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Stan's Cafe Theatre Company: Of All The People In All The World

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I stumbled on to this via an item in Tom Hoffman's Google Reader Shared Items list. I'm finding Shared Items to be one of my best sources of interesting items found on the web.

Of All The People In All The World (UK) uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statisitcs to startling and powerful life.

Each grain of rice = one person and you are invited to compare the one grain that is you to the millions that are not. Over a period of days a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics

- the populations of towns and cities - the number of doctors, the number of soldiers - the number of people born each day, the number who die - all the people who have walked on the moon - deaths in the holocaust.

The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever changing landscape of rice. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking. [From Stan's Cafe Theatre Company: Of All The People In All The World]

Stanza eBook Reader for the iPhone/iPod Touch

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Lexcycle.com has an application called Stanza, an ebook reader for the Mac. I recently wrote about Stanza and use it quite a bit to convert content for use on my Kindle. The version I used before also had the ability to export a book into a Safari bookmarklet format. By saving the bookmarklet file to your Safari bookmarks, you could then tranfer the file to your theiPhone via a sync. While this worked, it did cause performance issues for the Safari browser.

Lexcycle has now created an iPhone/iPod Touch application that allows you to easily transfer books and other documents from your Mac to your iPhone. In addition you can also download them directly from online directories such as Feedbooks. A local wireless connection is made between your computer and device and you can then browse for open Stanza documents and import them into your iPhone/iPod Touch. Below are some screenshots that highlight this process.

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Summer Reading List

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Chris Lehmann tagged me with his Summer Reading meme, so below I have listed what I have been recently reading and what I plan to read over the summer.

Recently Read:

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, by Steven Johnson

Shakespeare, by Bill Bryson

Currently Reading:

A Schoolmaster of the Great City, by Angelo Patri
This weeks selection in the Gary Stager book club is quite frankly a remarkable book. I am about a third of the way into it, and am finding it fascinating to read the reflections of this man who wrote of his experience over 90 years ago. I believe that we who work in education do not think enough about those who came before us and this book is a good reminder that we need to take advantage of that knowledge.

Queued up in the Kindle, or soon will be, or on the coffee table...

The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It , Jonathan Zittrain
photo.jpgI have this on my Kindle, and also on my phone thanks to a Twitter post by Bud Hunt who alerted me to the fact that Zittrain has made electronic copies of the book available on the web. Recently I came across a great ebook reading tool for Mac OS called Stanza. Stanza has the ability to read and convert from several different ebook formats and one option is to convert a book to a .plist file, or basically a bookmark. It's an interesting way to put ebooks on an iPhone/iPodTouch. More about Stanza here...

The Post American World, by Fareed Zakaria

In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen

The Great Deluge, by Douglas Brinkley

Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
The story of the 1919 Chicago White Sox and the eight ball players who threw the 1919 World Series...

Wanted to also note that I am really enjoying the ability to download a sample chapter to the Kindle before buying a book. I find myself listening to interviews with authors and then looking on Amazon for the Kindle edition of the book and then downloading the sample chapter. Quite frankly, Amazon makes the book buying process a little too easy... :-)