Ted Underwood, a professor of 18th and 19th century literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has an interesting post on text mining and what is being called “distant reading,” “We Don’t Already Know the Broad Outlines of Literary History.” His blog is The Stone and the Shell: Historical Questions Raised by a Quantitative Approach to Language.

Some notes on the storm hitting the Northeast.

And io9‘s George Dvorsky reports on Lee Smolin’s theory of Cosmological Natural Selection, the idea that: “gives a kind of raison d’etre to our universe and all the objects flying through it. If true, it would mean that our universe is nothing more than a black hole generator, or a means to produce as many baby universes as possible.”