This year's question from edge.org: "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" Dozens of scientists, researchers, philosophers, writers, and thinkers respond.

Let's see... glancing back through the year, here's what I'm most glad to have read. I wrote about most of these... Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow Burning Chrome by William Gibson

Non-Fiction: The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis Interaction of Color by Josef Albers Theory and History by Ludwig von Mises Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams

Comics: Curses by Kevin Huizenga Tales of Woodsman Pete by Lilli Carr?© Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits by Kyle Baker The Surrogates by Robert Venditti

Too bad I don't have a better remembrance of what I read but didn't review. Need to keep better track of that.

My top artists for 2007, according to last.fm. Not the most representative collection, because the long tail of my listening habits is, well, really long. But aside from a few surprises, it's pretty fair. One thing that's not a surprise: I am decidedly out-of-date. I think only a few of these folks came out with an album this year. And a lot of them are dead. I almost never know what's going on in the music world, but I'm okay with that. On with the list...

Jeff Buckley - No surprise here. Pretty sure I've got more of his music than any other person in my collection. King Crimson - Big surge in the second half of the year. In the Court of the Crimson King quickly became one of my favorite albums, ever. And Beat is a lot of fun. Pink Floyd - Old standby. DJ Ti?´sto - This was a bit of a surprise, but In Search of Sunrise has gotten a lot of play. Like today, for example. Claude Debussy - Heavy play of the Nocturnes and Children's Corner. Dave Brubeck - Didn't expect him so high, but he got featured in a couple of playlists. Radiohead - No surprise. Jean Sibelius - Huge surge this winter, after reading The Rest Is Noise. Philip Glass - I went on a Glass-collecting spree this fall. Still have something of love/hate relationship with his music. Feist - We had a good year together, except for when she released an album when I was out hiking for a couple months. Sergei Rachmaninoff - Pretty balanced play from an old favorite, across the spectrum of symphonies, concertos, choral works and chamber stuff. Madonna - Never really listened to her until this year. Big fan. Bela Fleck & the Flecktones - Another surprise here. Didn't think I was listening to them so much, but I got addicted to "Big Country" for a while. Pat Metheny - Probably would have ranked higher if last.fm kept track of all the play on road trips. Henry Purcell - I sat through Dido & Aeneas a bunch of times so I could hear the final aria and chorus in context. Johnny Cash - A good bit of the older stuff, but especially American IV. Duran Duran - Rio, mostly. Especially "New Religion". Daft Punk - Eh. Need to play this less, I think. Al Jarreau - Mostly the live album, Look to the Rainbow. Carly Simon - Almost all from Anticipation. Erik Satie - Almost exclusively due to the Gymnopedies. April March - For some reason, the fact that she's over 40 really boggles me. Will Scruggs - A good friend and brilliant jazz saxophonist. Joanna Newsom - Surprised she wasn't higher on my list. Probably would be if her songs weren't so epic and awesome. Still feel like an idiot for not going to her Atlanta show this past November. Machito - The Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite got into a couple playlists.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The novel centers on a father and son who, realizing they can't survive another winter, start moving through the southeast towards the coast, trudging through snow and ash with their belongings in a scavenged shopping cart. Where they leave from, where exactly they are going, and what they hope to find are never made completely clear, just as the cause of society's downfall is unexplained. But the beauty of the story is in everyday purpose they find in each other despite the struggle. There are a few tense moments avoiding bands of thieves and cannibals or other desperate nomads, but most of the book is a catalog of daily trials and conversations, simply and lovingly told. McCarthy's language is surprisingly simple and repetitive. It often called to mind a bit of the last stanza of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow.

Like Wallace Stevens' poetry, McCarthy's book has something of music in it. At times, since the book has no chapters or divisions larger than a few paragraphs, it reads like a very long unbroken poem or chant or something you might read aloud. McCarthy occasionally disrupts this flow with some whiz-bang vocabulary (e.g. gryke, chary, kerf), but for the most part it's just really wonderful.

H.G. Wells: "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of mankind."

While working on a little research paper a couple weeks ago, I came across cloze procedure. A cloze test is used to measure the difficulty of a text. In a cloze test, you take a text and replace every fifth word with a blank space. The reader, who has never seen the passage before, reads it and fills in the blanks. It's kind of like mad libs, but the goal is to choose the correct words instead of just having fun with it. What's cool about cloze tests is what they can tell you about learning. By comparing how well readers complete the passage vs. how well they answer questions given a complete text, you can find where the optimal difficulty is. It turns out that there is an optimal difficulty level if you're looking to maximize information gain. Right around a 35-40% cloze success rate is best if you've got an instructor available when needed, and around 50-60% if you're learning independently.

You tend to acquire the most information with texts at those particular difficulty levels. You bring enough context and prior knowledge, but just enough to get a handle on the new stuff. What's crazy, if I can stretch it a bit, is that the most efficient learning takes place when you're stumbling roughly 40-60% of the time.

