Morbus Iff sent a link to his own reading journal, in a handy tabular format.

Do you have an online reading log? Email me.

Novelist Jeff Abbott has been writing a terrific series on The Organized Writer.

Roger Ebert: "Young people, heed this advice: Never marry someone who doesn't love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you."

My year on screen:

• 36 movies* (I'd seen five of these previously)
• Best new movie: Let The Right One In
• Also really good: In The Valley of Elah, In Bruges, Starting Out In The Evening, The Company, Kill Bill 2
• Don’t miss: Two Days In Paris (terrific Julie Delpy), Prairie Home Companion (more seriously Altman that you might expect), Michael Clayton
• Best TV: The Hustle, seasons 1-4; Battlestar Galactica

Notes*: I count a television season as one movie. These days, all my television comes on disc. I'm not making any distinction between new movies, old movies.

Over in the Tinderbox Forum, we’re having an interesting discussion on planning a new project, centered on keeping your notes attached to their sources.

The discussion promises interesting sidelights on teaching anatomy and on medical applications of Tinderbox.

Another thread that came up recently involved Alex Strick van Linschoten’s AfghanWire.com project.

Tinderbox users are interesting!

Hiker Philip Werner writes about Becoming A Naturalist.

So I was surprised when I felt myself beginning to take a keen interest in my surroundings during trips and I and started to spend much more time observing and photographing the plants, trees, animals and fungi that I saw on my expeditions. When I’d get home, I’d research what I had observed and began to teach myself natural history, biology, geology, and botany. Then, I started to write about it, as much to share it with others, as to cement what I had learned in my mind.

Gotta love a weblog that has reviews of adventure pants.

And Daily Kossack Devilstower writes about Steven Johnson's new biography of Joseph Priestley.

This was Joseph Priestley, formerly of Hackney, England, en route to his new home in America. At sixty-one years old, he was among the most accomplished men of his generation, rivaled only by Franklin in he the diversity of his interests and influence. He had won the Copley Medal (the Nobel Prize of its day) for his experiments on various gases in his late thirties, and published close to five hundred books and pamphlets on science, politics, and religion since 1761. An ordained minister, he helped found the dissenting Christian sect of Unitarianism. He counted among his close friends the great minds of the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution: Franklin, Richard Price, Josiah Wedgewood, Mathew Boulton, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin.

Aaron Swartz jots down his 2008 reading list, with comments. He does this every year; it's a treat.

Tim Bray is playing with his new Android Phone by writing a phone app and blogging his progress. It’s an instructive exercise, even if you aren’t very interested in this particular phone right now. Some things I learned from Part VI:

• Good minds talk about impressive things, but people of the first rank don’t mind talking about unimpressive things. The thrust of this article — let’s face it — is high school geometry. Bray is Director of Web Technologies at Sun and one of the top people in Web/XML technology. He’s not worrying what you’ll think, he’s worrying about getting the problem solved.
• The problem in this case is drawing an aesthetically curved line between two points. (The points are places on a map; drawing a straight line might often obscure things you want to see — such as the road you want to take.)
• Bray, needing a curve, reaches for a circular arc. My own tendency, these days, would be to grab a Bezier curve. I’m not sure which is better, though the Bezier is clearly more flexible, and I suspect that for points widely separated on the screen the arc will stray too far from the centerline. But I’d love to know why Bray reached for the arc in the first place.
• Bray has a reflex to avoid extra floating point computation and is at some pains to optimize this code, even though it turns out to be plenty fast enough. Nice to know I’m not alone in this.

What I miss here, despite the book’s magisterial size, is sufficient attention to Emerson’s material circumstances. Emerson played a vital role is funding people; he gave them money, rented them houses, gave them room and board. Richardson mentions in passing that, in some periods Emerson’s journal is filled with financial schemes and worries, but we hear few details. Many of Emerson’s successes and failures — his famous lecture series, the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial — were business startups, I'd like to know how they worked, whether the business plans made sense, how they stacked up to contemporary enterprises.

Starting the new year, John Brockman asks a bunch of people to predict “what game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see.”

