I’m working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I’ve ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I’d probably make better progress if it showed up as blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, and this one presents many new ways to look at things. It also gets me thinking about the current sorry state of the patent system, with these excerpts: