The Perfect Thing

Steven Levy's latest book, The Perfect Thing, is an unabashed iPod lovefest. He finds the feature he loves the most in an iPod, random shuffling of songs, and applies it to all sorts of changes in people's daily lives due to the Internet. Along the way, he delivers a concise history of its development and precursors, and touches on how iPods make their owners happier. For what it's worth, the most interesting part of the book was the fact that it has four permutations that vary from copy to copy.

Gmail + Reader

So I really like Mihai's Greasemonkey script to add a Google Reader link to Gmail, and I also like his Gmail saved searches script, so I merged the two to provide a list of feeds in a box like the list of labels (similar to this script that does the same for Bloglines and Gmail, although I didn't find this script until after I mashed Mihai's together). Any bugs are my fault, but the original code is Mihai's.

Update 2007-11-25: modified the script to work with the new gmail code, see current blog post.

Soul in the Computer

I just finished Barbara Waugh's Soul in the Computer which can also be downloaded from HP's University Relations site is a recollection of a career spent using a for-profit corporation to try and accomplish good deeds. She relates many anecdotes about small changes that can have big effects, and draws out lessons from those events that are applicable to many day-to-day attempts to change the status quo. While the book is focused on how to make the world a better place from inside the system (whichever system one might be inside), reading it is a good idea for anyone who wants to make changes in a large organization.

Fragile Things, Talking Right, In China's Shadow

I recently received copies of Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, Geoffrey Nunberg's Talking Right, and Reed Hundt's In China's Shadow.

Fragile Things is an excellent collection of short stories, and not having read Gaiman before, I was impressed by his ability to draw me into the stories in a small number of words. The stories (and poems) were quite entertaining, and I definitely need to read some of his earlier work (I was also very impressed by the movie MirrorMask, which he co-wrote).

Talking Right is an airing of the issues that the Democratic party faces with regards to language. The "Right" has managed to claim ownership over certain terms over the past thirty years, and uses those terms to shape the way that the general electorate interprets messages from both sides. Nunberg details a variety of ways that liberals fail to understand language, tactics that conservatives have used to modify the emotional definitions of words, and how liberals can respond. Of course, before liberals can try to show people what they stand for, they need to figure out what they do actually stand for.

In China's Shadow raises the issue of Chinese entrepreneurship and how America needs to respond by becoming substantially more entrepreneural. Hundt lays out the problem: China has a huge population and that population is starting lots of businesses while America is not starting as many businesses as it did at the height the 90s. To encourage people to take the risk of going out on their own, Hundt details a variety of measures the government should take, most of which struck me as heading in the direction that Europe has taken in terms of socializing healthcare, education, retirement, etc. In between his constant criticism of the Bush administration, he makes a number of good points regarding the static nature of big businesses and how government should not be used to protect the status quo.

Hundt also refers frequently to Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" and Nunberg mentions it as well, and it sounds like an interesting idea that I should read more about.