You are currently browsing the daily archive for January 25th, 2008.
from Wired magazine Feb.2008
“If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best -and perhaps only- place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
From where I sit, traditional “literary fiction” has dropped the ball. I studied literature in college, and throughout my twenties I voraciously read contemporary fiction. Then, eight or nine years ago, I found myself getting –well- bored.
Why? I think it’s because I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.”
Also:
“[Teenagers] know that big-idea novels are more likely to have an embossed foil dragon on the cover than a Booker Prize badge.”
A Leap Year is any year evenly divisible by 4 -except for century years which have to be divisible by 400.
International Atomic Time is outpacing astronomical time due to the earth decreasing spin. In 1972 the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (or as I like to call them the IER&RSS) began adding occasional leap seconds. They’ve added 23 so far, the last being December 31st 2005.