Oddly, many of the responses aren’t actually scientific ideas.

Nonetheless, there are lots of interesting speculations here. Some I especially enjoyed:

• Kevin Kelley: a new kind of mind
• George Dyson: interstellar viruses
• Stephon Alexander: on basketball and science camps
• Marti Hearst: the decline of text (resoundingly wrong, but interesting)
• David Gelertner: tracks and clusters replace schools (though argued by assuming their success)
• Brian Eno: the feeling that things are inevitably going to get worse (and this, you say, is new? Oy gevalt!)
• Dan Hillis: a forebrain for the world mind

Via Kevin Kelly.

• Congratulations to Dame Wendy Hall (!)
• Via Elin Sjursen, sad news that Jose Tesoro, long-time advocate of Tinderbox for applications in the law, died in a fall at Hong Kong airport earlier this month.
• Jon Buscall takes stock of his freelancing this year, and lists his favorite tools.
• And day now, the mailman should bring me Ted Nelson’s new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts.
• Nice vignette by Eliza Blair on how she became "That Chick with the Swiss Army Knife the Size of a Hamster." It looks like the merest blog cheese sandwich, but notice how she introduces characters, generates a bit of dramatic tension, and subtly leaves a loose end (the personal significance of the knife!) to be picked up another day.
• I spent some time in the Apple Store this month, helping Linda get her computer diagnosed and repaired. The Apple Store is one impressive retail operation, not least because it's filled with so many cheerful employees. Where so many people in stores were looking sad, or swamped with work, or simply hostile, the Apple place was filled with good cheer and competence.
• And the competence at the Genius Bar person was pretty impressive. Let's face it: I'm not a hardware person anymore, but I've been using, fixing, and upgrading Eastgate’s Macs since we got our original 1984 seed machine. These guys did not try to snow Linda, and they didn’t try to upsell her while pointing out that, for some purposes, it would be more cost-effective to get a new Mac than to put a fresh logic board into her G5 tower. They did a lot of work without charge. When I went technical on them, they kept up; when we got a bit impatient after three hours (this mall also has the Worst Borders In North America) of waiting for the installation to fail, they were charming and sympathetic and everything a retail trainer could ask for.

Roger Eberts sums up the way things are in Things Fall Apart. “Nothing,” he says, “cures wealth like illness.” He’s learned the hard way. The weather has gone crazy, the economy has gone mad, the Middle East is filled with nukes.

If you are a member of the U.S. Congress, you should not give a damn if you are a Democrat or a Republican. You should discard ideology and partisanship. You should be searching only for what works, or gives promise of working. You should be listening to the best counsel of the wisest people you can find. This is no time for playing to the crowd. That is all over with. This is the hour to seek what might lead us back from the brink.

“The economy is going to get worse,” he reminds us. “We may have no idea how much worse.” Tired of hearing old stories about The Great Depression, we may get to experience our own. In which case, when we're talking about feeding the wolf at the door, it might also be good to remember that goat cheese souflée is also pretty cheap to make.

Sunday. I'm recovering from a cold. There's lots of football to watch. The larder is pretty bare, the holiday banquet leftovers are getting thing, there's no time (or cash) for much shopping.

No problem:

• goat cheese souflée
• spinach salad
• Maggy’s farm lamb chops
• leftover chocoloate meringue pie

We has a couple of lamb chops from our farm share nicely thawed. I’m doling these out in tiny portions — basically one chop per dinner — and so we need something else. But Linda has asked last night, “where does the word ‘meringue’ come from?” So that led to McGee’s On Food and Cooking, and the etymology of “meringue” is not very far from the section on souflées and McGee’s reminder that the souflée is neither tricky nor difficult.

Very tasty!

Try not to miss “Let The Right One In” (Låt den rätte komma in), a brilliant Swedish vampire movie. (Movie site, IMDB, Ebert, RottenTomatoes). Two twelve-year-olds meet and become friends, in a story not meant for 12-year-olds (but which many 12-years old will totally get). Dense, allusive, tricky, and complex.

A fantastic movie. In Boston, it's at the Somerville.

