ebooks, ancestry, Christopher Judge, the history of energy, and Nate Silver

Well, after reading the sad story of a reader who lost access to her B&N ebooks after her credit card expired, even though she’d already paid for the books, I went ahead and fixed Calibre so that I don’t have to worry about that little twist for Nook books again. I haven’t gone so far as to back up my entire Kindle library, though perhaps I should.

Great essay on whiteness in the age of Obama: “Knowing your genealogy is itself a token of wealth and privilege. After all, we all come from old families, no new strains of humanity having colonized the planet recently. The trick has always been to be born into one of the few intact legacies, with the family bible and heirlooms that tend to come with a long history of property ownership and education. It's memory, not time, that makes an ‘old’ family.” Purdy’s family history includes “black-and-white photos of a Gettysburg veteran, painfully posed before long-exposure cameras, his uniform cap bearing the letters ‘F.U.’ (I suppose it stands for ‘Federal Union.’ It has always taken me aback.)”

SG-1 fans may be interested to hear that Christopher Judge is starring in a movie that is in a bit of a legal pickle, Age of the Hobbits, which Warner Bros. is suing for being too similar in name to The Hobbit.
( Yergin's The Quest and Silver's The Signal and the Noise )