I stumbled on this while wandering through Restoration Hardware yesterday. The Firefly Visual Dictionary ($33.97 at Amazon) is chock full of infographics breaking down, for example, all the parts in a power transformer pole outside your home. Or the innards of a windmill. You name it, it’s in here. Close to 1,000 pages with over 6,000 illustrations, this is the kind of book I loved to read all the time as a kid. I’m going to have to pick this up sometime soon.

News reports confirm a recent rumor – that J.K. Rowling’s sixth installment the Harry Potter series is complete, and will be released on July 16th. The new novel, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, marks a two-year gap between new HP novels, unlike the lengthy three years between “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” and Potter V, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which came out in summer 2003. Rowling likely had extra incentive to finish the current novel up now – she’s currently expecting her third child.