Category: books

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

Lynne Truss has a new book out about punctuation — and it’s a #1 best seller in Britain. The initial printing was 15,000, but “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is now up to 510,000 in print. I enjoy language in any case, but the book looks appealing on its own:

There are many possible reasons for the tremendous success of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a spritely volume that leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as “our long-suffering little friend”; makes a rousing case for the semicolon's usefulness in, among other things, “calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention”; and describes Woodrow Wilson's inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen, which he called � spectacularly undermining his own argument — “the most un-American thing in the world.” […]

And, if you haven’t heard the joke about the panda going into a bar (from where the book got its title), it's explained at the end of the article ;).

(Due credit: Media Bistro’s Daily Media News newsletter)

gnod — self-learning ‘like’ system

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

I heard about Gnod through a post on Slashdot from a story on discovering new music. You tell it some of your favorite bands (or favorite books, or favorite movies), it asks you some questions, and then recommends some new bands (or books, or whatever).

Gnod is a self-adapting system that learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don't like. In this instance of gnod all is about music. Gnod is kind of a search engine for music you don't know about. It will ask you what music you like and then think about what you might like too. When I set gnod online its database was completely empty. Now it contains thousands of bands and quite some knowledge about who likes what. […]

I entered a few obscure band names (well, highly successful in the metal scene, but not something you’d ever hear on the radio), and its picks were surprisingly accurate (it picked Iced Earth, Dark Tranquillity, and a few I hadn’t yet heard, for those wondering).

Borders is my Library

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

My Internet connection was down today (though it’s fine now), so I decided to make a trip down to Borders. I had photography on the mind (more on that later), so I headed for the photography section and selected a book on portrait photography.

I located one of their comfy chairs and just sat down and read it. Skipping over the boring parts (“how to buy a camera”, “glossary”, and so on), I read just about read the book cover-to-cover over a few hours.

With the rain softly falling outside and the store bustling with eager Christmas shoppers, it was really pleasant to be able to relax with a good book for a while. Still, as I put the book back on the shelf at the end of the afternoon, I realized that it would be handy to buy some photography books as well sometime.

Just as I was sitting down, the coffeeshop/bakery almost got the best of me. There’s nothing quite like a slice of German chocolate cake and a cup of Earl Grey to go along with a book. But, I’m trying to save some money these days.

On photography: I’d been thinking about buying a digital camera for some time now. In fact, as of last week, I was all set to buy one early this coming week (perhaps Tuesday or Wednesday). I had the store all picked out, and I had jotted in my Palm about what accessories I intended to buy. Of course, my income was pulled out from under me on Friday, and my camera plans evaporated. Bah.

Distributed Proofreading

Ashley BischoffLeave a comment

As you may be aware, Project Gutenberg is an effort to provide free ASCII copies of out-of-copyright works. Run by volunteers, they hunt down out-of-copyright works, scan them, apply OCR, and proofread them (OCR isn’t perfect, after all).

Project Gutenberg started in 1971 — long before the web — and it becomes more modern as technology advances. It used to be that proofreading was done “by hand”. However, there’s now a Distributed Proofreading effort:

This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the creation of Project Gutenberg E-Texts. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/E-Text creation process.

When a proofer elects to proofread a page for a particular project, the text and image file are displayed on a single webpage. This allows the text file to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the text file. The edited text file is then submitted back to the site via the same webpage that it was edited on. […]

So, now anyone can become a volunteer proofreader. And, I’m considering helping out. Sure, I may not have time to go through many pages, but those would be pages that someone else wouldn’t have to proofread.

Nine Free 2002 Hugo Nominee eBooks

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Fictionwise has now released six 2002 Hugo nominated works as free eBooks (for your Palm or other PDA). And, each link link below includes a book-excerpt, so you can get a feel for the book before downloading it. The free eBooks include:

“The Hugo Awards are among the most prestigious literary awards available and are presented annually by the World Science Fiction Society”. Thanks to PalmStation for the heads-up on this one.

And, if Josh reads this, hopefully he can enlighten me as to the proper means of citing books. For instance, I used double-quotes around the titles, but that was mostly an educated guess ;).