So it kind of woke me up to thinking, if the goal is to learn and grow, how can I pick and choose the best experiences? I don't mean it in a snobby sense---"that is below me"---but in the sense of growth and challenge---"this is difficult and worth it." If you've got perfectionism issues (like I do sometimes), sometimes you get stuck doing things you're great at, because you're great and being great feels good. But there's no growth there. So the cloze thing comes into play. Try something where you know you'll only be partially successful. See what happens.

Spent some time playing with Flickr stats the other day. I'm not really looking to be known for my photographs, but I am a sucker for data. As expected, my stats don't demonstrate that internet users worldwide have come to appreciate my uncanny eye for composition and form, but rather that one can leverage Flickr's hard-won Google ranking and search relevance to own some obscure keywords.

• I was happy to see that two photos of mine are being used in the Wikipedia article on Pine Grove Furnace State Park, from my earlier hike this summer. I think that makes me some kind of expert.
• Another photo from my hike is at some random $noring-related blog, of the dedicated snoring shelter at Tumbling Run, Pennsylvania. Of course, next door there's the non-snoring shelter.
• If you happen to Google for "big hanging balls," (I recommend you don't) my photo of a big hanging ball sculpture in the High Museum comes up on the first page.
• My photos also come up for Schatten Gallery and El Toro Ferocio, both parts of recent exhibitions at Emory University.
• Lastly, one of my favorites: I'm the number 2 result for 65536 iv, a screenshot from when I ventured to the very end of an Excel spreadsheet.

A long essay on why crunch mode doesn't work. The gist is that productivity peaks within the first 4, 5, or 6 hours of the day, then starts dropping. Eventually it dissolves completely. In the long run, that continuous overtime isn't helping you or your company.

How to create an extreme overhang with toy bricks [$]. Via BLDGBLOG, where you'll find some great images of the crazy stacking and some architectural speculation. I'd love to see some crazy buildings tilting over like that.

"After Darwin, after Einstein---just as after Galileo and Copernicus---we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before." An interview with theologian John Haught on science, faith, and the troubles of the new atheism.

I did not know that Wikipedia has a reference desk. Sort of like the super-helpful Ask MetaFilter.

From the Rope Swing Manifesto:

The absolutely best rope swing is one currently in use by your friends. If you approach a rope swing in use by persons not known to you, realize that you may get a cool reception or worse. As we’ve seen, rope swings usually occur on private land. The swings themselves, however, are private in a way more profound than matters of real estate, surveying, probate, and taxes. Prior use conveys ownership. While the other rope swing users are no doubt trespassers just like you, they may feel that they are the true keepers of the swing, and you are an interloper. They are right. As holders of local knowledge, and as people who have used the swing without getting caught in the past, they have every right to resent you, who by your very presence may call just enough attention to the swing to get it cut down.

"I don't know how anyone can try to be universal. The way you really do it is to take care in your own work, do the best job you can, be as truthful as possible about the things right under your nose." -Steve Reich

New poll shows correlation is causation.

PhD trivia: "Only 36.7 percent of humanities students have finished their dissertations by year 8, and only 49.1 percent have done so by year 10." That sounds completely insane to me. Granted, I've never been in a PhD program, but... wow. Just wow. Some schools are implementing policies to encourage professors to help students complete the dissertation, on pain of the department losing admissions slots.

Lapham's Quarterly looks like a worthy new periodical. Each volume covers a specific theme and the essays come from a wide range of historical texts. The current issue, "States of War," draws on Patton, Ruskin, Lenin, Goebbels, bin Laden, Virgil, Tim O'Brien, Whitman, Vonnegut, Tolstoy...

Merriam-Webster's words of the year, with the lovable "w00t" winning the number one spot.

Reuters Pictures of the Year for 2007. Not sure how to link to each, but I like photos number 2, 16, 22, 45, 63, 86, 92, and 98. [via kottke]

Tumblr and tumblogs are great, but the attribution can be shoddy. I had to click my way back through 4 or 5 websites to to get to the primary source for these really cool illustrations, No Hugging Is So Hard. [sorry, I lost track of the vias, but the next-to-last was startdrawing]

Flash Fiction Forward collects a bunch of stories that only take a couple of page turns to finish. One thing I thought was odd is how none of the stories take on a particular genre, and how many of them seem to have a contemporary setting. Why not a tight little detective story, or a scene from a Civil War battle field, or a nice little 13th century abbey? I'm all for penetrating meditations on modern relationships and culture and stuff, but it's a shame to see such talent spent in a narrow range. In any case, many of these stories are quite good, and the low cost of reading means you should take a glance. Some of the stories I particularly liked are:

"Before the Bath" by Ismail Kadare "The Great Open Mouth Anti-Sadness" by Ron Carlson "Rose" by John Biguenet "The Old Truth in Costa Rica" by Lon Otto "I Never Looked" by Donald Hall "Fab 4" by Jenny Hall "Words" by John A. McCaffrey "21" by Jim Crace "The Orange" by Benjamin Rosenbaum "Geometry Can Fail Us" by Barbara Jacksha "Bill" by Dan Kaplan "00:02:36:58" by Bayard Godsave "Traveling Alone" by Rob Carney "The Death of the Short Story" by J. David Stevens

One final note: it's incredibly disappointing how many of these stories are not (easily) available online.