Um, so this is obviously one of those things that looks good on paper… but once you see it, you can’t believe it actually exists. It’s billed as being for laptop users in colder climates, but I have to think, I sure could have used this while reading The Terror over the winter months. Reading 700+ pages about being trapped in ice while it’s freezing outside is just too much. This might have come in handy. Nah…
{via O’Grady’s Powerpage}
The Alabaster Library is having their annual book sale, April 26th and 27th. Paperbacks are 50 cents and hardbacks are $1. They said 50% of the stock is pulled from the shelves and 50% is donated, all sorted by category.
The NY Times ran an article about Philip Parker and his amazing technicolor technical writing computer program. Basically, his machine collects every factoid, statistic and number from the web, Parker then peppers a few introductions and transitional phrases in there, hits another button to format and index… and bam! You have a collection of 200,000 separate books “authored” by one man.
No doubt, the texts are dry and boring. But I bet some neat trends start to appear in what his program finds online. It’s a pretty interesting way to collect data and organize it for a book. Though I imagine, if you ever want anything beyond tables and graphs, you’ll always need that human element.
Of course, there is romance fiction which Parker said he has already targeted with new algorithms…
“I’ve already set it up,” he said. “There are only so many body parts.”
So we’ll have to wait and see if it ever goes any further!
I saw this over at fadetheory and had to share. First off, I had forgotten that the “paragraph symbol” is called a pilcrow (which is just a neat word). Second, I had no idea the “backwards P” that begins paragraphs is actually a bastardized ‘C’ for the latin word for ‘chapter’.
Now cool is that? We all learned something today. If you already knew all this, then you get a free lifetime subscription to {head}:sub/head.
