Should We Care About The Disappearance Of Marginalia With Digital Books?

“Kindle did launch a public notes feature in 2011, which allows people to make their notes and highlights available to others, but some still worry digital marginalia won’t be preserved as technology advances, leaving future historians without the kind of marginalia penned by people like Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Austen, and other historical figures. Others wonder whether there’s a point in trying to preserve marginalia at all.”

Hiding Behind Falsifiability

“Basically, it refers to whether or not a belief can be proven wrong. If I tell you that I weigh 70 pounds, this is a claim that can be easily tested and promptly thrown out by bringing me to a scale — that is, it’s falsifiable. If, on the other hand, I tell you that everything in the universe is controlled by an invisible astral monkey with a million arms, then there’s little you can do to prove, empirically, that this is a zany notion.”

Becoming The World’s Tallest Ballet Dancer Wasn’t Easy

Fabrice Calmels (6’6″): “I knew I had the technique and could do a lot of things principal dancers could do and I wanted my chance. But everyone was like, ‘You know, I think you’re really tall. I don’t think you’ll ever have a career. I think you should be doing something else from ballet.’ And when you’re young, that really f***s with you.”

Billboard Music Charts Will Now Count Streams

“Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan, the agency that supplies its data, will start adding streams and downloads of tracks to the formula behind the Billboard 200, which, since 1956 has functioned as the music world’s weekly scorecard. It is the biggest change since 1991, when the magazine began using hard sales data from SoundScan, a revolutionary change in a music industry that had long based its charts on highly fudgeable surveys of record stores.”