Whatever next?

Further to my discovery that some scientists can actually write, now I find out they’re discussing their favourite children’s books:
especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility.
Whatever next?
Via Boing Boing.

Editing on the fly

In what might be interesting news to his fans over at Sarsaparilla, Mackenzie Wark has put a draft of his new book GAM3R 7H30RY (oh man) on the web in a kind of wiki format to enable people to have a read and make suggestions. You can read about it at the Chronicle (and this [...]

Publishing a book: the word according to blogs

Lili has posted a wonderful little piece about how books are published and what blogs say about every step of the process.
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: it takes more than one person to write a book. And lucky for me, many of those people have blogs. So here, for your [...]

The White stuff

So, is Patrick White a piece of
“high Australian culture that nobody actually cares about”?
Laura at Sars is beseeching us all to join in a month of White reading. Nominate your suggestions tonight or just read the commenters pick after the decision is made. Then get yourself over to Sarsaparilla and give the old two fingers [...]

Hamble, where are you?

So, Play School is 40 years old. What I want to know is: what happened to Hamble? Jemima, Little and Big Teds, Humpty, they all made it but what about Hamble? Early death from cigarettes? Tragic car accident? Sent away to the big house for assault committed on Jemima out of jealousy? Drug trafficking [...]

A limestone landscape

The fact that we don’t like or haven’t understood a poem doesn’t mean, always, that it has failed. We may have failed the test it set us. This is rather awful when we have exams to face, but in the longer perspective of our life it doesn’t matter nearly as much. We are always free [...]

A scientist who can write

As some of you know, I’ve been hawking the wares of blogs dot usyd around the interweb of late. We’re progressing quite well with the ‘experiment’ and there are some interesting blogs emerging. I would like to draw your attention to Life of a Lab Rat. It has now become required reading for me, and [...]

There’s a man. He’s crying.

I live in a cramped inner city suburb and my house is on a laneway.
This evening, as is my wont, I took The Monthly and went out the back for a cigarette (yes, I read that boring magazine and enjoy it and yes, I smoke).
You can hear a lot of things in the city. Tonight [...]

I love you Tintin

I discovered Tintin in the tiny library of St Joseph’s primary school Alstonville. Considering the school consisted of around 120 pupils, you can imagine the library was not exactly well-serviced. Someone though had the foresight to stock quite a few Tintin books.
Perhaps they thought the kids who didn’t like reading, too old for picture books [...]

Academic blogs redux

After the Oz article of a couple of weeks ago, the Age has delved a little deeper into the murky world of academic blogs.
Interestingly, James McConvill gets a mention, even though he has ceased to blog:
For example, blogging deteriorated quickly into a slagging match on law expert James McConvill’s blog recently after one contributor made [...]