Bookbinding: Part 1 - Printing Book

Well this is the first part of several on printing and binding your very own book. I definitely not a pro, but I certainly enjoy bookbinding.

First off, you need a book. I would suggest Google Books. They have basically everything, and if you select the "Free Only" or "Full View Only" option when you search, Google will only return the free results. They have most classics, aka out of copyright, for free. I chose Dante Alighieri's Inferno. Now whenever you have your book, you need to download it. I had to jump through a couple
hoops in order to get this to work. In the search results, click on the "Full View" link then 

Click on the "Full View" Link

click on the Download a PDF button in the right-corner. 

PDF button

Now you should have the full text of your book in PDF form. Whenever you open it up in Adobe Reader, you can view the full text of the book, or, as we shall do, print it!

I went for the double page printing, with 2 pages per side, like a real book. I folded the pages into 4 page signatures and then stacked them on top of one another.

~V 1.1~ 

 //If you have any topics you would like to see me write about, drop me a comment\\

The Written Word

As a society, why do we always seem to gauge a person on their proficiency with the written word, through reports and essays? Adults are required to give multipage reports of themselves to even get someone to consider them for a job.

College undergrads must write a several hundred page thesis in order to prove that they understand a certain topic. Knowledge is not proven by an ability to write down information from other sources, the magic occurs when the ideas are used to synthesize new ones. That is not something that is recorded on paper, but merely the aftermath. I believe that in order for an accurate assessment to be made of an individual's proficiency, that we must depart from the ways of old (because papers have been written by college students for hundreds of years). I think that there are many individuals who are very successful, but would seem rather dull and silly if they were to try and show their genius on a sheet of paper. Success isn't something that someone can find on a sheet of paper. It is an intrinsic quality (along with genius) and if you try to measure of quantify it, we will end up with a very broken system of education and assessment of education. One very much like we have today.

So in closing. Let's find a way to teach kids better, and also a better way to make entirely certain that they have learned. I believe the first step to an educational utopia is personalization on the student's behalf. We shouldn't focus on things the student already knows and things which come easy to the student, but the things which don't. And to accomplish that goal, we need to depart from the current methods of education and testing. Writing papers needs to be saved for those points in time when giving an oral presentation or doing real world examples simply doesn't make sense.

Our educational system is a broken mess.

Community

Not like the typical suburbian dream community of block parties and unspoken lawnmowing competitions, but the community which exists between members of a technological community. The type of community which actively supports sharing of content and one's own creations with others for noncommercial usage.

This type of sharing began in small groups of hobbyists who built computers out of basic components before personal computers or computers with real displays even existed. Much like the group Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak developed their tastes for computer-building in. Wozniak especially would design something really revolutionary or a chip which gave a speed increase, and then just give it away to other members of the group. While Jobs eventually decided to capitalize of Wozniak's designs, when forming Apple Computers only a few short years later. However, that is another story entirely. But the point is, they would share brilliant technology and designs with each other for no charge. These small homebrew led to the distribution of a small OS kernel by the name of Freax (later renamed Linux, after its creator, Linus Torvalds) which is now distributed for free.

This community is something that I cherish. Whenever I have a problem with my computer, I know I can go to a forum and ask a couple questions and within a week, I will have several in-depth answers, and maybe even a link to a tutorial( written by an unpaid member of this forum community) on how to resolve my issue. But with more complex things like building a Hackintosh, or Rooting and flashing custom ROMs to my Android, the entire community is made of people who figured out, or wrote code (eg Tony Mac x86) to actually do these things. But the killer part is, they simply give away all of their brilliant engineering and programming for no charge whatsoever. Their only interest is to make the lives of other people better.

