Today’s New York Times Books section has a hand-wringing piece about the effect of Internet use on reading habits. I think the main point is that reading online shortens and fragments your attention span, but I never did finish the piece because I got distracted reading a New Yorker article on medical marijuana and a Times Magazine piece about Afghanistan while I set up an analysis on the UI supercomputing cluster and checked Facebook. And blogged about it.

(Meanwhile, I’m almost finished with the third volume of Neal Stephenson’s excellent, and lengthy, Baroque cycle, printed on good old dead trees.)