GoodReader is a robust feature-rich PDF reader that is my killer application for the iPad. A PDF-reader sounds too simple to be a killer app until you realize that no one else has gotten it right.

I have tried reading PDFs on a PC, a Kindle, an iPhone, and, of course, printed out on paper, and every single format so far has failed miserably. The Kindle's slow response time, small screen, and lack of effective zoom means that it can't adapt to the various formats commonplace in PDFs (I haven't tried the larger DX, but in talking to others the gripes remain the same). The iPhone, while adaptable in its small size, simply doesn't have enough real estate to read PDFs effectively. Furthermore, scrolling through endless pages of PDFs on my laptops is clunky and poorly thought out, owing to the added bulk of a laptop or desktop, and the horizontal nature of the screen.

I am relieved that my struggle with reading PDFs has been solved by GoodReader. The iPad's versatile vertical and horizontal format makes for easy reading, while the ability to flip through pages with touch eliminates any of the awkwardness of the Kindle or PC. GoodReader also uses tabs for quick switching between PDFs, a feature that I believe neither OSX Preview or Acrobat has really gotten right.

Outside of reading and reviewing, GoodReader takes advantage of the iPad's touch input by allowing for easy highlighting, text input, and drawing. Marking up PDFs on an iPad, while not professional-caliber, far exceeds the day-to-day utility of something like Adobe Acrobat Professional, while matching all the benefits of good old pen-and-paper without the associated reams and reams of paper.

Another problem GoodReader resolves is the management of PDFs. Having a dedicated, easy to access management system means I don't have to search through thousands of files on my laptop. The layout makes it easy to organize PDFs into folders, but the killer feature is the ability to sync GoodReader to DropBox or other servers. Now, when I edit or mark up a PDF I can easily save it and access that copy from anywhere without the hassle of email, or manual syncing.

It seems strange that a PDF-reader would become the killer application on the iPad, but it also makes sense. When it was first released, the iPad was a curiosity; a blank slate without a specific use. As it has matured, the flexibility and familiarity of touch-input plus paper sized high-res screen and long battery life has created an almost-perfect format for working with PDFs. And GoodReader is the application that has made it happen.

When I went back to college, I found one of the hardest things to deal with was trying to figure out where my grade stood in any particular class. Did the professor do weighted grades? Point system? What score did I get on that last test? Did I calculate in that extra credit? Is the score written on my test and the one in the professor's grade book the same?

Before I found Grades, I tried the two other student organizer apps on the Android Market. One was only really good at keeping track of my attendance and my overall GPA, the other ended up being useless to me because it could only handle weighted (each category is a percent of the grade) scoring. While the developer was nice enough, he/she didn't understand that I needed it to be point based (earned / total points = % score).

In a last ditch effort, I did another search and found a new app was added to the Market called Grades: Student Organizer. That was almost 2 semesters and a summer intersession ago and I haven't looked back!

Grades is able to calculate the student's GPA, how many units have been taken, grade in each class, and can customize each class individually in either weighted or point-based grading systems.

Their customer service is wonderful, too. I've emailed them several times with problems and suggestions to add to the app and each time I've gotten a response usually within a day and even a few of my suggestions were included in the following release (though I suppose that's more of a Great Minds Think Alike thing).

At the time, I had tried literally every other student gradebook application out there on the Android Market and this one did everything I needed and in the end had everything else the other applications offered. At only $0.99, it's also the cheapest.

The Anatomical Chart Series by Peter Bachin and Ernest Beck is a flip-page guide that includes excellent anatomical charts. It appears to be out-of-print but you can find it used.

The Human Body by Ruth & Bertel Bruun is a great and colorful children's anatomy book. You can find it used for around $3.

Of my maybe dozen books on anatomy (always fascinated by what Dr. Henry Bieler author of Food Is Your Best Medicine calls "the magnificent human body"), this is the masterpiece: Atlas of Human Anatomy by Frank Netter.

How any one human could do all these exquisite drawings in a lifetime is beyond me. The drawings of the hand are spectacular. There is no descriptive text, so I don't know if this is the perfect text for helping with self-diagnosis, but this is a reference book anyone interested in the human body should have.

I have an older 4th edition, but they recently released the 5th.

My doctor was using a Grey's Anatomy, and I sent him a copy of this and he was mightily pleased.

Sage Maths is free open source software for doing virtually every type of maths you can imagine. Not just numerical maths, but symbolic maths too - you can give Sage an equation and it will tell you what the equation of its integral or differential is, for example. And it will do numerical maths, plot graphs, analyze statistical information and solve equations or sets of equations. In fact, it will do virtually anything mathematical you can think of.

Sage was developed as an open source alternative to commercial systems like Mathematica and Matlab (it has most but not all of the functionality of both) because mathematicians and scientists need to be able to understand and review the algorithms their software uses - something not possible with a closed system.

Originally developed for graduate mathematicians, Sage is now at the stage where it is useful and interesting to professional and hobbyist mechanical and electronic engineers, amateur astronomers, business number crunchers, and people who just want to know more maths than they do. It runs on Linux, Windows and OS X, and lately people have managed to run it on both Apple iThings and Android smartphones.

I have been using this slim book as an editing tool for several years. By using a global word search on a couple dozen words, and reducing their occurrence in your writing, you can shorten the length of a piece of writing by 10% (or more). I've used it and it works extremely well. This is a tool useful to both professional and novice writers.

I have copied the list of words into a text file, which I printed out in a long, thin column and taped to the side of my monitor. Whenever I finish a story, I run the searches and tighten up the text. It helps you find and eliminate passive voice, evasive, wishy-washy prose, and general wordiness.

Like a thesaurus, it must be used with care and attention to the overall impact on your writing. That said, I highly recommend The 10% Solution as a quick and dirty editing tool to help you "write tight".

Anatomy Trains is a map of our musculoskeletal anatomy. It's intended for hands-on and movement bodyworkers but is a great read for anyone interested in structure, whole-systems thinking, and brilliant design. I realized after doing Pilates for a while that I had no idea about anatomical structure and why Pilates was effective. While advocating no particular body/mind discipline, Anatomy Trains allowed me to understand why Pilates works. That was eight years ago; my understanding continues to expand over time.

Author Tom Myers asks a grand question: what would happen if we take a different cut at understanding the muscles and tendons? Instead of cutting against the grain at the ends, what happens when you follow the grain past the individual muscles and tendons and see how long the lines of tension go? Tom creates a set of rules and then starts mapping.

An anatomy expert could research and apply those rules themselves; I just followed along. The results are pretty cool: a map of about a dozen or so long lines of tension in our bodies. Most of them are longer than we are tall; some are almost twice as long. Some lines are roughly linear and some spiral around our torso and leg bones. Some lines are near the skin while some are next to the bones. Tom created a new term for these lines: myofascial meridians. Nobody has ever done this before, but the lines are real: Myers has gone into the lab multiple times with teams of students to dissect these long lines of tension in cadavers.

Myers studied under two remarkable body/mind instructors: Moshe Feldenkrais and Ida Rolf. He also studied under Buckminster Fuller, the great whole-systems engineer of the 20th century. The first chapter of the book, The World According to Fascia, provides a lot of background information for the mappings in the remainder of the book. Myers notes that there are three fractal/pervasive networks in our body: circulatory/chemical, nervous/electrical, and structural/spatial. He notes the elusiveness of the structural network: while we've had clear models of the first two for hundreds of years, our fine-grained structural network is still quite elusive. This is whole-systems thinking at its finest: lots of ideas how natural tech connects from the nano-scale to full-size human beings.

Like the great science book Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, this book can be read at many different levels. The first way is just to look at the maps and the supporting drawings and charts. A second way is to read the various side discussions and notes. A third way is to plough straight through the rather dense text. I've never read AT from cover to cover, but I've gone through most of it and read almost all of the side discussions.

My one criticism of the book: its full title, Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, is enough to scare off those not in the industry. It is a wonderful and friendly book, but books like this must have a formidable title to be sold to medical/health professionals. The ideas it discusses are right on the edge of our understanding of biological systems, but there is not a milligram of woo-woo.

Hours can fly by in the blink of an eye when I am surfing the web. In an effort to regain some footing in this battle against distraction I have recently been using a program called SelfControl. This free Mac-only open-source program (there are PC and Linux based alternatives) clamps down on internet usage by selectively turning it off.

SelfControl uses brute force to stop bad online habits. When the timer-based program is activated browsers will act like they aren't connected to the internet. You can restart your computer, you can quit the program, you can switch browsers, and you can even uninstall the program (be careful, because if you are too invasive you can permanently damage some systems). It doesn't matter. You are locked out for the allotted amount of time. As such you have to be careful with how you use it. You don't want to accidentally lock yourself out of the web for 12 hours if you know you have to research an important subject that evening.

Unlike other programs like Freedom which only serve to ban all internet access for a designated amount of time, SelfControl gives you more control over what you want to keep on and off. You can use a "white list" of approved sites or a "black list" of banned ones. Or, you can selectively set it up to block things like twitter and email. This selectivity is crucial in that it allows you to tame but not break the internet.

I personally prefer to use a "black list". By eradicating access to well known time sinks during working hours I reduce the temptation to stray while keeping open the rest of the web for research (especially important as I work from home and primarily online).

I wish I didn't need a program like SelfControl. But given my inability to resist sites like Wikipedia, I am happy to know I can, at times, selectively curb my internet usage.

These ice trays aren't glamorous or costly, but they do the job. Below each cube's compartment is a button that releases the cube. The trays are very easy to use. My husband has very little hand strength. As such, we've tried aluminum, plastic and several other different ice trays. These are the only ones he has been able to use in several years.

Anki is a free, open source, flashcard program that is the best method I have used for memorization. I originally found it when I was looking for a better way to study for an EMT class. I quickly discovered one of the coolest features of Anki was the database of shared "decks" you can download for free. As it happens, another EMT student had already gone through the trouble of composing a deck that covered all of the material thereby saving me countless hours. The range of topics is astonishing but the most popular subjects appear to be languages (Japanese being the favorite) and vocabulary.

The system that Anki uses to order the cards is called "spaced repetition". It is based on an algorithm that uses how you rank each card to determine when it will show that particular card in order to maximize retention (and save time). The harder you rank the card the sooner the information reappears, and vice versa. This technique was first pioneered in the popular flashcard generator SuperMemo ($50), and is also used by Mnemosyne (free). Anki also has a slick informatics feature enabling it to produce statistics and graphs detailing how you have been learning over time. Another benefit is that you get to decide the pace of learning by setting the amount of new information introduced every session. I personally chose Anki because of the availability of community-sourced decks and have been thrilled with it so far. However, I am interested in exploring the other options as my studying increases.

