Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-reader is getting lots of favorable reviews vs. Amazon’s Kindle e-reader.  And the Nook won’t be on sale until the end of the month. I won’t go into the details.  You can Google the reviews written by the experts.

I use the free “e-Reader” app on my iPhone.  I have found free book sites and have been reading books from those sites.  I did not think I would enjoy the reading experience on my iPhone (I have a large paper library).  However, I find I can read faster and be just as absorbed in a book on my iPhone.  A simple flick of my thumb across the screen turns the pages.

My prediction is that e-books are the wave of the future for many readers.  The portability, ease of use, and instantaneous selection of books to download makes them perfect for people who like to read on the go.  I am half way through reading War and Peace on my iPhone.  I love having War and Peace in the front pocket of my blue jeans and a library of other free books.

The Tal Memorial chess tournament just started in Moscow today.  All the world’s best players are there except Topolov.  You can watch the Anand vs. Kramnik game live on the Internet early this morning on chessgames.com, a revenge match after Anand’s latest victory over Kramnik in the World Championship this past year.

I already have my alarm clock set for oh-dark-thirty because chess at the highest level is the best thing going in “sports”.

You are an hopeless insomniac.  You wake at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t go back to sleep.  You get out of bed, smoke a cigarette, drink some coffee, read one of Borges’ fictions, and watch the sky lighten.  Being an insomniac doesn’t seem, of a sudden, so bad.

Alone at night, I read Plutarch more and my Bible and Euclid less.

What if the Great Library at Alexandria had not been destroyed, but thrived, remained intact, and grew through the ages?  My naive response is that the world would be a better place.  However, great learning does not always trump folly.  In fact, it may exacerbate folly’s consequences.

No matter what, wouldn’t it be fun to have all those books lost because of hate, violence, ignorance, and folly?

Awake at a little past 4 AM, I procrastinate over making coffee or making one last attempt at getting a decent nights sleep.  The coffee tastes good.  I watch the sky grow light.

I’m thinking about two writing spaces: blogging and Facebook.  Over the past several months, Facebook has become my postcard place and I am in a postcard mood these days except when I work on the geometry book, the book that may have no end because of the research and expertise it requires to write it.

Sometime, I feel like a voyeur when reading Facebook entries.  Why I do not know.  People do not have to bare themselves on Facebook, which in most cases they probably don’t, but sometimes reading entries titillates.

Facebook is also more restrictive on the personae I want to project.  And these days the persona is the thing with me.  While dong my best to avoid identity issues, I remain fixated on them.

I measured how much coffee fits in my coffee cup.  Eight ounces, which, of course, is a cup.

Now, how much dark matter is there in the universe?  I think I’ll need more than my kitchen measuring cups to figure that out.  I wonder if Macy’s has anything useful on sale to help with the problem.

A small pocket notebook and a cheap pen come in handy.  One ought to have a space where one can write or work geometry problems without fear of fucking things up–no matter where one may wander.

I saw Bob Dylan at the Aragon last night.  He started off with a hard rocking version of “Watching the River Flow”, my personal anthem, and he and his band stayed hard rocking until the end of the show even on the really old songs from the Sixties.  They were totally smoking as we like to say at State Street.  They even played “Thunder on the Mountain”, another personal favorite.  One of their encore songs was “Like a Rolling Stone” done with all the hardness and harshness that it deserves and only Dylan could conjure.

It was my first Dylan show.  I never imagined in my wildest dreams he could put together a band and a blend of tunes that was that off the scale good.

Thanks, for the ticket, Billy.

The essay might be the most perfect form of writing.  (I’m thinking of David Hume’s essays.)  The essay displays a persona (mask).  The essay guides a path to new ways of thinking if written well.  The essay shares an intimate piece of mind. (All propositions about essays form an inconsistent set of sentences, yet one cannot tell for certain which ones are true or false.)

I wonder if these days when words spar with mathematics for my time and attention are telling me something

I wish I were dining with David Hume this evening.  I’d like to get his thoughts about blogging.  Would he laugh when I told him this blog would be my writing legacy if I died tomorrow, or would he politely pity me?