I’ve read a hundred pages or so of Dawkins’ new book and it just keeps on rocking me with fundamental truth. You can get your copy through this link:
The God Delusion

Thanks to Norm Jenson at One Good Move for turning me on to it early. If you buy through the above link, you are supporting One Good Move.

Stewart Brand writes glowingly of the Roomba at Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog. (Thanks to Dave Winer for the pointer.) I was awarded a Roomba for my half baked idea regarding robotic pet exercise devices last year at the Accelerating Change gathering.

When I tried it at my house it didn’t work. Things that choked the Roomba:

• Fringed rugs.
• Differences in floor elevation, room to room.
• Deep area rugs on hardwood floors… once off the rug, Roomba never wanted to climb back on, just kept cleaning the perimeter.
• Dining room table and chair legs. Roomba could never find its way under the table.
• Stairs.

Our old farm-house just isn’t Roomba-friendly.

Catherine Bennett on abuse memoirs as a genre…

In a really fine piece of survivor-ware, you’ll find something redemptive - yet convincing - on every page. As a child, Briscoe read The Little Princess and vowed never to give up. Now we can read Judge Briscoe’s horrifying memoirs and vow never to give up. Such - assuming that their appeal is not witless voyeurism - is the moral that makes these memoirs of true-life victimhood so compelling to readers of the Oprah persuasion that they have not just become a genre of their own, with a well-stocked misery section in Borders, but spawned a flourishing sub-genre: miserable true-life memoirs of questionable or contested veracity.