This is your brain on Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic Monthly)

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this?

Haven't these people read M.T. Anderson's Feed?

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to think that Google is, in fact, evil (and I'm only partially being tongue-in-cheek).

Book Collectors

I'm not a snob about books, but I'm probably a show-off -- as who isn't? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed -- much less commented upon -- my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic.

So states Luc Sante in his article The Book Collection That Devoured My Life. Very entertaining--take a look.

I can somewhat identify, although my own library remains steady at about 400-500 books. It's not likely to get bigger anytime soon either, as I've sadly curbed my desire to own books for the sake of owning. It is still good to keep my favorites, the collectible ones, the ones that have sentimental value, or the ones that I really want to read but that a library is unlikely to have. So many books, so little time!

Some trivia: I like it that Mr. Sante uses the term "library rat" to describe himself at the end of the article. He states earlier that he's bilingual in French, and "library rat," or un rat de la bibliothèque, is a French term equivalent to our English "bookworm."