Anki currently supports text, LaTeX, images, and sound, and though I haven't created many decks the process is easy and is helped by a clean user interface. It allows you to share your created decks, and offers the option to upload them to the Anki website where you can access the cards anywhere with an internet connection (and sync them across multiple computers). A downloadable version of Anki is supported on all the major operating systems (OSX, Windows, Linux) as well as iPhone, Android and Nintendo DS. In the end, Anki is one of the best pieces of free software I use, and I highly recommend it to anyone in need of a better study tool.

This book really works! My daughter could read at age three, and has now really discovered the joy of reading at a young age. There are so many skills that kids can learn for themselves once they master reading. This is truly one of the fundamentals that is worth the effort to instill as early as possible.

As I’ve been baking bread regularly these days, this tool has been surprisingly handy. An oven mitt, pot holder or kitchen towel of course works fine for pulling oven racks out, and pushing them in, without getting burnt, but this tool is just agile enough and more convenient that I reach for it every time.

Alton Brown calls it an “oven fish” and recommends it in his excellent baking book, I’m Just Here for More Food. He carved his out of a broomstick. If you already have a Carvin’ Jack, a cheap wooden ruler would also be a good starting point. Don’t dismiss this simple gadget just because it’s frequently given away as a promotional item. It’s actually useful.

There a lot of ways to catalog a personal book collection, but I've settled on LibraryThing because I have more books than other media (we don't buy movies, aren't gamers, etc). I use LT to keep track of my own books, books I wish I owned, or want to read (using a wishlist tag) and also to keep track of books I've loaned out to others (tag plus a note with the date loaned).

LibraryThing is a place where you can catalog books mainly, but also media. You can sort, share, explore, import, and export data pertaining to your personal—or institutional—library. You can track who has borrowed which book. You can see other users who have similar libraries to yours, and browse books they have that you might be interested in. And, of course, there are basic reviews of books on the system.

I work at the office of a religious denomination, and we use LT to catalog our small book collection as well. We've cobbled together LT plus a web form to create a workable lending library for our 70-plus churches.

Finally, LT will sell you one of those old CueCat barcode scanners, so you can scan your books instead of typing them in. This is actually how we cataloged the vast majority of the books at our office. We just bought the scanner and had a volunteer slam it out.

LibraryThing gets data from Library of Congress by default, and whenever possible. However, when users set up accounts and begin to add books, they'll be prompted to select a data source. LoC is the primary and preferred source, but other sources are also available, such as Amazon.com, and simply typing in data from the book itself (helpful for really old books).

The folks at LT seem to have left the import options as wide open as possible with their Universal Import tool. It allows import from formatted spreadsheets, Delicious Library, BookCollector, Amazon wishlists, and pretty much whatever data you've got as long as it can get into a formatted spreadsheet.

The export options are CSV, or tab delimited files. It pumps out lotsa data, including ISBN, which ought to be sufficient for imports into other tools like Delicious Library. I'm not too familiar with academic citation tools, though, so I can't comment on how well it works on the other end.

Back when I settled on LT, I played around with Delicious Library, and Goodreads.com. I didn't mess around with Amazon’s Shelfari.com at all, though I did have quite a wishlist on Amazon. Delicious Library was/is a pretty sweet application (Mac only). It’s very visually appealing, but limited to the user’s own computer, though you can export webpages. I wanted something more shareable, and LibraryThing fits the bill.

A close runner-up was GoodReads. My experience with GoodReads is dated now, though as far as I can tell, the core difference is that GR was designed to be more of a social network around books, and has the neat data-geek stuff sort of bolted on. LibraryThing was built around the data, and has the social stuff sort of bolted on. I care more about the data stuff and don't really need yet another social network around my books. So LT for me.

There are ten thousand business books published each year and way over a hundred thousand in print. Most business books are worthless drivel, some are a good article fluffed out into a thin book, and maybe 100 out of those hundred thousand are worth reading. Out of those 100 best, only 10 might have something to say to you.

But how to find those few? Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten, two guys who sell biz books, seem to have read all of the ones in print, and they have done the world a favor by selecting the 100 best business books ever, and then packing summaries of them all into one meta-book. If all you want is their list, you can go to their website and check it out.

But their book is much better than a simple list, and their list is better than most. The two have reviewed, abstracted, and compared all the best 100 in the context of thousands of similar books, unlike say your average Amazon reviewer who may have only read one other business book in his or her life. You get context instead of content. Reading Covert and Sattersten's summaries of these classics is often better than reading the book itself, and the review is always useful in pointing you to the few books or authors you might actually want to read in full.

In addition to including the expected gems like Good to Great, The Effective Executive, and Purple Cow, the 100 Best list also includes many lesser-known titles, some of them oldies-but-goodies, like Up the Organization, The Innovator's Dilemma, and Flow. Not everything is new in business; the wisdom of the past is often surprisingly relevant.

Finally, this book itself is one of the best business books, and can be read alone as a pretty good education in business in its broadest sense, even if you don't read any of the references.

A couple of caveats. One, the authors has included one of my books (Out of Control) in their list, which tickles me greatly but might have warped my perspective. Two, they sell business books (at 800CeoRead) and so their book can be seen as a sales tool. On the other hand, the authors have great incentive to sell and include only the best, and so their list is pretty persuasive. Three, in a slip of bad design each of the 100 books featured on their website does not appear with the review as found in their book, but is featured with the standard publisher verbiage; the author's fantastic summaries and analysis are only found in their printed book. (They sell books, see?)

All in all, this is a great business resource at a modest price. If you took their list and read all 100 books you'd get a better MBA than any university would give you, at a fraction of the cost.

This is by far the best guide ever written for designing games. All kinds of games, simple and traditional, but of course video games too. This fat book is packed with practical, comprehensive, imaginative, deep, and broad lessons. Every page contained amazing insights for me. The more I read and re-read, the more important I ranked this work. I now view it as not just about designing games, but one of the best guides for designing anything that demands complex interaction. My 13-year-old son, who, like most 13-year-olds, dreams of designing games, has been devouring its 470 pages, telling me, "You've got to read this, Dad!" It's that kind of book: You begin to imagine your life as a game, and how you might tweak its design. Author Jesse Schell offers 100 "lenses" through which you can view your game, and each one is a useful maxim for any assignment.

The idea of this thin book is that danger is something kids need to learn to handle by experience. The 50 small experiments in this book can potentially cause a minor injury (although they are unlikely to), but are never really seriously dangerous. In fact most of them aren't dangerous at all, but at least they are fun. There are no special techniques, secret formulas or exclusive knowhow here that everyday knowledge or a quick internet search would not turn up. The activities are the kinds of things kids will sometimes do on their own -- at least in the past. It's too bad a book like this is needed today, and maybe you, or folks you know, don't need it, but if the kids in your life live a very structured and constantly supervised existence, this is a way to supervise a little danger. The book is designed to be read either by parents or kids. Most activities have clear instructions. We've been going through the book, letting the kids choose. It encourages them try stuff, and to see the trade off in risks and gains in many things. Mostly we use this as a primer for more dangerous things to try later on.

Disguised as a biography of mathematician Bertrand Russell in graphic novel form, this comic book is really about the nature and limits of logic. It takes heady, heavy, and key ideas in logic and renders them witty, visual, and dramatic. You'll learn a lot. The fact that many of the original logicians were mentally unbalanced and irrational, adds a dash of delicious paradox and spice to this entertaining book.

The author covers both traditional and modern sail materials and sailmaking skills. He's not so much about design as technique. I particularly liked the associations with the history and self-sufficiency aspects of learning a skill like sailmaking. The book talks you through a simple version of making a ditty bag while giving you the skills to do it up to your liking. I've made two. One's served me well everywhere including at the top of my boat's mast. Get the book and then buy the materials and tools from SailRite.com and make your own.

The US Constitution is one of our most remarkable inventions of all time. A lot of people in other countries think so too. It is a robust self-correcting legal OS. But it was written in an arcane code long ago. To make any sense from it you need some help.

This lively graphic novel adaptation of the Constitution is by far the best aid I've found to deciphering its code. It is the comic book version, but rather than dumbing it down, it smartens it up. The graphic novel goes through the Constitution article by article, and explains what each bit means, why it is there, and how it came to be. Like the Bible, the Constitution doesn't say what you thought it did. I was surprised what was not there as well as what was. I learned tons from this annotation, despite studying it in high school. It renewed my respect for it, and in a way, also makes clear its limitation. I feel I can be a slightly better citizen. Best of all, this book does all that with pictures, which makes it a page-turner.

Recently my brother-in-law, who is an immigrant, had a lot of questions about the Constitution. I handed him this book and he came back very informed. I gave it to my son who would normally have nothing to do with such boring material. But it's a comic! You've always wanted to read it, and should. Here's the perfect excuse and ideal method.

If you want the unadorned, raw version, get a pocket version. This sturdy shirt-pocket-sized one contains both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I have a few friends who pack this pocket version in their travel bags. Good conversation starter.

This illustration-rich book provides a peek under the hood of the mechanized world we inhabit. David Macaulay, with tech writer Neil Ardley, has that rare gift of technical understanding paired with an ability to convey complex concepts through visual imagery. Kids, parents, Lit. majors, curious people - all can learn, and laugh, from the interpretive drawings that fill this wonderful tome, granting insight into the workings of everything from twin-rotor helicopters to printing presses to self-winding watches and even modems.

Remember floppy discs? The 1998 edition of this book (the most current) does feature some dated material regarding digital technology. Still, it’s an overwhelmingly relevant, educational reference -- awe-inspiring because of Macaulay’s talents as well as the achievements of human ingenuity on which his pictures shed light.

For years, illustrator R. Crumb has kept sketch books filled with power lines and other everyday urban "junk" as reference for his work. To paraphrase: it's easier to copy than it is to invent, let alone comprehend. Of course, all that industrial bric-a-brac doesn't have to remain a mystery.

Combining photos and clear, occasionally poetic descriptions, this thorough almanac deconstructs the general architecture and much of the minutiae found throughout the modernized world. From power and water plants to railroads, highways, airports, bridges, dams, docks, municipal dumps, and industries like ag and mining, the book illuminates the subtle and not-so-subtle: Manhole covers are round, making them easy to roll and impossible to fall in; huge rotary kilns force water out of mineral products; AEI scanners monitor railroad cars; the rooflines of mill buildings cascade since these operations use gravity to move materials from one section down to the next.

The industrial ecology of a utility pole (excerpted below) and drill down on the power grid is what first hooked me. Choke coils, lightning arresters, bushings? I couldn't have picked them out of a police line-up if my life depended on it. Not anymore!

Excerpts & photos available at Industrial-Landscape.com

I've never felled a tree and can count with my hands how many times I've chopped wood. Enough swings to have stumbled on the sweetspot, but also uncomfortably close to injury. This guide published by the USDA Forest Service is an incredible resource for everything ax-related, from beginner to advanced (and it's free!). Filled with succinct and wise passages, clear photos and helpful diagrams, the book explains the in's and out's of felling, limbing, splitting, chopping, bucking, and hewing. Plus, no-nonsense tips on how to swing, grip, sharpen, maintain, select and purchase the right ax for the right job. The subtitle is right: practical.

This handbook teaches you how to learn any language on your own, in the language's home turf, by teaching a native speaker to be your teacher.

The trick is to instruct your local agent to teach you something he/she is hardly aware of -- the structure of their language. You will supply the plan and so are teaching yourself through them. Comprende? It's done slowly, naturally, and playfully - the way you learned English. Your assistant doesn't even have to speak your language.

You begin using a few easy words, trying to make as many mistakes as you possibly can, entertaining the folks in the marketplace or anywhere else they'll put up with your blabberings. Then you systematically add additional words in steady daily use, guiding your guide in what you want to learn next. This well-tested method was devised by missionaries trying to learn languages lacking scripts, courses, or guidebooks, and works great for dialects, or indeed any language you want to learn.

The text of this workbook shows you how to construct your own exercises that fit the language you are after and later how to discover its grammar by yourself. The goal is multiculturalism, inseparable from multilingualism. Like realizing that you don't need a degree in anything to build your own house, learning that you can become fluent in another language without a course or classroom is deliciously radical.

If you like this approach check out other online texts by missionary linguists which take the same approach of enabling an intermediate to become your language teacher.

This DIY process works best on location, rather than before you arrive.

-- KK

Language Acquisition Made Practical
E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth Brewster
1976 (1998 printing); 384 pp.

Available from Amazon

or $15 from Lingua House

Author's website:
Lingua House
P.O. Box 704
Pasadena, CA 91102 - 0704
626/ 500-6278
LinguaHouse@LAMP.Bizland.com

There's more of the same approach (different book) here at SIL, also a language site for missionaries.

I planned my first trip to Japan six months out with every intention of studying basic language skills in advance. I subscribed to a podcast, looked into Rosetta Stone, and added a few foreign films to our Netflix queue. Easier said than done. After five months of procrastination (just being honest), I picked up this book as a last-ditch effort to learn at least a little as we traveled. For a two-week trip, we brought five guides, including the previously-reviewed Japan's Hidden Hot Springs. Survival Japanese is the only one I consulted everyday -- at least one-third of its pages are now dog-eared. Rather than overwhelm with long word lists or complex explanations of how to form unique sentences, the book is broken into scenarios with simple phrases listed in English, Japanese (Romanized), Japanese characters and, most importantly, spelled phonetically in English. You just flip to whatever situation you're prepping for or have found yourself in... in a taxi, greeting people, paying bills, apologizing, asking questions, at the station, in a bar, visiting a home, medical emergencies (thankfully, we had none) and more. Sure an extensive glossary with many more words would be nice; additional phrases for the same and other scenarios would also be useful. That's not the point with this one. If you're a true beginner, the book provides just enough in a package you won't mind stashing in a jacket pocket or tossing in a day bag. I still wish I'd learned more beforehand. Nevertheless, my new (and very polite) Japanese friends gave me an A for effort.

-- Steven Leckart

Survival Japanese
Boye Lafayette De Mente
160 pages, 2003 (revised ed.)
$7
Available from Amazon

If you want to save money and have the time to create a DIY pocketguide (I did not), this wikitravel phrasebook is a great resource; also, please note that below are just a few select phrases from a few sections -- SL

This is my library. I guess you would have to say all the rest of these books are books that did not change my life, although they tried.

Books still have the power to change lives. Which ones have changed yours?

I don't mean merely great books, or memorable ones, or favorite ones. I mean books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.

Here's my list, in the order they entered my life. (I'm not the only one affected by these books because each of these titles has a Wikipedia entry, linked here, if you'd like to know more.)

Childhood's End -- For a kid growing up without TV in the boring enclaves of suburbia in the 50s and early 60s, science fiction opened up my universe. I devoured any and all science fiction our public library contained. Arthur C. Clarke's stories in particular birthed a life-long interest in science, and a deep respect for the power of imagination. This story of a singularity always stuck with me as something to prepare for. (Available from Amazon)

Whole Earth Catalog -- When I was 17 this big catalog of choices gave me permission to have my own ideas, make my own tools, follow my two loves of art and science unabashedly, and invent my own life. Decades later, I worked at the Catalog in my first real job. Cool Tools is just the electronic version of this book. (Available from Amazon)

The Fountainhead -- I got sucked into reading this over-the-top manifesto of self-reliance during finals of my first year of college. By the end of the book I decided to drop out of school. I never returned. It was the best decision of my life. (Available from Amazon)

Leaves of Grass -- While reading this classic poetic ode to America and possibilities ("I am multitude!") my gasket blew and I became seized with an unstoppable urge to travel. I set the book down and bought a ticket to Asia. I roamed there off and on for 8 years. It was my university. (Available from Amazon)

My Experiments with Truth -- This autobiography of Gandhi curiously led me to Jesus. Gandhi's stance of radical honesty prompted me to attempt the same. I was surprised it took a tough Hindu to make me a tender Christian. (Available from Amazon)

The Bible -- Reading this all the way through, beginning to end, shattered all expectations I had of such a foundational text. It was weirder, stranger, more disturbing and more powerful than I was lead to believe. I've read through several times more and it never fails to disturb me. (Available from Amazon)

Godel, Escher, Bach -- I was amazed and impressed by the brilliance of GEB when I first read it, but it didn't change my life. However over the years I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. Now I find them my own thoughts, and I realize I now see the world through a similar lens. (Available from Amazon)

The Ultimate Resource -- Another book whose influence took time to establish. Simon's clarifying insight -- that mind and intelligence can overcome any physical limitations, and is therefore the only scarce resource -- has become a big idea that colors much of what I look at. (Available from Amazon)

Finite and Infinite Games -- This small, short book provided me a vocabulary to think about the meaning of life -- not just my life, but all life! It gave me a mathematical framework for my own spirituality. As it says, the game is to prolong the game, to rope all beings into playing infinite vs finite (win-loose) games, and to realize that there is only one infinite game. (Available from Amazon)

What's your list of Books That Changed Your Life? It has to be more than a list. A book cannot be said to change your life unless it can be annotated with the tangible consequences you made as a result of reading it.

Here are a few qualifying lists by others I have encountered in my clickage.

Peter Turney, AI researcher (Peter's list prompted this posting.)
Tim O'Reilly, Publisher
Steven Leckart, Editor
Mark Reid, AI researcher
Trent Hamm, financial blogger
Eric Rawlins, data architect
Larry Winget, motivational speaker
Mark Verber, software architect
Duane Johnson, software architect
Lucas Doran, road burn chaser
Ryan Holiday, blogger

I get a lot from reading these love letters to books. Why doesn't everyone do a list like this?

Send me links (kk at kk dot org) -- of yours or others you respect -- and I'll add them to the list if appropriate.

-- KK

I'm an iPod boom box guy, so I haven't owned a proper stereo in six years. Just don't tell that to the boxes of LPs and 7 inches stashed in my closet. I've always intended on revisiting my lonely analog collection, but what little I knew about properly using and maintaining a turntable has kept me at bay. Changing a cartridge? Setting horizontal geometry? Overhang? Zenith geometry? This DVD confirms how intricate it can get, but proves that a little bit of knowledge, practice and zen-like patience goes a long way. Michael Fremer, a writer for Stereophile magazine (and a former comedian), does everything step by step in real time without skipping the minute details or sugarcoating: "When they show this in the book, it takes up one paragraph. When you do it in real life, it takes a little more time..." Among the thorough, user-friendly segments are how to change a cartridge (tip #1: be in a good mood; tip #2: beginners should use an inexpensive cartridge just in case anything goes awry). There's also a solid rundown of which tools you need and why (tip: go for hex screwdrivers rather than keys because they're longer and easier to maneuver), and why or why not to opt for that top of the line pressure gauge. Fremer keeps things pretty lively, too, with the occasional Julia Child impersonation or self-deprecating, light-hearted quip: "It's more fun watching paint chip isn't it?" or "It's not like watching Terminator 2." I'm still shopping around for my new table, but as soon as I get it, I'll be re-watching and copying his every move.

-- Steven Leckart

21st Century Vinyl: Michael Fremer's Practical Guide to Turntable Set-Up
2006,
$23
Available from Insound

Or $27 from Amazon

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Scratch

The Alan Lomax Collection Sampler

The Buddha Machine

Stumble Upon is a community-based website recommendation engine that serves up fantastic random websites. Completely addictive, it still does that. But now that they have added search (including video and image search), it has moved from frivolous to useful, and Stumble Upon is beginning to replace Google as my primary search engine. You cannot yet add Stumble Search as the primary search engine in your browser, but the Stumble Upon tool bar makes it nearly as convenient.

Let's say you are looking for a new dining room table. If you put "dining table" into Google you get a gazillion crappy tables. If you put the same search entry into Stumble Upon you get 100 of the coolest tables on the net. The same is true in its video and image search engine. For instance, when I wanted to find a video for my wife who was learning Roller Derby, I searched You Tube and got thousands of results, almost all of them below mediocre. But when I searched Stumble Upon Video I got only 10 results, and all of them were awesome.

The key to the system is that for every site that you "stumble upon" in your web surfing, you can give it a thumbs up or down (or tag or comment it). Really cool content propagates through the network fast, yet people trying to game the system to give their pages high stumble ranks get voted down very quickly. When I met the founders of Stumble Upon recently I asked how they managed to do this so well, and they said that they did not write a single line of code until they had worked out the anti-spam strategy. While there are several recommendation engines on the web like Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, Stumble Upon's interface, huge active community, and easy tools make it the one that always delivers the highest level of cool stuff. It is basically how I find everything that I blog about.

-- Alexander Rose

Stumple Upon

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

Consensus Web Filters

Consumer Search

Google SMS

A gorgeous key to the surprising variety of snowflakes. There's more diversity than you think. The taxonomy of snow is categorized succinctly here. You can also find the same information on the author's densely packed website. He offers a companion book of a gallery snowflake photos, and prints, "wallpaper," and US postage stamps! However this small book is the handiest form for all this goodness.

