Readability is a script/bookmark that cleans up online content. It’s very convenient if you regularly read blocks of text online. I’ve been using it for a few months now, and I’ll testify that it makes reading on a screen much more pleasant.

EDIT: Added link. Hurr, durr.

In the wake of today’s stock-market-crash-cum-partial-recovery, here’s a diagram¹ documenting the loans that a few of Europe’s weaker economies owe to each other. Figures are in billions of dollars. Click for a larger view.

While there seems to be plenty to criticize about the fiscal policy of the Eurozone, it’s worth noting that America’s national debt is at $12.31 trillion (as of Q4 2009). For the infographically-minded, if we were to extrapolate from the size of the European debt circles then attempting to represent the US debt would exceed the size of the diagram.

¹ Diagram blatantly stolen from the NYT.

Move over Garfield Minus Garfield, I’ve got a new favorite surreal mash-up webcomic thing. The Nietzsche Family Circus matches random Family Circus panels with quotes from the German philosopher, often generating surprisingly appropriate juxtapositions. So by reading them, we’re applying the random quote to the random picture and still ascribing meaning to the result. Minds are awesome.

I don’t know which dark god Adobe sold their collective souls to to make this work, but I think they got a good deal for them.

Unrelated P.S.: It looks like a team of researchers at Caltech just cured cancer. FYI.

I just finished W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, which all things considered is a pretty good book, despite my occasional furious claims to the contrary.¹ I started it sometime around October, read most of it, and then put it aside. I just finished the last hundred-odd pages a few minutes ago. This seems to be a pattern — I start a book really enthusiastically, then get a little bored or distracted and put it down for awhile. Eventually I get so tired of seeing it sitting in my queue, shamefully reminding me of my miniscule attention span, that I just plant myself down on the couch and force myself to finish it. The satisfaction of finishing the book outweighs the grueling completion process.

This isn’t usually the case, of course. Only for certain books. I’m pretty sure I’d hate reading if this was the normal situation.

Note that the concept of book-graphing has been explored before, which reminds me: I want the book equivalent of a pedometer, so I can settle this graph thing once and for all. Then I want to correlate information about the structure, genre and subject matter of the book with the pace at which I read it.

If I worked at Amazon, I would be spying on customers’ Kindle usage and mining that data so hard.

¹ No chapters? Really? Why would you do that, Sebald? I demand discrete chunks.

I’m pretty sure that if you like this blog you’d like a graphic novel biography of Bertrand Russell, which is exactly what Logicomix is.

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who specializes in building artificial animals.