Steven Pinker writes about the mystery of consciousness—the biology of the soul and the moral implications of when we finally find it. The two big challenges: the Easy Problem, distinguishing the brain's participation in conscious and unconscious thoughts and how they evolved, and the Hard Problem, explaining first-person subjective experience as neural activity.

A brief history of infinity.

Here's an old interview with L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. about his escape from Scientology. The Stephen Colbert also offers a balanced perspective on the Daily Show.

The Galileo Project at Rice University has some awesome primary sources about everyone's favorite astronomer. They've got his collection of sunspot drawings from the sumer of 1613, as well as composite movies of those. I'm trying to imagine how he felt when he first observed them. I can totally see him making little flip books of his illustrations and watching the sunspots dance across the face of the sun. They've also got scans of the manuscripts from the Jupiter observations—note that the images are embedded right there in the text. So cool. And the moon drawings are pretty sweet, too.

She blinded me with library science. Buy it here.

Umberto Eco's 1994 essay on the Future of the Book.

Plato was expressing a fear that still survived in his day. Thinking is an internal affair; the real thinker would not allow books to think instead of him. Nowadays, nobody shares these fears, for two very simple reasons. First of all, we know that books are not ways of making somebody else think in our place; on the contrary they are machines that provoke further thoughts.

It reads a bit dated now, but it's still pretty good.

This is a pretty cool collection of electronic literature/ hypertext fiction/ web poetry or whatever you want to call it.

Cartoon of the problem with Wikipedia.

In the midst of updating the RSS feeds for Kottke.org, Jason realizes that he has delivered 58 gigabytes of RSS this month. Yes, that is crazy.

The 101 dumbest moments in business. [via blankenship]

John Bridges and Bryan Curtis offer a succinct guidebook targeted towards the young and clueless: 50 Things Every Young Gentleman Should Know: What to Do, When to Do It, and Why. It's certainly a tidy little volume, with 200 pages of guidelines in an almost-pocketable 5x8 inch format. It covers the basics from saying "please" and "thank you," proper silverware & napkin management, asking permission, giving compliments, tying a tie, accepting bad gifts, opening the door for people, and it even covers topics like "winning well." Each section comes with a tidy format:

1. A description of the situation
2. You Do
3. You Don't
4. Why

If I have any complaint, it is only that the book is a little boring. The book reads like it was aimed for those perhaps 12–16 years old, but most of the humor fell a bit flat. And I'm not sure why a middle-schooler would be reading an etiquette book, anyway. But those who do find it will hopefully learn a little something. It only takes maybe a half hour to get through it, so never hurts to have a little refresher on what you should have learned already.

The New York Times has a good profile of comics writers Robert and Aline Crumb.

Exploring the question: Is philosophy progressive?

Finally, we have caffeinated doughnuts.

Comprehensive, but a bit scatterbrained. I made it about 1/3 of the way through.

I just noticed that the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has a snazzy new website. It's about twelve times better than the old one.

The photos in 50 people see are images made from combining 50 photos with the same Flickr tag. Here's the mashup of 50 photos tagged with eye, soup, and each of the four seasons.

Why chicks don't dig the singularity.

Concert pianist Byron Janis share some interesting anecdotes about his struggles with acoustics: "music's most unpredictable partner."

Cory Doctorow writes about giving away his books for free.