-- KK

Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes
2006, 112 pages
$11
Available from Amazon

SnowCrystals website

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

The Cloudspotter's Guide

Icebox

Allen & Mike's Really Cool Backcountry Ski Book

I'm a big fan of rules of thumb. Like: "Count the number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, and add 37. That's the temperature in Fahrenheit." They are great estimating tools. At the Whole Earth Catalog we first published Tom Parker's collection of these portable estimates, soliciting others from readers. I suggested a few rules of my own, which made their way into one of Parker's later books. Since I remember -- and use -- a number of these rough recipes, I have always regretted that the books were out of print. If ever there was knowledge ideal for the web, rules of thumb are it. Tom Parker has recently digitized all the rules he has collected. He posts one old rule per day, and one new one suggested by readers. As the rules are tagged over time to make searching easier, we'll finally have the world-wide database of guesstimates that short-cut-takers like myself have always wanted.

You can find inexpensive used copies of the books, Rules of Thumb, and Rules of Thumb 2, but the web site really is a much better way to use and discover these. Parker has refined his explanation of what rules of thumb are, and why they are cool tools. He writes:

"A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark. Rules of thumb are a kind of tool. They help you appraise a problem or situation. They make it easier to consider the subtleties of the topic at hand; they give you a feel for a subject. A rule of thumb is not a joke or a ditty. It is not a Murphy's Law. Murphy says that things will take longer than we think; a rule of thumb says how much longer. While a proverb says that a stitch in time saves nine, a rule of thumb says to allow one inch of yarn for every stitch on a knitting needle."

I've spent a lot of time reading through these over the years. I now subscribe to the Rules of Thumb RSS feed from Parker's site. My new rule of thumb: "One in 25 rules of thumb will be useful to you." YMMV, but I find that a pretty good hit rate.

-- KK

Rules of Thumb

Sample excerpts:

The best way to make money in residential real estate is to buy the worst home on the best street.

When you are working in the vicinity of high voltage, keep 1 foot of distance between you and the power source for each 1,000 volts. For instance, stay 13 feet away from a 13,000 volt power source.

Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools

Self Reliance Journal

The Big Here Quiz

40 Principles

This is not your father's physics textbook. It is the self-published 1,500-page (!!), still-unfinished physics textbook written and designed by your polymath genius uncle who dwells on a mountain with the spirits of departed philosophers (whom he quotes, in German). It's what a physics textbook would be like if a poet wrote it and made no mistakes. The book is massively visual. There is minimal math. It's a textbook with soul.

The guiding metaphor of Motion Moutain, and thus its name, is to frame physics as varieties of motion and change. When it gets to quantum mechanics it considers this in almost Taoist terms, as the "smallest change."

This textbook is a work of art. Unlike standard texts, it is an enthusiastically personal masterpiece, yet still has exercise problems for students to practice. It sprawls across topics you won't find in any other physics textbook: semantics, lying, color theory, the physics of pleasure. In many ways it reminds me of Godel, Escher, Bach in its witty brilliance, stupendous range, and self-designed idiosyncrasies. Motion Moutain is an amazing portrait of the physical world as flux. It has the power to equip you with the intellectual tools to work with, and love, this flux. Studying it is an adventure in understanding.

Best of all, it is a free PDF book. A PDF means that it is hyperlinked to footnotes and intensely cross-referenced. And it is easily searchable. Every student -- anywhere -- can download a copy.

This book connects the dots. It answers the question of why 9/11 happened. It weaves together the many diverse strands from Arabia, Yemmen, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Germany and the US that lead to both al-Queda and the bombing of the Twin Towers. You see the final tapestry and say, Aha! The depth of the international research supporting the book is astounding. Every page is full of news. I was stunned both by how much intelligence insiders knew of Bin Laden, and how much the agencies failed to act on their knowledge. The book traces the saga of the Bin Laden family, the trajectory of Osama, who was a hero in Islam long before the Towers, the role of the heretics who influenced him, the fierce persecutions these radicals faced in their home country, and the sad, tragic turf wars and cultural ignorance in the US that blinded us to the looming disaster. This book will make you realize how ignorant we still are. No matter what side of the political fence you are on, it should be required reading before the next election.

-- KK

The Looming Tower
Lawrence Wright
2007, 576 pages
$11

Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

Bin Laden's [father's] fortunes began to lift as the American engineers, under pressure from the Saudi government to train and hire more local workers, began giving him projects that were too modest for the major firms. He was quickly recognized as an exacting and honest builder. He was a small, handsome man, with one glass eye -- the result of a blow a teacher had given him in his first days of schooling. Bin Laden never returned to school, and as a result he was illiterate -- "his signature was like that of a kid," one of his sons remembered. He was nonetheless brilliant with figures, which he could effortlessly calculate in his head, and he never forgot a measurement. An American who knew him in the 1950s described him as "dark, friendly, and energetic." Aramco began a program that granted employees a leave for a year in order to try their luck in business. If they failed, they could return to the company with no loss in status. The Mohammed bin Laden Company was one of many enterprises that got its start with Aramco sponsorship.

Moussaoui was probably intended to be part of a second wave of al-Qaeda attacks that would follow 9/11, most likely on the West Coast. If the agents in Minneapolis had been allowed to thoroughly investigate Moussaoui, they would have made the connection to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was sending him money. Moussaoui carried a letter of employment from Infocus Tech,which was signed by Yazid Sufaat. That name meant nothing to the FBI, since the CIA kept secret the information about the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place in Sufaat's condo. The bureau failed to put together the warning from its own office in Minneapolis with that of Kenneth Williams in Phoenix. Typically, it withheld the information from Dick Clarke and the White House, so no one had a complete picture.

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

The 911 Report: A Graphic Adaptation

Foreign Affairs

Eyewitness To History

Who knew that Bill Bryson would be the ideal guide to the history of the universe? Bryson has a reputation (at least in my family) of being hilariously funny as a best-selling travel writer. But here he has written a refreshingly brilliant introduction to the basics of physics, chemistry, geology, evolution and the rest of the cosmos. I'm not sure how he does it. He takes well-worn topics (atoms, black holes, molecules, DNA), inverts them, and presents entirely new ways of seeing them. And he still manages to be funny. He is not a scientist, but a storyteller. He's at his best when he recounts the feuds between ideas, and the unpredictable, often round-about route they take before they are accepted as "obvious." He delivers perspective, rather than facts. This is the best Science 101 course you'll ever take.

-- KK

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
560 pages, 2004
$12
Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

It isn't easy to become a fossil... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today - that's 270 million people with 206 bones each - will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That's not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 9.3 million square kilometers, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, it would be something of a miracle if they ever were.

The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is 3,959 miles, which isn't so very far. It has been calculated that if you sunk a well to the center and dropped a brick into it, it would take only forty-five minutes for it to hit the bottom... Our own attempts to penetrate toward the middle have been modest indeed. One or two South African gold mines reach to a depth of two miles, but most mines on Earth go no more than about a quarter of a mile beneath the surface. If the planet were an apple, we wouldn't yet have broken through the skin.

Google Answers was a great service I used and recommended. Sadly it was closed. Many of the free-lance researches from Google Answers moved to a new independently owned site, Uclue, that offers a similar service. You ask a question, announce a price you think an answer is worth, and if a top-notch researcher thinks your fee is fair, they will research your question. Questions can be quickies worth $5, or more complicated queries costing $200.

In my experience their answers are solid and reliable. You can always ask for clarifications. As with Google Answers, the results are public. That means it pays to search the site for previous similar questions. It also means that your answer won't be confidential. (Indeed. The answer to a question I commissioned on Uclue was Slashdotted.)

If you want advice, go to the free and free-wheeling Yahoo Answers. You'll get your money's worth. If you want help on a particular question that the exact right person can answer quickly, I think Ask Metafilter is by far the best guru (and it is free for members). But if what you need is some real research and serious sleuthing, the kind of answer that is not just sitting in someone's head, I believe your best bet will be Uclue.

Figure how long it might take you to answer your own question -- if you could at all -- and you'll see that Uclue answers are a real bargain.

-- KK

Uclue

The classic, Compact OED is a smaller, handy version of what is the best English dictionary, bar none, the famous OED. Because it's photo-reduced, it contains the entire OED, all 20 large volumes in one convenient reference (it comes with a reading glass). Aside from saving space on your shelf, it's also significantly cheaper. It's quite large, but you could definitely fit it in a regular backpack, if you're a student or need to transport it (although it is about 10 pounds!). I've been using it for 3 years now, at least twice a week for general queries, as I enjoy discovering and using obscure words and I also often look up words and dive into etymology as part of my Wikipedia editing. For example, recently I used my OED to look up an archaic usage of the word "quaint". Apparently Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" makes use of the old meaning where "quaint" also refers to female anatomy. Who knew?!

-- Gwern Branwen

Compact Oxford English Dictionary
E. S. C. Weiner, J. A. Simpson (Editors)
1991, 2424 pages
$240
Available from Amazon

Sample page:

Related items previously reviewed in Cool Tools:

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

The Synonym Finder

Visual Thesaurus

In art, literature, film and life, even the littlest image or reference can open a world of interpretation. This thick encyclopedia, with contributions from scholars in various disciplines, is an excellent guide to the major and more esoteric origins of seemingly everything -- from "abracadabra" to "Zodiac." There are a ton of spiritual, mythological and/or cultural tangents that hopscotch the globe and back in time. Whenever I pick it up, I learn something new. I find the animal and food-related facts particularly enlightening (ex; oranges, a fertility symbol, are given to young married couples in Vietnam; and in Ancient China a formal offer of marriage was accompanied by a gift of oranges to the girl). The book's title is somewhat misleading. It does not have illustrations -- it's all text. Some entries are a couple sentences, others stretch for a few pages. If you have plans to deconstruct the next season of Lost, you might find this one handy.

-- Steven Leckart

Dictionary of Symbols
Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant
1996 (current translation), 1184 pages
$15
Available from Amazon

Sample Excerpts:

otter
The otter, which rises to the surface of the water and then dives below it, posses lunar symbolism and from this derive the properties for which it is used in initiation. Otter-skin is used in initiation societies both among North American Indians and among Black Africans, especially the Bantu of Cameroon and Gabon… The shamans of the North American Ojibwa Indians keep their magic shells in an otter-skin bag. The messenger of the Great Spirit, who acts as intercessor between him and mankind, is supposed to have seen the wretched state of human weakness and disease and to have revealed the most sublime secrets to the otter and interfused its body with Migis (symbols of the Mide or members of the Midewiwin Medicine Lodge) so that the creature became immortal and could, by initiating humans, make them holy. All members of the Midewiwin carry otter-skin medicine bags. These are the bags which are aimed at the candidate at initiation ceremonies as if they were fire-arms and 'kill' him. They are then laid on his body until he is restored to life. After song and feasting the shamans present the new initiate with his own otter-skin bag. The otter is therefore an initiating spirit which kills and restores to life.

