This morning two friends of mine appeared in the news:

Alvaro De Rujula was interviewed by NPR about the new particle accelerator at CERN. I met Alvaro in 1980 when I was spending the year in Geneva. He is wonderfully entertaining on the subject of physics.

You can hear the interview here.

Another friend Richard Seltzer was written up in the Times today about his business of putting the texts of over 11,000 books on DVD.

Since 1993, Mr. Seltzer has been taking public domain books from the Internet along with government reports and combining them with convenient indexes in thematic digital collections (available from samizdat.stores.yahoo.net). A few years ago I splurged, spending $99 for a single DVD holding 8,479 books. The latest version of the collection, released in March, has 11,849 books, sold on three DVDs and costing $149. (For $19, individual disks of thematically related selections can be had.) I copied the books into the PC to allow easy sampling of 19th-century issues of The Atlantic Monthly or convenient submersion in the weightier works of Burke or Melville.

I've known Richard since the early days of the Internet and am happy to see this very worthy project has taken off.

You can read the full text here.

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