Books

Oh, for F@%&'s sake, go ahead and F@%&ing tax Stephen King so maybe he'll stop spouting such F@%&s nonsense and go away:

This article is recommended for any of my fellow science fiction fans. Lately I've been rereading some of my favorite Robert Heinlein stuff from when I was much younger. One thing you notice right away -- since "the future" he was writing in the 1940s and 1950s has mostly come and gone by now -- is how wrong he got many things. But that doesn't make his novels any less interesting. Furthermoere:

Ever hear of the steamship Sultana? Most people haven't (including me, until I stumbled across an article about it this week), even though its demise marked the worst maritime disaster in Amercan history. (And here's a whole book about it.) On the night of April 27, 1865, the steamer was on the Mississippi River near Memphis, loaded with soldiers who were veterans of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. The boiler exploded, and more that 1,800 of the passengers died.

Did you feel the effects this morning of the solar storm that shook our magnetic fields "like a snow globe"?

After hurtling through space for a day and a half, a massive cloud of charged particles is due to arrive early Thursday and could disrupt utility grids, airline flights, satellite networks and GPS services, especially in northern areas. But the same blast could also paint colorful auroras farther from the poles than normal.

Digital-age common sense from the New York Times op-ed page:

For Amazon, lavish praise. For bookstores, not so much:

"Starship Troopers," Paul Verhoeven's movie take on the Robert Heinlein classic, is interesting in the casual way it shows us an advance in communications technology. Though supposedly set in the far future, the TV/Internet mixutre it shows us could be from tomorrow. People watching news shows are told to "click here" if they want to know more. And it looks like tomorrow just arrived:

This seems like another one of those "let's do a study because we can get the money" studies:

How do Americans read the Bible? Scholars in Indianapolis have received a $500,000 grant to figure that out.

Will the Kindle Fire make the 7-inch tabled really take off?

Hey, all you bloggers out there, be careful when you're tempted to get creative with well-known apothegms. On this story about next month's closing of two Hammond library branches, they put this headline:

The Library in the Coal Mine?