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Welcome.  I get really excited when people tell me they're interested in reading and especially reading Science Fiction. This is what happened last Sunday evening, someone requested a virtual tour of the Sci-Fi section of my bookcase.  You can see how excited I got here: Quick Bookshelf Tour

For those used to my previous YouTube videos, I promise it's short and not boring, you can watch it with an espresso.

Enjoy!


Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience

The question of why we read and what books actually do for us is as old as the written word itself, and as attractive. Galileo saw reading as a way of having superhuman powers. For Kafka, books were “the axe for the frozen sea within us”; Carl Sagan held them as “proof that humans are capable of working magic”; James Baldwin found in them a way to change one’s destiny; for Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, they stood as our ultimate frontier of freedom.

Shakespeare's Globe Archive to be Digitised

A landmark digital project - Shakespeare’s Globe: Performances and Practices will see the digitisation of the majority of Shakespeare’s Globe’s archives, preserved since its opening in 1997. The collection will include an array of essential material for the study of Shakespeare, literature, theatre and performance, and will publish in Spring 2019, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Globe’s founder, Sam Wanamaker, born in June 1919.




Connecticut Developing a Statewide e-Book Program

Libraries in Connecticut often do business with multiple companies for their e-book collection. There are many players in this industry such as 3M, Baker&Taylor, Hoopla and Overdrive. Whenever a patron borrows an e-book, they often have to download a specific app that will let them read it. A new initiative by the Connecticut State Library system is seeking to address the situation.

Old Kobo Mini Finds New Life as a Sailplane and Paraglide Computer

We've seen any number of re-purposed hacked Kindles over the years, including as a weather station, fridge magnet, and wireless monitor, but all of those projects pale in comparison to one hack i just found.

Kepler's 'Alien Megastructure' Star Just Got Weirder

ow new research of precision Kepler observations has shown that the overall brightness of the star — unofficially named "Tabby's Star" after astronomer Tabetha S. Boyajian who discovered the peculiar signal — has been decreasing, which poses a new and confusing problem for astronomers trying to understand what the heck is going on.


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