Asymmetric

Congratulations to the former Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky! I hope they have a blessed life together.

That the marriage was such a big deal got me thinking about marriage a bit. Why do people celebrate marriages? They don't celebrate going steady. I think people do for a couple of reasons. One is the permanent exclusivity of their love and the the other is the justification for the former: the expectation that they'll become a semi-independent, dedicated unit that will contribute to our collective future by populating it.

Which got me thinking again about a great book I read called Children on Men by P. D. James. In the book, mankind has lost the capacity to have children. The book, written in the early nineties makes the observation that because of this worldwide malady, people have taken to marrying the same sex (!) or have abandoned marriage altogether. I wonder if people would still celebrate marriage if such a fate were to befall man or even bother with marriage at all.

The Children of Men by P.D. James

The movie, below, is not as thought-provoking.

Children of Men [Blu-ray]

Time to redecorate

Why ebooks?

The computer and the cell phone are two high-tech devices that have become essential for people living in developed societies. The third one might turn out to be the ereader.

The ability to acquire hundreds of books cheaply and carry them around on something that fits in your briefcase (next to your laptop and phone) is leaps and bounds more convenient than paper books. The non-obvious advantages over paper books are the lack of page-caused shadow while reading, far less raw material use, and automatic and manual bookmarking. People who read often will save money. Everything before 1923 and many things after are free and ebooks are cheaper to purchase.

Local public libraries now let you "borrow" Adobe DRM (DRM=Digital Rights Management=copy protection) ebooks for free without actually going there, saving more gas and time. The library books stop working after two or three weeks. Reading PDFs is useful. I can see putting Army manuals on it.

The disadvantages are mostly psychological. As there might be people who miss rotary phones and TV\record player cabinet combos, some will miss paper. It's not as impressive to have a list of ebooks on your computer as a reading room filled with bookshelves showcasing your eclectic, refined tastes. Lending books is harder if they have DRM.

Start shopping

The first division in ebooks is between those having a backlit screen and the ones that use the paper-impersonating E Ink. This one's easy for me. A backlit screen like the one on your laptop or iPad is better for magazines, blogs, and news because it can display color, but I cannot read on a computer screen for hours at a time- simple as that.

Apple iPad Tablet (32GB, Wi-Fi)

You can read E Ink in sunlight, something you can't do on an LCD device. If you don't want to bother your husband or wife at night, however, you have to buy a clip-on light with your E Ink ebook reader.

After that, the biggest split is between those devices with wireless and those without. Wireless allows you to download books without a computer. At first, I didn't think this an issue as I'm never too far away from a computer, usually my laptop, and I read blogs and newspapers on my cell phone. I’ve since learned that it comes in handy so I’d recommend getting some kind of wireless.

The second split is format. Barnes and Noble, public libraries, Kobo, Gutenberg, Google, and most ebook stores use the open EPUB format. Amazon uses the proprietary AZW format. You can't use Amazon books with DRM on other devices and vice-versa. This locks you into buying Amazon books. A program called Calibri can convert EPUB into AZW. You cannot legally convert copy-protected EPUB DRM to Amazon and, again, the opposite is true.

The last couple of months have been an e-book odyssey for me. Like the original Odyssey, the journey was involuntary. Unlike the first one, its main cause was having the bad luck to enter the market in a transitional stage for ebooks , not angry gods, I think.

Full story »

A couple of months ago, I was browsing the LA library ebook site, came across, and began reading Anne Rice's book detailing her reversion back to the Catholic Church, Called Out of Darkness. It was OK, although I didn't get too far into it, but it seems that she wanted to climb above the nihilism atheism demands.

I was disappointed to see that she fell away again. It's always a boost when a person converts to one's faith and a morale buster when they fall away.

“For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian ... It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

Reviewing her statement, it doesn't seem that she had a bad experience at Church. I don't count people arguing as a serious reason. Any members within a group who care about the group will argue. She says that she's a Democrat- do they quarrel? Anne Rice had a tough time with the Church's teachings on homosexuality, abortion, and birth control. There are two ways to join a religion: Decide which one is the truth and conform to its tenets or find one that conforms to yours. The Catholic Church didn't match her ideals.

Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Anne Rice

Some tech is fun. In that category, I'd place my portable mp3 player, my son's Playstation. Some tech is useful. Here, my flash drive. Some are both: Laptops, smart phones. My portable media player is such a hybrid device. It's fun because it holds hours of entertainment and allows me to summon that digital pleasure on strange TVs without a computer. That can mean the TV in hotel rooms or the one at my brother-in-law's in Mexico, where my wife saw 10 episodes of Legend of the Seeker from my little media wonder.

It's essential for two reasons: First, it backs stuff up. No explanation necessary. Second, I'm a teacher when I'm not dispensing wisdom on the internet and teachers sometimes show movies.

Instead of carrying bunch of DVDs or having to connect my laptop to a projector or TV (My computer doesn't have S-Video out so I'd have to buy a converter anyways.), I carry everything I need (Holes, Hatchet, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Huck Finn, etc.) on my portable media player.

Western Digital has some storage-less media players like the Live. The Live has the huge advantage of being able to stream Netflix onto any TV, convert up to 1080p, and play more file formats.

The reason I chose the two in this post is that they also serve as portable hard drives. You can connect them to a computer's USB port- without the power adapter, a big advantage- and back things up.

Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player WDBAAN0000NBK-NESN

Full story »

This is a very interesting moral view. It's cruel to kill bulls, but not babies. Also curious, the defense of bull fighting doesn't make the case that animals don't need the level of dignity nor protection that people do: They argued that Catalonia would lose tourism.