All our other major devices have user manuals, so why not the web? It's the gadget we use the most these days. Mark Frauenfelder, an editor with me at Wired magazine and later founder of Boing Boing, has written the missing manual for the web. I thought I was pretty web savvy, but after reading Mark's book of tips (written in a FAQ format), I felt like a slack-jawed newbie. I didn't know anything, while Mark seems to know everything and to explain it brilliantly. I bow to him. I dog-eared a hundred pages of the book highlighting great tips for optimizing my web habits. Since I spend so much time online, this is a big deal. Unlike most nerds caught up in the treasures of the web, Mark can put things into perspective, and increase your effectiveness, rather than computer time. This is the user manual to give anyone who is online, which is everyone. The smartest, hard-core, geeky, know-it-all web head will learn tons from it. I hope Mark keeps it updated -- on the web of course.

-- KK

Rule the Web
Mark Frauenfelder
2007, 416 pages
$11
Available from Amazon

Rule the Web website

Sample excerpts:

How Can I Listen to Three Hours of Podcasts in Two Hours?

Find a word within a Web page. It can be frustrating to search Google for a certain term and then go to one of the Web sites it returns only to discover you can't find the term you searched for. a quick way to find the term is by typing Ctrl-F (Cmd-F on Mac) and entering the word. By typing Ctrl-G (Cmd-G on Mac) you'll be taken to the next occurrence of the term on the page. You can also click the "Highlight All" button at the bottom of Firefox's window to give all occurrences a yellow highlight.

The slogan "The Fastest Way To Learn A Language. Guaranteed" may sound like a gimmicky promise, but none of the other "language lessons in a box" that you can get without joining the military, NASA, or the US Diplomatic core even remotely compares to this computer-based immersion program.

The genius of the process involves using pictures to teach you how to listen, speak, read, and write, rather than teaching by translation, as virtually all other language programs do. So as you learn your new language you associate the new words, phrases, and grammatical structures directly with the pictures rather than mentally translating through your native language. Using this method, most people can use a Rosetta Stone program regardless of native tongue, cutting out a major limitation of the translation-based language programs.

After a salesman at a mall gave me a demo for Vietnamese (which I've never studied before), I ordered a three-month subscription to the Russian program. I studied Russian in both high school and college, and went to Russia on "People to People" in 1991. At one point, I was getting very conversant, but couldn't say anything beyond the simplest phrases without mentally translating them into English. But after seven years of not actively studying Russian and rarely speaking it, my skills began to deteriorate. I was starting to be able to say things only on a very piecemealish basis (specific words, canned phrases, and common songs). Translation: I was losing my third language (I am fluent in Spanish).

Two months into the Rosetta Stone, which can be as as addictive as a video game, I was able to enjoy the fast-talking film "Nochnoy dozor" ("Nightwatch") without the subtitles. I have also found that I can now think, speak, and read in Russian without doing a mental translation into English like I used to do. And I think that when I get the money to travel to Russia again, I will become permanently fluent.

It is true that I used the program as a refresher course, rather than to learn a language from scratch. But as a relative veteran when it comes to learning foreign languages with different teachers and methods -- I've also studied German and picked up a good deal of French while traveling in Europe (forgot it in a matter of months) -- here is my take:

If somebody wants to learn a language from scratch, most people could finish Level 2 with excellent conversational skills (a feat that took me 3 months, but would probably take a beginner more like 6 months). If you are starting from scratch, doing Level 1 would still be a good foundation and you could easily survive "in country" when it comes to day to day living [note: Rosetta Stone sells programs for 30 major world languages, but they only offer Level 2 for certain languages, and only Level 3 for Latin American Spanish and English (US)].

For the people who are learning from scratch, there might still be some value in more conventional methods of teaching. And, of course, being in a community where the language was spoken would speed up the process. A determined English speaker with a high aptitude for language could probably do the Latin American Spanish up to Level 3, and then zone in on fluency very easily with no other formal instruction. But for languages with non-Roman alphabets and more divergent grammar systems, conventional teaching would not become irrelevant.

If you studied a language in school and got good grades, but can't really speak it, Rosetta Stone would be a really fun way to narrow the gap between book learning and real use. In short, I don't think an excellent language teacher has anything to fear from this tool, whether he/she works in a public school, university, a private language school, or as a private tutor. But the makers of all those crummy "language in a box" tools on the market have reason to be very, very afraid for their business.

-- Amy Scanlon

Rosetta Stone Language Learning
$210 - $260 (depending on level)
$340 (Levels 1 & 2)
$510 (Levels 1, 2 & 3: English [US] and Spanish [Latin America] only)
Available from and manufactured by Fairfield Language Technologies

[There are also online subscriptions that are cheaper. ex; In the case of Spanish Levels 1 & 2, $110 gets you three months, while $160 gets you six months of access -- sl]

There's an even cheaper alternative: free. Many public libraries purchase Rosetta Stone and some even make it available online. Patrons can access it free, anywhere, using their library card number.

Example: Palo Alto Public Library

-- Marv K.

SmartFlix will rent you nearly four thousand How-To DVDs in English. Subjects range from construction techniques (tile laying, cabinet making, timber framing), outdoor activities (kayaking, archery), and self-help, to such specialties as welding, lock-picking, and primitive fire-making.

The quality of the instruction varies tremendously. Some DVDs are smart and effective, some aren't. Some are old, some brand new. All come from various publishers. The SmartFlix site smartly provides customer reviews (although not all DVDs have reviews). I have found the reviews tend to be generous; I mentally deduct one star from the ratings.

It's amazing what you can learn from how-to books and videos. Most of my livelihood skills I learned this way, out of school and without teachers. A great book or video can equal, or at least compliment, an okay teacher. Through years of watching instructional videos, I've found I need to view them more than once. First I watch before I do anything; then I review parts in the midst of doing; and lastly I watch it again after I'm done, when I finally understand what they were trying to say. You to rent these videos for one week (it should be longer).

Renting these DVDs is not as cheap as using Netflix, but they are nearly as handy with their postage-paid mail-back carton and clear website. The cost is $10 per rental for a week, which works out to about half or a third or more of what buying them would be. None of these how-to's are available on Netflix, and no where else are they gathered together with such easy search, ordering, and evaluation.

SmartFlix was formerly known as Technical Video Rental; they are currently selling off all their video tapes and only rent DVDs now. The site and service is still young. As more members rent and review these very specialized factual films, this service will increase in value.

-- KK

SmartFlix
$10 per film
Available from SmartFlix

Remember that greeting card company and famous-in-the-late-90s website Blue Mountain Arts? Well the extremely talented and philanthropic founders have started a learning-to-read website, totally free, called Starfall.com. My daughters, ages 6 and 7, have literally gotten more educational value out of this than their schools. And now their schools are using it in their classes once a week! Super site, makes the most out of flash and audio on a broadband connection, and really a treasure for young kids (aimed at first graders and below) who want to get going with reading (at no cost).

-- Jeff Blackburn

Starfall.com

This old-school government manual for flight instructors is the best how-to guide I have come across for teaching, learning, communication and professionalism about any subject. It says almost nothing about aviation, and everything about how to teach. It's called "The Aviation Instructor's Handbook"; the full text is available for free as a PDF download.

-- Ronald Fuller

It's really pretty good. Covers all kinds of pedagogical approaches, and is especially good for teaching material where both head and body skills are needed. Think of it as a general "Instructor's Handbook." Short of signing up for a teacher's degree, I haven't seen anything else as thorough, explicit, and succinct in how to teach teaching.

-- KK

The Aviation Instructor's Handbook
Available from the FAA

Sample excerpts:

Student Tells -- Instructor Does
This is a transition between the second and third steps in the teaching process. It is the most obvious departure from the demonstration-performance technique, and may provide the most significant advantages. In this step, the student actually plays the role of instructor, telling the instructor what to do and how to do it. Two benefits accrue from this step. First, being freed from the need to concentrate on performance of the maneuver and from concern about its outcome, the student should be able to organize his or her thoughts regarding the steps involved and the techniques to be used. In the process of explaining the maneuver as the instructor performs it, perceptions begin to develop into insights. Mental habits begin to form with repetition of the instructions previously received. Second, with the student doing the talking, the instructor is able to evaluate the student's understanding of the factors involved in performance of the maneuver. According to the principle of primacy, it is important for the instructor to make sure the student gets it right the first time. The student should also understand the correct sequence and be aware of safety precautions for each procedure or maneuver. If a misunderstanding exists, it can be corrected before the student becomes absorbed in controlling the airplane.

*

*

Trick questions, unimportant details, ambiguities, and leading questions should be avoided, since they do not contribute to effective evaluation in any way. Instead, they tend to confuse and antagonize the student. Instructors often justify use of trick questions as testing for attention to detail. If attention to detail is an objective, detailed construction of alternatives is preferable to trick questions.

*

Questions containing double negatives invariably cause confusion. If a word, such as "not" or "false," appears in the stem, avoid using another negative word in the stem or any of the responses.

If weather is your religion, this book is good news. It's the best cloud identification guide I've seen. It's excellence comes in part because great photos of each cloud species have been selected from the world-wide fan club for clouds called the Cloud Appreciation Society. (They also have a great online gallery of unusual cloud photos.) Additional goodness stems from the enthusiastic, clear and lyrical descriptions of the author, who is Chief Cloud Appreciator. Better than anyone else, he's made the reasons behind cloud differences clear to me. I've become more of a cloud connoisseur, able to read the weather a bit better. Finally much of the charm of this book comes from its handsome presentation; the welcoming design is a throwback to an earlier era of bookmaking with clear tables and clear figures.

In short, this is the clearest guide to clouds I've encountered.

-- KK

The Cloudspotter's Guide
Gavin Pretor-Pinney
2006, 320 pages
$5
Available from Amazon

Cloud Appreciation Society

Sample excerpts:

We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking' wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day. We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere's moods, and can be read like those of a person's countenance.

*

This rare Cirrus formation is known as a Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud and can form in the region between shearing winds, moving in different directions.

*

The mamma cloud formations, sometimes known as 'mammatus', are named after the Latin for 'breasts'. As described earlier, these can appear on the underside of a number of different cloud types - Cirrus, Cirrocumulus, Altocumulus, Altostratus, Stratocumulus, and Cumulonimbus - and at their most dramatic look like a field of smooth, globular udders.

They are at their most impressive when wed to a mighty Cumulonimbus. Forming on the underside of its incus, mamma appear when the top of the anvil cools, by radiating heat up into the atmosphere, and parts of it sink into the air below. When this air is relatively warm and humid, some of its water vapour condenses into cloud droplets as it mixes with the cold air. The process is like the reverse of convection currents forming into Cumulus clouds: rather than air warming at the ground level and rising to forum clouds, here air is cooling at the top of the troposphere and sinking to form them.

