I came across an entry on Google Books, and realized they have a map with all locations mentioned in the book tagged on the map. This is a neat feature. Check out the map for Around the World in 80 Days. Certainly an interesting way to access data in a book.

I was recently reading how St. Jerome was partial to plagiarizing the hell out of Origen and other sources, in some cases most of entire biblical commentaries. The author makes the point that plagarizing was quite a bit easier in the ancient world, as there weren’t that many copies of the books floating around when each copy had to be written out by hand. Printing was one paradigm jump in text availability, and we’re now going through another one.

I hear often how the internet makes it a lot easier for people to cheat and plagarize, but I think the increased accessibility of our accumulated texts actually makes the opposite true. We’re just coming through a period where people aren’t yet submitting papers electronically, and these papers aren’t yet routinely run through a programmatic comparison with the database of all books to check for plagarism. (This won’t address paying someone to write your paper). Think of how accessible human knowledge is now compared to even 10 years ago. Doesn’t it seem astronomically harder to find plagarism if you have to look through a physical book for the copied text?

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is quite a reading project, to be sure, even if you stick to the first three volumes which take the story to the end of the western empire. But there’s more to it than the first “modern” work of history; He can deploy some enjoyable prose:

The pride and avarice of his mother cast a shade on the glories of his reign; and by exacting from his riper years the same dutiful obedience which she had justly claimed from his inexperienced youth, Mamaea exposed to public ridicule, both her son’s character and her own.

Also, his notes (pioneering the modern use of footnotes) are numerous, and in many cases delightful:

Vitellius consumed in mere eating, at least six millions of our money in about seven months. It is not easy to express his vices with dignity, or even decency. Tacitus fairly calls him a hog; but it is by substituting to a coarse word a very fine image.

In short, it can be a rewarding periodic read, that I pick up now and then, and probably won’t finish for a decade or so. But still worth it.

The recent genesis post reminded me of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, and prompted me to check its Amazon listing.  I thought there must be many people who never read it, and would now be trying to sell it used.  Sure enough, there’s more than 100 copies available for $11 and up.

However I also have wondered how much that book was a marketing campaign versus an important work.  Based on some of the more rigorous reviews, I’m now pretty confident the work is going to fade into obscurity.  Or I guess it already did, until I brought it up again.

Elegant and crisp interface design is an important whether you’re designing an automotive dash or a command-line tool.  I find good design practices can be harvested from a variety of seemingly unrelated sources.  The underlying thread, is to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.  It’s been said a million times, but it’s so true, whether you’re paring down your argument list or making sure your diagrams have functional uses for the colors you introduce.

Some resources:

• Any of Edward Tufte’s books, the first of which (The Visual Display of Quantitative Data) has the least eye candy, but the most basic truth in it.
• The Art of Unix Programming
• The Universal Principles of Design, a great coffee table book with a different design concept wonderfully illustrated on each page.

If you’ve ever tried to get work done in an environment that prevents you from doing so, you may appreciate this photo essay from The Guardian, showing the rooms various writers write in.

Themes seem to be a lot of books, and a modicum of clutter.

[via Lifehacker]