The Media Theory book is done and sent to the publishers. Which makes, I think, a good excuse to say a little of what it's about.

In short, a medium is a system of states and tokens that act on the states, like a deterministic finite state machine but without the complication of initial and final states, and with some extra axioms that the state transitions must satisfy. Because of these axioms, media can be shown to be equivalent in theory to partial cube graphs, but the automata-theoretic viewpoint leads to a different emphasis of topics.

There is plenty of material in the book about the sorts of things you'd expect me to be interested in: graph theory, geometry (particularly hyperplane arrangements, the regions and region adjacencies of which form media), graph drawing, and the design and analysis of algorithms. But my coauthors Falmagne and Ovchinnikov are, respectively, a cognitive scientist and mathematician, so the book also has plenty of foundational material on how to define and characterize media, how to use them to model important concepts from order theory (total orders, partial orders, weak orders, interval orders, etc), and how these concepts can be applied in the social sciences.

Was it Borges who proposed, in order to thwart readers who skip to the end of the mystery and spoil it for themselves, to end the story some number of pages before the end of the book? But it wouldn't do to leave the rest of the pages blank, or print obvious filler on them, for that would be too easy to skip past. Instead the rest of the pages would be filled with words that appeared to be part of the story, but were not the story themselves. Only the subtlest of readers would discern the transition from story to filler.

Anyway, if that is the goal Gregory Chaitin set for himself in writing Meta-Math!, he has succeeded, less subtly than Borges would have. The book is a hyperbolic riff on mathematical theology related to Kolmogorov complexity, that inexplicably fails to mention Kolmogorov; it invokes Godwin's Law on page 101. All the rest must be chaff. Or at least, someone else can tell me that it's chaff; I'm not going to read it.

A corollary to the observation that printed conference proceedings are obsolete: it is preferable to use color illustrations than black and white, even for proceedings that will be printed black and white.

To expand a little on the reasoning for this, the audience for your paper consists of three classes of people: those who view it on-screen, those who print it themselves from an on-line version, and those who read the printed proceedings. Color helps convey information more effectively people in the first two classes, the third class is rapidly diminishing, and a careful choice of colors can ensure that even the people who only see the black and white version (or who are color blind) get an understandable figure. So supplying the illustrations in color helps more people than it hurts.

Via meep: Snakes on a Sudoku. I'd say something about sharks and jumping but I think the metaphor is already quite mixed enough.

Our imminent move to a new building, and consequent need to evaluate what from our offices is worth moving, has led my colleagues and me to a sad realization: paper journals and conference proceedings are dead. At least for the ACM publications (a large fraction of my bookshelf space), online indexing is powerful enough, the available content in ACM's digital library is complete enough, and computer display of typeset text is readable enough, that it's easier to look things up online than to get up and walk the five feet to the bookshelf. Especially when the printed version is black and white still, while many of us like to use color for our illustrations. So all of our nearly-complete collections of JACM, and all of our carefully treasured old SoCG and SODA proceedings? Probably not going to survive the move.

And if they're not worth moving, are they worth the bookshelf space they use in our offices even when we aren't moving? So why are we still paying to get these enormous tomes printed and dealing with the hassle of transporting them with us when we attend our conferences?

The first story I've seen about successful use of Google Print, and it's a recreational geometry book. Eric Gjerde used Google Print to find Greg Frederickson's book Hinged Dissections: Swinging and Twisting. He writes: "I can honestly say I would never have found this book if it was not indexed in Google Print. "

ETA: Metafilter thread on Google Print. Most of which seems to be comments of the form "this looks neat, why would you want to stop them from doing that?"

Found out today (via Neil Gaiman) that Kepler's is closing. I no longer live near Menlo Park, but I'd shopped there many times. One less good independent bookstore in the world. One more step towards the complete domination of our culture by corporate homogeneity.