Mamma tend to be far less dramatic on the other cloud types. On the whole they are only plump, full and abundant when there is a mighty thunderstorm in the vicinity. The more powerful the Cumulonimbus, the more buxom the mamma.

Nolo Self-help books are written by lawyers. They give clear, no nonsense instructions on how to deal with all sorts of issues, from getting your greencard, incorporating, writing your own will or trust to buying a house. I've used Nolo's books to do two out of that list so far, and am very happy with the results. No lawyer needed! Forms are included on CD-rom, as is excellent website support. Best of all, the books clearly state if and when you should consult a real lawyer. These are tools written by lawyers who are fed up with overcharging customers and making law inaccessible through complex language. Most solutions are common sense, and Nolo tells you how to do it without breaking the bank (or the law).

-- Wouter

I've used these as well, and recommend them. In addition to their admirable paperback books, Nolo Press also offers many of its best-selling titles, like the ones below, in an e-book (PDF) format, so that you can instantly download it if you are in a hurry. Some very specific topics, like Trademark Basics for Naming Your Small Business, are only offered in PDF booklet format. Nolo's free web articles are also extremely helpful. In fact their website is the first place I head when I need an orientation in legal matters.

-- KK

UPDATE: I recently used a Nolo Press book, How to Change Your Name, to successfully bypass a chore that would have normally demanded a lawyer. It took me all the way through the paperwork and court system. Like most of Nolo legal self-help books, it was clear, thorough, and knowledgeable -- exactly what you want from a lawyer, but much less costly. I would buy one for a task even if I were to use a lawyer, just to get a feel for what I should expect. -- KK

I have constant need for scientific papers, and articles from obscure scholarly journals, or old newspaper clippings. A few years ago I would have trekked to the nearest university library whenever I required a journal article, to search through the stacks of bound volumes, haul them to the copy room and then xerox my findings. Now I stay at my desk and search through JSTOR, an online depository of the full text of most major scholarly and scientific journals, and download a PDF file of the same paper within minutes. Few academic books are available this way so far, but a surprising amount of the periodic portion of the digital library is now online.

This vast store of knowledge is found on the Invisible Web -- that part of the WWW that hides behind passwords and subscription fees, and is beyond the grasp of Google (although Google Scholar is working on this). This part of the web holds the databases that professionals and librarians pay to search, and includes the scholarly and scientific journals I crave, as well as marketing and business information, digitized magazines and newspapers, and several hundred of specialized databases built up over the years by fees -- but formerly only available to users at high prices. Very little of this material is available on the free web yet.

There are several ways to get to this stuff as an individual. 1) You can call a public librarian to do the occasional search. 2) You can purchase a subscription to a database vendor for personal access, or 3) You can use a digital library card for web access from your home via your local library system. For most of us, #3 is the way to go.

While coverage varies tremendously by region, it is very much worth your time trying your library system. Local library systems increasingly permit ordinary citizens access into for-pay databases. Our local system, the San Francisco Public Library, offers close to 100 databases remotely (and for free) to library card holders. The only downside for many systems is that you need to be a resident.

In most states, you can get a library card from a public library outside of your county of residence -- as long as you can prove state residence (true for the San Francisco Public Library). Often you will have to go the actual state library in person to pick up your card, but once in hand, you can access the library from the web. Fanatical researchers are known to have a wallet full of library cards from numerous public library systems within their respective states. Some states, Ohio and Michigan being two of the better known, have statewide consortiums of private, corporate and public libraries, which allows you access to the combined services and databases licensing power of them all.

If your local library system does not provide free online access to digital content databases, the cheapest way to get into these expensive databases is to pay for a library card from the New York Public Library. The NYPL offers membership to non-residents of New York, a privilege which also enables you to remotely access its online databases. For a $100 annual membership fee, non-residents will get a card that provides remote access to about 85 of its 300 online databases, although this card sadly does not include the JSTOR database of scientific journals. (New York residents can get the same card for free and obtain the same level of access.)

Another advantage of your digital library card to the NYPL (and others): They offer a rapidly increasing list of good e-books, audio books, and videos available for legal downloading. There's nothing like getting a squeaky-clean free copy of a best-selling "book-on-tape" to port to your mp3 player (but not iPods yet).

The New York Public Library is not the only major library to offer memberships to non-residents. If you live anywhere in California, I recommend getting a library card to the San Francisco Public Library, which is free, and which does give you access to the coveted JSTOR online journals. Only downside: you need to show up at the library in person to get your card.

This then illuminates the great bargain of the New York Public Library membership: you can apply for it online without ever setting foot in New York City, or State. When it ordinarily costs $3-5 to download a single article behind the pay-wall, the hundred dollars is a bargain on a larger research project. Again, you don't have to live in New York to get a card for the NYPL, or to show up to pick it up. You can simply apply online and receive your card through the mail. You do have to show up at the San Francisco Public Library to get theirs. Best is to inquire at your local, state or metro library.

I have a card for both the NYPL and the SFPL so I can access both from my home office. Just last night I was able to delve deep into scholarly journals to answer some questions that nothing on the Google-web could offer.

-- KK (with help from Michele McGinnis)

New York Public Library Card
$100 (non-residents)
Databases available from home

San Francisco Public Library Card
Free to residents
Databases availablefrom home

I'm into very low maintenance "pets." I've got my autonomous brine shrimp and have been looking for other critters I can keep and then abandon on a two-week vacation without external care or worry. I was given two tarantulas that fit the bill.

Tarantulas are big, beautiful, active and fascinating. I feed mine crickets. Since they sit on my desk basking in the warmth of the computers and electronic adapters, they've grown quite large. They burrow, cling, and pounce. Every once in a while they crawl out of their skins and molt. They are far more entertaining than I imagined. That's not too hard because I knew nothing about such creatures.

This wonderful book cured my ignorance. It is the best and most complete of the few volumes on the subject, and far more organized than any of the many web sites. It got me going by answering most of my newbie questions, and hasn't exhausted my spider curiosity since. Like many insects, tarantulas have lives that need books to explain and that can mesmerize readers for hours. This guide serves up natural history and practical how-to instructions for keeping these wonderful arachnids in your home.

-- KK

The Tarantula Keeper's Guide
Stanley A. Schultz, Marguerite J. Schultz
1998, 208 pages
$10
Available from Amazon

Sample excerpts:

Picking up the tarantula

*
How can the right kind be selected? Remember, these creatures don't live for only a few months like hamsters. They will live for years, perhaps for decades. Once purchased, it could be yours for a major portion of your life.

*
Not So Deadly Tarantulas
Virtually every reference is anecdotal with no firm medical evidence or authoritative species identification. There are also allegations that some South American species are dangerously venomous (e.g., one or more Phrixotrichus species); but again, there is little factual evidence, merely unverified anecdotal attempts to impress the gullible tourist with giant spider stories.

Too many people have cried wolf too many times. To say that these authors are skeptical is a vast understatement. With the exception of those listed above, none of the species commonly sold in pet shops are dangerous, and most make safe, reliable pets for the novice. The experienced aficionado may wish to acquire some of the rarer varieties, but is urged to take precautions when handling them until their identity is confirmed and verifiable evidence of the effects of their venom is obtainable. Other than that, neither the enthusiast, roommates, the spouse, nor the mother need worry.
*

The fresh exuvium [shed skin] of Brachypelma emilia. How much of the anatomy can you identify?

Like a lot of people, I find that the web is becoming my main source of news. Some of the sites I read are published by individuals, but I find the most informative sites are those published by groups of writers/editors/correspondents, including those put out by Main Steam Media (MSM). However for the past three months my main source of "what's new" has been a new breed of website that collaboratively votes on the best links.

This genre does not have an official name yet, but each of these sites supplies readers with pointers to news items that are ranked by other readers. None of these sites generates news; they only point to it by filtering the links to newsy items. Using different formulas they rank an ever moving list of links on the web. The velocity of their lists varies by site, but some will have a 100% turnover in a few days. I check them daily.

This new genre fits into a whitespace between already occupied niches of social web sites. In the established center are the group-produced sites such as Slashdot, BoingBoing, WorldChaning, Huffington Post, to name just four very popular ones, where a very small cast of editors (under a dozen or so) collaboratively filter and annotate the links to other sources. A daring and effective extension of this method was devised by the fantastic group at MetaFilter.Here the editors are a very smart mob of 25,000 users. One by one readers recommend the cool new stuff they find. Their filter is simply the emergent one of their collective discretion and taste; no one votes or ranks links. At the other end of the axis of collaborative filtering is the likes of Google and Yahoo News, which use the entire collaboration inherent in the web and many Googleish algorithms to programmatically generate a list of what's new based on who is linking stuff, the most "important" item at the top.No humans explicitly vote on the items.

These new uncategorized sites, which have emerged this year (and reviewed below), fall in between the positions above. They take the smart mob approach of MetaFilter and add the algorithms of search engines. So, readers themselves vote on the importance of linked items suggested by other readers; these votes are then subjected to a complex formula to produce rankings. The sites use various flavors of algorithms to balance and refine the votes and selection of smart mobs. Or they use the action of tagging or bookmarking a site as a type of vote. Each site uses a different algorithm, yielding slightly different mixes of links, and a different personality. The best sites maintain a balance between providing a sense of what everyone is reading (consensus popularity) and some novel items that not everyone is reading (yet). In the reviews below I try to capture some sense of distinctive style for each site.

How I use these consensus tools: By scanning these lists daily I get a fantastic sense of what the web is reading, and an early glimpse of what will reach the MSM in the next day or so. But most important for me is the large volume of very interesting news that will not become "news." This is the kind of material that is more interesting than random pages but which lacks an appealing hook to place it on the front page of a magazine or even a news website. Often these items are timeless; they don't make the front page because they could be run at any time. But they are more valuable than odd curiosities. Because of the voting, tagging, bookmarking process enough people find the item worthwhile that they rise to notice. What emerges for me is a delightful counter-news, or what we used to call at CoEvolution Quarterly, "news that stays news." I have encountered no other process in the world that is better at surfacing "news that stays news" and "news that will be news" better than these collaborative filtering sites.

I imagine in the near future there will be many dozens, if not hundreds, of tweaks on this scheme. Readers will gravitate to a formula that suits their own personal taste. Inevitably, there'll be some meta-operation that will seek out the overlaps among all the collab-voting sites and extract its own meta-list. Or, eventually, you'll be able to tweak your own mix of others' votes to roll your own collabvote site.

Given the rate of innovation, I'm sure I've missed some already in progress. If you find a new one at all useful, let me know about it.

