Spar supermarket pins from Lisbon, Portugal
Tesla Electronics pins from Prague, the Czech Republic
Chairman Mao pins from the People’s Republic of China

From Random Travels

I thought this was too shocking to be true but the other system admins confirmed it – Google officially wants to be the next god of the universe. The datacenter that houses over a hundred of our servers also caters to some of Google’s servers, and apparently Google also owns part of the building or something like that. They decided that they don’t have enough power for their servers, so they are actually demanding that the entire datacenter be stripped of all power for about two hours…

Google Wants to Be the Next God of the Universe

I can’t seem to get enough of them. “Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe” is
an early SF story about flying saucer kidnap, physics, and God. It was also the title story of my first
collection.

1 December 2007: What is it about flying saucers?

David Lance Goines started out as a student of classical languages, reading ancient texts in the original Greek and Latin.  After being arrested and expelled from the university for participating in student protests in the 1960s, Goines found work as an apprentice to a nearby printer, “becoming in the fullness of time a journeyman of that Art and Mystery.” Goines found a wonderful new calling, using his classical background and his own good taste to design beautiful and interesting…
GOINES

Roger Shattuck (1923-2005) on how to read Proust:

I believe it is best to approach the reading of Proust as if it were a kind of long-term cure, or an initiation to unfamiliar mental and physical movements evolved by another culture. A steady, leisurely pace, without the tension of fixed deadlines, serves best. Certain habits of thought can thus be laid aside as others are slowly acquired. It may take months, even years. The Search creates a season of the mind outside temporal limits.

…

Roger Shattuck on reading Proust

Design by Paola Ecchavaria

Saw this on the new books table last night. It’s the latest in this year’s mini-trend: the “book-on-a-book-cover” approach (also seen on The Last Novel and House of Happy Endings). It’s really quite beautiful and elegant in person, and I’ll leave it to those more zoologically inclined to determine if the wonderful spelled-out-in-random-letters creature at the bottom is actually more octopus-like than squid-like.

Buy this book from Amazon.com

Proust and the Squid

Hit Comics #23
Hit Comics #23

1. How economists lose weight

2. Does it matter if leaders are female?

3. Cory Doctorow on what is wrong with Facebook

4. Gretchen Rubin on Inner Economist and how to get people to tell the truth

Assorted links

Besides baseball, coffee, and my music collection, I probably obsess over how I read RSS feeds more than anything. Sometimes it feels like I tinker with the setup more than I actually read the news, but I’m making progress. I won’t claim to be completely satisfied with how or why I try to consume so much information from the internet, but lately I’ve been as content with the process as I can hope.

Bailing Out

Trying to stay on top of dozens of feeds can feel like trying to squeeze a river…

Sink or Swim: Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups

Founded in the 11th century as a lay religious order of hospital workers who observed vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta (variously known as: Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem; the Soverign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of…

Tombs of the Grand Masters of the Knights of Malta