Via Greg Mankiw, I just found out about Oxford's Very Short Introductions series. Greg has high praise for Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction. When I looked it up on Amazon, I found numerous other books in the series recommended to me: Particle Physics, Cosmology, Music, Economics, Theology, The Brain. There were about 20 that immediately sounded interesting.
As I explored more I found more and more books in the series. Oxford's Very Short Introductions site indicates over 150! Damn, almost every single one of them looks interesting.
As well as individually, they sell them in boxed sets like the "Basics Box" (Philosophy, Maths, History, Politics, Psychology), the "Brain Box" (Evolution, Consciousness, Intelligence, Cosmology, Quantum Theory) and the "Thought Box" (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard).
As is generally the case with these sorts of series, I'm guessing the quality varies a lot. Still, it's hard for me to resist buying a large proportion of them right now :-)
by : Created on Aug. 20, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 20, 2007 : (permalink)
I've spent the last couple of days doing a crude port of Leonardo over to Django including a converter from the Leonardo File System.
I apologize in advance for any problems with the new system.
Functionally, it should already be better than the old one. In particular, categories are handled in a better way which, amongst other things, means that you can navigate through all the pages in a particular category with a previous and next link (see the categories in this post for an example) and category pages list entries with a last modification date and number of comments. Also there is a path of links at the top of any page that isn't at the top level.
I still need to clean up some of the content in light of changes like this so excuse the construction work for the next few days.
Lots more new features planned though, which is one of the reasons I did the port in the first place.
by : Created on Aug. 19, 2007 : Last modified Aug. 19, 2007 : (permalink)