Some Knowledge

I went to the library yesterday.  I checked out two books on knives.  These books have all these cool pictures of knives and of damascus and pattern welded steel.  I spent most of the morning reading one book on how to make knives.  I find these kinds of books interesting.

Since last February, when I got my library card, I have read a lot of books.  Libraries are cool.  Why would anyone have to pay money to read a book?  The letters don’t wear out from people looking at them.  Sure, the pages eventually wear out, but hundreds of people can read the same book without doing too much damage to it.

I checked out a huge book about games the other day.  I am glad I did not have to pay a hundred dollars or so for that book, because it is not very good.  The other advantage of the library is that I actually try to read the books I check out, because I know I won’t have them for that long, so they don’t just sit around on a shelf taking up space.

I think I am going to go out shopping for a while this afternoon.  I go to the book store now and skim through books.  I have not bought anything aside from some magazines there in a long time.  I think half the people at the book store go there just to browse.  Anyway, that’s all for here today.  I mainly hooked up to the blog here to approve a nice comment.  One of these days I will get around to expanding the text here on this site.

I bought a copy of Inc. today.  It had a lot of interesting stories about business and technology.  I spent a couple hours reading it this afternoon.  There are not a lot of advertisements and the articles are short and to the point.  I think the magazine was probably worth the $4.99 I paid for it.

I waste a lot of time online searching for information on how to make money on the Internet.  Most of what I find are sales pitches for information products on how to make money online.  I think that has to be the fastest growing online business, at least in terms of the number of websites devoted to this subject.  There was none of this in the magazine I bought.  I guess you still get a higher class of information in the print medium.

I looked around at a lot of books at the store today.  I think I wasted an hour in there just browsing through the books on computers and business.  I think I am going to start learning more about computers.  I have always been interested in programming since I got my first computer, an old VIC 20.  I used to write programs for that thing in BASIC and later in machine code.  Now I have this fast, powerful computer and I don’t even write code any more.  I should look into doing some web programming.  That’s how Google got so huge, web programming.  There is a lot of potential in writing computer apps.  Go ask Bill Gates.

So I just stopped by here to write a blurb about a magazine and leave a few comments on what is going through my head.  There has been a big spike in page views here today.  People are reading a post I wrote about advertising and movies.  For some reason, every once in a while, one of the articles I have posted here becomes popular for some reason.  I guess I should expect this, since I have over 500 posts on this blog and it hasn’t even been up a year.  In any case, I am off to check the Inc. website and see what they have posted there.  Maybe tomorrow I will learn how to write useful web code.  Maybe I will make my own search engine.  That should get me my billions.

Bewildering Stories is a web magazine that has a lot of different strange stories.  Bob Brill from the Ann Arbor Writers Group told me about this site last night at the writers group meeting as a place where I could find some of his stories.  Bob is a good writer, and if you want to read what he has published on this site check out his bio page here.

There are a lot of web zines these days that publish just about any kind of story or work of fiction.  The world is changing, and much of the new literature will be available online as opposed to being printed in ink on dead tree fibers.  There is a lot of good fiction and other writing that can be found on the web, it is only a matter of looking for this material and all the time you will spend enjoying yourself reading.  If you are interested in reading some good stories, check out Bewildering Stories.  It’s free and there is no membership fee for accessing any of the work from any of the issues that have been published on this site.

I’ve just been looking around on the net for a while today, reading random stuff.  I just got done reading somebody’s site about how they want to make a million dollars.  I don’t see how he’s going to do this if he keeps writing about slack-jawed tactics like writing annoying little answers for a SMS answering service for three to nine dollars an hour.  The man seems to have about a quarter million saved from his and his wife’s jobs, but hey, they could just live in a cave and save all their money instead of spending it on an expensive house.

About the funniest thing I saw today was a website that had about a hundred Homer Simpson quotes.  I read through them all and strangely remembered most of them.  I guess I have seen every episode of that show two or three times.  It used to be on twice a day in a row at six and beat watching the news.  Now, I don’t watch so much TV during the day.

I wrote an idiotic story about the bigfoot hunters again today.  I guess I am running out of ideas for this blog.  Maybe I should just look for funny pictures on the net and post those.  I don’t see many of the comedy picture blogs listed in the top ten on wordpress here lately.  I should probably go blog surfing and try to find something interesting to read.  According to the site statistics, there are over 50 million words posted to wordpress every day.  That’s like ten times the entire lifetime output of a very prolific writer.  It would take years to read that much material.  I’m really surprised that so many people post so much to blogs every day.  Still, if everyone on earth had a blog and posted a 1000 word entry every day, that would be something like seven trillion words.  Impossible to read all that, unless you’re a computer and read without understanding.

In any case, this is sort of a personal entry.  Don’t imagine it would be of much use to anybody but myself.  I may change the format of this blog and instead of writing about stuff that’s in the news I might just switch to a personal log that records stuff I think about.

