The christmas holy day season is now officially over. The basis of that statement is that yesterday FD SCP gave me guidance to take down all the special ornamentation of the house. This was not a major undertaking. The day was relatively clement, not too cold or windy and surprisingly bright and mild. And of course we have the new year’s day holy day this thursday but that requires no exceptional efforts except to try to stay awake long enough the night previous, say till 2000 or so. This is, after all, Greater Metropolitan Arab and despite the electoral decision to legalize the retail of ethanol of consumption the city conscript fathers, aided and abetted by the state conscript fathers, have achieved nothing substantive in the way of enabling the desires and direction of the electorate. Yes, verily, a righteous democracy we have here in Alibam.
I note in the New Yawk Times that the eReader business is heating up. The marketplace has been controlled by Amazon with their Kindle and Sony with their Reader, neither of which was doing at all well until the afternoon talk television acted in restraint of trade and plugged the Kindle. Its almost immediate exhaustion of stocks spilled over to enrich Sony. Such is the power of shibbolith celebrity icons, such is the thralldom of the mystical and superstitious who follow them.
The New Yawk Times article details several competitors forthcoming. [Link] I do not find any acceleration of my pulse over this. AFter all, it has been less than five years since the eBook educational project collapsed from general apathy. The only positive thing that has occurred is the on-going collapse of the new yawk book publishing apparat. Apparently neither (modern) republicans nor (modern) democrats are inclined to bail out an industry that has increasingly lost relevance to the consumer. (Yes, Qadgop, that could equally well describe the American automobile industry as well.) Could it be that neither corporate oligarchs nor sodial engineering aristorcrats want their peasants literate?
But there seems little to recommend any of these devices. None have screens that are large enough, all in the six inch range except the iPhone which plots out on all cost metrics so far away as to skew the results. None have adequate resolution, all about 160 pixels per inch which is far short of the 600 needed for adequate sustained persistent reading. There is one positive thing about most; unlike the Kindle they are not locked to a provider but have at least a partial open architecture with espect to information sources.
Bright idea: wait and but a One Laptop Per Child Model 2 when it comes out. Its cheaper and has significantly better screen resolution, to say nothing of being a much more open and thereby useful box. That is, unless you are a fashion parasited bog who has to have one of these things as a statement of your inability to contribute to anything except your own ego.
Simple Country Physicist 