It's been a little more than a month since I last checked in with my reading. Maybe the 15th of the month would be a good, regular day to do that. Right, as if I could keep up a habit like that… well, it's good to dream.
Russell's The Problems of Philosophy continues to be moderately entertaining. I'm not exactly sure how Russell is going to build a useful theory of knowledge on the back of acquaintance, but we'll see how it goes. Should get clearer in the next few chapters.
I'm making slow progress on the Trek project. Gerrold's The Galactic Whirlpool was fun, but Sky's Death's Angel wasn't so good. Unless you're a completionist, I'd skip both of Sky's contributions to the Trek universe.
“We Owe It to Them to Interfere”: Star Trek and U.S. Statecraft in the 1960s and the 1990s offers an interesting perspective on the Federation's treatment of 'more primitive' cultures as a metaphor for the US's treatment of developing nations.
An extensive reading program is unlikely to provide sufficient contact with words beyond the 2000 most common families (Cobb, 2007). However, there are some possibilities for finding or deliberately constructing texts that will work better. An example is given of software that allows the reader to click a word and get a set of KWIC-style lines showing other uses of the word, either from some large corpus or, potentially, from a restricted one–the current text alone, perhaps, or a set of selected texts such as graded readers.
Swaffar (1985) observes that readers' knowledge of the genre of foreign-language text is important to their ability to understand it.
Mangiron (2017) provies a huge list of interesting-sounding references related to game localization, which I intend to work my way through.