SCIENCES!

Prepare yourself. Your IQ is about to get 10 points higher.

That's right! Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe (as seen on PBS) and The Fabric of the Cosmos, has done it again and come out with a book which threatens to rewrite our notions of the universe -- and reality -- again. Check it out! (It's called The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Knopf, $23.96, 984 pages)) Sure to stimulate your meta-meta ponderings about which multiverse your car keys drifted into and what Everett might look like in a holographic universe infinitely full of doppelgangers of our own. Woof.

Also peek at this link to a NY Times article about V. Nabokov's second life as a lepidopterist (butterfly enthusiast), which, looked at cutely in its time by literary critics, has recently been vindicated by sciencey types. Cool!

It's been awhile. My computer had the cramps. He got sick and had to go to the hospital. Now he's back (reloaded and) and better than he's been in a while. Sorry, anyhow.

In the News!:

LIBRARIES

While getting involved with some NY times backstories I found this enlightening and sort of blithely hilarious clip about a NY city jail whose librarian is none other than Robert Halderman, the slimeball who blackmailed Letterman. Be sure to catch the end where he recommends some Jonathan Kellerman novels to an inmate who in turn extols the virtues of 'hood story' novels as means of getting younger prisoners to read. Likely not their first 'gateway' experiences, huh? Anyways, a cool story. ("I think we've replicated the library experience as well as...well, we can in a jail setting..." hee haw)

2. The more important bit in the news, however, is that of California's budget shortfall, that may or may not ultimately see many of the state's libraries shuttered. But I guess if old Moonbeam's going to get spartan on his state, his state's readers might have to do the same. I'm thinking "300" in a library with a bunch of NPR listeners armed with Oxford English Dictionaries. Ah. If only Schwarzenegger were still in office. Then the movie would be made.

All this only adds up to so little but here's the gist: Support Your Libraries! Read Books! Fight the system with OEDs not IEDs!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/opinion/l04library.html?ref=librariesandlibrarians