So yeah, I'm bored today. Sitting at work with not much to do, so I figure I'll spill my random thoughts out here for a bit.
One site that not enough people know about is Project Gutenberg. It's an effort to publish books that are in the public domain online and make them available for free - an absolutely awesome goal! Now if only we could find a way to get around some of the difficulties of the past 30 years worth of copyright law "improvements".
A couple of my favorite books that are on there:
"The Problems of Philosophy," Bertrand Russell - A decent overview of some basic philosophical issues from my personal favorite philosopher. There's several other Russell books available, but I think this is the best of the bunch. Not my favorite work of his - need to find a way to get more of his stuff up on Gutenberg!
"The Ethics," Baruch Spinoza - This piece of philosophy has had a huge impact on my own thoughts and views on the world. It's a very challenging work to get through, one that truly emphasizes the work one must do to grasp the heart of any piece of philosophy, but the payoff is big.
Think this looks like a cool project? You can volunteer and take part in adding more books to the collection as part of Distributed Proofreaders. It's kind of like Seti@Home or the BOINC project, only it requires your eyeballs as well as your computer. Proofread some scanned pages to see that the OCR conversion of the text actually matches what was in the book. They've added more than 13,000 books to Gutenberg's library so far!
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