-- KK

*

Digg
My first stop. I only look at their top stories page, an approach which some devotees find whimpy; true Diggers look at the real-time stream of suggested items before they have too many votes.

*

Reddit
If I had to pick only one of these I would pick Reddit. It gives me the best balance between the lesser-seen and the over-seen. Some folks don't like it because users can down-vote items which may make the list more manipulated. But I feel it brings me a little more variety than Digg. I find I click on more stories here than any other consensus site.

*

NewsVine
I have their science thread bookmarked. It's the best link for breaking science news. And their world news thread is very fine too. (I find the their top story thread to be polluted by popularity.)

*



Fantacular
A new one. Still learning its personality, but so far it delivers fairly techie posts, closer to Slashdot themes. It does not churn as fast as Slashdot or Digg and Reddit.

*

180 News
Good for getting the latest news in the last five minutes. There's no attempt to weed out duplicates, as in say Google News, so you get a raw stream of voted items, many of them the same story reported by different sources. Their technology stream resembles the mix of Fantacular and Digg, but faster. I also like their World News bookmark. It feels like Yahoo or Google news, but still faster.

*

Gather
The type of stories that rise to the top here reminds me of a cross between Reader's Digest and NPR's Weekend Edition -- light, offbeat, humorous, encouraging, sometimes odd, inspiring. If you like a collaborative group hug, this is your place. It's just not me.

*

The above websites use voting to rank links to other sites. Another set of new websites use shared bookmarks to rank links. Delicious was the first well-known shared, or social bookmarking site. As readers bookmark interesting pages they would tag (categorize) and share these bookmarks with other readers through Delicious. The original idea was that one could search bookmarks by tags to find listings of cool sites by subject. But folks discovered that by compiling a list of the most popular shared bookmarks an ever-changing ranked list of sites would also emerge. There are now at least 15 different social bookmarking sites. Some of them provide a ranking of most popularly bookmark pages of the moment. I use this ranking function without bothering with the tagging part of sites.

Del.icio.us
I look at the "popular" page on Delicious. It features 4 or 5 popular links for five sample subjects at one time. The subjects seem to change every few days. There's a lot of action, and the links are generally high quality.

*

Oishii
This is my preferred way to "read" Delicious. It polls the front page of Delicious and posts any item that is bookmarked by at least 30 people. Quick, fast, one page.

*



Blogmarks
I like Blogmarks for one great innovation: they display a thumbnail of the front page of the sites they link to. Why don't all of these sites do that?

*

Blinklist
Blinklist also displays thumbnails of listed sites but not consistently.

*



Furl
Choose the "day" mode, otherwise the list refreshes too slowly.

*



Simpy
A lot of very geeky links, with an occasional keeper.

*



Spurl
Scarce traffic keeps the change in the list slow.

Yes, you are a good person. But a relative or friend may not be so law-abiding. And stuff happens. Here is what to do if you are ever arrested (mostly what not to do) and what you can expect if put behind bars. Written by two professors of criminology; one was a former correctional officer, and the other served eleven years in federal custody, including maximum security. They know what they are talking about, and they dispense their straight dope with surprising clarity and uncommon elegance and wit. (One chapter is called "You've Got Jail!"). They've written a guidebook to a distant country and its alien customs and ways; may you never arrive there. You get street-smarts from inmates and wise counsel from the Man. I rank my books by how dog-eared they are; this one had nearly every page marked and underlined. This is one of the books you want to read before you need it.

I used this video by Professor Claude Olney of Arizona State University when I was in school. The video is rich with specific hints on getting better grades without working harder. For instance: show up for class, sit in the front row, use your highlighter on items you didn't know instead of the important items, etc. It was a great help to me as an undergrad at MIT (one B and the rest A's). I'm reminded of it now because I'm watching it again with my daughter as she gets started on 9th grade. (We are using the college version although Olney offers versions for high school and grade school.) Bottom line: this video is a fantastic tool for getting better grades, presented with a nice bit of humor.

-- Keith S. Jackson

This an extremely practical set of lessons, with a lot of wisdom and smartness. Although presented in very boring format -- a teacher at a lectern podium -- my high school kids benefited from watching the college version too.

-- KK

Where There's a Will There's an A
How to Get Better Grades (in College)
By Claude Olney
DVD, 161 minutes

$20
Available from Amazon

Or $47 from
Olney Seminars

Also available used (hopefully) from Ebay for $8+
Ebay

Lynda.com is a great resource for digital-video tutorials of some of the more advanced design tools. You can buy discs or subscribe for $25 a month for Quicktime online access (a real deal). I find the tutorials quite useful--it's fun to see how much more I have to learn even in the programs I have used for a long time (Photoshop for example). It's also instructive to see how others accomplish the same tasks and do it from a completely different angle.

-- Chuck Green

I tried some of the free sample classes streamed on Lynda.com and found that I remembered much more from these movie tutorials than I did from the many guidebooks I usually use. Must be how my brain works. I retain the tip, shortcut, or method long afterwards, which is not true after I am done with most computer manuals. Normally I close the book, and then have to look it up months later when I forget again. If you think visually (and most of the software covered here has a visual basis) then you might find this style of learning superior, as I do. But it is harder to search/find a solution to a specific nagging problem with this online library, because they do not yet have a fine-grained index or search beyond section headings. For expanding your reach with software packages, their subscription deal for online tutorials is a fine bargain; for hunting down a needed fix, I'd use your standard software bible.

-- KK

Lynda.com

This is where you go when Google shrugs. A community of 20,000 of the smartest people you know will answer your question. I use Ask Metafilter when I have a question that can't be reduced to a key word search. Say you want to know the name of that song that was played during the closing credits in a science fiction film that begins in a boy's bedroom, or you've been curious what that bumper sticker you keep seeing is, or maybe you need advice about whether you should see a therapist, or a psychologist, or a psychiatrist? You need a human for these inquiries. Ask Metafilter is not great for questions requiring detailed and heavily researched answers. For that use Google Answers for a small fee. What Ask Metafilter is great for, are things that a smart friend could easily answer if only you knew which friend to ask. The Metafilter community is your all-purpose smartest friend.

There is a one-time fee of $5 to join the community in order to post a question (but its free to read). To keep the frantic rate of new questions under control you are limited to asking no more than one a week. (You can answer all you want, and please do.) The quality of answers varies, but in general the tips, referrals and advice are pretty good, and often astoundingly on the mark. For example, here are some fairly typical questions I've asked (with fairly typical answers).

I've tried a couple of other "ask your question" sites on the web and generally their answer to question ratio is so low I've found them worthless. Ask Metafilter has managed to retain its intelligence while scaling up sufficiently to cover all subjects; that's a magical balance.

In fact, even when I don't have a question I find myself reading Ask Metafilter everyday because people will ask questions that I didn't even know I wanted to know until they asked it, and then I realize I've been dying to ask that. It's a true hive mind and it really works.

[Ask Metafilter is one service of the Metafilter community blog. Reading is free. Registration allows you to post questions and answers as well as posts to the other parts of the blog.]

-- KK

Ask Metafilter
$5 registration

You can hear the best presentations at some of the best high tech conferences without paying large attendance fees and without travel. Just click on over to IT Conversations where you can stream or download keynote speeches, interviews, and talks by the likes of Jeff Bezos, Malcom Gladwell, Tim O'Reilly, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gibson and others in the digital limelight who have recently given talks at high-priced conferences. It's a great service. Audio quality is fine. (This site will soon offer the monthly Long Now Seminar series on long-term thinking I'm involved with.) I hope they can land other fine venues. It's a much more civilized way to keep current. [Suggested by Vincent Crisci]

-- KK

IT Converstaions
Free registration

Sample offering:

David Brin, at Accelerating Change 2004 Conference
Runtime: 00:44:21, 20.3 mb, recorded 2004-11-0

Horizon Evaluation is a process for exploring what threats and opportunities may await us beyond the near term. It can suggest plausible scenarios for science fiction stories. It can also suggest ways to minimize threats and maximize opportunities. It may be particularly relevant for determining where to make investments.

Our civilization has already developed techniques that work well at exploring some sectors of the Possibility Horizon. Nearly all of these techniques rely upon rapid discovery of errors before those errors can prove fatal. Transparency of information flow appears to be the one common element. Only an open society would appear to have a chance of succeeding and taking advantage of the opportunities that lie ahead.

The concept is exquisite. Scour the world for the best professors and record their lectures. Paying customers get world-class university courses, at less than world-class university prices, while attending the class at their convenience. I've audited a dozen classes this way (while driving). My favorite so far is Robert Greenberg's celebrated forty-eight lessons on "How to Understand and Listen to Great Music." It was absolutely superb. No, it was stellar. More than a music appreciation class, it was a view of western civilization through music. Professionally recorded, lively, insightful, fast-paced, authoritative, and memorable. What more could you want from college on a cassette? Other favorites have been an overview of Egyptian history taught by a mummy expert and a decent introduction to western philosophy. The Teaching Company catalog lists an eclectic range of other seminars; I'd love to hear recommendations from others. One caveat: these courses seem expensive for many individuals. But they are a) way cheap for college, and b) way cheap by the tape (most courses are at least forty or so tapes; also available on DC, DVD, and other formats). You can also check your library, which is where I borrow mine from, or form a course club to share costs.

-- KK

The Teaching Company

Geodesic structures have always been tricky to mess around with because the vertices have to be precise, which often equals expensive. This reasonably priced system provides highly machined plastic connectors and sufficient highly engineered struts in various lengths to build scores of geodesic forms. The possibilities of shape are open-ended so that even small kids can build with it (struts are color-coded to ease assembly), and yet logical and complex enough that the same components can be used in a high school math or even college engineering classes. They also offer a selection of lesson plans built around this research toy. I had my first "aha" experience of geodesics while building with it: crystals are geodesic!

-- KK

Zome
Kits range in price from $10 for a 72-piece starter kit to $125 for a set with almost 1,000 pieces.
1526 South Pearl Street, Denver, CO 80211, 303-733-2880, 888/966-3386

Zomes are used to teach symmetry, projections, geometry, tilings and mosaics, architectural space frames and truss structures, crystallography, and chemical structures.

The minimum kit makes a cubic structure which can be dunked into soap water to generate soap films

Holes in the connector balls are shape coded to only accept the proper length strut at the correct angle.

A truncated icosahedron, otherwise known as a Buckyball.

At the bottom of reality lies a paradox: self-created creation, either the universe or God. This conundrum of self-causation afflicts all life and consciousness and great art. Occasionally the recursive nature of our existence is captured by a simple witty loop. Here is a fine collection of hundreds of highly evolved self-cancelling/self-generating circuits, called oxymoronics. This handsome and intelligent book is classic cybernetics. I use these witticisms as meditative koans.

