A. J. Jacobs, author of the book in question and the passage to which I was referring. He talked to some huckster called Brad Blanton who thinks we should all be completely honest all the time without a filter at all. Because he doesn't get that it's a really stupid idea.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Thank you. I got the impression the guy talking was the author so didn't make the connection.

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Science is like sex. Sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it.
-- Richard Feynman

Indeed. They make a movie every once in a while about people who don't censor themselves (Liar Liar with Jim Carrey, The Invention of Lying with Ricky Gervais, another one back in the 90s about Dudley Moore I believe? about companies that tell the unvarnished truth in their advertising). These movies are always farcical comedies and much screen time is spent showing how horrible it would be if we didn't filter ourselves. We laugh because we know it would be absurd to live like that and we can sympathize with the protagonist's pain.

There was also a recent episode of House in which someone had a medical condition that had that result. Memorably, he said (in front of his young daughter), "Everyone likes to think their children are above average, but by definition there have to be many who are below average. And let's face it, ours is well below..."

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

I'm more concerned with how it hurts people who aren't the protagonist. I mean, one of the examples AJ gave was that a friend of his who had been recently widowed had turned to poetry to relieve his pain. He sent the poetry to AJ, and it turns out he'd turned to bad poetry. The guy whose program it was said AJ should have been blunt about that, because the guy would be better off because of it. Because a time of severe emotional trauma's the right time to tell him that.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Finishing Ellroy's Blood's A Rover. Good, but American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are better. Still a good conclusion to the trilogy.

Seeing as part of this one mentions Hoover's "secret files", I plan on re-visiting Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript. Been working my way through Forsythe's The Odessa File, too.

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" The universe is running away
I heard it on the news just the other day
There's this new stuff called dark energy
We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

I finished The Guinea Pig Diaries, which ended with an interesting chapter about doing what his wife wanted him to for a month, and have started The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture, by Nathan Rabin. He's a funny guy, and it sounds as though he needed to be, given his life.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Finished And Another Thing, started rereading Century Rain, a hard SF way of having an alternate history story. Protagonist visits Paris, but barely escapes from an attack from killer clouds!!!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Arthur C. Clarke: Islands in the Sky.
This early novel by one of the "big three" of classical SF (I'd make it a 4 - come on in, Bradbury) is probably underrated because it doesn't seem to have (I'm not through yet, though) a grand plot, like alien invasion or serial crime.
But it *does* take you into space, and this is why:
Clarke here anticipated, step-by-step, the getting-space-legs of a young space rookie in the foreseeable future.
I haven't found a single scientific woo-woo(*), and it describes everything you might expect on such a journey with an accuracy that we have with 20/20 hindsight vision, including among other multistage rockets, LOX propellant, a space station looking very much like ISS, and all the challenges that come with microgravity.
It is a novel, but Clarke clearly puts the emphasis on education here.
It was written in 1952 - 5 years before anything manmade ever left the atmosphere.

(*): At one point, the protagonist described looking through a telescope and seeing elephants and other big animals in Africa from 500 klicks up. I didn't believe it and whipped out the calculator: arctan(2/500000)*1000 ---> convert to degrees - I assumed 1000x magnification and came up with about 13 arcminutes, almost half the diameter of the moon.

Clarke's visionary creativity is immense - I wish we'd follow in his footsteps

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Mars Society.

In some ways more like a documentary than a novel. I have fond memories of it.

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

I'm currently reading A Dance Called America, which a friend as given me to read. Only just started, but very impressed so far. Very interesting read for anybody interested in Highland (Scottish), Canadian or American history.

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I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice. I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.

Hehe. That'd be like having the original Curse Of Capistrano serial by Johnston McCulley (the original Zorro story in which the real identity of Zorro is not revealed until the last episode) entitled Diego Vega, Masked Avenger from the first episode.

Actually, having grown up knowing - from all the series and movies - that Diego is Zorro, I found the novella rather lacking the suspense that McCulley obviously desired to create around the true identity of the mysterious "Zorro", the final dramatic unmasking was no surprise to me - I have no idea whether it was a big surprise to the readers of All-Story Weekly back in the early 20th Century.

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"The universe is driven by the complex interaction between three ingredients:matter, energy & enlightened self-interest." - G'Kar

"The universe is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can know." - Louis Wolpert

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity." - Harlan Ellison

I'm reading Your Heart Belongs to Me by Dean Koontz because I'm a longtime fan of his. And last night I read The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren because it's a comforting bedtime story even though I'm no longer a child.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

Laurel, I don't think you should have to justify reading children's books. I had a friend in college who said she wouldn't read any children's books again until she had children. She hadn't read A Wrinkle in Time, and given her life right now, she probably never will.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I have a huge children's book collection. And I have read A Wrinkle In Time, A Wind In The Door, Many Waters and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

My copy of A Wind in the Door is signed!

