Mike, Diane and I went to Santa Cruz today to watch Blade Runner: The Final Cut.  Afterward we stopped by Bookshop Santa Cruz.  Aside from a few books, I faced a dilemma as to whether I’d rather buy the George W. Bush Voodoo Kit or the Albert Einstein Action Figure.  Albert won.

Arthur C. Clarke invented the geostationary satellite, hence the designation of the circular orbit over the equator as the “Clarke Orbit”.  His science fiction has received many awards, including the Hugo and Nebula.

Three friends and I took BART to San Francisco last night to see The Golden Compass at the Metreon.  If I’d gotten around to it sooner, we wouldn’t have had to go 45 miles each way to do it.  Prior to that, the longest trip I’d taken to see a film was 35 miles from [...]

I was somewhat surprised that the cover of the mass-market paperback edition of Spin, the 2006 Hugo Award winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson, quoted a review in the Rocky Mountain News as having said that it was “the best science fiction novel so far this year”; that seems like damning it with faint praise, [...]

Books that make you dumb: a chart of Average SAT scores vs. most popular books among college students [h/t Boing Boing]. Some aren’t surprising to me, such as Freakonomics, Catch 22, and Atlas Shrugged being near the top. On the other hand, I’m astonished at Fahrenheit 451 appearing near the bottom.
There are also charts [...]

If you buy a Sony PRS-500 Portable Reader System (PRS-500), you can get 100 classic books “free” as ebooks. These are books that are in the public domain, so Sony doesn’t have to pay royalties on them, though Sony slaps DRM on them. I thought it would be nice to have a copy [...]

I certainly was shocked when it turned out that Voldemort is Hermione’s father!

In an article about the Amazon merchandising of the forthcoming final installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), The Inquirer has accidentally leaked the ending:
Over one million advance orders have already been placed for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as readers young and old tune in to [...]

I really enjoy reading Josef Conrad. I faked my way through the classic Conrad novels we were force-fed in high school, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, getting by with Cliff’s Notes. However, as and adult I have actually read and enjoyed both novels: so much so that I have gone on to slowly [...]

I’m about halfway through reading Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education by David F. Noble, a book recommended to me by a fellow student. It is a scathing critique of the trend of universities viewing education as a commodity product rather than a service.
I went out to a fast food joint for [...]