The average in-flight magazine is a bulky enough affair in isolation, but have you ever considered the payload drain 500 of them on a single flight creates? With that number of magazines weighing in at about a tonne, it's short wonder Emirates has decided to do away with them in favour of an electronic version instead. According to Emirates' president Tim Clark, the decision to ban all onboard paper ... Read full entry

I'm a little out of touch with the required reading lists in Australian high schools, but was surprised to hear that J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye is still part of the syllabus in US high schools. Anne Trubek thinks it is time to retire Salinger's classic, and suggests some alternatives. Sure, J.D. Salinger's novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. ... Read full entry

Descriptively written passages in novels can invoke the same emotional response as a captivating scene in a movie. "We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short 3s movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted," said Christian Keysers. "Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short ... Read full entry

For sheer stupidity, this has to top talking on a mobile phone (sans hands free kit), or sending text messages, while driving a car in peak-hour commuter traffic: reading a book. Yep, while driving a car. That's exactly what I saw when travelling into the city for a meeting earlier this morning. Must have been a great book. "Page turning suspense, I just couldn't put it down..."

Mac OS X Web browser rundown 2007: we all know Internet Explorer isn't the only browser for the Windows platform (nor is it by any means the best), but I was quite surprised by the number of browsers Mac (Apple) users have at their disposal, aside from the usual suspects, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. This is what happens when you no longer run a PC and Mac side ... Read full entry

This is interesting. When reading is bad for you, by Megan Tough at Flying Solo. Reading has an insidious way of filling all the cracks in our day. If we are reading, we can tell ourselves that we are actually working. In fact, there's a good chance we are simply wasting time. I guess it depends who exactly needs to be reading, and what it is they are reading. Extensive ... Read full entry