If the kids get comfortable reading, their chances at innovation and invention go up. If they hang out in a library, the chances of good reading in front of them go up. Nice plan.

Google is only useful after you have learned something about how to search. School librarians are good at teaching people how to search. Helping students learn how to use any index, including Google -- and judge the results they get -- is a superb goal for a school library.

Animals have to choose what to eat first, so a comparison operator is definitely applied to a collection of foods. The simple mathematical representation, which you are sticking to, is therefore the part we have to give up.

It's ineffective to abstract too early, and it's really ineffective to abstract into an inadequate framework.

Most employees are very sensibly reluctant to be relocated, because going to a one-employer town is really risky. It was a standard in the... 1980s? to move a division to a small town, fire everyone within five years, and re-hire them at half the wages -- which they had to take because they had underwater mortgages. And the mortgages were underwater *because* the company was dropping wages.

That's before worrying about whether one's spouse can find good work, whether the schools are connected to good work, etc etc.

Multi-employer, multi-industry towns are never as cheap to live in, even when they're unfashionable and have weather that's more... challenging... than the Bay Area's.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:General_FAQ#G.13._How_does_Project_Gutenberg_choose_books_to_publish.3F

All-volunteer; what people scan and proofread is what's there, after a copyright check. Some things that were popular and are therefore common; some things that were always rare and therefore an enthusiast scanned a copy; some things people sought out to fill out a subject heading. There's *lots* of old light fiction, adventure stories and social comedies, that no-one's cared about for a century. (I find it fascinating what changed, and what didn't, and what changed *first*. I love old B-side books.)

Lamia story -- I think Tim Powers wrote one. Set in Venice, maybe? and excellent.

There are groups working on this -- the University of California is trying to do it in a consistent way, with its wealth of historical data -- but it's harder than you'd think. It's not very useful if you don't get the metadata reasonable, and that's skilled work and not something we reward. Institutional support (libraries, machine shops, etc) gets pinched because it's constant overhead and hard to point to single high-status payoffs. It takes one year to kill a library (Canada's superb fisheries and lake science just lost one).

Even worse, a lot of scientific data is realia -- *stuff* -- and that's a worse metadata problem, and expensive and fragile.

One of the reasons California does as well as it does (you laugh, but there's some amazing literal and social engineering to keep the whole mess running) is that the state boundaries are close to the watershed boundaries. Water is *the* currency of the West, for energy and agriculture and domestic use, and having the water-governing bodies under one government is... well, it's bad enough, but it's easier than separate states grandstanding against each other. (GA/TN, recently.)

So the 6 Californias is badly designed and not ambitious enough -- let's reorganize the whole country --

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/19/map-the-united-states-of-watersheds/

Tends to keep metro areas together; also biomes often fall within a watershed, and then determine what the most productive land uses are.

(Did Saddam's personal cook write a memoir?) Either we've read/talked to different people, or we get different things out of the same stories. `You can avoid risk' sounds like the Just World fallacy at best, to me. F'rex, in tyrannies, it's always easy to be accused of something you don't get a fair trial for, so `avoiding risk' includes `never pissing anyone off'.

I am grateful that I don't have a personal opinion on this in most of my life, since I would probably get a decent legal hearing for most things in the US. But I sure think about the ways the TSA and now the NSA could wreck me, if they wanted to. It does change my behavior, and not to be more moral or productive or braver.

From reading what people write about living in Egypt, or Burma, or under Stalin, everybody has or had to do some things that might or might not attract punishment to survive; guilty and frightened all the time. Also, the rules change without advance notice.

Its from bits - - we already are beings of pure information. It's information all the way down and all the way up, even us lumpy bags of dirty water.

Could be an input of locally-sourced humanure instead of Haber-Bosch N. I should think a hot dry place would be a good place for controlled composting.