Saturday Stuff

Assorted items from around the Web:

• Here's a great Blowhards post on audiobooks. Excerpt: Being an on-the-page book reader can be discouraging these days. When to read, for one thing? Commutes are growing longer, life in general tends to get busy, and by the end of most work days, eyes and brain can be very tired. Come 11 pm, settling into a comfy chair and opening a traditional book often results not in an intense reading-session but in a swift fade-to-snooze. Audiobooks, by contrast, are usually listened to while commuting, while exercising, or while doing chores around the house. You're awake and alert as you listen, both because you're doing your listening during the brighter part of the day and because you're physically moving about. I just started in on Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror 1801-1805 by Joseph Wheelan on cassette, and I'm almost done with Daniel Pinkwater's Looking for Bobowicz on CD (a clever sequel to The Hoboken Chicken Emergency).
• FPFFM shares everything you ever wanted to know about John Locke.
• Martin Scorcese is one of my favorite filmmakers, and like any great filmmaker, he is first and foremost a movie fan. Here is a SOC piece on the many sources from which he drew when making Taxi Driver.
• Here's the brand-new blog of the guy who used to be the Director of Consumer Marketing and Brand Management for Google. Props to Search Engine Watch. Excerpt: To understand Google's hiring policies and organizational structure, it helps to think of employees as cells within the corporate corpus. It's useful to have cells that serve specific functions when the need arises, but it's inefficient to have those cells hanging around sucking energy from the rest of the organism if their singular function is no longer required. Better to have cells that can adapt themselves to any situation, solve the problem and then move on to the next issue. Yeah, we're talking about stem cells. Googlers should apply themselves to any project that needs doing, then take on totally unrelated tasks without hesitation. Moreover, they should be able to identify those needs on their own and teach themselves how to solve the problems they present. That's why the company is so fixated on hiring only really smart people without much regard for their prior work experience (no need to comment this post asking how I slipped through).
• Update, 10:03 PM: I'm working on getting the books in the living room put into rough Dewey order. (They're all 900s -- history and geography; The other topics are in another room.) I know, I'm a party animal. You should see me on New Year's Eve. Here's a great resource from Central York High School in Pennsylvannia that has Dewey-organized links to all sorts of cool stuff.