An Australian university textbook rental outfit called Zookal has promised to deliver its wares by drone, Simon Sharwood tells us in The Register. Zookal has teamed with another Sydney startup, unmanned aerial vehicle outfit Flirtey, to deliver books.
Customers order books using their smartphone and once loaded Flirtey’s drone homes in on that device thanks to some GPS wizardry. Flirtey’s birds are hexacopters.
Books by drone
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Rare Photos of Famous Authors at Qwiklit
“The trouble with fiction… is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” – Aldous Huxley from The Doors of Perception
“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.” – Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart
Famous Authors
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The best novels for learning about social skills
“As guides on how to navigate the complex labyrinth that is social interaction, avoiding embarrassing faux pas, conversational cul-de-sacs and social no-nos, (novels) offer an invaluable tool kit,” The Huffington blog informs us, tongue-in-cheek one suspects.
For example, if you want to know about:
Looking for Mr./Mrs. Right, then read “The Pursuit of Love” by Nancy Mitford
if, on the other hand, you find yourself
Ending up with Mr./Mrs. Wrong, then pick up “Middlemarch” by George Eliot
Learning from novels
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10 Rules for Creative Projects
On a recent visit to a Richard Diebenkorn exhibition, Maria Popova says,
“I was taken with a small, simple sheet of paper handed to visitors, printed on which were the artists’ ten rules for beginning a painting — a sort of manifesto that applies in various degrees and various dimensions to just about every creative or intellectual endeavor…”
Hand-lettered wisdom
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Knitting Sweaters For Penguins
Skeinz, a yarn store in New Zealand, Izebel reports, is calling for sweaters for the penguins affected by a massive oil spill. The tiny sweaters, while eliciting aww’s and squee’s, serve a very important function: they prevent the oil-soaked bird from poisoning themselves by preening, as well as keeping them warm before it’s their turn to be cleaned up by cleanup workers.
There seems to be some confusion on when this spill happened and whether the sweaters are still needed, but since spills occur all too frequently, they will probably be always welcome.
Penquins sweaters
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Underwater Internet For ‘Deep-Sea’ Communication
You can hardly walk through a café, subway station or even a public park without picking up WiFi on your smartphone, Philip Ross reports in the International Business Times.
“Almost anywhere you turn, there’s a wireless Internet network to greet you. But there’s one spot the mobile Web can’t go: underwater.”
Underwater Internet
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What’s your state’s book?
Here’s the most famous book set in every state, according to Business Insider.
State’s book
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Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
Neil Gaiman explains in The Guardian why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens,
Fiction … is a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key.
Gaiman on reading
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— Alma Alexander
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