Or in the creation of indie games like ADOM, Dwarf Fortress, or Dig-n-Rig. These games are extremely addicting, feature-rich and people would definitely pay to play them. BUT-and that's a big but-the developers like to develop and just give away their hard work for free. That is America, my friends. That spirt of community is contagious, because it is just so exciting to see everyone enjoy free

//If you have a specific topic you would like to see me post on, comment below\\

version 1.0

Style

What is style I wonder? What factors exactly lead society to the "realization" that a certain meme is cool. Be it words, clothes, methods of wearing clothes. Be it pants, hats, sun glasses etc. How does the mob determine what is good and bad of these styles?

I struggle to understand this sort of hivemind the crowd takes on, because almost everybody takes an instant liking to a certain trend and reproduces it, and launches it into sociological stardom. I hypothesize that it may be more of a hysteria type situation. Almost relating to the work of Dr. Zimbargo and the Stanford Prison Experiment. How a group will make crazy decisions, that when viewed from the outside, ie old people, looks and is understood to be rediculous, but whenever someone is on the bleeding edge of fashion or style, they understand these styles and trends and believe them to be popular. It would certainly be interesting to see some research done on this topic. To exactly pinpoint how and why a amorphous group makes seemingly unanimous decisions simutaneously without discussion or communication. They simply see it and ba-boom. A style is born.

Food for thought, my friends.

permanence

We often think of the internet as a permanent addition to our lives. Sure. I'll agree to that. For the rest of time, humanity will be interconnected via an internet of sorts. But the goods and services provided on this everchanging internet will vary dramatically. We often think of facebook, and twitter, and even google as the titans of the internet. The permanent Apollo, holding up the very fabric of the internet. Facebook and Google account for well over half of all the web traffic in the United States

But...they will not be here forever.

GOING RETRO.

Take for instance geocities, it was "the thing" in the nineties. Anyone and everyone could and did make a page. Either a blog, or about a topic that interested them. People spent countless hours documenting the lives of their children and how their days went. But in the early 21st century ;) yahoo decided to remove all of it. Total, it was less than 2 terabytes. But one day in the summer of 2005, it was deleted. All of those pages were forever lost. Some people were up in arms, some (archive team) decided to download as much as they could, and then put it up on piratebay for all to download. But for most people, nothing changed. The next "the thing" came along and everyone migrated to it, restarting their digital persona on a new service.

RETURNING TO PRESENT DAY.

So with services like Facebook's Timeline, I don't think will really be that relevant. It will last 4 or 5 years more sure, but after that. Will the interest still be there? Will Facebook will have become the next myspace, friendster, yahoo, or lycos? The irrelevant service that rarely anyone uses. I don't see anyone who will really be able to compete with facebook on the horizon atm. Google+ does look promising, but come on. Google has tried social before and that didn't ever really pick up steam. SOO I'm thinking Google+ will never become the next Facebook. Just because social just isn't in the DNA of Google.

GOING TO THE FUTURE.

So what will happen when Timeline isn't relevant any longer? What will become of all of our data that we intrusted into this service? It's almost frightening to think of it, but just remember, someday, this will happen.

//version 1.1\\

Civil Liberties

Today I have a provoking qustion: Do people really deserve their rights? Keeping in mind people like Terry Jones from Gainesville, FL (the one who burned a mildly popular Islamic religious text) who caused people to lose their lives due to their ridiculous protest, do all people deserve their rights to free speech? Albeit, in this case, he did do more than talking, but lets include this under the umbrella of rights known as Civil Liberties. Are there ever situations when free speech should be limited? Take Schenck v. United States, where limitation of citizens right to free speech was upheld during wartime, when it posed "a clear and present danger" to the nation. Is this something that as a nation founded upon the ideals of freedom to all people, should continue to allow?

What is freedom? Is it something that is just "the ability to do as one pleases" or is it "the ability to do as one pleases*" [*-As long as these freedoms do not restrict the freedoms of others]? I think our definition of freedom may be contributing to the misconception that freedom is infinite. Which it can never be. There is a limited form of freedom which is present, or at least was present in America, but nothing that can be described as "true or total freedom". It must be limited so that all may have any freedom at all.

Food for thought, my friends.

~version 1.0~