The next Fantastic Four movie will feature the Silver Surfer. The first film wasn't spectacular, but it was good, clean fun in an exuberant Jack Kirby kind of way. You certainly can't go wrong with the Silver Surfer, but I really hope Galactus figures in there somewhere.

The library at Chicago State University uses RFID and robots to file and retrieve books from the stacks, no humans needed.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel and eventually one of the godfathers of open-source software development, tells all in Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. I don't care much for biography, but this one did pretty well for itself. It starts off with the story of young Linus, growing up playing on his grandfather's computer--and never really stopping. The subsequent years are a typical nerd routine of sleeping, eating, and computing away in a dark room. He developed Linux as a side project, an exercise in operating system development and exploration in low-level PC hardware. The first public release was a tentative version 0.01 that managed to catch the interest of a couple other folks involved in that geek niche. And from there Linux just kept growing and growing, with its steadily improving quality and open-ness as its only real advertising. It's that "accidental" aspect that makes it so interesting--Torvalds didn't really set out to start an empire, and doesn't really seem to want one now, either. Torvalds on Bill Gates:

I'm completely uninterested in the thing that he's he best in the world at. And he's not interested in the thing that maybe I'm the best in the world at. I couldn't give him advice in business and he couldn't give me advice in technology.

I like this bit on the freedom that open entails, freedom from mega-personalities, control freaks, and their whims:

The point about open source has never been that I'm more accessible than anybody else. It's never been that I'm more open to other people's suggestions... the issues is that even if I'm the blackest demon from Hell, even if I'm outright evil, people can choose to ignore me because they can just do the stuff themselves. It's not about me being open, it's about them have the power to ignore me. That's important.

Near the end, there are a couple of philosophical chapters on intellectual property, control, and some industry prognostication. I like this gem from the intellectual property section: "The patent system of today is basically a Cold War with IP instead of nukes." Most of the book isn't that dogmatic, but just as enjoyable.

New York Times article on the trend of embracing entropy:

Mess is complete, in that it embraces all sorts of random elements. Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate).

Yes, I have to agree about Real Simple having no personality, along with most home-dec magazine in general. Anyway, I think the thing to keep in mind here is that being neat is just a means to an end; order is a preference. Let's not be too dogmatic about either choice. And the neatness they're talking about is really just appearance. Having things straightened up doesn't necessarily mean I know where anything is. I think part of the trouble that people have in being organized is that it can be hard to be systematic about it. That is, it's hard to develop a reliable, trusted system for all your crap and then stay diligent in sticking with it. If you don't have a good infrastructure, then you will tend not to use it.

The science of free-throw shooting: "The punch line with our paper is that this is the first evidence that neural activity--brain activity that happens well before the movement ever begins--has a lot to say about the variability or the exact movement that you're going to get."

A very good, and very critical review of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.

In a brief Economist essay on conversation: "One striking thing about the advice is how consistent it remains over time, suggesting that there are real rights and wrongs in conversation, not just local conventions."

My grandfather can fall asleep in about 12 seconds. It's amazing to watch, and he just might be on to something big. Take a Nap! purports to be "The scientific plan to make you smarter, healthier, more productive".1 Sara Mednick starts off with some nap advocacy, the usual bit about how we run ourselves into the ground with self-destructive habits, etc. The best part falls in the next section dedicated to the science of sleep, which I think is pretty fascinating. I first started getting interested in sleep as means-to-dubious-ends when I stumbled on Steve Pavlina's journey into polyphasic sleep and further reading into the Uberman sleep schedule. I was hoping for a ringing endorsement of these fringe adventures, but sadly, Mednick is not a big fan.

Mednick walks us through the stages of sleep, starting from mild alpha waves, to that embarrassing twitching when you first go under, to transitional stage 1 sleep, the recurring soup of light stage 2 sleep, then to the deep slow wave sleep of stages 3 and 4, and onward to that REM where so much magic happens. The cool thing is that sleep research indicates that each of these stages has unique benefits to your health. And when you know that, you can learn to calibrate your sleep to get what you want. And we all love to get what we want.

