If you had to recommend only one book on a particular subject, which one would it be? A recent MetaFilter post along these lines sparked a flurry of responses and some sincere debate. Several readers even complained that they had spent their entire monthly book budget in a single afternoon.

These great texts deserve to be listed in one place, so we’ve started the Reasonable Bookshelf, a collection of the best and most broadly accessible books available on a wide variety of topics. We know we’ll have to leave out many great books, but our goal is to choose one very reasonable book to bring the uninformed layperson up to speed on the given topic.

As always, if you have a suggestion, send us a message or leave a comment below.

Saul :: Jan.19.2008 :: Metareasonable :: No Comments »

Intoxication is Only for Self-Sufficient Adults

If you are under the age of 18 (21 in some temperaments), you should absolutely not be smoking or drinking or injecting or swallowing anything psychoactive. I am sympathetic to the desire of existential beings to alter their consciousness (in the parlance of our times, I know the people wanna get fucked up), but it is very important that you save it until you’re older.

Please, I am dead serious about this. Your mind is still developing, and I’m not giving you a load of anti-drug propaganda. Stay up all night, dance like a maniac, make out with people (I mean a lot of people, not just one), gamble with your parent’s money–just don’t use drugs. Even nicotine and alcohol can permanently modify your maturing brain chemistry, and you can give yourself a bad case of ADD with too much caffeine and high-fructose corn syrup. It is ultrareasonable to not use any recreational drug for the entirety of your adolescence and much of your adult life. Take it slow. Remember, there’s a time and a place for everything, and it’s called “college.” You’ll thank yourself later.

Of course it should go without saying, that regardless of age or experience, you should absolutely never operate heavy machinery or care for children under the influence of any drug, which includes alcohol and some prescription medications. Also, anyone involved with drug law enforcement or extreme drug intolerance is legally required to stop reading this document now.

On to the reasonable intoxicant.

Continue Reading »

Saul :: Jan.18.2008 :: Intoxicant :: 1 Comment »

Shawn requested a recommendation for the Reasonable Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for home use:

A NAS for home use…primary, durable storage of media; photos, movies, music, etc. Tired of having copies of everything on all the different computers in the house.

I’ve done a small amount of research on this, and Buffalo Tech’s TeraStation products sound like exactly what I want. But after digging through reviews of them (primarily on NewEgg), it sounds like they have problems with recovering from a drive failure. Which, if that is truly the case, makes their products Unreasonable.

That does sound unreasonable; the most important consideration for any NAS device is reliability. Nothing’s perfect, but you want the device to last a reasonable amount of time, and when a drive fails (and it will), you want it to be back up and running with a minimum of hassle and no data loss. (Also, always keep an offsite backup of your critical data, since there will never be a technological solution to fire or theft).

So I did some research, and the reasonable home NAS is the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+. It’s a PC Magazine Editors’ Choice, and it gets great reviews on Amazon and reasonable reviews on NewEgg. It supports a lot of filesystems and can function as a print-server too. The only cons: it doesn’t restart automatically after a power outage, external USB drives have to be FAT[32], and custom software has to be installed on any computer without UPnP–though this software is provided for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which are the only operating systems anyone cares about.

It’s a little pricey, but you get what you pay for, and no other NAS device has as good a feature set and performance for the price point, unless you build it yourself. Even if you buy cheapo hard drives for every other computer in the house, you should not skimp on your primary backup solution. It will come back to haunt you.

Saul :: Jan.10.2008 :: Computer :: 3 Comments »

The canonical book on stretching that every person with a body–every body–should have. There’s also a DVD ($20) available for those who prefer moving pictures.

Saul :: Jan.06.2008 :: Books/Media :: 1 Comment »