BOOKHUNTER by Jason Shiga is the most ripping library police adventure I have ever read, it is simply brilliant. The book tells two tales of the hard hitting library police of Oakland California in their never ending assault on library crime in the early 1970s.

This isn’t really science, but it is kind of neat. Virgil Griffith scraped Facebook data for which books people picked as favorites and what college they attended and created a graph of which books are most likely to be associated with higher or lower SAT scores. He calls it Books That Make You Dumb. [...]

Where is the Chinese fortune cookie really from? Not from China but from Japan apparently. Neat story, apparently became popular during the Second World War so I can see why the Japanese history of it was quietly forgotten.

George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman series of books has passed away. The Flashman series is a brilliant set of books set in the later half of the 19th Century and is a great teacher about the period as well as being a brilliant set of novels. Sir Harry Flashman is a scoundrel [...]

This video of wacky college kids playing Quidditch looks just like my son’s tenth birthday party. Although the ten year olds were smart enough to lose the brooms. The kids used bean bags as blodgers and an untied balloon released at random during the game as a snitch. If a seeker caught the balloon before [...]

I had some extra time at Heathrow yesterday and didn’t have a book with me so I picked up a copy of the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read it in the airport and on the flight home and it was ok. Better than the last two I think, [...]

Traveling this week and didn’t preload posts so it may be a light week.

Need angrier daily updates than I normally post? Check out Axis of Evel Knievel who does great angry posts.
Great American colonial history focused on Boston? Check out Boston 1775, a tight focus delivers a fantastic amount of well documented history.
History [...]

November 6th: Today in 2000 author L. Sprague deCamp passed away. He was one of my favorite short story authors and wrote a number of novels I enjoyed as well, but he is also an author who insulted me to the point where I haven’t read one of his books in over twenty years. I [...]

I just picked up and started Julian Dibbell’s new book Play Money and am really enjoying it. It is about farming gold in computer games for money, a topic that interests me both as a player and as someone who is interested in how our economies are becoming more abstract and fragile. Think about what [...]

I suspect that the Bad Driver’s Handbook is secretly the worlds best seller. It would explain sooo much wouldn’t it.