Comparing countries. I made a couple of graphs, just out of curiousity, with a little help from NCES's Create A Graph.

First, here's a comparison of Australia, the USA, and China, in terms of area. Pretty close, yes?

Now, see the graph comparing their population.

The point? I have none. I just think it's interesting.

Book roundup. Recent reads:

Call Of The Wild/White Fang (Jack London). I've read a lot of London, but somehow, never these books. Now that I have a dog I figured it was about time. Good stuff. London knows his dogs.

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens). I'm reading this for historical reasons. Recently I came across a couple of separate references to this novel which refer to it as a cultural phenomenon of its time. Pretty much the whole world, it seems, was reading it when it came out, serialized in a magazine. So I thought I would too.

Singularity Sky (Charles Stross). Science fiction candy. The guy obviously reads Slashdot. Some seriously crazy technical references, not dumbed down. Still, his short stories are better.

Titan (Stephen Baxter). Timely reading. Written in 1997, the story begins with the Cassini/Huygens probe -- which lands a month and a half from now -- finding evidence of life on Saturn's moon Titan.

Odd goings-on at the local Borders. Browsing in the bookstore this evening, I came across a ball-point pen that someone had left on a shelf -- not a skinny, cheap one, but a big fat nice one. I picked it up, and hit the button to push out the tip -- and promptly got shocked. What the...?

Why? What purpose could it serve? My immediate (and far too overdramatic) thought was that it some sort of spy pen, like the briefcase that shoots poison gas at you if you open it wrong. Then I thought, maybe it's a self-defense device, like pepper spray.

Of course, like the dumber maze rat, I had to get shocked a second time before I learned.

An internet search cleared up the mystery; it's just a novelty.

I just hope I wasn't being filmed.

Resuming my job as a cultural ambassador, today I tried a famous Australian "delicacy". Composed of yeast and sea salt, vegemite is typically spread on toast at brekkie. The cafe at work has little packaged individual servings of it (surprisingly to me, made by Kraft). Taking the advice of the Aussies I work with, I spread a very thin amount on my English Muffin. It has the appearance and consistency of gunky axle grease.

Americans notoriously react negatively to it. I thought I might be different; yeast and salt don't sound like a bad combination to me.

I have to say though. Ick.

The other night I proofread fifteen OCR'ed pages of an old book about the influence of ancient Greece on modern times. Why? For Project Gutenberg, a project (started well before the internet) to make publicly available books of interest that are in the public domain. Most of the books had copyrights that expired, or were old enough that they were never copyrighted. Check out some of the amazing books that are available for you to browse or download.

Music. I think I've mentioned here a few times my plan to have a home music server where I would just start downloading everything, without even considering the quality. There'd be a lot I would never listen to -- but, so? Memory is relatively cheap; I think the tendency to be discriminating is merely a holdover from a time where a large number of albums would require lots of money and space.

Well, here's a story about a guy who's trying to do it. His goals are, at least on the surface, more noble; he claims to be an archivist. Interesting, though.