Stephen Hawking has written a children’s book called George’s Secret Key to the Universe. (Hawking’s grandson is named George.) It’s aimed at ages 9-11, is 304 pages (in hardback) and is to be the first of three. (Oh how we geeks do love our trilogies.)

It’s written with his daughter Lucy (who is an author and journalist) and Christophe Galfard. According to Galfard, they wanted “provide a modern vision of cosmology from the Big Bang to the present day.”

I have three main comments in regards to this news:

1) How fucking awesome is that? A Hawking book for kids? I have pre-ordered mine. I figure if Hawking wrote it for an 11 year old, I should be able to understand it. That’s about how old I feel when I read anything by him.

2) 304 pages? Long for a kid’s book? I don’t recall how long books aimed at nine year olds are.

3) The Amazon page for the book has links to several discussions going on. They have titles like “evolution is a religion (757)”, “Science & Religion (124)”, “Human pathologies: an Incompetent Designer (63)”, and “Fair Treatment of Evolution Begins With Its Definition (2667)”. Those numbers are the number of replies in each topic. These are all in the science section of their forums. Who knew Amazon even HAD forums?!

I skimmed a few of the threads and as soon as I saw the standard poor debate tactics and logical fallacies, I whistled a casual tune and cautiously backed out the door.

Always late to a meme, I decided to post my “Reading Stack” to Flickr, as mentioned on BoingBoing a couple of weeks ago.

This is actually representitive of the true stack. For instance, there are more PHP books in the stack since I’m a PHP n00b and there are a LOT more comics in the stack.

Maybe this is old news, but I just found out there’s a Dragonlance movie in the works and it’s going to be animated. They must have a budget, because they just signed Kiefer Sutherland as Raistlin. That’s a good choice, but there are some odd casting choises too, like Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon.

I read DragonLance Chronicles back in highschool and loved them back then. I’ve never re-read them, so they’re stored away in my memory in a hermetically sealed jar. I always wanted to see this as a movie, but I imagined it more of a live action epic like LoTR. So, I’m a bit torn. I supposed it’s good that the original authors are credited as “creative consultants”.

I wonder what the animation will be like… should I be worried that one of the director’s first entries in IMDB is for the Jem cartoon?

Official Site and IMDB entry.

I’ve added a new link to the “SocialNetworking” category of links. It’s for LibraryThing, a social networking site about books. It’s not the first one (I believe reader2.com (also linked) holds that honor) but I do think it has a lot of potential.

They recently got hit with a tidal wave of traffic, thanks to the WSJ and BoingBoing linking them on the same day. Since they have managed to survive the onslaught (after a few upgrades), their userbase and database have both grown tremendously.

The site allows you to enter your library of books, then rate, review and tag them as you see fit. The possibilities are plentiful from there. You can find people who thought similarly of the book as you did, and then see what else they’ve enjoyed. You can also see people who’s collection is very similar to your own, and then peruse it to see if they’ve got anything you might be interested in.

Be sure to check out the Zeitgeist link. Lots of good timesinks for readers there.

Also, the site supports importing catalogs of books from other book websites and apps such as Delicious Library.

My Library Thing links: My profile & My catalog.

A friend of mine IM’d me with this link as proof that there is a book on EVERY topic.

Adult Video Business: How You Can Find Attractive Women to Star in Your Own Adult Films, Make Money, and Quit Work in 7 Week. That’s right. It’s a HOW TO book on porn flicks.

If ya check out the “also bought” section, you’ll notice there are several other similar titles. Get How to Become a Porn Director or Sex & Camcorders: The Complete Guide To Producing Low-Cost, High-Profit Adult Videos & DVDs or 1-2-3 Be a Porn Star! A Step-By-Step Guide to the Adult Sex Industry or even better… Coming Attractions: The Making of an X-Rated Video. heh. One must give a little thought to the title on that last one. ;)

Seems that there’s a whole Porn Industry library of books out there.

As if that’s not enough… you should really check out the rest of the stuff that Amazon thinks is relevant. Such as the link to info on Free Government Grants (that’s right, get a gub’ment check to finance yer porn) or the selection of music that they consider “Similar Items.” (Does Shania Twain know about this?!)

At any rate, this book wins my award for Best Book to “Accidentally” Leave Out When Friends and Family Visit.

My friend gave me a book called The Kalevala. (Yay! Thanks, Ron!) It’s a Finnish epic poem. It was once handed down from generation to generation orally by runesingers. It’s also one of the inspirations for Tolkein’s work. I’ll probably post more about it when I finish it. 3 years from now. It has 666 (!) pages! (Grr. Thanks, Ron!)

Tower Records/Video was having a 25% off sale on everything in their store. I figured that was a good time to pick oup some of the DVDs I’d been wanting to buy for a while. I got Buffalo ‘66, Akira, the Cell, The Fifth Element, Queen of the Damned and the third season of Buffy. I coulda got stacks more, but on my way into the Records/Video store I saw that Tower Books next door was having a 30% off everything sale!

If had have known about that, I woulda brought a list. :) But since I didn’t, I grabbed what I could remember from my wishlist. Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell), Technoromanticism (Coyne), Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), The Matrix and Philosophy (Irwin), Managing and Using MySQL (O’Reilly Pub.), Programming PHP (O’Reilly Pub.). Just some light reading. heh.

I was at Barnes & Noble the other day and bought four books. The
Illustrated Dictionary of Mythology, The Handy Religion Answer Book, A
History of God, and Essentaial System Administration. I just
knew there was a good “four books about god” joke or something in
there… but as I struggled to come up with it I took note of my cashier. He
so would not have gotten it that I gave up. Sometimes it just ain’t
worth the effort. I hate that.