is interviewed in More Intelligent Life. The discussion I find mostĀ intriguingĀ is this onĀ the saving of threatened world languages: Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Is there a book that explains…
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Faith in Probability
Following the publishing of his first book–Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives—David Eagleman is interviewed about religion and his beliefs, providing a refreshingly new andā¦ empiricalā¦ take on religious faith, atheism and agnosticism. Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty ā you find the atheist…
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The Body Language Resource
That “gestures come in clusters, like words in a sentence, and that they must be interpreted in the context in which you observe them” is the golden rule of understanding body language, says ‘The Book of Body Language’: a fantastically comprehensive body language resource, hosted by Westside Toastmasters. In the chapter on hand and thumb…
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Evolutionary Theory of Fiction
The age of “politically charged” analyses of literature has passed and the latest phase is that of analysing fiction through the lens of evolutionary psychology, looking atĀ how the brain processes literature. Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time, Ms. Zunshine said. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul…
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The New Nature-Nurture Argument
As it stands, the nature-nurture debate is wrong, proposes David Shenk in his book on the subject, The Genius in All of Us. Shenk submits the idea that we overestimate the effect genes have on many heritable traits, especially intelligence (or that ever-elusive ‘genius’). According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff…
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Things Every Programmer Should Know (Languages)
As part of a continuing series*, O’Reilly requested “pearls of wisdom for programmers” from leading practitioners of the craft, publishing the responses. The end result is the O’Reilly Commons wiki, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. The contributions that appear in the final, published book are freely available as are sixty-eight further contributions that didn’t…
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Our Fascination with Cookbooks
Cookbooks are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cooking while hiding that fact between the sautĆ©ingĀ of onions and the reduction of the sauce. That wonderful proposition comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fascination with cookbooks, and how they are used in our homes. The first thing a cadet…