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Finished Gladwell’s Blink. I read a substantial portion of this before, I believe, excerpted in the New Yorker. It was entertaining and chock full of the cleverly presented annecdotes he’s known for. Other than his coining a phrase (”thin-slicing”), it’s fluff. I wonder if he didn’t start with the material for other articles and later try to draw a thesis out of it.

Started The Scheme Programming Language by R. Kent Dybvig.

This morning at work there were two people walking toward the elevators, heads down, hands cupped a foot front of their noses, their attention completely absorbed with their handheld music players. It struck me that a crowd of these guys- it’s always guys- shuffling along like the undead in a bad horror movie remake would be funny. I can picture it- a few start out, emerge onto the sidewalk and stagger silently down the street where they’re joined by more gadget zombies until there is a mob stumbling by a wall plastered with those bold, colorful Apple ipod ads but all the figures in the ads are bent forward and shuffling too. Maybe get the Cingular logo in there, too, since the SMS thumbers are just as bad.

I first saw this mentioned in 2003 on Sweetcode but read about it again recently in a discussion of the Linux kernel: darcs.

Nothing I’ve written at home has grown beyond my ability to manage using RCS or CVS but designing around the patch, rather than the file revision, is interesting.

Sad to read the NY Times report. Suicide.

To get an idea of why he resonates with motorcyclists, read his Song of the Sausage Creature, his review of a Ducati in 1995 for Cycle World magazine. That article gave us one of the clearest explanation of, “Why?”

Some people will tell you that slow is good — and it may be, on some days — but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba….

I finished reading Descartes Baby by Paul Bloom today. An overview of cognitive development and human nature that a layman can understand. His ruminations on perception, cognition, altruism, morality, good and evil, disgust and dualism were engaging but he falls short when he tries to consider “Gods, Souls and Science” in one brief chapter. I was surprised to read that some theories that I’d been exposed to, particularly those of Piaget, were largely proven false. I’d love to dive into the extensive bibliography but short of taking a Master of Science in Psychology, I know I probably won’t.

Stacked on the table are:

• America: A Citizen’s Guide To Democracy Inaction from The Daily Show and Jon Stewart. Bought this before the election and I keep picking it up, reading a little of it, snickering and putting it down for other books.
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I read the cover flap and a random passage and I’m already dubious, but his writing was interesting in the New Yorker and the book has good buzz.
• 9/11 Commission Report. I’ve had this waiting for me since July but I can’t get past the cover.