Letters Remain

Tag: books

  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

    The First Law of Fanfiction states that every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. […] stories are about conflict; a hero too strong for their conflict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. […] The Rationalist Fanfiction Principle states that rationality is not magic; being rational does not require magical potential or royal bloodlines…

  • ‘Bit Culture’ and the Benefits of Distraction

    The information consumption habits of many in the younger generations–one feature of the ‘Internet information culture’–has many merits, despite its many detractors. So says Ban Casnocha in an article for The American that acts as both a review of Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy and a fairly positive and comprehensive overview of the “bit…

  • The Personal Business of Recommending Books

    For book recommendations, most of us rely on the suggestions of trusted friends and on word of mouth. This, at least, allows us to hold someone accountable for those inevitable poor recommendations. But what of ‘professional’ book recommenders (writers in publications, not algorithmic ‘recommenders’)? Laura Miller–author of the book recommendation Slate column, –looks at what…

  • Derek Sivers’ Book List

    Derek Sivers’ book recommendations continue to be some of the most well matched to my own tastes. Infrequently updated, Derek Sivers’ book list provides a tiny summary of his recent reads, followed by extensive notes he has taken from each: somewhat similar to my current process, now that Amazon’s Kindle has completely transformed my reading…

  • Educational Typography Ebooks

    I’ve only recently taken a look at font retailer FontShop‘s collection of educational typography ebooks despite having the site bookmarked for months. It’s a wonderful (yet small) collection, currently consisting of these five books: Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography The Typographer’s Glossary: Common Type Terminology Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips: Seven Rules for Better…

  • Become Comfortable with Incompleteness: Writing Tips from Rands

    “Don’t write a book” is the first piece of advice Michael Lopp offers us in a post chronicling his writing process. Lopp–an engineering manager at Apple, author of Being Geek and Managing Humans, and more commonly known as Rands–details his tools and methods for writing a book and, as always, his advice is applicable to…

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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, is interviewed in More Intelligent Life. The discussion I find most intriguing is this on the saving of threatened world languages: Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Is there a book that explains…