Linkee-poo wants to be yours

Cat Rambo on why titles matter. I am infamously bad at titles. Often times just blurting out what the story is, or the genesis, or something otherwise inane.

The Voynich Manuscript. A book from the 1400s, written in a cypher that so far remains impenetrable. Very cool. However, while the ink colors all relate to the appropriate period, you can only date the vellum. You can find images of the page on Google (as well as complete PDFs of the book). My guess, it might possibly turn out to be a cleaver palimpsest (although, I would have hoped they would have looked for the traces that it may be one). (Grokked from Jay Lake)

Tobias Buckell gives some insight into ebook sales. If Tobias is right, that ebook sales were above 9% of all book sales last year, they may have reached the tipping point. However, I can tell you, I have many friends with ebook readers (waves at you all), and many of them use them quit a lot. I also have a iPod Touch with the various software to read ebooks on it, and I've download a number of them. Even started reading some. But I haven't finished one (other than short stories, oh Andrew Lang, how I love you from a century away). While Tobias think that 2013 will be the telling year, actually I think 2012 will be. Can ebook sales keep that trend and hold or increase above 9%? If they can hold this year, it shows the market has a stability factor, if it drops below 6%, then the market may take longer to become entrenched. Overall, however, I don't expect ebooks, for fiction, to overtake 50% of the market (text and reference books are a different story).

Some people are just discovering, "Hey, Egypt's military are the same people who supported 30 odd years of repression." Surprise!

A Salon take on having a president that is a CEO (and running the government as a business). This is from the 500,000 foot view. There's a lot more from even the 100,000 foot view, let along on the ground. And, as pointed out in the article (and my first thought when I hear someone say these things), we've already had an MBA President who surrounded himself with captain of industry. Things didn't work out so good as I remember. (Grokked from Jay Lake)