April 2007
“We have plummeted into the basement in the last week. We went from millions of...”
– Ashleigh Banfield giving a lecture a month or two after the Iraq invasion, as referenced this post at Hullabaloo. Does the story we want relate to the format we’re getting it in?
“Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a...”
– Heurtebise in Orpheus, via The Criterion Contraption
“Hooke, for example, when he figured out how arches work, published it as an...”
– The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson - Salon
“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of...”
– An excerpt from the first chapter of ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ that ran in the New York Times
“it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live...”
– the lesson of the moth
“Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato...”
– Michael Pollan (author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma) in his NY Times Magazine article on the Farm Bill, and how it affects everything from nutrition to immigration
“An anonymous reporter in Dallas asked Peyton Manning after an Indianapolis Colts...”
– The Greatest Reporter Ever (and the Wikipedia article on “23 skidoo”)
“The media is very good at reporting on sharply punctuated events. The news cycle...”
– if:book: a problem
“The whole earth heaved and flashed, a tremendous and magnificent column rose up...”
– Lochnagar mine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“A good writer should tell a story, right? Keeping a thread of a plot will help...”
– Cognitive Daily: How NOT to write a science book
“Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Collyer were two United States brothers who...”
– Collyer brothers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“The launch tube for the burritos lies just under the tunnel mouth and looks like...”
– The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel
Sophie is a new project from The Institute for the Future of the Book to push out e-books-like documents with movies, pictures, scripted sequences, and even comments. The needs are different than most webpages, so they’re building a new authoring tool and a new container-format from the ground up. They’re hoping to get some implementation onto the $100 laptop, but it probably...
