Links for 2011-04-10

"My brother Aryaman (the talented one) writes: "A colleague of mine who is interested in pursuing science education after her PhD was directed to a collection of (I think apocryphal) answers to science questions from 5th and 6th graders in Japan. I noticed many of them were almost little haikus. So I took the time to work some into form...""

"It happens so often, people that are such big reading fans saying, "Gods, no, I'll never read an ebook! You can't curl up with a good ebook!" Bollocks, of course you can. Curling up with a Kindle or Nook is easier than reading an actual book, in fact.

"I like the feel and smell of a real book." Yeah, so do I, as I said before, and an ereader doesn't have those attributes. But not everything we read has to be a tactile, olfactory delight.

Let's be honest about this. Why is an avid reader really an avid reader? Do they like to go and buy a new book every week and run their fingers over it, sniffing deeply? Maybe. But is that the primary reason for buying it? No, of course it's not. You'd have to be pretty fucked up to prefer the smell of a book over its contents. People buy books because they love stories. The delivery system is hardly relevant - it's the content we want. We want that transportative magic of well-crafted fiction."

"The faux-Medieval world of dragons and knights seems like an odd genre to have caught our collective attention, but I think you can gauge a cultural moment by its guilty pleasures.  The same way that our huge romance industry tells us something about our fears about love, and urban fantasies like True Blood and Anita Blake tell us something about our discomfort with femininity and power, the knights and orcs that got us laughed at in middle school are attracting literally billions of dollars.  That means something interesting has happened.

We as a culture are anxious about something, and these particular stories comfort us.  They say something that we, the audience are willing to pay a lot of money to hear but from a distance that we can stand to hear it.

In particular, our two Tolkiens are telling us that we're tired of war."