Explorations of the net, books

I spent a lot of time on Youtube for the last couple of weeks. EDU channel is amazing : that and all of the other on-line sources of educational material remove that from the teacher's tasks. So, more of a teaching assistant role : labs, discussions, grading assignments, ... No wonder home schooling is a trend.

Will and Maeva dancing Boogie Woogie style are amazing. Went through a lot of boogie woogie piano, lots of duets are very good. Again, there are many mixes with other genres happening.

I normally read slashdot.com every day : only a few of the articles are normally interesting, but I scan them all. Ditto news.google.com and digg.com. Al Jazeera and Haaretz every few days. Al Jazeera English is far more honest / unbiased than almost any US media, at least I don't know of better. Haaretz has a lot of opinion pieces which are ditto. Anti-semitic, I guess 8).

I want to go through all of the biggest online info sources .

A.C. Clarke's and S. Baxter's "Sunstorm". Book 2 of "A Time Odyssey". Interesting info on the Sun's behavior. OK story, not a must read.

Robert J. Sawyer's "Calculating God". Very good, a must read. SciFi is a literature of ideas, this exemplifies that.

Jerry Pournelle's "Exile to Glory". OK, not a must read. Kid's story, tho. Standard future dystopia, Pournelle off on his tirades about the trends to a socialist/collectivist future, escape to space. Saved by super-wealthy, etc.

David Drake "The Sharp End". Good story, but you have to read other of the "Hammer's Slammers" series to grok this one. The armaments and tactics based on that technology are interesting in these stories, but I can do without so much violence in my reading. He anticipated the violence-porn that is common in the video games. Deficiency of his early stories is that the shock outweighs the story and the characters are not developed, tho "The Sharp End" is a bit better.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer". Very good, nearly a must-read. Good for teenage boys, at least. Post-apocalypse society trying to rebuild. I had a hard time believing that a nuclear power plant could sustain itself without constant deliveries of critical parts, but otherwise didn't have to suspend dis-belief dozens of times as I do with every single Hollywood movie.