a rare photo

She’s hard to capture in photos anymore due to a very high rate of movement at all times. Here’s the best one I’ve been able to get since returning from England, after many tries.

Since this is mostly just a head shot of Tamanya, you can’t see how big she’s getting.

Two new favorite activities: tearing door insulation, tearing any money left in the open. She seems to have an especial hatred for Egyptian 10-Pound notes.

What I’m really noticing these days is vastly increased muscular strength. When she tries to shove my hand with one of her paws, there’s now some pretty considerable force coming from her end.

the fate of libraries

I’ve been wondering for awhile: what will happen to libraries on university campuses? In one sense they are generally becoming livelier places, since librarians are often among the most progressive and insightful people on campus in recognizing new trends. In another sense, libraries are massive space-eaters who won’t need that much space forever. I’m trying to imagine what might be on the upper floors of our library 10 years from now.

Classrooms? But classrooms could be doomed for the same reason as physically expansive libraries. Actually, university campuses as a whole may be doomed, but I’m not quite sure about that yet. Universities themselves are very unlikely to be sustainable in current form indefinitely.

In some ways I envy people who are in their early 20’s now, but in other ways I’m glad to have gotten a taste of the old world of the 1970’s (pre-ATM, pre-home computer, pre-cable television, pre-email, etc.) to be able to gain some sense of how such transitions happen.

Two of the strangest memories in retrospect would be…

*People going to line up at banks on Friday to withdraw enough money to get them through the weekend. And some grocery stores letting people cash checks for over the amount of purchase in case they ran out of spending money on the weekends.

*My first trip to Europe, 1989, being dependent on two-day-old baseball scores in the Herald Tribune, and being dependent for more in-depth sports news on newspaper clippings sent to me through the mail from Maryland. It now sounds almost like: “When I was your age I used to walk three miles through the snow to school.”

“Amazon e-books now outselling print books”

This could be an important moment. HERE.

I’m somewhere between the tech celebrants and the angry pro-book luddites. It looks to me like paper books are obviously doomed for all but very special uses. And I do read sometimes on my telephone, iPad, and (once I have a free moment to set it up) Sony Reader.

However, I still read on electronic devices only in special circumstances. It still feels like a bit of a pain to me, and not as nice an experience as paper books.

But unlike many who make that comment, I think it’s only a matter of time. In 5-10 years I fully expect to be reading almost nothing on paper. There simply need to be some technical improvements, and given the market that obviously exists for e-books, there is plenty of incentive for those improvements to be made.

There will come a moment when many of us will be trying to streamline our lives by dumping hundreds or thousands of paper books from collections lovingly assembled over decades. I suppose sheer recycling will be the fate of many of these volumes. There are only a few paper books here in this apartment that have any sort of sentimental value that would protect from them immediate discard if I had a feasible electronic alternative.

One irony I continue to note is that when I meet ultra-reductionist philosophers who proclaim the eliminability of everything, these are often the most sentimental romantics when it comes to traditional paper books. Haven’t figured that out yet, but it occurs with surprising regularity.