Obviously impossible to say without knowing more. Do you currently own a Kindle? If so, which? I’m not going to bother picking up the newest model, because I got the newest model last time and remain extremely satisfied with it. But if you either don’t own a Kindle or have an extremely outdated one, then picking up the latest one might be worthwhile. Just depends.
I wouldn’t. I went through five of the previous version. The screen is incredibly delicate. Simply being in my pocket with my wallet was enough to kill several of them. One drop from a bedside table killed another.
I switched to the Kindle Fire, which is basically a cheap smartphone without the phone. That one, carried the same way, has lasted a year now with only minor software glitches. (It reset itself once, required me to download all the books again.)
But, the Kindle Fire has smartphone problems: needs charging daily, the screen is legible in sunlight, barely.
I have a hand-me-down first-generation Kindle. I find the screen-refresh too slow and the contrast too low. I find the iPad Kindle app adequate, not awesome.
I have the earlier version of the Paperwhite. Refresh rates are better; contrast is much better.
The problem I have with it is the reflective screen surface which provides uniform lighting is easily scratched and once scratched it creates glowing spots and shadows on the screen. That light can be turned down but not off. That light is blue-white so it will disrupt melatonin — just not as much as a regular screen.
Get an iPad. It has better resolution and depiction of the page, much easier screen navigation, and it can run any ebook format including Kindle and Nook. You do need a special app for each format. I have six. And you cannot download other formats from Apple’s store.
The iPad also provides all sorts of other apps like iWork, Safari, Mail, which are useful, and it supports wifi and 3 and 4G connections.
Here is a question: which edition of Game of Thrones is better? The KIndle edition or the iBooks edition. I am up to book 4 and noted in the samples that the iBooks’ maps are clearer than the Kindle’s ones. But are there extra features that one will get with either edition that clearly makes the choice of one over the other rational. Of course I am using an iPad with a retina display.
For what it is worth, I would wait for the next generation iPad in the Fall because it will come with a next generation CPU that will permit more complex computing to be performed. Watch the video of the announcement at Apple’s web site, the one on the recent Developer’s Conference.
I’ve switched to an iPad for all my reading, from the Kindle Paperwhite. This was mainly because a lot of non-fiction has a lot of filler, so the iPad’s instant refresh rate makes it a lot easier to skim. Also I read a lot of PDF books, which don’t work well at all on the Kindle.
Gaikokumaniakku: “In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” Of course, these must have been 18,000 randomly selected white Americans, to make a reasonable comparison with the historically white population of the majority of America, right? … right? The ghost of William Shockley is hovering silently over me and shaking his head from side to side in a manner I can only interpret as ominous.
Phileas Frogg: Every educational concern or observation in the modern world comes down to this: “Unless and until we finally accept that people are no more equal in their educability and intelligence than they are in their ability to sprint 100m, dunk a basketball or stand 7 feet tall, we will continue to waste limited time, energy, and resources on solving a problem without a solution: men are not equal.” God needs all sorts. And yet, every class of person projects their narrow measure of...
Jim: The labor market pays you for what you know now… The “labor market” is a centrally planned, authoritarianly organized corporate economy, a free market for employers as against employees, not a free market for employees as against employers. Fortunately, the Singularity is poised to render mutational load a thing of the past.
Isegoria: Caplan’s response would be that almost no one uses any of those skills, and those skills don’t generalize or transfer, at least not for most people most of the time.
Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...
Isegoria: Excellent example, Bob. I’m reminded, oddly enough, of how Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor of his Tesla factory: “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
Bob Sykes: I once had a family doctor who commented that doctors knew when to to add new prescriptions but not when to stop old ones.
Isegoria: Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture. On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points: The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They...
Phileas Frogg: Caplan is one of the most hit/miss popular academics today. He goes from cogently and insightfully detailing the flaws and issues with a complex system or behavior, to proposing the most obviously asinine and unworkable solutions imaginable to anyone with practical experience in that field, to slipping a totally original and unlooked for consideration into the mix that gives you pause, all within the span of a small handful of pages, only to do it again a few pages later. Reading Caplan...
Bob Sykes: One argument in favor of Emily et al is social cohesion and group self-identification, national-building. Caplan seems to think humans are identical, interchangeable atoms, without history or culture. Or is he just furthering the usual sabotage of the surrounding, somewhat alien, culture in which he is embeddded
David Foster: “The great 20th-century composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, in The Poetics of Music, “You cannot create against a yielding medium.” Stravinsky’s innovations were nothing if not revolutionary, but he knew that he could not have produced them if he had not been constrained by the traditions of music and the mathematical strictures of tone. “Let me have something finite, definite,” he wrote. “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the...
Jim: “They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?” That’s the worst imaginable environment for engineers, who invariably need to be held down and whipped with soapful socks like Private Pyle at boot camp.
