Let's see, now... Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter... and now Al Gore.

That makes four people who have been elected to the American Presidency who have gone on to be honored with a Nobel Peace Prize.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6945542?source=most_viewed&nclick_check=1

UC-Santa Cruz to put novelist Robert Heinlein's archive online By Lisa M. Krieger ( Read more... )

I was driving home in the Miata, listening to General Petraeus lie to Congress on NPR, when an old guy in a giant F-250/350 Ford pickup pulled up alongside me at a light and HONKED at me, because he had decided to take exception to my "Kerry" bumper sticker. He shouted down:

"HEY! Your bumper sticker is WRONG! Kerry LOSTI shouted back, "Yeah - too ( Read more... )

About a decade ago, we realized that our books were more numerous than the library that Jefferson had sold to replace the Library of Congress. That is, our late-90s collection - put together by an ordinary couple, in our modest suburban house - was numerically as big as the LC used to be early in the 19th century. (That's some sort of index of ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

There's a sub-genre of recent novels that have the look-and-feel of science fiction, but which aren't actually science-fictional.

Cryptonomicon is probably the type specimen here: it hit every SF button I have, and yet it's SF mostly only by courtesy: the 'data haven' idea is a little bit sf'nal, the crypto is fun, but mostly it's some sort of ( Read more... )

The fifteen-year-old rolled her eyes, sighed, and said:

"I wish I were like other kids and had normal parents!

If concepts are not correct, works are not finished;
if works are not finished, art and morality do not flourish;
if morality and art do not flourish, justice is not exact;
if justice is not exact, the country does not know where to lean.

Therefore one must not tolerate words not being in order.
This is what matters.

( Read more... )

I was participant in a conversation over on LibraryThing that touched on the question of, well, how many books is enough? How many books do you think you're ever going to get around to reading ( Read more... )

This is one of my favorite Fun Facts:

Harlow Shapely's quote has entered the culture - that "We are stardust, we are golden" as Joni Mitchell/CSN paraphrased it -- that every single heavy atom in us had to have been cooked up in the heart of an earlier generation of star.

Well, I've run across a factoid that's even neater. From Energies by ( Read more... )