- Blog
-
Gibson on Manguel on books
William Gibson talked to Alberto Manguel about books: I was in a bar in Barcelona, on the Rambla, with Alberto Manguel, just before Christmas, talking, as it happened, about why books, the paper kind, are such a good thing. Neither of us suggested building beds from them, but Alberto did say that he thought the…
-
New word of the day
If you’ve ever used a warm, comfortable, expensively-stocked book shop as a showroom for books you’ll later buy more cheaply online and felt slightly dirty about it, you’ll recognise Mike Lee’s feelings. He even has a word for it: shopshifting.
-
Constitutional vandalism
Neither side of the row over Universal ID cards is free of contradiction, neither has a monopoly on logic or morality. The pros are (depressingly) allowing narrow political contingency to shape legislation that will inevitably compromise important freedoms. The antis are (predictably) overstating the fragility of the mess of historic accident and random mutation we…
-
Didion’s lament
Joan Didion has been the unassailed Queen of the New York liberal elite for decades – essayist, novelist, political commentator. Her latest NYRB piece is hard-hitting but reads like a lament for lost freedoms and lost certainties in the post-9/11 United States – a good place to start to understand the crisis in the American…
-
Memex lives!
Gordon Bell, engineer and innovator responsible for – among other things – the DEC VAX computer, has entered “nearly everything possible from his entire life” into his computer as part of a Microsoft research project. He hopes to create a free-form database for organising your whole life. I need one of those. Thanks to Jack…
-
Quotas for BBCi
Owen Gibson in The Guardian wants the BBC to be compelled to apply the 25% independent production quota to the web.
-
Anti-singularists
Singularities and other tech-determinist fantasies are shown the door in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information. This is the sanest, most humane book I’ve read on information technology. Seely Brown ran Xerox’s PARC and Duguid is an academic working at both PARC and UCB.
-
You’ll have to wait until the interval…
I’m afraid I’m bringing this concert to your attention about 15 months late. Luckily the ‘performance’ isn’t due to finish for another 637 years so you have time to get an ice cream. The extraordinary John Cage (who used to have his own special side-bar feature here at Bowblog, back before blogger ate my template)…
-
The Singularity
Proper Science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge is preparing his speech for the day the singularity doesn’t happen. Although I should probably get on with preparing mine for the day after it does (but who’ll listen?), I keep wanting to dive in and point out that the important thing about singularities of all kinds is that…