1. Secret Societies
2. 1984
3. Animal Farm
4. Cicero
5. Catch-22
6. Dumb Witness
7. Lord of the Flies
8. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
9. Ulysses
10. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
11. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
12. Girl With A Pearl Earring
13. Candide
14. For One More Day
15. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
16. King Arthur
17. The War of Art
18. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
19. When You Are Engulfed In Flames
20. Five Little Pigs
21. Boudica
22. The Writer's Journey
23. A Cat Among Pigeons
24. The City of Falling Angels
25. The Hollow by Agatha Christie

The Hollow (Hercule Poirot)

Agatha Christie

I am really not one for mysteries, but I'm absolutely hung up on these early 20th century books.  Her writing is the model for the evolution of mysteries from the Sherlock Holmes logical deduction to the psychological deduction, both of which Agatha Christie dabbled in (Hercule Poirot for the former, Miss Marple for the latter).  She often pokes fun at herself whenever the characters mention murder mystery novels and she's even had a mystery novelist as a principle suspect.  Nevertheless, I was a bit unimpressed with this book since she applied a psychological mystery paired with the logical deductionist.  It felt very ill suited, but it was an entertaining read while I was a little incapcitated yesterday.

At the top of my queue, a book I've been meaning to read for a very long time:

Walden

Henry, David Thoreau

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I am a farmer who raise ducks and cows. The animals have a total of 9 heads and 26 feet. How many ducks and cows do I have?
Submitted by The BlueTie.

5 ducks, 4 cows.

Deduction: you have 9 heads, which means you have at the very least 9 * 2 = 18 feet.  That means you have 26 - 18 = 8 feet unaccounted for.  The 8 feet come in 2 pairs which must belong to cows.  Therefore, 8 / 2 = 4 pairs the belong to cows.  Now that you have 4 cows, you know you have 9 - 4 = 5 heads, which belong to ducks.  To verify:

4 cows * 4 feet  = 16 feet

5 ducks * 2 feet = 10 feet

total feet = 26

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Show us an antique.
Submitted by jacolily.

I don't have a picture of the one my Mom still has, but this is quite the antique (and it still works!)

Atari 2600

Check out the sexy wood veneer and single joystick button.  This was a joystick that turned your hand into a claw shape, made that rubbery creaking sound when you moved it and built up a callus on your thumb & the groove between your thumb and index finger.

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What question do you wish you'd never asked.
Submitted by cha0tic.

Is this going to hurt?

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1. Secret Societies
2. 1984
3. Animal Farm
4. Cicero
5. Catch-22
6. Dumb Witness
7. Lord of the Flies
8. The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
9. Ulysses
10. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
11. The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
12. Girl With A Pearl Earring
13. Candide
14. For One More Day
15. Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
16. King Arthur
17. The War of Art
18. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
19. When You Are Engulfed In Flames
20. Five Little Pigs
21. Boudica
22. The Writer's Journey
23. A Cat Among Pigeons
24. The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels

John Berendt

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Show us the book you're reading right now.
Submitted by Strive2Be.

Makes me want to see Venice....

The City of Falling Angels

John Berendt

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Who inspires you to be the person you are today?
Submitted by meuuy.

The person I want to be tomorrow.

I'm on a roll with these one sentence answers, so why stop now.

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What's the closest thing you have to a time machine?
Submitted by Verisimilitude.

It looks sort of like this.

Time Machine

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What is the biggest lie you've told?
Submitted by lazywong.

That I love the QotD.

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I read a very interesting quote this morning that I thought I'd share and get some thoughts on.

(paraphrasing since I don't have the book in front of me)  "Democracy has a serious failing in that when the quantity of people increases the quality of the chosen leadership decreases.  They end up electing any idiot into office."

While this is obviously written from an aristrocratic point of view, I can't help but wonder about the validity of such a curve applying to the political arena.  To juxtapose on top of this, I was watching this show
 and came upon an episode that intrigued me.  I haven't watched this show before, and I had only been watching it for a couple of episodes.  But in the second episode I had seen a huge change in Ramsay when he met the newly hired chef India for the restaurant that he was trying to save.  There was a palpable change in his demeanor and you can tell he had seen immense potential in her.  In the other shows I've watched, he continually rode the chef to improve his/her cooking processes/management.  With her he was relaxed and actually enjoying himself.  He saw her potential, and when the restaurant failed a month and a half later, he immediately swooped in and hired her for his own restaurant.  What and why does that matter?

It is possible for people to identify the intrinsic value/talent in other people.  I could identify it in my previous jobs, and I can see how that quality and talent can be seen with those that have the eye for it.  It's like finding a Hope diamond in the middle of the Sahara desert.  You can't miss it when you see it, and you can't miss it when you see someone else see that quality.  How does that quality scale?  How can you really see the intrinsic qualities of a leader you've never met, nor has been observed by leaders looking for such quality?  Endorsements do not provide that sort of tangible value; it's a ticket to punch and a side to pick.  It's not a personal observation.

There are many candles of quality to compare to.  Does the Reverand Al Sharpton compare to the brilliance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example?

I think it scales poorly because the quality of signal is lost in the noise of rhetoric and I can't rely on the media's instruments to guide me.  They are rudimentary, contrarian, and quite often useless.  The media itself, does not scale, either.

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