I wasn't trying to suggest you didn't. I'm just saying that most of the children's books I read, I read because they're comfort books. However, a lot of them are also just well-written, and it kind of irks me that they get looked down on all the time. After all, it's not as though there aren't dreadful, patronizing books written for adults, too!

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Well I remember a science fiction convention that featured a panel being faced with the "contentious" idea that children's books are currently the best books around. It emerged that everyone agreed. (Panelists included Philip Pullman and Diana Wynne Jones, but there were others too. Unfortunately I can't remember who they were.)

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Nothing beautiful was ever made from gravel.

I read a lot of young adult books. Some are just great books, some I read because I'm on a committee and others to see if I can persuade my students to read them. Margaret Haddix and Neal Schusterman are a couple of my favorite authors.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

I've worked in bookstores for a decade and a half, and I recall how dismayed most kids were back in the early nineties when expected to read a 200-page book--it was so huge!

J. K. Rowling changed everything.

Today when a ten-year-old girl asks for a book and I put an 800-page two-inch-thick book in her hand, I get tickled when her eyes light up with pleasure and anticipation. Simply put, you cannot write a children's book that's too long if the book is well written.

The auto-biography of Ronald Reagan.

Oooh, good so far? I LOVE autobiographies!

Though I do find they're best balanced with also reading a biography. In fact, I always like to get bios from multiple perspectives.

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The left hand knows full well what the right hand is doing, but quietly ignores it.

Isn't Reagan's one of the ones where you have to put the "auto" part in quotation marks?

I, having decided that And Another Thing . . . wasn't at all worth it, am now plowing merrily through Under the Dome.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I am struggling my way through Usipi: A Quest For Home. I'm not enjoying it so far, but am determined to see it through. I think that if you're going to write a historical novel based on real events, it's a fairly basic requirement that you research the setting.

__________________
I offer a complete and utter retraction. The imputation was totally without basis in fact, was in no way fair comment and was motivated purely by malice. I deeply regret any distress that my comments may have caused you or your family, and I hereby undertake not to repeat any such slander at any time in the future.

Rereading Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

I'm currently reading the InfiniBand^TM Architecture Specification, Volumes 1-2. 2500 pages!

Why is it that once manuals stopped being printed and moved to .pdf form, they exploded in size. One manual the size of Harry Potter 1 through 6 combined

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

I recall when I'd first heard of InfiniBand--we were using it for inter-board connections in a product. When I first heard of it, I couldn't but help to think of the company "InfiniDim" of Hitchhiker's Trilogy book....5 I think. Like Beavis and Butthead: "infinidim...heh heh heh...infinidim"

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Reading a bunch of old Star Trek novels. I few years ago the only bookstore in town which was a second hand bookstore went out of business. I bought the entire shelf of sci-fi and now finally getting around to read some. The only book I left was one written L. Ron Hubbard.

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If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

http://davidsuniverse.wordpress.com/

Sad day for the bookstore - fantastic day it was for you!

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The left hand knows full well what the right hand is doing, but quietly ignores it.

Finished Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy. Interesting conclusion to the trilogy, I enjoyed the first two volumes better.

Vol 1. American Tabloid covered Nov. 22, 1958 - Nov. 22, 1963. The Cold Six Thousand covered from Nov. 22, 1963 - to the MLK and Bobby Kennedy hits. Written as historical fiction from the viewpoint of corrupt/rogue cops. The conclusion picked up from there but delved into Hughes buying up Vegas, mobsters trying to set up new casinos in the Dom. Rep., the FBI trying to infiltrate Black militant groups and Hoover's secret files. Ellroy stopped short of "Watergate".

He used much the same style, chapters alternating with viewpoints of different characters, eventually having the stories converge.

My favourite of the three was the middle one, as I just got caught up in trying to seperate fact and fiction, with Ellroy's use of just about every JFK conspiracy theory, plus a few minor ones I didn't know about. MacAdams' website was helpful, especially a page showing all the suspicious deaths that CT's say are proof of a conspiracy.

Am now finishing Forsyth's The Odessa File and Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript is waiting to be re-read.

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" The universe is running away
I heard it on the news just the other day
There's this new stuff called dark energy
We can't measure and we can't see..." - from Jimmy Buffett's What if the hokey pokey is all it really is about?

How much did they cost each? The Hubbard could've been cheap wiping material.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman