Paul Fidalgo

Forget this

— The Macalope Weekly: A sad state of affairs | Tablets | MacUser | Macworld

thedailywhat:

Photo of the Day: William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy taking a break while on location to read the very first Mad Magazine Star Trek parody, “Star Blecch,” c. December 1967.

[nerdcore.]

This picture is growing on me.

I propose the following to be considered whenever we think of printing a book:

* The Books We Make embrace their physicality — working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative.

* The Books We Make are confident in form and usage of material.

* The Books We Make exploit the advantages of print.

* The Books We Make are built to last.

The result of this is:

* The Books We Make will feel whole and solid in the hands.

* The Books We Make will smell like now forgotten, far away libraries.

* The Books We Make will be something of which even our children — who have fully embraced all things digital — will understand the worth.

* The Books We Make will always remind people that the printed book can be a sculpture for thoughts and ideas. Anything less than this will be stepped over and promptly forgotten in the digital march forward.

Goodbye disposable books. Hello new canvases.

Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod

When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can’t even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you’d dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It’s said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.

Why you’ve never really heard the “Moonlight” Sonata (via ayjay)

To measure (or approximate) public knowledge of science, Pew administered a twelve-question quiz . It consists of simple multiple-choice and true/false questions testing basic general knowledge, such as the fact that tsunamis are caused by earthquakes… . But a quiz like this, focusing on a few random facts, doesn’t test what may matter most—the public’s understanding of scientific inquiry; the importance of experimentation, observation, and logic; and the relationship of evidence to belief. I care less about whether people know that electrons are smaller than atoms than whether they have an inkling of how scientists know.

Wendy Kaminer, Science and Public Opinion

That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future - The New York Review of Books

I used to like to write about more anecdotal humor types of things, you know, stuff that happened to me as I went about my life, and now nothing happens to me that doesn’t relate to the baby. Which I guess is just the way it goes. I used to have random encounters with actors and homeless people and alcohol and now I have random encounters with urine and drool and ass ointments.

She’s Having A Baby

Look. The Democratic Party is feckless, disjointed, and several vertebra short of a spinal column. The Republican Party is not only unserious about governance, but it’s greedy, and at times downright malicious and vengeful to boot. The Tea Party movement, regardless of how it is being portrayed lately by the mainstream media, as some “genuine” uprising of concerned citizens, is an excuse to celebrate willful ignorance, xenophobia, racism, and religious intolerance—why this is not completely obvious is beyond me. The progressive movement can’t decide whether to prop up the Democratic Party’s festering corpse and engage in a generation-long retelling of Weekend at Bernie’s or to nobly go down with the ship of state saying, “Well, at least we tried.” What, out of this morass, is supposed to rise up and save us all?

Bloc Raisonneur