One of the really nice things about Christmas is that the phone stops ringing and the tide of work-related email recedes, leaving time for reading. Here’s what’s I’m into just now:

Artemis Cooper’s biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Like many people I’ve been fascinated by Fermor ever since reading his two great travel books — A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. I’ve long been curious to know what the rest of his life was like. Now I’m finding out.

Sebastian Seung’s Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are.

Larry Lessig’s new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It.

Age of Fracture,a terrific work of intellectual history and the first really convincing account I’ve come across of how and why the post-war liberal consensus ran out of steam and was replaced by the neo-con nonsense that has got us into our current mess.

Shortly after the cake had been iced, we noticed that Tux had gently subsided onto his back. “Hmmm…”, said the lovely maker of the cake, “I must have put too much brandy in it.”

Happy Christmas to any readers who happen to be passing by.

Jeremy Bernstein’s Memoir: At Los Alamos in the LRB.

He advised me to face away from the explosion and count to ten. I was also given some very dark glass to put over my own glasses. Even the reflection from the bunker walls could damage your eyes. I don’t know how far away from the explosion we were but we were close enough to see the 700-foot tower that had the bomb on top of it. I noticed a hill behind the tower with a grove of Joshua trees. They looked as if they were praying. A loudspeaker counted out the minutes until the explosion and then counted down the last sixty seconds. I had turned my back and covered my eyes with the dark glass but the bright flash still made me shut them. I counted to ten and then turned round.

The horizon in front of me was in turmoil. In the centre was a livid red-orange cloud. The hugeness of it was what impressed me. I had had no idea of the sheer scale of a nuclear explosion. Peaslee had prepared me for the next step. I felt a sharp and slightly painful click in my ears. This was the supersonic shock wave. At Hiroshima it produced a wind stronger than any known typhoon: it knocked over the kerosene cookers the Japanese used to make breakfast and caused most of the fires at Hiroshima. Then came the sound: a sort of rolling thunder. The cloud had turned purple and black and hung in the air like a radioactive cobra about to strike. There was talk of taking cover, but it didn’t move in our direction. I stood there mute. We went back to the dormitory to get a little more sleep.

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American.

Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker.

It was a nice, but short-lived run for the e-ink based e-reader. iSuppli says sales of e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Nook have peaked. It’s all downhill from its 2011 high of 23.2 million units. The iPad, Kindle Fire HD, and other tablets are killing the e-reader, says iSuppli.
For some perspective on the death of the e-reader, iSuppli puts it well: “The rapid growth—followed by the immediate collapse—of the ebook market is virtually unheard of, even in the notoriously short life cycle of products inhabiting the volatile consumer electronics space.”

[Source.]

Seeing the Daily Mail applaud the Prime Minister’s rejection of Leveson’s prescription (“Cameron leads the fight for liberty”) reminds me of Sam Johnson’s famous question (in Taxation No Tyranny): “How is it”, he asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

As some readers of this blog may remember, I was sceptical about the iPad when it first appeared, mainly because it didn’t have the software ecosystem that I needed. I could see that it was a terrific device for media consumption, but initially it was hopeless for anyone who, like me, spends most of their time creating stuff. Over time, however, the software ecosystem materialised and — rather to my astonishment — I found that the device had become an almost-indispensable working tool. Apart from the software (terrific stuff like DropBox, SoundNote and iThoughtsHD, iAWriter and Day One) the key factors were the instant-on feature, the ten-hour battery life and a 3G SIM card — which meant that I could, for example, do a whole working day away from base and never have to look for either a power socket or an Internet connection. Bliss!

But one snag remained — the on-screen keyboard, which I found ok for short messages and notes, but a real pain for long-form typing (partly because I’ve never been able to stop myself hitting ‘m’ instead of the spacebar, which meansmthatmmanymofmmymmessagesmcome outmlooking likemthis). So of course I looked round for a bluetooth keyboard — and remembered that I had a neat little Apple one, which works fine with the iPad but means that I wound up lugging two devices around and wondering if it would have made more sense to bring a MacBook Air instead.

Then the Microsoft Surface appeared, and many of the reviewers remarked on the fact that the covers for the device include a keyboard. It seemed such a good idea, so I started looking for an equivalent for the iPad. Last week I found one. It’s the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover. It clips magnetically to the iPad — just as the original covers for the iPad2 do — but contains a real keyboard with moving keys.

Logitech claims that one will get six months of normal usage from the (USB-rechargeable) battery. It does add slightly to the weight of the iPad, and in tactile terms is slightly inferior to, and more more cramped than, the Apple bluetooth keyboard.

But it has a really neat groove with holds the iPad securely at an angle and overall is a really clever solution to a design problem. Recommended.

From the wonderful Brain Pickings site.

Warning: do not try this in a modern home.