-- KK

Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit & Wisdom From History's Greatest Wordsmiths
Marty Grothe
$11
Amazon

Sample excerpts:

The superfluous is the most necessary.
Voltaire

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead

I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Hegel

We are never prepared for what we expect.
James Michener

To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.
Napoleon Bonaparte

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
Maurice Chapelain

What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
Sydney J. Harris

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Henry David Thoreau

Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.
Harry S. Truman

Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde

War is a series of catastrophes which result in a victory.
Georges Clemenceau

First I dream my painting, then I paint my dream.
Vincent van Gogh

We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.
Walt Kelly, From Pogo

A man chases a woman until she catches him.
Anonymous

I want peace and I'm willing to fight for it.
Harry S. Truman

Study the past, if you would divine the future.
Confucius, in Analects

Love is a kind of warfare.
Ovid

All works of art should begin...at the end.
Edgar Allan Poe

An oxymoron has been wisely described as "a compressed paradox." Looking at it the other way around, I think of a paradox as "an extended oxymoron." To me, they're close cousins because they both link up contradictory or incongruous elements. And they both play around in the most fascinating way with the difference between literal truth and figurative truth. For this reason, I include both oxymoronic and paradoxical observations (and a few others, as you shall soon see) under the rubric of oxymoronica.

French In Action is a video-based course created by Pierre Capretz of Yale University. I know of no better way to rapidly obtain a knowledge of day-to-day French. This course is so excellent it almost justifies the invention of television.

The French in Action course is focused around 52 half-hour video lessons which assume you have no prior knowledge of the language. The course starts in French from the first instant. You may feel like an idiot at first, but the fact is you can mess up genders, adjectival forms, and much of verb conjugation in French and still be understood perfectly well on the street.

Get this course and play one video per day, each and every day, week in and week out. Just pick a 30 minute time period in your day, and work your way through the videos from number 1 through number 52, one per day. When you get to the end, go back to the beginning and start over again. Repeat until you understand perfectly and have ceased to improve. Even if you don't have time to read the accompanying text, or practice with the workbooks, or use the audio cassettes, make the 30 minute slot for the video a permanent part of your life. The first time through you'll probably miss about 90% at first hearing. The second time, you'll get about half, and by the third time you'll understand almost everything. Your very progress provides strong reinforcement as you follow the course. Simply by watching this series of 52 videos through two times, you could parachute into Abidjan and get along in day to day life from the moment you hit the ground. It's that good. Really.

-- John Walker

French in Action
Streaming video on demand, click the "VoD" button following each segment
DVD purchase

For library borrowing see note in Destinos.

Based on a recommendation from John Walker, founder of AutoDesk, now living in a French-speaking part of Switzerland, I tried out the French in Action series. It is all that he promises. I was amazed how far I got so quickly merely by watching and responding to this series of ever deepening complexity. The key to progress is the vivid visuals, body language and corny involvement that the videos cultivate.

Inspired by the French method, however, I sought out a Spanish equivalent and found it in Destinos. Like French in Action, Destinos is a highly structured, highly-evolved video program based on an innovative professor's work, and published by the Annenberg Foundation. In Destinos, you again start off with no Spanish and very rapidly become sucked into a long Spanish telenovela. The story is cleverly designed to start basic and steadily leverage in sophisticated terms, so that by the 52nd show you can understand nearly everything in the first show. And then you start over.

Having gone through both courses, there are some differences. In French in Action you get a wild-haired French professor gesturing emphatically to convey weird French grammar, while cute little clips from French movies repeat a phrase in many voices so you can get used to hearing it spoken live. And the love story that forms the backbone narrative is heavily diagrammed in a French logical way. Destinos, on the other hand, is more relaxed and focuses almost exclusively on a very high-production detective mystery/soap opera which was filmed in 5 countries on 3 continents. It is easy to let yourself get hooked on the story, even though you are only catching 10% of it. Because Spanish is less distant to English speakers, there is less emphasis than the French on grammar and pronunciation. Destinos is more casual, go with the flow and you'll pick it up, while French in Action is more pedagogical and well... French.

The ideal way to learn a language is immersion, where you are forced to both listen, speak and read. Because of the nature of this medium -- a series of videos -- listening is the primary action stressed, although both programs give plenty of opportunity for reading and speaking. At the end of even the third time through your fluency will be primarily in comprehension -- but you'll be in a great position to take it much further very fast.

Both of these programs share another very important feature; both are funded by Annenberg/CPB, a non-profit promoting innovation in schools. Recognizing the value of educational videos, Annenberg has funded the purchase of these series for public libraries. This means that almost every library system in the US has a copy of the series.

These shows are also occasionally broadcast on PBS so you can set your TiVo to capture them. Some local PBS stations conveniently run the series consecutively on a few nights to make them easier to tape.

They are outrageously expensive to purchase: $500 for the series of 12 DVDs and $400 for 14 VHS tapes. DVDs could be a good deal for those traveling to Spanish or French speaking lands, where the videos are extremely effective with local practice.

However, if you don't mind sitting in front of your computer you can get a completely free video stream of either Destinos or French in Action from the Annenberg website.

Me? I borrowed mine from the library.

In a perfect world, someone wise would fund a similar well-crafted soap opera language series in Chinese for learning Mandarin, which is only spoken by 1 billion or so people. Or Arabic, Swahili, German, and so on.

In the meantime, buena suerte, or bonne chance!

-- KK

French in Action
Streaming video on demand, click the "VoD" button following each segment
DVD purchase

Destinos
Streaming video on demand, click the "VoD" button following each segment
DVD purchase

This is one of those hefty references you don't need to own; you just need to know where to find it. It's like an oracle; if you want to know what some obscure mathematical concept or theorem is (What's a Cantor Set?), you go here. The book has wit and humor; you'll need persistence.

-- KK

Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers
Jan Gullberg
1997, 1,093 pages
$34
W.W. Norton
Amazon

Excerpts:

A cycloid is the curve generated by a point on the circumference of a circle which rolls on a straight line in its plane.

The Conical Helix

The conical helix is a three-dimensional curve formed as if lying on a right circular cone, where it cuts the generators of the surface at a constant angle a.

Still my favorite graphics program. It's more fun than Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes! Why can't Photoshop make cool sounds? Someday I'd like to do an entire comic using Kid Pix; it's that good.

-- Scott McCloud

Kid Pix Deluxe 3rd Edition
Macintosh or Windows
2000, $13
The Learning Company
Amazon

Herein is the richest trove of home schooling and self-educational resources I've seen anywhere. Thousands of textbooks, software, games, journals, and books--all gallantly reviewed and evaluated by a homeschool mom who must never sleep.

-- KK

The Complete Home Learning Source Book
Rebecca Rupp
1998, 865 pages
$20
Amazon

Excerpts:

I know these are supposed to be joke books, but they contain sensible answers to sensible questions. Why not rehearse the solution to a worst case scenario if it ups your chances of survival even a few percent?

-- KK

The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel
Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht
2001, 190 pages, $10
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The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook
Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht
1991, 176 pages, $10
Amazon

Both from Chronicle Books
San Francisco

Excerpt:

How to Jump from a Moving Train
Stuff blankets, clothing, or seat cushions underneath your clothes. Wear a thick or rugged jacket if possible. Use a belt to secure some padding around your head, but make certain you can see clearly. Pad your knees, elbows, and hips.

Cover and protect your head with your hands and arms, and roll like a log when you land. do not try to land on your feet. Keep your body straight and try to land so that all parts of your body hit the ground at the same time. You will absorb the impact over a wider area. if you land on your feet, you will most likely break your ankles or legs. Do NOT roll head over heels as if doing a forward somersault.

*

How to Fend off a Shark
Hit back. If a shark is coming toward you or attacks you, use anything you have in your possession - a camera, probe, harpoon gun, your fist - to hit the shark's eyes or gills, which are the areas most sensitive to pain. Make quick, sharp, repeated jabs in these areas. Sharks are predators and will usually only follow through on an attack if they have the advantage, so making the shark unsure of its advantage in any way possible will increase your chances of survival. Contrary to popular opinion, the shark's nose is not the area to attack, unless you cannot reach the eyes or gills. Hitting the shark simply tells it that you are not defenseless.

*

How to Perform a Tracheotomy
This procedure, technically called a cricothyroidotomy, should be undertaken only when a person with a throat obstruction is not able to breath at all - no gasping sounds, no coughing - and only after you have attempted to perform the Heimlich maneuver three times without dislodging the obstruction. If possible, someone should call for paramedics while you proceed.

All you need to learn about a subject can often be reduced to a phamplet. Why fill a book with yet another 20 examples? Country Wisdom has been dispensing pithy brochures of country living how-to for 30 years, but now they have a nifty new distribution model which keeps customer costs low. Go to the Simple Living website and for a few bucks each you can download a PDF file of your preferred bulletin. Print it out yourself, or if you are really cheap, read it on the screen. Note to other publishers: a new economy business is alive and kicking here.
�KK

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Now that you have finished reading all the great books of the West, you might want to turn your attention to the rest of the world. There is an equally vast and equally great classical literature in what is known as the East. Few of these works make it onto the lists of Best Books Ever; furthermore, guides to this wing of the universal library are rare. Given our interdependence with other cultures, introductions to this literary realm are vital and urgent.

For simple reading lists (sometimes the most enjoyable way to enter) I direct you to Robert Teeter's Great Books Lists, a handy website which convenes in one spot all the published lists of oriental (and western) classics. For a more annotated guide, with proper orientation of where you might want to head, I would start with A Guide to Oriental Classics, from Columbia University Press. The third edition of this indispensable work incorporates many works only recently translated into English, as well as an expanded number of secondary readings and glosses. I can't think of any major works in the four regions of the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan that are not covered here. With each work you get a very short description and -- very handy! -- annotated pointers to available translations.

For a more contextual inclusion, I find The New Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman to be superb. This revised and expanded fourth edition of his venerable book now covers many more eastern classics than in his previous editions. The list of eastern works is still way too short, but he offers them with two advantages. Because his plan is organized chronologically, one gets a better sense of how an eastern work relates to the West, and secondly, for each work he spends a few pages outlining to the reader its importance and a summary of its content, which A Guide to Oriental Classics does not. You'll get a better perspective from his select list, but you'll have more of an adventure with the Columbia University roster.

A Guide to Oriental Classics
Edited by Theodore De Bary
1989, 325 pages
$79
Columbia University Press
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The New Lifetime Reading Plan
The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded
Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major
1998, 378 pages
$11
Harper Perennial
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Robert Teeter's Great Books Lists