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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.
Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World: Sprawling, disorganized book about energy, mainly oil and natural gas but also a bit about nuclear, wind, solar, batteries, biofuels, etc. Zips back and forth across timelines and continents in a way that makes it hard to get a big picture; reads like a series of magazine articles not particularly well massaged into a bigger book. Probably the most interesting part is just how important China is already and will increasingly be in the future, as a major consumer of energy and worrier about where that energy will come from (and thus by necessity a major international player).
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't: Like many people I know, I was entranced by Silver’s election blog, and I love him for popularizing some important facts about survey data and probability. That said, this book was a bit of a letdown. Silver is a Bayesian, and he does a decent job explaining the basic principles, but there’s not nearly enough math. While I liked finding out that Gary Kasparov basically psyched himself out against Big Blue in the chess chapter, and I learned something about why earthquakes are so hard to predict, overall I found the treatments of his various topics (also including poker, climate change, terrorism, and the stock market, among others) too superficial to be really enjoyable. And his statement that, dire warnings notwithstanding, we shouldn’t worry too much that lower Manhattan would be covered by storm surge was amusing, in a bitter sort of way—though I should hurry to point out that the occurrence of an event deemed low-probability by a model doesn’t by itself mean that the model is wrong!
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.
Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World: Sprawling, disorganized book about energy, mainly oil and natural gas but also a bit about nuclear, wind, solar, batteries, biofuels, etc. Zips back and forth across timelines and continents in a way that makes it hard to get a big picture; reads like a series of magazine articles not particularly well massaged into a bigger book. Probably the most interesting part is just how important China is already and will increasingly be in the future, as a major consumer of energy and worrier about where that energy will come from (and thus by necessity a major international player).
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't: Like many people I know, I was entranced by Silver’s election blog, and I love him for popularizing some important facts about survey data and probability. That said, this book was a bit of a letdown. Silver is a Bayesian, and he does a decent job explaining the basic principles, but there’s not nearly enough math. While I liked finding out that Gary Kasparov basically psyched himself out against Big Blue in the chess chapter, and I learned something about why earthquakes are so hard to predict, overall I found the treatments of his various topics (also including poker, climate change, terrorism, and the stock market, among others) too superficial to be really enjoyable. And his statement that, dire warnings notwithstanding, we shouldn’t worry too much that lower Manhattan would be covered by storm surge was amusing, in a bitter sort of way—though I should hurry to point out that the occurrence of an event deemed low-probability by a model doesn’t by itself mean that the model is wrong!
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Only if you care about having your books repossessed without recourse. Amazon did that once to a whole bunch of people because of a copyright problem with a book (ironically, it was 1984) and I've heard of one woman who got her whole Amazon library repossessed for an unspecified TOS violation. As in, they told her she was violating their TOS but wouldn't say why, and they took all her books.
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(And I am the only person in the world who has decided not to see The Hobbit, because I was going to, of course, and then they split it into three movies, and my interest in watching it just doesn't live up to 6+ hours spread over three years. Sigh.)
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When I've thought of it in terms of privilege, just from my own research (still looking for the names of my great-grandparents, still failing!) I'd always thought of it more along the lines of race and location than anything else (missing data tends to be tied to race or being in rural Canada, and often both, with much of the missing information being essentially redacted for purposes of passing), and separate from property ownership or literacy. This is probably because when researching in England (which is most of my research, given where my recent ancestors are from), it's more tied to who had the better record keepers than it is to class or education--I can find deeper data on the ones who wound up in the workhouse than I can for the ones who wound up in Who's Who, just because that branch lived somewhere where, apparently, they'd nothing better to do than record everything. (And, err, that branch had occasional interesting and well-documented run-ins with the law. There was a horse involved. It was an intimacy thing.)