Okay, first we have to assume a few stated facts from both franchises, but namely Hogwarts.

• Technology isn’t supposed to work well (if at all) on the grounds
• With this limitation there is no drop in, Predator must approach on foot.
• Wizards are not inherantly stupid, they will notice classmates missing, this means element of surprise must inflict severe casualties.
• Cloaking will not work (technology)
• Predator is aware of technological disadvantage in effect, brings explosives and weapons with simplistic function / manual detonation (i.e fuse-type grenades, etc.) He is heavily armed but will require melee for majority of specified kills.
• Predator must leave with trophies of Faculty/significant skulls. He has no previous understanding of hogwarts society structure, will go off of prowess in battle, personal decoration, prowess of leadership, other visual cues. Predator does not understand English.
• Hogwarts is ENTIRELY UNFAMILIAR with Predator tactics/history. They do not understand what it wants, how it acts, and its limitations.

I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy.  For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

Read the whole piece. This is the best articulation of the issue that I’ve ever seen.

Men read technical manuals and comic books. But the well-read American male of the past is mostly gone. Although all Americans are reading less — one survey found that the typical citizen reads only four books a year and one in four reads none at all — men are the biggest drop outs. They account for only 20 percent of the fiction market.

This is fairly horrifying.

Historian Robert Darnton says there have been four great Information Ages in all human history, where a new technology has transformed how we communicate and interact—and he goes back to 4000 BC Mesopotamia for the first of these, the invention of writing. Then comes movable type, then mass steam-powered printing of the Industrial Age that makes books available to the masses for the first time in history, and now, our own Information Age where anyone can “Broadcast Yourself.” We’re 15 years into something so paradigm-changing that we have not yet adjusted our institutions of learning, work, social life, and economic life to account for the massive change. Fifteen years in is when people tend to start thinking about technological change in less fearful and more practical ways. They give up their nostalgia for the “before” and then start to focus on now, on how we can make the tools and resources available to them as productive as possible. In other words, we are right on time to give up techno-phobia and to tackle the problems and opportunities of the digital world with good sense, pragmatics, realism, and purpose. Once we absorb the realization that we’ve already changed, and that we’re actually doing pretty well despite major realignments in our lives, then we can think about how we want to take this amazing new tool and use it in a way that better serves our lives. Being afraid is never useful. It’s time to survey our lives and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how we can make real and practical improvements in our schools, our workplace, our every day lives.

You used to have a limited number of reasonably practical choices presented to you, based on what bookstores carried, what your local newspaper reviewed, or what you heard on the radio, or what was taught in college by a particular English department. There was a huge amount of selection that took place above the consumer level. (And here, I don’t mean “consumer” in the crass sense of consumerism, but in the sense of one who devours, as you do a book or a film you love.)

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

 

Culling is the choosing you do for yourself. It’s the sorting of what’s worth your time and what’s not worth your time. It’s saying, “I deem Keeping Up With The Kardashians a poor use of my time, and therefore, I choose not to watch it.” It’s saying, “I read the last Jonathan Franzen book and fell asleep six times, so I’m not going to read this one.”

Culling and surrender. Repeat after me…

Instapaper 3.0 has just arrived on the App Store, bringing new social features, search, a smart rotation lock, and an improved storage engine that enables higher image quality and faster downloads.

Instapaper has removed starring and replaced it with a Facebook-esque “like” feature. You can now follow other Instapaper users, allowing you to see and read the posts that they’ve liked. The app’s browser has been rewritten so that you can browse any site and share it from within the app.

When you browse to a site with Instapaper, you’ll be sent to the regular site as if you used Safari. To see Instapaper’s readable version of the site, you’ll need to click Read Later and then open the article from your list.

The Editors browser curates content chosen by featured editors on various subjects for those who want to bypass the noise of the Internet.

The new version also improves the app’s sharing features, bringing native sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinboard and Evernote. One major improvement is that you don’t need to be online to share–the action will be queued and go out the next time you’re online.

If you’re not using a service like this, I suggest giving this a go.

The fiction I’ve read has shaped how I think about life and problems and given me ways to think about solutions and actions. That’s true not only of the classics but also of Kurt Vonnegut and Isaac Asimov, Arthur Clarke and Franz Kafka.

As I wrote recently, I’ve been reading Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life. Near the end of the book, he tells a powerful story about him and his mom reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel when he was a teenager. This book gave them a way to talk about their own tortured lives in a way they could never have done without a story standing between them and the truths they lived but could not speak. As Conroy says, “Literature can do many things; sometimes it can do even the most important things.” I might go one step further: sometimes, only literature can do the most important things.