Software Suggests Evolution

It would be difficult to overestimate my contempt for stories like this: someone writes a program that purports to explain how the capacity for religious belief evolved. Here is my favorite part:

The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others.

The researchers ought to have had a lot of personal experience with that.

Judas Revisionism Revisionism

The carnival surrounding the the translation of the Gospel of Judas a couple of years back now has turned into a farce. Turns out even the fake Gnostic gospel bearing his name isn't really very positive toward the man. National Geographic and the agenda-drive scholars on the project made basic errors. Devastating recap here.

CreateSpace vs. Lulu

While pursuing my self-publishing adventures, I have done some research into the various options for getting a book professionally printed. A whirlwind of creative destruction is just revving up to tear through publishing, so it's a fun time to have a manuscript in hand.

Publish-on-demand is a big driver of these changes. Instead of keeping stacks and stack of books in a warehouse, ready to ship out to bookstores, a manufacturer just prints off a single book when an order comes in. This works great for virtual bookstores like Amazon. On the internet, two of the biggest players are Lulu and CreateSpace (a subsidiary of Amazon). I've used both services, so this post will be an effort to compare the two.

Characteristic	Description	Lulu	CreateSpace
Cost	If you want to print more than about three books, CreateSpace is the hands-down winner. The wholesale cost for my book (~250 pages) is $4.15 at CreateSpace, and $9.50 at Lulu. You can get volume breaks at Lulu, but the quotes they gave me were not impressive.		X
Time	Lulu's turnaround time is much better than CreateSpace's. CreateSpace has an approval process that takes at least a day. Plus shipping is slower.	X
Shipping	Lulu seems to print and ship a little faster. Their shipping costs are much lower (they offer a Media Mail option). However, once a CreateSpace book is in the Amazon system, you can take advantage of free shipping and Amazon Prime. I'll give them both a nod here.	X	X
Revisions	Because CreateSpace requires a proof for every revision, Lulu is more practical if you are rev'ing something a lot. Plus the high shipping means at least $10 for every turn of the crank at CreateSpace.	X
Amazon	Since CreateSpace is owned by Amazon, it's free to get an ISBN and get your book into the Amazon system. Also, as I said before, all of Amazon's great shipping deals apply. This is an astonishing thing - to be able to get a book into the greatest book distrubtion system in the world for nothing.		X
Distribution	Lulu has other distribution systems that I don't really care about. Consequently, I have not investigated them. Lulu charges $300, though, to get it into Amazon or any other system.	X
Profitibility	This is a labor of love for me, so I don't care about the money. But if I did, CreateSpace is a much better deal. For the same retail price, the author keeps a lot more of the dough.		X
Quality	This is close, but I would give this one to Lulu. The CreateSpace books are not as uniform, in size or cover registration. It's not a big deal and you would never know unless you had a stack of them in front of you. None of the CreateSpace books have been bad, but I just noticed the minor inconsistencies.	X
Cover Options	Lulu offers softcover, hardcover, and spiral bound (great for reports or editor's manuscripts). CreateSpace only has trade paperback.	X

Bottom line: I am using CreateSpace. I think Lulu would be great for a business user who has lots of really low-volume kinds of books (reports, etc.).

My Dream Desk?

HT: Tom King. His sharp eyes also spotted the one thing that would not appear on Jeff's desk. Can you see it? Hint: product from a company hq'd at One Infinite Loop.

Most Hated Toy in Burtonia: Gone!

At the height of the Chinese Great Leap Forward, even small towns and villages had steel quotas. Since it was impossible for them to comply with the insane demands of the communist planners, the hapless peasants would melt down their agriculture implements and submit the resulting "product." Another example of how socialism is most adept at subtracting value from industrial inputs.

Until yesterday, we had just such an endeavour in our home, thanks to the Crayola Crayon Maker. It made crayons in the same way the Chinese peasants made steel in the 1950's. You take a perfectly good existing crayons, heat them to about 200 degrees, and pour the burning hot liquid into a mold. The end result is crayon slag that comes in colors like "dark mucous" or "abyssal mud." Below is a picture of a couple of these excreta.




The whole idea is so preposterous that one might expect to find it on the store shelf next to the Lil' Woodsman Junior Chainsaw or Baby's First Soldering Iron. For me it sums up everything wrong with America: cheap plastic landfill fodder, pointless and wasteful "activities," and indulgence of children. But since my boys absolutely love everything that has to do with wanton destruction, it was one of their favorite toys. So how did this state of affairs come about?



Mom was up late scraping crayon wax off the floor. Now to figure out what is the second-most hated toy in Burtonia.