Jim: Yet maintaining the universalist, human-rights based legal infrastructure constructed after the Second World War takes priority over addressing these issues. The fact that this infrastructure was created for an entirely different world, where there was much less international migration, and where “asylum seeker” meant a political dissident from the Eastern Bloc, does not matter. If the post-WWII occupational court infrastructure were universalist, it would be possible for Englishmen to immigrate to...
Isegoria: That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, Phileas. I don’t want to share too many lengthy excerpts from a brand new book, but I’m happy to pique everyone’s interest.
Phileas Frogg: Looking forward to reading more excerpts, I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Sports Gene,” so much so that I went and bought a copy a few years ago. I expect some similarly provocative and interesting fodder from this one. On the topic of the book, whenever I was struggling to write a drum part for the band I played for in college, I would begin systematically taking pieces of my kit away until I developed something that worked, and then slowly add pieces back in. Limiting myself...
Jim: Phileas Frogg: Then we are substantially in agreement, our only meaningful divergence being that I reflexively view utility from the perspective of the world-controllers, as opposed to from the citizen-subjects. The major difference, then, is not moral righteousness or justice or other such thing, but the habitual understanding that the perpetuation of a system, any system, is owing, ultimately, to the perspective of its managers, formal or informal, that the purpose of a system is what it does…and...
Jim: Free men do not live subject to video surveillance or electronically locked buildings.
Bob Sykes: If you want a career in education, engineering, medicine, law, business, or the sciences, an accredited degree is mandatory. The days when you could just sit in the back of the room and listen ended long ago, even for state schools. At most schools, private and public, key cards of some sort are needed to get into most buildings, and surveillance cameras are everywhere.
Isegoria: Wow, times have changed! The recent Brown University shooting footage revealed that security cameras are common now, but the idea of locking a college down is really foreign to me.
Gaikokumaniakku: Historical perspective: Although the doctrine that the sea by its nature must be free to all was eventually upheld, most commentators did recognize that, as a practical matter, a coastal state needed to exercise some jurisdiction in the waters adjacent to its shores. Two different concepts developed—that the area of jurisdiction should be limited to cannon-shot range, and that the area should be a much greater belt of uniform width adjacent to the coast—and in the late 18th century these...
The new Kindle Paperwhite, announced today, has a 300 ppi display. Should I finally get one?
Obviously impossible to say without knowing more. Do you currently own a Kindle? If so, which? I’m not going to bother picking up the newest model, because I got the newest model last time and remain extremely satisfied with it. But if you either don’t own a Kindle or have an extremely outdated one, then picking up the latest one might be worthwhile. Just depends.
I wouldn’t. I went through five of the previous version. The screen is incredibly delicate. Simply being in my pocket with my wallet was enough to kill several of them. One drop from a bedside table killed another.
I switched to the Kindle Fire, which is basically a cheap smartphone without the phone. That one, carried the same way, has lasted a year now with only minor software glitches. (It reset itself once, required me to download all the books again.)
But, the Kindle Fire has smartphone problems: needs charging daily, the screen is legible in sunlight, barely.
I have a hand-me-down first-generation Kindle. I find the screen-refresh too slow and the contrast too low. I find the iPad Kindle app adequate, not awesome.
I have the earlier version of the Paperwhite. Refresh rates are better; contrast is much better.
The problem I have with it is the reflective screen surface which provides uniform lighting is easily scratched and once scratched it creates glowing spots and shadows on the screen. That light can be turned down but not off. That light is blue-white so it will disrupt melatonin — just not as much as a regular screen.
The “cool” white light that you can’t turn off is, well, a turn-off, but 300-ppi e-ink sounds great.
Get an iPad. It has better resolution and depiction of the page, much easier screen navigation, and it can run any ebook format including Kindle and Nook. You do need a special app for each format. I have six. And you cannot download other formats from Apple’s store.
The iPad also provides all sorts of other apps like iWork, Safari, Mail, which are useful, and it supports wifi and 3 and 4G connections.
If you hate Apple (some do), get another tablet.
Here is a question: which edition of Game of Thrones is better? The KIndle edition or the iBooks edition. I am up to book 4 and noted in the samples that the iBooks’ maps are clearer than the Kindle’s ones. But are there extra features that one will get with either edition that clearly makes the choice of one over the other rational. Of course I am using an iPad with a retina display.
For what it is worth, I would wait for the next generation iPad in the Fall because it will come with a next generation CPU that will permit more complex computing to be performed. Watch the video of the announcement at Apple’s web site, the one on the recent Developer’s Conference.
I’ve switched to an iPad for all my reading, from the Kindle Paperwhite. This was mainly because a lot of non-fiction has a lot of filler, so the iPad’s instant refresh rate makes it a lot easier to skim. Also I read a lot of PDF books, which don’t work well at all on the Kindle.