Siri is a new iPhone app that takes spoken input like “coffee places near here” and shows you a list of coffee places near your location with distance, directions, etc.  You can also enter a query by tapping on a type of location you’re looking for, but that’s boring.  I haven’t tried some of the more ambitious queries from the company’s demo video, stuff like “get me a table for two at a romantic restaurant near work at 7pm next Thursday”.  For the simple queries I’ve tried, it works well and is surprisingly fast, considering it has to recognize speech (done by uploading the recorded text to a server) before it can process the query.  The technology is interesting, using context awareness and service delegation.  See Siri’s About Technology page for more info.

For the “coffee places near here” example, I have only a small criticism: Culligan Water is not a coffee place, and my favorite, the Tattered Cover bookstore’s cafe, which is about a mile away, isn’t on the list.  Not a big deal, I’m sure it’ll improve by improving query formulation to map “coffee places” to additional terms, or delegating to services with better data.

I expect one of two things from a business book: an eye-opening new perspective that I would never have stumbled on myself, or a concise summary of insights that might occur to me if I had more free time to ruminate on the subject and lots of yellow pads and pens with me at all times.  Most business books disappoint in both categories and amount to 200-400 pages of fluff that might have been worth a read as a 2000-word magazine article when there’s nothing good on TV.

Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do? is the first business book I’ve read in a long time that’s not actually a slog to read.  It doesn’t deliver any stunning new perspectives, but it’s a worthwhile and readable summary of insights and lessons gleaned from observing not only Google, but also Facebook, Flickr and other successes of the Web era.  Jarvis presents the lessons in a breezy narrative style and doesn’t dwell on them unnecessarily, which is a nice change from most biz books that put each simple concept through a taffy machine to stretch it to fifty mind-numbing pages.  There are lessons about platforms, openness, speed, elegant organization and their implications for the Web and other industries.

I won’t bore my huge and dedicated audience by rehashing a lot of stuff from the book.  Instead, I’ll humbly suggest that if you’re shopping for a business book that won’t put you into a boredom coma on your next flight, get WWGD.

The book: What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis.  (Amazon.  A Kindle edition is available)

I’ve been using LaCie drives for years, but after no fewer than 3 cases of burnt-out power supplies in the past couple of years, I’m trying something new.  LaCie has always replaced the power supply under warranty, but they shouldn’t keep burning out, especially since I have them plugged into a line conditioner.  So I bought a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II for Mac, the 4TB model.  It claims to be green’ish (by using less power, generating less heat etc.).  It’s also quieter than my LaCie.  I resent a little that I have to install software to modify the RAID configuration (no hardware switch) of the MyBook, but in return the status bar item tells me temperature and RAID status, see screenshot.  So far, so good, hope this one lasts a while.  WD also includes several cables (FW800-FW800, FW800-FW400 and USB).

In Twitter this morning, @tatteredcover is asking how many people are moving from paper books to electronic ones.  I own a Kindle, but about 60% of my book buying is still paper.  I love the bookstore experience, and there’s nothing like thumbing through a paper book.  But my house is overflowing with the damn things.

I’ve been thinking for years that the ideal experience would be to have a book printing and recycling machine (the BookBox).  This box would be able to print and bind any book on the spot.  It would also have a slot for inserting used books to be recycled on the spot (composted, or whatever, with zero waste).  Plus maybe a USB port so you could hook up your favorite electronic reader and download a bunch of books before a trip.

In a world where the BookBox exists, there would still be bookstores: cafe + inventory for browsing + BookBox.  You can browse books while sipping an Oolong tea, then place an order to have a book printed on BookBox to take home with you.

Well, it doesn’t run in the browser, but it keeps itself to a single directory and runs from the command line, which is the next best thing.  The GIMPS project has been around since 1996 and harnesses the “power of 1000′s of small computers like yours” to discover new Mersenne primes, which are primes of the form 2^p-1.  46 Mersenne primes have been found, the largest having 12,978,189 digits.

The project was featured on NPR recently.  There are prizes to win for discovering the next prime (give it a few hundred Ghz-days and I might pay for the Mac Pro with this), but best of all, it doesn’t do creepy stuff like create groups and users on your system.  You just start it up the executable from a command line when you’re in the mood to hunt some primes and heat up the office.  Finally something to keep the Mac Pro’s CPUs busy: