Blowing up enemies with book learnin'

Ever wondered what a tank covered in books looks like? Wonder no more! Take that, ignorance! Take that, illiteracy!

Sidebar: I would have embedded the video, but it is unembeddable. Why would anyone do that? You're not driving more traffic by making it harder to access, sirs. You're just pissing me off. Argh.

Outer space + reading = awesome

Outer space is super awesome. Case and point made by this picture, taken from the Hubble:

Check out an explanation of what this picture is and even more pictures, from the book Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time by Edward J. Weiler, at Boing Boing. They include the Sombrero Galaxy! Man, I wish I were a scientist.

Dothraki is real, squees from my face

So, ok, deep breaths: HBO created a grammar for the language Dothraki from A Game of Thrones. No I'm not that excited whatever shut up.

Judy Blume quiz!

Check it out, ladies and gents. I scored a 64%, which is higher than Jessica at Jezebel. Beat that!

Climate changing smut

You heard it first here: climate scientists made up global warming to up the sex factor in their novels. Dum dum duummmmmm. This is like Peter Parker level scientist gossip.

Thank you CKHB for the link (which she tells me is via Sierra Godfrey)! Your assiduous and meticulous coverage science will not go unrewarded. ...This is your reward.

Watch out for steampunkers

Because they now have working guns. Boing Boing highlights these functional blunderbusses. I am officially frightened, and will be more careful around the steampunk inclined in the future.

I am out of Twitter jokes

Rick Moody is tweeting a short story, with snippets every ten minutes until Wednesday (except for sleepy time). That is a lot of effort, and a lot of tweeting (which I don't do, because I can't schedule it the night before and then be pleasantly surprised when it magically pops up during the day. Pop!). Whatever, Doonesbury made fun of it, and Doonesbury is never wrong.

But, the coolest part? If you want, you can get the whole short story in a book of tweets! I know, I know, I'm great and I do things for you all the time. It must be true that human nature is helpful.

E-ppreciating the art of bookbinding

I love me some technology with reading (yes, commenters, I must be in cahoorts with e-readers. I also eat babies and once cried during an episode of The Office because Dwight was so sad and that made me sad. ...Actually, that last one is true). I am insanely attached to no longer carrying around three to five books at any given time, because that's how I read and because that shit is heavy. That said, there are some experiences you can't replicate, and one of those is below.

Jacket Copy (a blog I love) says that the video below embodies the opposite of an e-book. I say nay, Jacket Copy—this is technology and books combined for the best. Digital pictures and videos plus bookmaking equals this:

Apocalyptic fiction: It has gotten more messed up

About twenty years ago we went bananas and stopped being able to blame the apocalypse on robots and/or sin. Because apparently we don't care any more about why the world ends—we just want to see what happens after the cool explosions and burning and what have you.

Perhaps the most important part, though, is this:

I recently finished a thesis project on post-apocalyptic genre fiction, and in my research I made a list of 423 books, poems, and short stories about the apocalypse, published between 1826-2007, and charted them by the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.) to see the trends over time.

Someone got a degree for reading about how we imagine the world ending. Please. Sign. Me. Up.

There's also a great graph. Clicky clicky.

Walden dies, no one cares

Ok, maybe that's unfair. Walden dies, I don't care. Walden is my least favorite of bookstores. My bookshelf at home is unorganized and only has things I don't really want to read--why would I want that in a bookstore?

The news is that 200 out of 330 outlets will close. But it's not a downsizing:

Borders CEO Ron Marshall said that “through this right-sizing, we will reduce the number of stores with operating losses, reduce our overall rent expense and lease-adjusted leverage and generate cash flow through sales and working capital reductions.”

So don't be sad for the people holding the 1,500 jobs that will be eliminated. Because it's a right-sizing. The best line is this, however:

The company also said it plans to integrate the remaining Walden stores into its superstore computer system to create a single platform.

When you think of the superstore computer system, imagine there are lasers.