If you take a look at the cover of the book, you'll see a cool little nap planning wheel. It's actually a plastic disc that you can spin around according to when you woke up that day, and that will let you customize your napping for the results you have in mind. There's even a recipe for the "perfect nap". Of course, self-improvement takes some work. Mednick has a program to walk you through some self-assessment you can do over a couple weeks, which of course I didn't do. But I learned a lot from reading through it.

All in all, it was actually was a pretty good book. I nap on the couch2 at work every day, but never really put much systematic thought into it. At the least, this book has been a good lesson in self-awareness. I love the idea that we can learn about these physiological mysteries and apply our knowledge to everyday demands. Every now and then, science really comes through for us.

--- 1. Those with good taste in music will be reminded of Radiohead's tune, "Fitter, Happier" (lyrics). 2. We used to have this incredible cot that would instantly put me to sleep. Alas, the cot was taken away in order to keep things from looking too tacky. We have to keep up appearances.

The government is celebrating the new year by automatically declassifying millions of secret documents. I look forward to the day when no government information is ever classified, excepting the Shadow Government, of course. [via librarycrunch]

A collection of classic snowman-building panels from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comic strips.

A great collection of stills and posters from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. [via coudal by way of daring fireball]

From an industry survey about a decade ago, The 50 Greatest Cartoons. "What's Opera, Doc?" takes first place. And here are video links for all but 1 of them.

Nicely complimenting last week's article about airline security theatre, Andrea Harner has a great cartoon that captures the moment and offers a quick solution for harried holiday travelers. Not recommended at wintry northern latitudes, but it's been in the 60s down at Atlanta's airport...

In praise of Dilbert's 9-point financial plan, which reads:

1. Make a will 2. Pay off your credit cards 3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support 4. Fund your 401k to the maximum 5. Fund your IRA to the maximum 6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it 7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account 8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement 9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

Makes sense to me.

For their first anniversary a couple months back, Visual Complexity created a cool mosaic of the first 360 projects from the year. Huge 2.1MB image here and a ginormous 11.6MB poster is also available.

Students rate their professors... and in return, there's a blog where professors rate their students. There's some really interesting commentary there, but I wish they'd ease up on the italics.

If you like jazz standards and finger-tapping, here's a video of Stanley Jordan playing "Autumn Leaves" on 2 guitars at the same time, soloing while 'comping himself.

Khoi Vinh thoughtfully bemoans the ubiquity of Chris Ware in Comics for People Who Hate Comics:

In spite of his many and frequent innovations, Ware’s name, to me, has become synonymous with ‘intellectually acceptable comics’ produced for people who basically think comics are crap. His works — especially his commissions — reflect not so much an appreciation of the comics art form, but rather a keen understanding of how it can be parodied, satirized and even ridiculed in the service to the intellectual flattery of an audience that would otherwise be offended by less self-conscious practitioners of the medium.

Here's a bunch of pictures of tiny foods: A wee salad. A little quail egg. World's smallest pancake... and cheeseburger. Mini mince pies. And another miniature burger, as seen on tv. Tiniest dill pickle. Really really small frozen yogurt. Fast food (okay, so it's candy, but at least it's a full value meal). Tiny cherry pies. A personal watermelon. A tiny crab. A mini omelette. A small bowl of tuna curry. And itty bitty cupcakes.

"The graphic novel has been a 'legitimate' art form for a while now. Does that mean we can start calling them comics again?" Publisher's Weekly reviewers vote on their favorite comics from 2006. It was a very good year. I agree that Absolute DC: New Frontier was really good. I loved Scott McCloud's Making Comics (my review). I sort of panned The 9/11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation (my review), but it made the honorable mentions anyway. I just started Kevin Huizenga's Curses, and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is definitely on the (ever-lengthening) to-read list.