• Lemon Ginger Gin Smash (in martini glasses) (thanks, AvecEric!)
• Roast pumpkin soup, créme fraîche and candied walnuts
• Lamb-apricot sausage, baked in brioche (thanks, MarkAnderson), with a taste of foie gras, served with sauternes (thanks, HughDavis)
• Fennel, blood oranges, almonds, and parmesan
• Pancetta-wrapped roast beef
  • potato gratin dauphinoise
  • Alwin’s tarragon-roasted carrots
• Meryl’s piéce de résistance (a player to be named later)

J. A. Wilcox has just launched a site on Zombie Studies, including an attractive annotated, stretchext bibliography that was exported from Tinderbox.

The structure of the repository was built using Tinderbox. The record in the bibliography were exported from EndNote. The CSS was refined using BBEdit, CSSEdit, and Safari. Everything renders fairly well in the latest versions of Safari, Firefox (Mac and Windows), IE 7, and mobile Safari.

Annotated bibliographies are tremendously valuable to students and colleagues. They can be terrific fun to read, too, if the author has the right spirit.

Mark Bittman has a nice article on adapting the classic Italian porchetta — a big hunk of pork, stuffed with rosemary, garlic, and fennel and slowly roasted — to duck breast. As it happened, I had a duck breast waiting to go: Monday Night Duck has become a running household joke.

So, I cut a slit in the side of the breast, carefully expanded it with a paring knife so it became a pocket, and stuffed it with fennel top, 3 big cloves of garlic, and lots of chopped rosemary. I scored the skin, salted and peppered, and then I sautéed it very slowly, skin side down, to render as much fat as I could without burning. Very tasty; you could do this with chicken, too.

3 cloves of garlic was too much. Bittman uses a lot of Parmesan; I left it out but you should put it in. He used fennel seed, I used tops, and I think next time I'd use both.

Information Triage is the classic spatial hypertext application. You’re gathering lots of information on a new topic, you’re trying to make sense of the big pile, and you’re trying to identify the most important sources. It’s a hard problem, and spatial hypertext tools are the best known technology for helping.

Steve Ersinghaus has an intriguing post on using spatial hypertext to revise and extend his poetry.

I'm reading Richardson’s Emerson: the mind on fire . He’s an interesting fellow, and he formed an even more interesting circle. In fact, you could argue that Emerson’s fireside was the place where the real definition of “the American” was fixed.

Besides, my wife is working on a Masters in this period, so I’m bound to find it interesting.

Problem is, it’s not my period. Sometimes I need for a scorecard. Sarah Ripley: is she connected to George Ripley? Is Mary Emerson the sister, or the aunt? Just a hint of who and what people were would help a lot; sometimes, all you need is a poke to get on the right track.

Lydia Child? Oh, she's the woman who always brought lunch to her husband who was in debtor’s prison.

An encyclopedia, or wikipedia, is nice to have, but it's really too much and too slow. I’m used to having the Oxford Classical Dictionary ready to hand for Antiquity; I don’t think there’s anything like this for 1830 Boston.

But, you know, it should be easy enough to make in Tinderbox. Tinderbox could take care of lots of clerical minutiae — searching, sorting, organizing. And Tinderbox can remind you what you’re missing: who needs to have birthdates checked, who needs more narrative filled in. You don’t need a database: I fancy a few hundred people would cover the crying needs, and that’s a small Tinderbox document.

You could share the work among a bunch of hands — either a class (in which case it could be the seed of something like Landow’s Victorian Web ) or just as a study-group enterprise. I bet a grad student with a flair for witty commentary could publish this. (Another example: What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew ). If you’re managing an enterprise product, I imagine the same sort of information on your customers would be great to have — and building the system would be a great assignment for an intern or an newcomer.

It's not just academic. Think about all the family you know — or can remember, or about whom you remember stories. Will your niece’s children meet these people, or hear these stories? Write stuff down. And I don’t know of a better way to write this stuff down so it can be used, so it doesn’t turn into a big bunch of cards in the back of a drawer.

Want to work on ways and means? What to hear how to do it? Want to lend a hand? Email me.