Three days ago I started my poetry blog here.  There’s a link to it on the blogroll sidebar.  I did not want to post my poetry in a blog with my random articles.  I wanted a place that would only be for the poems I write and have written in the past, if I ever get around to typing them all up someday.  I doubt wordpress is going to go out of business any time soon, and since these blogs are free, my stuff can stay on the web essentially forever.  Who knows though.  The blog business may just go south and everything will get closed down, but for now, I have a free magazine where I can post any poems I happen to write for anyone in the world to see.

I saw a site a few minutes ago that sells this software that runs on servers for making a blog empire.  It takes random RSS feeds and posts articles to another blog you set up and post advertisements on.  Seems like a copyright violation there.  I mean, you can’t just go around posting stuff other people write and expect to make money off their work by stealing their stuff.  Still, the site was really selling digital copies of this software for like $300 and they were making their money selling splogware.  How wonderful the English language is becoming.  Blog, splog, and every other computer word that makes it into the language.

Well, that’s about it for now.  I’m going to go read blogs for a while and see what other people are writing about.  As far as I know, they might all be writing about who Obama is going to choose as a running mate, if he hasn’t already picked somebody.  More nonsense than I care to find out about, but it will probably be in the news tonight so whatever it is, it will be hard to escape.

Once again I spent most of the day reading.  I read mostly about cars today.  I also watched a lot of videos about Jay Leno’s cars on the jaylenosgarage.com website.  I don’t know if that’s really the URL, but it was something like that.

I read all about the Tesla Roadster.  I read about how it is supposed to perform and what features it has and how much it costs.  In fact, it was the Tesla site that pointed me to Jay Leno’s site.  I’m beginning to see how publicity works.  You get somebody famous to promote your products and you can sell more of them.  Very tricky.

It seems I spent a good lot of time looking around for an electric motor that would be suitable to power a car.  If I had a lot of money, I might convert my RX7.  I found out that the Internet is not the best place to find good deals on puny electric motors.  Sites wanted thousands of dollars for a lousy 20 horsepower motor.  I’m pretty sure that is because they were selling them for car conversions.  A motor is pretty much a hundred pounds of steel and copper.  Even if it were all copper that would only be about $350 in material cost.  There’s a bit of a markup on resale of electric motors.  I should get a price on these things from a Chinese factory.

This morning I found this site that sells electric bikes.  I laugh when I think about anyone spending $13,000 on an electric bike.  I should get some cheap motors and make electric bikes.  I found a factory in Germany that makes pretty cool lithium batteries.  They probably cost thousands though.  Everything these days seems to cost a lot of money.

I looked at the price of oil this morning and it seemed to be coming down a bit after the high last week.  The price of oil changes so fast it may be up again this afternoon.  I used some electricity today, and a bit of natural gas for cooking, but I did not consume any gasoline.  It would be nice if people did not need to drive so much.  Maybe then I would feel better about riding my bike on the road.

A cold front went through last night and it did not get much above 62 degrees outside today.  I think I like the warm weather better.  Still, being inside most of the day, I did not much notice the weather.  It may rain later.  I looked at the weather map and the radar showed some rain moving in this general direction.

So, I spent most of the day reading about electric vehicles and finding out that getting parts for electric vehicles costs a lot of money.  No wonder the Tesla costs so much.  Add to the cost of materials all the design work and take into account the inefficiencies of building each one by hand, and it adds up to something that costs more than it’s worth.  Still, it probably costs less and is more practical than the biodiesel-powered gas turbine car that Jay Leno is having constructed all custom built.  Someday, somebody will design a practical efficient electric car that transports a bunch of people and does not cost millions.  Still, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Books and the written word are some of the most important things in life.  Knowledge, experience, and information are all written down and stored on either paper or in electronic format for anyone to access.  The ability to read is one of the skills we learn in school that helps us with many things throughout life.

If you want to learn something you can probably find the information you need written up in a book.  If you want a pleasant diversion from life and entertainment, there are books of fiction that can give hours of pleasure.  Reading is important, and not just for utilitarian reasons.  The ability to read gives us freedom.

In the days before writing was invented, the only way people had of passing on information was with spoken language.  Written language was developed in ancient Babylon to keep track of debts.  The original use of writing was for business.  Later, epic poems like the Epic of Gilgamesh were transcribed in cuneiform text on clay tablets.  Impressing language on some form of medium not only served to transmit the information to many people, it also preserved the information for long periods of time.

We live in an age of massive amounts of information.  This may be as mundane as some random person’s opinion or as earth-shattering as a new peace treaty.  Reading not only improves our lives, it improves society.  Reading exercises the imagination and expands the senses.  Through the written word we are able to keep records of our deeds and knowledge, and communicate our thoughts and feelings to the entire world.

We live in an age of change.  The written word is no longer held hostage by the publishing business.  Anyone with access to the Internet and a computer can type up their thoughts and transmit their words to anyone in the world who cares to read.  No longer do the masses of people have to listen to the programming of the mass media.  We are free to form our own opinions and to communicate to the people of the world.  The written word is not only knowledge, it is power.  How you use this power will define you as a person in the coming age of information.