Day 26: It's like living in the future!

17-18 Sep 2010

I'm not going to bother trying to figure out when I woke up, because my sleep was scrambled beyond recognition today. Anyway, I took 1 piracetam and choline at 8:00 PM and 3:00 AM, and I had a pretty great day overall. Some thick-headed person asked me why my blog is always about what supplements I'm taking, reports on my patterns of mood and activity, and so on. Well, if you haven't been keeping up, I'm conducting a non-rigorous unscientific experiment wherein I try a certain drug for 30 days and (subjectively) observe its effects to see what it does. Other people have expressed their interest in this, so I provide daily updates on how things are going. It's also been a fun challenge to find something new to write about every day for a month. I've personally heard from people who really enjoy reading my drug logs, so obviously someone's getting some use out of this. Essentially, my blog is a place for people who enjoy reading my blog! And if you don't enjoy reading my blog, I'm not sure why you would be reading my blog, but I admire your tenacity! Back to the substances, I'm going to cut down to 2 a day for tomorrow and the day after, and then 1 a day for two days after that, and the project will be concluded (with a daily followup for the week after to keep track of any residual effects). But don't worry, I'll be sure to provide a comprehensive report summarizing the experience!

I also posted a video tonight to promote dprjones' MSF fundraiser - I'll be on later today - and, to the surprise of no one, there are once again people in the comments who just really hate raising money for charities. In fairness, it's not exactly that they think charity itself is bad, just calling attention to charities, encouraging people to donate, and organizing events for publicity. Apparently we're just attention whores who only want to be seen being charitable for our own nefarious purposes. Or something like that. What interests me about this perspective is that it leaves absolutely no way for atheists to win, whatever they do. If we don't give to charity, we're being uncharitable. If we do help charities, we're being selfish. Does this mean we're supposed to be more like those virtuous folks who are too good to identify as atheists, and simply not do anything for charity? Would that be an improvement?

Another significant angle they've failed to appreciate is that well-known atheists leveraging their audiences really is an excellent way to encourage people to support important causes. If I have 22,000 subscribers, it would almost certainly be better for me to call on them to support a charity than to not do so. And even if this were motivated only by my own purely selfish desires to be recognized as a charitable person, this may be one of the best and most productive manifestations of selfishness that's possible. If feeling good about yourself is what gets people to support charitable causes - and, in many cases, it really does - then this is absolutely something to take advantage of! Appeal to someone's selfishness and ego, and it can be turned into a genuine good. If anything, they should be glad that we're allegedly so self-obsessed that we can be exploited to direct thousands of our followers to real, important charities.

All that aside, I also got my Kindle today! This is one of the coolest devices I've ever used. The "screen" is made of a fascinating and almost unnerving material. It isn't backlit, yet it doesn't need to be. There are just areas of blacker or whiter coloration, without any illumination. It actually is somewhat like a real printed page. When exposed to brighter light, it becomes more readable, not drowned out. Only direct sources of light produce some glare on the matte screen, but in diffuse light, it looks completely "normal". It remains just as visible when viewed from extreme angles. The "page" is just really, really interesting to look at - sometimes it's difficult to tell it apart from paper. The difference is... it's paper that changes as you watch! The page turning effect is especially trippy: it flashes to black for a moment before re-drawing the next page. It's like seeing the "ink" move. If I sound effusive, it's because I've never seen this in action before. When it switches to sleep mode, it just changes to a picture of Jane Austen or something (so people will think you're well-read). Apparently the screen doesn't draw any power once it's set in one configuration, and it's supposed to last for a month on one charge if you turn the wireless connection off.

Physically, it's a remarkably thin machine, and very light - lighter than most any book. It's very comfortable to hold, not heavy enough to be tiring, and the right size to fit in your hands (or mine, at least). It's definitely less unwieldy than real books tend to be. As for the technical side of things, I've been having fun figuring out the best way to format PDFs for it (OpenOffice.org Writer's Export PDF feature is great for this). You can have them sent directly to the device by emailing them to your Kindle address, or have Amazon convert them to the Kindle format, but I've noticed that tends to wreck the formatting - indentation, spacing, it's usually not pretty. On the other hand, if you use unconverted PDFs, none of the options to change the text size are available, and the only way to enlarge it is to zoom in and manually pan around the page. A lot of PDFs might have text that's too small to be readable with the Kindle's screen size, but switching the screen to landscape mode can make this easier. If anything, make sure to set the font to an unusually large size before making a PDF, so it scales down well. I also usually have to set the contrast to the darkest with PDFs, or the text seems too faint. For some reason, it likes to vertically center pages that don't contain a full page of text, and that's kind of disconcerting. Right now, I'm trying to find some better serif fonts that will be easier to read, but I've noticed that even single-spaced Times New Roman with no justification is still very legible and usable. It was really easy to just fall into reading it like a real book and forget it's on a machine.

It also has a very basic web browser, which I've been using to read fanfic and the comments I get on my videos. The screen does refresh a lot when loading elements of web pages, and the layout is often oddly crunched, or the text will be too small. The browser has an "article mode" that formats it more readably, though. It obviously isn't meant for any heavy web browsing, but it is usable.

Overall, I'm still figuring out some of the quirks, but it seems like a great device for reading, and at a good price. It's taking me some time to get used to the idea of picking up something that's multiple books and reading from it, rather than the typical paradigm of grabbing one book that contains just one book and reading it. If this is the kind of machine you think you might find useful, I definitely recommend getting one. 4/5.